Abstract
This article investigates the initial beliefs about social media held by fitness influencers and content creators. As influencers and content creators continue to play a growing role in mediating our social world, who invests in this work, and why, becomes increasingly important. Using semi-structured interviews with 41 fitness influencers and creators, this article identifies four typologies of initial belief: Science Communicator, Seller, Shifter, and Sharer. Differences in beliefs were explained in part by the variety of social positions held by influencers and creators within the fitness industry. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of social position and belief, this article aims to create a more generalizable account of who influencers and creators are, and why they continue to believe investments in social media are worth it.
Introduction
With the growth of influencer marketing and the digital economy, scholars have sought to better understand how the performance and occupation of celebrity on social media has impacted cultural production, economic conditions, and digital labor. These practices take multiple forms such as microcelebrity (Senft, 2008) internet celebrity, influencers (Abidin, 2018), creators (Cunningham and Craig, 2019) and lifestyle gurus (Baker and Rojek, 2020) suggesting that social media contributes to diverse forms of fame both on and offline. Scholars have explained this rise of influencers as a response to economic crises and neoliberalism by pointing to the reality that most do not succeed at sustaining careers online (Duffy, 2017; Khamis et al., 2017; Marwick, 2013). Much like the economy today, influencers and creators are competing in a highly unequal playing field. For example, a study of YouTube view distribution noted that among channels with over 250,000 subscribers, the top 10% of the most viewed videos accumulated almost 80% of total views (Kessel et al., 2019).
Given the difficulty of making a sustainable living online, what do influencers and creators believe initial investments in social media will achieve? Extant literature has demonstrated a variety of beliefs by influencers and creators from different industries, making it difficult to know if the beliefs are particular to a given industry or generalizable to influencers and creators in general (Duffy, 2017; Johnson and Woodcock, 2019; Wu et al., 2019). One possible solution is to better understand the social conditions that give rise to these initial beliefs. This has been demonstrated productively through case studies of influencers and creators, but the degree to which these experiences generalize is unclear (Baker and Rojek, 2020; Brown and Phifer, 2019; González, 2022). This article relies on interviews with fitness influencers and creators on Instagram to connect their initial beliefs about social media with their varied positions within and outside of the fitness industry. Divergent field positions shaped four main types of initial beliefs about what investing in Instagram was for, of which making a living were only a part.
The four main initial beliefs were: (1) Instagram is an effective platform for communicating fitness content (Science Communicators), (2) Instagram will improve my existing career (Sellers), (3) Instagram is necessary for transitioning careers into fitness (Shifters), and (4) Instagram is the ideal platform for documenting fitness (Sharers). To explain this divergence in beliefs, this article relies on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social position. This concept assumes the existence of hierarchically distributed social fields, where one’s position within the field constrains and affords beliefs about possible social action. Fitness influencers and creators come from many social positions within the fitness industry such as highly educated physical therapists, or professionally trained personal trainers, and outside of the fitness industry such as office managers and restaurant workers. These positions influenced what they believed investments in social media would do for them which impacted how they chose to navigate the fitness industry.
These findings contribute to discussions about influencers and creators on social media in two ways. The first is to offer a typology of initial beliefs that fuel investment in social media, which furthers our understanding of who becomes a fitness influencer or creator. This provides insight into who is producing content and under what conditions, which is particularly valuable given calls for increasing digital content produced by accredited health professionals (Byrne et al., 2017; Chan et al., 2018; Rubin, 2019; Trethewey, 2020) as more people in the US (Hannon, 2021) and Europe (Sortlist, 2022) turn to social media for health information. Second, a focus on social position offers one answer for why influencers and creators have divergent beliefs about social media within the same industry. This form of categorization helps explain differences among influencers and creators within the fitness industry while also providing a framework for comparative projects that seek to understand initial beliefs and investments across industries.
