Facebook Influencer Marketing: Complete Guide for Marketers

Facebook was not the first social media platform out there (that crown belongs to sixdegrees.com, founded in 1997). But it was the one that made social media an inseparable part of our lives.

Thanks to it, many people with outstanding ideas and talent for content creation started sharing their videos and photos with the world and gathering many fans and followers.

The next logical step was that brands realized that these “influencers” enjoyed the trust of their audience and could help them promote their products and services, and this is how influencer marketing appeared in the digital marketing scene.

Our guide will focus on implementing an influencer marketing campaign on Facebook, its benefits, and several great examples to draw inspiration from.

What is Facebook Influencer Marketing?

Facebook influencer marketing is an approach that involves partnering up with influencers on Facebook to create content on their channels that promotes your brand’s products directly or indirectly.

The process usually involves the brands searching for and identifying a group of verified influencers of various sizes (e.g., macro-influencers or micro-influencers) who have an audience that overlaps with the target audience of the products or services that the brand wants to promote.

After identifying these channels, brands will do outreach and offer their products or monetary payment in exchange for the influencer advertising, reviewing, or using and showcasing their products on their channel.

Influencers do this in the form of Facebook posts, live videos (using Facebook Live), regular Facebook videos, Facebook group posts, and any other type of content that they optimize for Facebook’s algorithm to show on people’s news feeds.

As a result of this collaboration, the brands get access to a new audience interested in their products, while the influencers expect to monetize their fan base.

Before digging into the details of Facebook influencer marketing, let’s first understand its benefits.

3 Benefits of Facebook Influencer Marketing

Facebook is a great place for finding influencers in any niche you want, partnering with them, and taking advantage of their engaged audiences to promote your brand’s products and services.

There are many reasons why you should consider Facebook for influencer marketing, and we have three of them highlighted for you coming up next.

Benefit #1: Popularity

Let us start with the most straightforward reason – Facebook is incredibly popular. It has around 3 billion monthly active users (or about 38% of the entire human population). For a better look at the staggering size and growth of Facebook’s user base, consider the statistic below:

From the perspective of digital marketing experts who want to create and manage influencer marketing campaigns on Facebook, a user base of this size brings two significant advantages:

• Size of your target audience. No matter which niche you want to target or what interests or demographics your audience has, the chances are high that you will be able to reach more people on Facebook than on any other platform (e.g.. there are roughly around 300 million young adults on Facebook versus approximately around 50 million young adults on Snapchat).
• Existence of very specific niches. A massive audience also allows you to target niches that are very specific and have a tiny audience on other platforms. For instance, if you are an eCommerce store selling anime-themed walking shoes, you can easily find and target fan communities of these shoes on Facebook.

With the existence of narrow niches and micro or nano influencers targeting them, you can also expect to see a nice engagement rate too for your influencer marketing campaigns.

Benefit #2: Influencer presence

Along with its sheer size and popularity, Facebook is also home to many influencers who manage pages of all sizes, including massive ones that belong to celebrities like Christiano Ronaldo with a follower count of 149 million followers, and Shakira with 113 million.

Now let’s take a look at several statistical measures regarding the presence of influencers on Facebook.

The majority of influencers are active on Facebook. Popular influencers usually do not limit themselves to a single platform. To increase their reach and audience size, they create and actively manage pages and channels on several social media sites simultaneously. Also, Facebook ranks second as the platform of choice among influencers to set up a shop.

Brands actively collaborate with Facebook influencers. It is not only about the number of influencers active on the platform but the “quality” too in terms of how actively they work with brands on various marketing campaigns. In this regard, Facebook has seen a skyrocketing increase in brand interest last year compared to 2019 as brands use influencer services more with an increase from 7% to 50% in 2021.

Influencers prefer Facebook to any other platform for marketing. Now let’s look at Facebook from the point of view of influencers instead of brands. We want to point out that Facebook is not necessarily the influencers’ favorite platform to post and engage with their audience, but the one they prefer the most for executing influencer marketing campaigns together with brands. Reportedly, according to a 2016 study, Facebook was influencers’ favorite platform for doing marketing.

