Where are the influencers in your industry? You probably know where to look for the top-tier influencers, but don’t underestimate the power of niche influencers who may not be as broadly known.

Here are three tools to help you find the hidden influencers in your niche:

1. Klout. Love it or hate it, Klout is a great starting point in any search for influencers. It’s free to use and easy to search by influencers according to selected topics. One thing to keep in mind: Klout only measures online influence. It won’t tell you anything about the valuable offline connections that your influencers may have, which is why you should treat it as a starting point, not the final point.
2. Follower Wonk. Follower Wonk is a fun and geeky little application that helps you uncover hidden influencers in your own network and those of your Twitter followers. You can search on Twitter profile data, compare different users, analyze your followers’ followers and overlay your own social graph on top of it all. Give it a try, but we warn you, it can get addicting.
3. Muck Rack. Muck Rack is a service that aggregates the tweets of journalists and organizes them according to beat, geography, and news source. We’ve written about them before, but the company has made updated their business model since then – most notably, you can no longer hunt for journalists by beat for free. With a bit more legwork, the free version of Muck Rack can still help you uncover potential influencers in your niche. The paid version is also affordable for most businesses and will save you a lot of time.

While you probably won’t read about them in Mashable anytime soon, these “hidden” influencers can still offer you valuable coverage, especially if they have a trusted following. It’s all about quality over quantity.

What tools do you use to find your influencers? Please share in the comments.