The Basic Things You Need to Follow to Become an Instagram Micro-Influencer

Are you considering turning into an Instagram Micro-Influencer? Do you have what it takes to create a market for products? Being an influencer on Instagram is a lucrative business in today’s times. With the changing trends of online marketing, more and more brands are beginning to invest in influencer marketing. If you can successfully build yourself as a micro-influencer on Instagram, you can expect to earn reasonably well from your posts. Today, several Instagram users explore the influencer market industry to make a few extra bucks, while many have already grown into full-time macro-influencers. 

What Do You Do to Become a Successful Instagram Influencer?

The first trick here is to ensure you have an ever-growing organic follower base who are active in your feed. However, it is not easy to build a substantial follower base. You need time, effort, and a good marketing strategy to reach a point where you can actually begin to have some influence over your audience. 

To speed things up a bit, you could consider giving your career a boost by buying trusted services followers. If you choose to try this out, find a good guide to avoid falling for services that may get your account into trouble.

You probably wonder how many followers you should have for your work actually to show fruit as a Micro-Influencer on Instagram. Although there is no set minimum number of followers, a micro-influencer is generally expected to have a follower count of 5,000 to 100,000. Anyone with less than 5000 followers is usually considered a Nano influencer. Likewise, influencers with more than 100,000 followers are technically considered Macro-influencers. How successful you are as a Micro-influencer depends on how you manage to influence your followers’ activities. 

Here are a few basic things you should keep in mind to successfully set yourself up as an Instagram Micro-influencer:

1. Before you begin your journey as a Micro-influencer on Instagram, consider the following:

• • • How much time are you willing to invest in this role?
    • How much money are you willing to invest in this role? 
    • Do you have a particular goal for Micro-influencing?
    • Have you done an initial study of the market for the niche you would like to work in? 
    • What is it that you can do differently to be able to stand out from the crowd? 
    • Do you have the patience, confidence, and determination to build yourself up?

2. Once you have determined the above, you can move on to the second important part of the process. If you already have an account, check if you have set up the right kind of Instagram account for the purpose:

a. Create a Business Instagram Account: A personal Instagram account does not give you the optimal Instagram experience for becoming a Micro-influencer. With a Business account, you will be able to:

• • • Monetize your account: This is of course the most important aspect. You can link several allied business features to this end as well.
    • Study Engagement Insights: Secondly, with a business account, you can track your audience engagement using Instagram Analytics. This feature will help you keep a tab of essential data like your active followers’ demographics, the engagement rate of each post you put up, the period of maximum engagement rate, and much more. Such data is very useful for you — a successful Instagram beneficial way to know how to anticipate audience engagement. When pitching to brands for collaborating, a thorough knowledge of your followers’ behavior is essential.  
    • Run Ads: A business account lets you promote your posts in accordance with your budget and target audience.

b. Complete your Profile Information:

• • • Your bio must be able to make an impact on the first read. Tell your story and make it attractive. An influencer’s bio must have its audience’s attention. How you present yourself here will give brands an idea of how strong an impact you are likely to create with your content. Make brands want to hire you by merely looking at your bio 
    • Ensure you have a website or a landing page filled out. 
    • Depending on what your niche is, consider making your location public.
    • Fill out how potential clients can contact you. 
    • Add relevant call to action buttons. 

c. Connect your Instagram Account to the Relevant Allied Sites: For maximum benefit, complete and connect your Facebook business page to your Instagram profile. As sister sites, the two share several tools and facilitate cross-platform posting. You will also be able to reach the audience over both platforms and access the same payment methods for both sites. In addition to your Facebook page, complete and connect your profile on partnering service sites so that you can add call-to-action buttons on your profile that directly let your client book or get in touch with you for your services. 

d. Set a Schedule for Your Instagram Activity: Most Instagram micro-influencers post daily or on every alternate day. Some post more several times per day, while others, depending on their niche and brand building, opt for a weekly schedule. No matter what pace you choose to post, consistency in uploading content is crucial as it builds anticipation for fresh content among your followers. It also lets your potential clients know you are serious about your role as a Micro-influencer. Your posts’ frequency impacts your engagement rates so adapt your Instagram activities to keep the uploads coming without too long a gap. However, remember not to compromise on quality when trying to stick to a routine posting schedule. Choose a realistic plan and, if necessary, use a service to post auto-scheduled content on your profile. 

