Micro-influencers: where to find and how to use
When it comes to promoting and popularizing a brand, no one can meet the challenge better than social media. Customers look forward to getting a review from someone who already used a product and a recommendation from public social media person could be determinative for buying decision. In the current state, unobtrusive advertisements in blogs and vlogs are the most effective way to increase brands visibility and customer engagement.
Influencers with million audiences fit perfectly for big brands, but cooperation with micro-influencers could show unbelievable efficiency. Actually, “micro-influencers” is today’s most fresh buzzword. However, it explains nothing to a stranger.
So, who are those micro-influencers?
Influencer marketing environment is highly chaotic and it’s really hard to give some classification of social media channels owners. Since there is no precision in the industry we can talk only about rough estimates. Influencers are generally divided to 4 groups: stars (over 1 million followers), macro-influencers (500K — 1M followers), medium-influencers (100K — 500K followers) and micro-influencers (1K — 100R followers).
Is the bigger — better?
You might think that the bigger audience is — the higher engagement it provides, but surprisingly this is incorrect. Different research shows that amount of likes and comments decreases with audience growth. So, micro-influencers have a tighter connection with their followers. Subscribers rely more on small channel owners judgement because they seem to be sincere in their sympathies. It is obvious to followers, that famous person could promote some products as an advertisement and not-so-popular bloggers and vloggers often really recommend products they actually use and like.
What is more important for medium and small companies with a limited budget — micro-influencers are less expensive. The pricing is very uncertain in influencer marketing, but a post in a niche channel with a 10K audience will surely be cheaper than on Kim Kardashian’s Instagram page.
Bloggers with a small audience are interacting with their followers encouraging them to leave comments and take part in discussions. Small channels owners are often highly knowledgeable about products they promote and could perform reliable “buying conversations”. After all, if they really love your brand they will be very convincing in their posts.
Your perfect micro-influencer
It’s obvious that not every influencer fit your business. Before starting the search, you should define your audience. Keeping in mind the image of perfect micro-influencer you should check following statements:
• An influencer is relevant. Channels theme must fit your product. Followers of a beauty blogger will hardly be interested in car parts. Micro-influencers often specialize in the narrow field, be sure his niche is relevant to your brand.
• Influencer provides a high level of engagement. The more channel-owner interacts with his audience — the more exposure gets the promoted brand. Choose someone who performs a lot of discussions and gets likes and reposts.
• An influencer has a large reach. This is not the most important thing if we talk about micro-influencers, but if on your list are two bloggers with same relevance and engagement — pick one that has sufficient reach.
How to find a micro-influencer?
First of all, you should be aware that “hunting” a micro-influencer would be a time-consuming process. There are billions of channels in social media and thousands of them will fit your business. Here are some tips how to fasten the process.
1. Check your follower’s list
A person you are searching for could already be your subscriber. This micro-influencer could even be promoting your product for some time. Interacting with such a person will be authentic and boosts conversions and a micro-influencer that really loves your brand provides more plausible content.
2. Use brands hashtags
This advice is a part of previous one. Bloggers that use your product will match it with a hashtag. After a little investigation, you could find a pretty relevant channel that is already boosting the brand. An influencer that is also your client will cooperate with pleasure.
3. Let the Google be with you
Google knows everything and you surely will find right bloggers and vloggers via the search engine — it’s only a matter of time. Scrolling the search results will not only help you to detect micro-influencers but also check where and when people talk about your brand.
4. Grow your own micro-influencer
Not having a social media channel nowadays is something of a bad taste. Your employees surely have at least a page on Facebook. Some of them could have enough audience and thus fit your goals perfectly. A member of your team knows the product and could tell a lot about it. It would be better to help your employee to increase his audience than to cooperate with a stranger.
How many micro-influencers do you need?
The answer is very personal and depends on the business size, needed promotion and expected ROI. Results also vary with the efficiency of micro-influencers posts. It is hard to predict a precise effect of a campaign without using specialized sets of tools like provided by SocialMedia.Market. The best you can do — is to try to find your own ideal formula for micro-influencers usage.
