How to Find Influencers On LinkedIn

How to Find & Engage Influencers On LinkedIn

Whether you're trying to find people to engage with, "influencers" probably comes to mind. You may have gotten advice that you should "engage with influencers". But how? And which ones? What do you say? Should you just engage publicly, or also privately? If you're a brand trying to recruit micro-influencers for your campaign: how do you sort out the ones who are actually relevant to your company's specific value proposition?

To start, think of it this way: can you name a few people in your niche, without looking them up, whose content you really like? These should be people whose opinion you, and your clients, trust. If so: great! These are easy people to start with. But if you can only think of 3-5 people who fit this bill, and you want to build a list of 50, 100, or 250 people to engage with: that might sound like a tall order.

I'd like to make your life easy by showing you a few ways to find relevant people, build quality lists, engage them in a scalable way, and then - if you're a brand and want to sponsor them - also take those interactions offline.

Tool Idea: Use Aware to Find LinkedIn Influencers In Seconds

Don't want to read the full strategy article or just looking for a tool? We got you. Sign up for a free trial of our tool, Aware and choose the Professional tier. You'll have almost instant access to the "Find People" feature which lets you discover new influencers with ease.

Aware vs Favikon?

If you're wondering how Aware differs from Favikon: great question. Favikon is a much better choice than Aware if you need Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or really any platform other than LinkedIn. But if you want to focus on LinkedIn, Aware is a great choice. We think there are three reasons for that:

1. Aware lets you search the content of what the person has posted for certain keywords, not just their headline and profile. This is where Favikon appears limited, to us.
2. Favikon has no built-in engagement capabilities. Aware does. With Aware, you can easily add all or some of the influencers you discover, to a custom engagement feed, and comment on all of their posts to nurture relationships.
3. Our database is significantly bigger than Favikon's, not quite by an order of magnitude, but almost. So you can get way more detailed with finding people on LinkedIn. But again, we don't touch Instagram/FB/TikTok etc.

In short: 👉🏼 Think of Favikon as a multi-platform "detailed-but-in-some-ways-limited" influencer database.

And you can think of Aware as an all-in-one (but LinkedIn-centric) influencer and people search platform that combines commenting and engagement feeds with post scheduling, AI content creation, and many others features to actually grow your LinkedIn account.

By the way: there's a FREE option for finding influencer posts! Check out our free influencer posts section here.

(...It just isn't fully customizable and searchable.)

Should You Engage Micro-influencers or Big Celebrity Influencers?

If you're looking to build your personal brand on LinkedIn, you might have wondered: should I engage with Justin Welsh and Lara Acosta? Or should I find smaller creators that are up and coming? Or should I engage with people who aren't professional creators, but are in my industry?

That depends.

For most people, my answer is simple: If you're building a brand in order to sell high value ($20k+) B2B products or services, go with small and relevant creators. Not big ones. Full stop.

Why? Justin Welsh is not going to buy from you. Well, probably not. Neither are his followers going to buy from you. Why? His followers are all... trying to build their own personal brands! They're not budget holders. Enterprise budget holders don't usually comment on "big influencer" posts.

The caveat to that is: if you are purely trying to amass followers and reach as quick as possible, and you don't care about your followers being budget holders, you can afford to go big and broad. A good example of this is: you're an author, you sell a micro-SaaS, you want to grow a large audience so you can sell sponsorships of your own as a creator, that kind of thing. In that case, great! Engage with the biggest and largest creators.

What should you say when commenting on posts?

If you're engaging with influencers and you just say "Great post!" or worse, spam their posts with your product link, you won't get anywhere. You might even get blocked, if it's the latter.

Here's a better way.

1. Be yourself.

Don't vibe with what the person said? Don’t force it. But if you ARE: let that show. Enthusiasm is wonderful.

2. Add to the conversation.

“Love this!” doesn’t really help anyone. If you agree with the post, say why. If you don't, politely say why as well. If you’re reminded of something relevant, share that. Or ask a good question.

3. Use humor if appropriate.

If you're funny, great! Do it.. But don’t "try to be funny" if it’s not your style or "on purpose", because it will probably come off as inauthentic.

4. Show your relationship with the author via your comment.

If you're actually friends with someone, write in such a way that makes your relationship clear. This lets my network know that the OP is trustworthy, and vice versa.

5. Be a little vulnerable.

Share part of your story if it makes sense and you're adding to the conversation.

6. Engage as a community member: to give, not just to get.

Don't do commenting because you'll then feel entitled to receive a response. It's similar to if you were at a conference: don't corner people and expect them to be ultra attentive to you just because.

My Influencer Sponsorship Strategy

Now, let's say you want to actually not just engage with influencers to expand your influence, but you also want to sponsor them to talk about your product. If that's you: great! Let's get into that.

