May 22, 2018
Facebook is building a Branded Content Marketing search engine to allow brands to find the best influencer partnerships for their marketing, particularly where Facebook ad campaigns are concerned. Brands can search based on certain parameters like location, interests, gender and education. You can save selected creators in a private list based on your initial findings and narrow your search down this way. Although Facebook launched the Creator App in November last year, this is their first advanced step into the evolving world of influencer marketing.
To get the ball rolling, Facebook are encouraging a selection of lifestyle influencers to get involved by creating a portfolio that will give users an idea of their audience size, demographic and metrics, as well as examples of branded content they have worked on.
An advantage of the tool is that the two parties are able to contact each other to agree their own terms and conditions, with the exemption of Facebook’s involvement. Added to this, Facebook are not taking any profit from the partnerships during the testing phase but hope that profit will come in the form of increased revenue from brands utilising Facebook ads, and a higher quality of content.
At the moment, the search engine only covers influencer following on Facebook, which presents more of a challenge as certain influencers have a much larger following on other platforms. Arguably, the addition of influencers with followings on a broader range of platforms, particularly Instagram, would prove highly beneficial for this tool.
So what does this addition to Facebook mean for the future of existing influencer marketing platforms? It’s clear that Facebook have enough belief in the role influencer marketing plays as this is a fairly big investment. However, there are a great deal of platforms out there that complement Facebook’s advertising interface, as opposed to ones that have been replaced by it, so it’s not to say that this won’t play out the same way.