Influencer marketing has been one of the hottest marketing tactics for a while. It only seems logical that we had influencer marketing long before the invention of social media.
The internet simply made influencer marketing much more targeted and available even for smaller brands.
Blogging and vlogging on social media allow influencers to find a loyal audience even in the most niche categories. Even if the product you market is not very exciting — say, power drills — you will always find a blog, a YouTube channel, or even a Pinterest profile dedicated to it.
Whether you work in a social media marketing agency or an inner marketing department of a specific brand, at some point you will need to find influencers for your campaign. You can turn to a talent agency, however, it would be much more cost-efficient to use an influencer marketing tool. The only challenge is to choose the right one. This list will help you to do exactly that.
Also read: Top social media trends for 2019
1. Awario
Awario is primarily a social listening tool. It allows you to monitor brands, competitors, carry out social selling and, of course, discover influencers in a chosen niche.
Also read: What is social media listening (and how it can help your SEO)
You can find influencers with Awario by monitoring keywords across social media and websites (it monitors Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, blogs, and news articles). All you need to do is choose the keywords related to your industry (for example, “gadgets”, “fitness tracker”, “headphones” if you’re looking to promote a new tech) and put them in Awario.
It gathers social mentions and articles with your keywords and analyzes their authors to find the most prominent voices in a chosen industry. It ranks influencers and platforms based on their reach and number of followers or daily visits, depending on the source.
Using a social listening tool for influencer search gives you a lot of flexibility. You can discover influencers in your industry, see who works with your competitors or the influencers who already mentioned your brand. Besides, you can use it for multiple purposes to enrich your business strategy at every stage, from marketing to product development.
Pricing
Influencer search is included in all plans as well as in the free trial. Plans start at $29/month.
2. Followerwonk
Followerwonk specifically focuses on Twitter and is essentially a Twitter analytics tool which can be used to discover influencers on the platform.
It also uses your keywords to find influential Twitter profiles, but this time it doesn’t monitor social mentions i.e. tweets, and searches based on Twitter bios, names, URLs and locations.
One of its most useful features for influencer marketing is the ability to compare Twitter accounts with each other. It can be used to find influencers who have the audience with similar interests and at the same time, doesn’t overlap with your own audience.
Besides, it analyzes your Twitter followers and segments them by their bio, location, and who they follow.
Pricing
The pricing depends on the number of followers of the accounts you want to analyze. With the accounts which have 25,000 followers and less, you can get the tool for free. If you need to analyze bigger influencers, you can buy the cheapest plan for $29 or invest in a more expensive one.
3. Klear
Klear is a tool specifically dedicated to influencer marketing, which uses a wide range of social data to find influencers. It even has some social listening features which allow you to monitor competitors and analyze the success of their influencer marketing campaigns.
Using sophisticated algorithms and machine learning, Klear divides influencers into over 60,000 topic categories and offers deep analytics about their audiences’ demographics and psychographics respectively.
The great thing about Klear is that the search won’t take much time, it has a huge number of profiles already indexed and associated with millions of data points in its database.
You can filter your findings by social channel, audience size, skills (chosen from the categories the AI organized them into), mentioned keywords, location, influencer gender, audience gender, and age.
Overall, you can be sure that you’ll discover influencers in the chosen field and will get a ton of useful insights about them.
Pricing
Klear offers a range of free tools to help you identify influencers on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs. Of course, free tools are quite limited in their functionality and do not include sophisticated analytics.
The prices for the tool are not disclosed. However, according to customers, they start at about $250 per month.
4. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a tool that can be very useful if you want to double-down on influencer marketing and content creation since it can help you in both cases. BuzzSumo uses social data to identify content trends as well as to find influencers.
Firstly, it can discover the most popular content to let you know who the top performing content creators in your niche are. BuzzSumo has a great range of features dedicated to content research, therefore you will be able to use it in your own content strategy or give the influencer guidelines on what type of content they could create during your collaboration.
Secondly, BuzzSumo has a powerful influencer search for Twitter. It monitors tweets and profile bios based on the keywords you provide. They also differentiate Twitter accounts by their type, i.e. blogger, influencer, journalist.
Pricing
The cheapest plan costs $79 per month.
