Shopify blog
Building a social media presence is a priority for businesses. In fact, it was the second-most popular year-one growth strategy among Shopify merchants (after word of mouth), according to a 2025 Shopify survey.*
One option for early growth is to work with macro-influencers, who have hundreds of thousands of followers but may be more accessible than celebrities or mega-influencers.
In this article, you’ll learn about the different tiers of influencer and get expert tips for how to work with them on your marketing campaigns.
What is a macro-influencer?
A macro-influencer is a social media personality with a large followingranging from 500,000 to one million followers or subscribers. Macro-influencers can be public figures who have translated their offline celebrity status into social media fame, or content creators who have amassed a large audience just through their engaging content.
Uly Morazan, a creator known for his short videos about married life with his “current husband,” is a macro-influencer with just under a million followers on both Instagram and TikTok. Uly has translated his social media success into partnerships with the likes of luxury fragrance brand Diptyque, as well as a podcast, comedy tour, and his own merch.
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5 types of influencers
Marketers categorize influencers into five groups based on follower count:
Mega-influencers
Mega-influencers have more than one million followers. This group includes A-list celebrities like Kim Kardashian (344 million followers on Instagram and 11.3 million followers on TikTok) and content creators like YouTube personality Safiya Nygaard, who has 10.2 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.9 million followers on Instagram.
Working with mega-influencers can be expensive. Jaclyn VanSloten, founder of growth agency Femra Consulting, says mega-influencer rates start at $20,0000.
According to creator management platform Aspire, only 2% of brands work primarily with mega-influencers.
One option for working with mega-influencers is to collaborate on a product with them, like candle company Homesick did with Safiya. The Safiya Nygaard Collection from Homesick has three scents inspired by Safiya’s most popular YouTube videos.
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Macro-influencers
Macro-influencers have between 500,000 and one million followers. For brands, partnering with macro-influencers offers a middle ground. They’re cheaper than mega-influencers (Jaclyn says rates start at $2,000), but have more potential reach than mid-tier, micro-, and nano-influencers.
In a 2026 HubSpot survey, 34% of marketers said they saw the most success with macro-influencers (which they defined as creators with 100,000 to one million followers), compared to 36% for micro-influencers (10,000 to 100,000 followers), 15% for mega influencers (one million followers and up), and just 8.6% for nano-influencers (1,000 to 10,000 followers).
Social media consultant and author of the Link In Bio newsletter Rachel Karten recommends that brands partner with influencers in a way that fits into their usual content.
For example, air-dry clay artist Sincerely Seashell shares videos of her process with her 714,000 followers on Instagram and 794,400 followers on TikTok. The creator teamed up with shoe brand Steve Madden to create a true-to-size platform flip-flop that doubles as storage for trinkets.
The video fits in with Sincerely Seashell’s other content and received 508,000 views, 6,300 likes, and 63 comments.
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Mid-tier influencers
Mid-tier influencers have between 100,000 and 500,000 followers. Talent management agency Influize and business analytics company DemandSage report that mid-tier influencers charge anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $10,000 per post.
Some creators are mid-tier on one platform and micro-influencers on another.
For example, Rosemarie, who shares artfully plated meals and snack boards, has a stronger following on TikTok (112,900 followers) than Instagram (11,400 followers). Private chef and recipe developer Sara Tane has more followers on Instagram (342,000) than she does on TikTok (47,000).
Tinned fish brand Fishwife—which is more popular on Instagram (303,000 followers) than TikTok (155,100)—partnered with both creators to promote their canned mussels.
Rosemarie incorporated the mussels into a snack plate with cured meat, cheese, and fresh fruits and vegetables, and Sara shared a recipe for a lobster-roll-inspired mussel roll. Both creators wore “mussel tee” merch from Fishwife and cross-posted their videos on Instagram and TikTok.
Rosemarie’s snack plate performed well on both platforms, with 55,600 views, 2,000 likes, 27 comments on Instagram and 21,100 views, 5,344 likes, 32 comments on TikTok.
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Sara’s mussel roll got more attention on Instagram (126,000 views, 3,500 likes, and 65 comments) but didn’t reach the same traction on TikTok, with just 4,660 views, 379 likes, and 12 comments.
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Micro-influencers
Micro-influencers fall in the range of 10,000 to 100,000 followers. According to Jaclyn, micro-influencers charge $500 to $2,000 per post, making them a more affordable option for small businesses.
Micro-influencer Carlee has 11,800 followers on Instagram, where she shares her all-green outfits. She regularly partners with small businesses, like accessories brand Jack Arden.
Nano-influencers
Nano-influencers may have a small following—between 1,000 and 10,000—but they boast the highestengagement rates, according to influencer marketing platform Favikon. Jaclyn says influencers in this tier can charge $100 to $500.
An example of a nano-influencer is Carla Jian, a yoga instructor who posts to her more than 9,000 followers about the workout equipment she uses. In one Instagram post, she mentions wearing a weighted vest by Aion Gear for her classes and walks.
She also shares her affiliate marketing code, which gives customers a discount and Carla a cut of any sales attributed to her.
One way to get started with creators is to pair influencer gifting with affiliate marketing: You send free products to influencers who align with your brand, and if they want to post about the product, they can use their affiliate code or link to get a share of the profits.
How to build a macro-influencer marketing strategy
Follow these steps to launch your macro-influencer marketing strategy:
1. Research and connect with influencers
There are a couple of ways to find macro-influencers to work with:
Identify creators who are already posting about your product
For Rosie Johnston, founder of fragrance brand By Rosie Jane, working with influencers who have already shared her product organically leads to more authentic content.
“The average consumer is smart,” Rosie says on Shopify Masters. “[They can tell if] there’s no substance behind it.”
