4 Best Ways to Find Micro-Influencers on Instagram

Oct 4

Instagram is one of the most used social media platforms not only by social media marketers, but celebrities, shows, businesses, and brands. It’s an ideal platform for customer and user engagements, social commerce, and more - especially for start-up brands looking to improve their online presence in the market.

While it’s great to have famous celebrities and huge influencers promoting your brand and products to their massive follower base, we all know that’s far easier said than done, most notably because they charge fees far greater than the average brand’s budget. However, Instagram is also home to a network of smaller influencers and creators, meaning your brand can find the best influencers for your budget.

What are micro-influencers?

Micro-influencers are creators who typically have total followers ranging from 1000-100,000. They post, film, and shoot videos and photos showcasing content on their chosen niche, just as bigger ‘macro-influencers’ do. The only difference is the scope of the audience they can reach, but they can still promote your brand and take your marketing campaign to the next level.

Why Micro-Influencers are Useful for Brands

1. Increases Engagement

While micro-influencers have a smaller number of followers than macro-influencers, they will almost definitely still increase your engagement. In fact, followers of micro-influencers are commonly more engaged and loyal, meaning a stronger connection for your brand to their audience. If you’re a start-up, increasing your engagement little by little is still a good start to establishing your reputation on social media. Having an influencer whose followers are your target audience can definitely build up your own brand’s community.

2. Builds trust and credibility

People follow influencers they like and trust. Wouldn’t it be more effective to post your brand’s important announcements, such as holding corporate events and product launches together with your chosen micro-influencers? Even with only a few thousand followers, micro-influencers have steady, trustworthy, and genuine followers. Engaging with such an audience helps your brand become trustworthy and builds a good reputation.

3. Helps In Brand’s sustainable Growth

Just as influencers start building their reputations slowly but surely, your brand also ensures growth by having them on your side. Micro-influencers charge less than macro-influencers, but still give you a significant boost in your customers and audience’s engagements. This is a massive advantage because you get to build your online presence and save money, which could help increase your growth in a sustainable way.

4 Best Ways to Find Micro-Influencers on Instagram

1. Utilize Instagram Hashtags

It’s overwhelming to think about how you could find the best micro-influencers on a social media platform with over a billion users worldwide (as of 2021). Well, it’s actually easier to look for users or influencers with 1000-100,000 followers through hashtags. You can browse the platform by searching specific hashtags that are related to your brand and find the influencers using those hashtags in their posts.

If you’re a makeup brand, for example, you would want to look for a micro-influencer who posts using makeup-related Instagram hashtags, like #MakeUpTutorial or #MakeUpLooks.

2. Look at your brand’s list of followers

Searching through the thousands of hashtags on Instagram may still seem a bit overwhelming, so if you haven’t got time to spare, it’s worth remembering that there is a high chance that some micro-influencers have already discovered you and followed your brand. Your followers are users that most likely find your brand and niche interesting. You could easily get a list of prospective influencers to hire from your followers list that are already posting content related to your brand.

3. Look at your prospective influencer’s following list

Micro-influencers do not only have close relationships with their audience, but they also have a support system and connections with other influencers as well, and they’ll most likely follow them on Instagram. When you’ve found one potential influencer for your brand, make sure to check out their following list too. You may find other worthy micro-influencers that have the same niche as your brand.

4. Use influencer marketing and search tools

Searching and browsing through Instagram’s hashtags and users are not the only ways to look for potential micro-influencers to work with. There are now different search tools intended to make your influencer search easy and convenient. Different tools that have features such as filters, engagement overviews, and follower counts can be used and accessed to easily locate prospective creators for your brand.

When building your brand’s online presence and reputation, you don’t necessarily need to go all in one huge campaign. You can always start working with micro-influencers on a smaller but regular basis to build a brand presence as well as a loyal audience as you steadily grow your name.