You already have a plan for what kind of campaign to run and how to go about it. But there’s one thing missing – you haven’t found micro-influencers for the campaign. This is the tricky part because you can easily end up working with micro-influencers who aren’t really right for you.
In this post, you’ll learn more about how to determine whether someone is a micro-influencer. You’ll also learn how to find the right micro-influencers for your business.
Who are micro-influencers really?
The term “micro-influencer” can be used to describe someone who has significant, but not massive influence. They normally have a huge following, but not as huge as other influencers. Or, their influence will be limited to a certain state or region.
The best way to determine whether or not an individual is a micro-influencer is by looking at their following size. This size will differ according to the platform for which you’re conducting your search.
A micro-influencer on Facebook, will have around 13,000 to 500,000 followers. As for Twitter micro-influencers, you can find users with anywhere between 3,000 and 82,000 followers.
According to Mavrck, however, a micro-influencer is an everyday consumer with 500 to 5000 followers.
So since there are varying definitions as to how many followers make a micro-influencer, let’s consider the safe amount to be around 1,000 and 100,000. They could be anyone from niche experts to your own customers as long as they have the ability to influence people’s purchase decisions.
Look for micro-influential fans
Now the best types of micro-influencers would be those who are already fans of your brand. They would either already be following you or creating content promoting your product just because they love it. And you won’t have to make too much effort in convincing them to work with you. Some of them may even gladly promote you in exchange for free products.
To find micro-influencers who are already talking about your brand, you can use social listening tools. Look for people who have mentioned your brand somehow and see how many followers they have. If they fall under the micro-influencer category, you can approach them for a partnership. Here are some of the best social listening tools you can use:
1. Awario
Awario is a tool that lets you look for social media brand mentions and mentions on other websites. So you can not only find micro-influential social media users but also micro-influential bloggers that are already talking about your brand.
Image Source: Awario
2. Social Mention
You can also use Social Mention, which helps you keep track of users that mention a certain keyword. This keyword can either be your brand name, a product name, or even an event. So you can amend your search and look for micro-influencers that are discussing topics relevant to your brand.
3. Mention
And then there’s Mention, which has similar features to Awario. Using this tool, you can look for social media users that are talking about your brand. And you can filter the results based on which conversations are the most relevant, which can make your search for a micro-influencer much easier.
Image Source: Mention
In addition to these social media monitoring tools, you can also conduct branded hashtag searches in the respective social media channel you want to use. A branded hashtag would ideally look like this: #yourbrandname.
Or it might be a unique hashtag that your brand had come up with for your previous marketing campaign. Retailers like ASOS, for instance, can search for users that have created content and tagged it with #ASOS or even their popular #AsSeenOnMe hashtag.
Finding micro-influential fans on Instagram
On Instagram, you can check out the photos you like from the search results.
If you click on the third photo in the results, for instance, you can see that it has plenty of engagements. There are 4000+ likes and several comments.
You can check out the profile of the user who posted the photo. In this case, it’s someone named Berry Malinowska who has just over 99k followers, which qualifies her as a micro-influencer.
Finding micro-influential fans on Facebook
On Facebook, you can look for posts that contain your branded hashtag. Let’s say you search for the hashtag #Glossier. You’ll get several results of public posts created by individual users and posts created by pages.
What you need to look for here is posts created by a page since individual accounts have several privacy restrictions. For your campaign to have optimal impact, you need an account that everyone can access. The following post looks promising. Now you have to check out the page and see how many likes they have.
The post was created by a page called The Brunette One, a personal blogger who has just over 1400 Facebook likes. This qualifies the blogger as a micro-influencer.
Finding micro-influential fans on Twitter
Just as with Instagram and Facebook, finding micro-influential fans on Twitter involves using your branded hashtag. You can check out the top results and look for posts that you like. Ideally, you should look for photo results if you’re selling consumer products. This is because you want the influencer to be able to showcase your products in an appealing manner.
Researching micro-influencers on Twitter is a bit easier because you can preview the influencer’s profile right on the search results page. For example, a search for Vans will bring up the following results.
And if you hover over the username, you’ll see a preview of their bio. You can also see the number of followers the user has. In this case, the user has more than 9600 followers, qualifying him as a micro-influencer.
Finding micro-influencers using tools
Although micro-influential fans are the best to work with, it may be challenging for startups and smaller brands that are yet to build a following. Or you may have too much on your plate to manually conduct your search using the tips above.
In such cases, you can use influencer marketing tools, or work with an influencer marketing agency.
For influencer marketing tools, you have options like BuzzSumo and Insightpool. Both of which can help you find relevant influencers using the right keywords.
Conclusion
These are some of the best ways to find micro-influencers for your business. The steps highlighted here can help you identify micro-influencers that have significant reach and are relevant for your industry. Got any questions about these steps? Leave a comment below and let me know.
