If you have a pulse then you probably also have an Instagram feed. That feed is probably a mix of one million pics of your high school friend’s babies, gratuitous selfies from your newly single friends, vacation photos from boss and his partner, and celebrities hawking their collagen teas and skincare regimens. Somewhere in between all those things is another category of social media mavens, called micro-influencers. WTF does that mean? Much like social media itself, the definition is a little bit nebulous and full of room for interpretation, but in a nutshell, Micro-influencers are a group of people with higher volumes of followers than you or your best friend, but less followers than Kylie Jenner or Chrissy Teigen. The exact number of followers varies across experts, but typically between 5K-50K is a good ballpark. The key is not the volume, but rather that these influencers are extremely influential in their niches with followers that are HIGHLY engaged across social media channels. These people are more grassroots, and community based so there is a level of authenticity and relate-ability that is often lost with the mega influencers.

Why use micro influencers?

Scale: Rather than putting all your eggs into one celebrity basket, you can diversify by leveraging multiple micro=influencers to reach those same audiences at scale (and without the $500K/post price tag)
Authenticity: While this group of influencers may have smaller overall footprints, they have strong power of their group and are able to communicate
Flexibility: Big ticket celebrities will usually have more stringent guardrails. Leveraging a smaller scale influencer or group of influencers could give you more creative flexibility