If you choose not to use a platform or agency for influencer marketing, you will need to build a direct relationship with influencers. To do this, you first need to identify the influencers that rule your niche.
If you're an active player in your niche, you should already have a good idea of who the best influencers are. In other cases, you will have to carry out considerable research first. Fortunately, there are several influencer marketing tools to help you in your quest.
Here we have selected 13 free or freemium tools. Freemium tools are tools that you have to pay to access most features. However, they also offer limited features for free.
In case you are looking for an agency to run your campaign, go ahead and use our agency matching form below and you will be matched with the agency that best suits your needs. You will have to consider where you expect to find your potential influencers. Many operate on social media, and therefore some of these tools focus on finding important people on social media channels.
You must first consider where your target audience spends their time. If you target older people, for example, you'll look for influencers in Facebook groups talking about your niche. If your target market is teenagers, you can focus more on Snapchat, Youtube or Instagram.
Many influencers have gained fame from the blogs they write. Here are some tools to help you find influential bloggers in your niche. You'll also find influential people for some niches who gained fame through podcasts.
To assist you in building direct relationships with influencers in your niche, Influencer Marketing Hub has partnered with HypeAuditor to offer the Instagram Follower Growth Analyzer. This tool allows you to analyze the follower growth of any Instagram account, helping you identify key influencers and ensuring you connect with the right creators for your marketing efforts.
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Here are 13 of the top free marketing tools for finding influencers:
HypeAuditor’s artificial intelligence thoroughly analyzes and ranks bloggers by quality followers and authentic engagement. They collect raw data from different sources, depersonalize it and group it. They only take real followers and their likes into account. The algorithm ranks influencers and forms lists of top global influencers, updated daily. You can curate a list of top 1000 influencers covering all niches or alternatively split the list into one of 14 categories. In turn, you can select influencer lists that span all countries, or select just a list that includes influencers from one of the 17 selected countries. HypeAuditor provides the following information about each influencer on each list: Key Features: Search/Discovery, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, White Label Reporting, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter Discover.ly is a Chrome plugin that helps you with your networking . You can use it to see your email recipients, social accounts, and connections updates from LinkedIn and Facebook in a sidebar. This means, for example, that you can see common Facebook friends for someone you connect with on LinkedIn. In fact, you can also view your connections’ social media accounts on a wide range of other social media channels and platforms. This includes Google+, Klout, Angel Base, FourSquare and Behance. One use of Discover.ly is to see if any of your existing contacts have connections with influencers in your niche. If you find a connection, you can leverage your contacts to introduce influencers to you. Tweetdeck is Twitter’s free social media dashboard to help you manage all your tweets . You can set it to display any item from your Twitter timeline, mentions, direct messages, lists, trends, favorites, search results or hashtags. You can manage up to 200 Twitter accounts through the Tweetdeck dashboard. Tweetdeck has very powerful search features. You can use Tweetdeck to track mentions of your competitors. You can also use it to find usage of a specific hashtag, which in turn can help you find influencers. You can also search by number of retweets. People whose tweets are retweeted multiple times probably have some influence. Social Crawlytics lets you track content and competitors. You can use it to find out which posts are the most popular and shared on specific sites. Unlike other social monitoring sites, you generate reports on Social Crawlytics through specific domains. So, for example, you can analyze your competitors to determine what their most successful content was and how people shared it. In the beginning, Social Crawlytics gives you 2,500 credits to use. Each URL you crawl costs a certain number of credits. Some of your credits are recovered each week and you also earn bonus credits by posting a tweet on behalf of Social Crawlytics. If you’re looking for influential blogs, a Google search can mean hit or miss. It records all different types of websites in its results and blogs are mixed in with everything else from sales pages to forums. Alltop can help you here as it simply aggregates blog posts. It is run by people (not an algorithm) who search for the top blog posts every day in specific niches. You can use it to find the top posts in your niche, which will help you get an idea of the most influential blogs on your topic. When we talk about influencer marketing, we rarely think about podcasting. But podcasting has grown dramatically in recent years, and many influencers now run their own regular podcast show. The easiest way to listen to podcasts on iOS devices is through iTunes. On Android, Stitcher is a highly rated app for this purpose. These apps aren’t so good at helping you find the most influential podcasters in your niche, though. Podbay.fm is useful because it categorizes podcasts into various genres . Look for the category that best fits your niche. You may find a podcast that uses an interview format to ask the host to add you to the relevant podcast’s interview list. Khoros has reduced its offerings in recent years, but it is still well known and gives you a good idea of how influential someone is on social media . It gives everyone who is active on social media a score between 1 and 100. The more influential Khoros believes you are, the higher your score. On average, a person who is active on social media has a Khoros score of 40. True influencers score much higher than that. Celebrities like Katy Perry (92) and Justin Bieber (91) score particularly high. Donald Trump’s Klout score is 94, although Barack Obama still has an extraordinary score of 99. Crowdfire is a freemium program . You can work with two social media accounts for free, but you have to pay for more accounts. You can use it to target followers on Twitter and Instagram, although its capabilities on Instagram have been reduced this year (2017) due to changes to the Instagram API. Crowdfire can help you find users to follow on Twitter and Instagram that are relevant to your niche. It can also help you keep track of how certain types of posts affect your follower and unfollower rates (at least on Twitter). While Full Contact isn’t aimed at influencer marketing, it does have features that will help you keep up with your influencers. It is technically a contact management solution. You’re likely to create a mix of potential influencers across blogs, podcasts, YouTube and social media. You may even know some of them personally. Full Contact helps you to keep track of your influencers details. Full Contact allows you to link all your contact accounts such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your phone and anywhere else you keep contacts. The service creates a centralized contact book. This merges your contacts, removing any duplicates and filling in any extra information it finds about your Internet contacts. SEOquake is a free browser add-on that you can use for some SEO purposes . It includes the SEO bar, which you can use whenever you land on a potential influencer’s website. The SEObar provides an instant summary of the influence of a given site. This is a wealth of information that can be of great value, especially if you’re looking for influential sites to work with. The stats provided include Alexa Rank, Google Index, Bing Index, SEMrush Rank and many other relevant analytics. Hunter.io finds email addresses for you . You can perform 100 searches per month on the free plan. You enter a domain name into the search engine and Hunter.io does its best to find the email addresses attached to that domain. SimilarWeb can be particularly useful if you are trying to discover the demographics that relate certain bloggers. SimilarWeb provides extensive site, industry, and application analysis. Although you need a paid plan to use SimilarWeb frequently, they offer a free plan where you can request a free report about any website or app. The free version gives you 5 results per metric, 1 month of mobile app data and 3 months of web traffic data. Obviously, you’ll want to use other tools to determine which potential influencer sites you want to investigate first before using your free search allocation from Similar.web. Buzzsumo is a freemium product, which means you can use it for free . However, the limited results shown by the free account quickly leave you wishing you had a paid version. Buzzsumo is great for showing what’s popular on social media. It can show you what content is most shared by any business, which is great for checking what has been successful for your competitors. Alternatively, you can search by niche. It will show you which content items were most shared on social media about specific topics.1. HypeAuditor
2. Discover.ly
3. Tweetdeck
4. Social Crawlytics
5. Alltop
6. Podbay.fm
7. Khoros
8. Crowdfire
9. Full Contact
10. SEOquake
11. Hunter.io
12. SimilarWeb
13. Buzzsumo
