There are no two ways about it – Facebook is incredibly popular all around the globe among people of all demographics.
A platform that started the social media revolution, Facebook is one of the biggest platforms in the world today. Given its incredible popularity, investing in a career as an influencer might not be a bad idea. In fact, with deteriorating economies and volatile markets, some might say it is a sound career option. With 1.84 billion daily active users, there’s no denying the presence of a market. However, influencers on Facebook have spent years carving a niche for themselves, leading to the current severely crowded space. And just like any other industry that requires an audience, becoming a successful influencer demands that one stands out from the pack and shines brightly to a dedicated audience.
In this blog, let’s take you through all the basics of becoming a Facebook influencer, giving you a legitimate opportunity to begin your journey with complete sincerity.
Step 1: Pre-collaborate – Get Started As A Facebook Influencer
Create an attractive profile
- Bio
The ‘Bio’ section of a Facebook profile describes you in the most concise manner possible. It is a tricky section as it has to give your audience everything they need to know about you while simultaneously keeping their fickle attention. Being an influencer, your ‘bio’ needs to strike a balance between being personal and business-oriented. Straight off the bat, it needs to include what your main mission is as an influencer. This is then followed by your interests and accomplishments without bragging too much. An influencer’s ‘bio’ can include quotes, music and other key interests that seem relevant to your target audience. The most important part of the ‘bio’ is a backlink to the influencer’s landing page or blog. If an audience is interested enough to read the ‘bio’ till the end, chances are they will be interested in knowing more about you and the brands you endorse in one direct location. Use SEO while crafting this particular CTA for maximum impact.
- Profile & cover pictures
While creating an effective ‘bio’ is all well and good, the chances are that the majority of the trigger-happy audiences on Facebook don’t have the time or the inclination to read it. The only other cues users get on a profile are visual – profile picture and cover picture. These need to, somehow, communicate your value proposition within a couple of seconds. Spend time picking a profile picture that best communicates your vibe as an influencer. As clichéd as the adage might be, a picture does speak a thousand words in today’s online landscape. The cover picture serves as a banner image that has to have a hard-hitting visual. Ensure that the profile and cover picture communicate your niche. A photography influencer should probably hold a camera or a gaming influencer should have a relevant visual cue present. Take risks here – the more edgy the picture, the more likely it is to pique the audience’s interest with a single glance.
Opt for a business account
While setting up a Facebook account, it is important to choose a business profile if you choose to be an influencer. Once you opt for the business account, upload the necessary pictures and relevant information about your brand, and you are good to go! The page also needs a username that is important as it is how a lot of your followers will address your page. The business page also requires necessary information regarding your brand – a description, the category it belongs to, contact information, location, working hours, and other optional information. You must use this section to craft an engaging story for your users. Once your page is set up, you have the option to publish your page and invite an audience. You are now ‘live’ and visible to the world! Ensure your first few posts have extremely direct CTAs asking users to follow you.
Once you’ve gotten set up as an influencer on Facebook, you can move on to truly establishing yourself!
Establish your niche
- Find an industry
One of the key questions any aspiring influencer needs to ask themselves is “what exactly can I influence?” The life of an influencer sounds great, but they have an engaged following because the audience trusts their expertise on the chosen subject matter. Posts from an influencer need to be engaging, informative and entertaining. This is difficult to achieve without substantial knowledge on a certain topic. It is recommended that influencers choose a fairly popular industry and pick a niche subtopic within that field. This gives you access to an interested audience that is curious to know more about a related sub-culture. Some examples include Irvin Randle – a fashion influencer, but for seniors, or Trader Joes Obsessed – a retail influencer page explicitly dedicated to recipes from Trader Joe’s! These are successful examples of a sub-niche that becomes their quirk and USP, leading to their overall success!
- Be unique, yet relevant
As the symbolic shelf space for eyeballs in the influencer world continues to get more crowded, influencers are going more niche to be unique and satisfy a particular type of audience. While that is great, it is important not to go completely off the trail with content that doesn’t interest anyone on the Internet! Influencers are recommended to stay on top of trends and add their twist to the flavor of the season online. Through a detailed audit of trending topics, cultures, and references; any influencer can create a unique take on a trending topic online. For example, one of the most viral topics this year was the Friends Reunion episode. Almost every influencer on the Internet had something to say about it! Like Elise, a food influencer who runs the page My Cupcake Addiction, who added her two cents to the topic with a themed cake to mark the occasion in her unique style!
