TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, The Little Red Book, and other social and gaming platforms are part of daily life for many students.
The average student uses social media at university to find their communities and interest groups – as well as access online content. This blurs the boundaries between campus-based and online learning. But growing group of students are creating content themselves – and many have a significant number of followers, and share in such a way that they attract “influencer status”.
Our recent project on youth and studenthood in digital spaces centred around how and why some students develop a large following on social media and become so-called ‘influencers’.
The first stage of this project involved interviewing 12 UK-based student influencers with a follower count ranging from a couple of thousand to over a million. We have interviewed home and international student content creators from different types of HE institutions.
