Globally, Twitter has 335 million monthly active users. This number can surely be lucrative for a brand that’s considering social media marketing. When it comes to social media, especially Twitter, no marketing tactic is as sophisticated as influencer marketing.

But it is not that easy to find Twitter influencers that are just right for your brand. With experience, you’ll realize that a huge number of followers are nothing if they are not relevant to your brand. And sometimes the number of followers is not always real.

There are many companies that sell fake followers in the form of bots and fake accounts. They even have different packages based on the number of followers. Here is an example of one of those packages.

Therefore, there is no doubt that it can be difficult to find Twitter influencers that are relevant to your brand. You need to be really methodical and go step by step while trying to find Twitter influencers for your brand. Below are a few steps you can follow.

Set Your Campaign Goals

The first inevitable question that you should have an answer to is “why do you want to do an influencer marketing campaign?“

Is it for brand awareness, lead generation, sales, or just reputation building? Or perhaps you want to increase your followers or improve your thought leadership? Whatever your goal is, you need to first identify it and then find Twitter influencers accordingly.

If your campaign goal is only to drive brand awareness, you can get several macro and micro influencers on board. You may exchange products or services in return for them promoting your product or service.

If your goal is sales, you may have to go deeper into the influencers’ profiles to analyze their interactions with their followers to understand who you should choose.

You could also use promotions, giveaways, and influencer discount codes in this case.

If you want to build credibility and trust for your brand, you can find Twitter influencers who write product reviews and are trusted by their followers.

Your choice of influencers will depend on what you want to achieve from your influencer campaign. So, it is crucial that you are clear on what your goals are before you set out to find Twitter influencers.

Determine Influencer Type

Once you have set your goals, you need to select the type of influencers you want. Every influencer has a specific interest area or specialization.

Here are a few types of influencers that you might come across:

Select your influencer type depending on your campaign objectives.

Use Hashtags to Search Search Twitter

If you want to find Twitter influencers, the first place you need to search is Twitter.

40% of Twitter users say that their purchase decisions are a direct result of a tweet from an influencer. Therefore, start your search on Twitter for influential people on the platform.

Keep a few points in mind while searching. One is, of course, the type of influencer you are looking for. Second is the relevance to your brand and your values. You can get a fair idea of their relevance from their profiles and content as well as their follower profiles.

Reach and engagement are two major pillars of influencer marketing. Therefore, keep these two factors in mind as well.

One effective way to find Twitter influencers in your niche is to search using popular hashtags in your industry. The hashtags should be relevant to your brand. Do some keyword research if needed. In the search results, you will get to see the tweets that used the hashtag and got the most engagement.

You can go to Twitter Search and use min_retweet: [a number] or min­_faves: [a number] to filter search results. This will help you find tweets that got above a certain number of retweets of favs.

Visit Chat Rooms

TweetChat is an amazing platform to network with and find Twitter influencers. If you already know the schedule of the chat, and relevant hashtags just search using the search bar. If you don’t know that already, there are different sites that can tell you about different chat hashtags and chat schedules, like TweetReports, TWUBS, etc.

Twitter chats are typically hour-long sessions and normally happen once a week at the same time. If you attend a chat regularly, you will see familiar accounts with similar interests and that’s how networking happens.

You may also host your own Twitter chat around a topic related to your niche. This can help you find Twitter influencers and have casual discussions with them before approaching them for your campaign.

Here is a Twitter chat example, organized by Hootsuite.

Read the #Digitalin2019 report from @hootsuite and @wearesocial!

In this report, you’ll find data about the changing landscape in social, mobile, and e-commerce from every country in the world 🌎 https://t.co/B4VPj0tNTB pic.twitter.com/EQJeoOOb6E

— Hootsuite 🦉 (@hootsuite) February 22, 2019

Use the Right Tools

There are plenty of tools that can help you find Twitter influencers. If you already have a few influencers’ names in mind, for example, you can try to get more info about them on Twitonomy.

This is a free and useful tool. If you search for a name, you can get details like the number of mentions, retweets, replies, etc. That information can help you gauge the capabilities of an influencer.

Here is the screenshot of the search results when you search for Sam Hurley, an influencer, on Twitonomy.

You can use GRIN’s influencer search feature as well. It has thousands of prospects to choose from with relevant filters. You can also see their content and contact them with verified contact details.

BuzzSumo, the popular content research tool can also help you find the right influencers. You can use filters to narrow down your search. Here you will get information like followers, retweet ratio, domain and page authority, engagement, etc.

Arrange or Attend Events

You can also attend or arrange events and invite potential influencers. You could invite them to your product launch, for example. You can even ask an influencer to host your product launch. However, that will only work if you have already decided on your influencer.

Here is an example of the New York launch of Armani Box, their beauty pop-up, where Camila Coelho was invited as a celebrity guest.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by CAMILA COELHO (@camilacoelho)

Make your event visually appealing so that influencers automatically get inspired to take pictures and post them on their Twitter accounts. The engagement their posts get could give you an idea of which influencers and audiences are right for your brand.

You can even go one step further and arrange a competition for influencers. The influencer with the most engagement will get the campaign contract. The engagement you will get in this process is a bonus.

You can also attend different influencer marketing events to help build your influencer network and find Twitter influencers to collaborate with BeautyCon Festivals, Playlist Live, The Social Shake-up, Influence This, and VidCon are among the popular influencer events. Plan in advance for this kind of event as seats are always limited.

Build Long-Term Relationships with Your Influencers

It is not an easy task to find Twitter influencers that are the right fit for your brand and can help you achieve your goals. However, if you follow the steps above, and do it right, you can easily find Twitter influencers for your brand.

Updated: October 2022