The most obvious way to find Instagram influencers is to look on Instagram itself, and with over 800 million users, you know the right influencers for your campaign are hiding somewhere. The bad news is, it will take you quite some time to go through enough user profiles until you find the ones that perfectly match your campaign criteria.

To give you a helping hand, here are a few tips to help you quickly filter through and identify the Instagram influencers that are perfect for your campaigns. 

 

 

1. Take A Look At Your Followers

Influencer marketing is all about authenticity. With 73% of influencers stating that they put more effort into content creation when they are passionate about the brand or product, your followers are the first place you should look.

Look for influencers who are already fans of your brand. Scroll through your follower list and see if anyone seems particularly invested in your brand. Perhaps there’s someone who comments on your posts regularly, or who often likes what you post. Not only will the influencers put more effort into the content they create but they are also likely to be more enthusiastic about the collaboration and may even charge less.

 See more findings from our influencer marketing report 

 

2. Influencer Tags, Mentions and Brand Hashtags

The gram was made for tagging. Going back to my earlier point about authenticity and finding influencers who are already advocates, look at the people who may not be following you, but tag, mention you or use your brand hashtag. From our own experiences running influencer campaigns, and taking example from companies like Glossier who embed customer-influencers into their business, we have seen how highly effective this kind of influencer research can be.

 

3. Search & Use The Instagram Discover Tool

If you can’t find any appropriate candidates from your followers, its time to dig a little deeper.

Use the Instagram discover tool to search for specific hashtags influencers are likely to use which are relevant to your brand, or locations you’d like your influencers to be in.

Look at the posts that come up in the results. The ones under the ‘Top’ tab, are usually the ones with the most like. The higher the number of followers… the higher volume of likes the post is likely to achieve. You get where I’m going with this…?

If you like what you see add the influencers to your list of potential collaborators.

 

 4. Building Your List Of Potential Instagram Influencers

When you identify potential Instagram influencers, by clicking on the downward arrow, Instagram will automatically suggest more, similar to the one you’ve identified. Making the whole search process that much faster.

 

5. Check Influencers’ Audience Health

Identifying whether or not the followers you’ve found have an authentic audience is that much harder when done manually. However there are always ways to find out if the influencers you have identified have bought followers or are using bots to boost their engagement. These include looking at the:

• Follower/following ratio
• Sampling influencers’ following to check for fake accounts
• Identifying follower drops/ spikes

Find out exactly how to spot fake followers 

 

6. Ask for Audience Demographics

Before you confirm any collaboration with the influencers you’ve identified, it’s crucial to find out who their audience actually is. Map your customer research to the influencers’ audiences to see if they are the right fit. Poorly targeted campaigns result in poor performance and budget wastage. Many influencers have already converted to a business account, so have access to their audience demographics. Or better yet request their ZINE media kit which guarantees that all analytics and insights are accurate and up to date, pulled directly from their Instagram page. 

 

 

Want to find out more on how to create a profitable influencer marketing strategy?
Download our free resource

 

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 Joanna Karamanis

I’m head of Content at ZINE, where I use my expertise in fashion consumer psychology to empower brands and influencers in their marketing campaigns. I love to travel, bake as well as shopping online.