6 Influencer Platforms You Need To Know

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We've witnessed an explosion in the growth of influencer marketing over the past few years. Many of the buying decisions made by consumers today are a result of recommendations from influencers. According to this article, up to 49% of consumers today demonstrate dependence on influencer recommendations. As the influencer marketing market grows bigger day by day, it also becomes more competitive as more brands start vying for the same customer base. It becomes increasingly challenging for brands to outperform their competitors and be able to reach out to the same audience pool more effectively than others. Fortunately, that can still be achieved if you are able to reach out and collaborate with the best influencers in your niche. This is exactly where influencer marketing platforms can come in handy.

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Influencer marketing platforms are software solutions that make it easy for influencers and brands to connect. Most of them will provide brands with influencer discovery tools to find influencers who are suitable for their marketing campaigns. They will usually offer a large searchable database, and some even let you exchange messages with and make payment to the influencers directly. Today, there are easily more than 1000 influencer marketing platforms that you can find and use. But with so many influencer platforms available, how do you pick? In this article we will discuss why you should use influencer platforms and introduce some of the most popular ones that you can check out so that you can kickstart your influencer marketing campaigns!

Why Should You Use Influencer Platforms?

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If you are new to influencer marketing, or simply want a hassle-free influencer campaign management system, then influencer platforms will be a good fit for you. These platforms are easy to use. They make connections and partnering with the right influencers straightforward and quick. Usually, all you need to do is to provide a description of your campaign and your ideal influencer onto the platform’s search function and the system will pull up a list of potential influencers that match your criteria. Quite convenient, isn't it?

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With influencer platforms, you can also kiss inauthentic time-wasting influencers goodbye. You will only get the best candidates for your campaigns. The systems are built to find and register the most authentic influencer profiles using their own in-house algorithms. However, that's not even the best part about these platforms. One of the key benefits that they can provide brands is that they make it easy for you to build a community and form closer relationships with your influencers, even converting some of these influencers into your long-term brand ambassadors!

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Now that you know why you should use influencer platforms, the next step is to identify which platform is suitable for you! In the next section, we have identified six influencer platforms which you can potentially explore. Without further ado, let’s dive in!

6 Influencer PlatformsYou Need To Know

1. Upfluence

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Upfluence seems to be one of the few influencer marketing platforms that claims to be able to help brands find influencers who are already excited about the brand’s business and products. They claim that their algorithm will trawl through all the potential influencers’ organic social media content and identify those who are already posting, discussing, and talking about topics in your specified niche. It has a massive database of 500 million influencers from all the most popular platforms, including blogs. And that is where they will conduct their research from.

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Upfluence can also provide you with reporting tools that allow you to measure your marketing ROI. It also has an influencer management system that help brands to manage their relationship with each influencer. Lastly, this self-serve platform has considerably affordable pricing that allows small to medium sized firms to access their platform’s features without having to dig deep into their pockets. 

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You can check out their website here!

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2. Grin

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Grin’s main approach is to encourage brands to build trust-worthy and authentic relationships with influencers. Its philosophy is that influencer marketing is basically marketing to the influencer. So if the brand can actively engage with and successfully sell the idea of the business’s products or services to the influencer, everything else will fall into place. Its area of focus is eCommerce businesses and can provide integrations into some of the major shopping platforms. 

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Grin offers premium marketing management software plus all the significant features whilst maintaining its user friendliness. The platform is easy to navigate and organizes everything into a workflow such that users will not get lost easily. It seamlessly integrates into existing systems, even those belonging to the largest organizations. 

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One of the special features that Grin has is that it is able to pull all the registered users from your eCommerce site and find their social media profiles. This way you get a list of potential influencers and their relevant stats, all of whom have previously purchased and enjoyed your products. This is a great way for you to find your most passionate and loyal influencers who will be happy and willing to promote your brand for you!

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Grin has a huge searchable database which includes influencers from the most popular social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. More than 100 million influencers are available for you to scout and approximately 37 million of these included their email addresses on their profiles.

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You can check out their website here!

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3. Klear

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Klear claims to have an extremely huge database of 900 million influencers. Who knew there were that many influencers? Besides influencer discovery, Klear also has advanced analytics and relationship management tools for brands to use. It also allows you to keep track of correspondence, including contracts and payments, that you have with influencers. Basically, everything you need to do for influencer marketing can be handled on this one-stop platform.

