Marketing

Everything You Need to Know About Instagram Influencers in 2019

March 18, 2019 /

Today Instagram has 800 million active monthly users and most brands use the platform to market their products and services. Most businesses are assumed to have an Instagram account, which has somewhat taken the place of websites. Instagram is one of the best ways to reach a mass audience no matter what business you’re in.

One of the ways businesses reach their audience is through Influencers.

Let’s begin with the basics.

What is an instagram influencer?

influencer (noun)

Influencers are Instagram users who have an established credibility and audience; who can persuade others by virtue of their trustworthiness and authenticity. Your brand’s influencers are users that employ your brand hashtag who have the largest number of followers.

(pixlee.com)

Who can be an Instagram Influencer?

If you are passionate and knowledgeable about something, and you are able to write and create beautiful visual content, you could be successful at becoming an Instagram Influencer.

Note: Instagram appreciates those that are genuine and authentic

How to Spot an Influencer?

Here is a list of things that will help you determine if someone is an influencer.

  • profile set to business
  • most likely have a website (if not, they should!)
  • have over 5k followers
  • post beautiful and professional content
  • post consistently
  • the ratio between followers, likes and comments is healthy (more on this in another post)

How to Spot a fake Influencer?

Oh I will make a separate blog for this! But on the surface, think logically.

If someone has a lot of followers but their content obviously sucks and has no engagement on their posts, this is a fake influencer. They most likely bought their followers.

Although there are some smart fake influencers too. They will buy both followers and likes for their posts. It is harder to buy comments! So if this fake influencer has both followers and likes but barely any comments, that’s your sign.

A NEXT LEVEL fake influencer will have fake followers, fake likes, AND fake comments! This influencer will have about 30% of all of the above that are real. How they get the fake comments, I won’t share in this post. But if you are an influencer reading this, you probably know how. đŸ˜‰

So how do you know who is a real influencer and who isn’t?

If you are a business looking to hire an influencer to work for you, you must check their engagement rate!

Engagement rate is a metric used to access social media content on a particular account. Engagement rate will be different for business accounts of different sizes. to calculate engagement of an account:

(likes + comments ) / total # of followers

Based on research I’ve done, engagement rate of more than 6% is considered to be excellent. If an “Influencer” passes all of the above points, they are a real influencer. Instagram is all a numbers game, and these numbers are the best indication of whether an “influencer” actually has the ability to influence others!