Purpose of this free PR tools list and guide
Once you have defined your target audiences, probably a group of customers, you need to then find which influencers they pay attention to AND that might be willing to work with you in order to promote your business, products and brand.
So you might find an influencer, a blogger for instance, that writes about organic beauty products, and they may review and recommend them in order to provide value to their readers.
If you’d like to take your business to the next level, then check out our awesome PR Playbook for lots of great PR strategies, tactics and tools!
Let’s say that your business sells beauty products that are not organic.
Do you think that you should spend time researching how to make contact with this blogger and then send them a carefully crafted bespoke message, in order to build and nurture a relationship that hopefully leads to a positive review for your brand and products?
The answer is no.
Your products aren’t organic and the blogger will probably think you’re disingenuous and haven’t bothered to read any of their posts or about the purpose of the blog.
This could then damage a potentially fruitful relationship with them, that you might need in the future if you were to produce organic beauty products. Additionally, they might tell other influencers in their network what you have done, potentially damaging relationships with a whole group of influencers that could have been useful.
The lesson here is to be careful and do your research.
Identify influencers, but only target the relevant ones.
Otherwise, you risk wasting time, money and your reputation.
Enjoy the read,
Dionne Taylor
Once you have defined your target audiences, probably a group of customers, you need to then find which influencers they pay attention to AND that might be willing to work with you in order to promote your business, products and brand.
So you might find an influencer, a blogger for instance, that writes about organic beauty products, and they may review and recommend them in order to provide value to their readers.
Let’s say that your business sells beauty products that are not organic.
Do you think that you should spend time researching how to make contact with this blogger and then send them a carefully crafted bespoke message, in order to build and nurture a relationship that hopefully leads to a positive review for your brand and products?
The answer is no.
Your products aren’t organic and the blogger will probably think you’re disingenuous and haven’t bothered to read any of their posts or about the purpose of the blog.
This could then damage a potentially fruitful relationship with them, that you might need in the future if you were to produce organic beauty products. Additionally, they might tell other influencers in their network what you have done, potentially damaging relationships with a whole group of influencers that could have been useful.
The lesson here is to be careful and do your research.
Identify influencers, but only target the relevant ones.
Otherwise, you risk wasting time, money and your reputation.
HOW THIS LIST HAS BEEN ORGANISED
For each tool in the list, I have written notes on what the tool does and my thoughts on it, a series of mini-reviews. I have also summarised some key points and features in a table that indicates the paid options for the tool (if available). Some of the tools are totally free (at the time of writing this).
Just below, you will see the summarised list of free tools.
My overall tip for getting the most out of these free tools and avoiding the need to pay for them is to combine their power. Often features are limited in the free version of the tool but the limitations can be overcome by using other tools on the list.
THE FREE PR TOOLS:
- Buzzsumo
- Anewstip
- Google Alerts
- Followerwonk
- Klear
- Quora
- NinjaOutreach Lite
- Ubersuggest
- Tweetreach
- Feedly
- AllTop
- Hunter.io
Read about each of the free tools in detail below, click on the tool names to go to access the tools:
#1 BUZZSUMO
WHAT DOES IT DO?
This tool helps you to research and analyse what content performs best for any topic (e.g. keywords, brand names, industries and competitors) so that you can find the key influencers to approach to promote your content.
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
This tool is very useful for finding relevant influencers across a wide variety of sectors. When using the tool for free, you are limited to a handful of searches for most shared content, trending content and Twitter influencers. The number of results shown for each search is limited to 5.
The results for either type of search result links to the shared content and stats relating to the number of shares on some of the main social platforms:
It also shows the number of links back to the page/post from other website pages/posts (AKA ‘backlinks’). This is another indication of how well shared and influential the content is. Backlinks are typically much more difficult to get than social media engagement though, so expect to see fewer backlinks.
From a promotional perspective for your content, a backlink building strategy is highly recommended as there’s a massive SEO benefit, as well as the benefit of having influencer endorsement that drives traffic to your site.
You could run this as part of your PR strategy, or alongside it as part of your SEO strategy.
Despite the limited number of results in ‘most shared’ content, this is still very useful as you can click through to the resulting articles and follow-up with other research to uncover relevant influencers. You can also filter the trending content by pre-set curated feed categories, and as part of the free account level tools, you can create one custom curated feed yourself.
