• Reality show contestants will often see a ‘Bachelor bump’ in their social media followings during the run of the show.
• Analysis using social media tool CrowdTangle reveals that this year’s Australian ‘Bachelor’ participants saw their Instagram followers grow by more than 320% over three months.
• Many of the show’s participants have already begun to pivot from using their accounts to promote the show to influencer marketing.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

For contestants on reality television shows like ‘The Bachelor’, their television career may only span a matter of weeks. But their fame — and the careers they can make from it — doesn’t just end there.

Social media accounts have become a key part of promoting the show and its contestants. And once the show ends, contestants can continue to use the accounts to promote themselves and, if they choose, brands or organisations as part of a influencer marketing campaign.

And in Australia, this can be quite lucrative. ‘Married at First Sight’ star Jessika Power told the Daily Mail that she was earning between $8000 and $10,000 a week from her endorsements.

Another ‘Married at First Sight’ star Natasha Spencer was reportedly commanding $1000 for an Instagram Story and a post.

But what facilitates this pivot to being an influencer is the audience they gain from appearing on a popular television show.

The so-called ‘Bachelor bump’ occurs when contestants see a spike in follower numbers on their social media accounts once they grace our screens.

But just how much of a bump is there?

Contestants on the most recent season of ‘The Bachelor’ in Australia had a significant spike in Instagram followers during the show.

The analysis was conducted using the social media tool CrowdTangle and measured accounts over a three month period that included the cast’s announcement and the show’s run, July 1 to September 30 of this year.

Across 25 accounts — which comprises the Bachelor, Lochy Gilbert, and the 25 contestants (minus one whose profile is on private — there was a 320% increase in followers during the recorded period.

In absolute terms, they added 310,000 followers to bring them to 405,000 in total.

But the growth of the show’s participants wasn’t equal. As the star of the show, Gilbert added the most followers in total. Starting at an already respectable 42,000 at the beginning of July, his follower count grew to more than 124,000 by the end of September.

And for the contestants, the increase in their audience size was roughly correlated with how long they stayed on the show.

The final two contestants, Bella Varelis and Irena Srbinovska, were neck-and-neck in followers with 109,000 and 107,000 respectively. Prior to the show, Varelis had fewer than 20,000 whereas Srbinovska’s count was so small that the tool did not collect data on it.

Contrast that with Nadine Kodsi, who was eliminated in the first episode, who still has less than 2,000 followers.

Through the three month period, ‘The Bachelor’ contestants upped their posting frequency: in June, the 25 accounts posted just 12 times. In September, that number increased to 177.

And they were rewarded with engagement: people liked or commented on the Bachelor contestants content more than 755,000 times over the three month period.

In the weeks since the show finished, already some of the show’s participants have pivoted their online personas into tools for marketing.

And while not every contestant will choose to pursue a career of influencing, the ‘Bachelor bump’ offers contestants a way to prolong their 15 minutes of fame online.

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