3. Now that you have the fundamentals in place, you can use the following tips to keep yourself in the race for the top in the Micro-Influencer market:

• • Stick to Your Niche: Sticking to a niche does not mean you have to be predictable and do what everyone else is doing. Keep to your topic but also explore what your unique selling proposition (USP) can be. Here is what you can do without deviating from your chosen field:
    • Be passionate about your subject and research new ways of approaching it. 
    • Your posts should not feel disconnected and random. If you want to post about various things, consider a story approach to tie everything together.
    • Bring a balance and method to your posting strategies.
  • Let your Personality Reflect in your Post Content: Being authentic is the key to winning your audience’s trust and getting them to engage with your content. 
  • Increase Engagement Rate on your posts and become an Instagram Micro-influencer by:
    • Building Meaningful Communication: As a micro-influencer, you cannot afford to be rude or irresponsible to your brand collaborators or your followers. Respond to DMs and Comments. Be respectful and warm in your conversations. Inter-personal communications can build credibility and trust towards you and therefore towards the products you endorse or showcase. Take time out to interact with your audience so you can create opportunities for meaningful audience engagement with your posts. 

• • • Crafting Call-to-Action in Post Captions: Instagram does not let you place clickable links in your captions, but you can always direct audience attention to the link you place in your bio using call-to-action phrases like “click on the link in bio”. 

• • • Presenting your Posts in an Eye-Catching Manner: Try and build your brand image by ensuring your posts have high-quality video and image. Use a consistent presentation style, so your posts are soon visually identified as yours by existing and potential followers alike. Keep your lighting adequate and audio clear to get maximum audience e interactions. Good stories, reels, and posts will draw followers towards the products you endorse or review. How you present your content will also determine how you place as a micro-influencer in your niche. 

• • • Organizing your Instafeed with a Professional Look: You must pay attention to not just individual posts but to your entire feed. You can choose a layout that gives a casual passer-by a lasting impression about your work at first glance. Visually appealing Instafeeds have a strong potential to attract organically active followers. They also leave favorable impressions upon brands and other account holders who may be considering a collaboration with you. As a micro-influencer, you must pay attention to every minute detail of your account. However, remember to not strip your feed off your personality and genuineness in an effort to tidy it all up. This is a tough thing to do and requires a good plan of presentation on your part. As you make your feed look goods collectively, ensure that each of your posts also stands out individually. As per your budget, you can make use of several readily available apps for the purpose if necessary. 
    • Providing Incentives to Your Audience: This marketing strategy has dramatically increased Story and post analytics. As a micro-influencer, you cannot go wrong in hosting giveaways and contests. This type of content works best when the audience is required to engage with the post in some way to be eligible for entry. For instance, you can ask each follower to tag a friend or to like the post to qualify for the contests. Remember to announce winners at the promised time and ensure your giveaways are genuine. You will not only build your visibility and audience traffic, but you will have credibly publicized the products as well. 

• • Leverage Instagram Stories to your Advantage: You cannot become a Micro-Influencer on Instagram just by uploading videos and photos. Keep the captions relevant and create appealing Stories to promote the same. You must use IGTV, live streams, reels, and highlights to strike a chord with your target audience. Give your audience authentic matter to interact and engage with. Instagram Stories that disappear in 24 hours have a high visibility metric. Use it to create opinion polls, get survey responses, and spread information about upcoming content. Present your stories in a manner that holds your followers’ attention and translates it into a favorable action for your posts. 

• • Form Your Group of Professional Support: To grow your follower base organically, participate as an organic audience member for other Instagram users as well. It is a good idea to follow and engage with content from similar accounts. This will allow you to survey the trends in influencer marketing in your niche. Moreover, it will help you scout for collaborating influencers and brands for your content.  

• • Use the Right Set of Hashtags: Instagram algorithms are geared to make posts visible on searches based on the keywords in the hashtags used by Instagrammers. To ensure your content is found by the right target audience and beyond, use relevant hashtags. Hashtags with high search volumes do not necessarily imply that your post will be discoverable. Combine and experiment with different types of hashtags that fit your post as well as your persona. Choose the ones that maximize your chances of visibility. Check your insights to keep a tab on which type of tags are drawing you the most active traffic. Likewise, make use of geo-tags. To avoid bad will, do not create unsolicited user tags into your posts unless the users have already allowed you to do so. You can use several readily available AI tools to determine which hashtags would likely bring you the best results in terms of audience activity. Conversely, search for and follow relevant hashtags to ensure you are abreast of similar and relevant content too. To stay ahead of your competition, observe and learn from the competition! 

Remember to post high-quality content consistently and make every effort to grow your audience engagement. A huge follower count with minimum audience engagement can backfire on your image as a Micro-Influencer besides bringing you less revenue. Do something relatable, credible, and yet so different that your audience wants to come back for more of your posts. No matter what your niche, find your voice and leverage the available Instagram tools to your advantage. With an audience that genuinely places its trust in you, you will surely see organic engagement, influence, and growth in your follower base. Bottom line – success comes from sincere and hardworking professionals. You will no doubt become a successful Micro-Influencer on Instagram if your work has integrity.