How to Find Instagram Creators in a Niche, With Contact Email

Quick answer: Describe the creator you want, name the niche, the market and the follower range, and Searchbase searches, opens the public profiles, reads the bio and the linked pages, and returns a table with handle, followers, niche signals and the contact email the creator published. Describe your ideal customer. Searchbase finds them across Europe in one prompt, with the source on every cell.

Creator discovery breaks in a specific way for European campaigns. The big directories are built on English-speaking creators and the largest markets, so a search for Italian home cooking creators between 20,000 and 100,000 followers returns either the same twelve accounts everyone already contacts, or nothing. The creators exist. They are simply not in the index.

Reading the live public web fixes that, because a Milanese food creator with 40,000 followers has a public profile, a bio, a link in bio and very often a business address in the contact button. That is all the information the job needs.

Step 1. Describe the creator, not the filters

Write the brief as a sentence:

"Find Instagram creators in Italy who post about home cooking and baking, between 20,000 and 150,000 followers, who post in Italian. For each one give me the handle, profile URL, follower count, what they post about, whether they have posted branded content, the link in bio, and a public contact email if there is one."

The follower range matters. So does the language, because "creators in Italy" and "creators posting in Italian" are different sets and the second is usually what a brand means. Say which one you want.

Be concrete about the niche too. "Food" returns restaurants, delivery accounts and chefs. "Home cooking and baking, recipes made at home" returns the people whose audience actually buys a stand mixer.

Step 2. Read the plan and set the boundaries

The agent shows the plan before it fetches anything: search for creators by niche keyword and hashtag in Italian, collect candidate handles, open each public profile, read the bio and the contact information, follow the link in bio, extract the fields, exclude anything outside the follower range.

This is where you rule things out. If you do not want brand accounts or restaurant pages in the list, say "individual creators only, no business or restaurant accounts". If you want people who have visibly done paid partnerships before, say so and it becomes a column rather than a guess you make later.

Step 3. Let it read the profiles

The agent searches, then opens the profiles. It reads what is on the public profile: the bio, the category label, the follower and post counts, the contact button if the creator turned one on, and the link in bio, which it follows.

The link in bio is where most of the contact emails actually live. Creators route it to a link page, a personal site, a Substack or a media kit, and the business address is on the other side. Following that link is the difference between a list with 15% email coverage and one with 60%.

Cross-checks come from the same public surface. Twelve social platforms are readable, so a creator who publishes a booking email on TikTok or YouTube but not on Instagram still gets a filled cell, with the source link pointing at where it was found.

Step 4. Watch rows arrive and correct the niche

Rows stream in as they are confirmed, and the first ten tell you whether your niche definition was right. This is the cheapest quality control in the process. If the list is drifting toward professional chefs, say:

"Exclude professional chefs and restaurant accounts, I want home cooks."

If the engagement looks thin, tighten it: "only creators who have posted in the last 30 days". A dormant account with 80,000 followers is a worse partner than an active one with 25,000, and posting recency is public.

Step 5. Fill the contact gaps

The first pass leaves blanks in the email column, because plenty of creators only use DMs. Attack the gaps directly:

"For the creators without an email, check their TikTok and YouTube channels and their link in bio pages for a business contact address."

A targeted second pass over 40 profiles is far cheaper than asking for cross-platform data on 200 up front. Some cells will stay empty, and that is the correct outcome for a creator who has genuinely published no address.

Step 6. Score, then draft the outreach

Ask for a judgement column once you have the rows:

"Add a column rating fit for a stand mixer brand from 1 to 5, and say why in one line."

Then let the agent write the first message:

"Draft a short opening DM and a short email for the creators rated 4 and 5, referencing a specific recent post."

It writes drafts and stops there. Nothing is sent. You read them, edit the ones that need it, and send from your own inbox or your outreach tool. Today teams use Modash for discovery inside the big markets, and drafts from this table export cleanly wherever you already send from.

What you get back

One creator per row, with the columns from your sentence: handle, profile URL, follower count, niche description, branded content signal, link in bio, contact email.

Every cell has a link to the page the value came from, so a follower count is checkable and an email is traceable to the exact page that published it. Every cell has a freshness badge, which matters because follower counts move. Every cell records the extraction method.

Anything unverifiable is n/a. Engagement rate is the honest casualty here. Public profile data supports recency and visible interaction on public posts, and it does not support a precise, audited engagement rate. A tool that gives you one to two decimal places is modelling it. We would rather leave the column empty than put a number you might present to a client.

What it costs in credits

A social profile read costs about 3 credits. A normal web page costs about 1. A Deep Research report costs 20 to 40.

So a run that opens 100 Instagram profiles and follows 100 link-in-bio pages costs roughly 400 credits: 300 for the profiles, 100 for the pages behind the links. A tighter run of 40 well-filtered creators is around 160. A cross-platform gap fill on 40 profiles adds about 120.

Free gives you 150 credits a month, which is a first pass of roughly 40 to 50 profiles, enough to see the shape of the output. Starter is €29 a month for 1,000 credits, the sensible plan for a brand running a few campaigns a year. Pro is €79 for 4,000 credits with API access, which is agency territory where you build creator lists for several clients a month. Business is €199 for 12,000 credits with webhooks.

Because profiles cost three times a page, the biggest lever on your bill is filtering before the profile read rather than after it. Give the follower range and the language in the first prompt.

Limits and honesty

Public profiles only. Business accounts, creator accounts and any profile set to public. Nothing behind a follow request, nothing behind a login, no private accounts, no DMs, no audience exports.

No audience demographics. Age, gender and location breakdowns of a creator's followers are private analytics that only the creator can see. They come from a media kit the creator gives you, and that is a conversation, not a scrape.

No verified engagement rate. See above. Recency and visible public interaction, yes. An audited percentage, no.

Not every creator publishes an email. Many work entirely through DMs. A blank email cell is usually a true fact about that creator.

Follower counts are a snapshot. The freshness badge tells you when. Re-run before a campaign brief rather than trusting a list from three months ago.

Outreach is drafted, never sent. The agent writes DMs and emails, you approve and send. There is no bulk DM function here, and building one would break Instagram's rules and probably your account.

Contacting creators is still marketing under the GDPR. A published business address is personal data. Having it does not by itself give you a basis to mail it, and none of this is legal advice.

Frequently asked questions

Which platforms besides Instagram can it read? Twelve social platforms in total, so TikTok, YouTube and the rest are available in the same prompt. Cross-platform is also the best way to fill contact gaps, because creators publish a business address on one platform and not another.

Can I search by hashtag? Yes, and it is a good starting point, but hashtags alone return a lot of noise. Combining a hashtag with a language and a follower range gives a much cleaner list.

What follower range should I ask for? Whatever your campaign needs, but the range is worth setting explicitly because it is the cheapest filter available. It excludes profiles before they are read, and a profile read costs three credits.

Can it tell me if a creator has worked with a competitor? It can flag visible branded content and paid partnership labels on public posts, with a source link to the post. It cannot see undisclosed deals, and it will not infer one.

Is the email the creator's personal address? It is whatever they published as a contact, which is usually a business or booking address, sometimes a manager's. The source link shows you where it came from so you can judge before you write.

How do I keep the list current? Re-run the prompt. Follower counts and posting activity change, and the freshness badge on each cell tells you which values were re-read.

Prices checked on 2026-09-08 on searchbase.org.