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What is an influencer?

Francesco Pastorelli
Marketing Growth Lead at Make Influence, I have a background in growing early stage startups through digital...

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What is an influencer?

An influencer is a person who has the ability to affect the opinion of a large pool of people regarding particular topics, and who uses this influence to promote brands, products and services of companies they collaborate with.

The act of promoting a brand products and services via influencers is called influencer marketing. 

From this brief definition, we can draw 3 elements that need to be in place in order for someone to be called an influencer:

  1. The ability to affect public opinion on specific topics, measured in impressions, reach and engagement.
  2. The use of this ability to influence people for commercial purposes, where the influencers promote brands’ products and services in exchange for compensation.
  3. A pool of people following them, usually within a niche they actively participate in, where the size of the pool depends on the size of the niche.

Vil du opnå flere salg med influencer marketing? Start en 30-dages gratis  periode nu!

The word influencer comes from the English verb "to influence". Blogger, Vlogger, Instagrammers, YouTubers are some other complementary terms for influencers, referring to the primary medium used. 

The word has become mainstream over the past few years - especially as Instagram has become more and more popular.

In this blog post, you can learn about key facts and common questions about influencers, such as: 

What are social media influencers?

While the definition of influencer above is a generic one, it is also worth considering the media influencers use to promote their messages to their audience, in particular social media.

While in the past influencers where mostly seen on TV, radio and in real life such as at sport events, today, they gather their following and share their messages primarily online. In particular, social media platforms, such as Instagram, Tiktok and Twitter are the main media through which influencers engage with their community, as well as blogs and other wesbites such as YouTube, Twitch, personal blogs and online forums (reddit, for example).

We call social media influencers those who use social media to convey messages and actively engage with their audience.

 

What is a social media content creator? 

A social media content creator, often referred to as a content creator or digital content creator, is a person who creates digital content and shares it through social media platforms, with the intent to inform, educate or entertain users.

Content can come in a variety of forms, from instagram posts, reels and stories to full lenght blog posts and Youtube videos, passing through TikTok videos and more. 

What is the difference between a content creator and an influencer?

Looking at the last category we highlighted above, which includes all of those people who became influencers not because of who they are, but because of the specific content they produce, we understand that becoming an influencer does not necessarily mean being famous or commanding opinion leadership on specific topics.

As a matter of fact, today, is not uncommon to find profiles on social media that are extremely popular without even having one single and clearly identifiable person behind them. These profiles are usually popular just because of the content they produce. We call these social media content creators, and they can or cannot be influencers depending on whether they use their influence to enter commercial collaborations with brands.

At the same time, an influencer is very often also a content creator, in the sense that they need content to convey their messages, and use this content to influence purchasing behaviour. However, you will find that for some influencers, for example celebrities or professional sport people, the quantity and quality of the content they produce does not impact how influential they are, because they draw their influence from something else, for example their job.

To conclude, the boundaries between a social media content creator and an influencer are blurred, and most often a creator will also be an influencer, while an influencer does not necessarily have to be a creator (in the sense that the quantity and quality of the content they produce does not impact how influential they are, because they draw their influence from something else.)

 

Vil du opnå flere salg med influencer marketing? Start en 30-dages gratis  periode nu!

 

Who can become an influencer?

In theory, anyone can be an influencer. However, just owning a phone with internet connection and starting a social media account will not be enough.

Your best shot at becoming an influencer is that you already have as strong interest (it can be anything really) and feel people with the same interest could find your point of view interesting about and value your opinion.

Most importantly, an aspiring influencers need to have the courage to share this interest on social media with strangers, as well as the willingness to spend a lot of time on social media.

For example, you are a great mother of 3 kids, and you feel your experience with being a full time mum can be useful for young women who want to start a family. Even better, maybe you have an interesting combination of passions or interests, like sewing and boxing? Do you love eating out or maybe you're a great cook yourself, maybe with a talent for a specific type of cuisine? Anything that can attract interest in your profile - while being particular and personal enough to make you stand aside from other people with the same interest - is gold.  

 

Hvad er en influencer?

 

How do you become an influencer?

As we said, It doesn't take a certain style, age or appearance to be an influencer, but you need to know how the platform you want to use works and how to create content that other people want to see, like, comment on and share with their friends.

You must also want to show yourself in private moments and be in contact with many people as you gain more and more followers. There is no being an influencer without sharing content and engaging with other users in your community. 

While there is secret formula to become an influencer, in general there are a few different reasons behind an influencer ability to condition public opinion:

  1. Because of their authority, knowledge or position on a specific topic or subject.
  2. Because of their job (usually publicly relevant: think of artists and musicians, actors, politicians, sportsmen etc).
  3. Because of their lifestyle, interests, crafts and creativity.

