Mega influencers have a lot of pull power due to their large audience.
They may have very little knowledge about the subject, but they can publicize your product or service to reach millions in seconds.
Celebrities are major examples of Mega influencers.
Cristiano Ronaldo, for example, has 200 million followers on Instagram, and in a minute, his post can generate a million engagements.
Mega influencers are only hired by top companies because they are usually expensive to approach.
Even if the company has an ambassadorial deal with the celebrity, it still costs money to maintain that relationship.
Ronaldo is a Nike ambassador and may not collect any money to post adverts for Nike, as his ambassadorial duties may include that, but to get that deal signed, he would receive benefits in cash and in-kind.
Mega influencers, despite their reach, do not target specific audiences. In all honesty, a post from Cristiano Ronaldo may reach 30 million people, but how many of these people are really your target audience?
Well, you can’t tell. Mega influencers, despite their reach, aren’t the best for all campaigns, and if wrongly used, they can cause very huge losses.
A great example of a mega influencer is Kim Kardashian, which single post might cost as high as half a million dollars!
Macro-influencers
Macro-influencers also have very large audiences on social media, typically between a few hundred thousand to a million followers.
Unlike actual celebrities that got fame through sports, music, or other forms of art, Macro-influencers are usually popular as a result of the internet.
Popular Bloggers, Vloggers, Podcasters, and the likes fall into this category. Bloggers usually know the subject matter.
Even if they are not professionals of that field or niche, they have enough information that they feed knowledge-seeking internet users who visit their blogs because of the valuable content that they publish regularly.
They also utilize their large volume of social media followers to promote their blog content.
A good example is Pat Flynn, the Owner of the blog “Smart Passive Income” boasting of a verified Twitter account with 158,000 followers; he also runs a podcast and a verified YouTube channel of 268,000 subscribers.
On his blog, he mainly teaches easy techniques for running E-commerce businesses and harnessing passive income opportunities.
If you have a useful service in this field, such as SEO tools, Pat Flynn can dedicate a series of blog posts to discuss this topic, or a YouTube tutorial video while recommending your tool for use with several backlinks to your own website.
He can also discuss you in his podcast as he has several ways to reach his audience.
Macro-influencers are the best bet when you want to reach out to your target audience based on your subject while ensuring that you reach out to many people, especially in the awareness stage of your campaign.
Bloggers and Vloggers can work wonders for you due to their loyal audience, which looks up to them for information because they have found them trustworthy over time.
Pat Flynn is a rare one, as he engages in blogging, Vlogging, and Podcasting. But many Macro-influencers use just one medium of sharing content with their audience.
Macro-influencers help you re-strategize content, boost your brand awareness, and you can find them for almost any category you want, fashion, gaming, technology, music, and so on.
Micro-Influencers
Micro-Influencers usually have followers ranging from a few thousand to 100,000 or, on some occasions, slightly more.
They are typically more invested in the subject matter and closer to the target audience because of closer interactions and engagement via social media.
They aren’t necessarily the best for awareness, but they are good for promotion campaigns.
They also work with cheaper and less flexible budgets, making them affordable for businesses with tighter budgets.
They also receive payments in different methods, cash, products, free services, and many more.
Some of these people are well-known professionals in their fields, and their followers see their recommendations as professional advice without appearing as a means of promotion at times.
A micro-influencer can be a dietician who gives expert advice on what to eat to improve certain things in the body or even lose weight.
A company in the food industry can adequately get promoted by such a micro-influencer through recommendation.
The dietician could recommend pleasant sugar-free edibles for diabetics, and companies who produce this can get huge promotions from this.
The trust gained from these people due to expertise makes them ideal for promotional campaigns as they can drive a large percentage of their relatively small audience to consume a product.
A lot of times, these micro-influencers are usually ignored or less prioritized.
This is, however, a wrong move because each level of influencers has their levels of engagement, and different stages in marketing require different approaches.
