Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Facebook is now Meta.
Does this mean the death of Facebook? The answer is – absolutely not.
In fact, it is one of the largest social media platforms, with 2.91 billion monthly active users and 10 million active advertisers, making it one of the most popular social media platforms and perfect for running Facebook influencer marketing campaigns for businesses today.
In this article, we’ll dive into the world of B2B marketing on Facebook and provide you with a comprehensive guide on how to find the best social influencers on this platform for your marketing campaigns.
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Why is Facebook the influencer marketing platform of choice?
Did you know that Facebook is one of the best social media channels for B2B marketing? Here’s why. Although visual content reigns supreme in content marketing today, B2B requires not only visual components but also in-depth storytelling.
That’s why Instagram and TikTok haven’t managed to take the crown when it comes to the top social media channels for B2B. Komarketing states that 74% of Facebook users and 46% of B2B marketers utilize the platform professionally.
Facebook represents a golden blend of visual and text content, which connects perfectly with Millennial users, among others. The Millennial demographic forms a major part of the global workforce worldwide and has the highest entrepreneurial spirit, which unlocked businesses’ potential.
Having a business account on Facebook is always a good idea.
It gives you an official presence and a valuable connection with your clients. But it’s one thing to exist and another to operate a successful marketing campaign. So then how? The answer is simple — searching for niche influencers and partnering with them to advocate for your brand. Here’s why.
5 reasons you NEED Facebook influencers for your brand
- Virality – Unlike Instagram, where the content is based on open search and its discoverability, Facebook allows you to share your posts in a single click with your followers; this way, you don’t have to do magic with visibility metrics to maintain your content popularity.
- Expert view – Facebook is known for its enclosed communities with serious niche-oriented discussions, making it easier for your business to find Facebook influencers who are professionals in their sphere, and if your product is good, they may be ready to recommend it to their audience.
- Lower per-influencer budget – According to Intellifluence research, Facebook has a much more attractive rate for “base level Facebook influencer posts” compared to Instagram. This is great news for SMEs and startups who can afford only modest budgets for their marketing campaigns.
- High engagement rate – The Social Media Industry Benchmark Report 2021 states that Facebook influencers have a high engagement rate per post per follower even if they infrequently post on the platform.
- Advanced analytics – Meta, Zuckerberg’s business empire, develops a wide range of social media products, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and others, providing businesses with Meta Business Suite. The suite offers detailed analytics on marketing campaigns held on Facebook, Facebook Insights, influencers’ performance, and much more.
And 5 ways Facebook influencers can benefit your brand
Aside from being the most popular platform for searching for B2B social media influencers, Facebook offers businesses many more benefits. Let’s have a closer look:
- Enhancing your influencer campaigns with Facebook ads – A lot of businesses running their influencer campaigns on Facebook increase their content reach by sharing it through Facebook ads. Using this tool, you can make your content more visible to your target audience, accurately set up your campaign objectives, and gain detailed stats on its development.
- Using Facebook Live for influencer campaigns – You can advertise your brand and products in real life with Facebook Live. This can be live broadcasts when an influencer unpacks your recent product line or visits your offline stores, and much more. Think of your own marketing campaign held on Facebook Live.
- Running cross-platform campaigns – Facebook can be one of the platforms in your multi-channel marketing campaigns where you can advertise events scheduled on other platforms. What’s more, it’s simple to operate combined Facebook and Instagram campaigns as Meta unites the two platforms into one business set. This means that with Meta for Business, you can get detailed analytics on your campaigns from both of the platforms.
- Launching contextual marketing campaigns – Social media users love when a brand uses social, cultural, national, and other events in its marketing campaigns. This builds brand relevance and brings the brand closer to its customers and makes it seem more human. Enhanced with an influencer’s communication can turn your campaign into a real hit with a huge number of leads.
Facebook influencers: Who are they and where do you look?
Running social media influencer marketing campaigns on Facebook can help your business effectively expand its reach and increase lead generation.
So, how to find the goldmine of potential customers hidden behind group privacy settings and find the right influencer who will become your trusted brand ambassador?
The 3 major groups of social media influencers
Social media influencers are content makers who share their knowledge and experience and have authority in their sphere. It’s likely they’ve already built up a community, are thought-leaders, and influence the decisions of their groups:
- Micro-influencers on social media usually account for up to 50K followers. Micro-influencers have more power over their audiences as they have rather small communities. Therefore, they can pay more attention to each of their followers and engage with them almost individually.
- Midi-influencers have a wider audience comprising 100K to 500K followers. This type of followers position themselves as experts in their sphere and gain recognition and respect from their audience for their knowledge. Midi-influencers can advertise for a wider number of brands and can take on roles of brand ambassadors.
- Macro-influencers can have more than 500K followers and are often the most expensive type of influencers for brands. Celebrities are the most common example of macro-influencers. They can endorse a wide range of products and become ambassadors for big brands.
How to find a Facebook influencer for your brand
Any successful influencer marketing campaign on Instagram, Facebook, or any other social media platform starts with a search for influencers who could exclusively cater to your brand’s needs – your top social media influencers. Here are the 5 practical steps to help you find this perfect match.
Step 1: Start your search right
Part 1: Let’s start with the basics – manual searching.
You can do your influencer search directly on the Facebook platform. Just type in the keywords related to your industry into the search bar and check Facebook group pages – but not individual accounts, just yet.
This type of search will help you find influential theme groups – casting the net wide and then reeling it in. Though it’s far from ‘exhaustive.’ The native search engine on Facebook is somewhat limited, making it easy to miss out on lots of groups where you can advertise.
Note: Another option is to look for Facebook influencers on unique marketing platforms that contain lists of social media influencers. It’s possible to find influencers there, though these platforms primarily include the most popular influencers, influencers with too broad coverage of themes, or simply outdated lists.
