7 Tools To Help You Easily Identify Influencers In Your Industry

How do you identify influencers when you’re going all in on influencer marketing?

Maybe you’ve paid a pretty price for a PR firm to handle it for you. Maybe you’ve got an influencer guide. Or, maybe you’re not sure where to start.

If you’re the last of those scenarios, this one is for you!

We’re listing 7 tools you can use to find and identify influencers for your influencer marketing campaign.

Influencer Marketing, Defined

First things first, let’s discuss influencer marketing and the types of influencers you may be seeking.

Wiki says,

“Influencer marketing (also influence marketing) is a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole.”

If you want to dive a little deeper, my post on Mark Schaefer’s {grow} goes into more detail on influencer marketing.

The other “biggie” with influencer marketing is that you don’t have to be seeking out celebrities like Kim K. for your campaigns. In fact, it’s probably wise (unless you have an unlimited budget … lucky you!) to search for micro-influencers for your brand.

Here’s why according to Digiday:

“It turns out that once a social media influencer reaches a critical mass of followers, audience engagement actually begins to decrease. A survey of 2 million social media influencers by influencer marketing platform Markerly showed that for unpaid posts, Instagram influencers with fewer than 1,000 followers have a like rate of about 8 percent, while those with 1,000 to 10,000 followers have a like rate of 4 percent.”

Now that you know you don’t have to pay your influencer close to $100k per Instagram post, let’s look at tools to identify influencers (even if they’re micro or middle influencers).

Tool 1: BuzzSumo

One of the coolest things BuzzSumo offers is a look at the top sharers of the best content.

For example, you can look at top sharers of your content on Twitter and BuzzSumo will lend useful stats about that person and possibly help you identify influencers who have already shared your content.

Stats worth viewing:

• The number of Followers they have
• How often they retweet and reply
•  Number of retweets they receive
• Authority of their website (page rank, etc.)

This allows you to reach out to influencers who are already familiar with your brand and content.

Or, you could search influencers by a popular topic in your industry and identify influences that way.

There are a million ways to search for influencers on BuzzSumo. Knowing how many followers a person has is one thing, but

Tool 2: Pitchbox.com

Pitchbox allows you to find influencers in your niche in a matter of seconds, as well as customize each outreach email to your target opportunities, without manual input, and automatically follow up with prospects who haven’t responded.

Their system also allows you to track each step of your outreach process, from broad strategy down to campaign and user specifics. white-labeled Management, Client, and Team

Their white-labeled management also includes:

• Client reports
• Team reports

Tool 3: Sprout Social

Sprout Social is probably best known as a social media dashboard, but they also help with identifying influencers!

In Sprout’s Instagram report, you can see your top engaged influencers (as pictured above).

When you click on those influencers, you’re able to drill into the contact (see below), add notes and other CRM details, and decide if you want to reach out to an influencer who is already engaged with your brand.

Pretty sweet, huh?

Though Sprout may not be as robust as some of the other tools we’re listing, it is a nice way to get started with influencer marketing without having to purchase and onboard another tool — especially if you’re already a Sprout customer.

Tool 4: Tapinfluence.com

Tapinfluence has opt-in marketplace grants that give you instant access to thousands of registered, vetted, experienced influencers, waiting to work with you, and acceptance rates of over 80%.

They offer 5 areas to help you identify influencers:

1. Find – Find and understand influencers and their audiences.
2. Manage – Manage outreach, scheduling, and communication.
3. Amplify – Amplify high-performing content, through influencer distribution.
4. Measure – Measure performance of influencer-generated content.
5. Automate – Automate legal, disclosures and payments.

With measuring and automation, Tapinfluence is definitely a one-stop-shop worth checking out.

Tool 5: Onalytica.com

Onalytica not only does the above but also helps you manage influencer relations with

• Influencer Feed – Keep an eye on everything that is said by your key market influencers in this comprehensive and detailed timeline.
• Influencer Profiles – Full profiles of your influencers are essential to better understand them in order to tailor your engagement.
• Content Seeding – Want to seed excellent quality content with your influencers? Easily surface content opportunities with this feature.
• Network Maps – These maps help you understand key relationships between your influencers and lets you see who talks to whom.
• Real-Time Alerts – Stay up to date on everything that’s happening; topic notifications, content opportunities and much more.
• Measurement Reporting – This functionality provides you with the data and insights you need to understand key online discussions.

Onalytica also has an influencer library worth checking out.

Tool 6: Affinio

I’ll admit it, we’re partial to Affinio as we’ve used their platform over the past couple of years to really wow clients.

But if you’re looking for a deeper dive, Affinio truly is a powerful tool for influencer marketing made easy.

Affinio determines which individuals, celebrities, and brands influence your audience to align with who matters most. And will help you discover long-tail, niche influencers that will ignite action amongst your audience.

Use Affinio to cross-check audiences and ensure your influencers are attracting the right individuals.

They also offer these free resources:

1. Influencer Marketing in the Retail Industry: A Guide For Retail Marketers (free eBook)
2. Discovery – A free tool to analyze your own online profiles to discover your personal brand.

Tool 6: Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach could be considered a lot of things (like a Lead Gen tool), but it does help identify influencers on Twitter and Instagram.

In the platform, users simply type in a keyword to find thousands of Twitter and Instagram influencers in seconds based on your target keywords. You can filter by tags like bloggers, influencers,

You can filter by tags like bloggers, influencers, executives, and companies. There are over 2 million Instagram profiles in our database and growing.

Ninja Outreach boasts over here are over 2 million Instagram and Twitter profiles in their database (and growing!).

How Do You Identify Influencers?

There are certainly many ways you can identify influencers. From organic outreach to free and paid tools, you’ve got several ways to start an outreach program for your brand.

I’m curious: how do you look for influencers in your niche? Do me a favor and let us know in the comments section below!

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Brooke B. Sellas

Brooke B. Sellas is the in-the-trenches Founder & CEO of @HelloBSquared, an award-winning social media, advertising, and social media customer care agency. She's also the author of Conversations That Connect -- a book all about social listening and social media customer care. Brooke's marketing mantra is “Think Conversation, Not Campaign” so be sure to give her a shout on the socials!

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