So you want to turn your best Instagrams into cold hard cash. How do you do it? Well, you may want to achieve some specific numbers to increase your chances of landing a covetable #ad. What you don't need, however, are millions of followers. Footwear News tapped Aliza Licht, who serves as EVP of brand marketing and communications and Alice and Olivia and wrote Leave Your Mark, to offer words of wisdom on becoming an Instagram influencer. She spoke about the importance of engagement, which is social media speak for likes, shares, and comments—and is arguably more important than your follower count.
Licht said that brands wanting to pay an influencer should look for specific engagement rates. "When it comes to valuable engagement, Licht suggests anywhere between 1 and 3 percent is ideal," Footwear news explains. What does that mean in simpler terms? If you have 25,000 followers, your posts would garner around 500 likes, while 50,000-follower accounts would get roughly 1000 likes.
"If I were a brand, I’d be going after people who have very niche audiences,” Licht said during a fashion panel, per Footwear News. "We find that micro influencers have a much higher engagement than the influencers that we all know." So there you have it: You don't have to be Aimee Song to make some dough off your Instagram.