How To Find TikTok Influencers: The Ultimate Guide
Have you been searching high and low to find TikTok influencers as part of your influencer marketing strategy?
With TikTok influencers, it’s important to remember that you’re never just buying their social following.
It’s their creativity and understanding of the platform that will set them apart from other creators.
In this comprehensive guide, we are going to show you how to find TikTok influencers for your next influencer marketing campaign.
You will learn how well performed Tiktok search can uncover a lot of possibilities and further aid your influencer marketing efforts.
What is Tiktok?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about TikTok - a video-centric social media platform that is taking the world by storm.
TikTok’s astonishing ascension into popular culture and memes has resulted in the exponential growth of its user base.
The application launched in September 2016 and has experienced a steady rise into the stratosphere.
As of 2021, TikTok currently has a modest 800 million users , becoming the go-to entertainment platform for Gen-Z.
Organic reach on Instagram is rapidly declining and marketers are going to be increasingly looking at TikTok to fill this void.
What is a TikTok influencer?
In the context of social media, an influencer is someone that authority on a particular platform, or several. They can often be regarded as ‘tastemakers’ or ‘trendsetters’ based on the number of people that are following their accounts and have a genuine interest in them.
From a marketing perspective, the worth of an influencer can be evaluated on how many followers they have and the amount of engagement they receive on posts.
During the dawn of social media, marketers found that influencers with large followings had the potential to increase the exposure of their products and services to specific demographics - and then came influencer marketing.
Tiktok search for famous Tiktokers pays off.
Along with the ability to reach thousands or even millions of people, influencers typically also have high social standing, creating consumer confidence in any products or services that they choose to promote.
For brands that are trying to tap into the purchasing power of Generation Z, Tik Tok influencer marketing has become a viable strategy for creating brand exposure and reaching their target audience.
Influencer marketing campaigns are now a common occurrence across all social media platforms and these can often deliver exceptional results.
Who are TikTok influencers?
If you want to reach the coveted attention of Gen Z, you need to create brand awareness on TikTok. It’s all about understanding where people’s eyeballs are and how you can effectively capitalize on the attention in your TikTok marketing strategy.
TikTok was downloaded more than 614 million times from January to November 2019. These staggering statistics are clear evidence that TikTok is where the attention is at.
So, why do you need TikTok influencers to capitalize on this platform’s attention? Why can’t your brand set up its own account and start building an audience? Well, you could certainly try this, but there are a few things that you need to understand about TikTok.
There really is an art to creating TikTok content that resonates with Generation Z and TikTok influencers are already masters of their craft. They understand what works on the platform, and what doesn’t.
An influencer’s unique understanding of how to create impactful content on TikTok, combined with their large audience, is the ultimate recipe for brand awareness.
Influencer marketing is being embraced as a growth strategy by businesses of all shapes and sizes. It is particularly effective for online-based businesses that have a desire to tap into a global audience.
Simply put - influencers on TikTok are the key to your TikTok marketing effort. Now, let me show you how to find TikTok influencers to work with.
Finding TikTok Influencers by Hashtags
Hashtags are a good place to start your Tiktok search. Tiktok hashtags will help you to filter down the types of influencers that you’re looking for. The majority of posts on TikTok contain hashtags, making this a highly effective search tool.
If your brand operates within a very specific niche, you will be able to find TikTok influencers that have used industry-relevant hashtags in existing posts.
If a TikTok influencer is using a specific hashtag, it’s likely that their fanbase actively engages or is at least interested in content relating to this hashtag.
In other words, this means that you’ve found an influencer who has the attention of your target audience.
Once you’ve found a few influencers using hashtags that are relevant to your niche, you can reach out to them for collaboration.
It’s quite possible for a marketing team to simply just task a high-profile TikTok influencer with the challenge of creating brand-sponsored content, but the influencer might not have access to their target audience.
At the same time, you also need the influencer to have a reasonably solid understanding of the audience you are trying to reach, so they can create content that they will find engaging.
Finding TikTok Influencers by Topics
Similar to hashtags, you might simply want to find TikTok influencers who are passionate about specific topics - be it cooking or pets, or even marketing.
You can try to search for specific topics using hashtags, but keep in mind that the hashtags don’t always reflect what influencers are about as they could be used once, for a specific post.
You would need to do extra research on the top, checking out their bio and profiles to find out what is their main topic.
This is rather crucial as you don’t want to collaborate with an influencer whose main audience is interested in pets, while your brand is about the keto diet.
You get the idea.
So how to efficiently search for Tik Tok influencers by topics?
Hypetrace allows you can quickly search for the right influencers with specific categories and topics into the search variables, helping you to find influencers that will fit into your specific niche.
How to find TikTok Influencers by Location?
TikTok has captured the imagination of a global user base. People from every corner of the globe are embracing the creative opportunities of this social media platform, whilst also engaging with the fresh and unique content that is being pumped out on a daily basis by other users.
The visual nature of TikTok content has created a language that transcends geographical location.
There is content on this platform that can entertain and engage the masses.
Finding TikTok Influencers by Country
If you only sell products or services in certain countries, you are going to want to make sure that your influencer marketing campaigns consist of influencers that are based in those counties, as their follower base is more likely to be in the same country.
For instance, if your business sells products or services exclusively to American citizens, partnering with a European TikTok influencer isn’t going to bring you much value, and if it does, it will be greatly limited.