Here’s what you could do next: Open twitter and copy and paste the URL of the highest shared article you have discovered on Buzzsumo into the ‘search Twitter’ box in the Twitter header area.
There are various search options within Twitter and we would recommend using the search ‘All’ search. You will then see the Tweets that have mentioned the URL you are looking for, even if the URL is embedded in another link such as in a shortened link (e.g. from bit.ly, bit.ly Pro, ow.ly, etc.).
You will then see all of the users and their Tweets that contained the link. Fabulous!
Let’s see this in action in relation to the rather broad ‘beauty tips’ keyword as an example. Pop it into Buzzsumo and click on the topmost shared link:
Copy the URL from the search bar:
Go to Twitter and paste it into the search box (e.g. https://guidewomenhealth.com/15-beauty-tips-for-women/) and then search.
You will get the search results and now you can see all of the people that shared the content!
However, one major drawback with the free version of Buzzsumo is that you can’t filter by location. So if you’re looking for local influencers, it’s not so good.
BIG TIP!
Use this tool in conjunction with the other free tools in this guide. If you’re looking for local influencers (e.g. influencers in a specific country) try using Ubersuggest – also covered in this guide.
PRICING & FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- Free version available
- Paid versions available from $79+ per month
Free Features:
- Most shared content searches
- Trending content discovery
- Find Twitter influencers
Usefulness:
- Free version – 4/5
- Paid version – 5/5
#2 ANEWSTIP
WHAT DOES IT DO?
Anewstip helps entrepreneurs, PR professionals and marketers connect with relevant media influencers.
The tool helps you to search for relevant media contacts from what looks like the world’s largest database containing millions of Tweets from the birth of Twitter to the present day.
It can also monitor news articles and Tweets from global media influencers so that you can keep track of what is being said about your own brand, competitor brands or any other brands you are interested in.
Additionally, you can get organised with the tool and create media lists and pitch to influencers directly through the platform.
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
This is a very useful tool for finding relevant influencers, especially as the number of searches is unlimited even at the free account level. Unfortunately, the free account does not allow you to access the influencers’ contact details.
BIG TIP!
The lack of access to contact details can be overcome by paying for the tool or by simply searching for the influencers’ names in Google and by adding ‘Twitter’ or another media platform to your search term (e.g. ‘joe bloggs Twitter’ or ‘joe bloggs LinkedIn’). Normally this results in quickly being able to match the Anewstip research with the influencers’ media channel. From there, you can add their details to your database and make direct contact.
PRICING & FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- Free version available
- Paid versions available from $200+ per month
Free Features:
- Unlimited influencer searches
- Create media lists (limited)
- Create alerts (limited)
Usefulness:
- Free version – 3/5
- Paid version – 5/5
#3 GOOGLE ALERTS
WHAT DOES IT DO?
A totally free tool from Google that allows you to set email alerts relating to keywords that are of interest.
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
This is a great tool for several reasons. In relation to identifying influencers, I would recommend that you create alerts for keywords linked to your brand or business to help you identify people who are actively creating content (e.g. written articles, videos, images and infographics, etc.) about those topics.
As Google seems to scour the whole web for content, this tool often picks up potential influencers that other tools can miss.
With regards to creating ‘useful alerts’, I would recommend setting up separate daily summary alerts for the following, using a fictional organic beauty (cosmetics) product business as an example:
- Your brand name (e.g. Totally Natural Beauty – fictional name)
- Your direct competitors brand names (e.g. Lavera – a real natural cosmetics brand)
- Other competitors in your industry (e.g. L’Oreal – a global cosmetics brand)
- Relevant keywords (e.g. “beauty tips”, “cosmetics review”, “natural cosmetics”, “organic cosmetics”, “beauty brands Australia”, etc.)
When you get your emailed alerts, you can then click through to the resulting articles and videos etc., and then assess whether the author is worth targeting as an influencer. You could do this by looking at the type of content they publish on their website and/or social channels to see if it’s relevant. You can then also see how active they are and how influential they are from the number of shares, likes, followers, etc. that they have.
This kind of research can be enhanced by finding the prospective influencer within tools like Anewstip for example (also covered in this list).
BIG TIP!
