The age of the Micro-influencer

Influencer marketing involves reaching out to people who are extremely well connected to your target market and then having them promote your product for you. Sounds like a great idea, right? It’s a marketing strategy that has big potential payoff but along with the well-publicised rise of professional influencers, comes an increase in consumer mistrust. Once a social media influencer reaches a critical mass of followers, audience engagement actually begins to decrease. Potential customers become skeptical about endorsements and can view the poster as inauthentic if they are frequently seeing content that doesn't resonate as 'real'.

At Sociability we work closely with those influencers with a smaller - but more loyal - following as a cost-effective and highly effective way to reach your target audience. The exact definition of a 'micro-influencer' varies by marketeer - but in-house we define them as everyday social media users with fewer than 10,000 followers on any one platform. Their followers usually consist of their friends and family, so their posts are much more trustworthy and engaging. Kyla Brennan, the founder/CEO of HelloSociety said, “Influencer marketing is still effective when they’re looked at as peers." “When it comes to celebrity accounts, who have maybe millions of followers nobody actually believes that a celebrity is a real fan of a product they’re trying to sell.”

And the figures support this. Take Instagram as an example. Micro-influencers get an average of two-to-five times more organic engagement per Instagram post, compared to those with more than 100,000 followers. In a survey of 2 million social media influencers by influencer marketing platform Markerly, for unpaid posts, Instagram influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers have a like rate of about 8 percent, while those with 1,000 to 10,000 followers have a like rate of 4 percent. As following base continues to increase, like rate keeps decreasing. Instagram influencers with 10,000 to 100,000 followers see a 2.4 percent like rate, compared to 1.7 percent for those with 1 million to 10 million followers and more. Comment rate follows a similar pattern.

With Instagram's algorithm favouring quality content, posts from micro-influencers are even more visible on the platform. On many of the other platforms such as Facebook, content from friends and family members is prioritized. In fact, across all social media platform, the content produced by micro-influencers will perform better organically due to the inherent superior engagement.

To find out how we could help you leverage the power of the micro-influencer for your brand or even just a specific campaign, drop us a line: vic@sociabilitygroup.com or call 07966 476631.

Stay social,

Vic x

Victoria Reddington

Founder - Sociability Group Ltd