Nano Influencers
Nano influencers usually have a similar or slightly smaller range of followers as Micro-influencers, but they do not possess the knowledge and the professional touch of the micro-influencers.
They are very vocal with their advocacy for a brand and very convincing too.
Nano influencers speak about a brand positively at any chance they get, jumping under Twitter threads or social media posts that criticize or bring up a bad or wrong image about a brand to defend them publicly.
Because of their less professional approach, however, they might come off as controversial.
Still, they usually have loyal supporters who would take their words as it comes, because they believe these nano influencers do not see the posts as promotional, they see it as an honest opinion that they should follow.
They are also relatively cheap to deal with.
Mini Influencers
These influencers are usually respected due to their knowledge of the subject matter.
Micro-influencers, although not necessarily professional, have a good online reputation, and they are known to recommend your product or service to their followers and anybody who cares to ask.
Because of their reputation, their recommendations are usually followed.
Some of these categories can be mixed together to achieve good results. You can have a celebrity post a new product you have while running a side campaign with bloggers to make reviews on it, with a backlink to your page.
While the celebrity’s post is doing rounds on social media – reaching millions of people in no time, the macro influencer can do a YouTube video comparing a product with other trendy products, highlighting and focusing on yours, making both campaigns effective the same time.
At certain times the influencers’ works will go so deep that even users of your product will join these influencers in promoting your product or service (provided it suits them), becoming a loyal customers, hence amplifying the jobs of the influencers on social media.
They are a very good source of social proof easily acceptable.
Locating Influencers for Your Campaign
After deciding on the type of influencer you want for your campaign, you need to locate them to pitch your brand to them.
Briefing them about what you want to do, how you want it done, your expectations, and the metrics by which you will judge their performance.
Mega influencers are the easiest to locate; all you need to do is go to the social media page of the influencer that fits your brand and check his/her bio.
Usually, they have many direct message requests from numerous fans, so it is best to get their email or business contact information from their bio. This way, you can easily get in touch with their managers to schedule an appointment.
Macro-influencers, too, are not difficult to find, as they are relatively small when compared to other micro and nano influencers.
Since they are typically Vloggers and Bloggers, it may be a good idea to do a YouTube research on topics that you find enthralling to your target audience.
Note the Vloggers that present them and check their subscriber count, from suggested videos and related videos too, you will see similar Vloggers.
This will help you locate the Macro-influencers in your niche, and you can easily contact them from links in their bio, most notably an email address.
You can also reach out to blogs that rank well on Google for your preferred content. Search for a series of words you think people who need your products/services will probably be searching.
Certain websites will show up repeatedly on Google’s first page with different keywords searched.
These blogs have a good ranking, and users will likely visit these blogs when finding answers to their questions; simply visit the blog and locate the contact information from there.
Looking for Micro-influencers and Nano influencers can be herculean. There are several hundred thousand of these on Instagram and Twitter, and selecting at random isn’t a good idea.
Hence it requires a more dedicated type of approach to locate these influencers.
It is important to know what has been trending online for a while and the people who create these contents.
Buzzsumo, Content Studio, SproutSocial, and HootSuite are good examples of tools that can help scan several social media websites, even with a streamline to your location, and understanding in general what content will work best for pushing your brand.
Some of these tools can also help you discover the people who get the most attention on these social media platforms, giving you a lead on who you should check their profiles.
Upon checking their profiles, you will find details on contacting them.
They don’t have overcrowded direct messages like influencers, so you can briefly engage them with a direct message to know their availability and see if they would love to be a part of your campaign before you proceed to send a brief via email.
Some popular micro-influencers do not manage themselves, and you need to get in touch with their management to pitch your brand. Other ways to locate micro, nano, and mini influencers include:
Conduct a survey with your audience, asking which social media platforms they use the most, and focus on prioritizing your influencer hunt from there.
Check LinkedIn for professionals who have a large following on other social media platforms, especially Twitter and Facebook, where interaction is high.