Benefit #3: Analytics

If you have already decided to use Facebook for your influencer marketing and you are ready to work with influencers that post content there, there is still one important aspect left to cover – tracking performance.

Luckily, Facebook is helpful to you in this area too. The social media giant has a comprehensive analytics suite called Audience Insights that is greatly helpful both to the brands/marketers and influencers.

This tool provides you with a vast array of essential metrics, KPIs, and insights about your audience. Among them are:

• Engagement. With this, you can keep tabs on the number of likes, shares, comments, and reactions for the entire page, as well as for each influencer post individually.
• Geography and location. Here, you can have a better understanding of where your followers come from and what languages they speak.
• Follower qualitative data. The suite also tells you how your followers have found you and what their interests are.

Considering that Facebook users report their age, gender, relationship status, and other demographic information, Facebook Audience Insights also lets you analyze your target audience with these parameters (as in the screenshot below).

The analytics data that Facebook provides can greatly help you to understand your buyer persona, check if a specific influencer’s audience is the right fit for you, as well as monitor the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns.

To conclude, Facebook remains a major platform for both influencers and brands interested in influencer marketing. Thanks to its size, the abundance of influencers, and its analytics capabilities, Facebook seems like a great choice for running campaigns.

Now, with the benefits clear to us, let us go forward and understand how you can identify the right influencers on Facebook.

How to Find Influencers for Successful Campaigns on Facebook

One of the main benefits of marketing with influencers is that you can find ones that target your niche, and the needs of their audience fit well with your products and services.

But how can you find potential influencers with such a relevant audience among the many millions out there (there are somewhere between 3 – 40 million influencers on the internet)?

Depending on the number of influencers you want to work with, you can either manually search for them on Facebook with hashtags or keywords or utilize influencer marketing tools that automate this process for you. Coming up next are more details about these approaches.

Way #1: Hashtags

There are several popular ways of searching Facebook for influencers with hashtags. Some of the most effective ones are:

• Topical hashtags. Here, we speak about the hashtags related to specific niches and interests. Some examples are #fashion, #camping, or #morningroutine. By searching for these hashtags, you can find influencer content related to them. This approach is great for identifying niche influencers.
• Trending hashtags. These hashtags are about events, trends, or holidays. For instance, you can search for #halloween, #spookyseason, #WednesdayMotivation, #oscars, and more. This approach is great if you want to launch a topical or seasonal campaign that will take advantage of that specific event or holiday.
• Branded hashtags: This one is more about performing competitor research. By looking for the hashtags of your competitors, you can see how active they are with influencers, as well as identify the creators that collaborate with them by creating branded content. Although some of these content creators might be long-term partners with your competitor brand, most of them could be open to partnering up with you.

Here’s a quick example to further illustrate the hashtags approach to finding influencers.

Let’s imagine you are managing an eCommerce store that sells gifts for couples. On Facebook, you can look for a topical hashtag like #couplesgoals to find influencers that post about their relationships.

From the search results, we can find a Facebook page with 21,000 followers that posts content about relationships and family life.

This page is called Stroller in the city and belongs to lifestyle blogger Brianne.

Among her posts, we can also find several talking about choosing gifts for your husband (as a bonus, these posts also carry the hashtag we searched for). Thus, she is probably a great fit for promoting our shop’s products.

Way #2: Influencer marketing tools

While the method described above is great for identifying influencers one by one, it will be a challenge for you if you want to gather tens or hundreds of influencers to work with you within a single campaign.

This is where specialized influencer marketing platforms and SaaS services come into play.

These tools have special features for helping you filter, reach out, and manage hundreds of influencers at the same time. Among these features, two of the most valuable ones are:

• Massive databases of influencers (including all of their social media channels). You don’t need to spend time figuring out if a specific page belongs to an influencer who is ready to make paid promotions or not. These databases only offer lists of influencers ready to collaborate with brands and have done it in the past.
• Easy filtering and search. Other than listing many social media influencers, these tools also gather information about their channels, such as their audience size, number of likes and shares, organic reach, engagement rate, language, country, niche, and more. You can use this data to filter out only those influencers that match your criteria.

Some of the well-known influencer marketing tools are Traackr, Insense, and Tribe.

Way #3: Keyword research

The keyword research method is somewhat similar to the hashtag search we discussed earlier.

