How to Become a Micro Influencer

Like every other user on Instagram, you must have also thought of becoming an influencer, gaining fame, and earning a lot of money. With nearly 2.35 billion active users monthly, it is the world’s fourth most popular social media platform. Today, millions of influencers are making a mark on it while harnessing opportunities from different brands. 

Do you think you be can one of them and grasp great deals with top brands? Well, that means you need a vast and authentic follower base, approximately more than 50,000 followers to get noticed by the brands. 
But, let’s not get your hopes down! If you are dreaming of becoming an influencer and have more followers than 50,000, you can still be an influencer. ‘Micro-influencer’ is the word for it!

A micro-influencer is a social media user, typically with a lower number of followers, between 5,000 and 25,000, who focuses on creating highly engaging content for a particular niche. These small-scale influencers are recent targets of brands and hence have the potential to earn.

If you are willing to learn how to become a micro-influencer and get yourself recognized by brands, this blog will guide you. It explains the rapid emergence of micro-influencers, what they do, and what skills they need to become one. Go ahead, and take cues and suggestions from our blog if you love social media and want to make money out of it! 

What is a Micro-Influencer? 

A micro-influencer is a social media user with a follower count anywhere between 5000 and 100,000. Micro influencers create and post content on a niche or theme to target a particular audience. Eventually, they get opportunities to promote products related to their niche/theme. 

Brands in the fields of fashion, food, travel and tourism, beauty, personal care, health, and education seek micro-influencers on Instagram, Facebook, and other social media. They believe micro influencers help them better magnify their promotions. It’s because they are budding content creators who are more connected with their followers and have greater power to influence the audience than large-scale or mega-influencers. 

It was certainly not the perception of brands earlier! Micro-influencers had no or less chances to grow their profile and leverage opportunities from the brands as mega-influencers took away all the limelight. 
Now, that you know what micro-influencers are and how they are ruling Instagram parallel to the mega-influencers, you might want to become one. 

Emergence of Influencer Marketing In The Social Media 

Influencer marketing began quite a time ago when ‘mega-influencers’ or ‘celebrities’ with massive audience bases started promoting products or services. Big brands approached them to promote their products for payment, which is usually very high. 

For instance, Selena Gomez, a singer, and actress with massive followers of 430 million charges nearly $1,730,000 for a single post. 
On the other hand, Neymar da Silva, a Brazilian footballer with 213 million fan followers charges $945,000 for a post.

Aren’t they huge?

Well, this may be a big reason for micro-influencers or small influencers with lower follower counts to rise on Instagram and other social media platforms. 

Since celebrities or artists who are mega influencers charge extravagant costs for every single post of promotion, they are usually out of the scope of smaller brands. However, they too need to leverage social media, which is a significant mode for marketing and advertisements. So, they started approaching regular users with a substantial follower base who have carved a profound niche with their engaging posts.

As success came to both brands and users with this idea, the importance of micro-influencers started growing. While brands gained exposure to a broader and more relevant audience base, those influencers earned considerably, between $1,000 and $1,500 per month by using a social proof platform.

On average, micro-influencers charge $200 - $1000 per post, based on their follower count.

Does this shift of influencer marketing from popular celebs to ordinary people make you think about how to become a micro influencer? Well, it’s no rocket science or mere luck to become one. Our tips and guidelines in this blog will let you know how. 

What You Need To Do As A Micro-Influencer? 

Before you learn how to start micro influencing or become a micro influencer, you need to know what will be doing after you become one.
A micro-influencer usually has 10,000+ credible followers with consistent growth of the follower base, higher engagement, and niche-based quality content. They mostly create content ideas and manage their content on their own or with a small team. 

Generally, micro-influencers post content that highly interests their audience, like entertaining or educating them. 

If you are planning to become a micro-influencer on Instagram, remember to do the following tasks.

