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This post details the impact of Facebook’s recent changes on both content creators (influencers) and marketers who work with them. It is full of insight from some of the smartest creators and agency heads in the space.
Facebook’s changes are upending influencer marketing campaigns. Here’s how to stay in the game.
The past few years have been a wild ride for Facebook and, of course, its consumers. Algorithms have been constantly modified. Advertising and branded content rules have shifted. And, in the wake of Cambridge Analytica’s privacy violations, drastic changes have been made to the API. It seems that Facebook’s stated priority for “meaningful interactions” has led to anything but.
All this means is that it’s now difficult for influencers--and the marketing networks who engage them--to capitalize on some of their most powerful platforms. Whether they’re teenage YouTubers talking mascara or celebrities tagging brands on Instagram or moms who post about everything, the concept of how to use one’s authentic experience to promote a product has changed, permanently. Here are key takeaways for understanding influencer marketing on Facebook in 2018.
Audience Numbers Aren’t Always Real
On Facebook and Instagram, Russian bots don’t just affect politics. In influencer marketing, creators who have worked for years to build up an engaged and organic following report feeling they can’t compete with influencers who buy followers overnight. Artist and content creator Lucrecer Braxton notes that because buying reach is so expensive, “Facebook is becoming a club of exclusivity, if you want to be seen past your initial Friends list.”
Unfortunately, even if their posts have low engagement, Facebook pages with huge numbers of followers are able to attract more money from advertisers. Now, creators with smaller but extremely engaged and dedicated audiences have to constantly experiment with expensive and time-consuming strategies that allow their content to be seen by a majority of their followers, often to no avail. Baby Rabies founder and author of the bestselling new book 50 Things to Do Before You Deliver Jill Krause says, “What's so disheartening in this environment is I feel now that you cannot get ahead unless you play the buying followers game.”
The irony is that for advertisers, engagement is far more important when it comes to delivering true ROI. “There are plenty of pages out there that will have 500,000 followers. They're scheduling 6 to 12 posts a day. It’s like a content churning machine. And there's zero engagement,” says BostonMamas founder and influencer Christine Koh (who is also my colleague at Women Online, the firm I own). She notes,”sharing my content into your personal Facebook feed is the holy grail, and comments and likes are also very valuable.” In the current environment, influencers with inflated follower numbers and lower engagement garner bigger sponsor deals. “I am getting turned down left and right for campaigns that I used to be able to snag no problem,” Krause says, “because I don't have over 200,000 followers on Instagram.”
If you’re an advertiser or agency, don’t be starstruck by an influencer’s large follower numbers. “If I go to a Facebook page with a huge follower count and I see zero engagement, I immediately think something is fishy,” says Christine Koh. Make sure engagement is in line with followers.
Facebook’s Rules Are a Moving Target
If you feel like Facebook releases a new platform change every week but you have no idea what the heck it means, you’re in good company. “I have always had a strong Facebook community. It's really been the fuel for my success,” says Jill Krause. But now, she spends a lot of time wondering and experimenting. One day, it seems that “Facebook isn't liking square videos anymore. They want them a little bit more rectangular. Or Facebook isn't liking the link in the caption anymore. Facebook's not liking pretty links anymore. They want the real link.” All this adjusting is exhausting, and confusing. “I feel like we have been hung out to dry,” Krause says. “There's no guidance as to how to navigate this new landscape.”
Speaking of the upheaval, Christine Koh says, “It's really, really frustrating to feel like, ‘Okay. I can only get this seen by the thousands of people who actually want to see my stuff if I pay for it, but I have no idea what I'm going to get back in return.’”
Agencies are also feeling whipsawed. Unpredictable changes can affect an agency’s ability to accurately report results back to a sponsor and undermine a marketing company’s investment in measurement systems and processes.
A new API has closed off third-party data reporting
As Danica Kombol, owner of Everywhere Agency, explains, “After the Cambridge Analytica breach, Facebook just shut the door on all that data that third-party platforms rely on to deliver influencer’s results. They can no longer sneak into the back of Facebook.” That means, as Carmen Shiu, Product Developer at Clever, writes, “Influencer marketing platforms that used APIs to automatically search for proof of posts will now need to find alternate solutions.” Also, agencies who also pay for third party “Social Listening” services are also going to be impacted by these changes, especially on Instagram. Holes in data can mean resetting a client’s expectations for a Facebook or Instagram post. Agencies who work with influencers have to start to pull data from publicly available information (which social listening software can still access), and ask influencers to self-report metrics.
Reach is Tricky
In the good old days, an influencer with an engaged audience could post content and reach a good portion of their audience. Those days are long gone. Now, even though influencers employ Facebook’s branded content tools or pay to boost their content, how much of the audience sees it is a guessing game. Jill Krause has been chronicling her Facebook marketing mishaps on — where else?--her Facebook page. “It used to be I could put a Facebook live video up and I would get 200 people watching it within a few minutes and we would have 50 comments right away,” she says. “We were used to seeing original posts get pushed out to 6000 people. If people started sharing it, then that number would go up to 20,000 or 40,000.” But the new emphasis on sheer numbers means a recent book campaign fizzled. “I understand Facebook has a business model,” Krause says. “I get Facebook wants me to pay them to sell my book. I don't mind playing the game. [But] you have to tell me the rules.”
So what are some solutions?
Influencers Should Go Back to Basics, AKA Don’t Put Your Eggs in One Basket
Blogalicious founder Stacey Ferguson, an influencer and agency owner, says, “ As an industry, we've gotten too comfortable relying on sites like Facebook to deliver reach for us. The algorithm changes are showing us just how much we are at their mercy.” This may be a healthy reset for the industry. “Now, Blogalicious has recommitted to providing high-engagement, in-person, experiential marketing events for our brand partners, with the intent of helping them generate more earned media and longer form storytelling content in the shape of blog posts,” she says. Cooper Munroe, CEO of The Motherhood, stresses the stability and long-term value of campaigns anchored by blog content. Unlike Facebook page admins, bloggers aren’t subject to “surprise changes in algorithm, settings or guidelines” when they’re creating content, because bloggers own both the content and the insight into measuring how it performs.
In this moment, many content creators are, as Krause puts it, “actively seeking other ways to build our influence elsewhere,” reinvesting value in a website, blog, podcast, or email newsletter that is truly is their own. As blogger Rita Arens put it to me in 2008, “My blog is my living room and I own it, I created it, and I decide who's in it!” In 2018, those are words to live by. Invest in content you control, which can include your own website, an email list, or an app.
It’s About Quality, Not Quantity
Advertisers should remember: Influencer marketing is not mass marketing. Engaging an influencer’s hard earned community is more beneficial than broadcasting to an unengaged channel. No matter how many millions of followers an influencer might have, Facebook’s reality means content is only seen by a small number of people. It’s in advertisers’ best interest to make sure the content itself is good, and the influencer delivering the message is well loved by their audience, wherever the audience is. Engagement beats big audience. This was the original magic of influencer marketing, remember?
Postscript: My Ask to Facebook
Finally, I’ll close with this, which echoes much of what I’ve heard from many interviews with influencers and agencies who work with influencers. Influencers and the agencies who connect influencers with brands understand that you make money through advertising. We want to be transparent and follow your rules, but we are unclear both what those rules are, and how to implement them in daily practice.
In short, Facebook, we love you, but you gotta do better . Otherwise, consumer demand will force an innovation beyond your walled garden.