You can see in the screenshot below that I have previewed an alert for “beauty tips” and I have actually used speech marks (“”) in the search box. This makes sure that the results contain that exact phrase, which is handy if results in the preview look too broad.
PRICING & FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- Totally Free!
Free Features:
- Get alerts for keywords related to your business directly into your inbox
Usefulness:
- Free version – 5
#4 FOLLOWERWONK
WHAT DOES IT DO?
This tool scours Twitter for users’ profiles or just their bios for keywords that you search for. The results list Twitter account and profile information that includes names, Twitter handles, bio info, geographical location, no. of Tweets, no. of followers, no. of following, the age of the Twitter account (in days) and ‘social authority.’
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
This is an extremely useful tool. You can use some of the key features of the tool for free in exchange for your Twitter details. A bargain!
To find influencers, all you need to do is search for keywords that relate to your business. If we stick with the beauty brand example then you might search for “beauty blogger” and the results will show Twitter users with that in their profiles (see screenshot below). You can also see how influential they are from the stats, and the ‘Social Authority’ measure is particularly useful here. This is basically how influential the user is.
‘Social Authority’ is composed of:
– The re-Tweet rate of users’ last few hundred Tweets
– The age of those Tweets
– A re-Tweet-based model trained on user profile data
To read more about the ‘Social Authority’ measure, take a look at this Moz Blog post.
So this will help you to determine which users are worth targeting and adding to your database.
BIG TIP!
Combine using this tool with other tools mentioned in this list. For example, you might have found a potential influencer using Google Alerts because they have produced some relevant content. But are they worth adding to your database and targeting?
Well, you could search for them in Followerwonk and Klear (see later in this list) to check out their stats.
PRICING & FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- Free version available
- Paid versions available from $29 per month
Free Features:
- 50 Twitter profile searches per day
- 100 Results per search
- Analyze accounts with up to 25k followers
- 20 Analyses per day
- Compare to others with up to 150k followers
- 20 Comparisons per day
Usefulness:
- Free version – 4/5
- Paid version – 5/5
#5 KLEAR
WHAT DOES IT DO?
Find (some for free), monitor and analyse (paid features) influencers by searching in relation to their ‘skill’ and location. This is based on Twitter influencers and if you pay, then bloggers, and Instagram and YouTube influencers are included too.
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
This is a great tool for discovering the top influencers in relation to topics, industries and keywords. The free tool for searching for influencers by location is so limited that it’s basically useless though.
This tool also shows you the influencers’ handles/presence on other social networks and enables you to connect with them, so it’s helpful for productivity and for opening multiple channels through which to make contact with the influencer…and helps you to assess the opportunities for content promotion through multiple social channels.
BIG TIP!
This is a wonderful tool for combining with other tools such as Buzzsumo and the Twitter search function, also mentioned in this list. Again, you may have discovered potential influencers that have posted and/or shared content but you are wondering who to prioritise with your outreach efforts.
In Klear, you could then find the influencers by searching for their Twitter handle (obtained from another tool like Buzzsumo for example), so that you can note their influence scores in Klear based on activity, popularity and responsiveness.
PRICING & FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- Free tools available with limited usage
- Paid versions available from an unknown amount – you need to talk to their
- sales team to uncover the pricing info
Free Features:
- Search for the Top 10 twitter influencers in a niche
- Search for the Top 10 twitter influencers in a location
- Get some basic analysis on a twitter account
Usefulness:
- Free version – 2/5
- Paid version – 5/5
#6 QUORA
WHAT DOES IT DO?
Quora is a question-and-answer website tool/platform where the questions and answers are user-generated.
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
You might have come across Quora before when seeking answers (for anything!), but Quora is actually a great free tool for helping with your influencer search and assessment. You can search for questions and answers relating to relevant keywords. Users with good answers on the site tend to receive ‘upvotes’ and get lots of views. Using this knowledge you can then spot potential influencers in their capacity of acting as an expert in this forum.
In the screenshot below you can see that I searched for ‘beauty tips.’ I then clicked on the ‘Most Viewed Writers’ link in the results menu to see a list of potential influencers. I then clicked through to Emma Brown’s Quora profile to view her profile information including all of her answers (see overleaf). As part of this there is a link to her Twitter account (see overleaf), so that could be used for further research and finding contact details. Some influencers enable the direct contact functionality within the site and so you can message them directly.
