Advertising disclosure:
Our partners compensate us. This may influence which products or services we review (also where and how those products appear on the site), this in no way affects our recommendations or the advice we offer. Our reviews are based on years of experience and countless hours of research. Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services.
If you opt not to use a platform or an agency for your influencer marketing then you will have to build up relationships with influencers yourself. To do this, you first need to identify the influencers that rule your niche. If you are an active online participant in your niche you may already have a good idea who are the best influencers. In other cases, you will have to carry out considerable research first. Luckily there are a variety of influencer marketing tools to help you in your quest.
We have selected 22 influencer marketing tools here that are either free or freemium. The freemium tools are tools that need you to pay to access most of their features. But, they also offer limited capabilities for free.
Here are 22 Free Influencer Marketing Tools to Find Influencers:
1. Upfluence
Upfluence offers a free Chrome plugin. It is a “do it yourself” tool for influencer marketing. You can use it to analyze an influencer’s profile straight from your browser, and it is compatible with profiles on all major networks: such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Blogs. The plugin offers instantaneous, cutting edge analytics for any influencer, across all of their social media accounts.
Furthermore, Upfluence is a full-scale influencer platform, offering a well-rounded set of features. A pivotal part of influence, however, is its influencer search and discovery engine.
It features a massive database of over 3 million influencer profiles. Upfluence’s AI indexes and updates these profiles in real-time. The algorithm analyzes each piece of content for reach and engagement.
Clients can search through Upfluence to find influencers using as many keywords as necessary. By drilling down with keywords, you start to narrow the pool a little bit. You can place a relative weight on each keyword, making some more important than others. You can also narrow your search even further on Instagram, using criteria like location, social platform, or the number of followers. The resulting statistics show up in near real-time. The left side of the screen is where you type search terms, and the right side displays the number of results based on your search—and categorizes them into groups based on follower size.
Key Features: Influencer Search & Discovery, Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Third Party Analytics, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Lifecycle Management, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Campaign Reporting, Audience Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Payment Processing, Social Listening, Affiliate Management, Affiliate Campaigns,
Channels: Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Tiktok, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs
2. Affable.ai
Affable is an influencer marketing platform that streamlines the process for influencer campaign planning, optimization, and execution. It uses AI to provide deep demographic insights into an individual’s social media history on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok along with their impact on your brand or product page—all from one login. Brands such as Lenovo and Clarins have found this service invaluable in measuring ROI while identifying new opportunities at every stage of producing marketing campaigns.
The Affable database of influencers is more than just a list. It’s an extensive research project that provides all sorts of information to help you find the perfect candidate. You can make use of a variety of advanced filters to find influencers based on their demographics, location, and number of followers.
Key Features: Search/Discovery, Influencer Relationship Management, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Social Listening, Competitor Research,
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok
3. HypeAuditor
You can use HypeAuditor to determine the top Instagram influencers ranking by the number of quality and engaged followers.
HypeAuditor’s AI analyses thoroughly and ranks bloggers by quality followers and authentic engagement. They gather raw data from different sources, depersonalize and clusterize it. They take only real followers and likes from them into consideration. The algorithm then ranks influencers and forms the global top influencers’ lists, updated daily.
You can either select a list of the top 1000 influencers, covering all niches or alternatively break the list into one of 14 categories. In turn, you can either select influencer lists covering all countries, or select a list only including influencers from one of 17 selected countries.
HypeAuditor provides the following information about each influencer in each list:
- Their current ranking (and the change since last month for some lists only)
- The influencer’s Instagram username
- Main topics the influencer posts about
- Their audience country
- Their followers
- An estimation of their authentic engagement
If you click on any influencer, you will be taken to a page giving additional information and statistics relating to their Instagram performance, Audience Quality Score, demographics of their 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
4. Storyclash
With Storyclash’s free influencer search tool, you can research new Instagram influencers that are talking about your brand. It lets you find the right kind of social media personality for your needs and reach, which is crucial when it comes to your target audience’s reach.
To use the free influencer search tool, simply enter your brand name or hashtag into the search bar. Storyclash will show you a partial list of all the influencers that have recently mentioned it for the past 30 days. The results include each influencer’s number of followers and their niche.
Key Features: Search/Discovery, Influencer Relationship Management, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Library, Campaign Reporting, Product/Gifting Tools, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Social Listening, Competitor Research,
Channels: Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, Facebook & Twitter
5. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is very much a freemium product. You can use it for free, but the limited results shown by the free account quickly leaves you wishing you had a paid version.
