How to search on Instagram and find influencers for your account

Working with influencers is an important part of every brand’s marketing strategy - they bring the most impressive traffic numbers and raise sales rates significantly. Searching for the account of the right Instagram influencer is not the easiest task, but Combin is here to save time and help you find lots of potential influencers.

Combin’s functionality allows using 3 influencer searching strategies:

1. Searching competitors’ followers and following lists

Open Search tab, pick user search and type in competitor’s username, specifying followers/commenters’ last activity time and search results number. After getting the results, sort them by number of followers.

Accounts at the top of the list could be your potential influencers - check their profiles for more information and contact them about the details of possible partnership if they seem suitable for advertising your product.

2. Searching popular Instagram posts by relevant hashtags and locations

Open Search tab, pick posts search, type in relevant to your business hashtags/locations, specifying post date and search results number. Sort the results by number of likes/comments, look up the posts uploaders’ profiles. When picking an influencer, pay attention to the following:

• Make sure real person is managing the account. Potential influencer’s account shouldn’t look spammy - focus on the image quality, the language and meaning of the captions and account description, to the way they communicate with the followers, if they do at all.

• Don’t pick the influencer based only on their huge following. It doesn’t always mean success + it can easily be just an army of bots. In order to prevent dealing with the latter, check a handful of the posts and see how many comments the account receives on average - the more the following rate, the more comments there should naturally be. Be aware of shady accounts with massive following and single to no comments under their posts.

3. Searching popular posts’ authors by event hashtags

Open Search tab, pick posts search, type in relevant event hashtag, specifying post date and search results number. After getting the results, sort them by number of likes/comments. Look through the hottest content and visit profiles of authors’ posts - potential influencers for your brand.

4. Searching by accounts’ bio

Open Search tab, pick the users search, select search by bio. Type in a keyphrase the potential influencer could have in their profile, depending on your business field and location (for example, ‘fashionista seattle.’) Sort and filter the found accounts, hover the cursor over their profiles to see more information (bio text, their language and gender.)

Note that search by bio works the same way Instagram search does, so it doesn’t bring over 100 results and cannot be updated.