The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Influencer Marketing

With a whopping 2.74 billion active users, Facebook isn’t only the largest social media platform but is an undisputed pioneer of social media as we know it today.

Yet social media existed long before Facebook. Sites like MySpace, Bebo, and LinkedIn took to the stage way before Facebook shot to fame.

But one thing set Facebook apart from the get-go. It’s simple and easy, yet it has highly effective community building features.

With Facebook, suddenly, you could connect with strangers who shared your interests, seek out family members, friends past and present, colleagues, and even acquaintances on one platform regardless of their location.

This characteristic turns Facebook influencers into a multifaceted social network that merges all areas of your life into one place. Unlike other platforms like LinkedIn, which focuses on professional development, and YouTube, which is mainly for entertainment and education.

When Facebook started its journey to becoming the largest social media platform, its primary goal was to connect people worldwide. But as their user base grew, the platform evolved to have a dual purpose; helping people maintain connections and assisting businesses to build relationships with their target audience.

Here are just a few amazing Facebook statistics that highlight the social network’s demographics and achievements:

79 billion people use Facebook daily
More than 1.4 billion people use Facebook Groups monthly
There are over 10 million Facebook groups
Unlike most of the other popular social channels, the majority of Facebook’s users are male (63%)
38% of adults in the U.S. spend 38 minutes on Facebook each day
Facebook’s largest demographic is 25-34-year-olds
Young Facebookers (18-24 years old) spend 75% of their time on video
74% of high-income earners use Facebook
The typical Facebook user clicks on 12 ads each month

Facebook and the Beginnings of Social Advertising

There’s no question why Facebook quickly reached superpower status. With its user base surpassing some of the world’s largest countries, advertisers quickly realized the tech giant’s marketing superpowers and were keen to get a piece of the action. As a result, businesses began creating Facebook Profiles to promote their products and services. This development spurred Facebook on to create Facebook Pages for Businesses in 2007. It was a successful move, and now there are around 60 million Facebook Pages for businesses. Facebook Pages were a pivotal step forward for brands previously hindered from connecting with their target audience due to Facebook Profiles being closed off to ‘friends’. Facebook Pages allowed brands to create a public persona. They equipped businesses to connect with potential and existing customers and build personal connections at scale. Creators also began to make groups to forge relationships with their target customers and increase their visibility.

That same year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a long-awaited ad strategy: Facebook Ads’ first iteration. This consisted of three things: Beacon (RIP), Social Ads, and Insight. Facebook Ads have had several iterations over the years. Today, the platform offers a sophisticated solution for advertisers around the world.

Social Media Advertising vs. User Experience

Thanks to its worldwide fame, strong tech force, community-building features, and impressive advertising platform, Facebook Ads quickly became a vital tool. It offers a powerful way for brands to find, build, and test new audiences. Consequently, you can expand your business' horizons and get noticed with ease. So, it's no surprise that more than 3 million brands actively advertise on Facebook along with 9 million advertisers. What makes Facebook Advertising so successful? It’s ability to deliver the right message to the right audience. Over time, brands have come to understand that users don’t like their experiences on these platforms to be interrupted. Ensuring your branded content is highly relevant and creative will help you build meaningful relationships with potential customers.

BOTH! Influencer Marketing and Facebook Ads

Don’t feel like you need to pick one or the other. With the growing competition for paid social ads and organic reach for brand accounts throttled heavily, more and more brands are taking a hybrid approach to their social media marketing mix. Merging influencer campaigns with paid Facebook Ads brings an element of trust, making the pair a perfect marriage. It also helps you expand a campaign’s reach, which the influencer’s audience size would have otherwise capped. You can even combine influencer campaigns with Facebook Ads based on lookalike audiences to skyrocket your qualified leads and sales.

When combined with the right influencers for the project and made to fit a specific customer journey stage, Facebook Ads become conversion-generating machines! Collaborations with content creators can also help you acquire social proof, a must to gain the attention of skeptical today’s consumer market. Blending the two types of marketing will enable you to use Facebook’s top-of-the-range targeting capabilities and inspirational and persuasive influencer marketing powers to drive results continually.

Facebook and Influencer Marketing

Facebook is a powerful platform that knows a vast amount of information about you and your social activity- they know which brands and what type of content you engage with, they know what you’re in market shopping for, and they know what types of ads you’ve clicked and converted on in the past. This type of highly engaging environment is conducive for paid ads because you can really tailor the content, targeting, and objective to reach your pinpointed audience, but must assure content and copy feels native and uninterrupted on the platform to truly drive success. Leveraging influencer content for paid ads is a great way to do so, because you can take content that was created with a loyal organic audience in mind and optimize it for paid social, while still holding on to the influencer’s likeness and strong brand voice that users can trust. If content does not feel native to the Facebook/Instagram ad platform and isn’t optimized for strong paid branding, Facebook will likely de-prioritize your ads in the news feed.
— Sofie Guariglia
Senior Paid Social Manager

Facebook’s Powerful Features: How to use them within your Facebook influencer marketing strategies

When it comes to features that facilitate influencer marketing, Facebook doesn’t disappoint. Let's look at some of Facebook's top features and how you can use them to optimize your Facebook influencer marketing campaigns:

Branded Content Tags

Facebook’s Branded Content tools help you join forces with reputable content creators and be transparent with your audience in the process. This feature reduces consumer skepticism by crafting labeled paid partnership campaigns. Influencers with access to Facebook's Branded Content tools have gained a respectable level of credibility, audience size, and content creation skills. Partnering with them will bring enormous benefits to your brand!