Creating your niche through engaging content? Learn from the best influencers that Facebook has to offer!
Market yourself well, and how to approach brands
While a large part of an influencer’s journey on Facebook involves catering to the audience, the real revenue comes from brand collaborations. Brands looking to create content to attract a certain audience niche usually collaborate with an influencer who has the same target audience. This is a more direct approach. Given how myopic most brands are, it seems impossible to be aware of all the happenings within the influencer world. Hence, the job of an influencer is two-fold — create content that engages an audience and appeals to brands as well. Every influencer needs to keep their marketing hat on at all times and sometimes proactively approach brands themselves to offer their services in collaboration.
Step 2: Reach Out To Brands
Create a pitch for brands
Now that we have established that it is important to get your message out there, we need to look at how influencers are involved. Similar to a pitch in other industries, bloggers and influencers must create a media kit to be shared with brands for collaborations. This is a PDF document that is a de facto resume for influencers. The main details covered in a media kit include a bio, social media stats, blog stats, demographics, partnership ideas, and records of previous partnerships and collaborations.
The next step is to determine where to meet these brands if they do not come to you first. The most obvious way is to DM them on social media. This is a great way to touch base and establish communication. The second, and more effective method, is to go through an influencer marketing platform. These act as a liaison between brands and content creators.
All these steps aim to get relevant brands to notice your work and create a desire to collaborate with you to reach your target audience.
Handle negotiations
Negotiating with a brand over a collaboration doesn’t entail just the commercial details. It includes the type of work and the frequency. The best way to get the chips in your favor is to constantly show the brands the value you add to a campaign. If your value is more than their value, you hold the leverage. Influencers are encouraged to be proactive and suggest different content ideas. Go the extra mile and provide mock-ups and references to drive the point home. Also, provide quantitative details on how the collaboration will impact the brand’s followers and audiences. This creates all the incentives required to drive the negotiation.
While pitching the financials, it helps to provide pre-set rate packages based on deliverables. This could include money or product samples in different combinations. The most important step is to fearlessly express your value to the brand without undercutting your rates, just for the opportunity. That sets a negative precedent in the market and could impact future collaborations and brand deals!
Display understanding of the audience
- Your audience
There’s one reason and one reason alone for why a brand wants to collaborate with you for a campaign. And that is your audience. They want access to your audience, and you are the missing ingredient that can connect them to the said audience. Hence, it would only make sense that you use that as a starting point in your discussions with them. Do all the necessary research regarding your audience before getting on the phone with a brand.
There are several ways to convey meaningful audience-related information to a brand. One is through buyer personas. If you can create a direct workflow that connects the customer persona to engagement through your content, you’ve gotten the perfect recipe for success. It is necessary to study social habits and how they translate on Facebook, with relevant ideas to increase engagement for the brand. Overall, tell the brand why your audience would trust you to drive their brand communications through.
- Your competitors’ audience
Once you’ve established yourself as a credible voice to communicate brand messages to your audience, you also need to tell the brand why you’re the best among the rest. As we mentioned before, the influencer market is now a crowded space and chances are that your niche has several established content creators with engaged audiences. You will need to provide data as to what makes you a better fit for the brand when it comes to truly connect with the audience they have targeted. A unique aspect of your marketing communications needs to be a unique aspect that stands out from the crowd and makes you irresistible to the brand’s target audience. One great way to drive this point home is to convey that you are passionate about the brand yourself genuinely. An invested influencer has a better chance to evangelize a brand than someone doing it just for a campaign. The more authentic your interest, the more likely you are to effectively mimic the brand voice and tone of the brand while pitching to them.
Step 3: Execute Influencer Campaigns On Facebook
Create and post relevant content
- Static/Video
This is the most generic form of content created as a form of a static post or video. Since it isn’t broadcast live, the content is mostly scripted and pre-approved. These could be reviews, mentions, contests, giveaways, or generic product posts. These usually include the hashtag that pertains to a campaign for easy indexing. These also need to be extra engaging to catch the user’s eye while they scroll through the feed.