• Create engaging content, including posts and videos (reels) to entertain, update, or educate the audience. 
• Optimize your content strategy or design a new strategy after a certain time gap to stay ahead of the algorithm.
• Study the audience behavior and preferences using social media analytics and other integrated tools and adapt strategy accordingly. 
• Collaborate with the brands to promote their products or services, through different types of content. 
• Engage with the followers i.e., respond to their comments, tags, and Instagram stories. 

How Micro Influencer Adds Value To Brands As Their Advertisers?

As a micro influencer, you bring value to companies or brands whose products/services you promote. This goes without saying that the more value you add, the better you are as an influencer. 
While earlier only small and mid-sized businesses approached micro influencers, now big brands also prefer them. It’s because they add more value to brands or businesses due to the following factors.

1. Higher engagement rates

Studies of profiles of celebrities and micro-influencers on Instagram, which is the best micro influencer platform, showed that that later has almost double engagement. It simply means the followers like, comment, and re-post/share their content more.

Usually, pages or profiles of celebrates comprise inactive users or bots as followers generated by their PR (Public Relationship) executives. But, for an influencer, it comprises authentic users who are truly interested in engaging with their content. Henceforth, by collaborating with the micro-influencer, brands have the chance to engage with everyday users and expose their products/services to a real audience. 

2. Micro-influencers are more cost-effective than super-influencers

Micro influencers do not expect to be paid a huge amount, unlike celebrity influencers for a single post. They keep their expectations considerably lower and reasonably from the brands, which means brands have greater ROI (Return on Investment). 

A micro-influencer strives to build long-term relationships with the brands so they can create a consistent stream of income. To grow exponentially in the field of influencer marketing, you must charge a smaller amount for every post. However, this means the lower they charge for every post, the more brands engage with them.

3. Micro-influencers have the same target audience as their followers

Super-influencers can reach a wide audience but that’s temporarily. Their followers merely stick to them for a long time because they are not from the same demographic and cannot relate to their content. 
On the other hand, micro-influencers have followers from the same demography, background, or niche. As a result, they are most likely to stick around with them. For this reason, brands find it more effective to advertise through micro influencers because they will promote it to similar types of people. 

11 Vital Tips On How To Become A Micro Influencer

If the present prosperous scenario and earning capabilities of micro influencers tempt you to become one, it’s the right time to take the plunge. But are you feeling dubious or non-confident about it? Think people will not follow you, and you will be unable to cross 10K followers?

Give away all your apprehensions or worries right away! We will guide you on the journey of becoming a micro influencer. With our proven micro influencer tips and steps, elevate your profile to a new level and start making money. 

Here, we explained the steps on how to become a micro influencer on Instagram and other platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Take a read. 

1. Discover your niche based on your passion

Find what you are passionate about and choose your niche. Hundreds of profiles start impressively but fail to grow in terms of followers and engagement because their content is irrelevant to a particular topic or niche. 

To attract a group of audience and keep them glued to your page, you must create content aligned with a topic or a few related themes. When your target audience can connect with the content or find it interesting/entertaining, they will hit on ‘Follow’. 

A key way to find a niche that works for you, as well as your audience, is to go for the topic that you love or are passionate about. It can be anything, trying new foods/cuisines, trying outfits, getting makeovers, doing touristy things, and exploring new places. 

When you love something, you will be interested in creating content regularly and introducing new ideas and trends revolving around your topic. Eventually, you will create a series of content around your topic or themes. You can always find the posts or videos that you enjoyed creating, or had more engagement and later, focus on only such content type. 

Let’s take the example of Elizabeth Moye (Instagram account: hellospoonful), a micro-influencer with 74K. She is a nutritionist and entices her followers by providing affordable healthy eating options and recipes everyone can try. 

With her simple yet demanding topic, she is winning the hearts of her audience who seek healthy diets for a balanced lifestyle. On one hand, it is easy for her to get followers because who doesn’t want to be fit and healthy? On the other hand, to create posts, she does what she loves doing, i.e., preparing wholesome and affordable recipes using her knowledge of food nutrition. 

