Influencer Marketing Tools for Finding and Analyzing Influencers

Brands are using influencer marketing to expand their reach and increase the likelihood of resonating with their target audience.

For example, a food brand might target influential food bloggers in the hope that they will write or tweet about their products and promotions. Food brands can also partner up with trendy or up-and-coming influencers who are making waves within their communities to build brand awareness with their audiences, as this coffee brand did.

An influencer acts like a megaphone spreading a brand’s message to potential customers. Typically, these individuals will hold a great deal of authority within certain communities and on specific topics.

An endorsement by an influencer means that prospective buyers are more likely to be receptive to a brand’s message.

We wrote an in-depth guide on how to use influencer marketing for lead generation.

Influencer marketing is a tricky landscape to traverse. Finding the right social media influencer is key to success, but knowing where to start and how to manage these relationships can be overwhelming.

Thankfully, there are many tools that can help you identify suitable influencers and figure out which individuals will help deliver your message to the right audience. It’s worth noting that the majority of these tools work on a freemium model; however, the free features can still be robust enough to cover the basics of influencer research.

But first things first: What are influencer marketing tools?

An influencer marketing tool is a software solution that brands can use to scale their influencer marketing programs, from discovering and managing relationships with influencers to managing the brand’s influencer strategy and campaign execution and reporting. 

A powerful influencer marketing solution can help you:

• Discover the right creators faster
• Manage influencers more efficiently
• Automate campaign reporting and reduce time spent on administrative tasks
• Reveal valuable insights about your campaigns and latest social media trends
• Understand the ROI of your campaigns and make adjustments where necessary
• And more

Without technology, influencer marketing is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. From researching creators to reviewing ROI, a dedicated platform is the best way to see results from your collaborations.

Without further ado, let’s get to our curated list of the best influencer marketing tools.

Top eight influencer marketing tools

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo brings together content sharing analytics and influencer identification into one simple dashboard. The first feature allows you to search for the most popular content shared around a certain topic and identify who shared it. The second feature helps you find influencers based on keywords and hashtags.

BuzzSumo is particularly useful for content marketers. You can get a quick overview of what content is already working well in your network and then identify the individuals who will be able to amplify your own content marketing.

The search functionality allows you to filter influencers by type, such as bloggers, companies, and journalists. This is very useful if you have a clear idea of the types of influencers you want to engage with.

For example, a PR professional might only want to find journalists to pitch stories to, while a content marketer might want to make sure that the influencer has a blog to publish on.

Brandwatch Influence

Brandwatch Influence is the end-to-end influencer marketing platform to help you save time and run more effective influencer campaigns, eliminating time wasters like manual influencer research and manual tracking and reporting.

The platform’s powerful influencer search feature can help you define audiences using a number of filters, including social followers, engagements, and audience demographics. You can also segment creators by country, language, keywords, and more.

With Influence, brands can also manage influencer relationships in their private CRM, including applications and onboarding, contract management, correspondence, contact and payment details, influencer contact details, and campaign deliverables and tracking.

On top of that, you can easily create sales materials to share with a potential advertiser via a live link.

Finally, the platform’s dataset includes over 30 million influencer profiles across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a social media management dashboard tool for Twitter that offers a lot of extra functionality. And some of these make it a great influencer marketing tool.

For a start, their search function is excellent, letting you use the Twitter search operators and then save your searches as columns that will update in real-time. Perfect for looking at subjects or events to see who is talking about them.

On top of that, you can build lists of accounts and create updating columns with them too. This is excellent when you have a list of influencers and want to keep an eye on what they’re saying. You can also start segmenting your list, meaning you get a collection of carefully curated timelines.

TweetDeck is perfect for bringing some order to your influencer marketing.

Klear

Klear is great for finding influencers already engaging with you and those within your network. One of the most useful features is the ability to filter influencers by celebrities, power users, casual users, and novices.

When conducting influencer targeting, it’s important to set realistic targets.

Reaching out to the likes of Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, and Rihanna is the marketing equivalent of buying a lottery ticket. Instead, you should aim to find influencers who can reach a large number of people and are receptive to the message you are promoting.

Klear comes packed with useful demographic features that allow you to see which types of people are following the influencers you are considering targeting. Matching this demographic data to your audience means you will have a better chance of delivering your message to the right people.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a great tool that allows you to search for keywords in Twitter user bios and sort individuals to find those with the largest reach and most authority.

The free version of the tool also comes with a few handy analytics features, such as the ability to compare the followers of up to three different Twitter accounts.

This particular feature can be used to identify social media influencers who are following your competitors but aren’t following you.

In the example below, you can see how you can quickly generate a list of beauty vloggers.

Kred

Kred is a good entry-level tool for those interested in getting to grips with influencer metrics. Influence is measured by evaluating mentions, retweets, replies, and follows on Twitter.

Kred also offers an ‘Outreach Score’ based on how often you retweet, reply, and mention other people.

Both metrics are combined to give a synopsis of how influential and active an individual is within certain communities such as marketing, social media, tech, sports, etc.

Trend.io

Positioned as a custom content creation platform, Trend.io is a curated network of creators, aka an influencer marketplace. Instead of buying pre-packaged services, brands and agencies can create projects and have influencers apply. It’s ideal for brands with a project in mind who are just looking for talent to work with.

Anyone can become an influencer on the platform, and it’s free to join for creators.

Upfluence

Suggested as a good fit for SMBs by Capterra, Upfluence is an influencer marketing platform for e-commerce and social commerce. 

Upfluence’s database contains over three million vetted influencers. Its influencer discovery tools can be used to find influencers from within the brand’s network of customers or their social media communities.

Key takeaways

Running influencer marketing programs involves a lot of time, effort, and managing many moving parts. Brands and agencies should consider using tools for influencer marketing to supercharge their influencer campaigns. 

• A robust influencer marketing solution can help brands make smart, data-driven decisions and boost campaign performance and results.
• Finding the right influencers and managing those relationships in one place will ensure the overall success of your influencer marketing programs.
• An all-in-one influencer marketing tool will become your partner in building and executing a well-oiled influencer marketing strategy.

Influencer marketing doesn’t have to be rocket science. Brandwatch’s Influence makes it easy for brands big and small to manage their influencer marketing initiatives in one centralized platform.

Are you ready to get started with influencer marketing? Schedule a free Influence demo to learn how we can help you connect with the right influencers and track your campaign success.