Other features include setting up alerts and notifications for topics and following members. So this can help with your research efficiencies.
Click through to Quora profiles to view profile information including all of the influencers’ answers.
Find further information for influencers by clicking on their listed details, which can include social media profile links:
BIG TIP!
To further assess how influential the potential influencers are in Quora, you could find them in Followerwonk and check out their Social Authority score.
PRICING & FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- It’s free!
Free Features:
- Search for influencers by topic using keywords
- Find influencers’ social media accounts, personal websites and contact details (when available)
- Directly message influencers (when available)
- Create alerts for topics
- Subscribe to influencers’ feeds
Usefulness:
- Free version – 5/5
#7 LINKEDIN
WHAT DOES IT DO?
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with more than 575 million members, with more than 260 million monthly active users in 200 countries and territories around the globe. It does rather a lot of things really; by building your profile and network through the site it can help you to land your dream job, grow and nurture your network, unlock sales opportunities and find and hire talent.
Free accounts are available and come with many useful features. Paying for an account (there are different membership levels) enables you to contact and connect with more people more easily, and gain access to insights about yourself, your business (if you manage a business profile) and other LinkedIn users.
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
This is a great tool for finding influencers; some LinkedIn users are so influential that they are classified by LinkedIn as an ‘Influencer’, but there are not very many people at this level in relation to the number of LinkedIn users. However, even if someone isn’t classified as an Influencer by LinkedIn, you can easily find thousands of them.
Probably the easiest way to do this is to use the main search box in the header menu are of the site and use keywords relating to your business.
In the screenshots below, you can see I did a Boolean search for “beauty” AND “influencer” OR “blogger”.
I then filtered the results by location to just see LinkedIn members based in Australia.
Then you can look down through the results and find relevant influencers by exploring their profiles and also by checking them out on the platforms where they say they have influence. Similarly, you could look them up on other tools in this list like Followerwonk. You can also see how many followers they have on LinkedIn, and if you start noting these stats down you can build up a picture of who is influential for your business niche on LinkedIn.
BIG TIP!
If you are unable to contact them directly because you have no current network connection with them, then you could find them on a different social network (e.g. Twitter) and contact them through that channel. If you can see their profile details (this depends on the users’ privacy settings) you can also see what LinkedIn groups they are members of. If you join those groups too, that can be a good place to get on their radar and build a relationship with them.
Also, use Boolean searches wherever possible, they are sooooo powerful! You can use them on other platforms too. For example, you could enhance your Google Alerts with them!
PRICING & FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- Free version available
- Paid versions start at $29.99 per month but pricing varies depending on which country you are accessing the site from
Free Features:
- Create a profile
- Search for influencers using a variety of content parameters
- Make direct contact with influencers
- Find other ways to contact influencers (e.g. through their websites and other social networks)
Usefulness:
- Free version – 4/5
- Paid versions – 5/5
#8 NINJAOUTREACH LITE
WHAT DOES IT DO?
NinjaOutreach lite is a Chrome extension that lets you pull up a website’s social media stats, SEO metrics, and contact info. The makers of NinjaOutreach has designed this extension to:
(1) help people find a way to validate the authority, ranking metrics, and engagement of any site, page, or influencer, and
(2) reach out to them in a faster and more convenient way, using a single tool.
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
This extension is really handy and a great timesaver when you’re doing some content or influencer prospecting and outreach. For example, you’re looking for topics to write about so you click on some articles to draw ideas from. Once you find a web page that catches your eye, you can just click on the chrome extension for some fast background research.
The extension shows a drop-down where you can easily check the engagement level on the website, the number of followers they have, and their SEO metrics.
Under the Website Data tab, you can immediately view from the drop-down menu include the domain and page URL, and other basic page info such as page title, meta description, and meta title.
Note that the upper part of the website owner’s picture and the option to add to organised lists is only for Pro users who can integrate the lists with their more comprehensive web accounts.
Scroll down further and you can also see email addresses, available podcasts, latest articles published, as well as links to the about and resource pages on the site.
Even further down, you can view the site’s average monthly site visits, Alexa rank, Moz rank, backlink profile, number of shares on social, domain, and page authority.
