Want to get started in influencer marketing? Or maybe you’ve already tried out the strategy, but had a bit of trouble when the moment came to find influencers for your campaign?
Finding the right influencers for your brand’s marketing campaign can be a challenge, especially if you’re searching directly on social media. Fortunately, there’s a more efficient way to search: by using an influencer marketing platform.
Heepsy is an influencer marketing platform that lets you search through and analyze 11 million influencers on Instagram, Youtube and soon, TikTok. What’s more, you can organize your search results in customizable lists, and then export those lists to help automate your influencer outreach.
Find influencers with search filters
If you’re searching for influencers directly on social media, you can’t tell Instagram or Youtube to find, for example, all the food influencers in California who have at least 15K followers and a high engagement rate. But with Heepsy, you can!
As a general caveat, always define your campaign before you start searching for influencers. You need to know your objective, target audience, budget and timeline before you start looking, as those elements will guide your search.
Heepsy lets you search for influencers with the following filters:
- Category – like food, fashion or sports
- Location – by country, state and city
- Followers – from 5K and up
- Engagement – choose the exact % or a rating like high or very high
- Contact – see only verified influencers, only those with public email, or those who have another specific social network
- Audience – set demographics related to age, gender, country, language and interests
- Authenticity – stipulate the percentage of the audience that is authentic
- Advanced – choose the estimated cost, % branded content, or posts per week
To use these filters, simply plug in your parameters. Let’s take the example from above and look for California-based Instagram influencers in the food category with 15K or more followers and a high engagement rate.
We can see in the above screenshot which filters are activated, and some of the results that meet that criteria. At first glance, we get a basic look at each influencer: their bio, their followers and engagement, as well as categories and frequent locations.
Analyze their profile content and performance-driven metrics
Once you find an influencer who looks promising, click on them to get more detailed analytics. Heepsy provides you with the following profile information and performance-driven metrics:
- Quality score – a rating of the overall health of the profile
- Engagement – the level of interaction between an influencer and their followers
- Photo post metrics – average likes, average comments and cost estimate
- Follower growth – how the influencer has gained followers over time
- Post frequency – how often they post
- Comments/likes ratio – how many comments they have compared to likes
- Followers/following ratio – number of followers compared to accounts they follow
- Audience demographics – age, gender, country, language and interests
- Audience authenticity – % of audience that may be suspicious
- Brand mentions – past branded content and its performance
When you click on an influencer, you’ll see a visual preview of their feed, as well as their biography, contact information and other social networks.
From there, scroll down to see their performance metrics. Heepsy also offers expandable tips for users who may be new to influencer marketing. These tips tell you why the metric is important, and offer guidance as to how you can spot fake influencers by analyzing their data.
For example, the above chart shows the follower growth rate metric from Heepsy. We can see that this influencer has grown 4.2% in the last four weeks, and we can also see their growth over time from Sept. 2017 until present.
If you scroll over Why care?, Heepsy pops out a tip telling you to beware sudden spikes in followers and negative growth. Spikes in followers can be caused by giveaways or viral moments. But in the absence of some logical cause, spikes can also be indicative of bought followers.
And while a small percentage of negative growth sometimes happens throughout the life of a profile, continued negative growth means followers are losing interest in the influencer’s content. It’s important to analyze these metrics so that you don’t end up choosing to collaborate with an influencer who has a fake audience or a real audience that is losing interest in their content.
Organize, export, and contact
After analyzing to see which influencers look best for your campaign, Heepsy lets you save their profiles to a customizable list. You can name your list whatever you want. In this example below, I’ve called it California Foodies.
With lists, you can easily compare influencers against one another and see aggregated metrics for all the influencers you’ve included in the list. Also, you see the followers, engagement, quality score, branded engagement, and estimated post cost for each influencer on the list.
Moreover, with Heepsy’s lists, you can add ratings, notes and statuses. This is especially useful if you’re working with a team, as you can easily keep everyone on the same page.
Finally, you can download your list to a spreadsheet format. If you’re working with many influencers, you can use that spreadsheet in connection with an automated email service to speed up and streamline your outreach.
Conclusion
Heepsy is a great way to find influencers and make confident decisions when choosing which ones to collaborate with. Heepsy also has a variety of plans at different prices so that any business, regardless of size, can participate in influencer marketing. So if you need to find and analyze influencers, stop on over to Heepsy and check it out!