In a time when nearly half of the top social media influencers are fraudulently inflating their follower count and engagement metrics, it can be challenging to sift through all the noise and find the right influencers for your marketing campaigns.
“Right”, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean the most popular influencer in your industry. It’s more about finding the top social media influencers in authenticity, niche authority, target audience engagement, brand connections, influencer marketing strategy, resonance, and return on investment (ROI).
To identify this ideal group of prospects, brands should look beyond the surface-level impressions and dig deeper into meaningful influencer metrics. You must also know where, when, and how to scout for, vet, connect with, and engage the right social media influencers.
The following guide walks you through that entire process while providing actionable tips for finding the right influencers in your industry.
Influencer marketing is a social media promotion strategy, in which brands commission influential content creators to endorse their products or services.
Influencers recommend items to their social media followers, who, in turn, make consumer decisions driven by audience trust built over time. This type of marketing is often more well-received than traditional ads because of the personal connections social media influencers share with their audiences.
The impact of this is particularly significant among younger consumers. For example, 36% of Millennials now find influencer posts more trustworthy than traditional ads, while 74% of Gen Z shoppers rely on influencer recommendations as a primary product discovery channel.
Brands continue to aggressively engage in influencer marketing, with most of them leveraging multiple partnerships simultaneously. About 37% of businesses are served by up to ten social media influencers, 46% have tens to hundreds, and 14% work with over a thousand influencer collaborations.
These influencer partnerships can be categorised into four tiers – mega, macro, micro, and nano social media influencers.
Mega influencers are individuals with over one million followers. They are often celebrities, public figures, or prominent content creators. Their extensive reach guarantees access to a wider audience size, making them ideal for global awareness campaigns. However, it all comes at a high cost, and the engagement rates for mega-influencers may be lower than in smaller influencer collaborations.
With follower counts ranging from 100,000 to one million, macro influencers offer a balance between reach and engagement. That means you’ll have broad exposure while maintaining a moderate level of audience connection. You can thus partner with macro-influencers for both awareness and conversion campaigns.
The costs here are lower than those of mega-influencer marketing, but you’ll still need a substantial campaign budget. Another thing you can probably expect is brands competing fiercely for the attention of the top macro influencers in your industry.
These influencers have a following of between 1,000 and 100,000, with the majority attracting niche audiences. They are known to cultivate close, personal connections with their followers, which make their recommendations feel more authentic – leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
As such, micro-influencers are well-suited for targeted influencer marketing campaigns on a budget. Their limited reach can however restrict your scaling options.
Nano influencers, with fewer than 10,000 followers, enjoy the strongest community support and the highest levels of audience intimacy. Their small but dedicated following interacts closely with them, making their recommendations feel deeply personal.
You can thus consider nano-influencers for hyper-targeted influencer marketing campaigns with exceptionally strong engagement. However, their limited reach means that scaling up will require collaborations with multiple social media influencers.
To establish a list of potential social media influencers, start with these three steps to discover and qualify prospects:
Social media platforms are naturally the richest source for discovering potential influencer marketing partners for your brand.
You can begin by searching for hashtags relevant to your industry, products, or target audience. For instance, a skincare brand could look up hashtags like #SkincareRoutine, #CleanBeauty, or #GlowUp. Influencers using these hashtags are likely already creating content that resonates with your niche.
Many social media platforms additionally run “explore” pages that showcase trending content according to your interests. Their algorithms often feature influencers creating content within your industry.
You can also use location-based searches to find influencers active in your target regions.
Influencer marketing platforms are purpose-built tools that simplify the process of building, executing, and managing influencer campaigns on social media.
Many even provide analytics and filters for sorting through influencer profiles, trends, interactions, and topics across social media. You can use them to identify potential influencer marketing partners based on their engagement rates, audience demographics, and content themes. For a broad but simplified view of the social media influencers driving conversations in your niche, consider using Streem Social. It analyses global social media data to find influencers by topics, hashtags, handles, themes, and reach.
As the biggest search engine on the web, Google taps into all the indexed blogs, journals, forums, websites, and digital publications in your industry. YouTube, on the other hand, is the single most expansive web directory for videos.
On both platforms, you should be able to discover top social media influencers by searching industry-specific keywords. You should then open influencers’ content pages to review their material for relevance. Pay attention to their titles, descriptions, tone, messaging, target audience, and engagement.
Google and YouTube can provide analytics that you can use to gauge a social media influencer’s reach. For data on traffic visibility, for instance, go to the Google Search Console. On YouTube, you can qualify potential influencers based on their videos’ views, subscriber count, and engagement rates.