Buzzsumo is excellent for showing what is popular on social media. It can show you which content any business shares most, which is great for checking out what was successful for your competitors. Alternatively, you can search by niche. It will show you which items of content were shared most on social media about particular topics.
However, Buzzsumo does more than that. You can also use it to see who has had content shared the most. It includes an Influencers and Outreach section which allows you to find, analyze and follow influencers. You can sort this in many ways to determine who are the most important influencers on social media in your niche.
You should probably concentrate more on influencers’ domain authorities than on their followers. If you want to build up a relationship with an influencer you also need to ensure that he or she has a reasonable retweet ratio – something near 20% or higher. If he/she doesn’t retweet then you are unlikely to be able to encourage that person to share your material.
You can only see the top 10 influencers in a list with the free license, though. You might consider taking out the short-term free trial of the premium version to give you more time to find influencers.
6. Influence.co
Influence.co takes a vastly different approach when compared to most influencer platforms. Although Influence.co offers all the usual influencer marketplace services, it also acts very much like a social media platform. This helps brands sustain the types of authentic and long-term relationships that are intrinsic in influencer marketing. Indeed, Influence.co now has a social network and marketplace with over 250,000 members, 150,000 of whom are influencers, 70,000 businesses, and 30,000 other people.
The social aspect of Influence.co doesn’t take the place of discovery and activation; it complements it. However, it succeeds in elevating the platform to something else. Brands are likely to build their best relationships with influencers whose posts they see in their feed.
Influence.co operates two plans, one free and one paid. With the basic free account, you can build your own profile and access the platform’s community. You can do basic searches with up to 50 results per search and organize those results in up to 3 lists. You can create and publish campaigns and message up to 12 influencers per month.
The Business Pro paid plan offers much more, of course. It gives you multiple profiles, advanced searches, unlimited results, unlimited lists, advanced search, unlimited campaigns, campaign management, campaign reports, team members, lead sourcing, and more.
Key Features: Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Relationship Management, Influencer Marketplace, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis,
Channels: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Patreon, Snapchat, Tiktok, Amazon
7. PitchBoard
Pitchboard is primarily a marketplace focused on executing campaigns quickly and at scale. It sees no need to include influencer discovery or relationship management functionality. Instead, its main focus is on enabling marketers to reach new audiences on a large scale. This means that it works well when coupled with platforms focusing on other areas. Pitchboard uses its machine-learning algorithm to parse through influencer data from various sources to identify those whose audiences are suitable for campaigns.
Its user interface is clean and easily navigated. Once you log in, you view your campaigns—live ones, past ones, and drafts not yet published for pitches. You see a high-level view of each one on your dashboard.
Pitchboard handles compensation well. Brands can put out a detailed request for multiple content pieces, offering a fully fleshed-out compensation package. Pitchboard gives real-time information with estimates showing projected engagement and cost per engagement.
Brands submit their campaigns for review, and someone on the Pitchboard team takes a look to ensure everything looks good. These manual reviews ensure that invites to influencers are legitimate. Pitchboard also does a quality check on the briefs. Once they approve your brief, they invite relevant influencers to pitch to your brand.
Pitchboard shows in-depth data and analytics for influencers who make pitches to brands. This includes estimated engagement projections for each influencer and a breakdown of the cost of those engagements. They give detailed information about their audiences and show an audience credibility score.
Key Features: Influencer Marketplace, Content Review, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Payment Processing,
Channels: Instagram, YouTube
8. Dovetale
Although any brand can opt to use Dovetale, its real focus is on eCommerce stores. Dovetale highlights their integration with Shopify, stressing that they help Shopify stores recruit, manage and grow sales with people who love their products. As a result, it caters exceptionally well to small businesses. That doesn’t indicate that they aren’t suitable for larger businesses, however. They also offer enterprise tools built to help teams manage influencer marketing campaigns. Nonetheless, Dovetale caters better to small businesses than many of the other platforms mentioned here.
Perhaps this is best reflected in Dovetale offering a usable free plan, not merely a free trial. All you need to do to get started is connect your Shopify store. With this free plan, up to three users can manage five community members (influencers), with a custom community sign-in page, a custom sign-up widget for your Shopify website, unlimited gifting and affiliate orders, and affiliate sale tracking. As your need to use influencers increases, you can upgrade to one of the paid plans.
