14 Ways To Find Micro Influencers (Free & Paid Methods!)

Influencer search has always been tough – and it’s getting tougher. Indeed, Modash research found that an eye-watering 87.5% of influencer marketers feel it’s becoming more difficult to track down the right influencers for their brand, product, or campaign.

Tearing your hair out looking for the perfect micro-influencer?

Fear not, because there are still plenty of effective tried-and-trusted methods to find those high-value smaller influencers with authentic voices and super relevant audiences. Here’s how…

1. Use an influencer discovery tool

Modash has a searchable influencer database that lists every creator on Earth for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube with 1k+ followers. That’s over 350 million profiles 🤯 It's the fastest way to build a shortlist of influencers who match your criteria.

You can search using criteria like…

Influencer follower ranges (e.g. 10k – 35k)
The influencer's location, gender, or main language
Minimum engagement rates, or minimum follower growth rates
Whether or not a contact email is available
Their audience demographics
Keywords (e.g. words in bio, or hashtags used)

…and more besides.

Or you can use our AI influencer search feature to find creators based on what’s inside the content (images and videos), not just what the caption says.

After running a search, Modash can also help you to analyze each profile that matches your criteria. Without even reaching out to the creator, you can instantly…

Check audience demographics
Check fake followers & engagement rate (including benchmarks vs. similar creators)
Their past collaborations
Get contact emails (in bulk)
See most popular posts & hashtags used

...and more.

And when you find a bunch of influencers who fit your next campaign, you can reach out to them with personalized, automated bulk email sequences – so you never have to send another manual follow-up email 😮‍💨

Modash also has features for:

Integrating with Gmail, so you can manage your influencer outreach within the tool
Integrating with Shopify, so you can track promo code redemptions per creator
Tracking live influencer content (Who posted? What did they post? How did it perform?)

👉 You can try Modash free for 14 days. Pricing is public, from $199/month.

2. Leverage the search feature and hashtags on social media platforms

Creators rely on hashtags to improve their content distribution. Many users follow hashtags or search for them to discover more content around a topic.

As a brand, you can use hashtags to find niche micro-influencers who align with your brand. In fact, almost three-quarters of influencer marketers rely on hashtags or keywords to find the right influencers.

Most marketers are using five main types of hashtags or keywords to manually search for influencers on social media:

Niche-specific keywords/hashtags such as skincare, fashion, or travel.
Category or product keywords/hashtags such as skirts, earplugs, or makeup.
Credential-specific keywords/hashtags such as nutritionist, food creator, or doctor.
Platform-specific keywords/hashtags such as #tiktokmademebuyit or #booktok.
Content-specific keywords/hashtags such as “get ready with me”, vlogs, or “day in my life”.

And then there are influencer-specific hashtags related to things like account size (e.g. #microinfluencer) and location (e.g. #nyccreator).

Which hashtags you should focus on depends on your brand and what you’re looking for from your micro-influencers. If you’re a lifestyle brand, searching for generic #micro-influencers might be helpful to find the best-performing small creators. Local brands would benefit from using location hashtags to find local influencers. When selling niche products, category hashtags are your best bet.

Overall, your hashtag strategy will be largely trial-and-error. Search for all related hashtags you can think of and spend some time vetting each influencer profile. Look for the most views on Instagram Reels and TikTok videos for the hashtag to find well-performing micro-influencers.

For YouTube, use the search functionality to find influencers using your desired keywords. Think: what would my audience search for?

For example, if you’re a fashion brand selling sustainable clothing in the UK, search for “sustainable fashion brands UK” and see the creators whose videos pop up top in the search.

‍🤓 Pro tip: Don’t be limited by platform. Sure, you might be planning a YouTube campaign – but you might end up finding the perfect micro influencer on Insta or TikTok.

Ultimately, while manual searching is a viable strategy for small-scale recruitment, it’s a seriously heavy lift, as Victor Wiśniowski explains.

You save time (and ultimately money) by using software because shortlisting influencers and asking each one of them for metrics takes so long. And once they reply with their metrics, you might realize they aren’t a fit.

Victor Wiśniowski Founder and Influencer Marketing Specialist

3. Find micro-influencers who are creating UGC for your brand or following you already

Micro-influencers are proactive in hunting for new products that might be helpful for their audience and creating user-generated content for brands they’d like to partner with. Keep an eye out for small creators already posting reviews about your products or tagging you in their relevant posts – they might already find your brand interesting and your merchandise useful.

For example, beauty and wellness micro-influencer, Lily, posted casual photos about everyday things and included BlendJet (along with some other brands) in her post without being asked or paid.

She has over 26K followers and would make an excellent micro-influencer for BlendJet as she already uses their product and has a decent audience size.

Along with tracking your user-generated content, also regularly run your eye through your followers’ list. You might hit a pot of gold by discovering that a perfect-fit micro-influencer is already following your brand.

The influencer collaborations coming out of these scenarios is likely to be organic and authentic since the micro-creator is already aware of your brand and finds it useful. Influencer outreach to these micro-influencers is also easier because you already have an “in” with them.

4. Convert top-performing affiliates into paid influencers

Running your own affiliate program?

The Pareto Principle holds that approximately 80% of your revenue will be generated by just 20% of affiliates. Those are the folks you want to keep working with long-term, so consider turning them into paid micro-influencers.

Bear in mind that top performers will have lots of opportunities. At peak periods like Black Friday and Christmas, they're very likely to have other paid partnerships on the table, and they’ll (understandably) prioritize those deals over creating affiliate content for you with zero guarantee of payments.

If they're that good, it’s best to lock them down and reward them for focusing on your brand. Or, as Beyoncé put it, “If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it.”

🤓 Pro tip: Modash gives you a full breakdown of which affiliates are driving the most sales and revenue, making it easy to identify potential future influencers.

👉 Learn more: Using Influencer & Affiliate Marketing Together: Benefits & Tips

5. Find micro-influencers who are adjacent to your niche

(Hat tip to Maia Pedro, influencer marketing lead at Bitpanda, for this tip. Listen to our full conversation with Maia here.)

Partnering with niche creators is a good way to scale your influencer marketing efforts. For example, if you’re delivering healthy, nutrient-rich meals to people’s doorstep, fitness influencers are your natural go-to choice for micro-influencers. But so are busy moms who might not have the time to whip up something healthy and delicious for their kids. Metabolic Meals realized this and started partnering with micro-influencers of both kinds – from athletes like Allison to moms like Sharon.

Instead of limiting yourself to one type of niche creator, see if you can widen your horizons and find micro-influencers in adjacent categories.

6. Find doppelgangers of micro-influencers you like

Found a micro-influencer you like? Find similar ones using the “down” arrow on Instagram and TikTok:

These creators are likely to have the same kind of audience and are creating the same type of content.

Other ways to find micro-influencer doppelgangers:

If you scroll Instagram and TikTok long enough, the algorithm will also start showing these influencers in your Explore or For You page.
Micro-influencers often collaborate with each other to grow their audience. If you’ve found a micro-influencer you like, scroll through their posts and check if they’ve collaborated with another micro-influencer.

YouTube doesn’t have the same kind of arrow, but look for “related” videos on the right hand side to find similar creators creating videos on the same topic.

All these methods require thorough, time-intensive vetting.

To save some time, you can use Modash’s influencer lookalike tool. For example, if you want to find TikTok influencers similar to @u_beautylauren, enter her profile URL in the ‘Search by Username’ tag, and Modash will give you a list of influencer lookalikes who have the same type of audience and produce similar content.

7. Find your competitors’ influencers

Don’t fancy running your own influencer recruitment campaigns? Let your competitors do the hard work for you!

There are a couple different ways to do this.

One approach is to use a backlink analysis tool like Ahrefs, which lets you view the websites that link to your competitor’s site most often.

Chances are some of the names on that list will be affiliate/influencer sites – so you can reach out and ask if they want to collaborate with you as well (or instead).

Or, if you’re a Modash customer, try searching our influencer database for profiles that…

Mention your competitors
Use influencer-friendly hashtags and phrases like #brandambassador and “discount code”

Even if you don’t pay for Modash, you can use our free tools to find sponsored content examples for hundreds of brands, including social handles and basic metrics for each influencer:

‍Pretty generous of us, huh?