If you click the Contact tab, you can then send an email directly to the blogger or website owner, and even use some pre-made templates that you can just modify to fit what you need.
BIG TIP!
Although some design elements could use a bit of a refresh, upgrading to the web app yields a lot of features such as mass email outreach, campaign management, a log of your whole communication history per outreach, automated follow-ups, and organised lists.
You can get a license key from the web app that you can use to activate the pro version of the chrome extension, which opens up more features you can’t get from the lite version. You can then sync some settings from the web version to the pro chrome extension, such as your saved lists and notes. You can also export your data points into a spreadsheet as needed.
PRICING AND FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- Free version available
- Paid versions start at $49.99 per month
Free Features:
- Full Name
- Location/Address
- Links To Social Pages (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, G+, Youtube)
- Follower Counts for all social pages
- Domain Name
- Page URL
- Page Title
- Links To Key Pages (About, Contact, Resources, Infographics, Podcasts, Interviews, Giveaways, Sponsored Posts, Product Reviews, Guest Posts, Press)
- Monetization Techniques (banner ads, email lists)
- Meta Description
- Email Addresses
- Phone Number
- Alexa Rank
- Average Visits Per Month
- Average Comments Per Post
- Average Social Shares Per Post
- Backlinks
- Page Authority
- Domain Authority
- Page Rank
- Moz Rank
- Klout Score
- Social Shares of page
Usefulness:
- Free version – 4/5
- Paid versions – 5/5
#9 UBERSUGGEST
WHAT DOES IT DO?
Ubersuggest helps you generate keyword ideas for your content marketing strategy and production. It’s essentially an amazing free SEO and content marketing tool.
With Ubersuggest’s free keyword tools, you can generate an unlimited number of suggestions for free and take your content creation to the next level while increasing your website’s chances of ranking against the competition.
But what’s this got to do with influencers?
Read on…
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
Well, SEO tools don’t just belong to people doing … erm… SEO!
We can use this tool to find influencers that have basically created their own content hubs away from the usual social media channels.
I’ll give you an example where we imagine that we’re a beauty brand in Australia again.
Firstly, and this is very important, put yourself in the shoes of your target consumer/buyer. Think about what they might Google that would end up relating to people that might influence their buying decision.
A great place to start is with the challenges they face (pun intended). For example, they might suffer from dry skin, blotchy skin, allergies to certain ingredients, acne, etc.
When they start searching for help and answers to their questions, they’ll probably do so with these challenges in mind.
They might start off with a broad search term like “skin care tips” – let’s check that out:
First of all, we see the overview for that keyword and it’s helpful as a quick check here to notice the “SEARCH VOLUME”:
This is the number of people searching for this search term each month on average over the last 12 months. And in the graph, you can see the search trend for this search term over the last 12-months.
This helps us to understand if people are searching for this search term and also what the outlook for the search term is. This will vary wildly depending on your industry and how niche your products/services are.
The example above looks healthy to me, so I’ll use it to find some influencers.
Go to the “Content Ideas Tab”:
Now you can see a list of links to content (web pages and blog posts) and the website domains they are on. I don’t know how the tool selects what to show here but I suspect that it’s showing us content that has been shared a lot on Facebook and Pinterest, and/or… has gained backlinks. Backlinks are much harder to get than social media shares so where you see a number of backlinks for a URL it’s a good indication that the content is very good.
This list you see before you is essentially a list of influential websites. You should explore theses websites, the content and social media channels to see if it’s the kind of content that your target audience would value. If so, add them to your influencer outreach list, particularly if you’re looking for Facebook and Pinterest influencers.
You might find that there are several writers posting content on these sites. If that’s the case, start looking up their individual social channels too as you might be able to find several influencers all from a single website.
Next, find additional influencers by repeating this process by looking at content ideas from other relevant keywords. You could try more niche searches like ‘dry skin makeup tips’ (a challenge-based search) and also see what other related searches the tool provides in the ‘Keyword Ideas’ tab:
BIG TIP!
I mentioned looking at the search trends earlier because it’s a good idea to use search terms that are stable over time or trending upwards. You can get a longer-term view by using Google Trends (another free tool) to look at the search terms you’re testing out in Ubersuggest. Google trends will also indicate related trending breakout search terms you could try out.
