Mega? Nano? The answer lies in between

Influencer marketing is currently more in demand than ever, as many companies see it as a promising alternative to traditional advertising. In response to this growing demand, the number of influencers offering their services and posting sponsored content on social networks such as Instagram, YouTube and TikTok is also on the rise. This makes it increasingly difficult for companies and agencies to choose the right partners for their campaigns.

An important factor in the selection of influencers for collaboration is typically their number of followers. However, opinions remain divided on whether it is more worthwhile to work with “big” influencers, whose follower numbers often run into the millions, or to rely on “small” influencers, who often only have a few thousand followers, in order to maximise interactions, such as the number of likes or comments, with sponsored content.

In a new study Finding Goldilocks Influencers: How Follower Count Drives Social Media Engagement published in the Journal of Marketing, Professor Alexander Bleier, Associate Professor of Marketing at Frankfurt School, together with Professor Simone Wies (Goethe University Frankfurt) and Professor Alexander Edeling (KU Leuven), tries to get to the bottom of this current issue to help companies and agencies with the strategic selection of influencers for their collaborations.

The results show that, in fact, neither the very large nor the very small influencers tend to deliver the best performance in a campaign. Instead, collaborations with influencers in the upper-middle segment are most effective. This is due to the interaction of two core factors that determine the volume of interaction that influencers generate with their posts and stories: reach and conversion rate. In particular, as influencers’ number of followers grows, their reach increases but their engagement rate declines because the quality of their relationships with followers weakens. Given the prevailing uncertainty how to best integrate influencer marketing into a company’s digital strategy and how to optimally allocate budgets, the study’s findings provide important information for future planning in this increasingly important market.

More information can be found here (link to the publication) and here (LinkedIn post, Journal of Marketing).