No matter how many followers an influencer might have, it won't lead to sales if the audience isn't right.
Before spending time on finding emails & reaching out, you need to confirm that the creator can reach your target market.
Asking influencers one by one to share their demographics just doesn't work at scale. It's slow & painful. It forces you to invest time in influencer outreach which might be wasted. And you're limited to only whichever data the platform gives their creators.
Here's how you can analyze influencer demographics quickly, without reaching out to them.
How to check an influencer’s follower demographics
I’m going to show you how to get influencer audience data using Modash, a tool for finding & analyzing influencers.
It’s quick & easy. You can run checks for a single influencer if you already have a profile in mind, or you can search for new ones based on your criteria.
Here’s the TL;DR:
You search for a profile (Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok), and click once to open up a profile summary. That’s it. Here’s an example using Mari Maria, a Brazilian Instagram account with 20M+ followers.
There’s more detailed data available too which I’ll get to shortly.
Keep scrolling to get more details, or grab a 14-day free trial and try it for yourself. No credit card needed.
Let’s look in more detail at these two scenarios: checking a specific influencer’s audience, or finding new influencers based on your audience criteria.
1. Checking an influencer’s audience demographics data
After you sign up for a Modash trial, you’ll land in the Discovery tab. It looks something like this.
The first thing you should do is select the right platform (Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok).
Next, scroll down. Below the filters, there’s a search bar where you can directly type or paste a profile handle. Put in the username, and run the search.
In the results section you’ll see the profile you searched for. Below that, Modash’s influencer lookalike tool will also suggest profiles that have similar content or audiences.
You can see three different levels of detail for David Beckham’s audience data.
Follower range & engagement rate will already be visible in the search result (see above).
By clicking on the result, you can open a profile summary in the sidebar.
Then scroll down to see more data. In most cases, you’ll find all the data you want at this step. Regarding specifically demographics, you can see:
- Gender split (e.g. 40% female, 60% male)
- Age brackets split (e.g. 50% aged 18-24)
- Top 5 audience locations by country
- Top 5 audience locations by city
Outside of demographics, there are also a bunch of other data points available.
- Average likes per post
- Followers
- Average post engagement rate
- Audience interests
- Popular hashtags used by the influencers
- The account’s most liked posts
In 90% of cases, that’s probably already enough data to make a decision.
If you need though, you can continue & open the full report to get every detail available. There, you’ll find extras like:
- Follower growth over time
- Recent day-by-day engagement rates
- Audience data by likers (as well as by followers)
- Audience ethnicity breakdown
- More details on countries & cities (more than top 3)
- Notable followers
- Their past sponsored posts
- …and more.
2. Finding new influencers based on audience demographics criteria
Modash’s influencer discovery tool acts like a search engine for influencers. It lists every creator on Earth with 1k+ followers across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
There are filters available that you can use to narrow your search & find best-fit creators.
Here’s an example. Let’s say I want to find TikTok influencers, and my target market is young males in South Africa.
I can apply audience filters for:
- Location
- Gender
- Age
- Language
Each can be controlled with a percentage filter too. Very few creators are going to have 100% of followers in South Africa, for example. So to broaden my search, I could specify that the results should have at least X% of followers in my target country.
There are additional filters available based on the influencer, rather than the audience. For example:
- Influencer location
- Minimum engagement rate
- If a contact email is available
- Keywords used in bios / posts
- Minimum follower growth rate
After that, it’s a case of iteration. Run your search, check the results. Analyze a few profiles (as above), and add them to a shortlist. Modify your search, and go again. Rinse and repeat as much as you need.
How else can you check influencer audience demographics?
If you don’t have an influencer analysis tool to use the method above, it might still be possible to get some data for your decision-making.
Ask the influencer to send screenshots
Depending on the platform & the account type, influencers have access to some audience demographics data. During the outreach and negotiation process, you can request that they send this information manually.
The big downside is that you have to spend time on outreach before you confirm that the influencer reaches your target audience. Plus, you’re limited to whatever data the platform gives to creators. Nevertheless, it’s better than flying blind.
For Business and Creator accounts, Instagram Account Insights are available in the mobile app. That includes top locations and age ranges.
TikTok
In TikTok's analytics, there is a 'Followers' tab where creators can learn about their audience. There, you can find data on top countries & genders that are following the account (among other stats).
YouTube
In YouTube Studio, there's an Analytics section. In the top menu, you can select Audience. There, you can see audience ages, genders, and locations (among other stats).
Manually review their engagement
It isn't as good as having quantitative data, but you can get a gut feeling just by manually looking at likers & comments.
Take a look at a handful of recent posts per influencer. Scroll through their comments & likes. Open up a few profiles of those who are engaging with their posts.
What's your gut reaction? Do these people look like your target market?
Doing a quick check like this is still time consuming, but once again, better than flying totally blind.
Pull influencer demographics data via API
If you want to get audience data at scale, or integrate it into a product or other data set, you can use Modash’s influencer marketing API.
Pretty much all the data that is available in the Modash platform, including audience demographics, can be requested via API. That means you can enhance your own dataset, power a product or a marketplace, or automate some existing workflows.
If you’re a technical user, you can check out the documentation to learn more. If not, I won’t bore you with developer jargon that you aren’t here for.
You can book a call with our team to get a demo & ask questions.
Watch the video
Wrapping up
Undoubtedly, using an audience analysis tool is the fastest & most scalable way to check audience demographics.
That said, if you're just getting started, it isn't the only way. You can (and should) do unscaleable things if you're on a shoestring budget, trying to prove that influencer marketing can work for your brand. That might mean asking influencers to send screenshots, or working off gut feeling.
Either way, if that's you, you might find this post useful: https://www.modash.io/blog/influencer-marketing-roi.
It's all about how to prove the ROI on influencer marketing, ready to get more resources, and scale up.
Good luck!