How to Become a Micro Influencer (from 500 to 5000)

In the past few years, micro influencers have exploded onto the scene. This makes total sense.

With their smaller audience size, they’re able to preserve authentic relationships with their followers, keeping things more personal and relatable. Even better, smaller accounts generally tend to have more engagement since your audience feels like they actually know you. 

Of course, just because micro influencers are relatively small, that doesn’t mean just any random account qualifies to be one! Micro influencers still have the same basic criteria you would expect of any influencer account, regardless of size – high-quality content, a disciplined posting schedule, and consistent interacting with followers. 

And like we said, even though they have smaller numbers, that doesn’t mean they’re tiny: we consider micro influencers to be accounts that have around 5,000 followers. It’s small enough that things still feel intimate, but large enough that hundreds of people are interacting with your content. Indeed, once you reach that magical number of 5,000 followers, brands will start to notice you and seriously consider partnering with you, especially direct to consumer brands that thrive on personal relationships and interact with their customers directly. 

Basically, micro influencers around 5,000 followers are like Goldilocks – not too big of an account, not too small. Just right.

Not there yet? Are most of your posts getting these types of numbers? 

No worries – the good news is that with some simple strategies and consistent effort, you can easily grow your account 10x from 500 followers to 5000. 

Read below to learn more! 

Find Your Niche 

This is true for anything in life, including becoming an influencer. It’s important to create a space where you can express your unique, original voice and plug into a community that shares your interests and passions. After all, the whole point of being an influencer is to share your thoughts and ideas on a subject that you know and care about. 

By dedicating your account to a specific niche, you improve the odds that people interested in that will follow you. Additionally, over time you’ll come to be seen as a leader in the space – people will come to you for inspiration, advice, and ideas. 

For instance, lots of people love food (it’s kind of important to live) and there are millions of foodie accounts on IG. The successful ones that amass a large following though have a specific angle – vegan food, baking, best restaurants in a specific city, etc. In this case, @Atxeatsnadtreats has dedicated her account to Austin eats, and even has story highlights of each neighborhood’s best areas! 

They’ve staked out their territory and people who are interested in that same stuff follow them. Do the same! 

Plan Your Content 

We mentioned this earlier as a criteria of any influencer account. That’s because it’s true, People follow you because they’re interested in your niche. Cool. Now you have to kgiveeep them a reason to keep coming back! 

Simply put, content is the lifeblood of your Instagram feed. 

It’s what people see and interact with and how they get to know you and what you’re about. Your content should be fresh, curated, and high-quality. By fresh, we mean it should be original and compleing. Curated means all the images should compliment each other and help create a cohesive, branded aesthetic. And high-quality means just that – crisp, professionally shot images. 

Combined, these elements will make your content stand out and make folks want more. Over time this leads to a larger, more engaged audience, and before you know it, you’ll have a community that’s interested in what you have to say! 

Engage With Your Followers

This is always essential, but even more so when you’re just getting started. If content is the lifeblood of your account, followers are the bones that give you support and build you up. They’re there because they want to be and are interested in what you have to share. 

Be sure to let them know that you recognize this and appreciate it!

Especially when you’re just getting started and growing from a small account of 500 to a respectable 5,000, engaging is both easier and more important, so there’s really no excuse. 

It’s easier because there’s literally less people you’re interacting with, which gives you more time to devote to each individual person. And it’s even more important at this stage because these are your #1 fans. They’ve been there from the beginning and you want to keep them around. Learn what interests them about your account and what they’d like to see going forward.

For instance, it’s not very effective if you switch up your account and start attracting 2 or 3 new followers a day but are losing 2 or 3 old followers that aren’t as interested in the content. 

Boost Your Growth 

So you have your niche, you’re posting consistently and you’re interacting with your audience – you’ve got the essential pieces in place! Now it’s time to start boosting your growth. 

There are several strategies you can use to gain exposure and bosrt your growth on Instagram.

One of the simplest strategies that you can put into place immediately is using the right hashtags. Indeed, a post with at least one hashtag averages 12% more engagement than one without. Using hashtags will also make your posts more discoverable to people who are already interested and searching for related content. The more tailored and niche your hashtags are, the better, since it allows you to stand out more and presents more refined results. For example, #veganbbq currently has 52k posts, which is much more tailored than 80.6 million posts under #vegan. 

If you consistently implement these core strategies, your account will start to take off! After all, even accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers started at 0, and then 500, and then 5000 and then 50000. On that note, it’s worth mentioning that these strategies are just as valid to get from 500 to 5000 as from 5000 to 50000. Of course, it gets a bit harder to scale and keep up, but that’s a different story. 

Besides, once you reach 5000, you’re in a comfortable place where things are still manageable but you start to be taken seriously as an influencer. Thousands of people are tuning in to what you have to say and you have all the criteria of a great account. 

This also makes you very appealing to brands, who may even start to approach you directly. 

So what are you waiting for? Start your journey to becoming an Instagram influencer today! By the time you’re done, your posts will be batting a hundred all the time.