Why 1K Followers Is Better Than 10K

You are a worthless imbecile.

Did the sentence above make you feel confused, angry, or ready to report this article? Then I succeeded in my mission of engaging you with this content.

The technique is called emotional marketing, where emotions are used to make your audience notice, remember, share, or buy a product or service. Emotional marketing taps into human’s complex, yet basic, four categories of emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise/fear, and anger/disgust. Today, marketers and advertisers largely employ rational marketing, where the rational need for a product or service is used as the primary mechanism to engage consumers and trigger call-to-action. The old “you need this phone because it never cracks” strategy. But researchers found that when evaluating brands consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences) rather than information (brand attributes, features, and facts). The innate emotional affinity to brands, services, and products explains why campaigns that use emotional marketing perform twice as well as those with rational marketing. The markets and science give us a firm conclusion, if you want to engage your audience you have to tap into their emotions.

Nano-influencers (1K-10K followers) are exceptionally good are tapping into the emotions of their audiences. Managing the smallest audiences, they are remarkably able to generate double the engagement and conversation rates when compared to other top tiers. But the outperformance of nano influencers is no surprise. Research had already spotted an inverse correlation between the number of followers and the engagement rate - the lower the following, the higher the engagement rate.

Despite the mounting evidence supporting the proven success of managing smaller audiences, social media influencers and other users insist on the power of a high number of followers. But the misguided notion has users swimming against market currents.

Marketers, advertisers, and brands are quickly moving away from users with a high number of followers towards influencers with smaller, often specialized, audiences. A whopping 77% of marketers are already working with nano influencers, a drastic contrast from top tier influencers who only received 35.6% of the vote. Of the respondents who are not yet working with nano influencers, 43% intend on doing so in the next year.

Consumers too are shifting away from top tier influencers. In a Morning Consult survey, 88% of respondents expressed attraction to influencers who are authentic and genuinely care about their interests. Nano and micro influencers provide the authenticity consumers want, enabling a deeply rooted sense of trust between them and their audiences. Trust in turn enables influence. In another survey, 82% of customers said they would be very likely to follow a recommendation from micro-influencers.

Make no mistake your 10K following is losing relevance. The market has transformed and grown a big appetite for small audiences, with a high degree of organic engagement, and one that yields high conversion rates.

Is your audience fit for the market?