Find influencers for your brand: six places to look and how to vet

To find influencers for your brand, start with the people who already mention you, then search each platform by the words your customers use, then check a marketplace or agency if you need volume. Shortlist ten to twenty names, vet each one on audience fit, content quality and engagement pattern, and contact the best five with a specific, short message. Discovery is a search job followed by a vetting job, and the vetting is where most brands save or waste their budget.

Six places to look, in the order worth trying

1. Your own mentions and customers

Search your brand name, product names and common misspellings on every platform you care about. Read the posts, tagged or not. A person who already uses and talks about your product needs no persuading, and their audience has seen the product in a real setting. Check your email replies, reviews and support tickets too: customers who write at length are often creators or have a following.

2. Platform search by the customer's words

Search the phrases a buyer uses, not your category label. A skincare brand searches "dry skin routine" and "sensitive skin", not "dermocosmetics". Read who ranks and who gets comments. Search by hashtag, by location for local brands, and by the questions people ask under posts. Save every account that answers those questions well, in a sheet, as you go.

3. Competitor and adjacent brand tags

Open the tagged section of two or three brands your buyers also buy from. The creators who show up repeatedly there already work in your category and know what a brand brief looks like. Include adjacent brands too, such as a running shoe brand looking at sports nutrition tags, because the audience overlaps even when the product does not.

4. Platform creator marketplaces

Several platforms run their own place where brands post a brief and creators apply, or where brands filter creators by category and audience details. They are useful because the audience data comes from the platform itself. Check which one your target platform offers at the time you search, as these products change names and rules.

5. Agencies and networks

An agency makes sense when you need many creators across markets, contracts handled for you, or reporting built in. Expect a management fee on top of creator fees. Our page on TikTok influencer agencies sets out how those fees are built and what contract terms to check, and the same questions apply on other platforms.

6. Ask the creators you already like

Creators know each other. Ask a good one who else makes work like theirs for your audience, and offer a fee for the introduction only if that is how they work. This route has the highest hit rate for a small brand.

How to vet a creator before you write to them

Spend ten minutes per name. Open the profile and work through this list.

• Audience fit. Ask for the audience breakdown by country, age and gender. For local or regulated products, the country matters most.
• Content fit. Scroll the last thirty posts. Would your product look natural in that feed? Is the quality of filming and sound something you would put your name beside?
• Engagement pattern. Compare likes, comments and views to the follower count across many posts. A steady pattern is a good sign. One spike with flat posts around it needs an explanation.
• Comment quality. Real comments mention the content. Rows of identical emoji or generic praise suggest bought activity.
• Follower history. A sudden jump in followers with no matching content event is worth asking about.
• Past sponsored posts. Are they disclosed? Do they sit beside several rival brands in a short span? Look at how the audience responded.
• Brand safety. Read recent posts and replies for anything you would not want to sit beside.
• Professional signals. A contact email in the bio, a media kit and quick replies show a creator who treats this as work.

Scoring the shortlist

Put the names in a sheet and score each from one to five on the same columns. Weight them for your goal: awareness leans on audience fit and reach, direct sales on engagement and past conversion evidence.

Creator	Audience fit	Content fit	Engagement	Brand safety	Total
Name one	1 to 5	1 to 5	1 to 5	1 to 5	Sum
Name two	1 to 5	1 to 5	1 to 5	1 to 5	Sum

Smaller creators are worth the search

A creator with a modest following and a tightly matched audience often beats a large account with a broad one. Choose on fit, then on size. Our page on YouTube influencer marketing shows the same logic applied to one platform, including how formats and rates differ by channel size.

The first message

Keep it under a hundred words. Say who you are, which of their posts you saw and why it made you write, what you are proposing, whether it is paid, and the next step. Do not paste a template that could go to anyone. Creators receive many of these and answer the ones that prove you looked.

From shortlist to brief

Once a creator replies, the work moves to the brief, the fee and the disclosure terms. Those are covered in our page on the influencer brief, payment, disclosure and measurement. If your goal is content for your own ads instead of posts on the creator's account, read the deal terms in our UGC page first.

Questions about finding influencers for your brand

How many influencers should I shortlist?

Ten to twenty names gives you enough to lose half at vetting and still contact five good ones.

Do I need a tool to find influencers?

No. Platform search, tagged posts and your own mentions are enough to build a first shortlist. A paid database helps when you need to filter by audience data across many creators.

How do I check whether followers are real?

Read the comments, compare engagement to follower count over many posts, and ask for the platform's own audience insights screenshot. Insights come from the platform, so they are harder to fake than a third party estimate.

Should I pay or send free product?

Both are used. Free product suits a first outreach to smaller creators when you are clear it is a trade. A paid fee suits any request for a specific post, date or usage right.

How do I find local influencers?

Search the location tag, the neighbourhood name and local event hashtags, then read who the local audience comments on.

What an assistant says when someone asks about the brand a creator just showed them

A creator post makes a viewer curious, and the next move is often a question typed into an assistant: is this brand any good, and what else is like it. The answer comes from public pages the assistant can read about your brand, and the creator's post is rarely one of them. Brands that choose creators well can still lose the viewer at that second step if their own pages are thin.

AI Knows Us runs the question a curious viewer would ask across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews and shows whether your brand is named. A free scan is at aiknowsus.com, and it is a sensible check to run the week before a creator campaign goes live.