Let us look at the Facebook influencer Owen Video. The content creator is popular for the online show ‘The Business of Video’ that consistently cuts across genres and formats. Here is a static post on Owen Video’s feed advertising a product as a part of the brand collaboration. Here is also a video post from his channel promoting a new show that he is hosting. Both are pre-planned regular posts and serve different levels of engagement.
- Facebook Live
The next effective format for posting content as a Facebook influencer is going live. Ever since Facebook released this feature, it has caught on with fans like wildfire. The feature allows influencers to mention, use or review brands directly on the camera without requiring pre-recording. The real-time format comes with two-fold advantages. First, the format gives the content creator more creative freedom. Second, and most importantly, the live format allows users to interact with their heroes and instantly react, thereby increasing engagement. This requires lower production value as well. Looking at the same Facebook influencer as an example – Owen Video, we can see the benefits of going on Facebook Live as the posts are flooded with way more comments in real-time. These videos stay on the feed and can be viewed later as well, serving as de facto video posts.
Influencer content formats
- Social media takeovers
This involves relinquishing the reins on the brand’s social media page and giving control to the influencer. The influencer posts content as the brand, creating quirky posts that align the influencer’s persona with the brand. This helps bring the influencer’s fans to the brand’s page and personify the brand, making it more than a commodity and giving it a touch of humanity. A social media takeover gives users a welcome change from traditional content and mixes things up for them. In 2016, for example, adventure brand North Face conducted a Facebook takeover by skiers Tatum Monod, Angel Collinson & John Collinson at the Red Bull Cold Rush. This gave viewers a chance to witness the entire flagship event from the perspective of a participating athlete. The same content was repurposed for their Instagram and Snapchat, giving viewers multiple opportunities to be a part of the event.
- Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing involves a brand getting an influencer to promote a particular product directly on the platform. The post generally redirects to a landing page on the product website. Based on a pre-agreed deal, the influencer gets a commission for every sale made for their content and ability to influence. This is a win-win for both the parties involved as the brand makes a sale and the influencer makes financial gains from the brand. It is a direct approach that involves reaching out for help within a community to help promote a brand. As the influencer gets directly compensated, they are more active and passionate in supporting the brand. Here is a post from the Beardbrand page, where Carlos Costa sports a hat from the brand and simultaneously links the post directly to the hat and the parent website for other products.
Creating ads is one thing; optimizing them for the best ROI is a whole different ball game!
- Sponsored content
As a brand, there is nothing more hurtful than crafting amazing content that is engaging, informative, and entertaining, only for it to be drowned out by the noise and crowd of the Facebook feed. In that case, it makes sense to have an influencer post it as they are likely to draw more eyeballs to the same content. The brand gives the influencer the guidelines, content, and timings of the posts, with the influencer repurposing the content on their social media channels, barring a few creative tweaks. The compensation here to create and promote the brand is usually monetary or a discounted product exchange. This format of social media promotions is different from affiliate marketing and social media takeovers as the content is posted directly from the influencer’s page to project it as their content.
- Sponsored blog posts
Blogs have slowly and steadily become one of the most trusted sources of content on the Internet, with brands trusting blog influencers to help sway their trusting audience in their direction. By leveraging a blog’s trust, brand pages on Facebook get substantial traction since the recommendation is practically word-of-mouth. The blog talks about the benefits of the brand’s product and service with discounts and recommendations. If you have a keen eye for language and craft engaging blogs, brands will swarm you to help promote them. These can either be dedicated blogs that subtly talk about the benefits of a particular brand or broader topics that passively mention a brand as a potential option. Either way, both get compensated by brands as they increase visibility towards it. Blogs have come back in a big way on the Internet and are as valuable as a landing page dedicated to a particular influencer’s work. When users search for a query on Google, the most trusted answers are usually found in sponsored blog posts.
- Brand ambassador programs
As the name suggests, brand ambassadors are brand evangelists who believe in a brand so that they are willing to actively promote it on their platforms. This is an easier way to pursue a brand as they appreciate the interest shown in them. The influencer shares photos, videos, and articles regarding the brand. The ambassadors are elevated influencers who clearly use the brand as their preferred option and will shun competitor brands away to convey their loyalty to their followers. Several platforms like Prezi and Hootsuite have templates for established brand ambassador programs. American Express is a brand that trusts ambassadors for their influencer marketing needs with #AmexAmbassador or #AmexLife.
