• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 18, 2017

It’s another Facebook-Google war, by proxy: photo-sharing platform Instagram is far and away the most popular marketing channel for social media influencers, but YouTube is growing fast.

That’s according to a new survey of around 300 influencers by social media marketing firm Hashoff, which maintains an opt-in network of more than 150,000 influencers.

Asked which social media platform is their number one area of focus, 92% of influencers polled by Hashoff chose Instagram, trailed by Facebook and YouTube at just 2.7% each, while Snapchat garnered just 1.4% and Twitter just 0.7%.

That doesn’t mean they’re not working on the other platforms at all: 99% said they’re working on Instagram, 67% on Facebook, 51% on Snapchat, 43% Twitter, 30% YouTube, and 28% Pinterest.

Instagram looks set to dominate influencer marketing next year as well, with 87% of influencers saying it will be their top focus in 2018 – but 8.5% said they expect YouTube to be their main focus.

No surprise, social media influencers spend a lot of time in their native milieu, with 33.1% spending two to four hours per day on social media, 32.1% spending four to seven hours per day, and 23.6% spending more than seven hours per day.

Despite these impressive figures, for most influencers it still isn’t a full-time job: 57.4% said they have another full- or part-time job, 25.3% are students, and just 12% said being a social media influencer is their only job.

Some influencers take a considerable amount of time to create their best posts, but for others it’s a relatively quick affair, Hashoff found, with 26.2% saying they can create a high-quality post in ten to 30 minutes, while 25.9% said it takes 30 to 60 minutes, and 25.9% said it takes one to three hours, and 16.3% said it takes more than three hours.

By 2019, the sponsorship money influencers receive on Instagram alone is set to more than double from about $1 billion this year to nearly $2.4 billion, according to a recent estimate by Mediakix.