Micro Influencer: Explained with @bruhrelia

Janhavi Gosavi (she/her)

We all have a love-hate relationship with influencers. Whether you love to hate them, or hate to love them, influencers have reconceptualised what fame is and who has access to it. 

My Instagram feed used to be inundated with international influencers whose lifestyles were as foreign to me as they were. I didn’t always have a frame of reference for the products they used, the places they visited, the income bracket they operated within. I grew weary of content I didn’t resonate with. But my love for influencers was rekindled when I began seeing more local faces flood my Explore page. 

One of my local favourite accounts is @bruhrelia, which is run by Eli. Eli is a non-binary 19-year-old from Auckland who has 28,000 followers on Instagram. They first blew up on the app for their bold makeup looks, but have since stayed popular for their unfiltered hot takes, hilarious oversharing, and undeniable thirst traps. 

I paid Eli a visit at the end of 2020, back when they used to live in Wellington, to discuss all things social media. Articulate and chaotic, glamorous yet disheveled, I was shocked at how true to form Eli is in person. Stuffing our faces with pizza while we yarned about Teen Wolf, they felt no different to any of my other friends. 

But their following of 28,000 did make them different. It made them, for a lack of a better word, an influencer. term they audibly cringe at.

More specifically, it made Eli a micro-influencer. Micro-influencers can be defined as social media stars with a following between 1000 to 100,000. They are not noteworthy enough to be labelled ‘legitimate’ influencers, nor can you dismiss them as ordinary social media users. Treading this fine line makes micro-influencers uniquely beneficial to companies for two reasons. 

Firstly, micro-influencers are relatively affordable. 

Rising to fame on social media is a rat race, and micro-influencers understand that. Eli gave me the impression that in the early stages of a micro-influencer’s career, they are happy to collaborate with brands for little-to-no compensation. They adopt a “good things take time” mindset; if I work for free now, I’ll get paid gigs in the future. Small businesses have the most to gain from these unpaid arrangements, as many do not have the means to pay influencers for advertising their products. Big companies even make it seem like they’re doing micro-influencers a favour by ^letting them advertise their products in exchange for the coveted exposure that comes with being associated with their brand. 

Secondly, micro-influencers feel genuine. 

It can be anyone. Your little sister, your childhood best friend, that quiet guy in your tutorials. Micro-influencers dangle on the cusp of fame while retaining that casual, girl-next-door quality. Their audience inherently trusts them on the account of their ‘relatability’. 

This trust brings them amazing engagement rates. That’s why it’s more effective, not to mention cheaper, for a company to pay ten micro-influencers than to pay one macro-influencer. Besides, New Zealand sorely lacks macro-influencers. Shannon Harris, aka @shaaanxo, is our most famous influencer with 1.4 million followers on Instagram, and she is the only one to surpass the 1 million milestone. Our local companies therefore have to rely on micro-influencers to spread the good word. 

Some aspiring influencers are inorganically growing followers purely to monetize off of fame. Eli was increasingly frustrated with being asked for advice on how to blow up on IG. 

Gaining followers is sustainable when the process is a slow burn, not a cheap thrill. “People can tell when you don’t have an honest dialogue with your followers [...] when you’re getting into it just for the free stuff and a chance to move to L.A.”, said Eli. Being disingenuous would cause the trust between micro-influencers and their followers to crumble, which in turn would invalidate one of the two reasons why they are useful to companies. 

When an influencer can no longer manage their brand alone, many resort to signing with a management agency. Managers are the middle men who receive commission through connecting businesses to relevant influencers, and vice versa. Along with helping an influencer grow their business, managers also provide social media training and guidance. 

Eli does not have a manager, and admitted it was complicated to navigate social media without one. It was hard for them to use IG like a normal user because their large following wasn’t conducive to normality. They would receive copious DMs from followers who wanted product recommendations, or were simply trying to spark a conversation. While staying on top of messages is overwhelming, Eli did their best because their relationship with their followers is “really really really close”. 

