Harnessing the Power of the Nano Influencer: How Brands Can Discover Higher Engagement Rates on Social Media

For marketers, leveraging brand awareness and engagement on social media is an imperative part of growing any business. It’s for this reason that the power of nano influencers can’t be underestimated. 

With a following of between 100 and 10,000 followers, nano influencers don’t have the biggest presence online, and this can make it easy to overlook their ability to improve the visibility and conversion rates for brands. 

Although many brands can fall into the trap of assuming the larger scale influencers with millions of followers can be better for their bottom line, it’s actually their counterparts with lower volumes of followers that can pack a surprising punch when it comes to engagement. 

In fact, EMARKETER data suggests that nano-influencers on Instagram have a leading 6.23% engagement rate, while the top influencers on TikTok can only muster a 4.95% rate in comparison. 

It’s also worth noting that nano-influencers are unsurprisingly dominant on social media in terms of scale. 65% of all influencers on Instagram have less than 10,000 followers alongside the biggest engagement rates. 

For brands, this means that there’s a wide market of high-engagement influencer accounts available that are more likely to resonate with your audience and improve your lead-generation efforts. 

Tapping into Intimate Follower Relationships

What makes nano-influencers so valuable to brands? Their higher engagement metrics are largely down to the more intimate relationships these smaller accounts build with their followers. This helps to generate a greater level of trust through shared interests and a dedicated community. 

While nano-influencers have fewer followers than their larger influencer counterparts, their smaller communities allow them to spend more time: 

• Engaging directly with followers, influencers, and brands

• Respond to audience comments

• Answer questions quickly and efficiently

• Nurture closer online bonds with followers

So, why does this help brands to bolster their profit margins? And is the pursuit of many nano-influencer relationships really better than utilizing a single all-encompassing influencer campaign that reaches a wider target market? 

Tactically, as long as you choose the right nano-influencer for your needs, your investment would be best spent pursuing smaller, more engaged audiences. 

Nano-influencers are not only market leaders in terms of engagement, but they’re also far more accessible and cost-effective when it comes to generating influencer marketing campaigns. 

Unlike better-known influencers, nano-influencers are less likely to charge hefty fees for a single post or campaign. 

This, coupled with their far more focused and receptive audience, means that nano-influencers offer brands the opportunity to boost their ROI in a meaningful way while saving upfront on costs. 

Accessing Nano-Influencers

The best thing about nano-influencers is that they’re considerably more accessible than world-renowned influencers with higher follower counts. This is because it’s usually rarer for brands to battle with one another for collaboration opportunities with smaller influencers. 

There are also plenty of ways to get in touch with these influencers. One leading option is to utilize Instagram’s Creator Marketplace tools, which allows brands to access a list of content creators who are either enlisted or have tagged their accounts to the marketplace. The list will only display accounts that have joined the Instagram Creator Marketplace, making it a great way to analyze your options effectively. Alternatively, for professionals on LinkedIn, tools like Linked Helper can automate outreach to nano-influencers or industry-relevant contacts, helping businesses efficiently build relationships within professional networks.

The Creator Marketplace allows brands to directly identify influencers of all scales who have specifically indicated that they’re willing to collaborate with businesses and can suggest creator accounts that could suit the specific goals of brands. 

Of course, it’s also possible to take a more organic approach when searching for collaboration opportunities with nano-influencers, and the use of industry-relevant hashtags can be a great way to identify influencers who could be willing to work with you. 

Through this approach, you can also identify influencers who are more discoverable, who interact more effectively with your target audience, and who are best aligned with your own brand values. 

For brands that may not have the resources to manually identify nano-influencer collaboration opportunities, it’s certainly worth enlisting the help of a quality-focused SEO agency that specializes in link-building on a multi-channel basis. 

Leveraging the Social Proof

Another reason why nano-influencers are so effective when it comes to boosting your brand value is through their ability to leverage user-generated content (UGC) as social proof. 

Statistically speaking, UGC consistently outperforms brand advertising. In fact, as much as 70% of consumers trust user-generated content ahead of content that comes directly from brands. 

As a result, working directly with nano-influencers can help brands resonate with their own audience better and in a more trustworthy manner. By showcasing this content on a social media wall, brands can further amplify the impact of their campaigns. 

In the example above, we can see that Home Depot has utilized nano-influencer UGC from an account with around 6,600 followers to great effect. Despite its relatively low follower count, the Christmas-themed post became Home Depot’s most-liked content for the first three weeks of December 2023, amassing more likes than any of the 16 other posts published during this timeframe. 

Additionally, the wholesome nature of UGC can help to form a more resonant connection with consumers in a way that more direct brand messaging could fail to emulate. 

This also serves as an opportunity for brands to effectively outsource their content. Rather than relying on in-house advertising and social media ideas, nano-influencer campaigns can help to ensure a steady stream of varied content that can form a strong social proof for the company built on a sense of trust and authenticity. 

Measurable Results

Nano-influencer campaigns can also be useful to track and use to form a better understanding of your customer profile. 

By monitoring your inbound trafficking from different nano-influencer campaigns, you can learn about the type of content and industry niche that’s driving the best levels of brand engagement. Different KPIs can be weighted differently depending on the objective and group, and measurable figures from Google Analytics can help to measure the individual success rates of campaigns based on factors like reach, engagement, and conversions. 

Of course, it’s important to monitor success by its more intangible components too. Engagement can be measured in different ways. This includes keeping an eye on influencer’s posts. An influencer tracking software can help by providing detailed analytics on post performance and audience interactions.

Perhaps quality posts that receive fewer views but high volumes of comments and conversions can be weighted more appropriately than high views and likes but without the same traffic levels. Here, it all depends on your specific marketing goals. 

Consider factors such as the convenience of your collaboration and whether there can be easy-to-implement improvements that can bolster your KPIs. While nano-influencer campaigns are rarely black and white in their success or failure, a more diversified range of campaign options can help to enhance your chances of success. 

Discovering a Balance

Nano-influencers can be great for developing a tangible marketing strategy that helps brands reach segmented audiences that are more likely to engage directly with the content they’re presented with and your brand itself. This can help to generate far greater engagement while bolstering sales. 

In many cases, nano-influencers have already generated trust among their followers, meaning that they can become far stronger brand advocates than their counterparts with higher follower counts. 

For ambitious brands who know where their target audience is likely to be online, it’s essential to build some form of exposure to nano-influencer markets. In doing so, you can help to leverage far greater levels of consumer trust and awareness into the future.

• Author
• Recent Posts

Hira Ijaz

Latest posts by Hira Ijaz (see all)

• Leveraging ChatGPT for Affiliate Marketing Success - February 20, 2025
• How to Make Money with AI Affiliate Marketing - February 18, 2025
• How to Become an AI Product Affiliate - February 11, 2025