Also, try using the filters in the content ideas tab in Ubersuggest to find the most shared content on social media or the content with the most backlinks.
PRICING AND FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- It’s free!
Free Features:
- Domain Overview
- Top SEO Pages
- Keyword Suggestions
- Content Ideas
- Backlink data
Usefulness:
- Free version – 5/5
- Paid versions – n/a
#10 TWEETREACH
WHAT DOES IT DO?
Tweetreach is a twitter analysis tool that part of a suite of tools made by Union Metrics. Union Metrics paid subscriptions provide in-depth analytics on social posts across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, including reach, engagement, content performance, competitive analysis, and more. You can monitor all the topics and profiles that matter to you.
The free Tweetreach tool as part of this provides some great overview analysis of twitter hashtags, keywords and twitter accounts/users.
What they provide is enough to help us find some twitter influencers! Hooray!
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
This is really useful for finding the top twitter influencers.
Here’s how.
First, you need to create a free Tweetreach account and connect it to your Twitter account.
Now let’s imagine we’re a beauty brand again. I’m going to see what the score is for #makeup as that’s what I’m selling.
So there’s plenty of tweets with this hashtag. Let’s see who’s getting the impressions (eyeballs on their tweets) by scrolling down the report to the “All Contributors” section:
I’d recommend checking out all of the contributors on the lists shown in these results to see if they look appropriate for your brand.
BIG TIP!
Check the influencers you find in Followerwonk and Klear (also in this list) to get further information on their activities and levels of influence. I’d also recommend that you monitor these reports on a regular basis to find more influencers as the results will change regularly.
Also, if you want to discover good hashtags to analyse take a look at these free tools:
They’ll help you to see trending and related hashtags. They’re also great for finding what’s popular in different countries which is important because you should find influencers that relate to your target market which could be geographically restricted (e.g. you sell just in Australia).
PRICING AND FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- Free version available
- Paid versions from $99 per month
Free Features:
- Free snapshot reports include:
- Limited Twitter-only data
- Snapshots will include up to 100 tweets
- Summary analytics
- Top-level metrics including reach and Tweet activity
- 7-day snapshot
- A static view of only the most recently posted Tweets
- Analyse single query
- Report on just one query at a time
- Limited Twitter-only data
Usefulness:
- Free version – 4/5
- Paid versions – 5/5
#11 FEEDLY
WHAT DOES IT DO?
Feedly is an RSS feed aggregator. In plain English that means that you use it as a central place to subscribe to the content you are interested in whether they come from the news, blogs, social media posts, RSS feeds, or other sources.
What’s brilliant is that you get to see all of this information one place which saves a lot of time and hassle.
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
Beyond using it as a tool for finding influencers, which we’ll look at shortly, this is a great tool for monitoring industry trends, your own brands, competitor brands and the news. It works well on desktop and mobile devices and it’s free! It’s easy to categorise content too, so it’s easy to browse your content subscriptions by the topic/category feeds/folders you’ve created.
Here’s how to use it for finding influencers using our beauty brand example again.
Firstly you need to create a free account.
Once created click ‘Add Content to Your Feeds’:
And then start typing in keywords that relate to your brand. In this example I’m going to look for “makeup” again and select the hashtag that Feedly has identified:
Then, on the results drop-down box, I’m going to look at the stats for the content sources provided – number of followers, the relevancy of the content to my search, and the number of articles published per week. Feedly automatically lists the sources by ‘Feedly Score’ which is basically an order for influence as far as we’re concerned.
Work your way down the list checking out the sources to see if they are influencers that you could add to your outreach list.
Also, check out the related topics to find more influencers.
BIG TIP!
Cross-reference the influencers you find with other tools on this list!
For influencers that you want to approach, follow them in Feedly so that you can monitor their activity and look for opportunities to engage with them so that you can get on their radar and nurture relationships with them.
PRICING AND FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- Free version available
- Paid versions from $6 per month
Free Features:
- Find and follow lots of feeds
- Categorise your feeds
Usefulness:
- Free version – 4/5
- Paid versions – 5/5
#12 ALLTOP
WHAT DOES IT DO?
This is a tool that’s a lot like Feedly, it’s an RSS feed aggregator. So basically, you subscribe to content and view it in one place and you can create a free account to do this.
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
This is a great tool for the same reasons as Feedly.
How do we find influencers with it though?
Easy.
Look up your target category (e.g. “Beauty”):
And then check out the sites of the top publishers listed to see if they are worth adding to your outreach list:
BIG TIP!
Explore the publishers you find as you may be able to find multiple influencers on each site. Pay close attention to which influencers are posting the most popular articles and monitor this over time. Use other tools on this list to further verify how influential the influencers you find are.
PRICING AND FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- It’s free!
Free Features:
- Subscribe to recommended RSS feeds and other feeds that you find and add into your account
Usefulness:
- Free version – 3/5
#13 HUNTER.IO
WHAT DOES IT DO?
Hunter.io is basically an email hunter tool that helps marketers find contact information associated with a domain. The tool can also be used to verify emails (check that email addresses work) and do bulk tasks.
I’m including it here as a bonus tool not so much as an influencer identification tool, but a tool that will help you to make contact with influencers.
POLKADOT COMMUNICATIONS VERDICT
Sometimes getting in touch with influencers can be tricky, especially when you’re on their owned platforms (like their blogs and websites). Often there are no email addresses or contact details, or even an obvious indication of what social media channels they might be using too.
That’s where this tool can help.
Let’s imagine that I’ve just created a new PR tool app (I have actually, it’s called Story Match) and want to promote it and as part of that I’d like the folks at HubSpot to write about it. If you’ve never been on the HubSpot blog, you should take a look. It’s possibly the most helpful blog for marketers, comms professionals, sales professionals and customer service professionals in the world.
If I go to the HubSpot blog and search for PR I can find this post: The Ultimate Guide to Public Relations in 2019.
As part of the post, there’s a list of PR tools. In my opinion Story Match should be on there! 
I can see that the post has been written by Ali Decker. If I click on here name I can see a link to her own website and her twitter and LinkedIn profiles:
I can go to those channels to read more and possibly make contact with her through those channels too. But I’d like to email her…
…so I run HubSpot.com through the Hunter.io app and find 675 emails listed!
Take a look at the results and also look out for some of the results containing social media links and even telephone numbers. Great!
But I want to find Ali, so I put her name in the “Find Someone” search box and hey presto – there’s a 70% chance that this is Ali’s email address.
I can now use this and the other channels to reach out to her. Fingers crossed!
BIG TIP!
I find this tool particularly useful for finding email addresses for people at larger organisations where they don’t list their email addresses on the website. It’s a great tool for sales as well as influencer outreach.
Once you’ve got an email list you can use the Hunter.io Outreach tool for emailing your influencers (or sales prospects) and include automated follow-up emails. Emails will be tracked and you can see if they’re delivered and opened. Awesome! I can’t believe this is actually free!*
*It’s free at the time of writing this list…it might not be forever.
PRICING AND FEATURES SUMMARY
Website:
Industry:
- All
Cost:
- Free version available
- Paid versions available from 49€ per month
Free Features:
- Do up to 50 email searches on domains each month
- Send cold email outreach campaigns – see https://hunter.io/outreach
Usefulness:
- Free version – 4/5
- Paid versions – 5/5
AN EXTRA NOTE…
Conclusion
Now that you’ve read all about these free PR tools and our tips on how to use them, individually and together, it’s time to get started.
With these tools, you will be able to research and identify influencers worthy of targeting as part of your PR, influencer marketing or blogger outreach campaigns.
So what are you waiting for?
We’d love to hear about how you get on with these tools and how they help you to either get started or enhance your current campaigns.
Soon we will create more useful guides and collections of free tools that will support other areas of the PR and influencer outreach process, remember to sign up to our newsletter to receive them when they are published.
We hope that these tools will help save you precious time and money, while making your campaigns more effective, generating a really awesome return on investment you can be proud of.
Launch your brand into the stratosphere with Polkadot Communications
For the last ten years, we have gained literally thousands of pieces of media coverage for our clients, exposing their brands to millions of people in Australia and around the world. You can book in for a free communications assessment here with Dionne Taylor, Polkadot Communications founder.
Find out how PR can help you to:
- Connect with the right influencers
- Amplify your brand awareness on a local, national and even global scale
- Get more leads, sales and loyal customers
- Optimise your brand positioning