Regularity and consistency
- Create a calendar strategy
Once you’ve figured out the type of content you wish to post for respective brands, it’s time to focus on posting schedules and frequencies. By now it is an open secret that the Facebook algorithm prioritizes the content of pages that post content regularly. It is important to stick to the chosen frequency once agreed upon daily, weekly, or any other fixed frequency.
This requires discipline and efficiency as you cannot always put a clock on creativity. The smart thing to do would be to pre-decide a posting schedule with different content formats or content buckets for different days. This helps increase the variety of content shared by the influencer and avoids creative fatigue as the same content formats aren’t repeated consecutively. Posts on Facebook can also be scheduled beforehand, taking away the last-minute stress of creating content to a deadline. Several online tools help influencers plan, schedule, and organize content for social media, thereby easing the logistical load on the influencers.
- Focus on aesthetics and content
Influencers are encouraged to develop their own creative tone and voice. This tone and content aesthetic needs to be the perfect mix of unique yet repeatable to make it your own. The more the audience is exposed to this tone, the more they connect it with the influencer. This ultimately helps the influencer establish themselves as a brand of their own. While constantly creating and posting content is crucial, it is equally important never to lose sight of the creative aesthetic involved, which helps content stand out.
One easy hack is to have a fixed number of content formats with a unique style for each. This helps the influencer easily correlate a content format to a unique aesthetic while still remaining fresh on the Facebook feed. Different color schemes, visuals, language, tone, and hashtags for different content buckets are effective and easy to replicate over a substantial period.
- Hashtags and titles
Hashtags and post captions, if used correctly, are the biggest boon on social media platforms. They are akin to SEO when it comes to Facebook content and helps with indexing. This makes it almost as important as the content itself. It is the most effective way to help influencers communicate content to the audience amidst the ocean of content on crowded news feeds.
Influencers need to put sufficient research into the campaign keywords, hashtags, and phrases used by competitor brands and other influencers in the space and trending topics that are viral on Facebook. Creative Facebook influencer spend as much time on these processes as they do on crafting their content itself, an adage to the notion of working smart over working hard.
Audience Engagement
- Host contests & giveaways
Of all the possible influencer marketing campaigns we see on the Internet, giveaways are always the most effective because of their authentic and direct approach, combined with the mutual benefit for all parties involved. It is almost a guaranteed source of engagement as the influencers attract users to participate and stand a chance of winning something. The creativity and gifting strategy adopted by influencers helps raise brand awareness.
The contests are usually fairly straightforward, thereby encouraging maximum participation from the audience. The anticipation of winning also helps build excitement, giving the influencer more time to promote the brand in the process. It also helps massively in data accumulation as participants submit the information that can be used to optimize campaigns through metrics and analytics, adding to the overall benefits of the campaign. The ultimate benefit is the chain effect involved as most such campaigns involve asking users to tag their friends, thereby creating a whole new pool of followers for both the brand and the influencer.
- Respond to fans
A clear sign of changing times is that if one were to ask a child today what they aspire to be when they grow up, the answers ‘YouTuber’ and ‘influencer’ are actually realistic responses. Influencers have cracked the code of being valuable to corporate brands while simultaneously being accessible to the commoner on the Internet.
If a Facebook influencer isn’t in constant touch with fans, there is a good to fair chance that they aren’t successful influencers. Engagement is the name of the game and responding to comments and queries is almost mandatory on Facebook for everyday influencers. This is what separates influencers from mainstream celebrities – access. Here are posts from an influencer – Marco Marfella, who responds to comments regularly, thereby giving his fans a sense of personalization through interactions.
The better the click-through rates on posts, the higher the engagement!
Step 4: Optimize Your Campaign For Success
Collaborate with other influencers
While a brand’s prerogative is to collaborate with you as an influencer to leverage off your followers, it does help to build relationships with other influencers yourself and collaborate for a stronger offering to brands. A brand’s products and services might be relevant to a fellow influencer’s audience as well, but that audience might not follow you.
Together, you not only offer a wider audience to the brand but allow each other an opportunity to build a new fan base from each other’s following. This could save the brand the resources needed to create a whole other campaign to tap into the following of another influencer. These collaborations also allow for playful banter and expand the overall creative scope of the campaign.
