Online influencers are increasingly in the spotlight and important to political campaigns. With their large groups of followers and perceived authenticity, they are a political force on social media platforms. They can leverage their influence and affect public discourse and opinion in the lead-up to an election. In this paper, we examine the emergence and impact of this new set of political actors facilitated by digital campaigning, focusing on the 2022 French presidential election campaign on Twitter. While there is as yet no clear definition of what an online political influencer is, we adopt as a starting point that they are a quasi-official individual who plays a role in mediating the messages of a campaign. We present and assess the trade-offs of two approaches for identifying online political influencers on Twitter: one manual and the other automated. The first approach involves the identification of influential political accounts based on mentions in the media, and a combination of mentions by prominent political actors, number of tweets, and the numbers of likes, comments and retweets received. The second approach involves identifying a ‘take off’-point, which is the period of time when a given set of hashtags on Twitter takes off in an election, and then isolating the actors who were involved. To compare the performance of both approaches, post-identification, we fit the actors to a continuum or categorisation scheme, with a view to drawing out greater or lesser influence, and higher or lower proximity to power, and wider or lesser reach. Based on the results of this exercise, we reflect on the trade-offs of both approaches, f.i. in terms of time, quality of data and sample size.