How to find micro-influencers on Instagram, step by step

What you're looking for

"Micro" usually means 10,000 to 100,000 followers and "nano" 1,000 to 10,000. The number matters less than three things:

• They post about your thing, regularly, in their own words.
• Their followers look like your customers: same city, same hobby, same budget.
• People actually talk to them. Comments that answer what they posted, not strings of emoji.

A baker with 1,800 followers in your town can be worth more to a flour mill than a food account with 80,000 followers spread around the world.

Six ways to find them by hand

1. Start from accounts that already fit

Think of two or three accounts you'd love to work with. Open each one and tap the arrow next to Follow: Instagram lists accounts it considers similar. Open the ones that look right and do the same again. It's the best source there is, because Instagram has already done the matching for you.

2. Search the words they'd use in their name

Instagram's account search matches names and usernames, and small creators often put their niche right there: "home baker", "sourdough", "pastry Lisbon". Try the same words in the languages your customers speak.

3. Small, specific hashtags

Big hashtags are full of brands and huge accounts. The specific ones are where small creators post: #sourdoughbaking rather than #food, #lisbonbakes rather than #bread. Open the posts, then the people who made them.

4. Places near you

If your business is local, search your city or neighbourhood as a place and look at who posts from there. Cafés, gyms and markets have place pages full of locals with local followings.

5. The Tagged tab of brands like yours

Open a brand in your niche and look at its Tagged tab. Those are people who posted about it, paid or not. Either way, they're used to posting about products like yours.

6. The comments under bigger creators

The most thoughtful commenters under a big account in your niche are often small creators themselves. Tap through.

How to judge a profile in a minute

Before you add anyone to your list, check five things:

1. Last post: within the past couple of weeks. Quiet accounts rarely reply.
2. Comments: real sentences from different people, and replies from the creator. Thousands of likes with a handful of comments is a warning sign.
3. Followers and following: someone following 6,000 accounts with 6,500 followers may have grown by following back.
4. Who they post for: the language, the city, the price level of what they show.
5. Brand work: a few past collabs is good. A feed that's only ads is not.

Keep a list with the username, why they fit, and whether you've messaged them. A spreadsheet is enough.

The same method, without the afternoon

CollabScout follows this method, in your own browser, while you're logged in to Instagram:

• Ways 1 and 2, done for you. Pick a category and name one to five example accounts, or use the examples that come with most categories. It opens them, reads the accounts Instagram suggests, and keeps going outward from the good ones.
• The one-minute check, done for you. Each profile is checked against your category: bio, name, links, recent captions and hashtags. You see the words that matched, so you can tell at a glance whether it got it right.
• The spreadsheet, built in. Everyone it finds is kept, with whether you said yes, whether they've been messaged, when, and from which account.

Typical timings: Instagram's suggestions show up within a minute or two, about a dozen profiles are checked in the first ten minutes, and after that it works through a few dozen a day, at a pace that's easy on your account. There's no follower minimum, so the baker with 900 followers turns up too.

When you've picked your creators, you can message them from your own account, every message previewed first. Here's how to write that first message.

What it doesn't check is audience data, such as where followers live or how many are real. If you need that, see the free tools worth knowing.

Questions

How many followers does a micro-influencer have?

Usually 10,000 to 100,000, with 1,000 to 10,000 often called nano. There's no official definition, and for a small business the smaller end is often the better deal.

Do I need a paid tool to find micro-influencers?

No. Instagram has everything you need: suggestions, search, hashtags, places and tagged posts. Paid databases make it faster and add audience data. CollabScout makes the by-hand method faster, for free.

How many micro-influencers should I contact?

Start with ten to twenty good fits rather than a hundred loose ones, and write to each of them properly. You can always find more once you know what kind of creator replies.

How do I spot fake followers without a tool?

Look at the comments more than the follower count. Few comments for many likes, comments that have nothing to do with the post, and a following count close to the follower count are the usual signs.