The word "influencer" was officially added to the English dictionary this year (2019) and it's about time, too. Influencer marketing is far from a new concept. We’ve always learned from the experiences of our friends, family and coworkers, or looked to aspirational figures for inspiration on what to buy.
The influencers world grows so fast, that despite its relative youth, we already can categorize the influencers by the number of followers and the quality of engagement.
That is to say today many websites give the possibility to check the engagement rate, which gives the possibility to choose the right influencers for your company. But not all influencers are good for your business, lets see the types of influencers, and how can we categorize them, to choose the best for your brand.
Types of Influencers
Influencers indeed are at the heart of the social media industry; without them, they probably wouldn’t exist in the way we know them today. But not all influencers are created equal. Whether you’ll need a micro-influencer or a macro-influencer depends on the nature of your business and your target audience.
78% of social influencers for brand collaborations worldwide used Instagram as their primary social media platform.
(Source: Statista, 2018)
There are several types, based on the size of their audience. Let’s take Instagram influencers as an example:
| 5K - 25K followers | Micro-influencers |
| 25K - 100K followers | Small influencers |
| 100K - 1M followers | Big influencers |
| 1M - 7M followers | Macro influencers |
| 7M+ followers | Celebrity influencers |
Then all the Instagram influencers may be classified by their niche and the language and location of their followers or the influencer by itself. These criteria are very important when you choose an influencer to promote your brand.
TOP 10 Major Influencer Industries and Niches:
- Fashion/ Beauty
- Travel/ Lifestyle
- Food reviews/ Cooking
- Celebrity/ Entertainment
- Sports
- Gaming
- Health/ Fitness
- Family/ Home/ Parenting
- Finances/ Investment
- Business/ Tech
This is a very small list compared to all the possible combinations. Many influencers will combine different niches and each niche has a lot of sub-niches.
For example, the food influencer may talk only about a special diet or food lifestyle, like vegan, paleo, or with low gluten, or even about entomophagy ( about eating insects).
What is also important to know is the location of the influencers and the followers. Here we can categorize them in Local influencers - the ones who always talk about one city, region, or country and Traveling influencers (most often in the travel niche) - the ones who will change their location very often. And the ones who have local followers, or followers around the world. This combination will influence the visibility of your campaign.
For example, a local influencer with followers around the significant countries of your potential clients will give you visibility in these countries and may bring the post to the TOP posts of the local Geotag or hashtag, which may be interesting for a hotel or holiday property.
A local influencer with local followers will be the best option for a restaurant or bar, as you will get seen by the residents of the place where the business is located.
As mentioned before, language is also very important. For example, you can find influencers in Thailand but with an Instagram in Thai, English, Russian, French or other languages. Following that it’s essential to know who your client is and your service possibilities. As there’s no sense to work with a Chinese influencer if nobody in your business speaks Chinese.
How does it work?
There are 5 main ways to collaborate with an influencer:
- Paid posts - the company pay the influencers for a post or multiple posts about their brand. May include stories.
- Brand ambassador - A brand ambassador is a person who is hired to represent a brand in a positive light to increase brand awareness and sales. The brand ambassador is meant to embody the corporate identity in appearance, demeanour, values and ethics. In this case, the company provides the brand ambassador with their products and fixes a number of posts per month, and a monthly payment for the influencer.
- Free products or services - the company provide their service for free to the influencer, in exchange for a post, or multiple posts about their brand. May include stories.
- Special code = commissions on every sale of a service/product from this code
- Giveaway - when you provide your service/product for free to the winner of the giveaway. Often include some special conditions for all the participants, like following the brands' account, or tag some friends, or repost a photo, or creating a thematic photo.
FAMEsolutely is here to help you to find your influencers and to assist you during the whole advertisement campaign. To be sure to select the Real Influencers, we have our insider Anna with her 14K+ account @FromWinterToTropics
FAMEsolutely is happy to help you to bring your business to a new level!
We like to share our experience and PRO TIPs, check out more of our blog posts below!
