How to find TikTok influencers, free methods first

To find TikTok influencers for free, use TikTok's own search: type your niche, switch to the Users tab, and rank what comes back on likes per video rather than followers. In a houseplant search on 19 September 2026, a creator with 317,700 followers averaged about 24,500 likes per video, while one with 95,500 followers averaged 527. The free TikTok creator finder runs the same kind of search in a browser.

The paid platforms are worth their price only when you need what TikTok does not show, like audience country or a verified email address; their prices below were from 5 October 2026. What follows is every route in order of cost, then the method we use: pull the candidate list with an agent, pull each profile's public counts, and rank them in a table before you look at a single video, with a real shortlist of ten houseplant accounts.

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<a href="https://tokconnect.com/guides/find-tiktok-influencers/"><img src="https://tokconnect.com/graphics/find-tiktok-influencers/summary.png" alt="Rank creators on likes per video, not followers: 24.5K likes per video, 317,700-follower creator; 527 likes per video, 95,500-follower creator; 0 of 40 accounts shared by two phrasings of one niche" width="1200" height="632" style="max-width:100%;height:auto"></a><br>Source: <a href="https://tokconnect.com/guides/find-tiktok-influencers/">How to Find TikTok Influencers in 2026 (Free Methods First)</a> on TokConnect

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How to find TikTok influencers for free

1. The Users tab in TikTok search

Search a niche phrase, then tap Users. You get accounts whose handle, display name or bio matches, ordered by TikTok's own relevance. Search the phrase your customers would use, not the industry word: on 19 September 2026, "plant care" and "houseplant" returned 20 accounts each and not one account appeared in both lists. To see up to 10 matching profiles side by side without the app, use the free creator finder.

2. Hashtag pages

Open a niche hashtag and read the authors of the top videos rather than the videos. This surfaces creators who are actually posting now, which keyword search does not guarantee. It is also how you find the mid-size accounts that no database has indexed yet. Pair it with keyword research so you are searching the phrases your buyers use rather than the ones your category uses.

3. TikTok One, formerly the Creator Marketplace

TikTok's official brand-to-creator tool is now TikTok One. From a TikTok One account you can search creators by username or keyword, and filter by creator details, audience demographics and performance. TikTok's help page (updated June 2026) lists filters for creator country, follower count, language, audience age and gender, median video views and engagement rate. Creators join in a market where TikTok One has launched, if they are 18 or over and in good standing. TikTok's old Creator Marketplace closed as a standalone site on 1 April 2025 and lives on inside TikTok One; the Creator Marketplace guide covers who is in it.

4. Find Creators in TikTok Shop

If you sell on TikTok Shop, the Affiliate Center's Find Creators tool is the strongest free option, because it is the only one with sales data. You can filter by product category, follower size, commission rate, follower age and gender, revenue, units sold, average views and engagement rate, and creator profiles show 30-day revenue, units sold and video views. TikTok's caveat on that page (updated 23 February 2026) matters: creator metrics only appear "for creators who have authorized their data to be shown".

You can also start from a product instead of a niche. Paste a TikTok Shop product link into the free TikTok affiliate finder and it lists the creators whose public videos link that product, ranked by views on those videos, with TikTok's "Creator earns commission" label. On 7 October 2026, for the top TikTok Shop US listing in a "lip oil" search, one page of results found 17 creators, and the top creator's 5 videos linking it had 30.6 million views between them (snapshot). It shows views, not sales; for per-creator sales and commission rates, use Find Creators.

Paid platforms, briefly

5 October 2026 against each vendor's own pages: Favikon pricing, Heepsy pricing, Tokfluence, Upfluence pricing. What you are paying for in all five is the same thing: contact details and audience data TikTok does not expose.

Pick Heepsy or Tokfluence if you need email addresses and audience country splits, and TikTok One if you run brand campaigns with audience filters. If you only need a ranked shortlist, the free method below does the job. For a side-by-side of the paid databases, see the influencer search tools comparison.

The TikTok influencer search we use

Discovery and vetting are two jobs, and doing them in the app means opening each profile one by one. Doing them in one table is faster.

The method: search users for two or three phrasings of your niche, take every account that comes back, then open each candidate's profile for the public counts (followers, total likes across all videos, video count, verification, bio). Sort by followers, then work out likes per video, then look at videos. To pull the same table in one go, use the question below and swap "houseplant" for your niche:

Here is what that returned for houseplants. Two searches produced 40 accounts; these are the ten with full profiles.

Data: public TikTok profiles. Likes per video is total likes divided by video count. Open the snapshot. @mrhouseplant returned a video count of zero, so it has no likes-per-video figure.

Read the likes-per-video column, not the follower column. @reagankastner has a fifth of @plantswithkrystal's followers and nearly the same likes per video, off 110 posts instead of 1,394. @mr.houseplant, in the same niche, has published 2,658 videos for 527 likes each. Three times the gap in followers between those two, forty-six times the gap in what one post is worth.

Two rows are traps, and both are the reason to check profiles rather than trust a search result. @houseplant is not a creator: its bio sells "thoughtfully-designed objects", and it ranked first only because the handle is the keyword. @mrhouseplant and @mr.houseplant are two different accounts with near-identical names, and the search result for both claimed verified status while the profiles say only one account on this list is verified.

Vetting checklist

Four checks, in this order, before anyone gets an email.

• Relevance. Read ten recent captions. Does this account make content about your category, or did it make one video about it in 2024? A handle that matches your keyword is not relevance.
• Engagement ratio. Total likes ÷ videos gives likes per video. Divide that by followers for a rough engagement ratio and compare accounts in the same niche; a lifetime average has no official benchmark. On our shortlist, @reagankastner came out at 7.7% and @mr.houseplant at 0.6%.
• Recency. Pull the creator's last five posts with their dates and view counts. @living.junglee's latest five ran from 11 to 23 August 2026 and drew 1,252 to 3,022 views each, against 38,500 followers. Nothing wrong with the creator; everything wrong with paying a rate card built on the follower number.
• Brand safety. Watch three full videos with sound. Check what they have already promoted, whether disclosures are present, and what the comment section looks like. This is the only step you cannot automate.

The outreach message

Short, specific, and with the number in it. Creators delete anything that reads like a template.

Hi [name], your [specific video, named] is the reason I'm writing. The bit about [detail] is exactly how our customers talk about this.

We're [brand], we make [product in five words]. We'd like to pay you for one video and one photo set, usage on our own channels for 90 days, budget [$X]. Happy to send the product first with no obligation.

If that's not for you, no problem. If it is, what's your rate for that scope?

Name the budget. Every message that says "paid collaboration" without a figure gets filtered, and the creators worth having are the ones who reply with a real rate card.

Once you have a shortlist, check what their audience is actually searching for before you brief them, using topic audience data, and see how they stack up against the accounts already winning your keywords in the competitor analysis guide. The full campaign, from goal to measurement, is in the TikTok influencer marketing playbook, and agencies can use the shortlist in a pitch alongside search data that wins TikTok clients.

Running this for clients? Connect TokConnect to ChatGPT or Claude and run the same table for a whole client list.

How we got these numbers

All TikTok data was pulled through TokConnect. We searched users for "houseplant" and "plant care" on 19 September 2026 (20 accounts each), then pulled profiles for the ten accounts with the most followers that looked like creators or brands, and the latest five posts of one account. Followers, total likes and video counts are the public, rounded figures TikTok showed that day; likes per video is total likes divided by video count, and the engagement check divides that by followers. These are lifetime averages, so they flatter accounts whose best years are behind them, which is why the recency check matters.

Public profiles and posts carry no audience demographics or contact emails; those come from the paid platforms above, and per-creator sales and commission rates come from Find Creators. The lip oil affiliate example is the creator video rail on a TikTok Shop US product page. Data: houseplant snapshot.