Facebook Groups

Facebook groups are a great way to enhance user engagement. Groups are a great way to build brand identity and add value to your community. Let’s remember people trust people. Partnering with creators is a great way to attract new audiences or to help nurture your community within these groups.

Facebook Shops

Facebook Shops enables you to set up a store on Facebook’s platform that potential and existing customers can use to buy your products without leaving the platform. This setup allows you to offer a top-class shopping experience. One of the great things about having a Facebook Shop is that you can weave Facebook influencer marketing campaigns into it. For example, you can make popular influencers the 'face' of your store and create unique product photos for your brand that match its style and ethos. The influencers could also promote your store via their page to increase conversions. You could even use Facebook Shop features like Live Streaming to host real-time tutorials with influencers on how to use and get the most out of your products.

How Facebook sparked the evolution of social networking and fuels cross-platform amplification

Facebook’s 2012 Instagram acquisition was a game-changer for brands, content creators, and marketers. But why?! Users around the world spend a lot of time on both Instagram and Facebook feeds. And while we know there are demographic differences, we also know people connect on these platforms based on their attitudes, values, interests, and passion points. The fact that Facebook and Instagram share the same ad platform presents many cross-promotional opportunities for brands. Despite Facebook being the most widely used social media platform with a 69% utilization rate amongst U.S. adults, there’s a generational imbalance in its user base.

Facebook maintains the seal of approval from more mature generations like baby boomers who regularly flock to Facebook. Conversely, there’s been a decline in the younger generations’ usage rates like millennials and Gen Z who tend to find themselves on platforms like Instagram. So, what does this mean for your Facebook influencer marketing initiatives?

Cross-platform amplification is no longer optional but is essential for achieving success in your campaigns. It’ll fortify your efforts by ensuring your target customers across generations see your content on platforms they spend the most time on.

Top tips for successful Facebook Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Invest and trust in the right influencers

There's no other platform with the popularity levels Facebook notches. These facts make Facebook the place to be if you want to get your brand noticed by the masses and accelerate sales. But to make your Facebook influencer marketing campaigns successful, you'll need to provide story-based content on topics that interest your target audience. Focus on making crisp images and videos with unique, creative angles. This approach will lure in your target customers so you can introduce your brand and jumpstart the customer journey at scale. This may seem like an uphill battle, but you can make it happen with the right strategy and influencers. It’s crucial you take the time to seek out content creators that are a good fit for your brand’s look, feel, and mission. Once you’ve found influencers that match your brand’s criteria, hand over the creative reigns to the influencer, so they do what they do best. Craft content that will stop users in their tracks and lure them in! Most people scroll mindlessly on Facebook. Soon everything becomes a generic blur. Build a creative strategy that disrupts that flow with innovative, eye-catching content served directly to their newsfeed.

Invest in Video Content

Thanks to Facebook’s ‘pay to play’ nature colliding with its social media savvy users, there are countless disruptions on the platform. Not only are your target customers distracted by their friends’ life updates, ranting posts, and wedding photos, but viral memes and videos compete for their attention. This raises the question, ‘how do you rise above the digital noise as a brand?’

Video.

Video piques the curiosity of Facebook users and lures them into watching the content. Make video a priority, and it’ll help you drive more engagement and sales from your Facebook influencer marketing endeavors. Facebook Video PRO tip: Always ensure videos are understandable without sound. To get you inspired, here are a few stats that highlight the importance of video on Facebook:

85% of Facebookers watch videos on the platform with their sound off
65% of people who watch the first 3 seconds of a Facebook video continue watching for a minimum of 10 seconds
Facebook videos amass 4 billion views each day

Build Unique Experiences Using Live Video

Studies show that people spend 3x longer watching live videos compared to a pre-recorded video. People want to be part of unique experiences - even in the virtual world. One popular feature brands tend to overlook when it comes to Facebook influencer marketing is Facebook Live. This feature gives you the opportunity to show your business’ human side and provide the fun, entertainment, and education that people flock to the Facebook platform for. You can also slip in your product(s) through demonstrations with influencers to showcase how it’ll add value to the buyer’s life. Live content engages viewers in immediate and authentic ways that other social media formats cannot. Create these unique digital experiences and promote them ahead of time on multiple social media platforms for better performance.