Facebook

Although Instagram is currently the top platform for influencer marketing, success can be found by finding unique ways to promote your brand or business on other social media platforms as well. Influencer marketing on Facebook is a way to avoid the crowds and get real results with your influencer campaigns. There are more than 2.5 billion active monthly users on Facebook. A 2018 survey by CPC Strategy also shows that 70% of these users were likely to hear about new products, services, and events through Facebook compared to anywhere else. In a 2018 survey by IZEA, 48% said that Facebook impacted their purchasing decisions.

How to carry out a Facebook Influencer marketing campaign

1. Decide your Influencer Marketing campaign goals, KPIs and target audience

Step One should really occur before you consider which social network(s) you use for influencer marketing. Your entire campaign should be underpinned by your goals. However, you may already know your target market well, and understand that they are the type of people who enjoy spending time reading, watching, and listening to their favorite Facebook influencers. 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.

2. Decide how you intend to organize your campaign

At this point, you need to make some crucial decisions. Your answers will be affected by your budget, along with your influencer marketing experience, and how much you want you and your team to be involved in the process. 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.

3. Carry out Influencer discovery

The way you do this will very much be affected by your earlier decision on how to organize your campaign. Effectively you have three options:

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:

1. Do they produce content that is relevant to your niche?

2. 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.

3. 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%

4. Is there evidence that the influencer will create and/or deliver the types of content you want to use in your campaign?

4. Reach out to your potential Influencers

Again, this will depend on how you have chosen to organize your campaign. If you are working with an agency, it is possible that they may undertake the first contact between you and suitable influencers. At the very least, they will set up an easy way for you to contact influencers. 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.

5. Sign up suitable Facebook Influencers for your campaign and begin your campaign

Once you have decided the influencers with whom you most want to work and had an indication that they are happy to work with you, then you can sign them up to your campaign. Again, this process will be dependent on your method of campaign organization. You will have little to do if you are working through an agency. Those platforms offering relationship management and campaign management tools will have systems in place to simplify this process for you. 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.

6. Take notice of your campaign performance and tweak your campaign as needed

Never forget your campaign goals and keep a close eye on your recognized KPIs as the campaign progresses. Agencies and many platforms will provide you with the necessary data as your campaign progresses. Indeed, some of the platforms offer a plethora of data about virtually every aspect of the campaign. 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.

Organic posts from Influencers

Organic posts on Facebook are a great way to see how much clout an influencer has and the results that they can get with their audience. An organic post is one that is posted without spending any money to boost or promote the content. An influencer with a loyal, engaged audience on Facebook can help to drive traffic to their organic posts by sharing it on other social media platforms, and this can extend reach. However, it should be noted that Facebook organic posts are typically only seen by about 1-10% of the influencer’s audience. If you are trying to gain widespread reach with your influencer’s organic posts, you should consider whitelisting the influencer so that you can pay to promote this content to the rest of their audience. 

Videos

Videos are one of the best ways to grab attention on Facebook. They are easy ways to capture views in the feed and provide more information to the consumer than a typical, single image post. Videos can also be repurposed easily on other platforms, like YouTube, extending the reach of your influencer’s content. There are several options for sharing video on Facebook: Facebook Live broadcasts, Facebook Stories, and organic video posts.

Facebook Live

Facebook Live is a chance for you to present a live video with your influencer partners. In addition to being a video option, it also sends a notification to the followers active on Facebook that a live broadcast has begun. This is just one more way to drive traffic to your brand’s message. Facebook Live offers a more authentic experience with your brand than edited video. Members of your audience will have increased trust, and will get to see a behind-the-scenes, unfiltered look at your brand. Influencer partners with charisma and public speaking skills will be the best options for this type of broadcast.

Facebook Stories

Facebook Stories offers a bite-sized way to reach your audience. Facebook Stories works similarly to Instagram Stories, so Instagram influencers may be able to transfer their skills to this format on Facebook. Facebook Stories are also a way to provide timely updates to your audience. Facebook Stories live outside the feed and they autoplay, so you’ll be able to reach your audience and drive them to the content on your influencer’s or your brand’s profile.

Contests/Competitions

Contests and competitions are a great way to gain attention online and even generate UGC. Partnering with an influencer can help get the ball rolling and can help you promote these contests, giveaways, or competitions. Have the influencer post to their own Facebook, and you can post to your brands’ profile as well. You’ll gain buzz for your brand, while also offering a prize incentive to follow your brand.

Cross-promotions

You don’t have to limit yourself to influencers posting about your brand. Instead, think outside the typical influencer marketing promotions and look for ways to partner that are mutually beneficial. If there are complementary brands who sell products related to your own, you can cross-promote. This could be a giveaway that includes both brands’ products, or collaborating to create an event for your audiences. The trick is to find brands that don’t directly compete with your products, but also have a lot of overlap with your ideal customers. If you have a large influencer who has a proven track record with your brand, then you can also consider cross-promoting in the form of co-branded products. These would be products that are created with the influencer and that the influencer endorses to their audience.