Dovetale includes all the necessary tools for your campaign management, reporting, and analytics that help you establish the success of your campaigns.
Key Features: Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Marketplace, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Payment Processing,
Channels: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok
9. Discover.ly
Discover.ly is a Chrome plugin that helps you with your networking. You can use it to see your email recipients, LinkedIn and Facebook connections’ social accounts and updates in a sidebar. This means, for instance, that you can see mutual Facebook friends for somebody you connect with on LinkedIn.
Indeed you can also see your connections’ social media accounts on a wide range of other social media channels and platforms. These include Google+, Klout, Angel base, FourSquare, and Behance.
One use for Discover.ly is to see if any of your existing contacts have connections with influencers in your niche. If you find any connections you could then leverage your contacts to introduce you the influencers.
10. Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is Twitter’s free social media dashboard to help you manage all your tweets. You can set it to display any of your Twitter timeline items, mentions, direct messages, lists, trends, favorites, search results, or hashtags. You can control up to 200 Twitter accounts via the Tweetdeck dashboard.
Tweetdeck has very powerful search capabilities. You can use Tweetdeck to track mentions of your competition. You can also use it to find used of particular hashtag, which in turn can help you find influencers. You can also search by the number of retweets. People whose tweets are retweeted multiple times are likely to have some influence.
Tweetdeck can alert you whenever one of your followers adds a new person to their list. You could take a close look at these people to see if they are worth investigating as a potential influencer.
You can also use Tweetdeck to see how many lists particular people are on. This could be a useful sign about how influential other people believe them to be.
11. Social Crawlytics
Social Crawlytics allows you to track content and competitors. You can use it to discover which posts are the most popular and shared on particular websites. Unlike some other social monitoring sites, you run reports on Social Crawlytics by particular domains. So, for instance, you can analyze your competitors to determine what has been their most successful content and how people have shared it.
At the beginning, Social Crawlytics gives you 2,500 credits to use. Each URL you crawl costs you a certain number of credits. Some of your credits regenerate each week, and you also gain bonus credits by sending 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 the top authors and their total number of shares. This could give you possible influencers.
12. Alltop
If you are looking for influential blogs, a Google search can be something of a hit or miss affair. 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 curated by people, not by an algorithm, who search for the top blog posts each day in particular niches.
You can use it to find the top posts in your niche, which should help give you an idea of the most influential blogs on your topic.
13. Podbay.fm
When we talk about influencer marketing we rarely think about podcasting. But podcasting has grown dramatically over the last few years, and quite a few influencers now host their own regular podcast show.
The easiest way to listen to podcasts on iOS devices is via iTunes. On Android, Stitcher is a well-rated app for this purpose.
But, these apps are not so good at helping you find the most influential podcasters in your niche.
Podbay.fm is useful because it ranks podcasts within various genres. Search for the category that best fits your niche.
You may want to find a podcast that uses an interview format so you can request the host to add you to the relevant podcast’s interview list.
If it is not obvious from the description on Podbay.fm whether a particular 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.
14. Crowdfire
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 it’s Instagram capabilities were reduced this year (2017), due to changes in the Instagram API.
Crowdfire can help you find users to follow on Twitter and Instagram who are relevant to your niche. It can also help you keep track of how particular types of posts impact on your follower and unfollower rates (on Twitter at least).
15. Full Contact
While Full Contact is not targeted at influencer marketing it does have features that will help you keep track of your influencers. It is technically a contact management solution. You are likely to build up a mix of possible influencers across blogs, podcasts, YouTube and social media. You may even know some of them in person. Full Contact helps you keep track of your influencers’ details.
Full Contact allows you to link all your contact-carrying accounts, e.g. Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your phone, and anywhere else you keep contacts. The service then creates one centralized contacts book. This merges your contacts, removing any duplicates and fills in any extra information it can find about your contacts from the internet.
Be aware, though, that the free Testing version only allows you to match up 100 people and 100 companies per month. The lowest of the paid levels, Starter, allows 2,500 people and 2,500 companies per month (for a $99 per month charge). If you wish to find and record details on potential influencers on the free plan you will need to be careful which accounts (and lists of contacts) you link to Full Contact, to keep within your limit.
16. SEOquake
SEOquake is a free browser add-on you can use for quite a few SEO purposes. It includes the SEObar which you can use whenever you go to a website of a potential influencer.