Influencers, creators, and their beliefs
Defined as a vocational, sustained, and highly branded form of internet celebrity (Abidin, 2018), the term influencer already suggests forms of professionalization or hierarchy among those with social media fame. The term internet celebrity is itself an outgrowth of Senft’s (2008) concept of microcelebrity which sought to describe how a wide array of internet users could attain a relatively small yet loyal following. As part of a broader divergence from the traditional mass media stars endemic to 20th century consumer culture (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Hearn and Schoenhoff, 2016), influencers and content creators are often seen as regular users that over time develop “extended competencies in creating sophisticated content” which “may rapidly attract a mass audience and attain fame through accumulation of cultural capital” (Audrezet et al., 2020: 1).
Qualitative interview-based studies of video game streamers, adult webcam models, fashion bloggers and YouTube creators offer valuable insight into the beliefs of those seeking to professionalize their presence online despite increasing barriers to entry. From their interviews with professional video game streamers on the platform Twitch, Johnson and Woodcock (2017) found the platform “extremely appealing for those already creating game content and seeking more intimate interaction with their viewers” (p. 7). In this case, Twitch was seen as a simple addition to the activities that gamers were already engaging in, fueled by a belief that it would make them more popular in their current industry. Many were aware that streaming required a large time investment, but it was often worth the chance to professionalize as a streamer. Nayar (2017) reports similar beliefs among adult webcam models who hoped that part of their streaming work could be fairly passive, allowing them to pursue other hobbies and activities. Both cases suggest that previous investments in social fields and hobbies may obscure the real difficulty of making a sustainable career as an influencer or creator from scratch.
Brooke Erin Duffy, in her work on fashion bloggers, contests the popular notion that anyone can make it in the influencer industry, calling it an “unshakable myth” purported by media outlets that, “routinely profile style influencers who lie at the margins of elite fashion’s mainstream” (Duffy, 2017: 3–4). Duffy (2017) identified three different types of beliefs for engaging in content creation online, which included the belief that social media would lead to greater “creative freedom and personal expression” (p. 52), as well as help in “managing uncertainty in the post-recession economy, and ‘breaking in’ to the creative industries” (Duffy, 2017: 61). The suggestion that influencers and creators believe investments in social media will help them in times of economic precarity has also been made by Banet-Weiser (2012: 56), and Khamis et al. (2017). However, this account does not explain why those that have already secured fame and fortune, such as the “instafamous” studied by Marwick (2015) would invest in social media.
Further evidence of beliefs impacting how YouTube creators approach their work online comes from Wu et al. (2019) who investigated different personifications of the YouTube algorithm. YouTube creators personified the algorithm as an Agent, Gatekeeper, or Drug Dealer, with each personification corresponding to a set of beliefs about what the YouTube algorithm is and how to engage with it. The authors found that YouTube creators come to these different conclusions about the algorithm based, “on their personal experiences of what they believe makes their content gain traction, as well as through discussing their understandings with fellow YouTubers” (Wu et al., 2019: 18). While this work emphasizes the connection between experience and belief, it focuses on their experiences as YouTubers, rather than the experiences that led them to an investment in YouTube in the first place.
While these examples point to important aspects of how beliefs about online celebrity are shaped, it is not immediately clear how to make sense of these different, and sometimes conflicting, beliefs. I suggest that Bourdieu’s concept of social position offers one set of answers to these questions. By synthesizing the relationship between individual level attributes and initial belief, social position helps make sense of why fitness influencers and creators risk investments in social media despite the seemingly slim chances of success. While fitness influencers and creators all believed their investments in social media were worth the effort, how they evaluated worth was based in part on their varying social positions within, and outside of, the fitness industry.
Position, initial belief, and the fitness industry
The use of social position comes from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and relies on the assumption that social hierarchies both exist and are discernable through empirical analysis. Bourdieu uses social position to hierarchically categorize actors within communities and industries based on the unequal distribution of social characteristics such as, but not limited to, occupation, education, cultural tastes, and geographic location. One’s position within these communities or industries shapes the type of actions that appear possible. “This is the field of possibilities objectively offered to a given position [. . .] It follows from this that position and individual trajectory are not equally probable for all starting positions” (Bourdieu, 2000: 110). The shaping of the possible is expressed in belief which, “can be experienced simultaneously as logically necessary and sociologically unconditioned” (Bourdieu, 1990: 50). In this sense, belief is not only one’s reported explanation for a given practice or disposition, but also a reflection of those practices as embedded within one’s social position (Bourdieu, 1990: 67). For the initial beliefs of fitness influencers and creators, social position situates these choices structurally, limiting certain choices without determining or predicting action.
