An influencer marketing platform is an online tool that connects brands and agencies with different types of influencers to promote specific products or services.
Essentially, an influencer platform makes it really easy to do influencer marketing.
However, for those who don’t use an influencer marketing platform, the process can be quite tedious and lengthy.
In these cases, finding influencers might involve manually sifting through databases and spreadsheets, Googling obscure things like ‘food bloggers in South America with an MBA,’ and quite often, pulling your hair out in desperation as you aimlessly scroll through Instagram.
(Well… hopefully not the last one.)
But really, it’s a lot of work. Which is why it makes a lot of sense to spring for an influencer marketing platform if you have the ability to do so.
In this article, we’ll cover:
How an influencer marketing platform works
Some of the best influencer marketing platforms
How to tell if you need a platform-specific app
Some of the best apps for Instagram, Snapchat, and more
The brand signs up for an account on the platform.
The brand searches the platform’s database to find influencers with the right audience to promote a specific product or service.
The brand picks a circle of influencers and submits a proposal.
The influencer sees the proposal and decides whether or not they want to work with the brand.
The influencer who accepts the proposal creates promotional content for the brand.
The platform supplies statistics to help the brand measure the impact of content created by the influencer.
If you’re new in the influencer marketing space, an influencer platform can help ease your entry, helping you set up solid campaigns without getting in over your head.
If you’re already working with influencers, you’ll appreciate how easy your life has become using a top influencer marketing platform.
Note: If you’re a small company and you want to get as many free mentions as possible, using an influencer platform could backfire. Once you create a campaign and place an offer on the platform, you reduce your chances of getting free mentions.
This is because, if you reach out to an influencer who’s already signed up for a platform where you posted, they may have seen your post already. So you face the risk of that influencer knowing there’s money on the table. For this reason, I recommend sticking with your direct approach first (if you plan that route), then switching to a platform once it slows down.
Best Influencer Marketing Platforms
Upfluence
Traackr
Buzzoole
NeoReach
Let’s take a closer look at what these top influencer marketing platforms offer.
Upfluence is one of the leading self-service influencer marketing platforms. It allows you to search influencers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and even blogs.
Once you sign up, Upfluence gives you complete access to influencers’ personal contact details. Also, you get the ability to manage your favorite influencers into lists.
Besides all that functionality, Upfluence’s content-rich database will not disappoint.
Its algorithm indexes 500 million+ content items, and analyzes each one for engagement and reach. That means you can use any imaginable keyword to search for influencers, and even drill down your search to long-tail terms.
In addition, you get access to helpful tools for computing an influencer’s followers per platform, most recent social media posts, and their relevance and influence scores.
Set up a free, no-risk demo and see if Upfluence works for you. If you decide to sign up, you can chat with an account manager to start the purchase process.
Traackr is a social media influencer platform that connects you with influencers of all sizes around the world, helping you build lasting relationships and creating a campaign strategy that works.
Its discovery function offers a variety of options to search and filter by: influencer age, social channels, locations, keyword, and more. If there’s an influencer who isn’t registered in Traackr’s database, you can manually add their username, and Traackr goes out and finds all of their social profiles.
Another unique aspect of Traackr is that it allows you to organize influencers based on how close you are with them. The feature is dubbed the ‘relationship stage.’
If it’s someone who has posted about your brand and mentioned it positively, you will put them under ‘Advocate.’ Once you’ve set up campaigns in Traackr, you can segment influencers into these, too.
In general, Traackr is a good fit for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and large organizations. Access to the influencer platform is granted through multiyear or annual subscriptions.
To find out if Traackr is right for your business and get pricing for your needs, schedule a call with their sales team.
Buzzoole is a technology-powered influencer marketing platform that uses robust data and artificial intelligence (called GAIIA) to manage, measure, and automate investments with influencers.
It’s one of the few platforms that allow brands to source and analyze data directly through an influencer’s social login. Besides that, you get an automated planning tool that enables you to pick content creators and optimize budgets against key performance indicators (KPIs).
Additionally, the platform lets you approve content, manage legal licensing of visuals, decide payments, and more. Brands can then sit back and see the influence happen; content is published and social sharing gets the word out.
You can see your branded updates, along with all the related performance metrics. Real-time insights and measurements ensure you get in-depth campaign reports with full transparency.
Buzzoole follows a cost-per-post (CPP) business model. Expect to pay on the basis of content created by the influencers (of course, you get to determine the maximum dollar amount you’d like to spend).
Plus, you can decide if you want to gain social traction, connect with popular bloggers to increase your company’s exposure, or a balance of both.
NeoReach is another top influencer marketing platform with a database of more than 3 million experts – and it offers a significant level of detail on each of them.
It allows you to effortlessly search its listings or upload and manage your own using more than 40 unique filters.
You can narrow down your search based on profile performance, keywords, social channels, and audience demographics like language, gender, location, and more.
NeoReach isn’t just limited to influencer discovery, though. It also offers all the tools you need to manage your influencer relationships, contracts, notes, and historical campaign data.
The NeoReach dashboard serves as a centralized hub for communications, with a messaging function that makes it easy for everyone on your team to gain insight into the entire influencer relationship.
Additionally, you receive communications from NeoReach itself, courtesy of the AI that leverages your performance data along with brand affinity searches.
