BUILDING A PERSONAL MICRO-INFLUENCING BRAND THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA
The influencer marketing world is set to be worth $8billion in 2019 and is on course to rise to a double of the current value by 2022.
If you’ve been on social media and follow the activities of the marketing world, then you probably know a lot about what being an influencer means; who they are, how they work and what they do.
If you do not know, an influencer in simple terms is someone who has built a huge personal brand following and is able to and make their followers exhibit certain behaviors.
As the influencer world has blossomed, it has also created a new path for a new category of people, ‘Micro-influencers.
A micro-influencer is someone who has built a personal brand and expertise across a specific niche and has a following of around 10,000 to 500,000 followers on social media. Micro-influencers are people who have already built the audience a brand is looking for through the specific and unique content they create to engage that audience, growing and establishing trust with them.
While follower count is a prerequisite to influencing, Micro-influencers’ influence are determined based on the specific audiences they engage with and the connection they create with them.
Here are the Characteristics of a micro-influencer:
- A relatively high number of following ranging from 10,000 to 500,000
- They have high engagement rates. Because they have consistently built their followers through creating relatable and unique content for the audience, they usually have high engagement rates on their posts.
- Specific/Niched Content: Micro-influencers create content that their followers love and want to see. Through these content, they cater for the needs of a category of people. These content could be in video, audio and text format and they depict a style, mood or emotion and are usually about specific topics.
- Relatability: Micro-influencers build relatability with their content for the audience they’re create them for, because they understand and know what they want. As a result, a two-way engaging relationship with their audience is built.
Now that we know who a micro-influencer is, it is important to also know how to build a micro-influencing brand through social.
- Be accessible: you must have a strong online presence so that people can easily find you and also stick to a brand name that can be linked to you.
- Pick a specific niche: Starting out a micro-influencing career starts with identifying what your interests are, area of expertise and knowledge base and developing content to those who have similar interests in what you do
- Brand yourself: After picking a niche and interest areas, you need to brand yourself. Branding means creating a style, voice and personality for your message. When branding yourself you should level on what you want people to think when they see, read or listen to your content and the kind of image you bring to mind. Building your brand is an important step in building a micro influencing career and you should put major effort into creating a spectacular brand.
Your brand is what they say about you when you’re not in the room
Jeff Bezos.
- Quality over Quantity: One major challenge with building a personal brand is the need to always churn out contents, which often times leads to producing undesirable and poor contents. Once your content starts to lose quality, you lose direction with the audience who previously followed you because they enjoyed your content.So if you’re setting out to become a micro-influencer, think about the quality of the content you want to put out as against the number of content you produce.
The old saying, quality over quantity, holds true.
- Don’t get carried away with your follower’s number: It is important to think outside the “follower’s box” Because It’s easy to get caught up on increasing the number of followers you have, but other metrics are important too. Pay attention to engagement, like number of likes, comments and shares. Evaluate your progress by asking questions you can measure the answers to. Does your content results in engagement from x% of your followers? Do you see a lift in new followers when you post specific types of photos? Learn different ways to keep your followers engaged and active on your social profiles
- Tell great stories: stories are a great way to reach the hearts of your audience. Today, brands and businesses have realized that to sell to your customers, you tell stories about them. As a Micro-influencer, you should know how to tell stories that your followers can relate to, tell stories about them. With stories, you’re able to connect with the hearts of your followers.
- Take advantage of trends: Figure out what type of content is going viral on the internet, and understand the mechanism behind its success. If possible, work on reverse engineering that success. For example, memes are very popular on social media so they could work to engage your audience, but make sure the humor is relatable and relevant to your niche.
If you come across content that is gaining huge popularity on social media, research its evolution. What was the idea behind the success of this content? Invest some time and research to get an idea of what is working successfully and what is not, and if the same approach could work for your own content.
- Mesmerize Your Audience: You need to make sure to leave a long-lasting impact on the minds of your followers. You can post high-quality content or pictures on your social media platforms. You also need to ensure that the content is engaging.
The goal of mesmerizing your followers is to increase your engagement rate, visibility, and you active follower count. You need to invest time, energy, and perhaps even money to implement a perfect visual strategy. This will also help you to increase the amount you can charge per post.
- Avoid controversy: The social media age has made it easy to build influence and also more importantly made influence easier to destroy.
Building your micro-influencing career means you need to be careful with the kind of content you create. Yes, it takes a lot of time, effort and patience but when you start your journey, you should know that it’s not going to happen overnight.
Avoid creating deceptive, provoking and negative content for quick trend.
Lending your voice to important causes and discussion could be a great way to grow, but a little misstep could bring down the empire you’re trying to build.