Bourdieu’s work appears in both the influencer and fitness literature when discussing social capital, but his work on social position has received relatively less attention. Centering social capital has led scholars to argue that social, and potentially economic, capital can be outcomes for those who invest in social media (Duffy, 2017; Zulli, 2017 ) and fitness (Crossley, 2008; Fuller and Jeffery, 2017). Understanding the dynamics of success and failure around converting social to economic capital for influencers and creators is a valuable outcome of this work (González, 2022; Limkangvanmongkol and Abidin, 2019; Marwick, 2019). However, focusing on the use of social capital begs the question of where it comes from in the first place. Social media is a site of investment for the already famous and those looking to become famous, suggesting that investing in social media cannot easily be reduced to having, or desiring, social capital. Categorizing initial beliefs about investments in social media through the lens of social position helps explain the variety of initial beliefs and contextualizes subsequent conversations about the origins of social capital and its role for influencers and creators on social media.
Contextualizing the social position of fitness influencers and creators involves the unfolding of economic stagnation, occupational arrangements, and the cultural value of fitness over the past two decades. Extant scholarship has connected the emergence of the influencer industry in the United States with the great recession of 2007–2008 (Hund, 2019), as well as its development in Japan in the early 2000s as a response to its so-called “lost generation” (Lukács, 2020). Coinciding with an increase in consumer debt spending and a steady decline of prices for ICTs such as smartphones (Schiller, 2014), many turned to their devices in search of work in an increasingly precarious labor market (McChesney, 2013). Fitness influencers and creators are a unique case in this economic narrative partly due to the growing health and wellness sector of the economy both in the United States and globally. At the level of the national economy, job growth of personal trainers and nutritionists outpaces the average (BLS, 2019a, 2019b), while internationally, the health club industry has grown over 33% in the last decade (IHRSA, 2018). Data from industry think-tanks reports that the global wellness economy was worth 4.2 trillion US dollars in 2017, and grew at a rate of 6.4% between 2015 and 2017, twice the rate of the global economy (Global Wellness Institute, 2018).
Although not all fitness influencers and creators are personal trainers, many are, which traditionally situates them in one of the least lucrative jobs in the industry (Andreasson and Johansson, 2018). In terms of employment opportunities and necessary credentials, it is easier to become a personal trainer than it is to sustain a successful career. Being a personal trainer today means having a bad job in a good industry within a stagnant global economy. Prior to Instagram, many personal trainers shared advice, debated, documented their training, and marketed products through online forums and message boards, which helps explain the rapid growth of fitness influencers and creators on the platform. (Andreasson and Johansson, 2013; Fuller and Jeffery, 2017; Smith and Stewart, 2012).
Data and methods
To better understand the initial beliefs of influencers and creators in the fitness industry, this article relies on an international sample of 41 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted between November 2019 and May 2020. After receiving IRB approval and conducting five pilot interviews, I finalized the interview protocol and created an Instagram account to facilitate participant recruitment. I contacted participants via email and the direct message feature on Instagram. As I was interested in responses from a variety of influencers and creators, Instagram users were eligible to participate if they regularly posted fitness and health content online while engaging in a, “practice focused on social-media based, multimedia, fame on the internet” (Abidin, 2018: 72–73). While not all participants were comfortable self-identifying as influencers, the term content creator (Cunningham and Craig, 2019) was shared among many, hence the use of influencer and creator throughout this article. I used purposive sampling for a range of social characteristics that could be ascertained before the interview such as brand partnership, Instagram followers, and employment status.
