With the continuous growth of social media and the rise of social media influencers,there is an increased need to understand their behaviours, more specifically, an understanding of the influencer-follower relation from the influencers’ perspective. Horton and Wohl’s (1956) original concept on social relationships, parasocial relationship, has been used in numerous studies to review the influencer-follower relationship; however, due to the unilateral direction it entails, these studies have only focused on the follower’s behaviours and perspectives. Most of these studies have not accounted for the reciprocal engagement that social media influencers and their followers have within the online platforms. Due to this, Lou (2022) has created a concept called Trans-parasocial relationship to acknowledge this gap. This study uses a general inductive approach to explore how influencers perceive their relationship with their followers and how that relationship could impact the content created. Semi structured interviews were conducted with seven micro-influencers who have 10,000 to 100,000 followers (Campbell & Farrell, 2020) and were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings suggest the environment (online and offline), self-identity of an influencer, and online engagement impacts how the micro-influencers’ perceive their relationship. That perception they have on themselves and on their relationship with their followers create self-influenced content and follower-influenced content.

Externally, there is also brand-influenced content, although the relationships formed do no directly create brand-influenced content, it has an indirect impact as influencers still choose the type of brand they endorse based on what they prefer (self-influence) and what their followers would want to see (follower-influence). The results from this study fills in gaps within academic literature on influencer-follower relations and support the trans-parasocial relationship concept by confirming the key traits from the influencer’s perspective. Managerially, this study provides marketers and small businesses insights on how to use influencer marketing to promote their businesses. By understanding how an influencer feels and behaves, will provide opportunities to enhance influencer-brand relationships for successful implementation of influencer marketing.