10 Influencer Identification Tools to Help You Find Brand Partners

After seeing how influencer marketing has helped other businesses increase their brand awareness and sales, you’ve decided it’s time to partner with bloggers and social media power users. But how do you find the people who most appeal to your target audience?

If you feel like finding social media influencers to work with is a bit like going on an elaborate internet scavenger hunt, you’re not alone. One survey from Econsultancy found that 73% of marketers rank finding the right influencers as the biggest challenge of influencer marketing.

Fortunately, a bevy of influencer identification tools has emerged to help marketers and influencers connect. These tools range from free social media monitoring platforms to robust search databases that cost thousands of dollars a month. To help you sort through the many options, I’m providing an overview of 10 widely-used tools to find influencers.

First, some quick caveats:

1. Pricing in this post is based on the most recent data available at the time of publication.
2. I’m not affiliated with any of these platforms, and I’m not recommending any one over the others. The best influencer identification tools for you will depend on your brand, business goals, and budget.
3. There’s a whole cottage industry around influencer marketing, and this blog post is far from a definitive list of all the influencer research tools out there. I’ve tried to choose a representative sample of some of the most popular tools that reflect a range of price points, focuses, and models.

Here’s the quick TL;DR table version of the platforms I looked at:

Followerwonk

Pricing:

Free for 1 Twitter profile

$29/mo for up to 3 profiles

$79/mo for up to 20 profiles

Followerwonk is a Moz tool designed to help with influencer identification on Twitter. You can search for keywords that are relevant to your product or service within Twitter users’ bios, and you can also identify influencers who are following your competitors but not you. Followerwonk has a useful Venn diagram feature that lets you compare followers of 2-3 users (say, your Twitter profile and the profile of your biggest competitor).

Source: Followerwonk

Other Good Stuff to Know

The free version of Followerwonk is a good starting point but has some limitations. You can’t analyze Twitter accounts with more than 25k followers, and you can only perform 50 Twitter profile searches per day. You also can’t download analytics reports, as you can with the paid plans.

Trendspottr

Pricing: $49/mo

Brands with visually appealing products may be well-served by Trendspottr, an influencer identification tool built for Instagram. One of the key benefits of Trendspottr is that it lets you find social media influencers associated with trending topics in real-time.

Other Good Stuff to Know

Trendspottr has applications that extend beyond influencer marketing. You can also use it to research emerging trends in your industry, discover Instagram posts that are resonating with your target audience, and monitor your brand’s social media reputation.

AuthoritySpy

Pricing:

$27 flat rate for Basic Plan

$47 flat rate for Pro Plan

$47 flat rate + $17/mo for Platinum Plan

Enter a search term related to your niche, and AuthoritySpy will identify the most influential people and blogs associated with that term. It will also show you social media metrics (such as number of Facebook followers and likes) to help you determine the reach of each blog and influencer.

As with most influencer identification platforms, AuthoritySpy lets you narrow your search using filters like region and language. One thing that makes AuthoritySpy a little more interesting is that it also lets you search for people working at a company; for example, you could use this tool to quickly pull together a list of editors at a site where you want to pitch a guest post.

Other Good Stuff to Know

AuthoritySpy is the one tool on this list that is software-based rather than cloud-based. It requires the Adobe AIR app, which runs on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS operating systems.

Buzzsumo

Pricing:

Free with limited features

$79/mo for Pro Plan

$139/mo for Plus Plan

$239/mo for Large Plan

$500+/mo for customizable Enterprise Plan

Buzzsumo lets you enter keywords to find the most-shared content on social media and see who has shared that content. One easy influencer identification strategy for Buzzsumo is to search for terms related to topics you’ve recently written on; this can help you uncover social media influencers who may be interested in sharing your content or promoting your product.

Source: Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo’s paid plans help you refine your influencer discovery process by applying filters such as Influencer Type (e.g. journalist, blogger, company), reach, authority, influence, and engagement. Once you start finding influencers you’d like to work with, you can use the Amplification tool to start building outreach lists.

Other Good Stuff to Know

The free version of Buzzsumo can be frustrating due to its limitations. It only lets you search for the most-shared content in the past year (rather than adjusting your search range to the past 3 or 6 months, for example) and you can’t view the people who shared the content.

