Social media channels are the new platforms to drive brand awareness and conversions and connect with your audiences. What sets YouTube apart from them, is its massive almost 2.5 billion active users and that people can still browse and enjoy content long after its publishing. YouTube is the go-to platform if you want to explain complex ideas and create in-depth tutorials and product reviews.
Partnering with the right YouTubers presents a huge opportunity for brands to tap into unique audiences and build credibility through them. However, finding the right creator for your business among more than 2 billion active users seems like finding a needle in a haystack.
This article aims to solve this problem. We gathered 11 methods that simplify your YouTube influencer discovery. The list includes no-brainers like searching for creators on YouTube and less familiar online and offline strategies. Without further ado, let’s get into it!
1. Search for Creators with an Influencer Discovery Tool
An influencer discovery tool is a feature of a comprehensive influencer marketing platform that enables businesses to find and evaluate social media influencers. Influencer platforms have a huge database of diverse influencers or a pre-vetted smaller catalog of creators. They provide sophisticated filters that help businesses refine their YouTube influencer search by audience traits, engagement, and other data. Influencer search tools are powered by AI and evaluate enormous amounts of data to list creators who match a brand's criteria.
Let’s see a realistic example of how to find influencers on YouTube with an influencer discovery tool.
You want to find YouTube gamers in the United States with an audience between 18 and 24 years old based in the US. You can start your search by setting these essential criteria in HypeAuditor’s discovery tool.
Once you check the results, you can set more filters, including ER, comment rate, average views per video, Channel Quality Score, and much more.
A glimpse of HypeAuditor’s advanced filters
A YouTube influencer platform simplifies the efforts and time you would invest in manual search and helps you scale as your campaigns grow.
2. Identify YouTube Creators with a Lookalike Tool
Influencer lookalike tools are invaluable if you know or worked with several creators and want to identify more individuals like them. With their advanced algorithms and data analysis capabilities, they help you discover similar YouTube channels to your favorite creators.
These tools analyze the source influencer’s content, audience demographics, interests, behaviors, and engagement metrics. They create a template and based on the characteristics of this model they search for similar YouTubers in their database.
HypeAuditor’s Lookalike tool allows you to filter results by influencer size and location
Just type in the social media handle of the influencer you like, then set the platform to YouTube, and narrow your search by additional factors if you can. The tool will list numerous similar YouTube channels. The lookalike tool comes in handy in many scenarios. For example, if a brand can’t afford big names they can find micro-influencers identical to celebrities.
3. Find Influencers on YouTube
Do you want to collaborate with YouTubers? Then it makes sense to explore the platform itself. It is slow and manual but easy, affordable, and available for anybody.
3.1. Use niche-specific keywords
Come up with keywords that fit your business, products, and services. You may use keyword research tools or Google Autocomplete but even YouTube can suggest keyword variations if you start typing in the search bar. If you have a few relevant phrases, try them in YouTube’s search field. The platform will return videos that match your search criteria.
Now, you have to skim through these videos and take note of the channels that have a significant number of subscribers. After that, you can go into a more in-depth analysis of the channel and the videos. Although you won’t be able to see all the analytics, you can still access the number of views and likes the videos generated. You can assess the video quality, topic consistency, and relevancy.
If you search by keywords, YouTube will list every video that includes the keyword in its title, description, and tags. The results will be broader and could include videos that aren’t super closely related to the search term. However, don’t consider this as a disadvantage. You may find influencers on YouTube who create content on topics that complement or intersect with your niche.
3.2. Discover YouTube creators with hashtags
Another way to leverage the social platform’s search functionality is discovering YouTube creators through hashtags. These specific phrases are mostly used to facilitate discoverability, searchability, and content organization. YouTube will list videos that use that particular hashtag in the title or description.
Hashtag searches will return hyper-focused content or videos that tag specific events, challenges, or trends. Hashtag searches, therefore, benefit niche brands or businesses that want to target very precisely. You may also find that some people use your brand hashtags in their video descriptions. I this is the case, you may discover your new YouTube ambassador.
Whenever you search by keywords and hashtags you can use YouTube’s Filter feature on the top right corner. Refine your YouTube influencer search by the upload date, type, video duration, and features and you may sort the results by view count, rating, relevance, and upload date.
3.3. Dig around in the Trending tab
YouTube Trending section’s major purpose is to feature a curated selection of videos for users that are popular or cover trending themes. Therefore, it’s a great way to spot coming trends in various categories, such as music, games, and films. However, it could help brands uncover relatively unknown creators who recently uploaded content that attracts users or has viral potential.
Content in the Trending section is updated every 15 minutes and the platform showcases here videos that grew their views relatively fast. The YouTube algorithm takes into consideration your location as well, so monitoring this section can help you find YouTube influencers in your location or creators who speak your language.
3.4. Review suggested videos
YouTube itself will suggest videos based on your watch history. The platform’s algorithms consider a vast amount of data, such as the topic, creator, title, metadata, description, likes, dislikes, shares, and video types. It uses all this information to recommend matching videos.
These videos can identify content creators or subject matter experts in your sector. As a side note, the suggested videos feature can unearth potential competitors as well, who rock YouTube and a worth keeping an eye on.
4. Discover Top YouTube Influencers on Google
Another easy, however, time-consuming technique is searching for YouTube creators on Google. Since both YouTube and Google are owned by Alphabet Inc. when you search for something on Google it lists YouTube videos as well if there are any. You only have to enter the right key terms and add ‘YouTube’ or ‘video’ to it.
Top YouTube influencers in the beauty category featured on Google
Choose your keywords wisely, and be as precise as you can. For example, you will find numerous YouTube creators if you search for ‘fashion influencers on YouTube’, if you want to find local creators you just simply have to add your country’s or region's name to the keyword.
