An Instagram influencer has a lot of power over an audience and can determine people to make purchasing decisions. Yet, sometimes it might be difficult to find Instagram influencers for your niche. But this is about to change, so keep reading.
Finding Instagram Influencers that are relevant for your niche can boost brand awareness, conversions, attract a higher audience and more. So, follow the strategies below to find Instagram influencers for free for your brand and bring in great ROI:
- Check Most Popular Posts for Specific Hashtags
- Look at Your Brand's Followers
- Monitor Brand Mentions to Find Top Fans
- Search Instagram Influencers on the Explore Page
- Check the List of Top 1000 Instagram Influencers
- Use Dedicated Tools and Platforms
- Conduct a Search on Google
Influencers' authority, knowledge and connection with the audience are strong performance indicators, which makes them highly valuable for inbound marketing and social media marketing, in particular. So, let's see how to find the most representative influencers for you!
1. Check Most Popular Posts for Specific Hashtags
One of the easiest and effortless ways to find influencers on Instagram is to use the power of hashtags. Hashtags collect together posts and stories so you can easily find inspiration and content.
To get some inspiration of which hashtags to look for, think of your industry and your niche and search for trending hashtags. For example, you can search on websites that collect popular hashtags, such as All-hashtag.com.
Instagram accounts that have a large number of followers and lots of engagement (likes and comments) are categorized as top posts.
So, whenever you search for certain hashtags, first you get to see Top posts. Most of the time, here you can find brands of influencers.
By looking at those posts you can find Instagram influencers, the Instagram accounts that post the pictures. That content is updated frequently. So, keep on eye on that section.
Scroll on an influencer's profile to find out which other brands collaborated with them, the engagement rates and see if they are a good image for your brand. Send a private message, start social networking and clearly state what is your proposal.
Make sure to ask for an email to share sensitive information regarding your collaboration. Don't send all the details on Instagram.
An email is a more powerful contact that you can use in other marketing projects and PR campaigns. You'll never know what opportunities arise.
If you want to make the most of this tactic, make sure to search for those hashtags when people post the most on Instagram.
2. Look at Your Brand's Followers
We can certainly say that people who follow your brand have an interest in it. At some point, they liked something about the brand.
Getting followers means a lot of work, so you should value each one of them.
It means you did something good and you should take advantage of this situation. Look on the list of people who followed you and find Instagram influencers. Browse each influencer's profile, see the type of shared content, how often they post, engagement rates, how they communicate (the used language) with the audience through comments. Is it offensive or is it safe?
Another important aspect is the number of followers they have. Instagram influencers are categorized by the number of followers:
- Mega-influencers – social celebrities that have more than 1 million followers.
- Macro-influencers – influencers with between 100,000 and 1 million followers.
- Micro-influencers - someone who has between 1,000 and 100,000 followers.
- Nano-influencers – somebody with fewer than 1,000 followers who has immense influence with a comparatively narrow market.
Then make a list with all the data you collected and start to contact them.
3. Monitor Brand Mentions to Find Top Fans
There are dedicated tools (free and paid) you can use to find top people and fans that mentioned your brand on Instagram. The cool thing about these tools is that you can also find non-tagged posts with your brand, using only text, since these are really hard to find.
BrandMentions is a tool that shows the influencers of any brand on Instagram, as well on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Reddit.
The Top Fans mentions section is a great feature of the tool where you can find a list of people categorized by the number of followers and mentions.
It can be a great starting point for direct communication with the people that mentioned the brand and great connections. Plus, they've already made the first step by mentioning you or hashtags, keywords you are interested in. Half of the job is already done.
4. Search Instagram Influencers on the Explore Page
Another easy and free way to find Instagram influencers is to look on the Explore page on the app.
The Explore page is where people go when they want to see photos and videos related to their interests from accounts they may not already follow.
The Explore page, as the name says, helps you and everyone finds similar accounts you could collaborate with, influencers or new brands and businesses as well.
Based on the likes and viewed pages, Instagram uses an algorithm to show on Explore content that might interest you. Each person sees a different version of this page on their device.
If you scroll on this page and see accounts that are a good fit for your brand, add the details of their account on your list for your Instagram influencer marketing campaigns or social selling projects.
5. Check the List of Top 1000 Instagram Influencers
For each country, there are websites that collect and list top Instagram Influencers for the whole country, plus lots of other influencer lists based on various industries and topics.
Let's take, for example, StarNgage - an influencer marketing platform that enables brands to analyze, customize, measure, and offer a variety of tools. Here you can find a filter that you can apply to lots of countries and see top Instagram accounts on topics such as art, cooking, design, pets and animals, education, game health, and many others.
Below you can see an example for the US overall.
You can find lots of other similar websites maybe with other categories, more niched if you want.
6. Use Dedicated Tools and Platforms
Speaking of search tools and platforms, there are companies that will do the work for you. Search, filter, measure, and give you the final list, maybe even launch the influencer marketing campaign. You just give them the details and they will do the rest.
Or, if you want to do it yourself, you can use platforms and websites to search Influencers accounts where they are listed, with curated and updated content.
BrandMentions is a complex tool that shows you lots of data and metrics about your brand, besides Influencers data. Here you can get the full list of Instagram influencers that matter for you.
Heepsy is an influencer marketing platform where you can connect with all sort of influencers. You need to create an account with a subscription and find Instagram influencers by location, category, or number of followers.
The variety of filters allow you to find rally niched and relevant influencers you can work with. Their database contains over 7 million influencers with 5K followers or more (without fake followers or fake data). This platform has 90% coverage of influencers within this range.
Be precise and discover creators with a specific engagement rate, audience quality score, type of audience, and many others.
Shout is another example of a platform where you can find influencers. As it is promoted, the influencer search engine has a large database you can search on. Make an account as a brand or marketing agency search through the influencers' profile those who would fit best to scale your influencer marketing.
Klear is another discovery tool on the market to identify influencers by lots of factors. Advanced filters allow you to get really niched, relevant and find the best fitted influencers based on audience demographics, followers count, niche topics and more.
7. Conduct a Search on Google
Search engines are getting smarter and smarter these days and they can offer a few directions and show you how to find Instagram influencers. Simply search top Instagram influencer in the country you want or specify the niche and look through the search results. There are lots of websites that collect influencers or databases that offer lists.
Google is a good starting point to find potential influencer relationships. Explore every possible option you might find. You never know where opportunities arise.
When searching for influencers, make sure to set up the goals, build a spreadsheet and start adding the influencers' profile with all the necessary data for your social media marketing campaign. Filter the winners and keep the ones that didn't make it this time. Maybe there will be future campaigns that will be more fitted for them. Add a tag for those that you should not contact, and those that might want to collaborate further on.
Keep an eye on social media trends and conversion rates. Perform social media management and look for Instagram influencers with authentic engagement (no fake followers and posts with a low number of comments). Don't be afraid to ask for more information from the influencers that are a good fit for your brand. If they are genuine, they'll give you some data and metrics from Instagram analytics tool.
Keep scrolling and keep going!
