An Inside Look Into the Age of Influencers

Story by BROOKE CARLSON | Photos by THU NGUYEN & RAE AFLATOONI

His photo hung in the halls of a New York City art exhibit. Adoring fans from all over the world get nervous when he hasn’t shown his face on social media for more than a couple days. He has more followers on Instagram than the population of Washington State’s capital city. A personal photographer dotes on him for hours at a time as he models in front of sets laid out for him.

He is also a small, cute, fluffy rabbit.

Mason the Holland Lop and his brother Mei, also a rabbit, are the faces of Veryfatrabbit, an Instagram profile run by their owner, Thu Nguyen.

With over 70,000 followers, Mason and Mei are supermodels of the bunny world. They both have milky white, pristine and clean fur. Mason is chubby with blue eyes and droopy ears. Mei’s ears stick straight up and has dark eyes, enveloped by long lashes.

Throughout the Instagram feed, you may notice a carefully placed watch or beanie juxtaposed against the unblemished fur of rabbits. This is the side of Veryfatrabbit that makes it different than the average social media profile.

Nguyen works with brands to promote and advertise various companies. Her opinion serves as a trusted review for their followers.

Online influencer Rae Aflatooni is the blogger behind the Instagram profile Raepublic. She occasionally uses her platform as a space for company advertising. However, there are no bunnies to be seen here, just a great deal of food.

She is part of the vegan food niche on Instagram. Her feed is a harmonious blend of culinary photos of all colors and textures. Deep red beets meld with burnt orange squash in bowls. Perfectly piped chocolate fudge frosting sits atop cupcakes. A flourescent green smoothie photographed from a bird’s eye view. Aflatooni shares her own vegan recipes and photos as well as promoting other profiles and and blogs on her page.

Online influencers are individuals, or rabbits, who have the ability to affect a larger community. Companies have taken advantage of online influencers who have these huge followings as a marketing strategy. Brands will pair with influencers, giving them compensation to promote their products. In turn, the influencers provide positive consumer opinions.

Though online influencers have found their way into the public sphere as a tool for marketing, people like Nguyen and Aflatooni have proven some have goals that reach far beyond becoming walking, talking advertisements. Their instagram profiles are platforms for education, change and optimism.

Recent Western grad Nguyen didn’t start Veryfatrabbit with the intentions of rabbit fame, rather to make herself and others feel better.

Brilliant white fur juxtaposed upon bright green grass, Mason was hard to miss when Nguyen would take him out on Old Main Lawn to hop around. Mason acted as Nguyen’s therapy animal when she lived in Nash Hall.

She believes that many use social media as a way of coping with their realities, so she wanted to use her online profile to share what helped her: Mason.

“One of the purest things for me as therapy was my rabbit. He’s cute, he’s fluffy, he does insane things. He’s like a cat and a dog together,” Nguyen said.

Veryfatrabbit is a totally bunny-centered profile, with no humans to be seen in the photos. Nguyen says her rabbits can offer more to her audience so she rarely post photos of herself.

“[My followers] message me that they smile everytime they see Mason,” she said. “I think it’s a really positive impact.”

Nguyen is passionate about caring for animals, rabbits in particular. She never forces them into poses, even if that means the photoshoots take four hours. Her voice softens with affection whenever she speaks about her own pets. Her tone sharpened when she spoke of a darker side of sharing her life online.

Content theft is something that Nguyen has constantly dealt with. Other Instagram users will take Veryfatrabbit’s photos and display them as their own.

Even worse, companies that sell rabbit-fur products have used her photos of Mason and Mei to promote their businesses. For instance, real rabbit foot keychains.

“It’s horrible how these products are made,” Nugyen says. “It’s things like that I’m not okay with. Their practices are unethical, and they promote my rabbit, so it kind of seems like I promote it.”

This is her least favorite part of being an influencer. But luckily, because of her status online, she’s got a following that is willing to fight for her.

“It’s a good thing to have the community that I have, because if I do see injustice like that, I blast their account,” Nguyen said.

She says first she’ll comment and direct message them asking to take the photo down. If they don’t respond, she’ll screenshot the post, and her community takes over from there.

