Are you looking for a tool to find social media influencers? You are not alone. If you go to Google, you will see over 93 million search results! You might not know where to start or which of those tools can help you generate the most relevant data about your influencers. So let me tell you what I found out during my research and save your time for more important things, like finding your next social media influencer
It can be a challenge to know what tools are out there that can help you find social media influencers for your brand. In the past, it used to be really hard to find any tools that could help with this. Nowadays, there are plenty of tools out there designed specifically to help you with this type of research. This is where I wanted to come in and try and make things a little bit easier for you. There are many tools out there but I’ve done my personal research to find the best ones out there for finding influencers.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a social media tool used to find people who are already discussing your company or brand. With varying plan levels–including various price points–Keyhole can be used for small companies, just starting out in their marketing efforts, and larger companies, with several years of marketing campaigns and efforts under their belts. Keyhole provides a seamless and simple way to monitor different social media platforms, blogs, and websites, to locate mentions of your products, in order to better understand who is using and talking about your company, brand, or products. Keyhole can also provide monitoring and use of your own social media profiles.
Awario
Awario dashboard
Awario is a social media listening tool, which means it searches social media 24/7 to find every mention of your brand, competitors, industry, product, or any keyword you have in mind. It then analyzes the data and presents you with the insights needed at any given step of your marketing work — from audience analysis to content research.
Awario is a great tool to start with because it lets you run a quick scan of your business environment and uncover niche-specific social media influencers in 3 ways:
- by monitoring your industry — opinion leaders and key publishers
- by monitoring your competition — brand ambassadors
- by monitoring mentions of your brand/company/products — influential mentioners and prospective brand ambassadors
The tool’s Boolean search mode and advanced filtering allow for laser-sharp monitoring and influencer identification — brilliant for uncovering micro-influencers (10-100K followers). Awario lets you check user profiles and interact with influencers in-app, which makes for a smooth influencer workflow.
Pricing: starts at $29/mo. A 7-day free trial is available.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch
Brandtwatch is another social listening platform that does the job of finding social media influencers while also offering a slew of other social listening perks. Brandwatch is perfect as an Enterprise-level social media tool with advanced analytics and reliable insights.
Brandwatch boasts a database of 450M people to assist companies in finding micro-influencers for any niche. The tool relies on its own Influence Score to help companies pick brand ambassadors with not only the right following but also proven engagement records.
Brandwatch is built to measure the efficiency of any marketing efforts. As part of its influencer marketing functionality, the tool monitors purchase intent and benchmarks the ROI of campaigns.
Pricing: available upon request.
Influence.co and Social Blade
Influence.co is a tool that helps you easily find and connect with influencers who want to work with brands. It’s like a big influencer database for almost any niche imaginable. Plus, it’s free to use until you get to the point you’re contacting more than 30 influencers per month.
It’s super-easy to use. Just type your category/industry in the search bar and click the Search button.
You then see a list of influencers (who’ve joined the platform) in your niche.
If you click the Advanced Search tab, you can sort these influencers by their Instagram follower count, location, age, engagement rate, Google Analytics traffic, and more.
If you’re not keen on Instagram, you can search based on YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, or the influencer’s own hosted blog. Simply check the appropriate boxes on the Advanced Search tab.
I almost always search for influencers who have a strong blog. This is powerful for link-building and SEO, as well as great engagement on your social media channels and a strong network to share with.
As for the other metrics, try using a minimum of 4% engagement rate and a minimum 10,000 Google Analytics traffic per month. This helps weed out the people with loads of followers but no real engagement
After you identify some potential partners, you can vet them using the free influencer data reporting tool Social Blade. You want to see if they have a natural follower growth curve.
To illustrate, here’s the profile for one of the influencers who turned up in the earlier “fitness” search on Influence.co. At the top of this report, you see the user’s stats followed by a rank, which is a grade for the account based on the engagement and following.
Below that, you can view a chart of their Instagram stats, showing their follower increase (or decrease) week over week, as well as how many people they’re following and their media mentions.
Finally, at the very bottom, you’ll see a chart of the user’s follower growth over the last 4+ years. Look for a natural growth curve, with no sudden spikes in follower count. If you see a sudden spike in a user’s curve, there’s a good chance they bought followers. Of course, they can still buy followers slowly to look more natural, but this is rare.
This user only got a B+, but we can assume her followers are authentic and she didn’t buy them because of the natural growth curve in the chart at the bottom of her profile.
Keep in mind that not all influencers will have enough data to show up on Social Blade, and that’s okay. It’s just an extra security measure if you’re going to pay people to help promote you. If you’re not, and you’re just building a relationship, their engagement score doesn’t matter quite as much.
Zoho Social
Zoho has a massive number of tools to automate your business, but one standout is the social media management platform Zoho Social. This tool makes it easy to tag and interact with influencers on social media. The standard account is $8.33 per month billed annually (or $10 month to month).
Setting up your account is simple. When you first sign up, you’ll be prompted to sync your social media profiles. Just click Connect and log into your accounts.
From the home screen, you can see an overview of your social stats, recent posts, and a live stream of any mentions or comments you get.
When you click on a mention, for instance, you can reply to it directly from Zoho. You can also see some useful information about the user, such as how many followers that person has and the history of your engagement with them. These insights allow you to reference past conversations and build a relationship.
From here, you can click on the person who engaged with you to add notes such as a description and contact info (especially if you have a long engagement history).
Once you click their name, you can see your engagement history with that person. To add notes, just click the pencil icon next to Personal Info. You can also @mention them directly from this page.
Beyond direct interaction with your followers, you can also schedule posts to be shared at a specific time. Just click the New Post button in the upper-right corner of your home screen.
What’s really cool about Zoho is that it uses an AI tool called SmartQ to tell you the best times to post based on your specific following. To use the feature, click the SmartQ tab in the new post window and select the time you want to publish.
You’ll see the projected engagement percentage based on which time you choose. For example, the image below shows that 10% of the audience should engage with the post if it’s published at 4:00 AM on Tuesday, April 10.
For posts that do well, you can schedule them to be reshared again at certain intervals.
Tip: Keeping your feed full of your highest-engaging posts helps you stay active without having to always be on your social media accounts. My highest-engaging posts almost always involve influencers. Tagging and interacting with influencers (especially targeted influencers) can help boost your post engagement.
Conclusion:
If you have a social media account, specifically a Twitter or Facebook account, then you must have noticed increased number of spammy messages and their increasing frequency lately. This is because social media sites are becoming the go-to point for finding influencers and those with large audience size (marketing managers are hunting for the influential people who can promote their products).