5 Tips to Help You Find Micro-Influencers for Your Business (For Free!)
Yes, influencer marketing can work with micro-influencers that have a small audience!
As someone who mostly works with small businesses & startups, I wasn’t really keen on doing “traditional” influencer marketing in the past, but over the past 6 months, I have been trying it out, and boy, do I regret not trying it before!
For some reason, I believed that for influencer marketing to work, you needed to find creators with a big audience… I was wrong! With one of my clients, we’re currently working with a content creator that has less than 500 subs on Youtube, but has already generated hundreds of $$ in sales, in less than a month…
If you’re interested in how you can find those types of creators for your own business, here are 5 tips I’ve personally tried to find micro-influencers, for free, on Instagram, Youtube, TikTok & Reddit!
How to find micro-influencers on Instagram
Before we start with Instagram, I just want to note that all of the steps I have outlined below can be automated using tools like Jarvee or Phantombuster, but I would do it manually. By engaging with the micro-influencers you follow, not only you’ll find other similar accounts organically, but you’ll also learn a lot about the topics that are popular with their audience!
Hashtag research
Most smaller influencers still use hashtags, so it’s a good place to start when you’re looking for micro-influencers to collab with.
If you already know one influencer in your space, then you can just start by looking at which hashtags they already use.
If you don’t, then just start by making a list of hashtags related to your niche. I personally like to use iQHashtags to do this. It’s a freemium tool, but the free version is more than enough.
For example, let’s say you’re looking for creators in the parenting space:
- You could start with the #parenting hashtag.
- Then, sort the hashtags to see the hashtags with the lowest amount of posts first. This is important because if you start with the big hashtags, you’re probably going to find bigger, more established accounts, and not micro-influencers.
- Search the hashtags you found on Instagram, look at the top 9 posts of the hashtag, follow the accounts that use them, and add them in your list.
- Don’t stop there! Click on the posts, and then see what other hashtags they use.
Suggested accounts
This is pretty obvious, but a little reminder doesn’t hurt: the Instagram’s suggested accounts feature is a gem to find micro-influencers similar to the ones you already follow!
After your hashtag research, you should already have a list of 20–30 relevant accounts. When you follow them, just make sure to take a look at the suggested accounts as well, and include the accounts in your list. In less than an hour, you could find around a hundred relevant micro-influencers this way, for $0!
How to find micro-influencers on Youtube
Youtube is the second biggest search engine after Google: whatever industry you’re in, you can be sure to find relevant micro-influencers on there. Here’s one easy way to do it:
- Go on Youtube, and just type in a search query that your audience would look for. Let’s keep the parenting example, and search for “how to help a baby crawl”.
- To make sure that you’re targeting micro-influencers that are still active on Youtube, filter the videos by upload date.
How to find micro-influencers on TikTok
If you think that TikTok is only teenagers doing weird dances, think again: the number of monthly active users on the platform is expected to reach 1.2 billion this year (Source).
Hashtag research
Like on Instagram, you can start by searching hashtags related to your business to find relevant accounts.
It’s pretty easy to do:
- Download the TikTok app
- Type a hashtag in the search bar (on the app, you can either search for users, sounds, hashtags or videos). For micro-influencers, I’d recommend using the videos and the hashtag option.
- Then, just take sometime to watch the videos, like them, and make a list with the accounts you’re finding.
Be active on the platform
Once you’re past the initial research stage, it’s not over! Indeed, the more you feed the algorithm by liking videos related to your niche, the more the algorithm will show you this type of content, and sooner than later, you’ll start to discover new micro-influencers you can reach out to everyday!
How to find micro-influencers on Reddit
Reddit users are pretty allergic to self-promotion, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t find micro-influencers on the platform, it just means that you have to be smart about how to find them. Here’s one way to do it:
- Find relevant subreddits. I like to use this tool to do it. In this example, let’s say that you’re looking for micro-influencers in the digital marketing space: you could simply start by looking for subreddits related to marketing.
2) Once you have the subreddit list, you can use Subreddit Stats (it’s 100% free of course 😎) to find:
- The Top Commenters By Score Sum & by Frequency
- The Top Posters By Score Sum & by Frequency
3) Note down the redditors you find on a list, then go take a look at their posts and their profile. Redditors who are open to being reached out will have either their website, or their social media information in their profile!
That’s it! I hope you’ll get to use some of those tips in your own marketing strategy! it was helpful.
Any questions about any of the tips I mentioned in the article? Just reach out to me on Twitter and I’d be happy to help!
