In the inescapable world of social media, it feels like everybody knows somebody who is an influencer. Its that girl you went to high school with or that friend whose closet you always went to raid before a big event it could even be you, actually, if you have a few thousand Instagram followers.

Micro-influencers , which are roughly defined as having anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 followers, are becoming more appealing to brands.

Francesca Gariano, a New York City-based influencer marketing manager, told HuffPost that deciding which influencers she works with on paid campaigns depends on the project, the brand and the budget of the campaign. Some brands still ask for a 10k follower minimum if they want to be able to use a swipe-up link in Instagram stories, she said.

But follower count matters less and less in influencer marketing, and, in fact, much of influencer marketing is skewing in favor of smaller accounts. You can use the case study of @Arii, an Instagram user with more than 2 million followers who created T-shirts last spring that she promoted on her account, but it didnt hit the 36-unit order minimum to continue producing them. It further proves that if you have 2 million Instagram followers but none of them care about what you have to say, you dont have influence. You just have 2 million Instagram followers.

Gariano said she does a lot of social sleuthing when finding influencers for campaigns for the brands her company works with, which she has asked not to name in this article. An account with 75,000 followers and seven comments or 200 likes on a post is a bad sign to me, Gariano said. I get really into authentic following and engagement because I think integrity is important, and if brands are using their budget to work with creators, I want to ensure that their money is being spent on an influencer whose audience is real. If I see a lot of comments that are just emojis, comments in a language that the influencer doesnt speak, etc., those are red flags. I also scroll through their likes and followers and check for similar signs of fake accounts or fake engagement.

Many brands have made micro-influencers a priority in their marketing budgets for two main reasons. The first is that there is higher return on investment for the brand, because larger accounts naturally get lower engagement, whereas smaller accounts get higher engagement. The second is that there is a lower risk associated with hiring a micro-influencer. If a brand shells out $1 million for a celebrity to post an Instagram photo and it flops, thats a huge miss. But if you hire a few micro-influencers to post on Instagram and spend a few thousand dollars in total, youre reaching a wider audience and saving money.

So if you have 1,000 Instagram influencers and you create content, can you get paid by a brand to create content? Absolutely. As there continues to be more transparency about pay in the influencer space , it has become more apparent that smaller creators can be valuable for brands, deserving to be compensated for their work, and they could ask for additional fees if a brand wants usage rights to content for any period of time, exclusivity or the use of the influencers content in paid social or email marketing.

We profile five influencers with Instagram audiences of fewer than 5,000 to learn how much they were paid for recent social media and blogging campaigns they worked on. The influencers below didnt name the brands that paid them for their work.

Lisette Melendez (@ohsnapitzlizzie )