by By: Gabriel Morris
Influencers have drastically changed the landscape of marketing from what it once was. With the birth of social media came new opportunities for organizations to reach their publics and the collaboration between a brand and an influential person ultimately resulted in what we know today as an influencer. An influencer can be anyone with a social media presence that has the ability to influence others through their platform to buy a product or service. Companies are then able to use these individuals to their advantage and reap huge profits compared to the actual costs of working with these influencers. Finding the right influencer for a company’s product or service is a big part of the marketing strategy. Knowing the different types of influencers and their effectiveness with influencing the public and delivering results can become quite a challenge. The most common influencers in which we see today are: Mega-influencers, Macro-influencers and Micro-influencers.
In fact, different influencers are approached for different types of products. Companies that want to promote the household products they sell, for example, tend to reach out to a new breed of influencers known as Mumfluencers. On TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms, these influencers typically post about parenthood. They frequently collaborate with brands to promote the company’s products and services. They accomplish this by sharing unique content with their followers, such as photos and videos. Mumfluencers many times also run contests and campaigns to increase the reach of a brand.
A Mega-influencer is an individual with over 1 million followers. They likely are a celebrity on both social media and for their real life talent. Their outreach is extremely large due to the large quantity of followers in which they have and each of their individual posts can be worth thousands if not millions of dollars in advertising value. Often times these Mega-influencers are less influential due to the distance in which they have from their followers on a personal level. The price of having a Mega-influencer advertise something may also be quite high compared to the other types of influencers. While their social media outreach may be quite large, due to the diversity of their following they often times can be less influential and are better suited for advertisements that appeal to the masses.
Macro-influencers tend to have a following that is anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million followers. These individuals have a large reach through their platform and likely have a lower rate for advertising costs compared to that of a Mega-influencer. Although the outreach of these individuals may be large the engagement can often times be less due to the demographics of the influencers followers.
These influencers have a following that ranges from 1,000 to 100,000 followers. Oftentimes brands choose this type of influencer to advertise their product or service due to the intimacy shared between the influencer and their followers. The cost of using these influencers can also be substantially less. The influencer also likely shares a similar interest as the follower making them feel more trustworthy to them. While outreach may be less it is quite often that follower engagement is greater than that of the other influencers with a larger following.
Influencers have the potential to create huge profits for organizations and have ultimately altered the ways in which marketing is facilitated in todays day and age. Their ability to influence multiple people at such a small cost is what makes this market so popular among companies. This billion dollar industry is only growing.
I liked how you broke down the different categories of influencer status based on their following and interests. I have many friends that are involved with representing a company’s products through their social media because it aligns with the content they post from their lives or their followers are college students who might be interested in the brand. Since my friends have a micro-level influence, they are able to answer questions or comments from their posts to help their audience learn more about the product or what the brand has to offer.
I enjoyed learning more about the types of influencers that there are such as when you said there are Macro-influencers vs. Micro-influencers. This is extremely true and sadly, I find more brands are willing to work with larger influencers because of their “status” This can leave POC and other minority groups out of the loop.
I really liked how your post broke down different influencer types. It was interesting for me to read because I reflected on who I follow on social media. For the most part I think mega influencers really dominate the social media scene. Most brands work with macro-influencers and mega influencers for things like brand deals the most I think. Overall, it is crazy to think not too long ago influencers did not really exist.
Great read! I enjoyed the breakdown of influencers depending on their following, it gives it more of a visual appeal to the three types. In the past, I’ve usually only assumed influencers to fall under what you considered mega- and micro-influencers, but the breakdown helped me think more broadly about the types and their actual influence they could have on their audiences.
Hi Gabriel! I really enjoyed your blog post. I am very interested in influencer relations and influencer marketing and think it would be an incredibly fascinating field to go into. Influencers can be so beneficial to companies and get content out there that people really want to see. However, there is always the possibility of people not trusting paid content or having an influencer do something socially unacceptable that hurts brand reputation. These are things that make this field so interesting to me because brands have to be so careful who they are aligning themselves with and how to stay true to their core values while still trying to get their products out there.