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It has a free plan that allows you to test and see what the platform has to offer. Of course, this means you will have only demo monitors, and limited influencer search and social profiles. If you go for the paid Advanced plan, you will gain access to more features such as the ability to undertake influencer research, pitch to influencers, manage relationships with influencers, monitor campaigns, social monitoring, as well as 1-on-1 consultation as part of your account management.

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Klear focuses more on influencers from Instagram and YouTube only. So, if your target audience fits the demographics of users using these social media platforms, be sure to check it out!

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You can check out their website here!!

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While anybody is allowed to sign up to Aspire as an influencer, they must meet certain criteria to be qualified and allowed to view potential campaigns and connect with brands. As stated on one of Klear’s blog posts, the criteria for influencers on various platforms are as follows:

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▶Facebook – Minimum 10,000 likes

▶Twitter - Minimum 5000 followers 

▶Pinterest - Minimum 10,000 views

▶Blogs – Minimum 1000 followers and 3,000 monthly views

▶YouTube - Minimum 3000 subscribersand 2,500 average views

▶TikTok – Minimum 1000 followers

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You can check out their website here!

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4. CreatorIQ

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CreatorIQ is another influencer marketing platform that you can consider. Currently it has 15 million influencer accounts indexed on its system. One of the strongest selling points about CreatorIQ is that its algorithm can recognize common problems, such as fraud, inauthentic influencers and inflated metrics (something which have been plaguing the influencer industry tremendously) and intelligently uses AI to identify and avoid influencers which are associated with such malicious activities. How it works is, it can directly integrate with the most common social media platforms’ APIs, and then uses its AI-powered algorithm to analyze over a billion social accounts. It checks the profiles' eligibility against their own criteria. Only influencers that meet the criteria are added to the platform database. 

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CreatorIQ mainly focuses on the evaluating the overall quality of the influencers’ content as opposed to simply looking at the number of followers they have. It looks at discrete parts of the creators' content such as the image, mentions, emojis and even location and makes logical inferences to ensure the influencers are exceptionally relevant. Their algorithm also assigns an "integrity quotient" to all influencers to help you discern the authenticity of their audience. When you manage to identify influencers whom you are interested in working with, you can leverage on their in-built and customizable “Talent Sheets” feature to easily vet, pitch and/or approve influencers. 

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You can check out their website here!

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5.#paid

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Unlike most platforms,#paidshies away from traditional models. It does this by helping brands create campaigns that target different sections of a typical sales funnel, such as awareness, discovery, intent, action etc. That’s because the team behind the platform believes that creating exciting content and being a good fit for collaborations with brands is far more important than the number of followers that the influencers have. So that means that a micro influencer which has the correct messaging sent to the correct audience has the potential to be able to generate better ROIs and outcomes as compared to any macro influencers or celebrities which have generic, mass market audiences.

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Similarly, to most influencer marketing platforms, you can create and launch your own campaigns and suitable influencers will be matched to you. You can also chat with suitable candidates directly on their platform to discuss terms and details of collaborations etc. They also have post-campaign analytics tools for you to review your campaigns ROIs.

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You can check out their website here!

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6. Creator.co

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While Creator.co has a huge database of 500 million influencers, it mainly focuses on high quality micro-influencers. That’s because it is more concerned about creating quality and relevant content that influencers produce, rather than the number of followers these influencers have. This platform can also create deep insights reports on the influencers’ stats for you so that you can analyze and evaluate them thoroughly.

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Creator.co offers brands with two plan options: the Community driven (automated) plan and the Self-serve plan. With the Community driven plan, the system suggests influencers from a smaller but thoroughly vetted pool of 80,000. Your brand is simply responsible for defining the campaign and your ideal influencer. Once that is done, the system trawls through the database for you and the team even helps you to approach and do the initial pitching for some of these influencers for you. Once these are done, a curated list of potential influencers is then generated and presented to you. But in the end, you still must choose whether to activate these influencers or not. 

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On the other hand, the self-serve plan search runs pretty much like other typical influencer marketing platforms. It has similar features to the Community driven plan, but less the automated processes. If you are tighter on budget, consider going of this plan first.

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You can check out their website here!

Conclusion

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Influencer marketing tools make it incredibly easy for brands to find the right influencers for their campaigns. There's such a wide variety of platforms to choose from, so take your time to look through the various features that they provide. Most of them do provide you with a free trial period so that you can test out their features and see if they meet your needs and expectations. By looking through the six platforms we’ve shared, you should have been able to get a better idea of what are some of the options and product features out there that you can expect from this market. We hope that this article can help you gain deeper insights and make a more informed decision in choosing the influencer marketing platforms most suitable for you!

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