Apart from the influential people Google features on top of the search page, you can discover content creators on aggregate websites, and marketing blogs that compile top lists in various industries. Oh, and don’t forget to click on the ‘Videos’ button once you’ve typed in your key term.
5. Scan Your Brand’s Subscriber List
Does your brand have a YouTube channel and do you upload videos regularly? Then you have subscribers as well. You should examine your subscribers, because you may find users with a substantial audience and high influence level. The cherry on top, since they subscribed to your channel, they already love your business, are satisfied with your services, or simply enjoy your videos.
So how do you find YouTube influencers among your subscribers? Click on your profile in the top right corner, and go to YouTube Creator Studio. By default, you’ll be on the Dashboard tab. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and find Recent Subscribers. Set the date to longer than 90 days - for example, 365 days or Lifetime - sort the list by subscriber count and start researching your subscriber list.
6. Use Social Listening and Social Monitoring
Social listening and monitoring tools allow users to track keywords, hashtags, and brand mentions across numerous social channels. If you decide to apply a tool, the task is simple: 1. you either track industry-specific or product-centered keywords or hashtags, or 2. you monitor your brand mentions.
Whenever the selected keywords, tags or your brand’s name appears in a video or comment, you’ll get a notification. After that, you can study closely those users. Check if they have a channel, what content they create, how many likes, dislikes, and comments they get, and how many views their videos generate.
Tracking the above terms will provide you with a lot of content on YouTube. But it would be a shame not to track your competitors’ brand mentions and the key phrases and hashtags they use. This is another way social listening tools can help you find influencers on YouTube worth teaming up with.
7. Recruit YouTube Creators through an Influencer Program
Attract YouTube content creators with an influencer or brand ambassador program. The great thing is, that many people who apply will be genuinely interested in your brand and chances are they already recommended it or reviewed it. So why not involve them in your next influencer or ambassador program?
Build a dedicated page where you specify the requirements, benefits, and possible compensation for participants. Cast a wide net and cross-promote the program on other social media channels besides YouTube, your business website, and in your newsletters. When the applications start rolling in, you can analyze them based on your criteria.
An ambassador program is mutually beneficial for you and the influencer as well. It builds long-term partnerships between your brand and your most dedicated fans. These people sincerely promote you and will be excited to be associated with your business officially. Only, this time their efforts will be remunerated. The authenticity will be evident in the endorsements positively affecting consumers. It’s a win-win situation.
By the way, businesses can build a brand ambassador landing page with HypeAuditor. You can customize it to your program’s details, and add your logo. Even better, it really takes only a few minutes to set it up.
Zomee finds brand ambassadors and influencers with HypeAuditor’s landing page feature
8. Check Other Social Media Channels
It’s not uncommon for influencers to be active on multiple social media channels. You shouldn't disregard an influencer whose audience and values align with yours just because their major platform is Instagram or TikTok. Chances are they have a YouTube channel as well. Yes, they might not have as large a following as they have on their primary channel but you could still approach them with your collaboration idea.
Many creators upload sneak peeks and behind-the-scenes videos on other social media platforms or simply use these channels to promote their YouTube channel. TikTok and YouTube attract different age groups, yet, a lot of TikTokers upload their short videos to YouTube so that they can reach as many audience cohorts as they can. By assessing other platforms you’ll be able to identify YouTube creators for your next campaign.
Thruhikers has a remarkable 279K follower base on Instagram, but their YouTube channel has a massive 786K subscribers
9. Research Your Competitors’ Collaborations
As a business that is about to start YouTube campaigns or has already created a few before, you are well aware of your competition on the platform. Study thoroughly their brand videos. Do they get a lot of engagement? Do they have recurring commenters whose feedback generates discussions or a lot of replies? Have your competitors promoted their YouTube collaborations on other social media channels? Did they mention any notable industry names in their content?
Leverage technology by either using social listening tools or influencer marketing platforms to monitor certain keywords your competitors regularly use or their brand mentions. By constantly monitoring your competitors you can quickly find out i they have an influencer campaign running. Plus, you can estimate their share of voice on social media.
10. Ask for Recommendations in Your Network
Try offline, word-of-mouth methods such as asking around your colleagues, especially your PR and marketing team. People from your company likely follow experts, and marketing and PR teams have more experience in spotting talented creators on social media that can contribute to your brand’s success.
Dust off your old industry connections. A chat with partners, vendors, suppliers, and ex-colleagues can also yield results. They might collaborated with YouTube influencers before and can share their experiences with you.
If you’re a member of relevant online group chats and discussion boards, you can seek advice from your peers there. Professionals on community forums like Reddit and Quora can help you with their insights and provide recommendations.
As a fourth option, industry experts and thought leaders often attend events, conferences, and trade shows either as visitors or speakers. These live events are another way to get to know potential influencer partners or you can network with your business fellows and ask for their help.
11. Hire a Marketing Agency
Agencies specializing in influencer marketing already have a roster of influencers they have built a relationship with. They consult with brands, assess their needs, create a marketing plan, and recommend creators from their network or search for the right fit. Apart from YouTube influencer search and vetting, they conduct market and competitor analysis if needed, and handle negotiations, briefs, and the campaign itself.
Conclusion
YouTube caters to a wide age range and all genders. It would be a huge mistake not to use it in your marketing strategy. YouTube influencers can help you connect with the right viewers, introduce them to your products, and amplify your brand message.
Find YouTube creators who are well-acquainted with your industry, can create quality content, and have an enthusiastic subscriber base. You may decide to follow one method, but mixing several options allows you to find more relevant YouTube creators. Combine manual search options with tools for maximum results, build mutually fruitful relationships with influencers, and reap the rewards.