Unfortunately, there's no simple answer or guideline. Costs fluctuate according to the following factors:
Influencer marketers often calculate campaign rates according to their follower count and tier:
The biggest payment checks often go to mega-influencers for engaging large audiences over wide-reaching awareness campaigns. Their averages, as reported by influencer marketing benchmarks, are as follows (AUD):
Macro-influencers demand lower rates due to their reduced reach. Pricing tends to range between:
With up to 100,000 followers, micro-influencers charge even less per sponsored post. You can expect to pay the following:
Nano-influencers are the cheapest option due to their limited audience reach of less than 10,000. Typical rates include:
The social platform you choose also affects your influencer marketing costs, as each has its own unique content requirements:
Broader influencer marketing campaigns that are more demanding usually incur higher charges than their simpler counterparts.
Some common campaign formats used by the top social media influencers include:
Reach is the total number of unique users who have seen an influencer's content. Impressions, on the other hand, measure how often a post appears in users' feeds.
This measures how audiences interact with influencer posts through likes, comments, shares, and saves. High engagement rates indicate that the content resonates well with viewers and persuades them to take action.
Brands may calculate an influencer’s engagement rate by dividing the total number of engagements by the follower count, and then multiplying by 100.
For instance, if a social media influencer receives 500 engagements from 10,000 followers, their engagement rate is 5%.
Increased engagement happens to be the most successfully fulfilled influencer metric, according to 32% of marketers worldwide.
Conversion analytics measures the audience members that take a desired action after engaging with influencer content. This can include making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.
To monitor such conversions from social media, brands may use unique tracking links or promo codes associated with each influencer marketer. These results help you to evaluate the amount of revenue generated from the social media influencers.
Traffic metrics establish the volume of users directed to your website or social media profiles through influencer campaigns.
You can use these figures to gauge an influencer’s ability to generate interest and bring target audiences closer to your brand. Influencer marketing industry reports suggest that brands can easily maintain a positive performance trend with the right influencers, ranking traffic as the second best-performing influencer metric, behind engagement growth.
While reach, conversions, traffic, and engagement metrics measure immediate impact, long-term impact analysis evaluates how influencer partnerships drive sustained brand awareness and customer loyalty over time.
You can, for example, use social listening tools (like Streem Social!) to capture post-campaign brand mentions across social media platforms. A consistent increase indicates long-term brand growth, sparked by your social media influencers.
Influencer marketing campaigns have the potential to drive brand awareness, product discovery, conversions, website traffic, audience engagement, and long-term sentiments. You just have to find the right influencers for your brand.
To do that, you need to prioritise authenticity over sheer popularity. You should go for social media influencers who maintain genuine engagement with their followers, consistently post industry-relevant content, and target the same niche audience as your brand.
You can always search for them manually across social sites by topic, location, demographic, keywords, mutual connections, and so forth. Or, you could make things much easier and more accurate by using a social media intelligence platform like Streem to discover influencers. Our traditional monitoring platform can also find influencers, by using your brand's name as a keyword, then filtering down to 'Influencer Social' media type mentions.
Whenever you find social media influencers with a suspiciously large fanbase, assess their engagement rate by dividing the total number of likes, comments, and shares by the follower count. While platform benchmarks vary, unusually low engagement rates may indicate fake followers.
You can also review the influencer’s content quality and consistency. Look for thoughtful posts, genuine interactions in the comments section, and a consistent tone that resonates with their audience.
Another method would be tracking follower growth patterns on influencer marketing. Sudden spikes in follower counts may suggest the purchase of fake fans.
Influencers can be categorised into three main types based on their follower count. Your choice depends on your influencer marketing campaign objectives, audience size, and budget:
The cost of social media influencer marketing varies based on follower count, platform, content type, and the scope of the influencer campaign.
Nano influencers typically charge between $10 and $250 per post, micro-influencers ask for $25 to $1,250, their macro counterparts go up to $25,000, while mega-influencers may bill you upwards of that.
On the content type, you can expect video marketing to cost way more than other forms of media – because they require more resources to compose and share.
YouTube itself, being the largest video-sharing platform on the web, attracts the steepest influencer marketing rates from its sponsored videos. Facebook and Instagram influencers also earn premium rates per post, ahead of both TikTok and X.
As for the influencer campaign scope, short-term collaborations may cost less than long-term partnerships. The latter may however offer better value than one-off posts, as they allow influencers to build a deeper connection with your brand.
Your influencer outreach email should begin with a personalised greeting that mentions their name and maybe any of their content pieces that resonate with you.
Next, state your brand's mission and link it to the social influencer’s values or niche. Be concise about what you are offering – whether it's compensation, free products, or exclusive access – and explain what you hope to achieve through the collaboration.
Include details about the marketing campaign timeline, the deliverables expected from the influencer, and the mutual benefits that will come with the brand partnership.
To measure the performance of your influencer program beyond surface-level metrics, you might want to review both quantitative and qualitative results. You can use influencer marketing tools to help you. The key influencer metrics here include: