Influencer marketing has grown rapidly in last two years. Individuals are agreeing to it and viewing it as the future of marketing. For those who don’t wish to use a platform or an agency, influencer marketing is helpful in building relationships with influencers. The first step of influencer marketing is to identify the influencers that rule your niche. If you are an active online member, you won’t have to struggle as you will have a good idea about who are the best influencers. However, if you are new to digital marketing you may have to do an extensive research to identify the influencer. This will be a time-consuming task but if you choose the right influencer marketing tool you will be able to reach your goal in no time. Most brands and marketers have already started using Influencer marketing to earn profit and cater large user base.
Most of you must have an idea about Influencer marketing, but for those who are new to it let us explain what Influencer marketing is and how it helps build your company into a brand.
Influencer Marketing: With the emergence of new and false advertisements tactic people have started to grow skeptical towards advertisements. They say we see commercials at every possible place, but how to trust the claims made by marketers?
Due to this, they have started to go with products recommended by their peers or family members. Obviously, they would trust approvals coming from reliable source rather than someone they don’t know or even haven’t heard of.
A Breakthrough in Digital Marketing
All this made advertisers understand how they can use social media and other online tools to market their products and attract customers. They can use these platforms to indirectly encourage people, talk about and recommend their products online and gain and extra edge over their competitors.
Influencer marketing evolves from an individual’s expertise, popularity, or reputation. It involves marketing of products and services by those who have a power over people and how they will buy things. Like word of mouth publicity. Influencers can come from varied places, can be a person of any age group, culture. Often celebrities or known faces are used as influencers to market products because they are esteemed individuals and are highly visible. When such a person markets a product, the maker of that product gets more exposure and people easily believe due to celebrity confirmation.
Various Areas of Implementation
Not only celebrities are looked upon but bloggers have an important role to play. Nowadays they are too considered as an authentic source due to their number of followers. When a product is recommended by such people they seem to be more trustworthy as compared to old ways of advertisement.
All this helps companies to tackle the cynicism that people have before trying a new product. Influencer marketing is unique as it gives influencers freedom to endorse the product via an open and organic platform.
Any Major Anomalies?
But it has a drawback sometimes it isn’t as controllable as traditional marketing and the success of a product depends on the image of the influencer. Therefore, marketers should always be prepared to deal with negative fallout if any. As it may become a major cause of product rejection, therefore they need to choose the influence wisely.
To make things easy we have listed 15 influencer tools. They are a combination of both free and paid. Paid tools offer time limited capabilities to let you try the tool and decide if you want to go with paid version or not. But before you select any tool, study the market trend and plan how you wish to search for your possible influencers. Most of them function on social media platform and will benefit you in discovering the significant people on social channels.
Important points to keep in mind
- See where your target spectators spend most of its time.
- Decide the age group you want to focus on: If it is for older people, search for influencers in online groups talking about your product. If it is for teenagers, focus more on apps like Snapchat, YouTube or Instagram.
- Don’t just focus on celebrities you can even look for bloggers who are famous for their writing style and blogs. We have listed certain tools that will help you search them.
- Furthermore, you will be able to find influential people who are popular because of their podcasts. The tools mentioned below will help you find them too.
15 Best Influencer Marketing Tools to Search Influencers
- FollowerWonk
- Discover.ly
- Tweetdeck
- Alltop
- Podbay.fm
- Klout
- Crowdfire
- Full Contact
- SEOquake
- Hunter.io
- Personapp
- Similar Web
- Buzzsumo
- GroupHigh
- BuzzStream
1. FollowerWonk
Explore and grow your social graph with FollowerWonk:
- Dig deeper into Twitter analytics.
- Find and connect with new influencers in your niche.
- Use visualizations to compare your social graph with others.
- Share your reports around the globe.
- Compare the followers of any 2-3 users to find overlaps and new audiences.
- Breakdown your followers by social Authority, tweet count, follower count and more.
