How do you check where a creator’s followers live?

A view only helps your store if the viewer can get there. Followers in another state may love the video and never visit. You pay for the post either way. So the question before any booking is simple. How many of these followers could come in this month?

A big audience does not settle this on its own. A creator may have grown their first followers in a hometown or a college town. If they moved, that old audience may have stayed put. The numbers on the profile do not show that.

Add up the answers, and most adults would not drive more than half an hour. That drive is the circle a creator’s audience needs to fall inside. A follower in another state is far outside it.

The creator already has the best data on their audience. On Instagram, a public account’s Insights show where followers live. Shopify’s guide to Instagram Insights says this data includes top cities or countries. Instagram’s own help page on insights lists the top locations of followers under Total followers. You cannot open those insights yourself. Only the account owner can.

TikTok keeps its numbers in TikTok Studio. Its help page on TikTok Studio lists a Followers tab with a demographic view of followers. Later’s TikTok analytics guide lists follower location among those audience insights. The Viewers tab covers the people who watched instead. A Socialinsider guide to TikTok audiences says it shows top countries and cities. Viewers are not all followers, so ask for both screens.

Your guests are spread across these apps. A creator who posts on more than one app has a separate audience on each. Those audiences can live in very different places.

Ask in the first reply, before you talk about dates or pay. Shopify’s guide to retail influencer marketing says to ask for a media kit once you make contact. A good kit lists where the audience lives. Ask for the app’s own screenshot as well, since a kit can be months old.

A screenshot can be edited, so ask for a short screen recording if the numbers look too good. Scrolling from the profile into the insights is hard to fake. If a creator refuses to share anything, treat that as an answer. A booking is not worth a guess.

Find your store’s city on the list first. Then add the towns around it that your guests come from. A suburb store may draw from several towns that never top the list alone. Count them together.

Compare creators on the local share, not the follower count. A creator with a smaller audience that mostly lives in your city can bring more guests than a bigger one spread across the country. Our guide to finding food influencers for your restaurant covers where to look for them first.

Location numbers are an estimate. The comments show real people. Open the creator’s last several food videos and read down the thread. Then open a few commenter profiles and see where they post from.

Watch for the opposite signs too. Comments made of emojis alone, or from accounts with no posts, can point to bought engagement. Comments in a language your guests do not speak point elsewhere. If your guests speak Spanish, our guide on creators who post in Spanish shows what local searches to run.

For one store and a few creators, no. The screenshot and the comments are enough. A paid tool earns its cost when you check many creators across many towns. These tools guess location from public signals. Modash, one such tool, says it reads followers’ location tags, languages, captions and bios.

The cost is real. On its pricing page, Modash lists its entry plan at $199 a month, paid as $2,388 a year. Modash also scores how many of a creator’s followers look real. Its help center calls anything above 70% real followers generally acceptable. Fake followers cannot visit your store, so a low score is a warning sign too.

If you run stores under a brand, ask head office before you buy one. The brand may already license a tool, or keep a list of creators it has cleared. Some brands also need to approve a creator first, as our guide on hiring influencers as a franchisee explains.

Say thanks and move on. A creator with a far-away audience may still suit a store in their home region. Note it for later. For this store, pick the next name on your list and run the same check.

These notes pay off later. After the campaign, compare the local share with what happened in the store. Our guide to telling whether influencers brought you customers shows how to measure that, and our plan for a local creator campaign shows where the check fits.

Checking creators store by store takes hours. CreatoRain, which wrote this guide, books creators from its food-creator network to visit each store. It handles each booking until the video is posted. Each video is $300, and that price already covers what the creator is paid.