Influencers Research

1. Find influencers with a social listening tool

There is a chance that influential people are already talking about your solution, product, or service. Your job is to find those people. How you can do that?  You’ll need a high-quality social listening tool. We will base our analysis on Brand24, one of the most reliable and affordable tools on the market. 

First, start with creating a social listening project. In the project creation wizard, enter the keywords you would like to track. The keywords can be:

• The name of your company
• Your branded hashtag
• Your campaign-specific hashtag
• The name of your CEO or another highly recognizable team member
• A term specific to your industry niche

Once you create a project, the media monitoring tool will start gathering all publicly available mentions containing your keywords. Every result is then analyzed, and you can find the most insightful data in the Analysis tab.

Top public profiles list all the social media public profiles talking about your brand. The list is accompanied by some useful metrics. The share of voice measures what part of the whole discussion was started by a given social media profile. The higher the number, the more influence the person behind the profile has.

Influence is the estimated number of views generated by the selected author containing the monitored phrase. The bigger the influence number, the more people given influencer can reach. You can also derive a lot of useful information from the Most active public profiles. This section is especially important if you are looking for micro-influencers.

Micro-influencers usually do not have a massive following, but they have a good relationship with their followers. They have authority, and their followers trust their recommendations and opinions. For many companies, cooperating with a smaller influencer will be a better solution. You will be able to reach the right audience, at the right channels, and with a message crafted for them.

Since Brand24 collects data from the whole Internet, you are also able to find other reliable sources. You can filter mentions according to:

• Major social media sites (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook)
• News
• Videos (including YouTube)
• Podcasts
• Forums
• Blogs
• Web

2. Google search to find influencers

In case you don’t want to invest in a social listening tool yet, you can try using Google search. You can still find the right influencers to boost your business that way. The process will take much more of your time. To use Google for finding influencers, try to act like a customer looking for a particular solution.

So, if you want to find out about a new game release, a review of a book, or which foundation people recommend, what would you do? I would ask the question online and look for some solid responses. I would read the detailed reviews or watch a YouTube channel. You can find influencers in the same way. The process has one substantial advantage — it is free of charge.

For starters, the process is much more resource-consuming. You have to manually look for influencers, assess their online activity, and following. Secondly, an automated process will provide you with metrics you can track. And tracking applies to the whole process of working with an influencer. You can assess the metrics before starting the campaign, during, and after it has ended.

3. Find influencers by using hashtags

Hashtags make social media content searchable. Influencers use them to reach the target audience. You can use them to reach potential influencers to work with.

You need to know what hashtags are trending right now across social media platforms and track them. Twitter and Instagram influencers are known for their willingness to use hashtags. So if you are thinking about starting an influencer campaign across those platforms, hashtags will be helpful.

How to do that? Open your Twitter and Instagram apps, click search and enter the hashtag. Here’s how you can filter the hashtags:

• On Instagram, you can search hashtags by top, recent, and reels.
• On Twitter, you can search by top, latest, people, photos, videos, and by location (anywhere or near you).

Unfortunately, hashtags do not work well on Facebook. Users don’t like to use them on this social media platform. Looking for influencers by hashtags can be effective, but it will take some time. You will have to check potential influencers manually.

4. Find influencers through influencer marketing platforms and agencies

To make influencer marketing much easier, you can benefit from influencer platforms and agencies. It’s an excellent option for companies with big budgets that want to run broad influencer campaigns.

Such a platform is a link between marketer and influencer. With an influencer marketing platform you will be able to:

• Find influencers that match your target audience
• Analyze influencers reach and effectiveness
• Forecast results
• Manage multiple influencer campaigns
• Measure the results

There are a lot of influencer platforms available, for example, Influencer Marketing Hub, Influencity, Upfluence, or Linqia. Furthermore, most of the highly popular influencers (celebrities) have their agencies and personal agents. To collaborate with such a person you will contact her/his agent. The main disadvantage is the price. Agencies add an extra fee for mediation.