In general, you will need a mix of these ingredients to have a chance at becoming an influencer:

  1. You need to have one or few interests (or passions) that you feel like opening up about completely and share with strangers over social media.
  2. You need to have at least one communication skill you master, either written or graphic (for example you make great pictures or videos).
  3. You need to invest a lot of time creating content and engaging with people in your community, brands and influencers.
  4. You need to stay updated on latest social media trends.
  5. You need to proactively reach out to brands and keep your portfolio of collaborations up to date.

What do social media influencers do?

Being a social media influencer can become as much as a full time job, so there is a lot of different activities that go into becoming one. Some of these activities are what their audience see, but many more happen in the background.

First, the majority of time is (or should be spent) producing content and engaging with their community on the platform of choice. This includes for example scripting, shooting and editing and publishing pictures and videos, but also following, commenting and answering followers, liking and messaging with other influencers and your followers. Remember, good influencers post several times a week, some of them even more than once a day. However, only a small part of the content should be sponsored, usually no more than 1/5 pieces of content should include sponsorship. 

Second, an influencer needs to discover and be discovered by brands that fit their interests and their social media personality. Usually, it’s brands that reach out to influencers, but an influencer can also decide to reach out to brands they admire and would like to work with.

Third, there is the collaboration management activities. Before creating content promoting the brands product, there is a long process of negotiation and learning about each other needs. For example, an influencer will have to prove the company they can reach and engage the right community in order to deliver value to the brand in the form of impressions, traffic or sales. They will also have to negotiate which products they will promote, how will they speak about the brand, as well as what they will get in return from their promotion (commission of sales generated, fixed sum, free products only etc).

Fourth, the influencer will produce the sponsored content and often they will be required by the company to share the results before publishing it on their channels.

Finally, since being an influencer is effectively a job, the influencer will also need to manage all the administrative tasks that are related to manage their own business, such as setting up a company, creating and sending invoices and ensuring they get paid, filing tax reports etc etc. 

Clearly, being an influencer takes a lot of work, and that's why most established influencers sign deals with agencies to help them managing part of this work, especially the administrative and collaboration discovery part. However, agencies will take a big cut of your collaboration revenue, and managing the relationship with the agency often becomes a job in itself.
Luckily, today there are some other options for influencers to manage their work while remaining independent. 

One of the best ones is for sure Make Influence, which offer influencers several tools to discover brands, manage collaborations, tracking performance and getting paid directly to your bank account. The best part, it is 100% free to use Make Influence as an influencer, and you just need 1500 instagram followers to get started. 

 

Do you have 1500 instagram followers and want to become an influencer?
We can help you!

Make Influence offers creators and upcoming influencers free tools to help you manage your work and make the most out of your time. Sign-up here and discover if you qualify to be part of our community of influencers and content creators - it's 100% free!

Create a free account

Hvad er en influencer?

 

 

What is a good influencer?

There is no such thing as a good or bad influencer. In particular, contrary to popular belief, the size of an influencer (that is the size of the community or amount of followers he has managed to gather), does not tell anything in regards to how good an influencer is.
However, professional influencers will share some of these characteristics: 

  • They have a personal business, and manage their collaborations according to the law for example, they invoice, declare their earnings from their collaborations and declare when a post is sponsored as part of a collaboration. 
  • They do not say yes to any collaboration, but know what their audience might find interesting. 
  • They take time to research and understand the brand and the goals of the campaign. 
  • They listen to company proposals, but give suggestions when they know what way of promoting works best with their followers. 
  • They do not promote directly competing or very similar brands close to each other. 
  • They have an healthy balance of sponsored and non-sponsored posts. 

When it comes to top performing influencers, here's some key things to pay attention to: 

  • Performance is directly associated with reach and impressions, which in turns are associated with amount of content produced. In other words, the more the content produced by an influencer, the higher the chances your promotion is going to be seen by a lot of people.
  • The higher the amount of engagements (for example likes and comments on instagram) over the amount of followers - something we call engagement rate - the better the quality of your influencer. An engagement rate of over 5% is usually a good sign!
  • Beware of fake followers! If an influencer resident let's say in denmark has an anomalous number of followers with empty accounts or residing in Asian or African countries, the higher the likelihood that influencer has bought followers. 

At Make Influence, we have made a list of top performing influencers in Denmark based on proprietary data points from our platform,  which you can read here.

However, you can find many more influencers on our platform, where you can access statistics about influencers such as impressions, reach, demographics and more.  You can also invite them to your campaigns, text with them, start collaborations, track their performance and pay them out - all from the same place. 

Most importantly, all of our influencers are manually verified, so you there is no risk of influencer fraud!
You can read more about how it works here and Get started as a brand!

 

What are the different types of influencers?

As we have seen before, the boundaries between creators and influencers, and also between different types of influencers are quite blurred.

However, we can divide influencers in some different categories, based on their size (that is number of followers), by type of content produced and by level or source of influence.

 

Based on size: micro, macro and mega influencers.