8. Ask for referrals

The influencer marketing industry is a tightly-knit community. If micro-influencer marketing isn’t your first rodeo, ask your old pals for recommendations for other good micro-influencers. They might have names to offer or know mutual micro-influencers who are a good fit for your brand.

Even other nano-influencers or macro-creators might know some micro-influencers who’d be a good fit for your brand.

Here’s a script you can tweak:

“Hey {influencer name},

We loved partnering with you on {1-2 personalized lines about the campaign you partnered with them on} and can’t wait to chat about future collaborations!

In the meantime, we were wondering if you had any recommendations for micro-influencers on {social media platform}? We’re looking to partner with micro-creators influencers for our new campaign, and an intro from you would be super helpful! Specifically, we’re looking for micro-influencers creators who… {send some requirements like niche, engagement rate, and other metrics you’re looking for}.

Do you have anyone in mind who might be a good fit for {company name}? No worries if not!”

Talk soon,

{Your name}”

⚡ Pro-tip: It’s also worth checking the comment section of macro-influencers’ posts to see if any micro-influencers have commented. It’s not particularly scalable, but you might get lucky and land on an excellent micro-influencer. For instance, here’s micro-influencer Siân (@wavycurlysian) commenting on a post from macro-influencer Sophie Marie (@sophiemariecurly):

9. Check out the speaker lists for industry conferences

Industry events typically have a bunch of different speakers – and some of those speakers will be potential micro-influencers.

For instance, say you’re working for a cosmetics brand targeting audiences in the UAE. In that case, you might Google something like “middle east beauty expo” and stumble across the following event…

…which, in turn leads you to an agenda page featuring various events and speaker names:

Then it’s simply a case of Googling those names to see if any could be potential micro-influencers for your brand. Like this guy, who specializes in cruelty-free makeup:

If that’s a key focus for your (imaginary) brand, it could be worth reaching out to Armand to see if he fancies getting involved.

10. Work with an influencer marketing agency

The influencer marketing industry is full of agencies that can help you find the perfect micro-influencers for your brand. The pros of working with a full-fledged influencer marketing agency are they’re experts in their field, so you aren’t gambling your hard-earned money.

Another advantage is agencies do the heavy lifting for you – from influencer hunting, managing influencer payments, drafting influencer contracts, and maintaining influencer relationships.

The downside is working with an agency can be heavy on the pocket, and there’s no guarantee an influencer marketing agency will have a large enough database of micro-influencers for you.

If you have the budget, you can ease some of these cons by thoroughly examining influencer marketing agencies before committing to one. Some questions you should ask are:

What does this influencer marketing agency specialize in? They might be known for a particular industry, like fitness brands, or perhaps their expertise is in one platform, like Instagram.
Who are the faces behind the influencer marketing agency? If the agency is run by well-known experts who have run successful influencer marketing campaigns in the past, you know you’re in good hands.
How many influencers does the agency have access to? Some agencies strictly use their own network of influencers, while others have a more detail-oriented approach of using tools and manual vetting. You want the latter to access a large pool of micro-influencers.

👉 Learn more: 18 Top Instagram Influencer Marketing Agencies

11. Search on Google and ChatGPT

It can be a little cumbersome, but you can find listicles of excellent micro-influencers on Google. Enter “your industry + micro-influencer” and you’ll get a list of articles (like this) detailing the specifics of each influencer.

If you opt to search on Google, remember only to read recent articles. Why? The influencer marketing industry evolves by the minute. A fast-growing influencer might climb the ranks from a nano to a micro to a macro-influencer by the time you read the article.

The solution is simple: go to “tools” below the search bar and select the timeline to “past year” or “past month” to only get a list of the articles published in the time frame you selected.

Don’t read only a couple of articles. Scour as many as you can to find unique and unheard-of micro-influencers to evaluate.

You can also ask ChatGPT. Go for the simple, “tell me 10 micro-influencers in the {industry}” or go for a more detailed script like this:

If you prefer the detailed version, here’s the script you can tweak:

“You're an influencer manager for {your company}. The brand sells {product you sell}. Your job is to find micro-influencers for the brand with a following of 10,000 to 100,000 on Instagram. The influencer should create {the kind of content your ideal micro-influencer would create}. Give me a list of three micro-influencers who meet this criteria.”

