A Simple Guide to Influencer Marketing on Facebook and other Social Media Networks

Facebook influencer marketing is more important than ever because the organic reach of brand pages has been shrinking continuously for the past several years. Let’s examine why Facebook influencer marketing is essential as well as the best ways to find Facebook influencers and reaching out to them to promote your brand. 

The Shrinking Organic Reach of Facebook Business Pages

The organic reach of Facebook pages has been on a decline for years. By optimistic estimates, the average organic reach of a Facebook post is around 6.4% of the Page’s total likes. Therefore, if your page has 1,000 likes, your average post will be seen by only 64 people. 

Facebook says the organic reach is declining for two reasons:

• There’s far more content being created and shared compared to a few years ago. As a result, the newsfeed has become extremely competitive. It’s harder for a story to gain exposure than it was, say, 5 years ago.
• If things were left unmanaged, an average Facebook user will likely see more than 1,500 stories in their newsfeed. Facebook limits the number of stories to around 300. Putting a cap on the number of stories offers a better customer experience, according to Facebook.

The curbs on organic reach are also good for business, as far as Facebook is concerned.  Businesses need more paid advertising to reach their audience. But advertising is expensive and exposes brands to double jeopardy—they need to advertise to build followers, and then advertise again to reach them!

The other option--the better option--is to expand your social media reach with influencer marketing. 

Why Get into Facebook Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is the strategy of building relationships with social media influencers in your business category and working with them to promote your brand, offer, and products. Here are the reasons why influencer marketing is now essential for any socially engaged brand today.

Because others are doing it: Social media influencer marketing is forecast to grow at a jaw-dropping 30.6% CAGR between 2019 and 2025. Influencer marketing on Facebook and other social platforms is growing so fast simply because of its many advantages over native advertising.

Customers trust influencers: Customers trust influencers more than they trust advertisements. A study has shown that only 4% of consumers believe advertisers and marketers practice integrity. Another study finds only 1% of millennials trust a brand more because of a compelling advertisement. On the other hand, 33% rely on blogs for making online purchase decisions.

Influencer marketing is highly targeted (and effective): Influencer marketing is targeted by its very nature. The influencers you select to promote your brand specialize in a specific niche that relates to your business or campaign. Their audience is the same as your audience. For example, a healthy food brand can team up with nutrition experts and a home furniture manufacturer can work with interior designers.  Better targeting delivers more sales. It’s that simple!

Because it doesn’t appear salesy: People follow influencers because they are inspired by them and want to receive content from them. Your products and offers don’t appear pushy to your audience when recommended by an influencer they’re following. Plus, you can sidestep ad blockers that are used by an increasing number of users these days.

Because it’s easy on your bank account: Facebook influencer marketing doesn’t have to break the bank; unless you’re intent on partnering with celebrities. There are thousands of micro-influencers on Facebook. They can be less expensive and more effective than celebrities. Celebrities may have a large but generic audience and most of their followers may not be interested in your product.

Influencers give you cross-channel reach: Many influencers have a multichannel audience. They may have a blog, Facebook page, YouTube channel, Instagram profile, Twitter handle, and other social media profiles. You can reach multiple channels by just working with one influencer. You’ll be working with many influencers and can reach your customers across a variety of different channels.

Influencer marketing is highly profitable: For starters, you’re likely to generate $6.50 in revenue for each $1 invested in influencer marketing. Businesses that use social media well can gain up to $18 in earned media value for every dollar they spend on influencer marketing.

Types and Traits of Facebook Influencers

There are qualities that all influencers have in common regardless of the size of their following. The profile of a typical Facebook influencer is as follows:

• They share valuable and engaging content, which often goes viral
• People trust them because of their expertise in a certain field
• They build a community around their page
• They usually don’t have strong personal bonds with their audience.

For the sake of simplicity, we can divide Facebook influencers into three types based on the number of followers.

Top Influencers

• Have over 100K followers on Facebook, website, blog, and other social networks
• Possess deep knowledge about their niche
• Are widely trusted and acclaimed for their expertise
• Can be picky and expensive as partners

Mid-level Influencers

• Have 10K to 99K followers
• Soundly understand heir topic or subject
• Are acclaimed and trusted for their honest reviews
• Can be easier to work with than top influencers
• Have higher engagement levels than top influencers

Micro Influencers

• Have 1,000 to 10,000 followers
• Work with more targeted audience than mid-level and top influencers
• Are very easy (and inexpensive) to partner with 

Considerations for Finding Social Media Influencers on Facebook

Relevance: The content they share should align with your brand. Check out their recently shared photos or video and determine what type of audience they have.

Engagement Level: Examine the number of likes, comments, shares, and video views on their posts. The influencers you select should have an engaged and responsive audience.

Credibility and Trustworthiness: Authenticity and credibility is the central reason for doing influencer marketing, so the influencers you select must be trusted by their audience. As a rule of thumb, the lower the ratio of sponsored content shared by an influencer, the more people are likely to trust them. Also make sure that the comments, likes, and followers are genuine and not generated by bots!

Tone and Aesthetics: The language, tone, and aesthetics of the influencer should align with your brand’s voice and target audience. For example, the tone and appearance of the influencer should be decent and mature if you’re targeting parents. A more casual or humorous tone may be required if you’re selling to millennials or GenXers.