Promotions
- Link to an external website
As an influencer, the job of marketing a brand doesn’t end when content is posted. Like any other digital marketing scenario, influencers also need to promote their content to get the maximum reach. There are several brand deals where an influencer’s remuneration depends upon the sales made. In such cases, a landing page goes a long way. This collates all the different content of the influencer in one succinct location and gives the viewers a second opportunity to consume the content that the influencer is looking to get out there.
- Cross-platform promotion
Content on Facebook often gets a new lease of life with a second opportunity to be seen across platforms. Repurposing content across platforms is essential for all influencers as audiences present on one platform might not necessarily follow the same influencer on other platforms. To repackage influencer content on Facebook, the same post can be modified into a static image or carousel for Instagram, a poll or short tweet for Twitter, and a short video for TikTok. This helps attract audiences across platforms, irrespective of whether they follow the Facebook influencer or not.
Use analytics
The most obvious marker of success a Facebook influencer is to see your numbers grow. Fortunately, Facebook allows you to see these numbers have a lot going on behind the scenes. This includes looking at what’s working with your followers and what’s falling flat. While several third-party tools are available to help with insights, Facebook’s metrics are usually sufficient to get a clear picture of what’s going on.
Facebook’s Insights are free to access for all users. It gives you a measure of the success of posts, who’s visiting the page, from where they are, and when they visit. Influencers and marketers all agree that Facebook Insights are invaluable. It also tells you the most crucial information with regards to how new users are finding your page. This makes it easy to optimize your future content and campaigns for continued success. Since the information is straight from the horse’s mouth, there are no questions regarding its authenticity. Course correction as an influencer just got a whole lot easier!
To access it, all one needs to do is to click on the flag icon on the news feed, go to Pages, and choose Insights from the menu on the left side. It gives you access to various analytics related to your: Followers, Likes, Reach, Page Views, Page Reviews, Posts, and Videos.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing uses content creators with a sizable user base to promote a brand’s message through content, to give the brand access to the said user base.
2. Who uses influencer marketing?
Any brand from any industry looking to leverage social media for marketing. These industries include CPG Food, Beauty, Pet Care, Feminine Care, Apps, Retail, Events, Health & Wellness, Charities, and much more.
Take a look at the flipside and get an understanding of how brands leverage influencer marketing on Facebook!
3. How much does an influencer campaign pay?
Every campaign is custom-made to suit the client’s needs. Costs vary across agencies and will fluctuate based on the number of posts, platforms, and genre.
4. How do I get started on my first influencer campaign?
All influencers start as content creators. Build a fan base in a particular niche through compelling content before approaching brands.
5. How much involvement do brands get in an influencer campaign?
While some brands like to be hands-on, others prefer to let the influencer operate within predefined guidelines to get the maximum creative output.
6. Is there a minimum number of followers a person needs to be considered an influencer?
There are many factors involved here. While there isn’t a set minimum, an influencer needs to have substantial control over a target group that the brand is looking to eat into.
7. How do the influencers know what content to create?
Influencers spend sufficient time with the client, assessing the needs and goals of the campaign, right down to the number of posts and posting frequency. This content varies across platforms and demographics, especially Facebook.
8. How much should an influencer charge for Facebook content?
Again, there is no straightforward answer. Brands pay different rates, which are based on many factors, and vary between individuals and campaigns. Sometimes influencers have their base price, which they wish to be paid, and others are happy to negotiate based on the ask for each campaign.
9. Which demographics are influencer marketing campaigns reaching?
These can cut across all demographics available on a network as global as Facebook. However, the most significant proportion belongs to Millennials, Gen X, and Gen Z because they are the most common users of social media networks.
Your desire to become a Facebook influencer in today’s social media landscape is an extremely well-thought-out move. Everyone you know is on the platform, following brands and consuming content from influencers. There is no reason why you couldn’t be one yourself. While you focus on creating engaging and irresistible content, we hope the details presented in this blog can help you on your journey.
Need professional help? Sign up for free to get access to our revolutionary product atisfyre, which helps millions of influencers connect with leading brands worldwide. We help you understand and reach your audience, engage your community, and measure performance with the all-in-one platform built for connection.