Once participants agreed to be interviewed, they received a consent agreement mentioning that their name would be pseudonymized and identifying information would be redacted from interview transcripts. As a result, all names in this article are pseudonyms. On average, interviews lasted between 45 and 90 minutes, and were conducted remotely over the phone. Interviews were recorded on a separate audio recorder and transcribed initially by Temi AI software. Next, I reviewed and edited each transcript for accuracy, and to remove identifying participant information.
Interviews are particularly useful for investigating social position because, as Bourdieu notes, one’s position is a socially naturalized place in the world where people feel “made’ for jobs that are “made” for them’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 110). Some participants initially had difficulty expressing how and why they invested in social media because it seemed obvious and natural to them. Semi-structured interviews helped uncover the process and meaning behind these aspects of participants’ lives that may have otherwise gone unrecorded through a different method of investigation.
I gathered information about social position by asking participants about their employment, education, and family or social support when they started investing in social media. I categorized degree of employment as either full-time, part-time, or no employment in the fitness field. Due to the high prevalence of personal trainers in my sample, I operationalized type of employment as either personal trainer, non-personal trainer in the fitness field, or non-fitness field employment at the time of investing in social media. Non-personal trainer employment in the fitness field included nutritionists, healthcare workers, researchers, and business owners. I operationalized education based on degree type in the field of health and fitness as either a graduate degree, undergraduate degree, or high school/degree in another field. This did not include personal training or other certifications. Additionally, I asked a series of demographic questions at the end of each interview about income, age, race, gender, and where participants currently lived.
Data analysis aimed to produce what Weiss (1994) calls a case-focused and generalized report which began by sorting and coding limit cases that maximized the range parameter of social position. I then began the process of local integration (Weiss, 1994: 158–160) by connecting social position to beliefs in these limit cases. Afterward, I moved to inclusive integration by analyzing more moderate cases and creating typologies that generalized the experiences of all my participants. This process led to four different groups governed by distinct initial beliefs about social media: Science Communicators, Sellers, Shifters, and Sharers. In cases where participants expressed multiple beliefs, an initial belief was determined to be dominant due to its frequency and relevancy in the interview.
Findings
Table 1 shows the distribution of the characteristics operationalized as social position. Science Communicators came from within the fitness field but were not personal trainers, often holding positions such as researchers, teachers, or consultants. Most of them had graduate degrees from within the disciplines of health and fitness. This proximity to the fitness field is also expressed in their high likelihood of having help starting their social media page. Sellers were mostly personal trainers and often male. While this may make it seem as if men were more industrious or career-oriented than women when it came to their social media investments, it more accurately highlights a gendered divide around where these investments came from. If both Sellers and Shifters are combined, the two groups with explicitly career-oriented intentions at the time of investment, there are 10 men and 9 women in both categories. This reflects a roughly equal distribution of intention but a division in social position, as over half of those women began making those investments from outside the fitness field. Although an almost equal number of Sellers came from families with and without a parent that was a small business owner, out of the 12 total participants that had business owning parents, over half (7) believed social media would advance (6), or start (1), their career within the fitness field. Sharers started the furthest outside of the field and with the least support with three-fourths of them not having help starting their social media page. Sharers were also the least likely group to have parents that owned their own business.
Distribution of social position characteristics across initial beliefs.
One participant declined to provide information about their family.
Science Communicators
Science Communicators believed that social media was a helpful medium for Communicating scientific information about health and fitness. In many cases, as Science Communicators started to use Instagram, they recognized a lack of reliable information about fitness on social media. Nancy, a former professor, said, “I don’t know that a lot of people were doing gut microbiome stuff before I was doing it, [. . .] it’s really frustrating to see all this misinformation and I want to do something about it” (NANCY, 2/25/20). It was often this recognition of a gap between popular fitness content on Instagram and their own knowledge that motivated Science Communicators to start posting and investing in social media. While Nancy saw a gap between what she learned in the academy and what she saw on Instagram, others wanted to use the platform to push back against certain dogmas from their own academic fields. Adam, a physical therapist who started to invest in social media while in graduate school, said, “I was frustrated in my educational experience and the information that was available to the general public and wanted to be able to offer as a resource more accurate information to people” (ADAM, 11/5/19).
