Do you want to run an influencer marketing campaign? Wondering how you can find influencers who align with your brand’s goals?
It can be hard to find influencers on social media. It can be time-consuming to manually search for profiles that meet your criteria. You could also outsource your campaign and hire an agency, but you will need to be prepared to spend hundreds of thousands or even thousands of dollars per month.
There’s an alternative: An AI-powered platform that helps marketers find influencers according to their specific needs. There are many platforms available, but today we’re going to focus on one: Heepsy.
About Heepsy
Heepsy is an influencer marketing platform that helps you find influencers on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. You can search over 11 million influencers using filters that will help you find exactly what you are looking for. You can then analyze their profiles right away. No waiting for media kits or calculating metrics manually.
Heepsy isn’t like other platforms that require an annual commitment. Instead, you can subscribe on a monthly basis and cancel at any time. Three plans are available to suit different needs and price points: the Starter Plan and the Business Plan.
How to locate influencers
Open Heepsy once you have decided which types of influencers are best for your campaign. Before you can search, you need to know your goal, target audience, budget and timeframe.
On Heepsy, set the search engine for the desired network. You can first search using keywords, categories or handles by using the search bar at top of screen. You can also use the search filters.
To find Instagram influencers, you can use the following filters:
- Categories: Choose from many categories, like beauty, fashion and fitness.
- Locate: Limit your search results to a country or region
- Followers: Define the desired number of followers
- Publications: Choose the frequency of posts or the date of the last post
- Engagement: Choose the engagement rate
- Type of Influencer: Show only verified influencers.
- Contact: Search for influencers with public contact info or profiles on other social networks.
- Audience: Choose the demographics of influencers’ audience
- Authenticity: Find influencers with authentic audiences
- Promotional Activity: Get a cost estimate and see which influencers have a certain percentage of branded posts
To find YouTube influencers, use the following:
- Location: Choose the country
- Subscribers: Set the number of subscribers
- Views: Select the number of views or the average view per video
- Videos: Search according to the total video, videos per week, or most recent video
- Channel: Set the date that the channel was established
- Type of Influencer: Show only verified channels
- Contact: Find influencers who have public email addresses or are active on another social network
For TikTok creators, you can use these filters:
- Followers: Choose the followers range
- Engagement: Select the engagement rate
- Views: Search by average views per video
- Influencer Type: Find verified TikTokers
- Contact: Show only TikTok creators with public emails or profiles on other specific networks
Tips for how to Search
These are some best practices to make the most of your Heepsy search:
- Before you begin searching, define your goals and target audience. These will help you decide what kind of influencers to search for.
- Be flexible. For example, don’t discount influencers younger than 24 if your target audience is between 25 and 35. These influencers might be perfect for your campaign and might even fit your target audience perfectly.
- You can run separate searches for different categories, such as fashion and beauty. This will ensure you get the best results.
- Search for multiple keywords separately if you are searching for the same keyword. Heepsy will only show profiles that contain all keywords if you search for multiple keywords at once, so you might not get the results you want.
Analyzing profiles
The platform will return influencer cards that match your criteria. These cards provide basic metrics about the influencer.
To open the profile of an influencer, click on any one of these cards. You can view more details about the influencer’s performance and get a preview of their profile.
An influencer profile as seen on Heepsy.
The available metrics depend on which search you used (Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube). But, for example, for Instagram, you’ll see the following metrics:
- Quality Score: An aggregated evaluation of the audience and the influencer’s connection to them
- Engagement rate: The amount of interaction between an influencer and their followers
- Video and photo post metrics: Average views, likes, and comments
- Cost estimation: An estimate of how much the influencer charges
- Follower growth rate: How followers have grown over time
- Post frequency: How many posts the influencer makes per week
- Ratio comments/likes: How many comments they have per like
- Followers/following ratio: How many people follow them compared to how many they follow
- Brand mentions: Branded content and its stats like engagement and average likes
Here’s an example of engagement rate analysis. Heepsy compares influencers with their peers on the same network.
The platform also offers audience insights, if you have the Heepsy Gold Plan. AI analyzes the followers of an influencer and the users who interact with their profile. The AI then gives you information about the audience demographics (age and gender, location, and language) and authenticity.
This example shows that 70% of this influencer’s audience is German.
To ensure that your target audience is being reached by the influencer, it’s worth checking into their audience. It is important to understand that the audience and influencers don’t always have everything in common.
How to avoid fake influencers
Fraud is a top concern among influencer marketers. Fake followers, fake likes, and fake comments can be bought easily online. But there are some things you can do to ensure you don’t spend your marketing budget on bots.
- Extremely high engagement rate could indicate that an influencer bought likes/comments. Heepsy will give you an assessment of the engagement and how influencers compare to their peers, so you can see if their engagement rate is suspiciously high.
- Slow and steady is the key to good follower growth. You might notice sudden increases in followers. These could indicate that an influencer is buying fake followers. You should check if they have a giveaway or gone viral. But if you can’t find any logical reasons, look deeper into their audience.
- You should check their comments/likes ratio. Influencers may buy fake likes, but not fake comments. A low ratio could show this.
- You can check the audience authenticity analysis to determine how suspicious their audience is. You can analyze this on social media if you don’t have Heepsy, but it will take a lot longer. To see if the influencers look real, scan through their followers, likers and commenters. Bots don’t usually have profiles, don’t use meaningful handles and make comments that are unnatural or off-topic.
Organizing influencers
You can also create custom lists on Heepsy to save search results. Different lists can be created for different campaign types, locations, and other criteria. Once you have added influencers to your list, you can view aggregate metrics or compare them side by side.
A sample list that was created using Heepsy.
You can also add notes, ratings and statuses to your list. This is useful if you’re working in teams, so everyone stays on the same page.
Conclusion
Heepsy is a great platform to help you find influencers for your next campaign. The golden rule of influencer discovery is to find influencers who have healthy performance metrics and align with your brand.And Heepsy helps you do just that.
