Traditional technique such nanoindenter (NI) can’t measure the local elastic modulus at nanoscale (lateral). Atomic force acoustic microscopy (AFAM) is a dynamic method, which can quantitatively determine indentation modulus by measuring the contact resonance spectra for high order modes of the cantilever. But there are few reports on the effect of experimental factors, such length of cantilever, contact stiffness on measured value. For three different samples, including copper (Cu) film with 110 nm thickness, zinc (Zn) film of 90 nm thickness and glass slides, are prepared and tested, using referencing approach in which measurements are performed on the test and reference samples (it’s elastic modulus is known), and their contact resonance spectra are measured used the AFAM system experimentally. According to the vibration theory, from the lowest two contact resonance frequencies, the tip–sample contact stiffness is calculated, and then the values for the elastic properties of test sample, such as the indentation modulus, are determined. Using AFAM system, the measured indentation modulus of copper nanofilm, zinc nanofilm and glass slides are 113.53 GPa, 87.92 GPa and 57.04 GPa, which are agreement with literature values MCu=105–130 GPa, MZn = 88.44 GPa and MGlass = 50–90 GPa. Furthermore, the sensitivity of contact resonance frequency to contact stiffness is analyzed theoretically. The results show that for the cantilevers with the length 160 mm, 225 mm and 520 mm respectively, when contact stiffness increases from 400 N/m to 600 N/m, the increments of first contact resonance frequency are 126 kHz, 93 kHz and 0.6 kHz, which show that the sensitivity of the contact resonance frequency to the contact stiffness reduces with the length of cantilever increasing. The novel method presented can characterize elastic modulus of near surface for nanofilm and bulk material, and local elasticity of near surface can be evaluated by optimizing the experimental parameters