The rise of the Influencers
Fifteen years ago, many brands competed to hire the most famous celebrities in order to create the best marketing campaigns. They invested large parts of their budgets in Hollywood stars, famous athletes, and people who frequently appeared on television. Nowadays, the entire industry has changed the way it works, mainly because of the rise of social media.
The arrival of social media gave almost everyone on the planet the opportunity to be seen and heard by others. With this new form of communication, many people might think that social media has simply helped major superstars maintain their position at the top of the marketing industry. However, that is a common misconception. Today, everyone has the opportunity to talk about and share the things they like. This has led to the emergence of influencers.
Influencers build their success around a loyal audience. They usually attract people who share similar interests, lifestyles, and preferences. As a result, a single marketing campaign can help brands reach highly specific audiences and generate valuable engagement. In fact, many of the potential customers a company wants to reach may already be following a single, relatively unknown influencer.
In today’s marketing industry, having millions of followers is not necessarily as important as having the right followers.
What are micro-influencers?
Micro-influencers are key to understanding new social media marketing strategies. They are people who create content and have a relatively small but loyal audience.
Their topics can be as varied as you can imagine. Micro-influencers can focus on sports, fashion, culture, gaming, health, technology, books, or food. However, what they all have in common is a loyal and engaged audience that trusts their recommendations and advice. This trust is often based on the close relationship that can develop within a small community. Micro-influencers typically have between 10.000 and 1.000.000 followers, and their audiences are usually genuinely interested in the topics they cover.
However, this can be a double-edged sword. Influencers have to deal with many marketing opportunities that may not be relevant to their communities but can offer them significant financial rewards. Brands also face an important challenge: choosing the right people to represent their products. They need to focus on their target audience rather than simply choosing someone with a large following. A poor choice can damage the connection between the influencer and their followers, as well as the brand’s image.
This new era of influencer marketing makes these decisions more complex. However, it can also create great opportunities when brands and micro-influencers understand what makes a partnership beneficial for both sides.
Engagement: Quantity over Quality
The current era of social media comes with the idea of quantity over quality. This is something that many people started doing on YouTube, publishing a daily video of 10 minutes or less rather than one longer and well-produced video every week.
Nowadays, the idea of quantity over quality has gone beyond daily YouTube videos. The most popular social media platforms are now TikTok and Instagram, where most videos do not last more than one minute. This makes it easier for micro-influencers to prepare and publish several videos a day.
The current era of social media encourages the idea of publishing more and more videos. Doing so increases the chances of creating the “perfect” video for your audience. It also helps influencers understand what actually works and what does not work for their followers. Publishing more short videos creates the opportunity to understand your audience: what they care about, what they want to see, which topics are sensitive, and many other things.
All the work that a micro-influencer can do to improve their videos helps them prepare better content for their viewers. I am focusing on videos because most social media platforms actually work better with this format, where people can hear, see, and feel closer to the narrator or the people appearing in the video. Videos offer more possibilities for brands and influencers to increase their views and connect with their audiences.
Trust and Authenticity
The main difference between micro-influencers, and even influencers in general, and real superstars is that influencers feel more trustworthy and have more common and normal lives. Watching videos of someone cooking at home with 100,000 followers, without any special brand or expensive equipment, and just using whatever they have in their house, is something that almost everyone in the world can relate to. The idea of seeing an Oscar winner actually cooking at home feels unreal. This can happen with almost every topic, and that is one of the main reasons why micro-influencers have become such an important trend for brands. They can help companies increase their leads, but also improve brand awareness and engagement with their audiences.
When people see things that they can relate to in their own lives, they start thinking, “I can do that” or “I can also have that new product”. This can eventually lead to a new sale for a brand. However, this does not happen automatically. Brands have the responsibility of finding the right influencer for the job, someone who can make their target audience feel comfortable and genuinely believe that the product is valuable and worth the investment.
Why do brands choose micro-influencers?
One more thing that differentiates micro-influencers from superstars is that micro-influencers commonly have a more active community, with people sharing, commenting, and liking their videos. The comfortable and natural environment they create in their videos, showing their daily lives and other common situations, actually helps them get more people interacting with their content.
Another important point is that having fewer people in your community makes it easier to interact with your followers and create a certain feeling of closeness. For followers, this is great because it makes them feel that they are part of the micro-influencer’s community. For brands, this is also very positive because people who feel involved in a community are usually more engaged with the products and advertisements their influencer shares.
Conclusion
Having the highest number of followers on social media does not necessarily mean having the best results in terms of engagement, leads, or brand awareness. Micro-influencers can often work better with their communities because they know their audience and understand what they want to see. Finding the right audience for a marketing campaign can make a huge difference for a brand. The best influencer is not necessarily the one with the most followers, but the one who can create the strongest connection between a brand and its audience.
This new era of marketing makes everything more complex, but it also creates new opportunities for brands. By choosing the right influencers, companies can invest less money and still achieve great results. However, celebrities are still very important in marketing. They can create a different image for a brand, often connected to an aspirational lifestyle that many people would like to have. This does not mean that celebrity marketing does not work anymore. It simply means that brands now have more options and need to understand which type of influencer works best for their goals.
Sources
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-025-01107-3 A Meta-analysis of the Effectiveness of Social Media Influencers — Barari, Eisend & Jain (2025)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-024-01052-7 Influencer Marketing Effectiveness: A Meta-analytic Review — Pan et al. (2024).