Having an educational background primarily made up of graduate degrees within the fields of health and fitness allowed Science Communicators to see the need for better information on Instagram, but this alone does not explain why they chose to invest in addressing the problem. Science Communicators often had experiences or circumstances that fostered their belief in social media investments. In part due to her early investment (around 2015) into the fitness field on Instagram, Sarah, a current PhD student, had particularly positive feedback from her audience.
I was getting my master’s in exercise physiology and more and more people were asking fitness and health related questions. I wanted to make another space there. I tried to start [my Instagram page] with the intention of just sharing things I was learning in my masters. (SARAH, 5/3/20)
The engagement Sarah received early on helped solidify her belief that investing in social media was an effective way to communicate fitness. Beyond audience engagement, however, was the recognition that being in a master’s program gave her access to information about exercise physiology that was unattainable to others. Both the audience engagement, and the belief that social media was an effective medium for communicating science came from her position as a graduate student.
Adam’s belief in Instagram as an effective platform was encouraged by colleagues from graduate school who were influencers and science Communicators themselves. By seeing the ability to succeed as a Science Communicator of general fitness on social media, Adam figured he would be able to replicate a similar outcome in the field of physical therapy. Coupled with the belief that using Instagram as a successful fitness communication platform was a practical possibility, Adam’s educational background also influenced his belief in the theoretical impact of fitness messaging.
We have a huge body of literature that indicates that the words we say as people of influence, have a high impact on people’s lives and if that information is not accurate or not representative of what is actually known, it can have a very negative impact. (ADAM, 11/5/19)
Adam’s access to education contributed both to his self-identification as a person of influence and his desire to correct misinformation on social media.
Sellers
Sellers saw Instagram as advancing or stabilizing their career, with specific goals being tied closely to occupation. For those looking for employment in the fitness field, personal training was a common entry-level occupation even when it was not seen as a long-term career. Explaining his investment in social media, Ian, a personal trainer, said: I saw from day one being a personal trainer, some days are 12 hours long and there’s times where you’re just sitting there doing nothing, waiting for your next client. And it was just so frustrating. And so after doing that for such a long time, I knew it was gonna have to evolve to something more than that. Otherwise, I would’ve burned myself out. (IAN, 3/11/20)
Unlike influencers and creators in other fields who were looking to find work by investing online, Ian, along with most other personal trainers, were finding ways to manage their work and make it more sustainable. “The fact that I’m also able to start an online business [. . .] feels secure. I want to continue to build on that so that I don’t have to continue to just do session to session and class to class” (QUINN, 4/8/20). Part of this security came from a pragmatic calculation that the investments would still be valuable even if they did not lead to immediate success. Self-branding was already familiar to them as personal trainers, they had access to training facilities, and offering online training rarely required monetary investments. These factors made it so they did not need to believe investments in social media would guarantee success, they simply needed to believe it was worth a shot.
For Sellers who were not personal trainers, more conviction was required. Norm, a college student with a passion for fitness displayed an extreme example of this conviction.
I guess you could group me into that category [fitness influencer] right now. But this has all been planned by me over pretty much the last seven years of my life where I knew I wanted to change the world. And this is essentially the first step in a long staircase of goals I have to accomplish. I’m getting into modeling, I’m getting into acting. (NORM, 4/6/20)
Coupled with the belief that investments in Instagram would help him grow in the fitness field there was also the hope that it would propel him into other industries as well. As a young college student without an established career in the fitness field, Norm invested in social media to grow his career rather than stabilize it.
Having friends in the fitness industry and parents who owned a business influenced the beliefs of Sellers. In some cases, such as Barry’s, social connections were the main reason they began investing on Instagram. Recalling a conversation he had with a personal training client who was famous on Instagram, Barry said: she said we need to get you an Instagram. And I was like, I don’t want to do that. She’s like, we gotta get you an Instagram and we’re just gonna post our workouts and stuff. And then I started to slowly grow and over time it just kept growing’ (BARRY, 11/22/19).