To work with creators who have already shared her product, Rosie will either leverage the existing content, or commission new work by saying, “Hey, we love this piece of content. Thank you so much. We would love to work with you. Could you create more pieces of content for us?”
You can find creators who are already posting about you by checking your tagged posts and searching for your brand or product on social media. Or, use a social listening tool that automatically tracks brand mentions.
Use an influencer management platform
Influencer management platforms and affiliate networks connect brands to creators who are open to collaboration. Some social media platforms have their own built-in influencer management platforms, like TikTok One, which has a Creator Marketplace.
Shopify store owners have access to Shopify Collabs, an all-in-one creator management tool that lets you search for influencers by number of followers, engagement rate, location, keywords, and hashtags.
On an episode of Shopify Masters, Adrian Solgaard, founder of luggage brand Solgaard, says he prefers to use Collabs because it keeps him organized.
“If you’re going directly into their DMs, when a creator responds, it just gets lost in the DMs of customer service inquiries,” Adrian says. “It’s hard to keep track of.”
2. Negotiate terms
If a macro-influencer wants to work with you, you should be ready to discuss compensation, deliverables, and the timeline for completion. The type of collaboration, how quickly you need content, the amount of content you need, and how much creative freedom creators have can all affect compensation.
There are a few different ways influencers make money:
One-time flat fee
With this structure, a creator earns a flat fee in exchange for the content they create. In a 2025 survey from partnership platform Impact.com, 19% of creators said flat fees were their primary source of compensation for brand collaborations.
If you go this route, you can start by looking at influencer pricing lists to get an idea of general ranges for macro-influencers.
You might be able to negotiate a lower fee with a hybrid model, in which creators receive both a flat fee and the opportunity to earn commission. This was the most common compensation source for 32% of creators.
Commission
In a commission-based model, creators earn a percentage of the sales attributed to them by sharing a unique discount code or affiliate link with their followers. This structure incentivizes creators to promote products and doesn’t come with upfront costs for businesses.
Thirty-five percent of creators said commission was the primary way they got paid by brands in 2025.
Gifting
There are a couple of approaches to influencer gifting.
One option is to send products to creators in the hopes that they will like those products and post about them, also known as creator seeding. If they do, you can offer them an affiliate code to deepen the relationship, which is what beauty brand Three Ships does.
“[Seeding] works very well because it’s authentic,” says Three Ships cofounder Laura Thompson on Shopify Masters. “People will post about the product if they really love it.”
The other option is to actually pay creators in products instead of money, also known as product exchange. In the Impact.com survey, only 14% of creators said their primary form of compensation was product exchange or gifting.
Whether this strategy works for you may have to do with your product.
Aspire found that 86% of influencers were willing to work for brands in exchange for free products, provided that they loved the brand (61%) or the products were high value (25%). Only 14% of creators said they wouldn’t work for products.
If you use Shopify Collabs, you can pay influencers, create affiliate codes, and send gifts directly from your Shopify admin.
3. Track results
After your campaign launches, track results to determine whether you met your goals. Here are a few options for measuring the success of your influencer partnership:
Affiliate data
One advantage of using affiliate links or codes for influencer marketing is that they can provide you with data on how many people purchased an item due to a particular creator’s influence.
If you use Shopify Collabs, you can view an individual creator’s analytics by navigating to the Collabs app from your Shopify admin, then selecting Connections and the creator’s name. Under Collabs performance, you can see the total orders, sales, and site visits attributed to that creator.
Social media metrics
Social media metrics like views, likes, and follows can help you predict if an influencer’s post is going to bring in sales. That was the case for furniture company Transformer Table.
As cofounders Artem Kuzmichev and Richard Mabley watched the Reel they commissioned from macro-influencer Racha Abdel Redam amass millions of views within seconds, they knew they had to prepare for an influx of orders from the Middle East, where many of the viewers were based. (Racha, who is Lebanese and lives in San Francisco, posts in both Arabic and English.)
“We didn’t wait one second,” Richard says on Shopify Masters. “We started sending containers [of product] to Dubai. We did the math, with 131 million views, let’s say 0.1% of those people buy. … It's great!”
Sales data
If you want to track sales data, use a combination of social media and analytics tools. This is a strategy that pickle brand Good Girl Snacks employs.
“If an influencer posts on this day and we have an X percent increase that day in sales, it’s probably because of them,” cofounder Leah Marcus says on Shopify Masters.
This method is especially effective for Good Girl Snacks because they don’t use paid ads. So when they check on Shopify Analytics, it is more plausible that the influencer is responsible for the spike in traffic or sales.
Post-purchase surveys
Sometimes tracking social media metrics against storefront data like sales and site visits doesn’t show the full picture.
“You might not be able to correlate [an increase in sales with an influencer’s post] directly, because there is a lot of other noise,” Toral Patel, former marketing VP of Kopari Beauty, says on Shopify Masters. “There might be ads running. There might be something happening in-store.”
Toral uses post-purchase surveys as another indicator. “We ask specifically, ‘How did you hear about us?’ And very often someone will note a specific influencer,” Toral says.
To get started, download a post-purchase survey app, like Fairing or Grapevine, on the Shopify App Store.
Macro-influencer FAQ
How many followers do you need to be a macro-influencer?
Having anywhere between 500,000 and one million followers generally qualifies you as a macro-influencer.
What is the difference between macro- and mega-influencers?
Mega-influencers have more than a million followers or subscribers, whereas macro-influencers have between 500,000 and one million. Mega-influencers typically command higher prices than macro-influencers.
How do you choose the right influencer to work with?
When choosing an influencer, look into their audience demographic, how their tone and style of posts fits your brand’s voice, and their engagement levels. You can also try to find influencers who are already enthusiastically posting about your brand to help you create more organic content.
*Based on a November 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with two or more years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.