- View Interactive charts of new followers and unfollows; corelate with your tweets, RTs, and mentions.
- Sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important, influential followers?
- Search on any profile data: bio, location, name, URL
Followerwonk is a free app developed by Moz. It is modified version of Twitter, for those who are familiar with Twitter won’t face problem using FollowerWonk. Using it you can search the Twitter bios and connect with anyone, see who’s important for your field, compare Twitter accounts and find connections to target new influencers.
Furthermore, it allows you to use keywords for hunting and even shows you people who have tweeted about the keywords you are using. This is a paid version but free version will help you find the key influencers. If you like the free version can upgrade to the paid one.
2. Discover.ly
Discover.ly a Chrome extension that benefits you in meeting people, grow network and lookup contacts in Gmail, LinkedIn & Twitter. It even works with Boomerang, Rapportive, Hubspot, Buffer, Hunter, Yesware and Right Inbox. It makes Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn work together nicely. You can see when your common connections have tweeted something and can even contact with mutual Facebook friends on LinkedIn. Furthermore, you can see if any existing contact have connections with influencers in your place and can use it take your contacts leverage to make you known to the influencers.
3. Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is your personal dashboard where you can see all the tweets at one place, can stay updated and in touch with what’s happening. Using it you can schedule tweets, create, organize and share a timeline of tweets, redesign a new sidebar and can drag and drop columns in sidebar. It allows you to handle up to 200 Twitter accounts and can tack the mentions of your competitors.
Furthermore, you can look for specific hashtag that will help you search influencers based on number of retweets. Individuals whose tweets are shared multiple times are prospective influencer.
When your follower adds a new person to his list, Tweetdeck alerts you. Thus, helping you to look at them closely and see if these people can be a probable influencer.
4. Alltop
Google search is the solution for online searches. Whether you are looking for latest news or searching for influential blog Google search is the answer. But you can’t trust it always because sometimes it is a hit and sometimes a miss. The reason behind it is that Google shows all types of results that may have the search word, it can be a blog, a site or even a sales page. This is confusing. But if you want all latest news, blogposts and information in real time at one place use Alltop. It is designed especially for people who search for top blogposts of their niche. Each topic is the popular posts of their forte, the editors use best and trusted sources to collect the latest news and show what’s happening around.
5. Podbay.fm
Generally, people think Influencer marketing is constrained to social media but that isn’t the case, podcasts too can be used as a tool for influencer marketing. Over the years Podcasts have grown drastically and you may find influencers hosting the podcast show. Meaning it will help to popularize the product, as it is the easiest way to attract more audience.
Sometimes, these apps may not let you find the significant podcasters. In such a case using Podbay.fm is helpful, as it ranks podcasts in several categories. Search for the category that suits best to your product.
Besides this you can look for podcasts that uses interview format to make a question list for your forte.
6. Klout
Creating and sharing great content is the best way to influence people online. Klout helps you do the same, it suggests shareable content that has lesser visibility, helps you create content that can ignite flame in heart and mind of the reader, fans, followers and others. Klout grants a score between 1 and 100 to every active member on social media. The higher the score more influential you are.
An average Klout Score is of 40 those who have higher than that like (91), (92), (94) or (99) are the influencers. Sometimes you may not find a person in your niche with such a high Klout score. To find the one that will be helpful you can look for those who have a cloud score of 63 or higher. These people are those who fall under 5% of social media users.
To find someone’s Klout score firstly, download Klout extension for Chrome and when you go to your Twitter account you will be able to see their score besides their name.
7. Crowdfire
Crowdfire is a program that helps you see, schedule and manage all social accounts at one place. In the free version you can work on 2 social media accounts, to use more than that you must use the paid version. Crowdfire is helpful when you want to target and follow influencers that are on Twitter and Instagram. It helps you track how certain posts influence the followers.