They built their audience through vulnerability and transparency, cultivating a followership that’s “really understanding and accepting”. Eli often hops onto their IG story to candidly dissect mental health, eating disorders, sexuality, and politics. From documenting their recurring stints with scabies to sharing their experiences with polyamory, no taboo topic is off-limits. “If you want your IG to be a company, and for you to be the commodity you’re selling, then having management is useful”. But if they had to censor themselves on social media in order to make money, it’s a price Eli simply wouldn’t pay. 

The biggest misconception made about Eli is that their social media presence generates income. “Brands don’t care about paying me”, they scoffed. 

They’re not wrong. Out of all of the times Eli has promoted companies on Instagram, they had only been paid for it twice. The first was a payment of $250 for promoting an app on their story, and the second was a total of $15 in commission from advertising a face mask. 

The first companies to get in touch with Eli were contact lens brands and Chinese clothing resellers, back when they had 3,000 followers. They noted that “hashtags can be a great way for anyone with a public profile to get free stuff from resellers […] it’ll just take a few months for your gifts to arrive”. At 10,000 followers, makeup brand ColourPop noticed Eli. More recently, they had been added onto the Morphe and Sigma PR list. 

I still didn’t fully understand how brand sponsorships worked, so Eli broke it down for me. 

An influencer will receive a DM that reads along the lines of

Once they have expressed interest in working together, the company will send them their terms and conditions. Smaller businesses tend to do this through DM, while larger businesses do this through email. They might also get put on a weekly influencer newsletter, or even be granted access to a different portal on a company’s website exclusively made for influencers. 

What is required of an influencer is dependent on whether they are being offered a gift or a paid sponsorship. Paid sponsorships usually involve contracts. Companies may give influencers a timeline for when and how they want them to post about their products, along with key words and hashtags that must be used in captions. Think of IG as real estate; when a company pays you for posting one feed post and two stories about the same mascara, what they are actually buying is space on your page. 

If an influencer gets gifted products, there is no onus on them to post about it. When influencers rave about a gift, their audience assumes they truly liked it as they were not contractually obligated to advertise it. 

Some companies may let them choose gifts off of their site, while others will send an influencer whatever they want. For example, Eli received one big box of makeup from Makeup Revolution, while Morphe sends them about four individual items a month. Influencers with bigger followings generally receive more of a say on what their gifts are. From an influencer’s perspective, posting about gifts helps them build rapport with companies who may offer them paid sponsorships in the future. 

When considering brand collaborations, Eli investigates the company’s ethics. They won’t engage with fast fashion re-sellers who are not environmentally sustainable and purchase their stock wholesale off of sites like AliExpress. Eli also asks themselves if this brand deserves their support. “Dolls Kill reached out and I said no thank you”, they huffed, shooting me a big side eye. Eli was one of many people to boycott Dolls Kill when the company chose to support police instead of Black Lives Matter protesters. They also turned down TTDEye, a contact lens company, for being racist to past customers. 

But when it comes to small New Zealand businesses, Eli is always game. “It’s usually some girl in her bedroom making jewellery, so I’m like of course I will promote your stuff!” Eli is more than happy to post about a small business on their story and tag them for free. “I’m not gonna say hey that’s 300 dollars [...] it’s about providing support.”

Eli now has no further interest in monetising their platform, and said they couldn’t care less if they start to drop off of PR lists. They feel insincere claiming to love a product they were gifted, or worse, got paid to talk about. They question whether their own taste in beauty and fashion is organic. “Even if I do like the product, I’m like, well, do I really?” Eli’s bottom line has become “if I wouldn’t spend my own money on it, I shouldn’t tell my followers about it”.

Influencing is a public vocation, yet the mechanics behind it have been shrouded in mystery. 

I now realise micro-influencers have ordinary lives that intersect with their extraordinary online presence—a presence that pays with likes, but not always with money. When I asked Eli how they felt about being extraordinary, they laughed. “The only things that make me different to others are that I’m very mentally ill and I have a lot of DMs.” It brings me to a not-so-earth-shattering conclusion: influencers are people too.