How to Find TikTok Creators in Your Niche (and Check Their Real Engagement)

Short answer: search TikTok for your niche keywords and hashtags with a scraper, collect the authors of the videos that come back, then pull each author's recent videos and score them on engagement per view. TikTok Scraper by Clockworks on Apify does both steps, and a list of 200 scored creators typically costs under $10 in usage.

Influencer platforms charge hundreds of dollars a month for creator search, and most of the value is a filtered list of profiles with follower counts and engagement. You can build that list yourself for a specific niche, keep it fresh, and see numbers the platforms usually hide. This guide walks through the method I use for clients, with the exact inputs, the fields you get back, the costs and a simple scoring formula.

A note on ownership: TikTok Scraper is built and maintained by Clockworks, not by me. It is one of the most used actors on Apify, with more than 290,000 users, and it is on my list of the best Apify actors I recommend for jobs my own actors do not cover.

How do you find TikTok creators in a specific niche?

Start from content, not from profiles. TikTok's own profile search matches names and handles, which misses most creators, because a fitness creator is rarely called "fitness". Searching videos by keyword and hashtag finds the people actually posting about your topic, and each video carries its author's profile data.

The method has three steps:

1. Discover: search 5 to 15 niche keywords and hashtags and collect the authors of the top videos.
2. Deduplicate and filter: keep each creator once, drop accounts outside your follower range, drop private accounts.
3. Verify: scrape each shortlisted creator's last 20 to 30 videos and calculate their real engagement.

What data do you get about each creator?

Every video row includes an authorMeta block with the creator's profile, so discovery gives you the profile for free:

• Username, display name, profile URL and TikTok user ID
• Bio text (the signature field) and bio link, which is where creators put their email or link-in-bio page
• Followers (fans), following, total likes (heart) and number of videos
• Verified and private account flags

And per video you get plays, likes (diggCount), comments, shares, saves (collectCount), duration, caption, hashtags, music, the post date, and whether it was an ad or sponsored. The sponsored flag is handy: it shows which creators already do paid work and how their sponsored posts perform next to their normal ones.

Step by step: building the creator list

1. Pick your seed keywords and hashtags

Write down the words your buyers would use, not just the category name. For a protein snack brand that might be "high protein snacks", "gym meal prep", "macro friendly", #proteinrecipes and #mealprep. Aim for a mix of broad and specific terms. Specific terms find smaller creators with tighter audiences, who are usually cheaper and convert better.

2. Run the discovery search

In TikTok Scraper, put the keywords in Search queries and the hashtags in Videos with this hashtag. Set Number of videos per hashtag, profile or search to 50 to 100. If you want creators rather than videos, you can also set the search section to profiles and choose Number of profiles per query. For a niche list, video search usually works better because it ranks by content relevance.

3. Deduplicate and filter

Export to Excel or Google Sheets, then keep one row per authorMeta.name. Filter by follower count to your target band. A common split: nano creators 1,000 to 10,000 followers, micro 10,000 to 100,000, mid-tier 100,000 to 500,000. Drop private accounts and anything clearly off-topic.

4. Pull recent videos for the shortlist

Paste the shortlisted usernames into Usernames, set the profile sorting to latest and ask for 20 to 30 videos per profile. Turn on Exclude pinned posts, because pinned videos are usually a creator's best ever and they distort the average.

How do you calculate a TikTok creator's real engagement rate?

Use engagement per view, not per follower. On TikTok most views come from the For You feed, not from followers, so follower-based engagement rates are noisy. For each video:

engagement rate = (likes + comments + shares + saves) / plays

Then take the median across the creator's last 20 to 30 videos, not the average. One viral video can make an average look great while the typical video gets a fraction of that. Also record the median plays per video: that is the reach you are actually buying.

Rough benchmarks that hold up across most niches: a median engagement rate between 4 and 8 percent is healthy, above 10 percent is excellent, and below 2 percent deserves a closer look. Two red flags worth checking by hand: a huge follower count with median plays far below 5 percent of followers, and comment counts that are tiny next to likes.

If you have hundreds of creators, you can score the bios and captions automatically too. The Bulk LLM Runner runs one prompt on every row of your spreadsheet, for example "Based on this bio and these captions, is this creator about home workouts, and do they mention brand collaborations? Answer yes, no or unknown", and adds the answers as new columns.

How much does it cost?

TikTok Scraper charges per event. At the time of writing, a result (one video or profile) costs $0.0037, each run start costs $0.001, and add-ons like follower lists, transcripts or video downloads cost extra. Check the actor's pricing tab for the current rates.

A worked example for one niche:

• Discovery: 10 queries x 80 videos = 800 results, about $2.96
• Verification: 150 shortlisted creators x 25 videos = 3,750 results, about $13.90

Cut the verification step to your top 60 creators and the whole project comes in under $9. Apify's free plan includes $5 of monthly credit, enough for the discovery step on its own.

What should you avoid?

• Do not trust follower counts alone. Bought followers are common. Median plays and median engagement are much harder to fake.
• Do not judge on one hashtag. Big hashtags are dominated by large generic accounts. Specific keywords surface the specialists.
• Refresh the list. Creators grow, stall or change topic. Re-run verification every month or two before you book anyone.
• Contact creators properly. Use the email or booking link they publish in their bio, send one personal message, and respect a no.

If you are on the creator side and want paid work rather than looking for creators, the Whop Clipping Campaigns Scraper lists open clipping and UGC campaigns and what they pay.

Is it legal to scrape TikTok?

TikTok Scraper collects public data: public profiles, public videos and their public counts. It does not log in and cannot see private accounts. Public profile data about creators is still personal data under laws like GDPR, so collect only what you need for your campaign, store it securely, and delete it when you are done. TikTok's terms restrict automated access, so use the data for research and outreach, not to republish creators' content. This article is independent and is not affiliated with TikTok.

Frequently asked questions

Looking for other platforms? The best Apify actors page covers Instagram, YouTube, X and LinkedIn, and my own lead generation actors cover the directories and niche sources the big scrapers miss.