2.    Decide the ideal platform for becoming a micro-influencer

If becoming a micro influencer is your goal right now, then decide which social media platform is the right one for you. Now, that depends on your niche. Your niche determines who will be your target audience, and consecutively, you know where you can find them. 

Understanding your audience is crucial for securing success as a micro influencer. A particular niche and a highly engaging audience base are the key things that differentiate a micro influencer from celebs and mega influencers. Thereby, a critical step in how to become a micro influencer is to create an impressive profile that the target audience of your niche will love to follow!

Analyze influencers' profiles in the same niche to understand the demographics and personality of users who usually engage with them. In other words, determine their age, location, lifestyle preferences, goals, social media behavior, etc. User identification helps you to easily determine the ideal platform. 

Also, instead of operating multiple profiles at a time, just focus on a single platform and slowly, grow in it by diversifying your content. 

If you are choosing fashion, food, or art as your niche, Instagram and Facebook are the ideal platforms. If you are into career counseling, motivational speaking, or business/entrepreneurship training, LinkedIn is the ideal platform to start your micro-influencing career. However, if you are into traveling or adventure and like to post video content of your trips, YouTube is the right platform for you! 

3. Post content in a distinct way or pattern

After you decide to be a micro-influencer and create your profile, it is time to focus on the most important step, which is content creation. Make sure you create content consistently, most preferably regularly. 

Most influencers fail because they do not consider it significant to post daily, and it causes their slower growth. It simply means your content creation strategy decides the fate of your career as a micro influencer. 

However, posting daily does not mean you can post basic content related to your niche and post relevant content in between them! It might happen that on some days you feel inspired, and ideas pop up in your mind. And, on some days, you are jet-lagged, and no ideas come to your mind. 

While that is normal, how can you maintain consistency in content creation? Well, here are a few best practices for you. 

• Develop a precise content plan weekly or monthly to keep yourself on track. In the plan, you need to outline all your inspirational ideas, content pillars, date and time of posts, hashtags, and other details. 
• Make sure to always focus on visual aesthetics in every post. You must remember, social media platforms are more about captivating the audience with pictures and videos. To differentiate your profile from other influencers choose colorful and appealing content that reflects your personality. When a random non-follower comes across your profile, it catches their attention and might start “Following” you. 
• Lastly, you must follow and save other’s content for inspiration and ideas, which you will need for creating your content. It is also the key for any creative content creator to never run out of ideas. When you get ideas by following others, you can fuel your creativity. 

4. Evaluate your profile performance and create an impressive portfolio 

This step is supremely vital if you want to know how to become a micro influencer who remains successful in the long term. A micro-influencer is considered successful when it bags collaboration offers from different brands, and for that, you need a stellar portfolio.

Whatever niche you choose to start micro influencing, competition is prevalent. The key to standing out among other influencers so that brands will be truly interested in collaborations is a ‘dynamic portfolio’. It will enhance your credibility and provide all the reasons to go with you. 

As experts, we have the following tips to help you create a striking portfolio. 

• Track the content performance of your profile periodically with analytical tools. You can get useful insights, such as engagement rate, account reach, shares, etc. 
• Request some clients to get authentic testimonials and post them as social proof to boost your profile’s credibility. 
• Your profile must showcase the best of your works by pinning them on top. Also, dedicate some of your posts to elaborate on the hard work or BTS (behind-the-scene) work you do for your content posts. 

5. Set your value propositions for brand collaborations 

Being a micro influencer is easy if you have a niche and creative content ideas, but gaining brand partnerships is not. Why should brands choose you over other micro influencers in the same niche? Have you thought of it? If not, you might be losing out on a lot of opportunities. 

Define the value propositions you offer to brands, which will help them differentiate your profile from others. Anything can represent your value propositions – your unique content format, higher engagement, established credibility, or audience demographics.  

Whatever makes your micro influencer profile distinct from others, highlight it in your Bio as well as a portfolio to secure promotions from small to big brands. 

Here are a few examples of demonstrating your value propositions in the portfolio for the brands.

