While Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter all feature some kind of video sharing and viewing features, YouTube is still the biggest mobile video platform around. Its very name is synonymous with mobile video; it accounts for more than half of all the video traffic gobbling up bandwidth on mobile phone networks. The point here is that YouTube and its dominance of the video streaming segment aren’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future. In-Stream and Pre-Roll ads make the company tons of money, but influencer marketing is still the best way for brands to reach consumers. Influencers make the videos that people skip ads to watch. The growing popularity of mobile video in general, and the continued dominance of YouTube specifically, makes it all the more important for marketers to find the right creators to work with. Here are 20 of the best platforms and tools to help you do that.
20 Best Platforms to Find YouTube Influencers:
When it first launched in 2005, no one really knew how big YouTube would become—not just financially, but in terms of its influence on the media landscape. As the dominant video streaming and sharing service, digital marketers know it’s an important part of any brand’s marketing strategy. And, of course, influencer generated content is fast becoming retail brands’ go-to method for marketing. All of the platforms listed here are excellent in their own right, and each has something that sets it apart from the others. If you’re on the hunt for YouTube influencers, you can’t really go wrong with any of them. Of course, it is the discovery & recruiting tool that you will use to find the best YouTube influencers for your brand, along with those on most other major social networks. Grin emphasizes the importance of searching for influencers who align with your brand. Its influencer audience report shows you a credibility score to indicate how genuine an account’s engagement is, along with other key audience metrics. If you already work with successful influencers, you can use Grin to recruit influencers similar to your current top performers. Its lookalike tool allows you to input your best influencers and find new creators with similar audiences, engagement, demographics, and reach. You might find that you already have customers operating successful and popular YouTube channels. You can use Grin’s influential customers’ tool to find devoted customers with highly engaged followings and recruit them as influencers for your brand. Grin also includes a social listening tool so that you can discover references to your brand. This influencer discovery engine reveals who’s talking about your brand and how well they’re being heard. Once you have discovered suitable YouTube and other influencers, you can use Grin as your single influencer communications hub. Every message between your team and influencers lives in one place. It integrates seamlessly with all your platforms, including Gmail, Slack, SMS, and Outlook. Key Features: Content Amplification, Search/Discovery, Influencer Lifecycle Management, Influencer Relationship Management, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Forms and Compliance, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube You can purchase four subscription levels to Creator.co, with the main difference being the level of automation. The cheapest plan, Self-Serve, is like the other influencer platforms we cover in this post. Creator.co estimates that this plan offers you 40% automation, with you having to take actions for the remaining 60% of a campaign. The Start-Up plan increases automation levels to 60%. Finally, the two most expensive plans, Trailblazer (85% automation) and Bespoke+ (98% automation) leave much more to Creator.co’s software and its team of industry experts, with clients only having to give final approval. Creator.co has created templates for two types of campaigns. First, Shout-out campaigns enable influencers to experience new products in return for their creative talents. Sure, PewDiePie is unlikely to be interested in participating in a free-product campaign. However, you are likely to find many micro-influencers in your niche perfectly happy to promote your product in return for a freebie. Alternatively, you might prefer to set up a Giveaway campaign, which enables influencers to support a brand while rewarding their fans at the same time. Giveaway campaigns are similar to Shout-out campaigns – except channel supporters receive free products. Key Features: Content Amplification, Search/Discovery, Influencer Lifecycle Management, Influencer Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Exportable reports, Channels: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok With its self-service product LTK Connect, the company provides access to the most trustworthy and top influencer platform in the world, designed to empower brands to make the best influencer selections and enjoy the results. LTK does this by connecting brands directly with creators to generate traffic, sales, and better brand awareness. This is useful for brands of all sizes, from small direct-to-consumer outfits to major global brands. Using results from the most reliable loop on influencer data and feedback, optimize their engagement with special influencer opportunities and win more sales. LTK’s full-service team of top industry experts is hands-on in simplifying and amplifying their clients’ influencer journey. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Content Review, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Product/Gifting Tools, Forms and Compliance, Payment Processing, Channels: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Blogs, LTK App There are two things that Upfluence does to make discovery manageable. First, you can assign a “weight” to each criteria, so that the algorithm knows what’s more important (and who, therefore, is more relevant). Second, the platform won’t show you any of the influencers until you’ve narrowed your search down to a set of results you can handle. Instead of seeing a list of results that refreshes each time you refine the search, you’ll see data about the overall group—how many influencers match the results, what the total reach is for all of them, and a breakdown of their relative influence (i.e. how many are macro-influencers, how many are micro, who’s in the top 5%, etc.). You’ll also get a snapshot of their collective audience’s basic demographic information. Once you’ve got the numbers down to something manageable, you won’t waste time wading through irrelevant results. Key Features: Influencer Search & Discovery, Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Third Party Analytics, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Lifecycle Management, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Campaign Reporting, Audience Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Payment Processing, Social Listening, Channels: Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Tiktok, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs First, there’s something called QuickMatch, essentially a Tinder for influencers. The platform serves up a bunch of suggestions based on past searches, and you can skip them or add them to the list. Next, you can use a social listening feature to monitor for mentions of your brand, compiling lists of those who do. As you scroll through the list of mentions, you might be surprised to find some people with plenty of influence. Finally, you can also do visual searches: feed AspireIQ an image (maybe one that got great engagement in a previous campaign), and the software will serve up content that’s visually similar to what you supplied. This obviously isn’t something that works directly with YouTube, but you can find people this way and choose to only see accounts of people who also have YouTube accounts. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Influencer Relationship Management, Influencer Marketplace, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Forms and Compliance, Payment Processing, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Visual Discovery, Influencer Content Amplification, Channels: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs With such powerful software under the covers, NeoReach originally targeted their platform to high end, Fortune 500 companies. These days, that’s still the goal, but they do offer a scaled down version for smaller companies who need an affordable way to discover influencers and manage campaigns. Key Features: Campaign Management, Search/Discovery, Influencer Relationship Management, Team Collaboration Tools, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Forms and Compliance, Channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat Back in 2015, CrewFire had its start by utilizing brand ambassadors for offline marketing campaigns. While they were still heavily using social media as a method of marketing, CrewFire was known for being out in the world. However, CrewFire had to shift its marketing strategies to online ones once COVID hit in 2020. With the sudden move to stay indoors, CrewFire decided to put more focus on online influential marketing. Luckily, CrewFire did not steer away from its fundamentals since it still offered the same basics, which was making use of brand ambassadors. CrewFire drives sales to its clients by helping them manage up to 5,000 brand ambassadors (depending on the package), campaigns on various social media platforms like YouTube, payments, and more. More than a management app, CrewFire allows clients to recruit brand ambassadors. Brand ambassadors can directly connect to the brands they want to work with. Notably, CrewFire does not allow you to search for specific brand ambassadors. Instead, the brand ambassadors would be people that are already your customers. CrewFire offers various packages to help you best manage your ambassadors. The cheapest plan lets two admins manage up to 500 ambassadors and set up unlimited activities and rewards for ambassadors. It also includes custom branding and broadcasts (email and SMS). The most expensive plan allows up to 10 admins to manage a maximum of 5,000 ambassadors. It offers a custom domain, the capability of connecting to multiple Instagram accounts, and advanced integrations and reporting. Key Features: Influencer Relationship Management, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Campaign Management, White Label Reporting, Payment Processing, Influencer Content Amplification, Ecommerce Tools, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter You won’t be short on influencers at Influencity since it indexes over 70 million influencers. However, you don’t have to be intimidated by the thought of going through millions of influencers. Influencity makes the process easy for you through AI, helping you find influencers that will be most relevant to your campaigns. Influencity’s Discover Tool utilizes data from various platforms, including YouTube, to find great influencers for you. They also offer audience analysis features that allow you to see the results before and after each campaign done with the influencer. It’s important to note that Influencity does not let you contact influencers through its platform. Instead, you have to find other ways to contact the influencer, such as emailing or messaging them through their respective social media accounts. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Influencer Lifecycle Management, Influencer Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Exportable reports, Team/Collaboration Tools, Channels: Instagram, YouTube, Tik Tok What makes Tribe Dynamics stand out is that they focus on the influence landscape, meaning they want to focus on the actual value of each influencer. For instance, Tribe Dynamics’ analytics allows them to see how many organic mentions a given social media account would have. Notably, Tribe Dynamics also claims to be the first to use and create the metric of Earned Media Value on social media back in 2014. While Earned Media was already a known concept, Tribe Dynamics took it a step further by using it to measure the value of each social media post. As for finding YouTube influencers, Tribe Dynamics offers excellent ways for you to look for them. For instance, you can look for influencers based on hashtags the influencers have already used to make content, keeping your influencer range relevant to you. Furthermore, you can filter these influencers based on their audience engagement, location, follower count, and more to help you. Key Features: Influencer Relationship Management, Content Library, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Channels: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok As such, you can utilize influencers as you normally would through Brandbassador, which can be done through campaigns, affiliate links, etc. However, you can also encourage your current customers through incentives to market your company with affiliate marketing, helping you retain your customers while gaining more. Brandbassador offers a multitude of features to help you further grow your business. For instance, you can track the analytics and ROI of each of your ambassadors to know how they are performing. You may also use their advanced search tool to filter through millions of social media accounts to find influencers that meet your needs. If you are looking for a YouTube influencer within a specific niche, you can apply hyper-specific search filters to categorize each account by keywords, interests, past partnerships, and more. