We Analysed the 'Love Island' Cast's Instagrams to See Who'll Make the Best Influencer

People who go on Love Island say that the point of going on Love Island is to find "true love". They say they are "in here to find someone". This, as we well know by now, means that they’re there to snog approx. three people, pick the one they like best and then finger them under a duvet, relentlessly, for the following five weeks to prove that their love deserves 50 grand. This, ostensibly, is the name of the game.

But the unspoken motive behind going on Love Island – the reason they’re really there, which viewers and Islanders alike are fully cognisant of – is different. The actual main aim of being a contestant on Love Island is as follows:

• Get as many Instagram followers as possible during your time in the villa by looking absolutely bango the whole time.
• When you are eventually kicked out, use those followers as stats for monetary leverage when you’re making sponcon deals with betting companies or flat tummy tea merchants.
• Become very, very rich indeed in the space of a few months and buy a mansion in Cheshire.

We know this. This is not news. You go on reality TV to get a bite of that juicy lil fame cherry, and in *very grave old person voice* The Age of Social Media, it is easier than ever to pull yourself away a piece of that sweet fruity flesh. The Love Island villa is pretty much an incubator for major influencers who will be plying you with discount codes like GEORGIA15 by the end of August, but from looking at their various accounts it appears that some of the contestants are a bit more ready for that than others.

While some have nailed their #aesthetic, already providing the details of their makeup artists and doing captions like "thanks soo much for the goodies *insert brand name here*", others are posting horrible close-ups of salt beef sandwiches. What I am trying to say is that not all influencers leave the Love Island villa equal, and some are more primed for total Pretty Little Thing domination than others.

Here is how I think they will do:

Here is someone who is ready to take her 10 percent off Miss Pap code and run with it. People seem to quite like Ellie – I am not personally won over just yet – and her "am just a normal lass, me!" shtick will probably see her do quite well. Her Instagram feed is already a very well curated grid of pictures of herself, and there are loads of soft lads calling her "actually perfect" in the comments. What this says to me is that she is ready to get you to buy so much shit. Don’t follow her unless you’re willing to walk into an eyelash extensions place and only consciously register what you’re doing when you’re in the chair and half your full set is already in, such is the weight of her sheer influence.

This is shocking form from the big fella. The size of him – the ripe potential for protein powder promotional deals – and he’s posting this shite. Not only is "If you know you know #saltbeef" the worst use of a hashtag in recorded human history, if we’re really honest the thing looks disgusting. Awful stuff.

If you look at Rosie’s pre-Love Island posts, you’ll notice that like Ellie she has been working up to her influencing career for a while. If I were to describe her grid in one word, it would be "aspirational" – she’s got a pathological love of nude shades and cursive fonts, and she’s not afraid to hit you over the head with both! If she’d stayed in the villa a bit longer she’d have been nailed on to design a range of those dresses with a million little holes in for Pretty Little Thing, but as it stands she’s doing #ads for William Hill, for which, in fairness, I bet she got paid an absolute mint.

Full disclosure: I fancy Sam Bird (or I would if he didn’t have eyebrows like my mum's hairdresser) and it has been enjoyable to watch his videos where he aggressively does his gym moves for "work" over the last couple of days! I have had a nice time! Haha, anyway, he’ll do well on Instagram because he’s a personal trainer so he’ll probably get loads of promo codes (LOVEISLANDSHRED) for those weird websites where you can buy lean meat in bulk.

Should she choose it, Samira will be an actually very good influencer because she is genuinely stylish. I can easily imagine myself flicking through her feed in two months' time and making a disastrous baker-boy hat purchase as a result.

Thirst traps like this mean business. Wes is going to have his own collection with Boohoo Man (inc. T-shirt that says "Do Bits" in 3x colour-ways) within two weeks of exiting the villa, mark my words.

If some charcoal toothpaste brand doesn’t sign Jack the fuck up with an exclusivity deal as soon as he gets out of that villa they’re all missing a trick. You can have that one from me, free of charge.

Dani, like Kem Cetinay last year, is the runaway personality of Love Island 2018. She’s sorted for life and probably has a long and illustrious TV career ahead of her, but if that doesn’t work out she also has the most Instagram followers of all the Islanders, having already hit a smooth 1.2 million. This means she could easily be offering you discounts on sewn-in hair extensions to the tune of a six-bedroom detached in Brentwood as soon as she gets out, but I think if she really wanted to harness her Instagram power she should just do Lives where she offers people advice, which is always that they're too good for their boyfriends.

Goes without saying, but obviously this shithouse is going to be fucking useless. If he can’t interact with other people without experiencing a robot brain glitch which results in him using some utterly godless phrase like "Doggy Fashion", or calling the dick the "Johnson", there’s absolutely no way he’ll be able to convincingly craft a caption which will flog me food supplements or whatever it is that male Instagrammers sell.

In the example post I have helpfully provided above, his incompetence is on full show: he’s fucked up the spacing on the caption, which itself sounds like it should be suffixed by "M’lady", and the image feels shrouded in the sort of vague wrongness that belongs on the "non aesthetic things" Twitter account. Go back to the NHS, you time-waster.

@hiyalauren