Building a personal micro influencing brand through social

The influencer marketing world is set to be worth $8 billion in 2019 and is on course to rise to a double of the current value by 2022.

If you’ve been on social and follow the activities of the marketing world, then you probably know a lot about what being an influencer means. Who they are, how they work, what they do.

If you do not know, an influencer in simple terms is someone who has built a huge personal brand following and is able to and make their followers exhibit certain behaviors.

As the influencer world has blossomed, it has also created a new path for a new category of people, Micro influencers. A micro influencer is someone who has built a personal brand and expertise across a specific niche and has a following of around 10,000 to 500,000 followers on social media. Micro-influencers are people who have already built the audience a brand is looking for through the specific and unique content they create to engage that audience, growing and establishing trust with them.

While follower count is a prerequisite to influencing, Micro-influencers’ influence are determined based on the specific audiences they engage with and the connection they create with them.

Here are the Characteristics of a micro-influencer:

1. A relatively high number of following ranging from 10,000 to 500,000
2. They have high engagement rates. Because they have consistently built their followers through creating relatable and unique content for the audience, they usually have high engagement rates on their posts.
3. Specific/Niched Content: Micro-influencers create content that their followers love and want to see. Through these contents, they cater for the needs of a category of people. These contents could be in video, audio and text format and they depict a style, mood or emotion and are usually about specific topics.
4. Relatability: Micro-influencers build relatability with their content with the audience they create them for, because they understand and know what they want. As a result, a two-way engaging relationship with their audience is built.

Now that we know who a micro-influencer is, it is important to also know how to build a micro-influencing brand through social.

1. Pick a specific niche: Starting out a micro-influencing career starts with identifying what your interests, area of expertise and knowledge base and developing content to those who have similar interests in what you do
2. Brand yourself: Your brand is what they say about you when you’re not in the room – Jeff Bezos.

    After picking a niche and interest areas, you need to brand yourself. Branding means creating a style, voice and personality for your message. The question when branding yourself should be about what you want people to think when they see, read or listen to your content. What kind of image do you bring to mind. Building your brand is an important step in building a micro influencing career and you should put major effort into creating a spectacular brand.

1. Quality over Quantity: One major challenge with building a personal brand is the need to always churn out contents, which often times leads to producing undesirable, poor content. And once you start to lose quality with content, you begin to lose direction with the audience who previously followed you because they enjoyed your content.

So, if you’re setting out to become a micro-influencer, think about the quality of the content you want to put as against the number of contents you produce.

1. Tell great stories: stories are a great way to reach the hearts of your audience. Today, brands and businesses have realized that to sell to your customers, you tell stories about them. As a Micro-influencer, you should know how to tell stories that your followers can relate to, tell stories about them. With stories, you’re able to connect with the hearts of your followers.

2 Avoid controversy: The social media age has made it easy to build influence, and also more importantly made influence easier to destroy.

Building your micro-influencing career means you need to be careful with the kind of content you create. Avoid creating deceptive, provoking and negative content.

Lending your voice to important causes and discussion could be a great way to grow, but a little misstep could bring down the empire you’re trying to build.

KENNETH IBE