YouTube is one of the most popular social media platforms for influencer campaigns. In fact, 38% of influencer marketers use YouTube. Thanks to its highly visual and interactive nature, extensive reach, and active user base, YouTube is an effective way to drive brand awareness and sales.
However, finding the right YouTube influencers can be challenging. There are millions of influencers on YouTube, so how do you know if they are right for your brand?
Find out our top 7 ways to find YouTube influencers and how to make sure they’re a brand fit.
YouTube Influencer Discovery: Essential First Steps
Before jumping into your YouTube influencer marketing journey, you need to have a strategic foundation.
This begins with defining clear, measurable goals for your campaign. Whether it's boosting brand awareness, driving sales, or increasing social media followers, knowing what you aim to achieve will guide your choice of influencers and understand how to measure the results.
Equally important is understanding your target audience.
Dive into the demographics, interests, and online behavior of your potential customers. Are they avid YouTube users? What type of content resonates with them, and which influencers do they trust and follow? A deep understanding of your audience will not only help in selecting the right influencers but also in crafting messages that truly engage and convert.
Types of YouTube Influencers
YouTube influencers come in various forms, each with unique strengths and audience niches.
Broadly, they can be categorized based on their follower count:
Nano influencers (1K-10K followers)
Micro-influencers (10K-100K)
Macro influencers (100K-1M)
Mega influencers (1M+ followers).
Each category offers different benefits, from the highly engaged, niche communities of nano and micro-influencers to the vast reach of mega influencers.
Beyond follower count, consider influencers' content niches. From beauty gurus and tech reviewers to lifestyle vloggers and gaming experts, aligning with an influencer who shares content relevant to your industry is key. This alignment ensures that your brand message is delivered in a context that resonates with the influencer's audience.
Now, without further ado, here are our top 7 ways to find YouTube influencers and how to make sure they’re a brand fit.
7 Ways to find YouTube influencers
There are many ways to find YouTube influencers. Here are some of the most popular methods:
1. Use a Youtube influencer marketing platform
Let's start with the most reliable and accurate way to find YouTube influencers—with a YouTube influencer marketing platform like Storyclash.
Storyclash makes it easy to find YouTube influencers and check their performance data, previous collabs, and content.
Simply open the “Discover Creators” tab and click the YouTube icon. Then, type what you’re looking for in the search bar.
You can also filter based on follower size, country, language, industry, gender, engagement, and more.
2. Search on Youtube for influencers
One of the simplest—and free—ways to discover potential YouTube influencers is by conducting direct searches on the platform.
As the second-largest search engine in the world, YouTube offers a vast landscape of content creators, making it an ideal space for businesses to collaborate with influencers to reach their target audiences effectively.
To get started, open Youtube and type in keywords and phrases related to your brand, industry or product.
The search will pull up a ton of videos. Then, review them to see which ones align with your brand's values and target audience.
Filters can help you narrow your search. Click “Filters” in the top right-hand corner. You can choose from filters like upload date to find up-to-date content, and view count and rating to find high-quality videos.
You can also use hashtags to find influencers whose content aligns with your brand. If an influencer has used a hashtag relevant to your brand, it indicates that your product or service is probably relevant to their audience.
For instance, if you are a cosmetics brand, the hashtag #makeup alone pulls up 4.1M videos and 730K channels. Sift through these results and find the influencers you like best.
Another way to find influencers on YouTube is with the Trending tab. Trending tab can give you insight into what’s hot on YouTube right now.
Just scroll down to the “Explore” section and click “Trending.” From there, you can see videos that are currently generating lots of views.
3. Use Google to find YouTube influencers
Okay, you probably already thought of this one.
Just head to Google and type in the name of your industry + influencers.
For instance, this search for skincare influencers pulls up curated lists from around the web of the top skincare influencers.
4. Ask your network for ideas
Reach out to colleagues, industry peers, and other professionals in your network for recommendations on YouTube influencers they have worked with or come across. Personal recommendations can provide valuable insights and save you from trial and error.
5. Do research on social media
Extend your search beyond YouTube by utilizing other social media platforms. Many influencers promote their YouTube content on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok. Engage with relevant influencers on these platforms, and you may discover YouTube creators whose content fits well with your brand.
6. Use an agency
If the prospect of manually searching for influencers seems daunting, consider partnering with an influencer marketing agency. These agencies have expertise in identifying suitable influencers, negotiating collaborations, and managing influencer campaigns. They can save you time and effort while ensuring that you find the right creators for your brand.
7. Find influencer lookalikes
Are you already running successful YouTube campaigns with influencers and you want to scale the results? Lookalikes could be a great option for you.
With the “Find Lookalikes” feature from Storyclash, you can find creators who are statistically similar to another creator, in terms of industry, content, reach, and audience.
To get started, open the “Discover Creators” tab in Storyclash, then click “Find Lookalikes.”
Next, type the name of the creator you are interested in. That could be a popular influencer, someone your competitor works with, or one of your current top-performing influencers.
You can see at a glance the number of followers on YouTube, engagement rate, views per video, and other key stats. To take a closer look at their YouTube content, just click the downward-facing arrow.
8. Get personalized recommendations
This is probably the easiest way to find YouTube influencers. No need to search! Just open the “Discover Creators” tab in Storyclash.
Storyclash gives you personalized recommendations based on the categories you have chosen (like beauty, fashion, food, health and more), language and country.
How to vet YouTube influencers
Searching for influencers is an essential first step to a successful partnership. But it’s also important to take the time to shortlist and review your chosen influencers before committing to anything.
Carefully evaluating potential YouTube influencers helps ensure that your collaboration will be smooth, stress-free, and mutually-beneficial. Here are some essential steps to vet YouTube influencers:
- Check content quality
It’s important to review the influencer's past videos to assess their content quality, values, and messaging. You don’t want to work with an influencer that shares dimly-lit videos and poor sound quality, as this will reflect badly on your brand.
For example, popular YouTube influencer Pamela Reif’s videos always look professionally-produced and well-lit, with beautiful backgrounds:
Take the time to watch a few of their videos and ensure their style aligns with your brand image and values.
- Consider audience engagement
Check the level of engagement the influencer receives on their videos, including likes, comments, and shares. High engagement indicates an active and committed audience.
With Storyclash, you can easily check the overall engagement rate of a creator’s YouTube videos. You can also see the likes, shares and views for all their YouTube content in one dashboard.
- Look at audience demographics
You need to understand whether an influencer’s followers align with your target audience. You don’t want to run a campaign with a popular influencer only to realize that most of their audience speaks a different language, or lives in a location you don’t ship to.
Storyclash makes it easy to check audience demographics, including age, location, and interests.
You can also check the Audience Quality Score to better understand how genuine their audience is. This helps avoid influencers with bots and fake followers.
If you don’t have access to an influencer marketing platform, you can try asking the influencer for this information. or checking their content manually to get some insights.
- Focus on authenticity & Brand Fit
You need to understand who else the influencer has worked with, and what their sponsored content looks like. This can help you answer questions like:
- Has the influencer previously worked with brands similar to yours?
- How did they integrate the sponsored brand into their content?
- What is the split of organic vs. sponsored content?
It might be better to avoid influencers whose channels are over-saturated with sponsored content. This can lead to audience fatigue. Similarly, if they promoted your biggest competitor a week ago, it might not be a fit.
Storyclash makes it easy to check out who an influencer has worked with. Just check out the collaboration timeline of any influencer:
If you don’t have access to Storyclash, you will need to check their content manually, and/or ask them personally who they work with.
- Analyze reach and Impact
Audience size is an important factor to consider. More YouTube subscribers will typically mean more reach.
Data shows that larger YouTube channels tend to have higher engagement rates than smaller channels. Channels with 100K-1M followers demonstrate the highest engagement rate at 3.47%. Mega YouTube stars with 1M+ followers have the second highest engagement rate on average, with 3.40%. In comparison, small YouTube channels with just 1K-5K followers drive an engagement rate of 1.90%.
That said, it can be worthwhile collaborating with smaller accounts with a highly-engaged audience. It depends on the creator and your brand’s goals.
Want to find influencers on YouTube?
While you can search for influencers on YouTube or Google manually, it’s not the most efficient or accurate way. Storyclash uses AI technology to make the process a breeze.
Get in touch to see the Storyclash platform in action, or read more about our YouTube capabilities.