Easily Accessible Fame: The Rise of the Micro-Influencer

The age of social media has brought the rise of a new type of celebrity: the influencer. Unlike classic celebrities, influencers are people who might not have any palpable talent, but have a massive social following nonetheless. People aspire to be like them, checking their instagram pages for the latest fashion trends, or following them on TikTok to find out what the next big dance or meme may be. There is a lot of discourse about the impact of this new era of celebrity on culture, but there is one area of impact that has been huge: the accessibility to celebrity, and the way fame no longer seems like an unreachable goal for a “normal” person. And in the past few years, a new phenomenon has made this even more realistic: the rise of the micro-influencer.

Image courtesy of Marco Verch

A micro-influencer is defined as a person with a larger than average but not massive following (usually roughly 10k-100k). While 100,000 followers is an objectively large number of people, it pales in comparison to major influencers such as Charli D’amelio’s 48.9 million on Instagram (not to mention her 148.8 million on TikTok). Micro-influencers are often people who have jobs other than social media, and they generally present themselves as gaining a following seemingly by accident. Many TikTok micro-influencers are just totally normal tiktok users who gained a following because one or two of their videos went viral and people started to enjoy their other content.

Micro influencers are especially appealing to brands – sometimes even more so than those with huge fanbases. As one Forbes article proposes, the use of micro influencers can be way better for a brand to use than a Charli D’amelio – type. The article lays out a solid argument for the importance of micro influencers in marketing. The primary reason, other than the lower cost, is that influencers with smaller followings have a disproportionately higher engagement rate than people with bigger followings. Marketing through them is more effective because they have more niche audiences who pay more attention to what they’re doing.

The higher engagement rate on smaller influencer accounts may not be entirely surprising to anyone who follows one of these pages. The people who we follow that are not mega-famous seem more relatable to us than those with hundreds of millions of followers. Not only do we sort of see them as our peers, they also present to us a more attainable goal: very few people think they will ever have D’amelio-level fame, but a girl in her 20’s who has over 100k followers on TikTok for posting her lifestyle videos feels relatable to her followers. She’s a “normal person” who found fame simply showing her daily routines – and now she makes a living doing it. For young TikTok users who follow her, her life is an attainable goal that they can aspire to and model their own social pages after.

The potential of becoming famous at any given moment on the internet lets us feed into the fantasy of fame that has always existed for people. As Chris Hayes writes in his New Yorker piece “On the Internet, We’re Always Famous”, “the Era of Mass Fame is upon us”. He explains that we all have a desire to be known, all get a little bit of a rush when someone we don’t know personally likes one of our posts (making us feel like they’re our “fans”). 

Simply existing on the internet is enough to make users feel like they have a taste of fame. And the new rise in popularity with marketers and social status of micro influencers makes the possibility of *actual* fame feel even more real.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user Scott Kidder