If you know me, you know that I typically can’t be bothered with reality TV. ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’? Pass. ‘The Bachelor’? No thanks.

With that in mind, I never thought I would be as hooked on a reality series as I am with Netflix’s new show, ‘The Circle’. Filmed essentially as a social media experiment, it piqued this marketing professional’s interest. And while I came for the marketing experiment, I stayed for the drama and laughter.

And best of all? I wrapped up this competition series with tons of social media marketing takeaways, outlined in my essay on Medium, “Let’s Get Real: Social Media Lessons from Netflix’s ‘The Circle'”.

My Biggest Social Media Takeaway from Netflix’s ‘The Circle’

To learn about all my big takeaways of social media and influencer marketing, I would head over to my post on Medium. But, if you want a tl;dr version, I’ll parse down my top takeaway here: be real, be unscripted, be unabashedly you on social media. It truly pays off.

As I said in my Medium post:

At this point, in 2020, we’ve had enough of the filters, the meticulously-edited photos, and full-scale production style Insta posts. We want to see the flaws, the scars, the things that make us human and relatable.

In ‘The Circle’, the contestants that were the most genuine and true to themselves ended up consistently ranking as the Circle’s influencers and eventually were in the top final four of the show.

Instagram Influencer Tip: Stories Cannot Go Ignored for Quality Community Engagement

With authenticity being more important than ever to build an engaged social media audience, it seems like Instagram stories will increasingly become more important. While it won’t necessarily be surpassing in-feed posts anytime soon, it can’t go ignored in 2020 – especially for micro-influencers and smaller brands.

Take a look below at what Fohr, an influencer marketing platform, had to say about the importance of stories.

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At Fohr, we’ve started to take a look at Stories as a reportable metric. Pictured above is the average Instagram Story reach numbers for various follower tiers, taken from influencers on the Fohr platform. With each, you see the upper and lower ends of the data collected. We are trained to think about Instagram as the Feed, this collection of images. When Instagram Stories were released a few years ago, it brought with it a new way to diversify your content. A new way to paint a fuller pitcher of who you are. We present this data to you simply for you to ask yourself a few questions—Are you using this data to pitch brands? Are you using this data to figure out how many stories you should be posting? Are you using this data at all? Increasing your reach by a small percentage point could impact your business in a real way, and it could be advantageous to start thinking about reach not just in terms of in-feed posts, but stories as well. Change your reach, change your life.

A post shared by Fohr (@fohr.co) on Jan 15, 2020 at 11:59am PST

As you can see on the graph, smaller brands and micro-influencers have an advantage of greater reach through Instagram Stories than larger accounts with 500k+ followers.

Bottom line: as we move into 2020, transparency and authenticity will be the keywords to follow if you want to build a loyal and engaged social media community.