I was asked recently in a group of entrepreneurs: "Anyone run B2B SAAS and successfully used ‘influencers’? Or just perhaps any tales to tell about going down the influencer route for B2B?" and here was my answer:

I describe this activity as more about making friends than ‘finding influencers’. Here's how I do it:

1. Become your own influencer. I start by posting and engaging actively in the industry, myself. It's a lot more compelling for people to work with you if you're also active in your niche, and have some of your own social clout to bring with you.
2. Get a pulse on your industry. As I post and engage, I naturally come across those who have great content. This is my subjective opinion. I also find who gets good engagement in terms of both quantity and quality, meaning I don’t want those with lots of clearly fake-seeming comments.
3. Transition public to private. After engaging publicly, I start to send private DMs: something relevant, an insight, a genuine compliment they probably don’t get often and on their content. Don't just blend in here and say what everyone else is likely saying to them.
4. Suggest a test. If it feels natural, I introduce an idea, maybe to do some content together such as a LinkedIn Live or a webinar, or even a short content recording if it seems relevant; and sometimes I also ask casually if they ever work with sponsors directly.
5. Gauge professionalism level. Depending on how this conversation goes, it’ll usually become clear if they’re interested in doing sponsored work (they’ll jump on it, they’ll have a media kit, they’ll have a rate card, etc) or if they’re curious about it and open to it but haven’t professionalized that side of the business yet
6. Don't spend for mere fame. Larger influencers who are experienced with sponsorships and have significant audiences whose reach runs into the 10-50M impressions per year, I find it unavoidable that we’ll pay less than $2k per post at best. I generally avoid these unless I have clear data that their audience is primed to buy from us. Midsize and growing ones, with 1-5M in content reach per year (which is the category I myself fall into) are usually the best ROI for us for the effort and money. Smaller ones, with <1M in reach, can be great too, you just need more of them if you have a low priced product that requires a lot of signups to make an impact.
7. If you're offering rev share, come with data. We have a thriving affiliate program and five figures of historical payouts, so we can really use that quite well with people because it’s not bullsh!tting when we say, “let’s look at doing our first post(s) on a rev share or partial rev share model” - I can show them the data and talk through how they have huge upside with this. Sometimes they just don’t want to bother with this, and if that’s the case I might just do fixed fee. In some cases, if I think they’ll crush it so much with our affiliate program that I’d RATHER pay fixed fee, I will not even bring up rev share and just go straight to cash up front offer.
8. Cap spend on reach, for relevant influencers. My target is to pay no more than $30-60 per 1k impressions, for direct response influencer posts - meaning, for posts that showcase our product and have a ‘sign up for Aware’ CTA in it, if I expect that post will get 15,000 impressions, I don’t want to pay more than $900 for that if I can help it. Sometimes, for high quality influencers that have a track record of pumping out signups for us, I’ll go higher. If your average deal size is particularly high, you will want to stretch this number WAY up. Our LTV is in the hundreds of dollars, whereas a lot of B2B brands with ACVs into the $10-100k or up range can pay much more than we can. If that's you: don't be afraid to spend more for enterprise-quality influencers.
9. Collaborate with them on publishing. When their actual post goes up, I do my best to keep engaging with people on their post publicly, basically buddy-buddying up with them a ton on the post itself so people can see that it’s not just a cold, arms-length sponsorship but also a real connection. See above, how I treat this as truly “making friends with people in the industry” rather than a templated outreach system where I lead with a “will you post for us?” cash offer. Reason I don’t do that is, you’ll get 1) worse content, unless you pay higher than normal rates, and 2) the highest rates they offer usually, because you haven’t made friends first so you aren’t getting the deal they’d offer to friends. Also, if you’re making high quality connections, you are opening up more opportunities for you and them too: co-marketing, goodwill and non-sponsored organic mentions, that kind of thing.
10. Monitor post-publish before you expand. Speaking of track record, I like to see conversion rates and retention of users driven from affiliates/influencers at or above our own organic conversion rates. I’ll bid more for these. Some influencers, particularly the largest flashiest ones, have a very low actual loyal community following (or they’re loyal but low-income fans). And using our affiliate management software, I can easily see from the revenue graph of an affiliate for example, whether their referrals churn at a high, low, or normal rate.
11. Find your high quality stable. Over time, you’ll realize which influencers have the best, highest-quality following. Sponsoring them every 2-4 months (or even making appropriate equity offers with vesting - you can get creative here if they’re SUPER valuable to your business) can work wonders with providing MRR on a CPA % basis.

Tools To Get The Job Done

Looking to find high-quality influencers on LinkedIn relevant to your niche? Consider signing up for Aware. We have premade influencer lists that you can use, some of which you can find FREE on our "influencer posts by category" page here:

Want to build your own custom influencer lists? Just sign up for a free trial of the Aware Professional tier, then use our "Find People" feature to discover influencers by keywords that you specify. That way, you can go beyond the premade lists. And if we don't have a list for your niche, you can just build your own: