How to Find Social Media Influencers for Your Brand (& Tools)

Imagine a world where your social media posts get so many engagements you almost can’t keep up with them. 

Scratch that—it can actually happen when you partner with influencers for your social media marketing efforts. 

You’ve probably seen scenarios like that with your competitors so you’re certain influencer partnerships work.

The challenge, however, is knowing where and how to find these influencers.

Well, cheer up because that’s what we’ll talk about in a jiffy. 

When we’re done, you’ll have learned about:

• Types of social media influencers you can work with
• How to find them
• Tools to help you find influencers

Let’s jump right in! 

What’s a Social Media Influencer?

A social media influencer is a popular person who has many followers and influence on their social channels. 

But beyond that, social media influencers: 

• Are perceived as industry experts or sometimes even role models by their followers.
• Have credibility and reputation in a specific niche or industry.
• Create and share authentic, inspiring, entertaining, and informative content.
• Help raise brand awareness and engagement rates. 

They’ve got a loyal, receptive and reliable audience of engaged people who pay special attention to their social media activities and what they do. 

As a result, these influencers can help drive engagement, shape audience attitudes, set trends, and impact the purchases people make.

So we don’t sound like that college professor that rarely gave examples in class 😉, here’s what a social media influencer looks like:

Let’s get back on track! 

Now, considering about 4.6 billion people worldwide (half of the earth's population!) are now on social media, there’s a large pool of social media influencers and creators to choose from.

Literally, anyone can be an influencer today: a mom of three children, a fitness blogger, a tech guy—you name it. Even animals!

As such, it is important to split them into different categories so you know which one is ideal to work with. 

We’ll shed more light on that in the next section. 

Types of Social Media Influencers

Four types of influencers are available on social media and they’re categorized based on the number of followers they have.

Let’s take a look at each of them:

• Mega influencers: These influencers are also known as celebrities with a follower count of around 1 million and above. Mega influencers are typically singers, actors, athletes, and TV stars.

You know, traditional celebs people love and have known for a long time as well as online personalities who’ve gained popularity in recent years.

• Macro-influencers: They’re creators with more than 100k followers.
  
  
• Micro-influencers: The number of followers they have is under 100k but they’re a group of highly engaged followers who share a specific interest with the influencer.
  
  
• Nano-influencers: These have an audience of under 5k. Their audience is the most targeted and engaged and trusts them like a friend. 

Nano-influencers support communication with followers and, unlike macro or mega influencers, nano-influencers still have time to answer comments.

This means that subscribers will not only see the post about your product but will also read, discuss, and may even share it in their feed.

Now, how can you find them?

3 Easy Ways to Find Social Media Influencers

For influencer marketing to work, you need to find the right influencers to work with. But for many marketers, that’s been a real challenge. 

In fact, over 70% of them consider identifying creators a huge challenge in influencer marketing.

Luckily, we’ve uncovered three ways to do that in this guide so you’re in for a treat. 

1. Find social media influencers in your niche manually 

Sometimes, marketers want to put on their work clothes and get things done themselves (manually).

If that sounds like something you’d prefer, here are some ways to do that:

• Go through your existing follower base: You might be surprised that who you’re looking for may be just around the corner. Influencers are real people and as such, will follow brands or other people that interest them. 

That includes your brand, so don’t hesitate to click the Following button to see if one or more of your followers are the influencers you need. 

You can identify them by the number of followers they have, their names, the high-quality profile photos, or the kind of stuff they post about. 

If you’ve found someone like this, you want to take it a step further and see if they’ve been engaging with your content because that’s a sign they already know about your brand and would be open to partnering with you. 

• Run relevant hashtag searches: Ah yes, the famous hashtags are also life savers when it comes to identifying social media influencers. But first, you need to be familiar with popular hashtags in your niche. 

Once you are, type them into the search bar of your preferred social networks and it’ll highlight content where the hashtag has been used. What you want to do then, is identify people producing the content as influencers are usually among them. 

More specifically, look out for posts with really good engagement rates and where the creator has a huge following.  

• Check your competitor’s follower base: You know how we said you should search for influencers within your followers? Well, you can repeat the same process but in this case, with your competitor’s following. 

Here, the first thing you’ll need to do is carry out market research to identify who your competitors are. Then, you can start sifting through their follower base. 

Now while finding influencers manually is fun and all, there’s no guarantee that you’ll like who you find. It’s basically a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) situation. Essentially, keep an open mind if you decide to go this route.  

2. Work with an agency

If you’re all about the soft life or would prefer to spend more time on your business, you can opt for working with an agency to help you find influencers. 

Agencies usually represent a wide range of creators allowing you to choose the potential influencers based on their audience, style, and content type.

They’re like the middleman between brands and relevant influencers. 

Working with an influencer agency can help you with:

• Creating a content strategy for your campaign
• Influencer search
• Content execution and campaign optimization
• Detailed reporting
• Price negotiation

They basically save you the stress of searching for influencers yourself. 

But, working with them costs time (in terms of price negotiation) and money, probably more than you budgeted for because they’ll need to include their cut.

3. Use influencer marketing software

There are also influencer marketing tools that can help you find influencers. These platforms allow brands to specifically search for the ideal influencers they’d like to work with. 

How do they do that? 

Well, by providing influencer discovery tools and a creator marketplace in most cases. 

Both tools help you identify and narrow down influencers in your industry who might be open to working with you. 

For most tools, all you have to do is fill out a brief indicating what kind of creator you want and the software matches the influencers that fit your description. 

Some others, like social listening tools, can help you identify who has mentioned your brand on social media so you can reach out to them if you want. 

Using influencer marketing software is the most convenient approach of the three ways we’ve mentioned above.

Before you start typing top…software in Google’s search engine, you’ll be pleased to know that we’ve curated some of the best tools out there for you to choose from. 

Top 6 Tools for Finding Social Media Influencers

With influencer marketing tools, you’ll spend less time guessing if the creator you’ve found is right for you and more time building the influencer persona you want. 

Let’s review these tools from the top. 

Insense

Insense is a collaboration platform where brands can find influencers to work with for their digital marketing campaigns.

There are two ways users can find influencers on Insense:

• Generate a creative brief where they can define the profile of the creator they’d like to work with.
• Visit the creator marketplace to manually search for influencers using filters such as location, age, ethnicity, engagement rates, niche, follower count, and more.

Their partnership with social media platforms such as Meta and TikTok makes them a good option for your influencer marketing strategy. 

Awario

Awario is a social media listening tool. 

With Awario, users can track important discussions and mentions of their brand across different social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit. 

In addition, they search the web and monitor competitors. 

The tool then comes up with an influencer list or your brand advocates from your competitors so you can reach out to them at your discretion. 

Klear

Klear has an influencer database and it’s also a platform for influencer marketing.

This influencer discovery tool helps users identify influencers based on category and location.

They’ve also got more advanced filters allowing you to find creators by followers, social channel, niche, and demographics. 

Each of their influencer profiles on the different social media platforms includes useful metrics, brand collaborations, audience demographics, and their top content. 

With this information, you can identify the best influencers for your business and launch an influencer marketing campaign using Klear.

Traackr

Traackr is a data-driven influencer marketing platform that helps with discovery, collaboration and reporting, and campaign management. 

It provides users with a more strategic approach to their influencer marketing campaigns. Traackr allows brands to have access to insights so they can optimize their strategy and get a greater impact. 

Concerning influencer discovery, Traackr lets users filter influencers and their followers based on their niche, language, location, age, gender, and brand affinities. 

The platform will help find influencers on social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube as well as measure the results of the campaign.

HypeAuditor

HypeAuditor is an AI-driven influencer marketing tool.

The AI analyzes and ranks Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok influencers according to the number of quality and engaged followers. 

They only take real followers and likes into consideration. HypeAuditor’s AI constantly updates its global top influencers' lists daily.

Users also have access to other solutions for their influencer campaigns such as competitor analysis, campaign management, campaign analytics, and media plan creation. 

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a platform that helps you find content that’s performing well in your industry and partner with creators who are already brand ambassadors. 

The content marketing platform allows users to find any content on the web related to their brand. 

Each search result is associated with the amount of social engagement for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. Also, the platform provides a content analysis report.

The Best Social Media Influencers & Creators on One Platform

Looking for the best all-in-one platform to find social media content creators?

Yeah, you can stop now as you’ve found it. 

It’s Insense!🤭

With Insense, you can find top influencers or creators in your industry and partner with multiple influencers at the same time. 

Ready for your next influencer partnership?

Then, go ahead and book a demo with Insense to kick things off. We’ve got someone waiting to guide you through the process.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

This section covers likely questions you might have regarding how to find social media influencers. 

If you’ve got more questions not listed here, don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Q1. How to find Instagram influencers?

You can use Insense to find Instagram influencers. 

Here’s how to get it done:

• Sign up or log in to Insense to get access to the dashboard. 
• Fill out a brief and ensure you indicate Instagram as your social media platform of choice. 
• Submit the brief upon completion and Insense will match you with influencers that fit the profile you created.

Q2. How to find TikTok influencers?

To source TikTok influencers for your campaign, you can visit TikTok creator marketplace or an alternative influencer marketing tool like Insense. 

If you decide to use Insense’s creator marketplace, here’s how to proceed:

• Log in and navigate to the dashboard
• Click the Marketplace button
• Use the available filters to carry out your influencer search
• Select TikTok as your preferred social network

Q3. What’s the best way to find influencers?

The best way to find creators is to leverage the search tools of influencer marketing software such as:

• Insense
• Klear
• BuzzSumo
• HypeAuditor
• Upfluence

Q4. Where can I find influencers for social media campaigns?

There are several places to find creators to work with. Here are some options you might want to consider:

• Check through your existing follower list or your competitors’ list
• Run a Google search
• Partner with influencer agencies
• Leverage influencer marketing tools