Influencer Marketing Trends in 2025
Stay at the forefront of Influence Marketing by downloading our exclusive study now: “Influencer Marketing Trends in 2025!” - your essential guide to anticipate changes in the sector.
"Tell me who you hang out with and I'll tell you who you are”. This is what your user journey on social networks looks like. Your behaviour is scrutinised and your information is meticulously collected. So if social networks contain a treasure trove of data that accurately reflects who we are, can we rely on the GDPR - General Data Protection Regulation - to protect us from giants like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter? Why is our data worth its weight in gold? And how can we preserve it? An overview of a sensitive and hot topic!
At the beginning of 2022, the CNIL has just imposed fines on Google and Facebook for their cookie practices. They will have to pay 150 million and 60 million euros respectively! And this is not the first time that financial penalties have been imposed. In 2019, Facebook was already penalised for “failure to respect privacy” and ordered to pay a fine of 5 billion dollars.
This time, the CNIL demonstrated that it was not possible to refuse cookies “as simply” as to accept them. Thus, several clicks would be required to refuse all cookies.
Haven’t you noticed that the friends suggested on social networks often have the same tastes as you? Thanks to cookies! These small computer files installed on websites and whose purpose is to offer you targeted advertising. The collection and processing of data allows us to better understand the behaviour of users in a given age group or city, or the opinion they share about a brand. Once collected, all this valuable information is sold to companies.
These companies will then use this leverage to provide you with tailored offers and encourage you to buy the right product!
All this data is worth its weight in gold when you consider that by 2021:
In force since May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation has changed the European landscape of customer data. The digital link between companies and Internet users is now subject to specific processing.
Indeed, faced with the explosion of social networks and the growing number of their functionalities, the implementation of a regulation had become necessary. It should be noted that the scope of the regulation is European. As a company from a European Union member country, you must therefore comply with it.
The RGPD in practice:
When you create an account on a social network or install a new application, you accept the conditions of use that you do not necessarily master. Lack of time or not wanting to read all the lines… You validate and thus consent to the use of your data.
But social networks are a great gateway to your privacy (personal or professional) and you are not immune to malicious practices. Hackers, cyber-harassment or just people with bad intentions: you need to protect your accounts.
In other words, don’t reveal everything about your life on the Internet! Keep some information confidential and as a company choose your partners carefully. For example, as part of an influencer marketing strategy, choose influencers carefully by entrusting this work to experts like Kolsquare.
The ideal solution is to create separate accounts to differentiate your professional (your community) and personal (friends and family) lives.
You can also keep control of your accounts and filter your followers:
This is a good way to prevent search engines from indexing your profile. You can simply limit your full visibility to your contacts. You can also classify your friends into several categories (close friends, acquaintances, family, etc.) to better control the distribution of your publications.
If Facebook has been condemned again very recently, can we say that there are good and bad pupils when it comes to using our data?
The META group, with Facebook and Instagram in particular, is the first to share so much data with third-party services. It is the bad pupil of the class!
And let’s not forget WhatsApp, which is also owned by Meta and whose data is now shared with Facebook. Many people have therefore left this messaging solution in favour of more secure ones like Telegram.
As ads on Instagram become more and more refined, it is the network that sells the most data. According to a PcCloud study, the virtual network shares up to 79% of our personal data!
Still according to the PcCloud study, other platforms show more acceptable rates of personal data sharing:
Beyond all these figures and a ranking of “good” and “bad” students, there are many other vagaries concerning our data. In the course of 2021, for example, personal data leaks have affected users of Facebook, LinkedIn and Clubhouse.
In April, a database containing more than 533 million Facebook accounts, including phone numbers, was posted on a forum frequented by cybercriminals. A little later, a user of the same forum claimed to have data on millions of LinkedIn accounts. Then an Internet user posted a database of 1.3 million Clubhouse voice social network accounts.
Hence the need, as you will have understood, to securely use social networks to protect your data. This is a subject that will continue to evolve as the web becomes more and more popular and personal information is increasingly shared.
Kolsquare is Europe’s leading Influencer Marketing platform, a data-driven solution that allows brands to scale their KOL Marketing strategies and implement authentic partnerships with KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). Kolsquare’s technology enables marketing professionals to easily identify the best Content Creators profiles by filtering their content and audience, and to build and manage their campaigns from A to Z, including measuring results and benchmarking performance against competitors. Kolsquare has built the largest community of influencer marketing experts in the world, and offers hundreds of customers (Coca-Cola, Netflix, Sony Music, Publicis, Sézane, Sephora, El Corte Inglés, Lacoste, …) the latest Big Data, AI and Machine Learning technologies to drive inspiring partnerships, tapping into an exhaustive network covering 100% of KOLs with more than 5,000 followers in 180 countries on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As a Benefit Company, Kolsquare has been pioneering Responsible Influence by championing transparency, ethical practices, and meaningful collaborations to inspire change.