How to find Russian influencers on Instagram?

Instagram in Russia is already ahead of Facebook by number of active users — 32M active users. The Russians are on Instagram 26 times during the day, spend on average 41 minutes daily, and are in 5th place in the world in terms of frequency of using Stories.

Russian ecommerce from categories such as fashion, baby items and cosmetics can’t imagine their promotion without Instagram. And many of them don’t even have a website or an online store and sell directly via Direct, or instant messages Whatsapp, Viber and Telegram.

However, Russian Mediascope’s study tells us about the reverse situation:

• 83% of respondents understand that bloggers promote only those brands for which they are being paid.
• 66% said that they’ve learned  about the latest and most fashionable trends from the bloggers.
• 50% believes that bloggers’ recommendations help them to make a choice of goods and services.
• 48% believe that bloggers recommend only those products and services that they like themselves.

In this article I will describe EpicStars — Russian influencer marketing platform that will help you find the so-called micro influencers, that is, those who have from a few dozen to a few hundred thousand of followers.

Promotion with micro influencers is not only suitable for those advertisers who have a small advertising budget. Often, cooperation with small bloggers is more effective than with an Instagram star with more than a million followers. Many of micro influencers have niche blogs and their target group has defined interests. They know their audience and better adapt the advertising message.

Epicstars

Currently, the platform has more than 22000 Instagram bloggers. This number includes both small bloggers and influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers.

On the main page you can roughly estimate your campaign results. Click on Budget forecast and then in the form define a budget that you can spend or number of impressions or clicks you want to get. I’ve noticed that in the English version of the website there is an error — it calculates in rubles, instead of dollars, despite the fact that there is USD written in the form.

So, for example, your budget is 300 USD, which equals 17000 RUB. Enter this amount in the form:

As you can see, the system gives a prediction that with this budget you can make 2-11 posts on Instagram profiles with 50k-250k followers, and the cost per click will be on average 3 rubles (0,05 USD). Remember that this is only an estimation.

Now let’s move on to the tool. After registration you can immediately begin to create an offer for bloggers.

You can choose between three advertising format:

• advertising post
• native integration,
• special project, for example, the contest or participation in the event.

And there are three payment methods:

• with money,
• with product or service,
• mutual PR.

The more popular the bloggers are, the less chance that they’ll be interested in payment with a product or mutual promotion.

If you want to find bloggers, click Search Bloggers. In the side menu, select Instagram, and then select the following parameters: category, number of followers, engagement rate, approval rate, discussion rate. When you have found bloggers that you are interested in, you can save them to your list of favorites, and then quickly go back to them when a task is created.

Note that some bloggers have a Contacts tab. They put their contact details there, so if you don’t want to work through EpicStars you can contact them directly.

After you publish your task, the moderator approves it, and you refill your balance, don’t forget to change the task status to “public” so that users could find it. You can also offer your tasks to the selected bloggers in the Bloggers Search section, that is described above. If the blogger wants to cooperate with you, you will receive a response in the internal chat. Good luck!