Due to the rise and reach of various social media networks, it is clear that influencer marketing has become, and will remain, a staple of many brands marketing strategies. For many businesses looking to reach their target audience, knowing not only how to find an influencer, but how to find the right influencer for your brand or business is essential. However, sometimes it is not as simple as it seems. 

There are criticisms of some influencers for their seeming lack of authenticity with promoting a product, brand, or service. There can be a few reasons for this, such as the influencer not having knowledge of a product or brand, a lack of general lack of enthusiasm, or simply that an influencer is not reaching a company’s target audience. This lack of authenticity, in particular, is problematic, not least because you are paying the influencer, but because people may not come away with a good impression of whatever it is they are promoting. 

However, when there is a good match between an influencer and business, the results can be extremely positive. Consumers can quickly identify with content created by influencers because it genuinely speaks to them. The result can mean not only increased brand awareness, but also positive feelings or opinions of your brand.

As you can see, finding not only an influencer, but the right influencer, is essential. As consumer trust becomes increasingly important for businesses, it is crucial for marketers to understand how to find the right influencers for their brands if they want to take advantage of the additional reach influencers can create for them. This is why figuring out how to find the best influencers for your brand is so important.

So, when thinking about how to find the right influencers for your brand, you need to identify those who can act as genuine ambassadors and not just someone with many followers. If you are looking for influencers that are a good fit for your brand, but have no idea where to start and how to go about it, we have got you covered. Conducting social media influencer research with a social media tool, along with a little know-how, can yield positive results. Read on to find out how to find influencers to promote your product, brand, or service.

Steps to Find the Right Influencer for your Business

You might think that with the sheer number of influencers out there, it will be challenging to efficiently and effectively find the right fit for your brand or business without the help of a specialized agency. However, you can actually do this yourself. Below, we will outline the steps you need to take to find the right influencer for you, whether you are looking to increase your reach or wanting to drive sales. 

When trying to find the right influencer for your brand or business, you should follow these 4 steps with the use of a social media tool that has influencer research features:

1. Clearly Define your Goals and your Content Strategy
2. Conduct a Targeted Search
3. Study Relevant Profiles
4. Monitor your Campaign

Clearly Define your Goals and your Content Strategy

In looking into how to find influencers on social media, the first step is to understand what you are looking for, so make sure to first set your campaign goals. What are you trying to achieve with your campaign? What metrics will you be using to assess the success or failure of your influencer campaign(s)? Perhaps your campaign is focused on generating brand awareness or, alternatively, you are looking to simply drive sales.

Depending on these campaign goals, you can decide which influencer metrics you want to focus on. For example, if you are looking to make your brand name known to a large set of people, a macro influencer with a large following might be a good fit. Conversely, if you are looking to create trust and interaction, your focus might not be finding a social media influencer with extensive reach, but rather collaborating with a micro influencer who has a smaller, but more targeted audience and high engagement on their posts.

Keep your eyes on the ultimate goal: reaching your target audience. It is important to always keep this in mind when thinking about how to find influencers to promote your brand or else you may not be reaching people who want to buy your product. No matter how many followers an influencer has or how much money you spend on your campaign, you will only benefit from a collaboration if both of you are targeting the same audience. For example, a real estate agency will not benefit from a collaboration with a beauty influencer, no matter how big their following may be. 

This brings us to the next point in looking into how to find a social media influencer: make sure the influencer’s content aligns with your brand. It can definitely be tempting to go for the latest reality star or whoever is being mentioned in the press at any given moment. However, always make sure the influencer’s content and their values align with your brand and your overall content and messaging strategy. 

Be sure to keep in mind how your content strategy relates to the audience size of the influencer you want to work with. While the smaller audience of a micro influencer may seem like a drawback for you, it can actually be an advantage. They can help you reach a more targeted and relevant audience for your brand. With the high engagement of a smaller, but relevant audience for your brand, you can get better feedback on your product. 

When studying how to find social media influencers for your brand, another benefit of micro influencers that you should consider is that they are more likely to be available for work and can be more cost-effective than some macro influencers. In this way, you have the chance to do several collaborations with a variety of micro influencers instead of just one. This makes it possible to maximize the use of your budget, while possibly even reaching a bigger, but more targeted, audience than with a macro influencer.

Conduct a Targeted Search

Now that we covered the importance of defining your goals and your content strategy, we will explain how to actually find social media influencers that fit with your brand and are related to your industry. If you do not want to hire an influencer agency, you will have to do the search yourself. While you can go through different profiles directly on social media, this requires a lot of manual work and can be very time-consuming.

Luckily, there are social media tools out there that can help you search for the right influencer and save you from a lot of manual work.

In helping to clearly illustrate the power of these social media tools, we will actually use one in order to show how to find influencers for your brand or business. In this case, we will use Fanpage Karma, an all-in-one social media tool, that comes with a discovery feature that can help you identify influencers you want to work with. In addition to this discovery feature, you can use this all-in-one tool to analyze not only your own social media profiles, but also those of your competitors or influencers you are researching.

In going through an example of how to find social media influencers, we will provide a concrete example. In this example, you will be looking at how to find local influencers for a vegan restaurant chain operating in Germany. The context is that we will be opening some new restaurants across the country, and we want to find some influencers to eat at our restaurants and post about it.