With the implication that growing his presence online could help his business as a personal trainer, Barry began by posting workouts and client transformations to promote his services. This example demonstrates the power of social connections because even though his occupation made him well-positioned to invest in social media, he was still initially reluctant.
In other instances, it was being exposed to the practices of entrepreneurship at a young age. For Dylan, a gym owner and online personal trainer, entrepreneurship was always part of his career goals. Before investing in fitness, Dylan’s career path involved graduating from college and taking over his father’s construction business. However, he eventually had a change of heart. “If I’m going to do something for 12 hours a day, I have to love it and I don’t love construction.” The influence of Dylan’s father extended into a resource for mentorship as well. “I had one guy who owned and consulted gyms for 35 years. He’s still my mentor to this day. I was 18 years old. My dad was friends with him, so I’d fly out and do an internship there” (DYLAN, 12/5/19). The differences in social position, and how they shape beliefs about social media, are clear when comparing Dylan and Ian. Although both were Sellers, the way they believed social media would impact their careers was different. Dylan’s family and social background in entrepreneurship made working 12 hours a day seem normal, with his belief that online personal training would make those 12-hours days profitable and enjoyable. Ian, who did not have a similar exposure to entrepreneurship, believed online personal training would prevent him from having to work 12-hour days.
Shifters
Shifters often had two distinct, but overlapping, beliefs. The first was their belief that, following Duffy (2017), a career transition into fitness would allow them to get paid doing what they love. That every Shifter identified as a woman further supports Duffy’s conclusions about the feminized nature of these aspirational attitudes toward work. The second was a belief that social media was the best avenue to make this dream a reality. Shifters believed in social media because it was often the most accessible aspect of the fitness industry to engage in while transitioning careers. It was a common practice for those employed outside of the fitness industry to build up their social media presence, as a proof of concept, before leaving their jobs. Compared to Sellers, this occasionally led to an overestimation of what social media was going to do for their careers, because their social position within the online fitness industry was often much less central than Sellers.
Greta, a personal trainer, and online coach who was previously in the non-profit sector, explains the typical circumstances of a Shifter. She invested more heavily on Instagram when she became dissatisfied with her job, believing this would facilitate her career transition.
I was no longer passionate about what my nine to five job was. Once I started having this feeling, that was when I started looking into, well, how can I become a content creator full time? Maybe I can give the fitness thing a shot and see if that can be my future career [. . .] I got my certification in June 2018 so that was when everything was kind of official and I already had my social media and stuff. So it was easy for me to start branding even more and pushing it out to my following. Like, hey, I’m doing coaching, it’s local, I’m doing personal training. And then it just grew from there. (GRETA, 12/18/19)
It was not the desire to leave her job that made her create her Instagram account, as she had been posting fitness content as a hobby for several years, rather, she believed a more organized investment in the page would help solidify her transition into the fitness field. The flexibility of producing fitness content online also allowed Greta to preview her potential success in the field before leaving her full-time job.
In some cases, Shifter’s beliefs about social media were impacted by early exposures to fitness. Carla, formerly in sales for a fashion company, got into fitness through an exercise community that combined in-person classes with an online community on Instagram. When Carla’s position at the fashion company was cut, she decided to pursue personal training as a full-time career, which resulted in rebranding her Instagram account. “Now it’s developed into more of my own page and, not necessarily selling myself, but also like taking my career into account” (CARLA, 11/26/19). Based on her position outside the fitness field and the type of exposure to fitness she had early on, investing in social media felt obvious. Carla’s belief was also sustained by her husband, who was able to support her financially as she transitioned careers. Unlike Barry or Dylan, Carla did not know others who were successful in the fitness field, or who had experience running their own business. This made it hard for Carla to judge the difficulty of transitioning into the fitness industry. “It has been challenging. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but it’s definitely more difficult than I was picturing” (CARLA, 11/26/19).
