Find & Hire TikTok Influencers
Before you can hire a TikTok influencer for your influencer marketing campaigns, you need to find them! We’ll cover this and how to reach out to TikTok influencers using an influencer API in conjunction with a service we provide, allowing you to export CSV files of potential influencers you can reach out to.
This will provide more customization for your marketing strategy (and probably at a lower cost) compared to using an influencer database or influencer platform (that your competitors also have access to) when searching for TikTok influencers for hire. This can usually lead to a better long term relationship with the influencer, as you’re starting the relationship using more layers of searching that should result in finding a better match (and perhaps better value that not everyone else is reaching out to).
We will not cover TikTok email scrapers that find the TikTok user email address linked to TikTok accounts, as this is private information and therefore illegal to scrape. However, as with many other social media platforms, TikTok allows users to share a public bio that is quite easy to scrape!
When considering how to contact TikTok influencers using the methods below, we will refer to email scraping as when you see an email on TikTok shared in the public bio. You may also find some influencers who don’t list an email, but an alternate social media app like WhatsApp, so we suggest scraping the full user bio for influencers and not to rely on a TikTok email finder, which can miss these alternate contact points.
Using TikAPI for Data Scraping
We will explain how to hire TikTok influencers using TikAPI, the unofficial TikTok API, to handle the search aspect. We can search using a number of strategies from profile bio, to content posted & filter by influence levels.
Sign Up for TikAPI
You can evaluate TikAPI for 5 days at no charge. Just visit their site and sign up, then you’ll receive an API key you can use to follow the rest of this article. You may also want to reach out to their customer support if you’re not comfortable providing payment information upfront and they can send you a free trial key like they did with us.
Disclaimer: We were provided with a free API key from TikAPI for the purposes of evaluating their service and writing this article, but we were not compensated in any other way to promote their service.
Find Influencers by Profile
You can directly search TikTok bios that match a keyword of your choice, so you can find profiles who self-identify with your target niche and then filter out the results with a follower count that is either too low or too high for your needs.
For this, we want to use the Discover Endpoint as it allows for large-scale pagination when the category is set to users. This will allow you to provide a search query in the keyword query input and then increase the cursor input by 20 for each subsequent request to scrape all users whose profiles match your query.
In the response you’ll get back details about each user, including their follower count and bio (which sometimes contains an email address). You can filter users by follower count (or other stats you may find useful, like total number of hearts) to pick out the influencers, and then get in touch with the ones who share their email address publicly.
Scraping with Stevesie: If you need help downloading this data, you can use our TikAPI Discover Search Results Endpiont, which will query this endpoint on your behalf and let you download results in CSV format. You can also use our TikAPI Discover Search Workflow to automatically handle the pagination and let you download 1,000s of results without writing code. Note these are both paid services that we provide, separate from TikAPI.
Find Influencers by Content
The second approach you can use relies on finding short videos that matches your niche (instead of relying on the profile’s bio), and then collecting the data of the author of the content to find influencers. We’ll cover 2 ways to do this, either via keyword search or by hashtag.
Both approaches will give us back stats on the content and the author. So we could apply multiple filters to the data and only look for posts with high levels of engagement and then filter the authors based on follower count… although you may want to find influencers with a low follower count, but high post engagement to find “up-and-comers” to showcase your brand.
Post Content Keyword Search
If you want to find influencers based on the content they post, you want to use the Search Endpoint, which will allow you to enter a keyword and will return both the TikTok post and detailed information about the author (including bio with email address if shared & follower count). Just provide your search term in the query parameter to get started.
You’ll want to set the category to either general or videos to perform a deep search (paginating over 1,000s of results), as the endpoint will only return 1 page for the other categories. We suggest sticking with the general type, but you’re free to experiment with videos. Both will return information about the post author so you can identify influencers by their posts.
For pagination, the endpoint will return 12 results at a time, so just keep accessing the endpiont and increase the offset by 12 each time to get more results.
Scraping with Stevesie: If you need help downloading this data, you can use our TikAPI Search Results Endpoint, which will query this endpoint on your behalf and let you download results in CSV format. You can also use our TikAPI Search Workflow to automatically handle the pagination and let you download 1,000s of results without writing code. Note these are both paid services that we provide, separate from TikAPI.
Find Hashtag Posts & Authors
If you have a specific hashtag you’re interested in finding posts (and associated influencers for), then the Hashtag Posts Endpoint will be able to do this for you.
Note that in order to scrape a large list of posts, you must access the endpoint with the id parameter (which will be a number corresponding to a hashtag). In order to get this value, you can query the endpoint but provide the name first (just provide the hashtag string without the #, e.g. just beer) and the API will return the hashtag ID, but it will be listed as “challenge.id” or similar.
Once you have the hashtag ID, you may want to save it somewhere so you don’t need to keep looking it up. You can then query the endpoint with the id parameter and you’ll get back up to 30 results. To get the next 30, just increase the cursor parameter by 30 each time.
Scraping with Stevesie: If you need help downloading this data, you can use our TikAPI Hashtag Posts Endpoint, which will query this endpoint on your behalf and let you download results in CSV format. You can also use our TikAPI Hashtag Posts Workflow to automatically handle the pagination and let you download 1,000s of results without writing code. Note these are both paid services that we provide, separate from TikAPI.