10 Surprising Ways to Find the Right Micro-Influencer for your Brand

Did you know that micro-influencers deliver a 60% higher engagement rate than influencers who have larger audiences? Furthermore,the engagement generated is 6.7X more effective as well. No wonder, micro-influencers are the talk of the town these days.

However, finding an ideal micro-influencer can be quite difficult because of reasons such as:

• There may be very few micro-influencers in your niche who can deliver real results.
• They may be slow to respond or difficult to get in touch with.
• You simply don’t know where to begin.

In a recent survey, it was found that the biggest challenge for 73% of marketers is finding the right micro-influencer. In this article, we take a look at 10 ways in which you can find the right micro-influencer for your brand.

1. Search Using Hashtags

One of the simplest and easiest ways to find the right micro-influencers is by using hashtags. Whether you’re looking for influencers on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, or Twitter, you can use this method effectively.

Here are three ways in which you can search for micro-influencers using hashtags on Instagram:

• Identify common hashtags in your niche. For example, if you’re looking for a fashion micro-influencer, just head to Instagram and search #fashionblogger or #fashionblog. Check out the top posts and recent posts. If a post stands out, go to their profiles, see if they appear to be a fit with your brand and assess their audience.

Images via Instagram

• Look for branded hashtags. If you’re a brand, you may not know if micro-influencers are promoting you already. Just type your branded hashtag and look for any micro-influencers who are using it. These influencers are valuable and more likely to work with you as they’re already promoting your brand.

Images via Instagram

• Look for promotional hashtags. Promotional hashtags are hashtags like #ad, #sponsored, #ads. If you search for these, you are likely to come across mostly influencer posts. Then scroll through these posts to find posts relating to your brand or products. If your niche is a little uncommon, it can take you a while to find the right micro-influencers.

Image via Instagram

2. Search by Keywords

Searching by keywords is quite similar to searching by hashtags. When you search by keywords, you can also keep an eye on the type of content. For example, on Facebook, you can type your keyword in the search box and then look for relevant pages, people, videos, or links having that keyword.

Similarly on Twitter, you can run similar queries in the search bar. Twitter also gives you the option of using “Advanced” search. You can use it to match your exact requirements using appropriate keywords.

Images via Twitter

3. Use Keyword Variations

Creative variations of generic keywords or hashtags can give you great results. For this, you need to think a little outside of the box. Don’t just stop searching once you’re done with the generic search terms. Get creative!

For example, if you’re in the travel industry, apart from checking for “travel” or “travelblogger,” look for other creative variations. When you search for #darlingescapes, many more results come up. These results are sometimes even more aesthetic and professional than the usual posts found under traditional hashtags.

Image via Instagram

Here’s another example. If you’re looking for home decor influencers, generic hashtags like #homedecor will give you numerous results. However, looking for hashtags like #decorcrushing gives you better and more refined results.

Image via Instagram

4. Use Social Listening Tools

31% of marketers are concerned that social media algorithm changes make their influencer content less visible, when in fact the majority of micro-influencers have seen an increase in engagement since the algorithm changes were made. If this is something that bothers you too, social listening tools can help you in dealing with the issue.

Also, trying to find influencers on social platforms manually, can be exhausting. Social listening tools can help you in finding your micro-influencer faster and more easily.

You can look for free or paid options to find your influencers with these tools. For example, with EpicTrack, you can locate influencers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. You can filter by location, followers, or personas to find the right ones. You can also find the top authors in your niche.

Images via EpicTrack

5. Use Influencer Marketing Platforms

31% of marketers run more than 5 influencer marketing programs per year. Looking for the right micro-influencers manually for all such programs can become extremely exhausting.

The good news is that, in recent times there has been a huge upsurge in influencer marketing platforms. Their benefits are many:

• You can quickly find your micro-influencers by using various filters. You can filter by keywords, followers, influencers’ audience demographics, or social media platforms.

Image via Vetterview

• You can compare your influencers at the same time and save serious efforts.
• You can manage and track your influencer campaigns directly from these platforms.
• Collaborating with influencers is also easier and simpler.

Influencer marketing platforms like Vetterview can be really useful to help you find the right micro-influencers. You can join the platform for free, and connect directly with influencers in your niche across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and blogs.

6. Leverage Social Media Groups

Social media groups are also a great place to find your micro-influencers. You can join relevant groups in your niche on Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also look out for Twitter lists. These are good places to start your search.

However, finding the right micro-influencer using this method can be a tedious process. You will need to regularly monitor people’s profiles and activities. Once you make a list of people who match your requirements, you can start communicating with them.

The advantage of using groups is that you can actually validate the engagement and responses an influencer receives. It’s also a cost-effective and personalized way of connecting with influencers.

For example, if I’m part of a Facebook group, and I come across a post like this:

Image via Facebook

I notice that this person regularly gets great engagement, I’ll start interacting with him. This will involve liking and commenting on his posts. After doing it for a while, I would approach him directly and talk about my micro-influencer campaign.

7. Check Out Crowdsourced Accounts

Crowdsourced accounts are Instagram accounts that repost content from other users or share user-generated content. These are good resources for finding Instagram micro-influencers because they generally share content from known influencers.

If you can find such accounts in your niche, look at the tagged influencers and analyze their profiles.

Image via Instagram

You should look at their captions to find the names of influencers. There are crowdsourced accounts on photography, fashion, food, and pretty much anything else you can think of. This is a great way to help you shortlist micro-influencers for your brand.

8. Look for Videos on YouTube

YouTube influencers are known for generating incredible conversions and have massive lists of subscribers. There are many platforms that can give you detailed information on YouTube influencers.

However, you can also do your own research. Download the vidIQ extension to make your life easier. With this, you can check how many views a YouTube video gets every hour. You can also gather insights into a channel’s subscriber information and average views.

This tool can greatly help you save time and get an idea about influencers from their videos. You can analyze subscriber counts and figure out if a micro-influencer is right for you or not.

Image via YouTube

9. Go Through Your Follower List

This is actually one of the very first steps you should be performing when looking for influencers. It would be awful if you’re looking for them everywhere else while you’ve got a community of organic followers engaging with your brand already.

Head straight to your list of followers and check if you have any relevant influencers there. They’d be your ideal micro-influencers.

For example, if I’m searching for digital marketing influencers on Twitter, here’s what I see. The first person in my search results has more than 12,000 Twitter followers. So, I’m immediately going to check out his profile to see if he fits the bill or not. Easy right?

Image via Twitter

10. Get in Touch with Local Bloggers

Now, we all know that the best place to look for blogs is Google. However, to find your micro-influencers faster, you can also check out Tumblr and LinkedIn.

With Tumblr, you can find top blogs. It’s free and not at all time-consuming. As you can see in the screenshot, Tumblr displays likes and reblogs for every post. This will help you understand what’s trending in this space and is a good way of find your micro-influencers.

Image via Tumblr

Final Thoughts

Finding the right micro-influencer for your brand will take a bit of effort from you or can be easily outsourced. If you decide to do it on your own, once you have a list of your potential influencers and a process in place, it will get easier. Experiment with different methods and see which one works best for your brand.

Can you think of any other interesting ways of finding micro-influencers? Let us know in the comments below.

Originally published at www.sitepronews.com.

About The Author

Shane Barker is the Founder and CEO of Content Solutions and Gifographics. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.