More and more brands are using influencer marketing to advertise their products and engage with their target market.
Because they’re becoming so popular, these influencers are seen as celebrities by consumers.
Micro-influencers are often more intimately engaged with their audience. They’re also more knowledgeable about their niche and tend to be cheaper.
You can use a proxy provider like Smartproxy, that also offers web scraping solutions to help you research and find the best influencers to work with.
Read on to learn about micro-influencers and how they can benefit your business. We also teach you how to find them using data scraping tools and techniques.
Post Contents
What Is a Micro-Influencer?
Micro-influencers usually post very niche content and only have around 1000 to 100 000 followers on a social media platform.
Their niche content is rich because they’re generally very knowledgeable or even experts on that topic. This means their followers trust their opinions.
Micro-influencers are more relatable to everyday people since more famous influencers become minor celebrities.
They’re able to engage with customers personally, leading to higher total engagement on their page.
Micro-influencers also tend to keep their content authentic to their niche. Larger influencers might start to branch out and try to make content for everyone.
Employing a micro-influencer in a field that interests your target market can mean more engagement with your brand.
Not to mention they’re a lot cheaper and often want to impress you. This means they’re more likely to give honest and positive reviews.
Web Scraping
Data scraping or web scraping imports information from websites onto databases. It allows for easy tracking and sorting of data and helps you visualize your engagement.
You can also use it to see who exactly is engaging with your product and identify trends in your industry market.
You can do this through a variety of methods and programs. One of the simplest ways is to set up an Excel sheet to track and record data from a website.
There are also programs out there to help you create formulas for scanning websites. They give you the tools to analyze any data you’ve collected.
Octoparse is one of the most popular data scraping programs on the market. It’s made for commercial use and doesn’t require any coding knowledge.
The program includes a few auto-generated algorithms, and the interface is intuitive and easy to use. You can export the data to Excel, HTML, JSON, or your company database.
You can even register at IFTTT.com to connect all your apps and set up automations.
These automations can include pushing data into a database or sheet when someone engages with your post or mentions your product or company.
The easy graphic interface makes it easy to build these automations or ‘applets’.
Finding the Right Micro-Influencers
The first place to look is right in front of you. The people engaging with your social media posts might be micro-influencers, and if they’re engaging, it means they’re already a fan of your product.
To do this, you need to use data scraping programs to extract the name, bio, follower count, and account link of every person who engages with posts or mentions your company or product, or your competitor’s product.
A quick but thorough scrape of Instagram or any other public social network should reveal several micro-influencer choices.
Once you’ve got a shortlist of potential micro-influencers, it’s time to analyze them. It’s important to make sure they’re the type of person you want to associate your brand with.
Check their social media accounts and presence.
Look at the kind of content they’re posting, how regularly they post, and what type of engagement they’re getting from their followers.
Ask yourself if this micro-influencer will reach your target market and advertise your product in a way that you approve of.
The last step is to contact these influencers. Although you want to keep a professional relationship, it’s a good idea to offer them a discount on one or more of your products.
You can even give their followers special prices with discount codes.
Conclusion
Business and strategies around IT and marketing are fluid and changing at an alarming rate, and companies need to keep up.
Billboards and pop-ups don’t have the same effect when everyone’s scrolling through Instagram or watching YouTube videos.
Using online automated processes in marketing can make your research more efficient and targeted, giving you an advantage in the online marketplace.
Influencers have one of the most powerful positions regarding marketing, and you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for the celebrities to get the engagement you’re looking for.
Micro-influencers can often bring more attention from the market you’re trying to reach.
As well as being cheaper, they’re usually more knowledgeable and passionate about your product.
Using methods like data scraping is one of the most efficient ways to find these micro-influencers, and you often don’t have to look very far.