NeoReach costs $399 a month for growing teams. Large agencies and brands can contact NeoReach directly for a quote. But before you sign up, you can test out NeoReach for 14 days through its risk-free trial.
Our Verdict
Top influencer marketing platforms exist to help companies efficiently manage influencer partnerships.
Criteria like audience size, social traction, industry, and content expertise can be matched with the results presented through intuitive dashboards.
If you want someone else to perform the outreach, there are even talent agencies like Shine Influencers and IZEA who can gather a relevant social squad for you.
Do I Need a Platform-Specific Influencer Marketing App?
A platform-specific influencer app offers a direct way for businesses to communicate and collaborate with influencers on a certain platform, such as on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, or YouTube.
It makes sense for most brands to use a fully-featured influencer app that allows them to look for influential people across several social media channels.
However, you may want to find experts on a specific platform.
Perhaps you just want to run promotions on Instagram.
Maybe you’re already doing well using Facebook and Twitter for business, but want to partner with a Snapchat influencer to gain traction on the multimedia messaging app.
That’s where a platform-specific influencer app comes in.
Best Influencer Marketing Apps for Instagram, Snapchat & Other Platforms
iFluenz is one of the few micro-influencer platforms out there that connects brands with Instagram influencers of all sizes.
With more than 20,000 registered influencers reaching an audience of more than 500 million followers on Instagram, you’re likely to find the right fit to promote your brand’s product or service.
They do more than just spread the word though; they prompt action among a wide range of demographics.
The platform allows you to build campaigns around your offerings and pre-select influencers after it matches them to your campaign based on the industry, audience demographics, engagement, and other factors.
You the receive proposals from influencers, which you can preview, negotiate, accept, or deny. Additionally, iFluenz allows you to track the influencer’s performance in real time, and you can also decide only to buy the influencer’s content.
You can review the registered influencers free of charge and launch an influencer marketing campaign on Instagram for as low as $1. There are no upfront or monthly fees, so you only pay for what you need.
Fanbytes is all about using Snapchat for business via influencer marketing campaigns. It helps you partner with Snapchat influencers who create ‘sandwich ads’ on your behalf.
No, I’m not talking about lunch (unfortunately).
A sandwich ad is a 4-panel story where the advertising is sandwiched between a short series of videos featuring an introduction from an influencer, followed by some comments. The last panel features a call-to-action (CTA) of some sort, with snapcodes and/or swipes to encourage the viewer to explore additional offers or content.
The ad displays for a maximum time of 40 seconds, with each of the 4 panels getting a 10-second run time. The format – short videos that go back and forth with an interactive element at the end – is ideal for brands that are marketing to Generation Z.
Additionally, Fanbytes presents you with ‘Fanbytes scores’ of different influences – the higher the score, the more quality engagement you’ll get from their followers.
Fanbytes stays away from a monthly subscription model. Instead, you work with influencers on a campaign-by-campaign basis, doing whatever your budget allows for each one.
What’s good about Fanbytes is that there’s no wasted campaign spend: it charges you on a cost-per-completed-view model. If users leave halfway through the advert, there’s no charge.
FameBit is YouTube’s branded influencer app. It connects you with the right YouTube creators to enable the production of branded content that reaches the right viewers and inspires action.
You can choose from a range of criteria to filter results, such as audience gender, creator’s country, channel category, and more. Search results reveal quick stats for each YouTuber, including their reach (which displays the overall user base across all channels).
One of FameBit’s strongest areas is campaign management. It offers several tools to facilitate communications between influencers and brands, which are neatly organized based on what stage of dialogue you’re at: Pending Approval, Proposal, Production, etc.
Perhaps the best part is that when you pick a YouTuber for a specific campaign, FameBit creates a unique trackable link.
This link can be used alongside the content to direct people to a landing page, a social page to follow, or any other goal you’ve set. It also makes it easy to track an influencer’s performance and attribute direct ROI to their efforts.
It doesn’t cost anything to get started on FameBit.
The influencer marketing platform charges a 10% fee on top of what you pay to YouTube influencers. So if you agree to pay $150 to a creator, you’d have to pay $165 in total to launch the campaign.
Klear (formerly known as Twtrland) is an effective and efficient influencer marketing tool for researching influencers on Twitter.
It lets you filter by audience size, location, influencer gender, skills (selected from the 50,000+ categories the Klear AI has classified them into), and more. Once you’ve finished your search, you can dive deeper into each influencer’s stats to gain more insight into their social influence and reach.
Klear also displays an ‘engagement level’ for each influencer, which offers a plain assessment (like Outstanding, Average, etc.) along with real numbers to show the average for each engagement type.
You also get an overall influence score for Twitter and a few other channels. Additionally, Klear lets you see the ‘True Reach’ of an influencer account. True Reach is a number the Klear algorithm determines based on the historical data associated with each profile on the platform.
Klear is ideal for brands and agencies that are looking for an industry-leading Twitter influencer app to build, measure, and scale their campaigns.
You can sign up for a free demo to see how it works. Once you do, a product specialist will contact you to learn about your goals and share information on Klear’s capabilities.
Obviously, not every influencer marketing platform in this roundup is right for every brand. But hopefully, this answers the question of how an influencer app works – and shows you how many tools are available to help you identify and work with influencers.
