How to find micro-influencers in your niche

A niche is a topic a creator covers consistently, in front of an audience that came for it. A hashtag is just a label the author picks for one post. The two often overlap, but not always — and searching by hashtag, a very common reflex, runs into two limits.

The first is the label itself. Instagram’s Help Center, checked on September 27, 2026, caps a post at five hashtags, and creators pick them to be seen: a pastry chef can tag a video #food, #paris and #reels without those three words saying that she has posted nothing but pastry for two years.

The second is ranking. Meta says Instagram search is personalized based on your activity, and that the suggestions shown as you type are ranked, among other signals, by how likely you are to click on them. Two people typing the same hashtag may not see the same results: what you see depends partly on you, not only on the niche.

Hashtags are still a fine place to start. What settles it is what a creator publishes, month after month — and the five steps below start there.

Before you search, write one sentence about what you sell, to whom, and in what tone. “Package-free solid cosmetics, for thirty-somethings who read labels, without preaching” says more than a list of hashtags: a precise topic, an audience, and even a tone to avoid.

That sentence yields three lists. The words your creators use (“shampoo bar”, “zero waste”). The hashtags they add. And the words to exclude: the ones that bring back off-topic accounts, such as a neighboring topic that is not yours, or deal accounts that repost anything that sells.

A micro-influencer has a mid-sized audience: big enough for a post to matter, small enough to still be a community rather than a crowd. Thresholds vary from one source to another; keep the order of magnitude in mind rather than a hard line.

Two studies published in the Journal of Marketing inform that choice. Wies and colleagues (2023) show that engagement with a sponsored post, counted in likes, comments and mentions, rises with audience size up to about 1.4 million followers, then falls: on sheer volume, a small audience does not win. Beichert and colleagues (2024), drawing on real purchases and field studies on Instagram, find instead that targeting creators with small audiences was far more profitable than targeting the most followed ones. Big accounts bring volume; small ones brought more for the money.

The idea that small accounts engage more, as a rate this time, does not hold everywhere. On TikTok, our own data, which measures engagement per view, shows almost no drop as audiences grow — likely because recommendation weighs more than follower count there; our article on engagement rate walks through those figures. Size is a starting filter, not a verdict.

A niche is not equally alive everywhere. Start with the platform where its creators post the most, then widen. Our niche pages, from beauty on Instagram to gaming on YouTube, show real creators from each niche on its platform — the most followed ones we have measured, not necessarily micro-influencers.

Then judge each creator by what they publish, not by what they tag. Five criteria do most of the sorting:

• the topic of their content, read from their posts rather than their bio;
• the words that must appear in their topics, and the ones that must not;
• the date of their latest post, to rule out dormant accounts;
• the language of their content, which tells you who they speak to;
• what they are: a creator, not a brand or a media outlet.

A good search result is only a presumption. Before you contact a creator, scroll back through several months of posts, not just the latest ones: an account may have changed topics, or only started covering yours with a recent partnership.

Look at engagement per view rather than per follower, where views are public, as they are on videos. A video pushed by recommendation can be seen far beyond its author’s audience, and a rate computed on followers then describes it poorly.

Finally, check that they disclose their partnerships. According to results the European Commission published in February 2024, a coordinated screening of posts by 576 influencers found that 97% published commercial content, but only 20% systematically disclosed it as advertising. If you work with French creators: France’s 2023 influencer law, as amended in November 2024, treats failing to clearly disclose commercial intent, unless it is already clear from context, as a misleading commercial practice; it names the labels that disclose it, or an equivalent suited to the format, and makes the advertiser and the influencer jointly and severally liable for damage caused to third parties in performing their contract.

In short, check for:

• months of posts on your topic, not a single series;
• engagement that holds from one post to the next, per view where views are public;
• partnerships disclosed as such;
• and, if it matters to you, the responsible commercial influence certificate from the ARPP, France’s advertising self-regulatory body, listed in its public directory.

When a creator matches exactly what you are looking for, they become the best starting point: creators who cover the same things have a good chance of belonging to your niche, even if they do not use the same hashtags.

Two caveats. Content proximity says nothing about audience size: sort afterwards to keep the micro-influencers. Nor does it say anything about audience quality: every new name goes back through step 4.

Describe your niche in one sentence: BriefBench searches Instagram, TikTok and YouTube live, and you filter creators by category, audience size and language.