• Clear insights into your current audience i.e., their age, gender, region, purposes, and preferences. 
• New and innovative content formats that churned higher engagement while being aligned with your strategy. 
• Current engagement rate and the growth in your engagement rates over time to show brands the effectiveness of your profile for marketing or promotions.
• Good reviews on authentic creator-reviewing platforms for micro influencers like ours, Privy Review that help micro influencers to stand out in the crowded market. 

6. Create content specifically targeted to your niche audience

This step makes micro-influencing a little bit challenging yet interesting. If you remember our earlier discussion before we started talking about how to be a micro influencer, then you know why.

A micro influencer is a user with 10K – 100K followers who consistently post engaging content for his or her videos that fully relate to your niche and specifically target the audience. The audience must be able to refer to your every post in their daily life or normal situations. It then persuades them to like, share, or engage with your posts. 

You need to post creative content that the audience finds relevant as well as interesting. A few tips to ensure that are:

• Create authentic content, i.e., photos or videos from your real-life situations while keeping the product/service of the brand in focus. 
• Post informative content/how-to guides/tips through videos or series of photos will help your audience achieve something or overcome a problem. Ex-professional rugby player and fitness influencer, Tom Bliss with followers (Instagram: coach_tombliss) is doing this.
• Follow the trends, occasions, or recent updates regarding your niche market and post relatable content.

 7.  Discover brands ruling or growing in your niche 

Micro influencer opportunities comprise promotion or collaboration offers from the brands in your specific niche. To leverage the opportunities, you can’t just wait for the brands to discover your profile among hundreds of other micro influencers and approach you! Rather, you should find them and approach them. 

But, how to find those brands that are impressively growing, or dominating your niche? 

Do your research on Google and find the companies ruling in your niche or industry. Simultaneously, you look at the profile of your followers to see the page of brands/companies they are following. It will help you find out the brands or companies they are interested in. 

Another effective way to find out the brands popular in your niche is by following the hashtags applicable to your content type or niche. You can easily find a lot of appropriate posts by brands when you randomly search for a particular hashtag. 

While you can effortlessly find out and approach a lot of brands in your target niche, make sure that you work with only two or three of them. It will help you focus on creating interesting quality content without diverging from your topic. 

8. Develop targeted content for the brands and tag them

It is a fundamental step to learn if you want to know how to become a micro influencer with assured success. You need to tag brands you have been collaborating with or working with for a long time on your posts. That means your posts have to be off-beat and targeted to the brands. 
See how Stefan Warecka, a tech enthusiast (with the Instagram account: techmagnet_yt) applies this brilliantly to grow his profile. He has plentiful information on the tech world innovations and gadgets, which he shares impressively through videos or photos and always tags the brands on them. 

As a micro influencer, you must lay more emphasis on the brands that partnered or collaborated with you. The brands will recognize you more if you consistently tag them in your posts. They perceive you as a loyal customer and influencer, which will eventually help you garner more collaboration proposals. 

9. Communicate and stay connected with brands 

If you want to be a successful micro influencer, collaborating with the brands is not enough but connecting with them is important. Establishing an ease of communication is necessary for that.  

The first effective way to connect with a brand is by joining its affiliate program. It lets a brand know you are genuinely interested in their products or services. 

You can also promote the brands in your niche organically, by posting pictures/videos of using their products and tagging them. It shows your natural liking towards the brand, and it might notice you and approach you next. 

Nevertheless, small or newer brands as well as bigger companies are always looking for impactful influencers in their niche to partner with. Thus, you must keep an eye on their profiles for partnership offers or micro influencer programs that will align with your audience’s interests.

Grabbing such partnership opportunities will help to maintain content consistency and engagement when running out of novel content ideas.

One-time or two-time partnerships are not beneficial if you aspire to become a micro-influencer with monetary earnings. Make sure you are communicating with the brands, from time to time, through greetings, tags, comments, replies, or appreciation posts. It makes the brands remember you and secure long-term collaborations. 