Check Twitter’s “trending” for hashtags and see the leading influencers from those tags. It is also a current indication of how active they are – you don’t want an inactive influencer to run a campaign for you.
Engage in competitor analysis to know the people your competitors are partnering with. Obviously, you cannot partner with those particular set of people, but it should give you an insight into who you should be on the lookout for.
Use Famebit (a platform on YouTube) where you can find influencers for various niches; Famebit makes it easy for micro-influencers to sign up without asking for any fee and collects 10% of the fee the influencer gets, hence there are thousands of influencers on that platform. Using Famebit, you can sort through influencers by different demographics like age, follower count, impressions, and engagements. Famebit gives you an easy way to connect with micro-influencers, especially for long term partnerships with different influencers for your products.
Whether you’re in the fashion industry, beauty, technology, etc., there is always a pool of influencers from you to select from.
An additional category of influencers that are relevant to a micro-niche is Mini Influencers.
What is a good influencer strategy?
A good influencer strategy balances the reach and engagement of a potential audience by partnering up with the right kind of influencer. For instance, a campaign where you connect with micro or nano influencers might be way more effective for smaller brands as it might lead to brand awareness and conversions. For much larger campaigns where the main goal is to generate buzz simply, macro or mega influencers might be more beneficial for that, as they have much more reach. Thus, it’s critical to set what’s the goal of the influencer marketing campaign.
What are the 5 characteristics of a good influencer?
There are several ways to assess whether an influencer is in target with a brand’s audience. Some characteristics of a good influencer are:
Online influencer marketing is a relatively new creation, but it has fundamentally changed how brands communicate with consumers. People with targeted audiences are now the focus of advertising efforts. Influencers can tap from small to larger audiences thus, giving companies another way to promote their products. Indeed, influencers make money by selling digital products via sponsorships and affiliations, brand ambassadors programs, and physical products.
Blogging is a prevalent and well-established practice, with popular blogging platform WordPress powering many websites on the internet. While a few successful bloggers really make money, those who do usually monetize through affiliate marketing, Google AdSense (or other advertising platforms), sponsorships, memberships, or selling their own digital and physical products.
TikTok, owned by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance turned as among the most successful native micro-video platforms, and it became the go-to platform for millions of young users. Thus, the “TikToker” has already become the evolution of the “influencer” from platforms like Instagram. Those TikTokers make money in a few ways, such as monetary gifts, sponsorships, advertising agreements, affiliations, and more.
Online influencer marketing is a relatively new creation, but it has fundamentally changed how brands communicate with consumers. People with targeted audiences are now the focus of advertising efforts. Influencers can tap from small to larger audiences thus, giving companies another way to promote their products. Indeed, influencers make money by selling digital products via sponsorships and affiliations, brand ambassadors programs, and physical products.
Podcasts make money in several ways. The primary sources of revenues from podcasting come from affiliate marketing, advertisements (in the form of pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll), sponsorships, selling your own products, or by using podcasting to sell consulting services. Podcasting is an effective marketing and distribution channel, and it can be integrated within a businessmodel.
Influencer marketing involves the marketing of products or services that leverages the popularity, expertise, or reputation of an individual. Influencer marketing is often associated with those who have large social media followings, but popularity should not be confused with influence. Influence has the power to change consumer perceptions or get their audience to do something different.
Instagram makes money via visual advertising. As part of Facebook products, the company generates revenues for Facebook Inc. overall businessmodel. Acquired by Facebook for a billion dollar in 2012, today Instagram is integrated into the overall Facebook business strategy. In 2018, Instagram founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, left the company, as Facebook pushed toward tighter integration of the two platforms.
TikTok makes money through advertising. It is estimated that ByteDance, its owner, made over $17 billion in revenues, for 2019. While we don’t know the exact figure for TikTok ads revenues, given it counted over 800 million users by 2020, it is a multi-billion company, worth anywhere between $50-100 billion and among the most valuable social media platforms of the latest years.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