5. BuzzStream
Although the names are similar, BuzzSumo and BuzzStream are quite different. BuzzStream is primarily a link-building tool, but it still enables you to organize every stage of your influencer marketing journey, from discovering influencers to reaching out to them.
You can discover influencers based on your keywords and see a comprehensive overview of this influencer’s website and social media presence on one page.
After that, you can add discovered influencers to a prospect list. You can sort and filter the list to choose influencers for a specific campaign. For example, you can sort them by authority, or whether someone has promoted you in the past or not.
Then you can start contacting influencers from your prospect list. BuzzStream will help you keep track of your outreach successes and failures, and will even send out automated follow-ups.
Pricing
Prices for BuzzStream plans depend on the number of accounts you want to reach out to. In the cheapest plan ($24) you have 30 searches and can get 1000 contacts in total.
6. Traackr
Traackr is one of the pioneers of the influencer marketing industry. It stepped into social media influencer marketing analytics back in 2008, just a couple of years after major social media platforms were created.
Traackr has its own influencer database which you can search and filter by social channel, topic keyword, language, location, age, gender, and brand affinities. You can also use the same filters to analyze the followers of an influencer.
The database is created by an algorithm and curated by humans. If there’s an influencer you want to work with who isn’t in the database, you can manually enter their username from one service, and Traackr goes out and finds all of their social channels, then indexes posts and statistics.
Since the tool focuses on building relationships with influencers, it doesn’t stop at the search stage. After you’ve found relevant influencers, you can create highly customizable lists depending on their social platforms, your plans of collaboration, the audiences you want to reach, and so on.
Another way to organize influencers is by relationships, have you interacted or worked together before? Traackr will take notice of that. This will simplify working in big teams and collaboration with other departments.
An in-built social listening feature allows you to follow the performance of your influencer campaigns and analyze which influencers are bringing you the most value.
Pricing
The tool prices are revealed upon request, but according to the users, prices start at around $500 per month.
7. Upfluence
Upfluence is a self-proclaimed ‘Google of influence’. It uses its own massive database of nearly 1 million influencers which is constantly revised and updated. Every piece of content their algorithms find is analyzed for reach and engagement. You can look for influencers on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and blogs.
While searching for influencers, you can put in several keywords and assign them different degrees of importance. Let’s say, you’re promoting organic and gluten-free products, and you’re especially interested in reaching people who are allergic to gluten. You can assign more weight to keywords related to gluten and thus the tool will look for influencers who cater to this audience the most.
Another cool feature is that during your search, Upfluence groups influencers depending on the size of their respective audience. You can also filter influencers by location, social platform, and the number of followers.
There is also an audience analytics feature, unfortunately, only available for Instagram. You can analyze influencers’ audiences by brand affinities, cultural interests, and more.
You can add influencers to lists upon discovery and customize them according to your needs.
Upfluence also has an outreach tool, which allows you to personalize your outreach emails. All email correspondence is archived for easy reference. It will also help you track what stage of influencer collaboration you’re on, who you’re negotiating with, who you’re waiting for to complete content, who are waiting on payment, and so on.
Pricing
The cheapest plan includes 500 contacts and costs $795 per month.
Should you try influencer marketing?
According to eMarketer, 81% of marketers that tried influencer marketing reported that it is an effective channel. There are two main reasons why influencer marketing is so popular:
- It’s cost-effective: Influencers already have the audience so you don’t have to do in-depth research and spend lots of time and money to build your own.
- It brings ROI: Influencers are able to have a deeper, more authentic connection with consumers. No matter how good your communication strategy is, your brand will never be seen as sincere and convincing as a blog you read every week.
The tools on this list vary from enterprise-level solutions best suited for social media agencies to more affordable options that cover a wide range of marketing needs.
If you’re planning to carry out multiple influencer marketing campaigns on a regular basis working in huge, possibly international teams, I’d recommend going with big guns like Traackr. However, if you need a solution for influencer search, I’d go with a social listening tool, for instance, the above mentioned Awario.
The tools can help you to discover influencers and organize your workflow with them, but how you will work with an influencer is on you. Personalize your influencer outreach, create engaging content together in the true spirit of collaboration, and maybe they will become a brand evangelist.
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