The Power of the Mommy Blogger

Recently, as I was finalizing our family plans for our first trip to Disneyland with our toddler, my husband turned to me and said, “well what do your online mommy friends think?”  In that moment, I realized just how much I have come to depend on the posts of other new moms in my multiple Facebook groups, Instagram “friends” and most of all – the all-knowing mommy blogger – for advice.

I don’t know most of these women, yet, every time one of my daughters enter a new phase of life – a growth spurt, the Terrible Twos, and now the even more Terrible Threes – I research the heck out of it.  I don’t tend to leverage the child rearing experts, but rather I turn to other women who are “real” and have gone through the same situations I was experiencing.

The aspect of my life that is most impacted by these social communities is how I shop for my kids.  Instagram has become my favorite way of discovering what’s trending now for the cool kids – some of my favorite Instagram profiles are mommy bloggers who started their blogs on design, wedding planning, cooking, etc. but have now evolved their Instagram profiles to include adorable pictures of their children, in even more adorable clothing and accessories that are all tagged with the appropriate sources.  Admittedly, I have searched for up to an hour to find out where blogger Joy Oh had purchased a pair of shoes her daughter was wearing when she did not tag it because I had to have them for my daughter too.

Why do I trust them so much?  They are the perfect mix of aspirational desire with the authenticity that they are real people who are just living and sharing their real lives.  They represent real moms, dealing with real life, and the simple fact that they aren’t trying to sell me on any product in particular makes their recommendations even better.  Just when I start to feel bad about myself that my kids are not as perfectly dressed as theirs, the moms I follow will post something about how they feel like they are failing or “zoom out” on the picture so you see the mess behind them.

So how valuable are they really to retailers and brands?  Almost all of the product reviews I read from blogs are caveated with the fact that they were sent this product to review. Over half of the accounts I follow on Instagram are of people and brands I have discovered through the few big bloggers I started following initially.  Mommy bloggers are fantastic influencers, and while their reach is often not large enough to capture a sizable chunk of the market, they do represent and influence an interesting, niche market.  As I am about to embark on my next project at Kelton focused on Millennial Moms, I hope to learn more about the value of mommy bloggers – and know that I will likely be finding more women to follow and more products to buy!