As a first step, we need to clearly define our market and network. As you can see in the screenshot below, we have the possibility to filter social media profiles by name or posted content. If we are conducting a simple search for those who post about vegan food, we should first choose the relevant network, and filter by country and whether we are looking for a person, brand, or business. In our case, we will select Germany as the country and look for specific people who are vegan food influencers. We will also be looking for influencers only on Instagram instead of a number of other social media networks.

To find relevant influencers for our vegan restaurant, we want to find Instagrammers that live in Germany and have posted about veganism within the current year. To do this, we will search by ‘post content’ (we want to find people who post about vegan food, not influencers with ‘vegan’ somewhere in their name) and enter ‘vegan’ in the search bar. Importantly, we will select the timeframe for our search which will focus on the last year which means we will search for those on Instagram who posted on this topic in the last year (although you can focus on any specific timeframe you want in your search).

With these filters, we get a list of influencers based in Germany who posted about veganism within the last year:

For each of the influencers on this list, you can see important metrics listed on each card. This displays not only their follower numbers, but also how many posts they create per day and their average engagement rate. For some companies, they may want to focus on how to find local social media influencers, so it is important to always confirm the location of prospective influencers. 

Once you have done this, you have completed a targeted search for possible influencers. However, studying the key metrics you found through your influencer research is not enough. In reality, you want to find an influencer with the right number of followers and a good engagement rate who posts about the topics your audience is interested in – in our example, vegan food and restaurants.

Conduct a Targeted Search

As you see above, simply reviewing these results can save you a significant amount of time  compared to a manual search on the social networks themselves. It will narrow down your search while giving you a good idea of what profiles to further investigate. The results overview also makes it easy for you to filter out influencers that are not relevant to you by size, posting frequency, or engagement rate.

The next step is to closely study the relevant profiles from your search. After all, you are looking for the best influencer for your campaign and not just any influencer who is posting about the topics you are interested in. 

Once you identified the profiles of interest to you, you should investigate further. With the Fanpage Karma influencer research feature, you can simply click on a person featured in this list, and you can see even more statistics for the respective influencer. For example, you will see numbers such as their follower growth, post interaction rate, and a number of other key metrics.

You can also analyze their performance on a closer and more qualitative basis by studying their best and weakest posts. In this way, you will be able to assess what they are posting about as well as the various metrics associated with individual posts. Maybe their posts about vegan food are among their most successful. In this case, the influencer might be a good fit for our chain of vegan restaurants. Or perhaps all the influencer’s posts about vegan food are among their worst performing, which may make you think twice about a possible partnership.

As you can see above, you can study the content associated with various profiles on a qualitative basis to see if it is a good fit. But you will also have to do a deep dive in their content to also find out how they speak about the relevant topic. For your list of possible influencers you created in the first step of your research, you will have to actually go through their posts on the relevant topic and find out what they have to say about it and if it fits your brand. With Fanpage Karma, you can do a targeted search within the influencer’s posts and have it show you everything the influencer posted about vegan food, as well as when they posted about it. 

Make sure to check out what they say is in line with your brand values. You can make an assessment by looking at the type of content they post and the language they use to see if they might be speaking to the same target audience as you. To be 100% sure about the target audience, you will need to contact the influencer and have them send you their media kit with their audience statistics, but their content can be a great first reference point to find out if the influencer might be a good fit for your brand.

Another piece of advice if you want to conduct further analysis is to add the profiles of prospective freelancers to your tracking backboard (this is the “Analysis” part of the Fanpage Karma tool). This allows you to more deeply analyze them and make sure to find them again once you have decided who you would like to collaborate with.

Once you have narrowed down your list of possible influencers further and have analyzed their statistics, you can contact some of them to find out more specifics, such as their availability and pricing. If they are affordable to you and available within the timeframe you need, nothing stands in the way of collaborating.

Implementing and Monitoring the Influencer Campaign

Once you have found an influencer and are working with them, you should implement the content plan that you have planned with your influencer(s). One of the best ways you can help your influencer is to give them some insights about topics using Fanpage Karma’s analytics features, such as finding them the best times to post or which hashtags they should consider using. This also includes using our cutting-edge Instagram hashtag generator. 

Apart from this, it is important to monitor the campaigns you are running with them. This is another area where a social media tool can greatly help you. As we mentioned above, adding the profiles of your influencers to your tracking dashboard allows you to analyze the results of your campaign. You can also compare their performance to other influencers you are not currently using to see how their metrics stack up against each other. 

Thoroughly analyzing your collaboration makes it easier to evaluate if it has been a successful campaign and if you want to continue working with the influencer in the future. Alternatively, you can also keep your eye on other influencers who you may want to work with, especially if their following keeps growing.

Key Takeaways: How to Find Influencers

As you saw above, we didn’t simply cover how to find an influencer, but how to find the right social media influencer. To find a content creator that is the perfect fit for your brand, you need to define your campaign goals first and then start searching for a matching influencer who can help you reach those goals.

Conducting social media influencer research with a tool like Fanpage Karma makes finding the right influencer for your brand easy while saving you a lot of manual work, time, and, in the end, money. 

The advantage of using an all-in-one social media tool is that you can also monitor the outcome so you can learn from what went wrong, or what you should improve upon. All-in-one social media tools such as Fanpage Karma also come with benchmarking, community management and publishing features that can be a real asset to a business working with influencers. 

Fanpage Karma offers a free 14-day trial that you can start today. If you are interested in finding out how social media tools can help you take your social media activities to the next level, sign up for Fanpage Karma’s free weekly webinar.