To save yourself hours of browsing TikTok to influencers that meet your location criteria, use Hypetrace to search for TikTok influencers that are located in specific countries.
This is just one of the many variables that you can add to your searches on our platform to filter down the results, helping you find the perfect influencer for your next marketing campaign.
Inside of TikTok, searching for influencers can take a lot of time. Hypetrace places an emphasis on convenience and speed, giving you the tools you need to quickly find TikTok influencers in your country that you can collaborate with to produce engaging content for your marketing campaign.
Finding TikTok Influencers by City
Sometimes, for certain influencer marketing campaigns, you might want to find influencers that are geographically located near to your business.
For example, if you’re a restaurant in Los Angeles, you could collaborate with a food TikTok influencer in Los Angeles and get them to shoot a video inside your restaurant, creating a super-relevant piece of content.
It all depends on the nature of the partnership that you had in mind.
If we go back to our example, getting a TikTok influencer to incorporate the restaurant food into their post cannot be achieved remotely. For a collaboration like this, the influencer would need to show up to the restaurant.
To cut down on unnecessary expenses, it makes sense to find someone that is in the same city with a strong TikTok following. This means that the collaboration will be able to take place with ease.
Alongside being able to search by country, Hypetrace can help you to search for TikTok influencers with an even more narrow lens.
With the filtering, you can find influencers in your area that could bring their creativity and social following to the table.
Finding TikTok Influencers by Follower Size
Now you probably wonder - okay, I can search them by location, but what about their size - specifically - their follower size? How to find Tik Tok influencers based on their follower size and reach?
When you’re trying to find TikTok influencers for your influencer marketing campaign to increase brand awareness, you shouldn’t become fixated on the number of followers that an influencer has. Yes, that’s right, follower count doesn’t always matter.
Ultimately, it all comes down to the relevancy of their followers to your marketing campaign.
If you partner with a TikTok influencer that has millions of followers but very few of these actually match the target audience for your marketing campaign, the content is likely to only engage a small percentage of their followers, despite reaching hundreds of thousands of followers.
If you’re paying the influencer based on the number of followers they have, this suddenly starts to look like a costly investment with limited upside.
We believe that there can be tremendous value in using micro-influencers, that operate within super-focused niches, in your influencer marketing campaigns.
Despite having fewer followers than TikTok megastars, these micro-influencers will have a follower base that is passionate about a very specific interest.
For instance, if you sell donuts, you could find a TikTok micro-influencer that decorates donuts in their videos. They might have fewer followers, but there’s a strong chance that their audience may have an interest in buying your donuts.
With Hypetrace, using an adjustable scale, you can select the minimum and maximum number of followers that a TikTok influencer must have to meet your specific requirements.
This level of freedom and flexibility can help you to find exactly who you’re looking for.
Finding TikTok Influencers by Engagement Rate
You know there’s something fishy going on when a TikTok ‘influencer’ has thousands of followers with very little engagement on their content.
Sometimes, it just doesn’t add up. It’s no good hiring a TikTok influencer with thousands of followers and zero engagement. When you’re searching for the right influencer for your next campaign, engagement rate and follower count are two crucial metrics that you need to pay attention to.
What is Engagement Rate?
Engagement rate is essentially a metric for measuring the level of interaction that a user is getting on their content. This can help you to estimate the percentage of followers that will likely interact with a specific piece of content, through views, likes, and comments. Engagement rates on TikTok can be anywhere from 1% to 70% and more.
For example, an engagement rate of 30% indicates that you could expect up to 30% of a TikTok user’s following to interact with their content.
Calculating Engagement Rate
There are many different ways in which you could attempt to calculate the engagement rate on TikTok.
Here is the equation that can be used quite accurately to calculate engagement rate:
Engagement Rate = ((total number of comments + total number of likes + total number of shares ) / Total number of followers) * 100
The easiest and most straightforward way is to use engagement rate calculators. You can go ahead and calculate the engagement rate with this TikTok engagement rate calculator.
How To Find A TikTok Influencer’s Email
An email will be likely your best communication channel with influencers you will be working with.
To keep everyone on your team in-the-loop email correspondence is often a preferred method of communication when negotiating potential partnership deals.
The question is, how can you quickly find a TikTok influencer’s email address?
Once again, an influencer search engine like Hypetrace is the answer. This is ideal if you need to contact influencers at scale, particularly large influencer marketing campaigns.
When you’re creating a custom filter to search for TikTok influencers on HypeTrace, you can choose to only see profiles that have included their email address on the database by enabling the “has email” option.
How To Export TikTok Influencer Profiles
When you want to evaluate the profiles of TikTok influencers at scale, Hypetrace enables you to export lists of influencers in an easy-to-read format. After adding custom filters to your searches, you can export lists of TikTok influencers for specific niches.
You can then use these focused lists as reference points when you are planning your influencer marketing campaign strategy.
Finding TikTok Influencers: Final Thoughts
Many brands are yet to expose themselves to the world of influencer marketing.
As it becomes increasingly difficult to engage and capture the attention of Gen-Z on other social media platforms, brands will soon be turning their attention to TikTok influencer marketing to reach young audiences.
Turns out, being Tiktok famous has a lot of pros.
Karen is a senior technical writer and copywriter at Hypegrowth. Her area of expertize are social media apps and new media.