The number of followers someone need to have in order to be considered an influencer varies greatly, depending both on their niche and the media they use. For example, a fashion expert on instagram will likely have more followers than a gardener on pinterest, but both can command a lot of influence in their respective niches.

For what concerns instagram, however, the general agreement is to divide influencers into 4 to 6 categories by amount of followers

  1. Mega Influencers = 1+ Million followers
  2. Macro Influencers = 500k instagrammers, tiktokers, bloggers and youtubers.- 1M followers
  3. Mid-Tier Influencers = 50k - 500k followers
  4. Micro Influencers = 10k-50k followers
  5. Nano Influencers = 1k - 10k followers

Want to know more about the differences of working with nano, micro , macro and mega influencers? Then you should check out this article!

 

Based on type of content produced and media used.

The vast majority of Influencers usually usually work primarily on Social Media (in particular Instagram, TikTok and sometimes Twitter), video sites such as youtube and twitch, while some influencers still engage their audience through their own proprietary blogs. While influencers usually use more than one channel to engage their audience, in order to maximise reach and appeal to more and different brands, they usually will focus on one channel.

On the contrary, bloggers will usually use several different social channels to “distribute” snippets of their content and drive traffic to their own website / blog.

Bloggers

As per definition, Bloggers are influencers who create content around specific topics they are passionate and knowledgeable about in the form of blog posts or articles. Bloggers usually place product placements or brand mentions within wider, in depht posts, making the promotion often seem more natural and organic. This

Podcasters

Recently, podcasts have also started gaining a lot of attention in the mass market because of their democratization via platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music, making this format and people who master it in all effects powerful influencers. Podcasts are a new form of online content in the forms of pre-recorded “radiofonic” talks streamed via platforms like Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts etc, usually lasting between 30 minutes and 1 hour and involving a host and one or more guests.

V-loggers & youtubers

Vloggers (i.e. short for video-bloggers) are litterally a figure between a podcaster and a blogger, using videos to talk about the most varied topic of interest and distributing them via platforms such as youtube, twitch and more.

This extremely flexible content format, that allows vloggers to to record from wherever and post produce videos in a second moment, as well as use content from other people (think for example of people commenting video games matches), is perfect for product promotions of any sort.

Instagrammers & TikTokers

Usually, all of the above categories also use social media like instagram (and more recently, tiktok) to distribute their content in different formats and engage even more with their audiences. However, there is plenty of influencers who do not produce any other type of content than the ones available on the social media platforms themselves. For example, while many food influencers use blogs and youtube to share their recipes, today some influencers solely rely on videos on instagram and short descriptions to engage with their audience and show their creations.

 

How to find influencers

Finding influencers is not complicated, and there is several ways to go about it.

One way is to just search on instagram, for example looking at tagged posts of brands similar to yours that you know use influencer marketing, and then look at suggested similar profiles by clicking on the icon next to “message”.

screenshoot of kylie jenner instagram page, showing the find similar profiles button.

Another option, is to search on google using this formula:

[ micro / macro / mega + Instagram influencers for + “industry” / “vertical” in “country name” ]

for example: micro influencers for beauty brands in Denmark

This method requires more time, and does not guarantee you will find what you’re looking for. Influencers who tend to end up in these public available lists are very sought after by brands, but they can be a starting point for you to then look at more in depth influencers.

Finally, you can use one of several tools (both free and paid) that aggregate influencers and allow you to filter them based on specific criteria. 

Make Influence is a marketplace where you can find over 1500 influencers who actively use the platform to manage their collaborations. Because the influencers connect their instagram channels to the platform, you can find them based on criteria such as follower count, location, impressions, category and more. 

While finding influencers is not complicated, finding the right ones for your brands is. In order to do this, you first need to understand who your buyer persona is, and what objectives you want to achieve with influencer marketing.

You can download our buyer persona template here, and our complete guide to getting started to influencer marketing here.

If instead you’re just curious and looking for a quick way to discover some of the top performing instagram influencers in Denmark, have a look at our list of danish influencers article.

 

What are the rules in influencer marketing?

If you are an influencer in Europe and advertise for brands, products or companies, you must follow the rules established by two European regulations, the  the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which are meant at regulating especially the rules on hidden advertising. This law is about not misleading consumers and that it must be clear what constitutes an advertisement.

The most important thing to be aware of is that, when you get paid for posting a post, it's in all effects influencer marketing and thus an advertisement. Therefore, always remember to mark content or posts as sponsored and write clearly if you use affiliate links.
If you forget to do it, you risk a fine. Be careful: Influencer marketing has grown significantly in recent years, and has therefore received more focus in the news and consumer protection agencies. 

 

Are you a creator? Sign-up as an influencer on Make Influence.

If you are social media creator with a legitimate and engaged audience on instagram or tiktok, you can signup to Make Influence for free. We are a company providing tools to creators and brands to meet eachother and create fair and transparent performance driven collaborations. Get started for free!

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