Tried these? Now it’s time to move to the third option that delivers detailed search results—a social listening influencer tool.
Part 2: Go automated with social listening tools.
With a social listening tool, such as Awario, you’ll be able to gather a comprehensive Facebook base with influencers ranging from the micro to macro. But first things first, how do you find the right tool to generate your list of social media influencers?
There are numerous options on the market today, many of which offer a competitive choice for your business. So, what should you look out for when choosing to avoid wasting your budget?
- Free trial versions – Genuine products will not be afraid to let you try out their tools, at least partially to see what they can do.
- Which data do the tools collect – Do they store brand mentions, hashtags, competitor mentions, trends, or something else? Know this before you buy and make sure it suits your needs.
- Intelligence features – Does the tool you’re using meet your required functionality? Which parts do you need and which can you live without?
From there, check out how much ROI (return on investment) you could be set to achieve by onboarding these tools and how worth it will be overall for your business.
Step 2: Monitor your competition
Knowing what your competitors do and who they collaborate with to promote their products can bring you a lot of valuable insights. By learning what type of influencers your competitors work with and which approaches they use to talk to their audiences, you can enhance your business strategies, making them more impactful and accurate. This will enable you to:
- Target your strategies more carefully
- Avoid working with competitors’ influencers
- Get a general understanding of what their audiences respond to and what they don’t
Using social listening tools allows you to discover everything about your competitors’ social media influencer marketing campaigns from start to finish.
They will track the relevant conversations happening on Facebook about your business sphere. They can provide you with some more detailed stats, e.g., sentiments—when the app evaluates the tone of the conversations, influencer posts with competitors’ brand endorsement, competitors’ product promotions, and much more.
Step 3: Track industry keywords effectively
To make your search more specific to your industry or niche, you can track your industry keywords related to your brand and product. For example, suppose you have your own coffee shop instead of adding just the ‘coffee’ keyword in your search. In that case, you can also try different types of coffee, e.g. ‘Brazilian coffee beans,’ ‘robusta,’ ‘arabica,’ or additional recipes, e.g. ‘mocha coffee,’ ‘cappuccino,’ etc., or the most popular coffee producers, e.g., ‘Peet’s Coffee,’ ‘Dunkin”, ‘Kahawa 1893’, etc. This way, you’ll make your search as precise and detailed as possible and be more likely to hit the right tone with your clients.
Some social listening tools have a handy topic cloud feature. With its help, you can quickly check what keywords and phrases are the most popular for your industry niche. Based on these stats, you can spot industry trends, discover positive and negative product feedback, and search for posts with the topic words.
Step 4: Analyze your influencers
Now you’ve gathered a list of potential social media Facebook influencers. It’s time to make a shortlist. For this, you need to analyze each of them by various metrics:
- Credibility – You need to make sure that you can trust the influencer you choose. For this, you can listen to your influencer, check their growth curve, and make sure that they have a real audience. Social listening tools can help you create detailed influencer reports to compare the metrics.
- Content – Check if the influencers have content related to the products you sell, how they organize their content, and its type – video reviews, storytelling, questionnaires, etc. And if it fits your brand.
- Engagement – Check out how well an influencer works with their audience if they answer the questions and start discussions in the comment section, how many participants are there in the group, and what percentage of them are actively engaged with likes, commenting, and post sharing. It’s vital to check if the commentators have real profiles and are not bots.
- Visuals – What type of visual materials an influencer uses if they create videos, infographics, or just post-viral memes to their group pages. Consider how you can use these visuals to create attractive product adverts for that group.
- Tone – It’s essential that an influencer’s tone matches the tone of voice of your company. If you have a formal style for your brand, you don’t want a casual influencer waltzing in and setting your audience into a dissatisfied frenzy.
- Language – The language you use closely overlaps with the tone of voice of your company. Make sure that the influencer you choose matches both and can keep up with the jargon (or lack of) used by your audience.
Step 5: Outreach successfully to get top-choice influencers
After closely analyzing all the influencers and picking the right ones for your brand, the next step is to get in touch. Here’s how to organize the process so that you don’t spend hours organizing your contact list before you key in an email:
- Sort your influencers by group – At this point, instead of starting with the first email address, sort your social media influencers out from micro to macro. Why does this matter? This approach will help you minimize the number of rejections and you’ll be able to work out your own tactics on how to organize effective communication with them.
- Develop your brand story – Create an eye-catching message and explain who you are and why you would like to collaborate with the influencer. This is your story—tell it as clearly and concisely as possible so that your influencers remain interested in your brand.
- Write that initial contact email – Try to make your emails as personalized as possible. This will show that you’re interested in collaboration and will encourage influencers to answer your message first. Next, click send and wait for their response.
Note! Don’t become too disheartened if a few of your selected influencers reply. This may mean they are too busy, don’t answer their messages, or are simply not interested. In any case, it’s time to move onward and upward.
Amplifying the social effect of your business with influencers: The future
Want to boost your brand reach on social media effectively? Go for it! Facebook is the ideal platform for B2B marketing and connecting with your community. But finding the right influencers to enhance your brand’s popularity can be quite challenging.
However, this shouldn’t distract or discourage you. Instead, focus on the right tools for your business, such as Facebook influencer searching practices and implementing social media listening tools to create a cohesive engagement strategy.
Social media can help your business quickly find and carefully pick up on trends and emerging influencers that can work with your brand and ensure its voice is heard loud and clear.
Guest author: Aleh Barysevich is Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at companies behind SEO PowerSuite, professional software for full-cycle SEO campaigns, and Awario, a social media, and web monitoring tool. He is a seasoned SEO expert and speaker at major industry conferences, including SMX and BrightonSEO.