Member Article

Millennial Trends – Microinfluencers

Goodbye celebrity endorsements. Hello Microinfluencers.

Nick Richardson Bee Industrious Market Research & Insights

Paying for Celebrity Endorsements is so “yesterday”, when targeting the younger generation.

Last week, a participant in one of our focus groups for young Millennials told us:

“It’s so obvious when celebrities are getting paid to advertise a product. Reality TV stars will advertise anything!”

And she’s right. We live in a world where transparency and authenticity are two of the most important values to shrewd younger consumers. The emergence of these key values has seen Microinfluencers become a key tactic for marketers to use.

It was reported that a brand who paid Kim Kardashian to tweet her 15 million followers about their product saw just 1200 resulting website hits. Gizmondo reports that on average, celebrities receive around $75,000 for a sponsored post like this one above on Instagram.

Microinfluencers, who can be found on social media posting about their niche interests, tend to have a follower count which reaches into the thousands or tens of thousands. And whilst this is relatively modest when compared to more mainstream celebrities, the level of influence appears to have far greater reticence.

We see Microinfluencers on YouTube, posting daily videos of themselves playing the latest video games, others ‘vlog’ about sports or post make-up tutorials. Travellers share their photos and stories on Instagram. Health & fitness fanatics set trends on Twitter. Sports mad fans share opinions and news on Facebook.

Younger consumers are both socially and digitally savvy, which means they gravitate towards online content that suits their specific needs.

Whilst their special interests (and social media platforms of choice) vary, Microinfluencers have one thing in common – a highly engaged follower base.

Microinfluencers enjoy a highly-engaged following thanks to a deep understanding and respect for their digital audience. This enables them to consistently and effortlessly share content which their followers love.

An engaged loyal audience is great news for marketers.

A recent study by Markerly analysed 5 million Instagram posts and discovered that as a user’s total follower count rises, their rate of engagement (people who like and comment on a post) falls. They report that Instagram users with less than 1000 followers typically receive likes on their content 8% of the time. This eventually falls to 1.6% for followers who have 10+ million followers.

This suggests there is a ‘sweet spot’ between the range of ten thousand and one hundred thousand followers, where there is a perfect combination between both engagement rates and content reach.

The explanation for this theory is relatively straightforward. If, for example, a health food brand was to pay an A-list celebrity with 10 million followers to endorse their product on social media, the content would reach a huge audience. However, chances are the vast majority of these 10 million people would have no interest in new health food products.

It could be much more productive (not to mention better value) to recruit 50 Microinfluencers, tasked with providing marketing content to their highly engaged, but smaller follower base, that is of course, as long as they like the product that they are reviewing.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Nick Richardson .