For those that did have family and social support in the fitness field, it was more than just financial and often played a role sustaining Shifters’ belief in themselves. Helene, a former financial analyst, and current online personal trainer, invested in social media with the help of her own online nutrition coach she found on Instagram. Helene’s coach ended up moving near her and they became friends. As Helene’s interest waxed in fitness and waned in finance, her old nutrition coach and now friend, offered her advice on how to successfully transition her career to online coaching. This decision was also buttressed by her parents, both business owners, who she described as having an “entrepreneurial spirit.” It was in this context that Helene called her transition into the online fitness field a “strategic leap of faith” (HELENE, 12/20/19).
Like Carla, Helene overestimated of the degree and type of online investments made by most fitness influencers and creators. To make her transition to the online fitness industry as successful as possible, Helene took the advice of her nutrition coach and hired an online business coach that specialized in online fitness. When asked how common she thought this was in the industry she replied, “every single person that I know online that is in the coaching space, they don’t show it, but I know the programs that they’re in and that everyone has basically a business coach for sure” (HELENE, 12/20/19). Of the 41 influencers and creators interviewed in this sample, only 6 mentioned hiring a business coach when either asked directly or asked if they had anyone help them get started on social media. Due to Helene’s position outside the industry, her understanding of the field was shaped by her avenues into it, namely, social media and the influence of her former nutrition coach.
Sharers
Sharers’ distinct beliefs about investing in social media were shaped by social positions that were often the least advantageous in the fitness field. The belief that social media platforms such as Instagram were places to post fitness content and connect with others was shared with Science Communicators, but due to Sharers often not having degrees in the health or fitness field, this shared belief did not take on the same aspect of science communication. Sharers occasionally followed similar career trajectories as Shifters, using their social media presence to eventually transition into the online fitness field, however, when this occurred for Sharers, it was unexpected and not an initial belief. The Sharers that did eventually invest saw themselves as accidental entrepreneurs (Neff, 2012). Unlike Shifters who were more likely to have a family member own a business or have a friend help them start their page, Sharers were relatively on their own. They often started a page to post about their fitness journeys or to document their athletic careers, with the belief that this was a commonsense way to become a part of an online fitness community or have fitness be a part of their lifestyle.
Lisa’s start in the online fitness field offers an exceptional example of the accidental entrepreneur, where initial beliefs were simply to document her recreational fitness journey. After leaving friends and family in Texas to move to Southern California, Lisa began working in the service industry and started her fitness journey. “I wasn’t anticipating being an influencer it kind of just happened that way. I started off my fitness page posting my journey and all that progress” (LISA, 1/29/20). Eventually, a fitness apparel company contacted her through Instagram which kickstarted her career in fitness modeling and online coaching. “Everything was all foreign and new to me, so I had never done anything in the industry like that before. I just kind of took a leap of faith” (LISA, 1/29/20). Unlike Helene, this leap of faith was not self-described as strategic, in part because her beliefs about social media were not shaped by an entrepreneurial family environment or a close friend in the industry.
For Ulma, a part-time group fitness instructor and mother, sharing on social media was a way to hold herself accountable on her own personal fitness journey. “I had my own physical transformation and I wanted to start sharing it on Instagram. It wasn’t intentional to start a business.” Ulma also believed that she would be able to connect with other mothers who were interested in fitness. “From the beginning my goal has always been to show moms that their best body days can be ahead of them. I think a lot of moms think that like, I’m not 20 anymore, I’ve had four kids” (ULMA, 5/7/20). Like Science Communicators, Ulma was interested in sharing what she had learned about fitness on social media. However, unlike Science Communicators, Ulma’s belief about why she should be sharing and documenting her journey was based on her fitness journey being successful. Sharers often did not have advanced degrees in health and fitness, meaning that the insights they thought valuable enough to document on Instagram came from their own experience, which overall had to be seen as successful to be worthy of sharing.
Beyond the desire to connect with the broader fitness community on Instagram, there were also functional beliefs about the role of social media. For Olive and Teresa, posting powerlifting content on Instagram was primarily a way to communicate with their online coaches. “I was recording all of my workouts predominantly for my coach, but I started to use Instagram as a way to just log my training.” (OLIVE, 3/25/20). Teresa’s experience was similar, using Instagram as an easy way to upload videos of her lifting so that she and her coach could, “share it, watch it, and see what we can fix,” (TERESA, 5/5/20). As Teresa’s page grew, this functional belief about filming and posting content started to be at odds with her audience.
