Influencers Are Making Their Mark on the Metaverse

Since Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was becoming a metaverse company and changing its name to Meta, the metaverse has gone mainstream. A week doesn’t pass without some tech executive talking about the massive potential of the metaverse. According to Buzz in Content, influencers have caught on and have started to pivot their activities to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the metaverse.

What is the Metaverse?

In Facebook’s metaverse coming out party, Zukerberg defined the metaverse as “embodied internet”, and successor to the mobile internet. As an embodied internet, users would not simply observe it, but participate in it. For instance, a person will be able to dance in the metaverse, or participate in a yoga class. It;s about more than gaming. It’s about creating a whole new world, and as such, no single company will be able to build the metaverse.

Matthew Ball, who has written an insightful Metaverse Primer, defined the metaverse in 2020 as possessing seven qualities:

1. That is, it’s always there, it doesn’t stop, reset, or pause.
2. It is synchronous and live, like real life.
3. Does not limit the number of concurrent users, and gives each user a sense of “presence”.
4. A fully functioning economy. So, for instance, you could order Full Coverage Painting & Flooring for your metaverse home, or purchase some digital asset.
5. Bridge the physical and digital world.
6. Have interoperability of data, content, digital assets, etc.
7. Be made up of content and experiences created by its contributors.

How Influencers are Impacted by the Metaverse

As Zuckerberg suggested, the metaverse will succeed the mobile internet, and therefore transform how we engage online. Influencers will be able to engage with their followers in a more immersive environment than has ever been possible. For instance, an influencer could build a metaverse town hall in which they could address and speak to their followers about a brand, or some issue. Zuckerberg believes that this will result in new forms of social media.

The metaverse is still some way off, but influencers are beginning to participate. In India, for instance, influencers have already started holding metaverse events, such as concerts, marathons, marketplaces and auctions.

The metaverse is uniquely tied to the communities involved, in ways that are much stronger than social media platforms. Influencers already have healthy communities that they can tap into and project into the metaverse. The metaverse will be able to bind influencers and their communities much more closely. The influencers of this metaverse have already started to call themselves Extended Reality (XR) creators, because of the way they span the digital and physical worlds.

There is a first-mover advantage for early influencers, who will be able to experiment and learn about the metaverse and find the best solutions to optimize the potential of the metaverse.

Think about how, for instance, the biggest influencers today were able to carve out a place for themselves and are able to generate an income to this day thanks to their first-mover advantage. It is likely that among the early XR creators, a star will be born who will, a decade from now, reap huge rewards for their early participation.