Her followers will try to get the account blocked by reporting it to Instagram. When an account is reported, moderators will review the post and assess whether it follows the platform’s community guidelines. With a following of 70,000, this is effective.

Aflatooni started Instagram after a long period of trying out different careers. She graduated college and traveled abroad in China, doing everything from lifeguarding to becoming a licensed contractor. The 31-year-old now holds blogging and Instagramming as her main job as she attends graduate school for nutrition.

What originally started as a vegan food blog has now blossomed into a space where Aflatooni shares very personal aspects her life, including her experiences with abuse and mental health. Her profile biography lists, “Holistic lifestyle to improve #mentalhealth w/ #plantbased #nutrition, recipes & #fitness. Living w/ PTSD + depression.”

“Part of the full circle of me becoming vegan and experiencing this and deciding to go into nutrition is because I’ve realized how much of an impact your diet has on your mental health,” Aflatooni said.

She limits how much she talks about this specific tie between diet and mental health. he wants to wait until she’s earned her master’s so she can base her knowledge in fact, rather than her own experience, she says.

On a platform like Instagram, online influencers like Nguyen and Aflatooni are seen frequently. They are people with substantial followings, usually more than 10,000, who share their lives through photographs and captions.

But how do they gain these huge followings? Nguyen made a conscious effort to grow her profile by investing in Instagram’s community.

She consistently interacted with other users, utilizing hashtags and keywords, liking and commenting on photos, and it paid off.

Nguyen was in class one day when she felt a peculiar feeling in her pocket. Warmth began to radiatefrom her phone. As it got hotter and hotter, it was uncomfortable to the point that she had to pull it out and see what was up. That’s when she saw that it was flooded with notifications from Instagram.

“Instagram noticed my profile, and they re-Instagrammed my Instagram,” Nguyen says. “I went from 16,000 followers to 34,000 overnight.”

From there, Veryfatrabbit continued to grow. Nguyen connected with other rabbit Instagrams with large followings, like Bunnymama, who has a follower count of over 800,000. When Bunnymama likes or ineracts with Nguyen’s photos, she gets almost a thousand new followers, she says.

Aflatooni has noticed that she has to be very careful even when interacting with different kinds of profiles.

“I can’t really like [posts] that aren’t in line with my brand,” she says.

Because she’s incorporated herself into this category of influencers, sections of her audience notice when she deviates. Even in the most minute of ways.

“People get really pissed at you if you’re like this vegan person and you go and like and comment on someone’s paleo dinner that had meat on it,” she said.

Aflatooni says if she comes across posts with non-vegan food she likes, she has to comment intentionally.

For example, she said she came across a post from a profile that emphasized eating whole foods and a gluten-free diet. It was a beautiful picture of a non-vegan cake. Instead of typing, “That looks so delicious,” she writes, “Wow, this is an amazing shot.”

“I look it at it like, I can appreciate that a person is eating whole foods. I can appreciate that they’re a really good photographer,” Aflatooni says. There are so many different aspects of their post that I can appreciate.”

Aflatooni chuckled as she explained that for a while, there were some followers who were totally intolerant of her interacting with any pages that weren’t strictly vegan.

“I was like, c’mon guys, don’t you have anything better to do?” she laughed.

But luckily, Aflatooni’s loyal following that have interacted with her since the beginning, stood up for her.

As her profile continues to grow, Aflatooni said her long term goal is to create accessible online nutrition courses aimed at improving mental health.

“Reflecting on everything, I might as well try to help people that may have experienced similar things to me,” she said.

Nguyen’s long term goals for Veryfatrabbit also pivot on helping others. As time goes on she hopes to start blogging on rabbit care tips and tricks.

The first time Nguyen met Mason, it was not a pretty scene. He was in a cage with no bedding, covered in his own waste. His previous owners were giving him away because their child was tired of the animal, Nguyen said. She drove down to Oregon to rescue him.

She wants to teach others rabbits are not just novelties, and educate others through her Instagram and blog that they need the same treatment as any other pet.

Eventually, she wants that to lead to a rabbit care product business in which she can give half the proceeds to humane societies.

Whether it be through nutrition or rabbits, Nguyen and Aflatooni are two influencers in a world of many who are using their platforms for positive change.