People would comment or [direct message] me a lot and ask lots of questions. And as my following grew, I don’t want to say it was annoying. It made me feel like, okay, if I just do a better angle, these questions won’t pop up anymore cause then they can literally see it’ (TERESA, 5/5/20).
This experience highlights differences among Sharers regarding who they believed their audience was on Instagram. While Ulma was documenting her journey for herself and other moms, Teresa was documenting for her coach, initially underestimating how much engagement she would receive from her audience. Both Sharers and Shifters misjudged investments in social media due to their positions outside the fitness industry, but this misjudgment took opposite forms. While Shifters overestimated the value of social media, Sharers underestimated social media due to the lack of educational background in health or fitness, parents that owned a business, or help with their initial investments.
Discussion and conclusion
With the presence of influencers and creators continuing to solidify themselves in the fitness industry and beyond, there is growing interest in understanding who these actors are and why they investment in social media. This article attempts to add to these discussions by applying Bourdieu’s concept of social position and belief. While previous literature has shown the importance of having, and strategically using, social capital as an influencer or creator (González, 2022; Limkangvanmongkol and Abidin, 2019; Marwick, 2019), this article attempts to explain the origins of disparity in social capital by addressing how social position within the fitness field shapes initial beliefs about social media. The typology of initial beliefs helps systematize comparisons among influencers and creators from the same industry. For example, it helps clarify why some invest online to seek celebrity (Duffy, 2017), while others decide it is a valuable medium for their already-existing celebrity (Marwick, 2015).
While some beliefs in this article align with those addressed in extant literature, this article clarifies why some influencers and creators hold these beliefs while others do not. For instance, connecting beliefs with social position helps explain why the belief in increased intimacy between Twitch streamers and fans (Johnson and Woodcock, 2019) was present among Sharers and Science Communicators but not Sellers. The educational status of Science Communicators and the personal success of Sharers shaped beliefs that social media was for sharing information with others, while the occupational position of Sellers made them believe it was a place to stabilize or advance their careers. Further, both Shifters and Sellers exhibited beliefs outlined by Brooke Erin Duffy in her work on the fashion industry (2017). Sellers were interested in having more personal and creative freedom at work, but, unlike Shifters, were not driven by the desire to do what they loved. Their social position within the industry as personal trainers made it so they were already engaged in their profession of choice with online investments occasionally seen as ways to reduce the amount of time they needed to work doing what they loved.
Further, this article identifies some of the barriers to elevating the voices of accredited health professionals on social media (Byrne et al., 2017; Chan et al., 2018; Rubin, 2019; Trethewey, 2020). Within the fitness industry, accreditation can take place through a relatively short and rudimentary certificate process, or many years of post-secondary education. The variety of positions and beliefs attached to these different accreditations suggests that it is not a sufficient base for consensus when it comes to the production of information on social media. Additionally, Science Communicators, or those with the most advanced degrees, needed to believe that social media was already a valuable place to share information about health and fitness. As they have fewer direct pathways to career advancement than Sellers or Shifters, it is comparatively more difficult to bring Science Communicators into the online fitness industry if they already feel that social media is an ineffective or untrustworthy medium for sharing information.
As social position was composed of generalizable social characteristics with contextual and contingent meaning within the fitness industry, this article offers insights into how to approach comparative studies of influencers and creators across industries. For example, it might seem reasonable to code personal trainer and gym membership salesperson as similar forms of within-industry employment. However, this would miss the unique impact of personal training on the initial beliefs about social media investment given the ease with which personal trainers became online coaches. This contextual meaning of generalizable social characteristics is important when setting up parameters of comparison across industries. This use of social position can also support quantitative research on influencers and creators. For instance, the various types of education and employment mentioned through the semi-structured interviews could inform question choice in a survey-based research project. Lastly, the discovery that many fitness influencers and creators do not think of themselves as influencers can help participant recruitment in further social media research by discouraging recruitment calls that only refer to participants as influencers.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
