Find influencers who fit your brand

Kite defines fit before it searches, because the right creator for a running-shoe brand looks nothing like the right creator for accounting software. It uses your customer research to describe who the creator's audience should be, which topics they should cover, which platforms matter most, and what tone would sit comfortably next to your brand.

Kite also writes down what would rule a creator out. That might be recent sponsorships with a direct competitor, content that contradicts a claim you make, or a style that clashes with your voice. You can add your own rules, such as a size range, a country, or a budget, and Kite applies them to every creator it considers.

The most reliable way to find creators your customers follow is to search for the topics and questions your customers care about and see who keeps showing up with an engaged audience, and that is how Kite searches. It runs those searches across several platforms with its built-in research sources:

• YouTube. Kite reads the top YouTube results for a search term and which channels own them. For any public video, it reads the title, description, views, likes, comments, and transcript.
• TikTok. Kite searches a library of public TikTok videos and ads by keyword and reads each video's caption and engagement. This source is strongest for consumer and ecommerce categories.
• X. Kite searches public posts by keyword, hashtag, or account, which helps it find the people leading conversations in your category.
• LinkedIn. For a business audience, Kite reads people's public profiles and recent posts to find the voices your buyers listen to.
• The wider web. Kite searches the web for creators, podcasters, and newsletter writers in your space, along with the roundups and articles that mention them.

Kite also looks for creators who already mention you or your competitors. A creator who reviewed a competitor's product last month already has an audience that buys in your category. A creator who mentioned your brand without being asked may be your easiest yes.

Say you sell a sugar-free electrolyte mix for runners. Kite searches YouTube for marathon fueling and long-run nutrition, searches TikTok for electrolyte videos and your competitors' brand names, and searches X for the running hashtags your customers use. The same dozen creators keep appearing, and those dozen become the starting list.

You find micro-influencers by searching for specific topics rather than for popular accounts, because small creators surface when the search is narrow enough that their content is the best answer. Kite searches the precise questions and problems your customers have, so creators with a few thousand engaged followers appear next to the large accounts instead of beneath them.

For the electrolyte mix, a search for "fueling for your first ultramarathon" turns up a trail runner with 18,000 followers whose videos draw hundreds of comments from people asking what she drinks on long runs. A broad fitness search would never have reached her. Kite keeps creators like her on the list when their audience matches yours, and it notes their size so you can plan budget and expectations.

You check whether an influencer's audience is real by looking at how people engage with their posts over time, not at the follower count, and Kite does this for every creator on the list. It reads the views, likes, comments, and shares on the creator's recent posts and looks at the patterns that separate a real audience from an inflated one:

• Consistency. A real audience produces engagement that rises and falls in a believable range from post to post. One huge post surrounded by quiet ones deserves a closer look.
• Comment quality. Kite reads the comments themselves. Questions about the product, personal stories, and replies between commenters point to real people. Strings of emoji and one-word praise on every post point the other way.
• Who is commenting. The comments show whether the audience is the one you want. A creator whose commenters ask about race training reaches runners. A creator whose commenters are mostly other creators reaches creators.

For a deeper check, connect your HypeAuditor account. Kite then pulls HypeAuditor's reports for Instagram and TikTok accounts, including authenticity scores, audience demographics, engagement, and follower growth, and adds them to its own read of the posts. A sudden jump in follower growth or an audience that lives mostly outside the countries you ship to is easy to spot in those reports.

The best way to vet a creator is to watch what they actually say, check who they already work with, and compare both with what your brand needs, and Kite does that from the creator's own content. It reads transcripts of the creator's recent videos, so it can quote what they said about products like yours rather than guess from a thumbnail.

Kite checks each creator for the things that would make a partnership go badly:

• Recent sponsored posts for a direct competitor.
• Claims about products like yours that you couldn't stand behind, such as health promises your product doesn't make.
• Topics or language that would clash with your brand voice.
• Whether the creator already discloses sponsorships clearly, which tells you how they'll handle yours.

Every finding links to the post or video it came from, so you can check it yourself in a minute rather than an afternoon.

The shortlist is only useful once you contact the right people, so Kite carries its research straight into the next step. For each creator you pick, Kite drafts an outreach message that refers to specific videos or posts and explains why their audience is a good match for your product. You review the message, and Kite sends approved emails from your team's Kite address or your connected email account, while direct messages go out from your own social account.

When a creator says yes, Kite can write the creator brief. The brief covers the product details, the points worth making, and the claims the creator must not make, so the content sounds like them and still stays accurate.

Kite keeps a record of each partnership: what you paid, what the creator posted, and how those posts performed. It reads the views, likes, and comments on the published posts and records which creators sent real attention your way.

That record shapes the next search. If small trail-running creators outperformed big fitness accounts, Kite leans the next shortlist toward creators like them.