How do I find Douyin influencers?

星图 (Xingtu) is ByteDance's first-party platform: it shows verified pricing, audience demographics, and historical campaign performance, and it handles contracting and payment. But it's built for entities operating inside China — onboarding gates on a Chinese business license, so overseas brands usually can't self-serve there. MCN agencies sit on top of Xingtu and will run a campaign for you, but you pay for the intermediation and rarely see the raw creator data behind their recommendations.

The third route — public-data keyword search — is the practical option when you don't have a Chinese entity and want to keep control of the shortlist. You search a keyword, get a ranked set of creators with their public metrics, and decide for yourself who's worth contacting. KOLens is built for this path: it scrapes Douyin natively, the same way it scrapes TikTok, so you're not limited to whatever roster an agency wants to sell you.

From public data you can reliably get: follower count, like/comment/share counts per video, view counts where Douyin exposes them, posting frequency, and bio text (which sometimes includes a WeChat, email, or business-contact line). That's enough to rank creators by real engagement and shortlist the ones whose recent videos actually perform. What you can't get publicly is Xingtu's verified audience-demographic breakdown or the official rate card — those live behind the platform login.

In practice the public engagement signal is the part that matters most for a first-pass shortlist. Audience demographics are a second-round refinement, and a real rate is something you negotiate directly anyway. So the public-data route gets you 80% of the way to a vetted list at zero platform-access friction.

Judge a Douyin creator the same way you'd judge a TikTok one: engagement rate from real videos, not follower count. Compute (likes + comments + shares) ÷ views across recent posts. Watch for a single viral video inflating the average — use the median. And check 播放完成率 (completion rate) signals where available, since Douyin's algorithm weights it heavily; a creator with strong completion tends to have a more loyal, sellable audience.

Run your keyword on Douyin and TikTok together to see whether a creator is genuinely big on the domestic feed or just has a large-but-quiet following. KOLens computes the engagement rate for you on every result, so the shortlist is sorted by who actually moves an audience — before you spend a single yuan or dollar on outreach.