What Are the Different Types of Influencers Your Brand Can Work With?

By Yuliya Gorenko 0 Comments

Digital media is shifting how we do things in marketing. Today, platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch have given rise to social media influencers. To make a point, look at the numbers.

Statistics show that 2019 found more than 380 influencer agencies.

Still, finding the type of influencers that works best for your brand is the greatest challenge for anyone running an in-house campaign. It’s tough to navigate media noise and find influencers to represent your brand.

Cloutboost influencer marketing agency has its finger on the pulse of who’s who in social media influencers. Learning about the types of influencers your brand can partner up with will help you create a successful influencer marketing strategy.

Let’s start by understanding who a social influencer is and how they can help your brand.

Definition of a Social Influencer

A social media influencer definition describes someone in a distinct niche, with an engaged following on social media. These social media influencers may have hundreds of thousands of followers or only a few thousand in their audience.

Their power lies in their ability to affect their audience’s purchasing decisions.

An influencer marketing strategy leverages their authority, knowledge, and relationship with their followers. Here’s the thing – just because a social media influencer has thousands of YouTube followers, doesn’t necessarily make them the right match for your business.

Agency Tip:

If a social media influencer has a massive following, it doesn’t guarantee that they’re genuinely influential. What you need to know is if they’re actually a thought-leader within your target community.

Types of Influencers

Influencers can vary by social media platform, by topic of their interests, and by the size of their audience. Let’s take a deeper look at different types of social influencers and their essential characteristics.

Primary Social Media

When choosing a social media platform for your next influencer campaign you need to keep in mind the peculiarities of each media channel and its audience. In simple words, people come to Instagram and Twitch for different reasons.

Influencers tend to focus on different platforms based on what they like—for example, photographers prefer Instagram, gamers hang out on livestreaming platforms like Twitch and Mixer, while make-up influencers often post their content YouTube.

In order to launch an influencer campaign, we recommend researching how your target audience is using social media. Are they looking for entertainment or content that would allow them to learn new skills?

To engage influencers effectively, you need to know the specifics of each platform. Think about what formats of content are available and what types of sponsored content perform the best.

Let’s take a look at how influencers vary by platform.

Instagram influencers

Instagram that hasover 1B active users is heavily used for posting and discovery of visual content. This social media platform is populated by lifestyle, photography, travel, and fashion influencers.

What’s more, 60 percent of the audience on Instagram uses the platform to discover new products.

As of January 2020, 90 percent of Instagram’s one billion active users are younger than 35.

YouTube influencers

When it comes to YouTube influencers, they produce all types of video content. With its two billion logged-in monthly users YouTube is filled with technology reviews, unboxing videos, make-up tutorials, gardening guides, how-to food recipes, and more.

Gaming video content is also a huge cultural phenomenon that can be seen in abundance on YouTube. In this list of influencers compiled by Cloutboost, you can find top gaming YouTubers who rule the roast on the platform.

TikTok influencers

In 2019 TikTok was downloaded from the App Store more than any other app. With 33 million installs TikTok gained huge popularity due to its unique types of content and opportunities for user interaction.

41 percent of TikTok’s 500 million active users are between the ages of 16 and 24, and it’s more of a place for entertainment than a lifestyle platform. If your goal is to engage the younger demographics, you might want to find your influencer on TikTok.

Twitch streamers

In the world of competitive gaming, Twitch has no rival, with 44 billion minutes watched per month. Not only that, but Twitch’s share of the video game streaming is at 72.2 percent compared to YouTube at 19.5 percent, and Mixer at three percent.

Good to know, right?

With 140 million unique viewers per month, Twitch influencers can reach 50 percent of millennial males in the US. Truthfully, Twitch is the platform to use if you want to get to that hard-to-reach, industry-specific demographic of 18 to 34-year-old gamers who consume all of their content on laptops and mobile devices.

There are multiple ways to collaborate with Twitch influencers that vary from brand mentions during the stream to the placement of branded banners in the channel’s infobox.

Mixer streamers

The only real competitionfor Twitch’s gaming audience out there is Mixer. At this point, Mixer has a much smaller community. Still, the platform has over 30 million active users per month, including both Mixer influencers and viewers.