Conflict of Interest: Finally, the influencer should not be working with one or more of your direct competitors, for obvious reasons.

Creating a Facebook Influencer Marketing Strategy

Getting into influencer marketing without a robust plan is a gamble that many businesses stand to lose. Here are the things you should think about for preparing an influencer marketing strategy before you start talking to influencers.

Outline Your Goals: Do you want to build brand awareness, generate leads, or enter a new target market? 

Decide the KPIs: How will you determine progress toward your goals? What are the metrics that you’ll be tracking and tools that you’ll be using to track them?

Move beyond Facebook: Instagram, the world’s number one influencer marketing platform, is also owned by Facebook. Don’t limit your brand to Facebook and look for influencers who also have followers on other channels such as blogs, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Target Micro Influencers: Influencers with 1,000 followers typically receive 5 times more likes on their posts compared to influencers with 1 million followers. Influencers that have 10,000 to 100,000 followers generally deliver the best engagement levels.

Determine the Compensation: The nature and amount of compensation that you pay to your Facebook and other social media influencers varies depending on your relationship and working arrangement with them. Some influencers may just want free products or deals they can offer to their followers. Others like to receive an affiliate commission. Cash is still king and Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media influencers are often paid based on the number of followers, video views, and user interactions.

Finding Facebook Influencers for Your Business

Despite knowing the types of influencers and their qualities, it can be quite challenging to find the right Facebook influencers for your business. Facebook search is generally useless for discovering influencers. Unlike Instagram and Twitter, very few people use hashtags on Facebook, which makes it difficult to track hot topics and the people sharing them. You’ll need to use marketing tools if you don’t want to waste time.

Finding Facebook Influencers Manually

The simplest and most obvious way to find Facebook influencers is to search on Facebook with your main keyword. For example, if you want to find a fashion designer for promoting your brand, you can search for the hashtag #fashiondesigner. 

If you’re into culinary and food and want to team up with a famous chef, you can simply search for the hash tag #chef.

You can also use Google search to find bloggers in your target category and find out their Facebook pages. 

BuzzSumo is another very useful tool to discover trending content and topics in your industry. Simply search with a keyword (such as keto diet) or domain name to discover the most engaging content on that topic or website. You can then reach out to the creators and explore marketing possibilities.

As you’ll realize after searching for several hours, it takes a lot of time to find influencers manually. And there may be certain niches that may be particularly hard to explore without influencer research tools (such as digital marketing). Thankfully, online tools are available that make your job easy. Influencer marketing tools generally fall in two categories: influencer marketing platforms and social listening tools.

Influencer Marketing Platforms

These are simply websites that maintain searchable databases of influencers segmented by industry and channel. These platforms include Upfluence, HypeAuditor, AspireIQ, Discover.ly, Crowdfire, as well as many others. Most of them also provide influencer marketing tools such as engagement, rates, reach out, and collaboration tools. 

In a perfect world, influencer databases may be the easiest way to find influencers. But in the real world, you may face the following hurdles while using databases:

• They may not include every Facebook influencer but only the ones who applied or were discovered by the people collecting the data.
• The industry-wide categorization may not fit your specific niche. For example, if you’re looking specifically for Keto chefs, you may have to spend hours browsing through the food category and short listing the influencers you need.

Most databases come with a free version or free trial, but the better ones can be too expensive unless you are an agency or have extensive needs. Most businesses working by themselves only need to use these tools a few times a year, and may find the cost unjustifiable.

We could find only 4 Facebook influencers for the category ‘digital marketing’ on influence.co

While influencer databases may work well for certain industries and products, there’s another way to find influencers in more specific niches. It’s called social listening or social media monitoring.

Finding Facebook Influencers through Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring tools such as Mention, Agorapulse, Awario, and many others help socially engaged brands track their mentions, discover new trends, and stay ahead of competitors. One of the many uses of social listening tools is to find influencers in your category. 

All you need to do is set up an account and create one or more alerts for your target keywords. The app will send you an email every time new content is published on that topic, so you can see who created the content and if they would be worth influencers of your brand. 

Most social listening tools have a free plan that allows you to set up one alert and track a certain number of mentions. You can also set up Google Alerts if you don’t want to use a paid plan, although a paid plan may be more effective.

Reaching Out to Facebook Influencers

After you have listed the names of influencers, reach  ut to them. You can use tools like Mailbiz or Voila Norbert to extract anyone’s email address from their Facebook address, name, or company. Build a comprehensive list of influencers and start reaching out using tools such as Mailshake, Mailchimp, or other email management tools. 

Make sure, however, that your influencer marketing strategy is ready before you start contacting influencers, so you know your goals and are in a better position to discuss and negotiate with them.

Final Thoughts

Influencer marketing on Facebook has become increasingly important just as the organic reach of business pages has progressively declined. It builds credibility for your products and brands and delivers a higher return on investment than advertising. Influencer marketing is about relationship building, however, and that takes time. You may still need paid advertising to kick start some quick sales and build brand awareness. But if it comes to a choice between the two, we’ll recommend influencer marketing over advertising.