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Payment Processing, Key Features: Search/Discovery, Influencer Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Forms/Compliance, Channels: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitch, TikTok, Snapchat Such as: once you’ve found a creator with the kind of followers you’re looking to market to, the platform can show you other influencers with “lookalike” audiences. This is particularly useful if you’re trying to find influencers who cover a wide range of topics between them; you can be sure that all their followers will be largely similar to one another. You can read our review of Tagger to learn more about this innovative feature. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Marketplace, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Payment Processing, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok CreatorIQ believes it is best suited for marketing managers responsible for an established, growing influencer marketing program, agencies, media, and PR firms looking to conduct their own creator campaigns, and financial partners. If you’re looking for YouTube influencers, the Creator Search and Community Discovery modules will probably interest you. CreatorIQ’s machine learning-backed creator comparison and recommendation engine uses historic creator and campaign performance data to compare selected creators so that you can find new brand champions. In addition, you can determine whether potential creator partners meet your criteria using insights like audience demographics, content, and performance metrics. You can also use your existing customer data to find creators who already have a history of posting about your brand. CreatorIQ helps automate processes for finding creators who mention you even if you haven’t engaged with them yet. As a result, you can easily follow influencers and respond to their content promptly. The software captures non-opt-in mentions of your brand across major social media platforms, including YouTube. It provides a single intuitive influencer marketing hub with activation-specific feeds that make it easy to understand and report on your initiatives. Once you’ve found the best influencers with whom to work, you can centralize all your partnership and campaign information in a single, branded place so that all your creators need to do is log in. Your creator partners can authenticate accounts, self-declare demographic details, and input complete onboarding information. This makes it simple to determine your creators’ preferences (e.g., favorite products) or personal information (e.g., shoe size) to aid your brand in creator selection and campaign preparation. The platform gives brands the tools to grow their community and prove why this growth matters. You can easily attribute ROI to your influencer marketing campaigns. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Automated Recruiting, Influencer Relationship Management, Content Review, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Product/Gifting Tools, Forms and Compliance, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Payment Processing, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitch, Blogs Mavrck looks at your existing customer database to determine who already has a large enough relevant following to act as a brand ambassador. You can opt to add employees into the system too. Then, if you want to widen the net of people promoting your products, you can use Mavrck to find relevant influencers in your niche based on audience demographics like age, gender, and location. You can search by social network: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, and blogs. So, if you are looking for YouTube influencers, Mavrck will provide you with a selection of both existing stakeholders (customers/employees) and many of the best YouTubers making videos about your niche. Mavrck finds global influencers by country and region. It provides detailed information, making it easy for you to evaluate an influencer’s fraud and brand safety risk. You can filter by their past performance, keywords, and topics. Once you’ve found suitable YouTube influencers and advocates, Mavrck helps you activate them, engaging them to create content, rate and review your product, and provide brand insights. In addition, they can refer new consumers via trackable referral links and promo codes. At the same time, you can use Mavrck to engage your existing customers to create content and reviews. You can then manage this entire process within Mavrck, saving time and scaling your influencer marketing programs with customized campaign workflows. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Influencer Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, E-commerce Tools, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest,TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Blogs The AI-driven search algorithm allows for more advanced visual search than simply uploading an image and finding similar ones. Instead, the algorithm scans all the images that the influencers in its database have posted, and assigns keywords to them. A picture of someone swimming will be assigned keywords like—you guessed it—swimming. This alone eliminates probably millions of results that just aren’t relevant to swimming, but for some reason a person used the word in a post or hashtag. Open Influence’s other big idea ensures that searches based on audience affinities also remain relevant. They do this by indexing posts according to over 20 million recognised keywords of audience interests. To ensure you get relevant influencers a result of searching for the interests, Open Influence only catalogs instances of the keyword by engaged users, not the audience as a whole. That means if you’re searching the keyword “Fashion,” for example, you’re not going get every influencer who’s posting on that topic. You’re going to get shown the ones with the most engaged audiences with fashion. This signals that there are conversations being had, and the accounts that show up as relevant are there because the most conversations are being had. