How to Find Instagram Influencers in Your Niche

How to Find Instagram Influencers in Your Niche

This question comes up a lot from digital marketers and brands, on how to find influencers on Instagram.  Finding influencers in itself is not all that difficult, but what poses difficulty, is finding influencers with in your niche.  This is the right question to ask, because you don’t just want to promote and advertise your product on any random page with a large following.  You want highly targeted audiences to view your ads when promoted on an Influencers page in order to stir the right attention and engagement, to maximize traffic and conversions to your target site/app.

Step by Step Instructions (Manual Efforts)

There are multiple methods on finding and discovering influencers on Instagram.  Below, we will go through the manual methods and the niche of choice for our example is Travel

1. After logging on to Instagram, click on the Search Bar/Button and type #Travel
   
2. Instagram will now auto suggest you popular keywords in your niche from the drop down.  Lets click on the first keyword: #travel
   
3. Typically, we recommend browsing all of the “Top Posts”, as they typically involve big brands or Influencers.  Lets go for the first image:
   
4. The above result is not bad, the account has quite a large following of 60.1k followers.  The account is not bad, but it’s very sub niche as it only posts content related to Scandinavia, but nonetheless, travel lovers will be following.  Lets try another:
   
5. The above account is not bad, they also post travel content, specifically related to hiking and trekking, and they have 33.9k followers.  If interested, you can DM them directly on Instagram (Mobile Only)
      
6. Rinse and Repeat

Manual Efforts Review and Key Points

This process can be done for all hashtags and keywords which match your niche.  Once you go through all of the Top Posts, you can begin searching for recent images posted.

Below are the biggest caveats using manual efforts, and one of the major reasons why we built SocialVex’s suite of tools.

1. Time: As you can see, the above process is tedious and can easily eat up 6-8 hours a day of work, or you would need to hire virtual assistants to take on this type of workload
2. Responsiveness: If an Influencer isn’t following you back
3. Scale: It’s extremely difficult to scale such a process when relying on human intervention and having to perform outreach with Influencers via a Mobile device only

Step by Step Instructions (Automation)

We will walk you through a similar process and scenario using automation via SocialVex, for the same Travel niche.

1. Login to SocialVex and from the Dashboard, click on Tools – Influencer Finder or Influencer Finder from the Quick Tools Launch button.
   
2. Click on your niche “Travel”.  If you niche is not listed, you may submit a request to have your niche added to the tool.
   
3. All Influencers in the Travel niche will be displayed with analytical data, along with profile URLs and contact info in order to assist with outreach.  Click on “Has E-mail” in order to display accounts with email addresses, where you can message directly from the SocialVex Influencer Platform
   
4. You may also get extremely granular with the sorting features which you cannot do with manual efforts.
   1. Sort based on the Influencers Follower Count
   2. Sort based on Geographic Area and Location
   3. Sort based on Recently Added to the DB
   4. Sort based on Followers (High to Low)
   5. Sort based on Engagement (High to Low)
   6. Sort based on Post (High to Low)
   7. Sort based on Likes (High to Low)
   8. Sort based on Comments (High to Low)
5. For Influencers with E-mails, you may communicate with them directly on the platform.  Just click on the small enveloper icon next to the heart icon to compose a new message
   

Automation Review and Key Points

The automation process mentioned above was designed and developed  by ecommerce and brand owners, to help eliminate additional expenses and wasted time with sourcing, finding, and messaging Influencers.

In addition to finding Influencers, we now have insights and knowledge about the Influencer in order to help aid and assist with narrowing down influencers to message and interview for potential collaborations.

All of the biggest caveats with using manual efforts have been solved with SocialVex.

1. Time: Finding and Messages Influencers can now take seconds instead of hours.  Additional staff is not required when using automation.
2. Responsiveness: Response rates via emails vs direct messaging on IG is a lot higher, due to visibility.  Direct Messaging on IG will land your message with thousands of others in the General tab of the users mailbox.
3. Scale: When you spend 6-8 hours a day and require multiple resources for one task in hand, it becomes difficult to scale and focus on other business functions.

Recap

There you have it! I have walked you through with two methods on how to find instagram influencers in your niche.  I hope this article was helpful and you can now begin your journey with Influencer Marketing on Instagram.

If you would like to learn More about our automation tools, please see the below resources:

Influencer Marketing Platform 

Find Influencers

Influencer Analyzer