SEObar gives you an instant summary of a website’s strength. This is a wealth of information which can be of great value, particularly if you are looking for influential sites to work with. The stats provided include a site’s Alexa Rank, Google Index, Bing Index, SEMrush Rank and many other relevant analytics.
17. Hunter.io
Hunter.io finds email addresses for you. You can undertake 100 searches per month on the free plan. You enter a domain name into their search engine and Hunter.io will do its best to find the email addresses attached to that domain.
Hunter.io can be particularly helpful for finding the email addresses of people who may be of value to your organization. For instance, as part of your influencer campaign, you may wish to ask for a guest blogging post on an influential blog in your niche. It can be difficult at times to find the correct email address when you need to approach them with your request. You can enter a person’s name company website into Hunter.io, and it will come up with a suggested email address.
If you think you have a valid email address to follow up but are unsure, you can enter the address into Hunter.io, and it will determine whether the email address is valid.
You can also use Hunter.io as a plug-in. In this case, when you go to a particular website you can click on the Hunter.io icon in your browser and it will find any valid email addresses attached to that domain.
18. Personapp
While you won’t be able to find any influencers using Personapp you can use it to help you determine the types of people you should search for to be influencers.
If you have received any marketing or sales training you will probably have had the importance of personas drummed into you. You are always told to draw up personas for your ideal customers. Manufacturers are also encouraged to draw up persons of the ideal users of their product.
The same can as easily be done for influencer marketing. If you spend time thinking up the persona of your ideal influencer, it could save you a considerable amount of time. Too many businesses have waste time and energy chasing after influencers who are not ideal for their business.
Just because somebody exerts influence online does not mean that they will be of real benefit to your business. For influencer marketing to be successful you need to find influencers who influence the types of people who make up your target audience.
Personapp helps you to create personas for your ideal influencers. It leads you through the persona creation process step-by-step, covering such factors as behavior patterns, goals, needs, attitudes, beliefs, workflow, skills, and environment.
19. Similar Web
SimilarWeb can be particularly useful if you are trying to find out the demographics that relate particular bloggers. SimilarWeb provides extensive website, industry and app analysis. While you need a paid plan to use SimilarWeb on a frequent basis, they do offer a free plan where you can order a free report about any website or app. The free version offers you 5 results per metric, 1 month of mobile app data and 3 months of web traffic data.
Obviously, you will want to use other tools to determine which potential influencers’ sites you wish to investigate first before you use up your free allocation of Similar.web research.
20. Followerwonk
When you’re looking for a way to identify influential people on Twitter, Followerwonk is the tool that can help. This website can be used not only to find out who your top followers are but also to compare their social media following against those of others, which may give insights into how they work best as potential marketing partners.
Followerwonk makes it easy to find influencers on Twitter who share your interests. You can compare accounts and break down followers by location and bio-related information about them such as their favorite celebrities or the sports teams they follow on the social media app.
21. TrendHERO
TrendHERO is an influencer marketing tool to penetrate new and existing markets, particularly on Instagram. It offers a convenient way of discovering suitable IG profiles and potential influencer outreach through its robust search tool.
The free account allows you to find the best Instagram content creators and influencers. You can check their demographics, compare your audience with theirs, and get insight into how their engagement rate has changed over time.
Key Features: Search/Discovery, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Social Listening, Competitor Research,
Channels: Instagram
22. Aspire (formerly AspireIQ)
AspireIQ describes itself as a community intelligence marketing platform built for advocacy. It sees your community as being the best influencers of all. It considers your community to be like-minded customers, creatives, professionals, experts, employees, and brand representatives who share similar values and passion tied to your brand beyond the product or service you sell.
You can use AspireIQ to turn every connection into value.
AspireIQ has built a database of more than six million content creators, so you can find the perfect partners with whom to collaborate. And AspireIQ grows with you. You can streamline each step of your campaign with their automated step-by-step workflow that adapts to your needs, from first connection and product fulfillment to content approval and tracking. This means you can expand your reach to hundreds of influencers if you wish.
Alright, AspireIQ isn’t a completely free influencer marketing tool. You will have to buy a plan if you want to use all its resources, but it is free for creators to join. It does not take any fees on creator relationships. It charges only for the software that helps you scale your community and influencer programs.