Klear

Pricing:

Free with limited features

$249+/mo for subscription

Klear boasts a database of 500 million influencer profiles across 60k categories. You can search for influencers by niche, such as “Yoga” or “Fashion,” and filter results by influencer level (Novice, Casual, Power Users, and Celebrities). Each influencer profile includes audience demographics to help you determine if the influencer is a good fit for your brand. When you find an influencer you want to work with, you can message them directly from Klear’s CRM.

Other Good Stuff to Know

In addition to using Klear to find social media influencers, you can use it to research your existing brand community. The platform includes demographic insights about the people who are talking about your brand on social media.

Fresh Press Media

Pricing:

Minimum spend of $250 to launch a campaign

Service fee (typically 20% of what advertiser pays the influencer)

Fresh Press Media is a marketplace where advertisers can connect with online influencers and content creators. Advertisers post opportunities to participate in a campaign and influencers bid on the project (i.e. tell the advertiser how much they want to be paid to promote their product or service).

Other Good Stuff to Know

This platform offers some flexibility in how you compensate influencers. For example, you could negotiate a flat placement fee to have an influencer feature your product on their blog or offer them a free product in exchange for a review.

Upfluence

Pricing:

Variable– must schedule a free demo to get pricing

Although its (relatively) high cost may be prohibitive for smaller businesses, Upfluence can be a valuable influencer identification tool for more established brands and agencies. Upfluence includes some robust search features, including the ability to combine multiple keywords or include negative keywords (i.e. words you want to exclude from your results). You can build influencer lists and use Upfluence’s CRM to email influencers (or export your lists so you can use your preferred email platform).

Source: Upfluence

Other Good Stuff to Know

Influencer profiles include details about reach and engagement across social platforms, but there isn’t a lot of information about the influencer’s audience. You’ll have to reach out to influencers directly (or combine Upfluence with other influencer research tools) to determine if they’re reaching your target audience.

GroupHigh

Pricing:

Variable—must schedule a free demo to get pricing

You’ll find a database of over 15 million blogs on GroupHigh. You can search for blogs and bloggers by niche topic, social presence, reach, location, and more. As with many of the other big influencer identification platforms, GroupHigh has its own CRM that you can use to track communication with bloggers. It also has reporting features that let you track the social engagement metrics of the posts you create with influencers, helping you to determine the ROI of each campaign.

Other Good Stuff to Know

GroupHigh has a lot of engagement tracking features and lets you collect all online content (tweets, Youtube videos, etc.) related to your influencer campaign. You can also integrate GroupHigh and Google Analytics to get a comprehensive traffic and conversion report.

TapInfluence

Pricing:

$1999/mo for Standard Plan

Custom pricing for Enterprise and Agency Plans

Like Fresh Press Media, TapInfluence bills itself as an influencer marketplace. Over 50k influencers have opted to be included in the TapInfluence database, making it a good place to find eager brand ambassadors. Advertisers can determine whether influencers align with their brand by using the Audience Intelligence feature, which includes audience information like interests, brand affinities, and income level.

Source: TapInfluence

Other Good Stuff to Know

One particularly interesting feature available on TapInfluence is the real-time Cost-per-Engagement report. Measuring ROI can be one of the biggest challenges of influencer marketing campaigns, and TapInfluence helps marketers get a better understanding of the cost vs. benefit of working with specific influencers.

HYPR

Pricing:

Undisclosed—must schedule a free demo to get pricing

HYPR’s influencer identification platform emphasizes audience demographics. You can search the database by audience demographics such as location, age, and interests. Each search will lead to a list of influencers whose audiences match the selected criteria. You can build lists of influencers you’re interested in working with and export them as PDFs.

Other Good Stuff to Know

HYPR doesn’t have a built-in messaging feature. However, you can access an influencer’s contact information on your exported lists.

Choosing Your Influencer Identification Tools

The best way to choose influencer research tools for your business is to try out a few that interest you. Most platforms offer a free trial so that you can get familiar with the features and interface before you make a commitment.

If you’re ready to launch an influencer marketing campaign but don’t have a lot of experience, you may be best served by working with a digital marketing agency. Agencies—including Leverage Marketing– typically have access to a range of influencer identification tools and can handle outreach and ongoing communication with influencers.

Contact Leverage to learn about influencer marketing and how it fits with our other services.

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