One difference is the real-time streams that have enabled Mixer streamers to get live feedback from their fans. Though many of them enjoy this, the downside is that it also makes stream sniping easier so the audience can tune into a stream while playing to enhance their gameplay, find the streamer’s location, and virtually kill their character.

With all this variety of features, you can imagine why it’s a good idea to understand the platform’s specifics before hiring the influencers.

Audience Size

While the definition of each segment changes from platform to platform, there’s a useful way to get a measurement of an influencer’s reach from their number of followers. Cloutboost operates influencer campaigns for our clients based on the following influencer segmentation:

• Nano influencers: Less than 5,000 followers
• Micro influencers: 5,000 through 50,000 followers
• Mid-size influencers: 50,000 through 500,000 followers
• Macro influencers: 500,000 through 1 million followers
• Celebrity influencers: Over a million followers

Let’s take a closer look at each type of influencers segmented by the size of their audience.

Nano influencers – Tight Group, Big Influence

Nano influencers don’t treat social media as their source of income or main activity. Instead, they share news and their thoughts with friends via their social channels. What makes them influential is that they might be passionate about a particular topic like gardening, pets, nail art, or some other specific niche. Ultimately, they’re a source of knowledge on this topic for their community.

Here’s the thing – people trust their recommendations because they’re unbiased and passionate. Nano influencers are great for small businesses who want product reviews.

Micro-Influencers

This group is obsessed with a particular topic, and they share their passion and knowledge with the world. In 2016 large firms increased their collaboration micro-influencers by 300% than ever before, and that number only continues to grow. Why?

Running an influencer campaign with micro-influencers might significantly increase trust in your brand as it’s an excellent word-of-mouth recommendation.

Take a look at this influencer case study based on the campaign Cloutboost executed for Samsung at CES 2020. A collaboration with micro-influencers is a great way to generate authentic content and increase conversations around your product.

Macro influencers and Celebrities

Macro influencers are social media stars who outgrew the platforms and gained recognition and fame. They usually have talent agencies representing them for brand partnerships.

Celebrities are individuals who are widely known outside of social media, and they get massive media coverage. An example of a celebrity endorsement is Reebok’s partnership with top model Gigi Hadid resulting in their #REEBOKxGIGI campaign.

Working with celebrities and macro-influencers is usually a challenge as they’re expensive and much less flexible with branded content creation.

A collaboration with macro influencers can be a great way to skyrocket Brand Awareness. One important note here, however, is that a medium-size influencer is easier to reach, and they tend to have a higher engagement rate with their audience.

The graph below shows how engagement rate varies depending on the influencer size:

Source: https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-benchmark-report-2020/

Area of interest

Influencers have become influential as they have been talking about a particular subject since the beginning of their online career. The segmentation based on the area of their interests leads us to countless categories most popular of which are gaming influencers, make-up influencers, travel influencers, tech influencers, photography influencers, and numerous other content creators.

Listen to your consumers, look into their interests and pin down what types of influencers resonate with them.

Agency tip:

When segmenting influencers by their interests don’t be superficial and one-dimensional. For instance, gaming influencers might showcase consumer goods or services that are not directly related to gaming but are still very popular among gamers. Knowing that gamers spend twice as much money on music, travel, gadgets, food and drinks, movies, and sports than people who don’t play games opens new opportunities for promoting your brand with gaming influencers.

How to Find Influencers for Your Brand

Cloutboost has a set of metrics that help evaluate a channel’s true reach and influence. You can use these metrics as best practices when looking for social media influencers.

Here are the 4 metrics to take into account:

• Relevance
• Reach
• Engagement
• Sentiment

Using these metrics as a guide will help you define a persona for the type of influencer that will work best for your business.

Agency Tip:

If you want to hire influencers you’ll need to draft an influencer agreement to use as a contract. It’s an essential piece of paperwork that defines expectations for both parties.

Wrapping Up

While our world is getting more and more digitalized it also becomes more fragmented. People group together in online communities and the leaders of these groups have the power to start conversations and introduce trends.

If all this talk about influencers has got you wondering what type of influencers will work best for your business, make sure to explore each of the platforms we described. If you need assistance finding the right influencers for your brand, contact Cloutboost agency – we’re here to help you.

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