8. Full Contact
Full Contact as the name describes is precisely a connection management resolution. The service helps to create a centralized contact book that has details of all the contacts from various accounts. It may not be a direct influencer marketing tool but the way it works help to keep track of the influencers. Using the free version, you can match up 100 people and 100 companies per month. If you want to continue using the free version be careful with your accounts search.
9. SEOquake
SEOquake is a browser extension using which you can perform a thorough SEO analysis of any webpage. All it takes is a single click and everything is done in a jiffy. Using the SEObar you can go to the website of a potential influencer and can get summary of website’s strong point.
The statistics give you information about site’s Alexa Rank, Google Index, Bing Index, SEMrush Rank and many other relevant analytics.
10. Hunter.io
Find email addresses and connect with influencers in seconds with Hunter.io . It is a free chrome extension that helps you build connections with more than 800,000 professionals, you can make 100 searches per month under free plan. Simply enter the domain name into Hunter.io search engine and let it find the email addresses linked with that domain.
Hunter.io is helpful in finding email addresses of people who value your organization or in future may be beneficial for your business. For instance, you may want to connect with a blogger to write a guest post on his blog but you’re unable to find correct email address. Hunter.io will help you find correct email address. Enter person’s name, company, website into Hunter.io, and it will show you the email address. Plus, if you have an email address but aren’t sure of it, enter the same in Hunter.io search and it will let you know if the email address is valid or not.
Besides, this you can use Hunter.io as a plug-in and click on its icon in your browser and it will find any valid email addresses attached to that domain.
11. Personapp
Personapp won’t help you in finding influencers but will surely help you in classifying the individuals you should search for. Persona is a narrative that describes the person your product will be used by. Using it you can create personas for your ideal influencers that is important for influencer marketing to be successful. If you don’t have it you may have to spend time in thinking how should be the persona of an ideal influencer should be. But Personaapp saves you from all this trouble it makes your aware of the step by step process that you should follow the create that ideal image.
Personapp covers factors like behavior patterns, goals, needs, attitudes, beliefs, workflow, skills, and environment.
12. Similar Web
If you are trying to sort out influencers based on demographics, SimilarWeb will prove beneficial. It collects raw data from various sources and provides widespread analysis of websites. For beginners they have free plan that will help them to know how SimilarWeb works and the free version offers 5 results per metric, 1 month of mobile app data and 3 months of web traffic data.
13. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is another freemium product, it offers a deeper understanding of our social footprints and helps to develop smart content strategies. You get to use the free version to see how it works, but you may be able to see limited results only. To see extensive data, you will have to use paid version.
Buzzsumo helps to identify what content is working well, an excellent tool that shows what is popular on social media. It shows you which content is liked by businesses and is shared most, great for knowing what will help you to be successful. Apart from this you can search the content according to your niche and can see which one was most popular. Furthermore, you can see the most shared content, use Influencers and Outreach section find, analyze and follow influencers. In Free version you can see the top 10 influencers to find more you will have to switch to paid version.
14. GroupHigh
Get a centralized list of Influencers connected to specific niche with GroupHigh. It is a great tool for beginners as it helps to determine influencers in your niche and how to approach them. You can search based on 14+ filters including: topical fit, social reach, location, contact, details and affiliate networks.
15 BuzzStream
Buzzstream helps you study, arrange, and find contact information for top influencers on any topic. It also saves your emails and tweets, lets your set reminders to follow up. Furthermore, it tracks your conversations and follows-up with influencers.
These influencer marketing tools will surely help you search the right influencers for your niche. Not only will they ease your quest but will also help you design your action plan for a successful influencer marketing. No way it will be seen with skepticism by the people. Individuals are attracted more towards products that are promoted or recommended by them knows rather than someone who is doing it just for money. You may see advertisements at all places but the ones those who are designed keeping in mind the target audience and their interest have more success ratio as compared to generic ones. Therefore, it is always a good to do extensive research before jumping to any conclusion. These tools will prove beneficial for both beginners and advanced marketers. They will not only connect you to influencer but will also let you design something that is tailor made for them.
