You might wonder, therefore whether Facebook had a future. Do people still use it? Does it still have a place in influencer marketing? Despite its recent troubles, Facebook is still coping admirably. There are many influencers on the network, helping brands market their products and creating excellent brand awareness.
The Essentials of Facebook Influencer Marketing:
Why Choose Facebook for Influencer Marketing?
In many ways, Instagram has grown to be the star of the Facebook stable of social media apps. Yet granddaddy Facebook still performs well. It may no longer be the social network of choice for teenagers, but it can still claim dominance of the social market, with over 2.32 billion active users at the end of 2018. That was a 1 9% year-to-year increase. Nearly 66% of those users log into their Facebook accounts daily, with Facebook claiming 1.52 billion daily active users as at the end of December 2018. We don’t talk about Facebook influencer marketing as much as we do marketing on Instagram. But if you are targeting a demographic that uses Facebook, it makes sense that that is where you focus your influencer marketing activity. And, of course, there is no shortage of influencers on Facebook. It is a very established network, and some influencers have had a long time to build their name and reputation. According to the respondents to a 2018 survey by CPC Strategy, nearly 70% of them claimed they’re more likely to hear about new products, services, and events on Facebook than anywhere else.
How to Carry Out a Facebook Influencer Marketing Campaign
It can be daunting knowing what to do if you are undertaking your first influencer marketing campaign. If you are genuinely an influencer marketing newbie then you should work your way through our Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing – Everything You Need to Know. If you have carried out influencer campaigns before, just on different platforms, then using influencers on Facebook is not significantly different to using them on Instagram, Twitter, or even YouTube. It is merely a case of picking the best influencers for your target audience, on their social network of choice. As always, however, you should begin by setting your goals.
Tactics to Help Your Facebook Influencer Campaigns
Encourage Your Influencers to Use Facebook Live
Facebook Live has proved to be a compelling way to attract a Facebook audience. People often suffer from FOMO – fear of missing out – and usually, take a keen interest in what their influencers broadcast. In many ways, influencer marketing is an extension of content marketing – it is a way to expand your distribution of content far wider than you could achieve yourself. You either create content for influencers to share with their audiences or preferably, you set content parameters and let influencers create relevant content in their typical styles, so the content comes across as authentic to their audiences. Your goals are what you expect from your campaign. There is little point undertaking a campaign if you haven’t determined a clear purpose for it. You need to shape your entire campaign strategy around the goals you set. You also need to establish key performance indicators (KPIs), so you have some way of measuring your campaign goals as you proceed and can determine your campaign’s success or failure. Some possible campaign goals you could consider:
Brand awareness Increased sales Attracting a new market Growing your own social media followers (i.e., influencers refer their followers to your social pages) Customer retention
This is also where you think carefully about who the target market for your campaign is. For example, if you are wanting to build brand awareness, who are you hoping will take an interest in your campaign? Where do they hang out, socially? If you are aiming to increase sales, you presumably already know the types of people who buy your products, so again you should have a reasonable idea as to their preferred social platforms. If you’re trying to attract a new market, you really need to think carefully about who that new market will be. You could even draw up a customer persona representing your potential new clients. A vital part of this will again be the social networks they enjoy. Should the answers to your question suggest that the target market for your new influencer marketing campaign spends time on Facebook, then it makes sense to target Facebook influencers for your campaign. Some businesses prefer to merely pay a company to organize their influencer marketing for them, much as they may pay an advertising agency for their traditional advertising. At the other extreme, some firms prefer to do every step of the process in-house, often with an extremely minimal budget. You have three main choices, although you don’t need to stick exclusively to one option.
