Happy Tuesday, y’all! Please Like and Restack this issue to help increase its visibility on Substack. Thank you! And if you are receiving value from my articles, please consider supporting me by subscribing to Backstage Pass. Free subscribers get access to all articles as they come out, after one month, older articles are paywalled. Paid subscribers have access to all Backstage Pass content with no paywalls. Paid Subscribers also have access to The Vault.

Does Size REALLY Matter When it Comes to Influencer Marketing?

One of the biggest misconceptions in social media is that size equals influence. Most people believe that a person with 100,000 followers will always be more influential and drive more engagement than a person with 1,000 followers.

Of all the ‘one size-fits-all’ rules I hear around social media, this one is probably the most laughably wrong.

There’s many reasons for this, but let’s start with the elephant in the room: It is insanely easy to grow a following on social media. Just follow 1,000 people, and typically at least 10% will follow you back. Then unfollow the ones that don’t reciprocate, lather, rinse and repeat till you have ‘grown’ your follower count to the level you want.

Years ago I worked with a major brand as an influencer. I was brought in as a group of about 10 influencers to help with a brand project. I knew a couple of my fellow participants, but there was one influencer who none of us were familiar with. Which was odd, because this person had over 300,000 followers on X. I just chalked it up to I somehow missed ever engaging with this person.

A few weeks after the project concluded, The New York Times did an expose on people buying followers on X. Lo and behold, the ‘influencer’ who none of us knew, was one of the people listed in the article. It turns out, over 200,000 of his followers had been bought and paid for.

This has been going on for YEARS.

So if you can’t use follower count to accurately judge the effectiveness of an influencer, what should you look at?

I recommend engagement levels. Measure how engaged someone is with their network. If you have someone who has 100 followers and is hyper engaged with those 100 people (meaning both the creator and the 100 followers engage back and forth), would you rather work with that person, or someone with 100,000 followers, but those 100,000 followers never engage with the creator?

“She Only Has 5,000 Followers, But Those 5,000 People *LOVE* Her!”

Years ago, I worked with a major global bank on an influencer marketing project. This was years before ‘influencer marketing’ was a commonly used tactic.

This bank needed to work with about 5 influencers in the personal finance niche. They had already put together a list of candidates, and one of my tasks was to vet their targets.

The bank was using the same strategy in targeting influencers that many companies use even today: They went after those with the largest following.

I went through their list and ended up rejecting most of them. One in particular they fought for had over 100,000 followers. I suggested they ditch him and go with a young woman with 5,000 instead.

They asked for an explanation, I told them to look at their blogs. The guy with 100,000 followers had no engagement whatsoever. No Likes, no comments, nothing.

Meanwhile, every single post the girl with 5,000 followers left got dozens of comments. It was obvious that despite her ‘small’ following, she had a very engaged community of readers.

“Look at her blog”, I explained to the client. “Her readers absolutely love her! If you pick the guy with 100,000 followers, he will write a post about his involvement with your project, and no one will care. Cause no one cares about his content now. But if you pick the girl with 5,000 followers, it will likely be her first influencer project, she will go out of her way to promote you and her involvement in the project. And her readers will love it and they will love YOU for working with her”.

Which is exactly what happened. She promoted her involvement in the project all over her blog and social media, and her readers responded.

This is a key lesson for companies when working with influencers: Engagement usually trumps size. If an influencer has a certain level of engagement with their network, then the size of that network really doesn’t matter.

Let’s remember what it means to be an ‘influencer’. An influencer is someone who has the ability to change the behavior of other people through their actions.

How GymShark Became a Player in Athletic Wear By Embracing Micro Influencers

In 2012, Ben Francis, at the tender age of 19, started working on his dream of having a fitness apparel company. He started sewing clothes in his mom’s garage and making what he could.

Keep in mind, Ben had no marketing background whatsoever. Which probably explains why his next move worked so well. As Ben was doing his research into fitness apparel, he would come across fitness influencers, especially on YouTube. After watching their videos and becoming familiar with their styles, he would pick his favorite fitness influencers, and send them free Gymshark clothing.

No fuss, no brand guidelines. Just free clothes and try them out and see what you think.

But the best part is, non-marketing Ben didn’t ‘know’ to focus on influencers with big followings. He just picked the ones he liked, and that was his criteria. Most of his picks were ‘micro’ influencers, some with only a few thousand followers.

But here’s the key lesson: Ben focused on the influencers that he LIKED. He liked them because they were GOOD CONTENT CREATORS. Guess what happened next? Most of those micro influencers blew up in the coming years and then built massive followings. Because Ben had connected with them before they ‘made it big’, it gave Gymshark a huge advantage because he suddenly had an ongoing relationship with all these high-profile fitness influencers. And he still uses the same strategy today, and Gymshark is now a billion dollar company.

Apply this to Substack: I suspect most of us can think of a few of our favorite writers here on Substack who ‘only’ have a couple thousand subs, or maybe only a couple hundred. But these writers have an incredibly engaged community of subscribers.

It’s obvious that in another year or two, these writers will have much bigger followings. It’s not about the size of the following, it’s more about how you engage with your following.

High engagement is always a good sign when you are looking for influencers to work with.

On Thursday, I will have my monthly recap of my growth here on Substack. I’ll also do a bit of a breakdown on how subscriber growth has tracked over the first 10 months of the publication. See you then!

Mack

Backstage Pass teaches you how to better connect with your customers, readers, clients, or donors. The lessons shared here draw on my experience over the last 20 years building customer engagement strategies for companies like Adobe, Dell, Club Med, Ingersoll-Rand, and countless others. I give you real-world research, examples and tactics that show you how to create customer engagement efforts that drive real business growth.

Want Better Feedback? Do This...

Mack Collier

·

Apr 22

Happy Tuesday, y’all! Please Like and Restack this issue to help increase its visibility on Substack. Thank you! And if you are receiving value from my articles, please consider supporting me by subscribing to Backstage Pass. Free subscribers get access to all articles as they come out, after one month, older articles a…

Read full story