Why More Followers Doesn’t Equal Higher Engagement.
Micro-Influencer has quality over quantity has never been more accurate when it comes to the influencer community.
While so much attention is focused on growing your following, have you ever considered that fewer followers equal more engagement? As a result, many businesses opt for partnering with a micro-influencer over someone with 100k or more followers, which is good news for anyone trying to start their career online.
Furthermore, micro-influencers have a large capacity to maintain authenticity, which is desirable for a brand trying to gain a community’s trust.
Engagement Explained.
Social media engagement is essentially a lot of metrics that relate to how well an audience receives your posts. All of the platforms measure engagement rates differently. For example, Twitter measures your re-tweets and followers, Instagram measures likes and followers, and Facebook measures shares, preferences, and followers.
Public shares, likes, and comments are all used to create metrics concerning the productivity of your account, to assess a person’s or post’s popularity. This can be tracked through analytics; Instagram, for example, has an in-app tool available on their platform for Business and Creative accounts.
Micro-Influencer has more focused content to your following
When working with a smaller following, you have greater insight into what your audience is interested in. As a result, businesses seek out these small niche communities to partner with influencers that may bring them consumers or increase their online visibility. Furthermore, micro-influencers have a large capacity to maintain authenticity, which is desirable for a brand trying to gain a community’s trust.
Micro-influencers can help a brand gain the trust of different target audiences.
Experticity has found that a micro influencer’s recommendation contributed to 82% of purchase decisions made by consumers. These influencers are also an ideal choice for brands trying to boost their engagement by utilizing a smaller community interested in the micro influencer’s niche.
It’s a good idea to investigate a brand before deciding to partner with them to ensure their products are services align with your following. In addition, you want to maintain your authenticity and the audience’s trust when recommending them products.
A large following has long been a top priority for influencers on every social media platform. Presumably, with more followers, you can charge more for your endorsements, partner with prestigious influencers, and offer more visibility to brands. But is this the best strategy? Studies are suggesting, no! Today, 67% of brands are concerned about influencer fraud, the practice of buying your followers instead of obtaining them organically. With a smaller following, you are much less likely to be using these cheap strategies, and brands are making the switch to micro and nano-influencers. This suggests that even if your following is small, your impact is monumental.
A report has recently discovered that 63% of consumers trust an influencer’s endorsement over a brand’s advertisement. Crowdtap has claimed that content made by an influencer, or even a user, is 35% more memorable and 50% more trustworthy than a brand’s content or a non-user. A personal recommendation from someone you trust, online or not, is far more reliable than a company pushing its products. This is good news for you because you are receiving higher engagement levels and reaching more people following a smaller number of followers.
Brands are increasingly seeking influencers who can interact with specialized, smaller communities that align with their products. Research presented by Edelman at the Cannes Lions in 2019 has found that relatability is two times more important than popularity because people want to follow others they can relate to and build relationships.
Fewer Followers, More Engagement?
When you’re strategizing how to grow a following, engagement is one of the cornerstones of a successful social media influencer career. An often-overlooked factor is that audience size does not always equate to importance. Especially when buying followers is easy, cheap, and convenient.
Companies are not ignorant to bought followers and will actively investigate anyone they decide to partner with, whether through an affiliate program or ambassadorship.
Brands these days seek high engagement rates as this boosts the probability of those followers buying a product based on an influencer’s recommendation. In addition, meaningful engagement between you and your followers builds relationships and trust. Therefore, a micro-influencer is far more likely to have a higher concentration, with a 3.86% engagement rate than only 1.21% for mega influencers.
On TikTok, the difference in engagement is even more extreme, micro-influencers tend to have 18% engagement, and mega influencers are just under 5%.
When your engagement rates are high, you are more likely to receive visibility on a platform’s Explore or For You page. A crucial session held by Facebook’s Vice President, Adam Mosseri, revealed exactly how engagement relates to increased visibility in their “News Feed: Getting Your Content to the Right People”.
Facebook strives to deliver the content you want to see based on who you follow and what stories you open. As a micro-influencer, what you post is more likely to align with your followers, therefore delivering you higher visibility and boosting your engagement rates, which is an attractive statistic to brands.
How to Grow and Maintain Your Engagement for Micro-influencer
Whether in person or online friends, people who follow you personally are more dedicated to your content. Monitoring your follower’s analytics can provide great insight and help to maintain and increase your engagement. Analytics can also help you decide ideal times of the day to ensure your followers see the content and, subsequently, engage with you. Instagram, for example, prefers posts that garner a lot of activity in a short time and will likely prioritize those posts to your followers.
Having consistent, meaningful, and authentic content is essential in building a relationship with your following. No one wants to see a counterfeit influencer pushing products that you don’t believe they’d use themselves, such as a multi-millionaire promoting over-the-counter skincare, when in fact, they have an esthetician who treats their skin regularly.
Only promote and endorse products you believe in; with brands you trust.
Learn the ins and outs of all of your social media platform’s algorithms. This is an essential step in getting your content to the right people. For example, Instagram loves its Instagram Stories feature and will show your posts to your most regular story viewers. Unfortunately, only 16% of influencers are utilizing this feature. On the other hand, Facebook posts that include a video will receive 400% more engagement than a post with only text content. Furthermore, Twitter engagement functions almost exclusively on hashtags, with a 1,065% increase in concentration when using viral hashtags.
All in all, mega influencers aren’t going anywhere. Still, micro-influencers are making their debut in a big way, and there is room at the social media marketing table for everyone!
