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Influencers

Published on March 31, 2026   12 min

A selection of talks on Marketing & Sales

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hi. My name's Julie Atherton. I'm the founder of Small Wonder, social media advisory and marketing consultancy, and I write books on social media strategy and social media marketing. Today, we're going to talk about influencers.
0:18
There are three areas we'll cover. First of all, we'll define what influencers are, we'll look at the influencer engagement model and then we'll discuss each type of influencers that we have available to us.
0:33
What are influencers? Well, this definition is a useful way to think about them. A social media influencer is an individual who has established a large following, usually in a specific business area on social media. Now that following can be extremely large, from mega and macro influencers right down to small niche influencers or nano influencers. We'll talk about what the differences are between each of those as we go through this lesson. Crucially, about influencers, their followers trust them. They're able to persuade their followers to try or buy experiences or brands because of their authenticity and reach. Influencer marketing is a strategic methodology enabling us to integrate influencers into marketing strategy, and we match influencers to brands and monetise the access to the latter's community.
1:30
What is the influencer engagement model? You'll see that on this model, we look at the different types of influencers in terms of the size of their community, going from small to large, but also how closely they're aligned to our brand, going from a close match to the brand's audience to a much looser one. As we move to be increasingly smaller communities and increasingly closer to matching the brand and the audience, the engagement rate, in general, increases too. Let's start right at the bottom right-hand corner where we're talking about employees. People who are colleagues within the organisation. They really understand what our brand stands for, and they're closely aligned to it. Individually, they'll have small communities in their own right. But collectively, if we can harness the power of those audiences, we can have a really significant impact on the people who follow them in terms of what they think about our business and our brand. Customers, too, individually have very small communities. But because they know about us, they've bought from us, and they're engaged with our social activity, they tend to be really believed by their followers and trusted by the people who know them. And so can support us through reviews and comments about our products and services and what they believe about our brand. Brand communities or brand ambassadors are people who are very closely aligned to our brand values. They support our brands and are often synonymous with what we stand for. As we move through the other types of influencers: nano, authoritative, micro, macro, and mega, we'll see that they have increasingly large communities and become ever more distant from the values that our brand may have. When it comes to mega influencers, their communities follow them for lots of different reasons, not just because of what they think about our brand or the area in which our brand operates. Therefore, we can often get lost in the noise. Businesses that use influencers in influencer marketing can choose to use all of these types of influencers or cherry pick the ones that are most important to them. As a rule of thumb, start in that bottom right-hand corner. Consider what you're going to do with employees, customers, and brand ambassadors, and brand communities before you start spending significant amounts of money or taking lots of time to work with larger influencers who are less closely aligned with your business. Remember, however, that increasingly authoritative, nano, and micro influencers are starting to become more important to brands' marketing strategies. They give access to communities that can't be reached otherwise in a trusted way, and also help us avoid ad blockers and increased SEO through external links to our website. Influencer marketing is a crucial part of any marketing strategy. It's important to take the time to think about which influencers are going to be most important to a brand.

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