Your Guide to Becoming a Social Media Influencer: From Zero to Hero

Saying that the influencer market is extremely lucrative is an understatement. Just one year ago, it was valued at $16.4 billion. Today, it’s estimated that it will surpass $21 billion. That’s a 31% increase in 12 mere months.

How can you reap the benefits of such a booming market? Simply put, how can you become a social media influencer?

This article will teach you how to gain more followers and turn their likes into leads.

The Journey to Influencer Stardom

Picture this:

You are scrolling through your Instagram feed when you see your favorite celebrity swearing by a new face serum they are using. Because you trust them to be genuine, you are more likely to purchase the products or services they are recommending.

So, an influencer is a person who has the ability to harness the trust they’ve built with their audience and persuade them to purchase a product or even adapt/change a behavior. They can be travel influencers telling you about the best hotel deals and least-known destinations or beauty influencers teaching you how to highlight your best features.

You don’t necessarily need to have millions of followers to become an influencer. In today’s market, micro-influencers (meaning a person who has 10,000-15,000 followers) can also build and monetize a dedicated audience. In fact, most of the big social media influencers you know today started as micro-influencers.

Micro-influencers can still reap the same benefits and build connections with brands, create campaigns, and use your voice to instill the type of action and behavior you want from your audience.

If you are still scratching your head wondering “What is a micro-influencer?” and “Shouldn’t I reach for the stars,” then keep reading to find out why micro-influencer marketing might actually be the secret to success.

Finding Your Niche

If you try to cater to everyone at once, you will likely fail. Perhaps the most important rule of becoming a social media influencer is knowing what you’re passionate about and then finding a niche.

Try to narrow it down as much as possible. Maybe you are passionate about cooking, but with so many food influencers out there, your content is bound to get lost. So you need to be more specific than this. For example, you could be a food blogger who comes up with creative and delicious meals that you can cook on a tight budget ($5 or less.)

You may think that narrowing your audience this much will not bring you too many followers, but that’s not actually a bad thing. Sure, you may have a smaller audience than a well-known influencer, but your followers are likely more invested and more active. And, that’s one of the things brands look like.

Recent data shows that micro-influencers get up to 60% more engagement than macro-influencers. These numbers are one of the reasons brands are beginning to pour more money into micro-influencer marketing. In fact, 56% of marketers who invest in influencer marketing prefer working with micro-influencers.

Building Your Personal Brand

Now that you’ve found your niche, you need to focus on building a personal brand – an online persona that reflects your values and skills. Your content, style, and tone need to be connected to this personal brand and reflect it. For example, if you are a food blogger who creates meals on a tight budget, it would be off-brand to post Instagram stories from various hip and fine dining restaurants. Instead, you should show your audience where they can get the best deals – delicious meals at affordable prices.

Building a personal brand also means taking control of your online presence. Take Noah Kagan, the CEO of sumo.com and AppSummo.com as an example. If you search for his name online, you will find links to his YouTube channel, his LinkedIn, and his latest tweets and Instagram posts. A quick glance through these platforms will immediately tell you that he is an expert in his niche.

Content Creation and Strategy

If you want to grow from a micro-influencer to a macro one, you need to start thinking like a social media manager. You can’t grow an audience and turn it into leads if you only post content sporadically. You need a good content strategy and here’s what that means.

1. Create Quality Content: Online consumers are flooded by content, so yours really needs to stick out. Make sure that your content helps, teaches, or adds value in some way to your audience’s life.
2. Find the Right Content Format: Experiment with different types of content and see which one generates the most engagement based on your audience type. If you are targeting Millennials, then creating Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels and YouTube shorts may be the best way to reach them.
3. Have a Good Distribution Strategy: Here you need to look both at the best hours to share your content and the best platforms. If your target is young professionals, they may be more active on LinkedIn. You will want to focus on this platform and find the best time of the day when your audience is more active.

Growing Your Audience

Growing an audience on social media is a two-way street. It’s important to be consistent and share content regularly, but you also need to interact with your audience and pay attention to what they are saying about your personal brand.

1. Respond to Comments and DMs: Try to respond to as many comments and direct messages as possible. This will make your audience feel like they are interacting with an online friend.
2. Practice Social Listening: Use tools like BuzzSumo or TweetDeck to see what your audience is saying about your brand and identify trends, and catch the general consumer sentiment.
3. Piggyback on Trends: Pay attention to the trends and hashtags that relate to your brand and don’t be afraid to jump on them.

Take Khaby Lame as an example, a former factory worker who became Instagram famous by reacting to silly life hacks videos. His consistency, genuine reactions, openness, and use of trends helped him grow an impressive audience.

Monetization and Collaboration

Now that you found your niche, built a personal brand, and have a growing audience, you can consider reaching out to brands and negotiating collaborations. There are different ways to do this:

1. Let brands know that you are open to collaborations by writing in your bio that you are an influencer and offering contact details companies can use to get in touch with you.
2. Tag brands in your posts. Make sure that the brands you are tagging are related to your content. You should also show enthusiasm about using a certain product or service and let the company know you are actually a fan.
3. Reach out to brands and pitch what you can offer. Show them data about how active and engaged your audience is and propose a type of content that you think will work for both of you.
4. Be honest and real about your stats. Don’t try to present yourself in a different light or make exaggerated claims. Brands will be less likely to work with you if you are unable to deliver.

Mandala AI Tools for Aspiring Influencers

If you’re not sure where to start in your micro-influencer marketing journey, Mandala AI’s tools are here to make things a bit easier for you.

Our tools can provide in-depth data about your audience, the type of content they are consuming, the trends they are following, and so on.

Two particularly useful tools to help you include:

1. Top Channels: See who the most popular influencers in your niche are.
2. Top Mentions: Find what your audience is saying about your content so you can react in real-time.

Learn more about how Mandala AI’s social influencer marketing tools work here.

Final Thoughts

Building an audience from nothing and turning from a micro-influencer into a macro influencer takes enormous and consistent work. That’s why it’s good to have a lot of great tools in your belt to help you scale faster and streamline some of this work.

Make sure to check out Mandala AI’s influencer marketing tools and see how they can help you grow from zero to hero.