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Visual Discovery, Channels: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, Blogs Another way that it helps you to discover influencers is by basing your search on the content influencers create. You can, for example, search by topics, niche conversations, hashtags, or popular search terms and Traackr’s algorithm will scan billions of posts across all the main social platforms, including YouTube obviously, to identify influencers who are posting about these subjects. Then, to help you narrow down your search results, you can group your initial results using the size of the influencer’s audience or demographics like their age or location. You can also filter it based on the main platforms where the influencer is most active on, making it an ideal platform if you specifically want to collaborate with YouTube influencers only. With the help of a 360-degree view of all the social platforms on which they’re active, you can also get insight into their engagement rate and audience growth rate. Once you’ve created a shortlist and it’s time to make your final selection, you can use Traackr’s Historical Influencer Performance and Brand Compatibility & Safety analysis features. This way, you can see which brands an influencer has mentioned previously and determine if the content that they’ve created resonates with your brand and target audience. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Influencer Relationship Management, Team Collaboration Tools, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Product/Gifting Tools, Forms and Compliance, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Competitor Research, Channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, Blogs Klear believes its discovery tool enables you to find the perfect YouTuber to promote your brand. The tool allows for segmented results by industry, region, audience demographics, past brand collabs, etc. Klear automatically generates a profile for every YouTuber. This gives an overview of an influencer’s capabilities, making the vetting process easy and efficient. These profiles include a Klear score, subscriber count, true reach, audience demographics, top-performing content, collaboration portfolio, etc. Klear’s Influencer Relationship Management tool makes it simple to message your YouTubers directly from within Klear, send campaign briefs, sign contracts, and make payments. The platform includes real-time analytics with dynamic analytics capabilities. For example, you can follow YouTube mentions as they happen and track the progress of your entire campaign or receive granular results by influencer. At the end of your campaign, Klear provides you with a PDF that breaks down campaigns by Post, Engagement, Reach, EMV, and Link Clicks. Klear’s interface is dynamic, easy to look at, and responsive. Its data is robust and deep. In addition, Klear’s AI-powered technology detects fake followers or engagements generated by auto-bots, ensuring your influencer’s audience will drive real value. Key Features: Search/Discovery, Content Review, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs By performing a simple keyword search, you can shortlist potential influencers. You can, for example, use specific keywords like “mountain biking” to perform a visual search, but you can also keep the keyword search broader and use filters like age, gender, and location to refine your search results. What makes them one of the leading platforms is that they give you a 360-degree view of the influencer. You can analyze the content, social connections, and personal info of each influencer to determine if the particular influencer will be a good fit for your marketing campaign. It also gives you access to key data to give you insight into the demographics (like location, gender, and age) and likes of their audience. Once you’ve narrowed it down to a number of best fits, you can create custom lists of your top influencers and invite multiple YouTube creators simultaneously. You can then use its robust automation to negotiate the right price, manage campaigns, and pay influencers directly. Key Features: Campaign Management, Search/Discovery, Influencer Relationship Management, Team Collaboration Tools, Content Review, Content Library, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis, White Label Reporting, Forms and Compliance, Fake Follower/Fraud Detection, Payment Processing, Influencer Content Amplification, Channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, Blogs Alternatively, you can use it to find the right type of content. Using specific keywords that you monitor, you can identify channels and videos that include related content. And, if there’s an influencer who reaches out to you first by mentioning you on YouTube, you can reply to them right away. Or, just use it to keep tabs on the influencers that your competitors are working with. You can filter potential influencers by category, location, engagement, and audience. You can also use it to filter videos by total uploads, frequency, total views, or average views per video. It also offers advanced reports that analyze the authenticity and audience. Using their reliable statistics, you can avoid influencers with fake followers, while their AI will also give you more general performance metrics like follower growth, engagement rate, average views per video, and video metrics. Then, once you’ve found a number of potential influencers, you can create influencer lists, export the data as a spreadsheet, and begin a conversation. Looking for influencer discovery platforms for other social channels? Check out all of our reviews to brush up on some of the best influencer marketing platforms out there.
