Influencer Discovery: Build a Vetted Creator Shortlist From Scratch (Free Claude Skill)

"Find me some influencers" is where most campaigns quietly go wrong. Not because the creators found are bad, but because the search never had real criteria to begin with, so the shortlist ends up built on vibes instead of a method.

What it does

Influencer Discovery takes a niche, platform, and budget and turns it into a defensible shortlist:

• Search criteria locked first: sub-niche (not "tech"), platform, audience size range, content format, audience demographics. Expensive products with long buying cycles get pointed toward KOLs, peer-cited experts, rather than entertainment creators
• A search order that's actually cost-ranked: existing customers first, then top affiliates, creators already promoting parallel brands, filtered search, and behavior-based search last, since that order reflects where the highest-converting creators tend to sit
• A screened pool: filtered on follower range, engagement, recency, relevance, and brand safety, with red flags logged for verification rather than treated as a verdict
• Per-creator profiles for anyone who clears screening: metrics, audience read, content style, partnership history, contact path, plus a roughly 10-minute real-world authority check (media citations, conference slots, who follows them) for finalists
• A three-tier shortlist: must-reach, strong, and consider, with a mix recommendation and next steps, favoring creators whose content roadmap overlaps the category for the next 6-12 months, since long-term partnerships lift brand recall meaningfully more than one-off posts

Nothing gets invented. If a creator can't be verified, they don't make the list. If the pool comes back too thin to hit the requested count, the skill says so and proposes how to widen the search rather than padding it with weak candidates.

For B2B searches specifically, there's a free trick built in: checking a target job title's "Followers of" list on LinkedIn against a candidate creator, a fast way to sanity-check audience fit before spending any real time on someone.

How to install

1. Download the ZIP.
2. In Claude, go to Settings > Customize > Skills.
3. Click the + button, then Create skill.
4. Upload the ZIP (it needs the skill folder itself at the root, not just the files inside it).
5. Toggle it on.

Next time you ask Claude to find influencers, build a creator list, or figure out who should promote your product, it uses the skill automatically. No need to reference it by name.

Who it's for

Anyone starting a creator search from zero, marketers entering a new niche or platform, founders looking for their first few partners, agencies building candidate pools for a new client. Manual discovery caps out fast once you're past a handful of candidates; Favikon's AI-powered discovery searches 10M+ creators by niche, audience, and brand fit in plain language, and Lookalike takes any creator that's already working and finds more like them, scored by similarity instead of guesswork.

‍