Facebook Tests Influencer Marketing Search Engine Tool

Earlier this month, screenshots were leaked of an apparent Influencer Marketing Search Engine Tool by Facebook. In Episode 12 of Industry Spotlight, the Flaunt Digital team discuss what this could mean for the social media giant.

See below for the full video transcription…

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

Lee: So the third topic we’re going to cover is Facebook has potentially leaked a look at its search engine for influencer marketing, so basically just a platform that allows you to search and find influencers on Facebook that have a large following. It gives you a quick look at their reach, their engagement, their followers.

So I imagine that this is just another layer of inventory that Facebook will eventually build into its ad platform. It will allow you to find relevant influencers and add their reach to your campaigns in the same way in which you would set up a paid campaign but targeted specifically at influencers who have already got an organic reach that you probably wouldn’t have access to through the normal paid ad platform.

Chris: Yeah. I wonder if you’re going to be able to search for an influencer by, you know, category or market or product or anything like that. It will be interesting to see how they segment that data and whether, I don’t know, you can get an estimated reach or any forecasting metrics like you can now.

Lee: The way it’s positioned on here is that you create a search based on the same target audience demographics that you would set up a normal ad campaign through, and then it returns relevant creators. Relevant influencers. That would be an interesting platform. I don’t know how much impact that’s going to have though because Facebook are always saying that organic reach is reduced. So these influencers on the platform that have got that reach, how valuable that is remains to be seen, or whether Facebook will somehow whitelist these profiles to have the ability to reach the full audience.

Chris: Yeah. Well, I guess it’s just another incremental way of getting reach. It might work. You might be trying to aim for a bit more reach through ads and then obviously, reaching your natural limit of what you can do through paid. That might just be another avenue that you can infiltrate, I guess, to expand. It’ll be interesting to see how it all integrates though. And pricing models will be interesting as well. I wonder how that will be priced.

Lee: Do they price on reach in any way?

Chris: Not really. You can buy cost per thousand impressions. You can’t necessarily buy by reach. So it’s CPC or CPM in the same way. But it’ll be interesting to see what that will be. It might be a cost-per-impression metric rather than reach or frequency. I don’t know. It’ll be interesting to see what happens there. Really, through that kind of activity, you’d be looking for engagement wouldn’t you, over anything.

Lee: It’s nice to see Facebook doing something about their ad product though. Maybe that’s a sign of them actually making the platform itself a bit more user-friendly and a bit tighter in terms of businesses actually using it as a verified ad product, because it’s a bit clunky isn’t it still. Interesting. I know Twitter already purchased an influencer marketing platform for, I don’t know, about $50 million a while back. So maybe they’re just following suit. I think Facebook are behind… I wouldn’t use…I wouldn’t say Facebook is really an influencer platform.

Chris: No. It’s not really. It’s Twitter or Insta are the main ones out there really for influencing. But you kind of get access to Insta network, I guess, through Facebook Business Manager. So if it is a case that you can get influencers just across Insta, then that’s a win in itself, isn’t it?

Lee: Maybe it’s a push towards competing with YouTube in terms of creators, and getting…because Facebook is moving more and more towards video, making it easier for people to post and create videos. So maybe they’re trying to compete in that way, because influencers on YouTube are massive, huge.

Chris: Yeah. It’ll be interesting.