Find Influencers on Instagram with These 4 Easy Methods!
You’ve heard so much about influencers, probably follow a few yourself, but how do you find influencers on Instagram to promote your own brand? In this article, we will provide a step-by-step guide with multiple methods to find influencers at different budgets and experience levels.
Search for Hashtags
The easiest, free, way to find influencers on Instagram is using hashtags. Hashtags are a very efficient way of seeing who is posting about a particular topic. Of course, you’ll have some bad apples where you’ll see people using hashtags to game the system rather than to tag for relevance, but as a whole it’s the easiest way to get a pulse on any subject. The top 9 hashtags will show you who is currently ranking. While hashtags aren’t the only way to go viral, they’re certainly helpful in reaching people who have explicitly expressed interest in that topic. As a result, the ability to rank is critical since a hyper relevant audience is within reach for that influencer. Different tags have different levels of difficulty when it comes to ranking. Longer tail hashtags typically have fewer posts and less competition. These very specific hashtags are much easier to rank on. For example, if you want to rank for #dog you’ll have a much tougher time than ranking for #wearedoglovers. You’ll want to experiment with different hashtags and blend different sizes while doing your research to find the right influencers for you. A free tool you can use to come up with hashtag ideas is Display Purposes - simply name a hashtag you’re interested in and the tool finds several more that are related. Once you have collected a few tags and influencers, head over to their pages to analyze the rest of their content to determine if they’re a good fit.
Follow People Who Share Similar Topics
Instagram’s Explore Page does a great job of displaying content that might appeal to you. If you consistently maintain a theme for your page and interact with pages within the same theme, Instagram’s explore algorithm will learn your behavior and show more content suited to you along the same lines. The more you interact with these posts, the more feedback the algorithm gets, the more specific the results become. Start with a handful of the profiles that pop up that resonate with you and follow them. Instagram will recommend similar influencers as soon as you follow any account. Simply repeat the process until you have a group to choose from.
Interact with People Who Are Already Following You
One of the best ways to find more influencers is to search within your existing followers. We’ve found that influencers who already follow our clients are nearly 10x as likely to accept a product exchange in lieu of cash compensation, and when they do take cash, they typically charge significantly less than a cold outreach influencer would. It’s worth taking the time to figure out who your most notable followers are such that you can build a team of ambassadors. These influencers will be your most loyal since they already love your brand organically, without you paying them to promote it. As such, you should take note of them, start interacting with them on your posts and theirs, and ultimately reach out for a collaboration request once you’ve built up a rapport with them.
Use an Influencer Marketing Platform
Until now, we’ve been talking about free methods to find Instagram influencers. If you’re new to influencers, or your brand is just starting, it’s important to conserve your resources until you’ve proven out your concept. If you’re an established brand, however, you can use influencer marketing platforms to aid your efforts. Smartfluence offers multiple means of finding Instagram influencers – not to mention influencers on TikTok and YouTube as well.
Our Promote feature allows brands to input their campaign requirements and budget, followed by detailed targeting of both Instagram influencers and their audiences covering demographics like age, gender, location as well as influencer sizes with regards to follower count and engagement rate. It then reaches out to Instagram influencers on autopilot on behalf of the brand! Just sit back and relax as our machine finds and reaches out to influencers for you – all you have to do is decide with whom you want to work once they respond.
Smartfluence also offers Discovery as a Service. What that means is our team of highly trained specialists can find Instagram influencers for you. Much like Promote, we take into account your targeting and budget and ultimately find and reach out to influencers for you. The only twist is we are able to refine your searches even further by drilling down into more detail. For example, if you’re looking for a hyper local audience, or if you’re looking for influencers who have an affinity for brands like yours, we can customize and tailor extremely tailored lists for you.
If you’re interested in taking your influencer marketing program to the next level and want a demo of our platform, head over here to book a call with us and we’d be happy to help!
