By Lilach Bullock

Influencer marketing has gained a lot of attention and popularity in recent years, partly due to the massive rise in numbers of influencers. Small, big and everything in between, there’s an influencer for anybody and everybody. Here you will learn three top ways that you can use micro-influencers to grow your business.

What are micro-influencers and why do I need them?

If you’re unfamiliar with micro-influencers, the term is used to describe influencers with a rather small audience of about 10,000 to 100,000 followers on social media. They can be anything from regular people with a larger than average audience, to thought leaders in your niche who don’t have a huge following, but still hold influence.

For many people, their first instinct is to go after the top influencers—the ones who have hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers, the ones whose names are known worldwide. The downside is these people are more difficult to get, not to mention, much more expensive to employ; in fact, some brands have had to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few photos, and it’s not at all uncommon to pay over $1,000 for a single Instagram post.

But it’s not just costs that make micro-influencers so appealing; while sure, they don’t have the reach that a celebrity or macro-influencer can bring to the table, what they do have is a much closer relationship with their followers.
When researching social influencers, engagement is, arguably, the most important metric to consider. Numbers of followers don’t really count at the end of the day if the followers are not interested in or engaging with the influencer, or if the influencer isn’t engaging with the followers in return.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that you’re much better off with an influencer who has fewer than 100,000 followers, but is actively engaging on a regular basis, rather than an influencer with over half a million followers, but who never takes the time to engage. The higher number of followers, the more difficult it is to catch up and to take the time to respond to mentions.

Because micro-influencers are more engaged, their followers are also more likely to trust them and their opinions. A study has found that 82% of consumers are highly likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer.

How to find micro-influencers

The best place to start looking for micro-influencer, is in your own backyard: your social media followers. These influencers hold the advantage of already being familiar with your business, and they may be already sharing your content with their followers  or engaging with you.

To find influencers in your follower base, you can use a tool like Agorapulse, which has a social media CRM tool that automatically tags any influencers in your list. The tool also tags any brand ambassadors, users who have been sharing your content in the past.

Next, to find more micro-influencers, you can use a tool like BuzzSumo. Better known as a tool for finding the best, most shared content in any niche, it also offers a powerful influencer search engine that allows you to filter results based on audience size, making it easy to find micro-influencers or influencers of any size you want. You can also check an influencers reply and retweet ration, their websites’ domain authority, as well as their average retweets and a list of the links they’ve shared on social media.