Boosted posts from Influencers

Once you have a few pieces of content from influencers, you’ll want to double-down on successful content. If an influencer’s content is out-performing the rest, you can boost it with some of your ad budget to have it seen by more of that influencer’s audience. There are two options here: whitelisting and dark posting. Whitelisting an influencer involves the influencer granting access to their profile so that you can create branded ads with their content, using their influencer persona to host the ads. Dark posting is anytime that an ad is created using an influencer’s content, without first posting to their feed or profile. You can download their images and create your own dark posts, or you can create dark posts using a whitelisted influencer who has already granted access to their profile for ad creation. These dark posts are ads that can target the influencer’s audience, your audience, or a combination of the two. If organic reach on Facebook is anywhere between 1-10%, then boosting the posts from your influencers helps this content to be seen by the other 80-90% of their audience. This can drastically improve the results.

What are the tools for Facebook Influencer marketing?

Awario

Awario is one of the newer kids on the block, but offers a robust social media monitoring tool that includes all of the advanced features you would want in a tool such as boolean search, sentiment analysis, location-based monitoring, social listening reports, topic cloud, as well as monitoring on sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube in addition to Twitter.

Brand24

Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that lets the user get real time social insights about their brand. It provides the user with features like “Influencer Score” which shows if popular media personalities have been talking about their brand. It can also perform a “Sentiment Analysis” for the user which helps them be aware about the type (positive, negative, or neutral) comments being made by the public. Another excellent feature of this tool is that it facilitates the user to detect sales opportunities and interact with the customers in real time.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch allows its users to keep up to date with the latest market trends by making them acquainted with all the hot topics and trends going around in the market. This is another real time listening tool which helps the user interact with the customers without delay. Its best feature is that it alerts the user about opportunities and threats. If a media influencer is engaged with the product, for example, the marketing team is alerted instantly. Note that Brandwatch’s recent acquisition of former formidable competitor Crimson Hexagon only strengthens their position in the social listening tool market.

Digimind

Digimind claims that they are an AI-powered and thus smart social listening tool. Used by some of the world’s largest brands like McDonalds, Sony, and Lexus, Digimind seems to have a particularly strong footprint with global agencies. A global company with offices in four countries, Digimind offers the features you would expect in a robust social listening tool such as state of the art sourcing, text mining, advanced monitoring, and real-time analysis. 

Keyhole

Keyhole is another tool that provides accurate and in-depth consumer trend monitoring services. It allows the user to understand their brand’s audience/clientele by observing conversations and by analyzing the sentiments in these conversations. It facilitates the user with all the required information to cater to the target audiences’ needs. It also allows the user to monitor campaigns and build reports.

Meltwater

With their recent acquisition of social listening tool Sysomos, Meltwater is clearly one of the leaders in social listening technology. With more than 30,000 clients, Meltwater’s social listening tools provide AI-driven insights decoding billions of data in real time. From quantifying your PR impact, to knowing your share of voice, Meltwater has you covered.

Mention

Mention allows the user to monitor their customers, campaigns, brands, competitors, different products, and the overall industry. It gives live updates from the web and social media about what is being said about a certain brand or product. Automated reports are generated, which assist in keeping clients and other users up-to-date. It also facilitates the user to find media influencers who can help with product or brand outreach.

Netbase

Netbase is a social media analytics platform which provides real time insight to all the customer conversations. It has the ability to distinguish between emotions, behaviors, attributes, hashtags, people, and brands mentioned in the text. Being used by companies such as Coca Cola and Edelman, Netbase claims to be the leader in social analytics. It helps in maintaining the brand’s health and improving crisis management by tracking issues in real time.

Sprinklr

Sprinklr is way more than just a social listening tool, but it bears reminding that they possess industry-leading social listening technology. One of the most popular and comprehensive enterprise social media platforms that exists, Sprinklr offers not just real-time data, but also allows you to dig into over 300 billion historical conversations to bring insights closer to action.

Talkwalker

Talkwalker is reportedly the first social listening tool to offer visual recognition analysis. As social media moves from text to the visual, visual recognition might be a critical way for your brand to find the right influencers on a visual social network like Instagram. Used by over 2,000 global brands, Talkwalker offers all of the advanced functionality you would expect from an enterprise-grade social listening tool.

Influence.co

Influence.co provides services where agencies, individuals, brands and companies can create their campaigns and manage them over different social media platforms as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. It provides all tools to measure analytics against each post on multiple platforms and informs clients of detailed performance statistics to identify success factors across different levels of user engagement.