How to find TikTok influencers, free methods first

The fastest free way to find TikTok influencers is TikTok's own search: type your niche, switch to the Users tab, and work down the list. It takes ten minutes and costs nothing. The paid platforms are worth their price only when you need filters TikTok does not offer, like audience country or a verified email address.

What follows is every route in order of cost, then the method we actually 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. There is a real shortlist of ten houseplant creators at the bottom, with the numbers we ranked them on.

Free ways to find TikTok influencers

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: "plant care" and "houseplant" return almost entirely different accounts.

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 notes that the natural-language AI search is "available to select customers", so the filters are what you can count on. Creators join by upgrading their account in a market where TikTok One has launched, if they are 18 or over and in good standing.

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 category, audience demographics, engagement and sales performance, and creator profiles show revenue, units sold and video views. TikTok's caveat on that page matters: those creator-detail metrics only appear if the creator has authorised data sharing.

Paid platforms, briefly

Checked against each vendor's own pages, 19 September 2026. What you are paying for in all five is the same thing: contact details and audience data TikTok does not expose.

The TikTok influencer search we use

Discovery and vetting are two jobs, and doing them in the app means switching between them forty times. Doing them with an agent means one table.

The method: run search_users on two or three phrasings of your niche, take every account it returns, then run user_profile on each candidate 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.

Here is what that returned for houseplants on 19 September 2026. Two searches produced 40 accounts; these are the ten we pulled full profiles for.

Data: TikTok profiles via TokConnect, pulled 19 September 2026. 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 rate: above 2% is healthy on TikTok, under 1% is a flag. 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.