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.
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: If you click on any influencer, you will be taken to a page that provides additional information and statistics related to Instagram performance, Audience Quality Score, demographics of your followers and engagement. 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. Tweetdeck can alert you whenever one of your followers adds a new person to their list. You can take a look at these people to see if they are worth considering as potential influencers. You can also use Tweetdeck to see how many particular lists people are on. This could be a useful signal about how influential people believe they are. 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. The Social Crawlytics report is quite detailed about the social performance of the crawled site. This includes details of top authors and their total number of shares. This can give you potential influencers. 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. If it’s not obvious from the description on Podbay.fm whether a specific podcast uses an interview format or not, you can search for the podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. You can then check its format and suitability for your purposes. 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. While influencers in your niche are unlikely to score this high, you can compare people to see what makes a good Khoros score for your niche. Those with a Khoros score of 63 or more are considered the top 5% of social media users. An easy way to find someone’s Khoros score is to download the Khoros Chrome extension. When you do this, you will see that everyone’s Khoros score appears next to their name when you log into your Twitter account. 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. Keep in mind, however, that the free trial version allows you to match 100 people and 100 companies per month. The lowest of the paid tiers, Starter, allows 2,500 people and 2,500 companies per month (for a fee of $99 per month). If you’re looking to find and record details about potential influencers on the free plan, you’ll need to be careful with accounts (and contact lists) linked to Full Contact to maintain your limit. 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. Hunter.io can be particularly useful for finding the email addresses of people who could be valuable to your organization. For example, as part of your influencer campaign, you could request a guest blog post on an influential blog in your niche. It can sometimes be difficult to find the correct email address when you need to approach them with your request. You can enter the company website with a person’s name on Hunter.io and it will give you a suggested email address. If you think you have a valid email address to track but are not sure, you can enter the address into Hunter.io and it will determine if the email address is valid. You can also use Hunter.io as a plugin. In this case, when you go to a specific website, you can click on the Hunter.io icon in the browser and it will find valid 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. However, Buzzsumo does more than that. You can also use it to see who has had the most content shared. It includes an Influencers and Outreach section that lets you find, review, and follow influencers. You can sort this in a number of ways to determine who are the most important influencers on social media in your niche. You should probably focus more on influencers’ domain authorities than their followers. If you want to establish a relationship with an influencer, you also need to make sure they have a reasonable retweet rate (something closer to 20% or more). If he or she does not retweet, you are unlikely to be able to encourage that person to share your material. However, you can only see the top 10 influencers from a list with the free license. You can take a short-term free trial of the premium version to give yourself more time to find influencers.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