But remember: ChatGPT is notorious for making stuff up.

Cross-check the list before playing with the prompts to minimize wasting your time on non-existent influencers.

12. Run inbound influencer recruitment

In an ideal world, you’d never have to search for micro-influencers yourself – they’d come to you instead.

That’s the idea of inbound influencer recruitment. Over half of brands say they already receive inbound requests from influencers eager to collaborate with them, so why not join them?

One inbound approach is to ask your email list (if you have one). It’s simple: just send an email asking if any of your subscribers have an existing audience and are interested in promoting your product.

Given that they’ve opted-in to your newsletter, there’s a good chance they already like your brand, which often makes their content feel more authentic. (Plus you might be able to negotiate a better rate for your collaboration).

Another option is to build a brand ambassador program to attract micro-influencers who genuinely love your products and are interested in partnering with you long-term.

Take Bolt. It has 500+ ambassadors across 18 countries – and they played a key role in the ride-hailing app becoming one of Europe’s fastest-growing companies.

How to put the spotlight on your ambassador program?

Ask your existing influencers, employees, and network to share your micro-influencer callout on their social media or newsletter
Share details about your ambassador program on order confirmation emails, newsletters, and all other forms of customer communication
Promote the exclusivity and benefits of your ambassador program on social media
Create a landing page for your ambassador program so would-be influencers can easily sign up, just like accessories brand BURGA does here:

However, starting an ambassador program isn’t a silver bullet for influencer recruitment.

In reality, brands typically find that the majority of applications are far-from-perfect fits. Just like when you’re recruiting for a full-time employee, it’s rare that the best of the best applicants will land in your lap without some outbound effort.

13. Get inspired by your existing audience

Your customers are the best research group for finding trusted micro-influencers. Who do they turn to for product recommendations in your industry? There’s a high chance there’s a similar untapped market in that micro-influencers’ following list.

How to ask your customers for micro-influencer recommendations?

Include a “How did you hear about us?” question for every post-purchase survey. You might be surprised to discover a micro-influencer’s name who recommended your brand.
Run a fine-toothed comb through some of your customers’ following lists on social media and spot micro-influencers they’re following.
Do a customer survey to ask your buyers who they follow on social media and which micro-influencers they trust.

Similarly, Fernanda Marques recommends spending time where your audience hangs out online – because that’s where your brand-fit micro-influencers will be, too.

Instead of hunting for influencers based on metrics alone, step into the world of your audience. If you’re marketing anime products, hang out in anime spaces. If it’s food, scroll foodie TikTok. Get to know how your ideal customers talk, joke, share, and consume.

Fernanda Marques Influencer Marketing Coordinator

14. Browse an influencer marketplace

If you’re looking for a low-touch way to find micro-influencers but don’t have the time or resources to build your own inbound recruitment pipeline, an influencer marketplace could be the way to go.

Platforms like TikTok One and Instagram’s imaginatively titled Creator Marketplace bring together brands and vetted influencers, allowing you to track down potential influencer partners using keywords and filters.

You can also connect with influencers who’ve actively expressed an interest in working with your brand.

There are a few downsides to creator marketplaces. For starters, if an influencer hasn’t signed up, they won’t be on there, so you’re not necessarily picking from the cream of the crop. Plus there’s a good chance they’ll be working with a bunch of other brands, which could make their content feel less authentic.

But, on the plus side, you can be pretty confident that any influencers you find in a marketplace will be open to collaborating.

Scale micro-influencer search with Modash

While there are lots of ways to find micro-influencers, the most scalable solution is to use a dedicated influencer search tool like Modash.

Modash makes it easy to identify influencers who match your search criteria, analyze their audience and performance metrics, and explore their existing sponsored content – all without having to reach out first. If they’re a good match, just add them to an automated email sequence. Easy!

👉 See how it all works by starting your free trial of Modash today.

 
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Audience fit is the #1 factor marketers look for in creators, and it’s the #1 reason collabs flop. Learn how to vet creators beyond audience metrics.