• Global analytics company HypeAuditor has released its 2020 State of Instagram Influencer Marketing in Australia report.
• According to the report, Australian influencers are more popular than their international peers, with higher engagement rates than creators from other countries.
• The top Australian creators can earn tens of thousands of dollars per post, while the average influencer can still command hundreds of dollars for a post.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

When people think of Instagram influencer, they often envision an account with millions of followers. But the average influencer looks a lot different to their most followed peers.

Global social media analytics company HypeAuditor published its 2020 State of Instagram Influencer Marketing in Australia, and its results show that a near majority of Australian influencers have between 5,000 and 20,000 followers.

But despite being significantly smaller, they can still earn hundreds of dollars per post.

The report breaks down Australia’s influencer landscape into five tiers: mega-influencers and celebrities, macro-influencers, mid-tier, micro-influencers and nano-influencers.

The top tier of influencers are defined by having more than a million followers but make up less than a quarter of a percent of all Australian influencers. On average, they earn anywhere between US$700 and US$15,000 for a post.

And despite engagement rate tending to drop as an audience grows, these creators have the second highest average engagement out of all the tiers at 2.22%.

Increasingly, these accounts are creators with established celebrity outside of the platform. Australia’s top ‘influencing’ creator in 2020 was actor Chris Hemsworth, who promoted brands such as TAG Heuer, Netflix and Global Wildlife Conservation in the past 6 months to his 45 million followers.

Macro-influencers are those with anywhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 Instagram followers. Macro-influencers like a Elyse Knowles tend to be individuals who are famous in a specific community, but haven’t crossed over to having a broader audience.

They make about about 5% of Australia’s top influencers, and will anywhere between US$60 and US$1,200 for a post.

Mid-tier influencers and micro-influencers are creators with between 20,000 and 100,000; and 5,000 and 20,000 followers respectively.

While they command different prices, they tend to be similar in profile: more niche audiences with in more specific communities with higher engagement levels than some of their larger piers.

These two tiers make up the brunt of the influencer cohort. Between them, they comprise two-thirds of the entire market.

23% of Australian influencers are mid-tier sized, and they can command anywhere between US$25 and US$250 for a post. Meanwhile 44% of influencers are micro-influencers who will earn from US$15 to US$150 per post.

And the remaining quarter of Instagram professional creators are nano-influencers with somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 followers.

They tend to have the highest rate of interaction with their posts — a 4.5% average engagement rate — according to HypeAuditor.

Overall, Australian influencers had more engagement across every tier compared to their international peers.

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