The difference here is that instead of looking at hashtags and the different types of content that carry them, you perform a regular search on Facebook, then filter out results and find influencers from there.

Unlike the hashtag method, you are not limited to searching for existing hashtags. Here you can type anything in the search bar and see what Facebook gets you.

But just like with hashtags, you can search for keywords that represent a niche (e.g., makeup, lipsticks), event (e.g., Halloween), or your competitors (e.g., ASUS VivoBook, if you sell laptops of other producers).

The example that we want to highlight for this influencer identification method is a recent trend of combining camping with luxury lifestyle and experiences. This trend is called “glamping,” and this is what we will search for on Facebook.

As it is a regular search that includes everything from people’s profiles to images and Facebook marketplace products, we will need to filter it out by selecting “pages” and then “Artist, Band or Public Figure” from the search filters.

That’s it. Now we can see influencer pages that have content about glamping.

Since now you have a better idea of how to find influencers too, it is time to highlight a couple of great Facebook influencer marketing campaigns for you to get inspired from.

3 Great Examples of Facebook Influencer Marketing

One of the significant advantages of influencer marketing is the creative freedom you and the influencers you work with have when promoting your products.

Our highlights below are great examples of brands and influencers going into a  full creative mode. Now let’s see what these campaigns were about.

Example #1: L’Oréal

L’Oréal is a beauty product giant from France that loves to work with influencers.

Their creativity shined when they were promoting one of their products – L’Oréal Revitalift Hyaluronic Acid Serum. During that campaign, the brand partnered with 15 creators on Facebook to use this serum and share their experiences with it.

L’Oréal made sure that the color palette and the branding elements of these videos were consistent with what they had for the campaign, thus making these posts visually similar. They did this to increase the chances of viewers remembering the campaign and the serum they were promoting.

Besides that campaign, L’Oréal utilizes the visual consistency idea in other campaigns, like the example below.

This video was made and posted on the beauty channel Milabu which has 3.4 million followers. In the video content, the girl is doing her hair using various products, including a hair spray by L’Oréal.

Example #2: ASUS

Coming up next, we have the computer manufacturer ASUS.

ASUS had a creative approach with its influencer marketing strategy too. In its campaigns, ASUS focused on highlighting real-life experiences featuring its products.

When ASUS was promoting their thin and light VivoBook laptop, they collaborated with a large number of influencers asking them to use their laptop in various real-life situations, make a video about it, and share their thoughts and experiences about its size and weight.

The campaign produced videos about using the VivoBook everywhere, from working outdoors to taking it to the class at the university or using it as a meeting room laptop.

Here is one of such videos that influencers have made within the scope of another similar campaign by ASUS.

The person who made this post is Kyline Alcantara, an artist from the Philippines with 6.2 million followers. In the video, she shares her thoughts about the ASUS VivoBook 13 slate and praises it for its portability.

Example #3: Konvy

Our final example is Konvy, a beauty retail company from Thailand.

Their marketing strategy to promote beauty products during the 11.11 Singles Day in 2020 was quite creative too.

The company had special discounts for Singles Day, and its campaign goal was to promote these deals. To do this, Konvy asked the influencers it was working with to make lots of creative, aspiring, and funny videos that would showcase these discounts.

The campaign resulted in influencers publishing lots of amusing and comical content that the viewers enjoyed. Konvy even took some of these videos and republished them on its social media channels (in case you want to focus on your own channel, check out our social media marketing costs piece).

The video below is among those influencers made for the 2020 Singles Day campaign.

Here, the influencer takes advantage of many visual effects and overlays popular in Asia to make the video appealing and entertaining.

To wrap up, we hope that the examples above served as a source of inspiration for your own campaigns.

Now Over to You

Facebook is the largest and most popular social network out there, with lots of active influencers and opportunities to sell your goods, increase your brand awareness or tell your brand story.

Aside from your regular marketing methods (e.g. Facebook ads, SEO, content marketing, etc.), if you find the right influencers and put together a creative campaign, you can expect quite significant returns on your investments thanks to Facebook influencer marketing.

This guide was part of a series about influencer marketing that we are actively covering on our blog. Go check the others out too!