10. Build and grow a community of your followers 

When you are a successful micro-influencer, your followers are your business assets, which you need to maintain and nurture for better returns. Think of them as your investment. The more you invest in conversations and engagements with them, the more likely they will stay tuned to your page. They will share your posts or stories with others and even recommend your products to some. 

Engaging with your followers is the key to fostering the strength of your profile as a micro-influencer. To engage, think of interesting posts, create innovative captions, ask questions, create polls in the stories, and induce the audience to share stories or tag you. For instance, if you are an influencer sharing food recipes, you can share your favorite chocolate recipe like a cake. In the caption, ask the audience to share the ways they would like to indulge in chocolate!

CTA (Call-to-actions) such as polls and Q&A posts are a great way to engage with your audience and witness an upward trend in the follower count. Create posts that compel the audience to start a conversation. Also, live video streaming is nowadays an effective way to build follower affinity as you give scope to your followers to interact with you live and ask questions. 

When you nurture the relationship with your followers, it cultivates a great community of followers for you. It gives long-term stability to your micro-influencer profile and opens up new avenues in the field of social media influencing. 

11.Curate ideas and diversify your content 

Amidst the uptight competition among micro and mega influencers in every niche, only quality content can make you win! 

That brings us to the last crucial step of this guide on how to become a micro influencer i.e., diversification of the content. Generating new ideas every day and posting intriguing content will keep your audience hooked to your page. They will always wait for your next post to come up on their feed! And, that’s how you can amplify audience engagement.  

Make sure you are posting different content in different formats. The exponential rise of short-time videos with trending songs, which are Reels on Instagram proved how social media users love motion content more than static posts. 

Also, to maintain a particular time for your posts as social media algorithms work that way. 

Diversifying your content simply does not mean posting different types or formats of content. It means embracing the changes that come across the platform in your content. Instagram and Facebook keep on updating features now and then, such as transitional videos, 90-second-long videos, etc. 

The more you utilize the latest updates, and showcase them in your content, the better it is. When you do so, the algorithms give a boost to your content and enhance its organic reach, which eventually means more traffic to your page/account. 

5 Crucial Skills You Need To Cultivate To Become A Successful Micro Influencer 

While we pointed out the elementary steps on how to become a micro influencer, you need some definite skill sets to win at each step. 
If you are aspiring to become a micro influencer, make sure to develop or nurture these skills. 

1. Good engagement capability with the audience 

Audience is the biggest asset of micro-influencers! Whether you have 25k+ followers or 50k+ followers, they are real and credible users. Brands like to connect with such influencers for collaborative promotions because they can tap into their authentic audience and boost their conversions.
However, if you are not engaging continuously with your audience, they might lose interest and feel unrelated to your niche. It can even persuade them to unfollow you. 

For this reason, it is essential to know how to engage with your audience regularly. For instance, reply to the comments of your followers, and re-share their stories/posts if they look relatable/appreciating/ appealing to your page. Lastly, post giveaways or discount offers to incentivize those who eagerly follow you and engage with you. When you have greater audience engagement, it makes the page more effective for promotions to the brands. 

2. Creative writing and storytelling 

Do not forget that engaging with your audience means bringing new content, ideas, and stories. Monotonous or the same type of content will bore them and can reduce your engagement. It is the reason storytelling and creative writing skills are vital for becoming a micro influencer. 

While most social media posts of influencers are captivating, you have to be different and make your posts highly relatable or engaging to the audience. It means you should be good at storytelling and creative writing.

With both skills, you can create realistic and impactful content for your viewers. You can bring in more audiences by curating interesting stories or meaningful video content around any topic or product. 

3. Social media management

Of course, you must know how to manage your Instagram account or whatever social media account you operate as a micro-influencer. 
Effective management of the social media presence is a compulsory skill to acquire if you want to grow your micro-influencing career. You need to be aware of the latest algorithms, trends, feature updates of the platform, and user preferences. Understanding all these is necessary to optimize your profile, content strategy, and individual posts for the highest level of engagement.  