Key Features: Search/Discovery, Influencer Relationship Management, Influencer Marketplace, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Forms and Compliance, Payment Processing, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Visual Discovery, Influencer Content Amplification,
Channels: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs
What to Do When You Find Potential Influencers for Your Brand?
Influencer marketing is a great way to connect with a target audience and drive engagement. It is also a great way to build a relationship of trust and collaboration.
Once you use these free tools to find influencers who are relevant to your niche, here are four tips to help you get started:
1) Connect with them on their social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
Social media is a great way to connect with potential influencers and get to know them better. By following them and engaging with their content, you can start to build rapport and develop a relationship.
Take the time to get to know them and build rapport before asking for anything. Always be respectful of their time and space, and do not bombard them with messages. If you show that you are sincere and genuine, the likelier they will work with you in the future.
2) Verify their influencer credentials.
As influencer marketing continues to grow in popularity, more and more businesses are looking to jump on the bandwagon. However, influencer marketing is not without its challenges, and many businesses make avoidable mistakes that can jeopardize their campaigns.
One of the most common mistakes is failing to verify an influencer's credentials. With so many influencers out there, it can be tempting to work with anyone who seems popular. However, it's important to make sure that an influencer brings relevant value to your brand and that their audience demographics are relevant to your products or services. Otherwise, you could end up wasting time and money on a campaign that doesn't generate any results.
3) Create content strategy goals for your influencer campaign.
Before you start reaching out to influencers, it's important to have a content strategy in place. What are your goals for the campaign? Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or boost sales?
With a goal in mind, it will be easier to pitch your campaign to your future influencer. Once you've decided on your goals, be sure to include information about your content strategy and how it can help them achieve their own goals.
4) Make a proposal for engagement and collaborations.
Once you have shortlisted and vetted influencers for your brand, you can prepare to make a proposal for engagement and collaborations.
A well-crafted proposal is essential when pitching to an influencer. You'll need to demonstrate that you understand their audience and have something valuable to contribute. Be specific about the topics you're interested in, and be sure to offer something of real value—either through content or engagement.
Keep in mind that influencers are busy people, so be respectful of their time and resources. If you can make a strong case for why working with you would be beneficial, you're more likely to secure a collaboration.
Final Thoughts
Influencer marketing is a great way to reach a target audience and generate positive sentiment. However, it is a complex and time-consuming process that requires a thorough strategy and a lot of patience.
There are influencer marketing tools out there that have more features that can make your life easier, but they come at a price. If you are just getting started with influencer marketing, or if you are working with a tight budget, these free tools can help you get the job done.
More importantly, be sure to think about the end goal of your campaign before you start reaching out to influencers. If you want to increase brand awareness, you will want to look for an influencer with a large following. On the other hand, if you are looking to drive sales, an influencer with a high engagement rate will be more effective. With these factors in mind, you can be sure to choose an influencer who will generate the most press for your brand and help you reach your business goals.
A freemium tool like Buzzsumo can show you what is currently popular on social media. You can search according to niche and it will display which type of content was shared the most on social media about specific topics. You can also use it to see which content a business has shared the most or see whose content was shared the most to identify the most important influencers on social media in your niche. You can use a tool like Tweetdeck to manage your tweets. It is Twitter’s free social media dashboard that lets you display your Twitter timeline items, direct messages, mentions and hashtags. Though, it does a lot more than just manage tweets. Thanks to its powerful search capabilities, you can also use it to track your competition’s mentions and find influencers. You can check out Podbay.fm to find the most influential podcasters. It is free to use and ranks podcasts within various genres. So, you can use it to search for the category that best suits your particular niche. You can, for example, check out a tool like Hunter.io. With Hunter.io, you can complete 100 searches per month using the free plan. All you have to do is enter the domain name into their search engine and it will do its best to gather the email addresses that are linked to that domain. You can also enter the email address into Hunter.io and it will determine for you if the email address is in fact valid. With the help of HypeAuditor, you can identify the top Instagram influencers by the number of quality and engaged followers. What makes this tool so great is that it considers only real followers and their likes. The algorithm will then rank influencers to create the global top influencers list which gets updated on a daily basis. In this list, it will also include information about the main topics that the influencers post about, an estimation of their authentic engagement and their audience’s country.Frequently Asked Questions
How can you find out what is popular on social media?
How can you manage your tweets?
How can you find the most influential podcasters?
How can you find email addresses?
How can you find the top Instagram influencers?
