How to find influencers on Instagram

Clearly, influencer marketing is a fairly new form of marketing and must be treated as such. In contrast to traditional strategies, ads and advertising messages can be natural extensions of an influencer’s personal brand instead of a blunt commercial or sales pitch. Consequently, if done right, a quality influencer program is highly effective to drive sales and level up your ROI. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, the industry is also set to grow to approximately $16.4bn in 2022.

In fall 2021, CBCN reports that, according to employees, Instagram has more than two billion monthly active users worldwide, who have the information from internal conversations but are not at liberty to publicly speak about them. In fact, Instagram has not published user numbers since 2018, when the numbers of monthly users crossed the one billion mark. This can be due to the concerns of legislators and regulators that Facebook, or rather Meta, has outsized market control.

Graphic by Influencer Marketing Hub

Anyway, it is clear that Gen Z still favours Instagram as their go-to social media platform, despite TikTok’s popularity with the digital natives. Although the Chinese video-app will have a steady increase in marketers choosing the platform, Instagram will proceed to remain in first place the next three years as illustrated by the following graphic by Insider Intelligence.

Graphic by Insider Intelligence

Activating Influencers on Instagram has many benefits

As stated before, corporations with influencers bear many benefits, compared to conventional marketing strategies and even besides the potential for higher ROI. As Influencer Marketing Hub calculated in 2020, the ROI for every $1 spent is $5.78 in return.

More advantages are the increase of brand awareness through authentic influencer campaigns. On the one hand, brand awareness can of course be achieved through an influencer marketing campaign, on the other hand, a distinct brand ambassador program can be something you might want to consider.

Read more about how to build a brand ambassador program on the Kolsquare blog!

Overall, micro-influencers are gaining importance in 2022, according to the statistics of Influencer Marketing Hub. Their market share of 89% in 2020 has increased to 91% in 2021. It is because followers tend to think micro-influencers are more authentic, reliable, and credible. Moreover, experts of the Forbes Communications Council predict that smaller industries will carry on choose to work with micro-influencer. As their audiences are highly engaged, campaigns will prove to be more lucrative while minimising their advertising cost per action as micro-influencers have less followers.

Calculating the prizing of your next influencer marketing campaign can be tricky while it needs to be consistent. Therefore you can read up on it on the Kolsquare blog here.  

Consider these Steps before Finding your Influencers

Besides all these appealing reasons, however, marketers cannot just rush to the platform and pick a star-influencer. The truth is, not everyone can sell everything and not everyone with a high number of followers is necessarily a good fit for your brand. Therefore, make sure to understand your target audience and the range of consumers you want to attract with your product. Consider their age, gender, interests, income and professional situation, as well as their preferred brands.

Furthermore and before you get in contact with any influencer, determine your brand’s strengths, qualities, and differentiators and define your brand’s public identity and message. This will be extremely helpful to find the right influencer for your next marketing campaign and to decide on who will promote which element or product of your brand.

Once you have identified all of the above, set your goals and objectives to efficiently and successfully target the right person to work with. Hence, it is advisable to write a clear brief before you take any action and contact potential partners.

Simultaneously with the campaign planning process, it is strategic to internalise the characteristics and special talents of influencers with the app’s features and format requirements.

Collect all the data you can get

Now, let us get to the tips on how to find Influencers on Instagram. The easiest way to start with is reviewing your brand’s own followers. That is how you can find out who is already talking about and convinced by your products. As authenticity is key, this can be a smart way to connect with your brand’s fans. By browsing their profiles, you want to get a sense of the content they share, their engagement rates, their style of communication and posting habits.

Almost as simple and helpful is analysing your brand mentions. By comparing the data with your followers, you can establish an even more detailed overview of who is talking about your brand. In order to get a feeling of the industry’s most influential voices you can also check the lists of influencers who are important for your niche, for instance fashion or photography.

Additionally, you want to consider having a look at the hashtags as well. Either you have created your own hashtags or you search for those relevant for your brand and product. Especially the featured “top post” on the Instagram search helps you find those accounts with bigger following that also most likely have a professional account.

Use Dedicated Tools and the Kolsquare Platform

Despite the fact that you can and most likely should always use Google Search, dedicated tools and platforms can help you even more by saving time and resources and providing helpful and insightful information.  

With the free download of the Chrome extension, Kolsquare offers your brand valuable statistics on the audiences of your designated KOL(s). This data includes the automatically calculated engagement rates, the socio-demographic data of their audiences, and the location as well as the credibility scores of their audiences. The latter evaluates the audience and its commitment, hence revailing scams and fake followers profiles through giving a score out of 100 to each profile.

The Kolsquare Chrome extension also summarises the influencers’ main interests, which helps you to get a sense of whether their brand is in line with yours.

Albeit seizing the opportunity and immediately opting for a long-term brand-influencer relationship, it is wise to not commit to anything serious right away but start with a view posts, evaluate the results and then see if the chosen partnership works for both parties. By communicating openly, you can then establish a long-term partnership with your influencers.