4. Adaptability 

The social media influencer market is evolving fast and consistently as more brands are entering the field. Small to big brands from widespread industry verticals are realizing the potential of influencer marketing.
This means you need to update yourself and align with the brands and their niches. In other words, you have to be adaptable enough to the industry trends and create engaging content for each brand and subsequently, their audience. 

5. Basic business and marketing skills

Building your micro-influencer and maintaining it with a growing follower base is quite like running a business. Just creating appealing content every day isn’t enough to become a successful micro-influencer. You also need to learn ways to market yourself as a personality or brand. When you are not promoting a brand or its product, you must create posts to promote yourself. 

Thus, you must nurture business skills and possess hands-on marketing skills to expand your reach as a business. You can learn from our ultimate guide to Instagram monetization to know how you can market well and earn better! 
 
Want To Become A Micro-Influencer? Privy Will Help Sky-Rocket Your Career!

Gone are the days when ‘influencers’ only meant well-known personalities and celebrities. Influencer marketing is no longer limited to those categories of people, who already have huge fan followers in their accounts but everyday users like you. 

Now, ‘micro influencers’ are keying in the market and taking away most of the limelight. It’s because micro influencers are social media users who continuously post engaging content related to a particular topic or theme and have a growing follower base. Usually, they have a follower count anywhere between 5 and 50K. 

This goes without saying; you can be a micro-influencer too. If you are good at creating persuasive and interesting content in a particular niche. You can start right away, with this guide on how to become a micro influencer. 

Just remember, maintaining consistency is the prime success factor. You need to keep posting content every day, or at least every 2-3 days keep your audience entertained. 

To give a boost to your career as a micro-influencer, Privy Review can assist! We are a creator-reviewing platform where followers provide genuine reviews of digital content creators in different niches. It is a trusted place that helps creators gain more followers or subscribers and allows social media users to discover credible creators around them. Join our platform as a featured creator today and start garnering reviews from your followers or subscribers!

FAQs 

1. How many subscribers you should have to be a micro-influencer? 

Usually, brands recognize an Instagram user with 1000 - 50,000 followers as a micro influencer. So, if you want to become a micro influencer, you need followers anywhere between that. 

2. How much does a micro-influencer earn on average? 

As per studies, a micro influencer earns around $1200 and $1500. This estimation is based on how much a micro influencer charges for every post. Usually, they charge between $100 and $500 for single posts on different social media platforms. 

3. What is to be considered a micro influencer?

This might make you think of the number of followers you need to be a micro influencer. The answer is any number of followers between 5,000 and 50,000 will make you considered a micro influencer! 

4. How do brands find micro-influencers? 

There are different ways a brand discover micro-influencers and find some potential ones who can help them in their advertisement. A few common ways to find IG micro-influencers or other platforms’ influencers are:

• Checking the followers on the brand’s social media profile and filtering out the ones with more than 10K followers. 
• Researching the related hashtags to find the accounts using them and having a maximum number of followers.
• Using advanced search tools offered by Twitter, brands can find people from a particular niche or location. 
• Joining different social media groups on Facebook or LinkedIn where brands can review recent activities to find out the most valuable accounts. 

 
5. Where do I start as a small or micro influencer? 

To learn how to become a small influencer and where to start, just remember these valuable steps. 

1. Discover the niche you want to explore and which will interest your audience.

2. Gradually build your social media presence by focusing on high-quality and captivating content.

3. Keep on creating authentic content and posting them daily, including posts and videos/reels. 

4. Approach like-minded people and connect to grow your follower base. 

5. View insights, measure your performance, and build strategies to grow. 
 
6. Are micro influencers worth it?

The answer is an absolute YES! Becoming a micro influencer will unravel a lot of opportunities for you, including monetary, creative, and professional opportunities. In the initial days, it might look challenging to thrive in this rapidly evolving social media landscape. But commitment and strategizing are the keys to becoming successful. Once brands discover you and approach you for collaborations, there’s no looking back!