Use an agency – there are many specialist influencer marketing agencies now to help businesses carry out their campaigns. We have profiled many of them here, and if you click on the dark blue icon, you can limit your search to those agencies that work with Facebook influencers. Each agency has its own specialty, so it is worth checking which one appears to fit your work model best. Operate your Facebook influencer marketing campaign internally but use a platform as a tool to help simplify parts of the process, e.g., influencer discovery. We have extensively reviewed many influencer marketing platforms here. Check which ones provide the tools you want and list Facebook as one of their channels. Although the influencer marketing channels initially just provided an influencer discovery service, they now offer many more useful tools, such as relationship management, campaign management, an influencer marketplace, third-party analytics, and internet content amplification. Run your campaign the traditional way, building up a series of Facebook influencers organically. While this is cheaper, it can be much more frustrating and time-consuming.
Leave it to your agency to recommend suitable Facebook influencers (they may have an internal team of influencers, their own influencer discovery tool, or they may use one of the influencer platforms to help them find suitable influencers for your campaign). Use an influencer discovery platform to decide on the most suitable Facebook influencers to help you meet your influencer marketing goals Go onto Facebook yourself, and find the suitable influencers in your niche. Look at relevant pages. Join Facebook Groups in your field. Gradually build relationships with them, and in time sound them out about collaborating in some form of relationship. You can search pages using keywords to help you find relevant influencers. You will need to think carefully about how you filter your results to receive the best results.
You will want to scrutinize potential influencers, even if you pay an agency to come up with suggestions. The main things that you will want to know about each potential Facebook influencer are:
Do they produce content that is relevant to your niche? Is their audience like the types of people you are hoping to attract? If you have created a customer persona, you need to analyze whether the influencers’ followers are like your customer persona. Does the influencer have a good engagement rate with their followers? RivalIQ’s 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report indicates that the typical engagement rate on Facebook varies by industry, but average engagement rates in 2018 were:
Food and Beverage – 0.24% Hotels & Resorts – 0.21% Higher Ed – 0.19% Sports Teams – 0.19% Non-Profits – 0.17% Home Décor 0.11% Fashion – 0.10% Health & Beauty – 0.10% Media – 0.08%
Is there evidence that the influencer will create and/or deliver the types of content you want to use in your campaign?
Some of the platforms also have systems to ease outreach to influencers. This is particularly so for those platforms that work with pre-vetted and signed-up influencers. Other platforms may not include a system for reaching out to influencers. However, they will most likely provide you with suitable contact addresses so you can sound them out yourself. If you have taken the organic route, you will have to take time first to build up a relationship with the Facebooker before you make any formal contact with them. Make sure that your influencers know your campaign goals, and how you intend to measure their success. More experienced influencers will be used to this and will probably be able to easily provide you with the necessary data as the campaign unfolds. If you haven’t paid for influencer tools, then you may have to rely on influencer-supplied data. If your goals and related KPIs relate to your own Facebook page, then you will have access to detailed Facebook Analytics vis your page’s Facebook Insights section. This should show you the impact of your campaign on your reach and engagement rates. Similarly, if your goal relates to your company website, then you will be able to extract data from Google Analytics, to show whether the campaign is operating as intended. Fa3book influencers can use Facebook Live to share their experiences of using your product. Indeed, they may even be able to use your product in a live setting if your product is suitable.
Provide Giveaways Your Influencers Can Use in Contests
Everybody loves to receive something free. Facebook competitions can be very effective at gaining peoples’ attention, particularly if you have selected the right influencers, whose fans will value your product. Competitions are particularly effective at bringing your product before a new audience. The audience happily engages with a contest because they can see something in it for them. Just ensure that you provide a relevant prize for the competition. You don’t want people entering the contest, purely for the prize, who would not otherwise be interested in your product.
Tell Stories
Facebook Stories, like their Instagram counterpart, is an excellent way for an influencer to tell a brand’s story. They are particularly effective if you include video content in your Story. One of the critical reasons for Facebook Story’s success is that they sit out of the main news feed, at the top of a Facebook user’s page. This means that Facebook Stories don’t get as severely affected by Facebook’s algorithm as regular content does.
