Facebook will make a ton of money from its influencer features — but it’s also good for your brand

By now you may either know an influencer, or have heard of influencer marketing. You may even be following a few and have seen them promote products which may have at one point piqued your curiosity and even helped you trust their recommendations more… or stop following them because you’re annoyed.

Either way, influencer marketing has become a mainstream strategy for driving earned media via trusted experts within niche categories like beauty, fitness, and food.   

The social media phenomenon of influencer marketing has become a bit more transparent for brands. One of Facebook’s robust advertising platform has just rolled out a new feature that allows the ability to boost third party influencer posts in the feed in September, 2017.  

Last March, 2017, Facebook started requiring influencers to tag brands in paid sponsored content posts, which gives marketers the ability to amplify content that their brands are tagged in and also to authorize which creators are allowed to do so. This means the targeted audience will see the post as originating with the influencer rather than the brand. Before the change, marketers could only boost sponsored posts by sharing the post first.

Facebook’s latest update can be seen as an attempt to attract brands interested in influencer marketing by giving them more control over tracking influencer campaigns, especially around campaign spending.   

There has already been some criticism that Facebook’s move is a revenue generating ploy to find another way to make money at the expense of brands that want to run influencer campaigns.

Now it’s fairly obvious that Facebook will profit from its new amplification features, but I would make the argument that the platform changes will help brands run much more transparent and effective influencer marketing marketing campaigns. And here is why:     

More enhanced targeting and metrics for influencer-generated content

Facebook’s changes will allow brands to drive even greater value from influencer-generated content. Up until a few months ago, marketers were only able to capitalize on Facebook’s targeting capabilities for ads and other branded content. When an influencer used to post about a brand on Facebook, the company or brand had to be okay with one of two scenarios:

• Either the post would reach the influencer’s network
• Or the brand could essentially repurpose that post as brand-generated content      

What has now changed is that brands now have the option to scale the reach of influencer-generated content directly to their target audiences. It’s up to advertisers to boost the content and they’ll have the authority to hand-pick and authorize who can tag them, to protect their brand from being misrepresented. 

This may not seem like a big deal to you, but in light of research showing how much more effective user-generated content is at driving engagement than brand generated content, this change could help marketers to achieve significantly better results. A study by Adweek found that as high as 86 percent of marketers are utilizing influencer marketing – with half of them planning to increase their investment year-over-year.

As brands start testing the performance of amplifying influencer generated content posts, it’s certainly possible that some may shift some of the marketing budget resources from investing in brand generated content to boosting influencer generated content.