Ultimate Guide to Finding Fashion Influencers on TikTok and Instagram

Over the past decade we have seen multiple fashion brands take their businesses from $0 to multi-millions in sales on the backs of influencers, take Fashion Nova for example. Traditionally, the main platform for this sort of growth has been Instagram, but more recently we’ve started to see more brands hopping on the trend of using influencers on TikTok. The fashion and beauty niche is one of the largest niches on TikTok, it’s where you can find anything from haul videos and styling tips to beauty tutorials.

As a fashion brand, it is almost a no-brainer these days to leverage influencers in order to show off your products to the world, not only does this generate social-proof for your brand, but it also creates a continuous stream of content that you can reuse on your marketing channels.

Many brands are well aware of the power of influencers on TikTok and Instagram, but the thing stopping them from taking the dive into the world of influencer marketing is that fact that they’re not sure where to start. Do you shell out thousands of dollars to collaborate with someone who has a million followers? Or do you work with a few dozen micro-influencers instead? These might be some questions that go through your mind when looking for influencers. In this article, we’re going to go over how you can find fashion influencers on TikTok and Instagram for your brand.

Who Are You Looking For?

The most important part of the process is finding the right influencer, before you even start the search process, you need to make it clear to yourself and your team what kind of influencer it is that you’re looking for.

The most important part of the process is finding the right influencer, before you even start the search process, you need to make it clear to yourself and your team what kind of influencer it is that you’re looking for.

Once you have identified your target demographic, it is time to move on to the search process where we will gather a list of potential TikTok and Instagram influencers that fit the criteria.

Finding the Right Influencer

There are many ways to find the right influencer for your fashion brand, some less tedious than others. You can essentially go about this two ways, and that’s either manually searching through TikTok and Instagram to find the right influencer for the job, or using an influencer platform. Both of these methods have their pros and cons, let’s start off with how you can find the right influencer for your fashion brand by using an influencer platform.

Using an Influencer Platform

Influencer platforms such as Collabstr are great because they take away the time-consuming process of manually filtering through hundreds of TikTok and Instagram profiles hoping to come across the right influencer.

With Collabstr you can easily filter through influencers on Instagram and TikTok, there are also additional filters that allow you to filter down further by price and niche of the influencers. Unlike a lot of services out there, all of the influencers on Collabstr are opted-in. Having access to opted-in influencers is a huge benefit, this means that they signed up to be apart of Collabstr all on their own, instead of being scraped from a database. Opted-in influencers are more engaged as they are here with the intention of working with brands.

By using the filters to narrow down your search, you can now browse through the various influencers that are offering their services for TikTok and Instagram. Once you find a good fit, you can purchase their services directly through Collabstr, or send them an instant chat message before you make a purchase.

Influencer platforms are great for saving time during the influencer search process, with a platform like Collabstr there is no more need for pesky excel sheets and scattered communication over DM’s and email, everything is centralized in the platform. One potential downside to an influencer platform could be the cost, this really isn’t an issue with Collabstr though, seeing that we are one of the only public TikTok and Instagram influencer marketplaces out there. This means there is no monthly subscription to access the influencers on our platform.

Manual Search

The alternative to an influencer platform such as Collabstr would be manually searching through Instagram and TikTok for fashion influencers that fit your criteria. This could get tedious and time consuming, but if you know what you’re looking for then you can definitely get results.

A great way of finding relevant influencers on TikTok and Instagram is by utilizing relevant hashtags and keywords to narrow down the list of influencers that fit your criteria. If we go back to the example of a fashion brand that makes leggings for woman, we discussed that the ideal influencer to promote this product would most likely be a woman who leads an active lifestyle, since we know this, we can narrow down our list of candidates by using hashtags. Use the TikTok or Instagram search bar and type in relevant hashtags, in this case, a good hashtag might be #femaleworkout. By doing this, we have narrowed down our search results to a list of content creators that are most likely females and interested in working out, just what we wanted.

Stopping at one hashtag won’t be enough, you will be best off if you gather a list of 5-10 hashtags so that you can get a variety of profiles to search through. While searching through the profiles, be sure to click on profiles that interest you and spend some time going through their content, engagement, and comments. If you like what you see, take note of their username and repeat this process until you have a decent number of candidates. You want to gather more candidates that you’re willing to work with, in the case that not everyone actually gets back to you when you reach out to them.

This brings us to the last part of the search process, which is reaching out to the influencers. Once you have created a list of potential candidates for your campaign, you will want to reach out to them via email. If the user does not have an email on their profile, it is okay to send them a direct message on the respective platform, whether that be TikTok or Instagram. It’s not recommended to revert directly to the DM’s when trying to workout a brand deal with an influencer, as these messages can easily go unseen by the influencer, but it’s fine as a last-ditch effort.

Final Thoughts: The Hard Part is Done

Finding and sourcing influencers for your campaign can easily be the most tedious part of running influencer campaigns on TikTok or Instagram. As you continue to run campaigns for your brand, you will start to develop systems and habits that streamline the process of running influencer campaigns. If you can streamline the influencer search and communication part of running a campaign, this will allow your brand to run a higher volume of campaigns in the long run.

We’re big advocates of recommending brands to dive into the world of influencer marketing head first, and if you feel you could use a platform to help organize and centralize your operations, give Collabstr a shot.