Social media influencers learn to live with Covid: Positivity, quality content can go a long way

While content remains key, there’s been a shift in what people have been consuming online since the beginning of the pandemic and positivity can help deal with online trolls, said three of India’s top social media influencers.

They were speaking on a panel comprising Archana Doshi – founder of food and recipe blog Archana’s Kitchen, Shivya Nath - author and travel blogger, The Shooting Star, and Malini Agarwal – founder of MissMalini.com, interacted with prominent journalist Sagarika Ghose as part of a session during the ET Women’s Forum.

Doshi said her blog saw an almost 2.5x growth in the first few weeks of lockdown because people wanted to know how to cook with minimal ingredients with a pressure cooker, and how even with rudimentary cooking skills they could rustle up simple but delicious dishes. Doshi had to work on her server capacities and technology to ensure that she was able to create small stories and videos from home to cater to this new demand.


Nath said the pandemic allowed her to see the other side of things – from living out of her bags for the last seven years to now staying in one place and figuring out cooking. While the travel and tourism industry has slowed down, Nath is working on keeping the stories of people based in rural parts alive through an initiative ‘Voices of Rural India’.

“For the people in rural parts, and especially those working in tourism, the income has slowed to almost zero. This curated platform we’ve started invites guides, homestay hosts etc. to tell their own stories. We hope this will create some upskilling in the short term and also become a repository of knowledge and culture in the long term,” Nath said.

There has been a shift in what people are looking for online, said founder of MissMalini.com Malini Agarwal, and self-care content like beauty, dance, fitness, finding a dance class online are all becoming important to consumers.

Agarwal is working on an initiative called ‘Girl Tribe’ – an online space where women talk about various issues affecting them. “We started this as a response to the kind of filth and creepy messages we have to see in our inboxes on a daily basis, and while it started as a Facebook group, we’re now developing an app for it,” Agarwal said. Nath said that posts around sustainability, veganism and climate change have picked up since the pandemic started.

Even posts around travel were slowly picking up. With brands, there was now more collaboration around planning future travel, being a digital nomad, finding another home to work from.

When asked about how coronavirus had affected monetisation opportunities, Agarwal said that Miss Malini had never sought paid content from celebrities. The company had diversified into an ad agency and influencer marketing, and these still presented streams of revenue. Agarwal said there was a big push from brands selling appliances like dishwashers. People are now more interested in staycations, fast fashion, organic food and dining in and this translated into monetisation opportunities as well.

When Ghose posed a question about how online influencers dealt with trolls, Doshi said, “I face off trolls by putting up a long note, and I have millions of users supporting me by facing the troll together.” She said trolls often came from a place of anger and she dealt with individual trolls in a positive manner. “I respect them and then get back with 10 times the warmth.” Agarwal added that it wasn’t necessary to defend oneself when trolled. “It’s not your problem. It’s their problem.” She said she believed that positivity can clean the internet.

Giving a twist to comic-book superhero Spiderman’s catchphrase, Nath said “With great influence comes great responsibility.” She said that she avoided geotagging places that are Instagram-worthy so that there’s no over-tourism in those areas. It also kept the mystery of travel alive and motivated people to explore and find those places for themselves.