You Ask, I Answer: Facebook as Influencer Marketing Agency?

In today's episode, Eric asks, what do you think of Facebook adding Instagram to its brand collabs manager? Is it going to put influencer marketing agencies out of business? At this exact moment, no. Um and I'll explain why. Uh in fact, let's go ahead and go right into this.

This is Facebook's brand collabs manager. If you have not tried it, if you're not signed up for it as a Facebook page or as an Instagram business profile, um, this is where you would go. You go to the collabs manager and authenticate your page, uh, and it will tell you if there's anything wrong with your page, uh, and then let you start browsing around the interface to see what you can do. And at first glance, it looks really terrific, right? You can create a project brief here, and in the project brief you decide, you know, what kind of budget you want, what kind of uh networking you want, things like that.

Uh the audience matches to try and build an essentially an ad campaign. It's fundamentally an ad campaign, uh inside a brand collaboration manager. And you can track and create uh insights uh to manage your influencers to hold them accountable to uh certain performance metrics. You can create saved lists, uh you have multiple project briefs, you can see who's already tagging you as maybe a starting source for your influencer lists, uh publishing tools to curate uh content that allows you to uh to share it. So it looks very promising, right?

Here's where it kind of falls down. Let's go look for some influencers. I'm going to start let's start uh just with the United States, because that's a market that I know reasonably well. And I specifically am looking for influencers who are who are interested and influential in data science. And what comes up is pretty appalling.

And just absolutely terrible. This none of these things here are about data science, not even remotely about data science. Ministry of Curry, Predator Gaming. No, this is this is laughably bad. Facebook has a lot of work to do here before anybody attempts to get to use this to get any kind of reasonable results out of this.

Now, here's the thing. Facebook knows the Zuckerverse as a whole, if you will, uh, that there are billions of dollars at stake. Influencer marketing as an industry is a massive, massive opportunity. And Facebook wants that money. If there's one thing you can reliably count on uh the Zuckerverse corporations to want, it is more of your money and less money for everybody else.

And so, while this is in really terrible condition right now and unusable for any kind of serious influencer marketing, you know it's not going to stay that way. Behind the scenes, Facebook has more than any influencer marketing agency is ever going to have on analytics, on deep learning, and the AI behind the scenes that can put together better models. Clearly, it's got a lot of work uh do here. Um, and the ability to connect to data that everybody else does not have access to. None of us, no one outside of the Facebook ecosystem has access to the deep level metrics that Facebook does because it's their network, it's their system.

And so I would fully expect over time this tool to get better. As long as it proves to be profitable to Facebook, they will continue to invest in it and it will continue to get better. And that should be concerning to any influencer marketing agency. So what an agency needs to do now today is start thinking about what your value add is, right? What can you bring that sits on top of this?

Maybe uh as an agency, you have people who can keep an eye on this really terrible uh tool and augment it or supplement it or manage uh parts of it manually for now until Facebook gets its act together on the targeting. But the real value for any agency is going to be in the relationships. It is going to be in the relationships with the company, you, uh, and what uh the brand wants out of its relationships. Because when you look at a lot of these things, if you look at what Facebook's making judgments on right now, it's pretty clear. Look on screen.

Followers and engagement rate, right? That's it. No one's talking about website traffic, right? No one's talking about leads, conversions, brand reputation, all that is missing from here, in addition to the complete and total miss of t on targeting. And so those understanding what your your client, the brand needs is one of the value ads because if you have a stable of uh influencers and you have visibility into the client's analytics, particularly Google Analytics, you'll have a much better understanding of what's actually working or not.

Uh there is absolutely no usable tracking or analytics built in here, right? Even if we go back to uh the insights section here, we see reach impressions engagement. That's what you're getting. Those those are not useful metrics for business impact. They are indicators.

They are certainly, it's better to have them than to not. But they're not business outcomes that any of us are going to care about. An agency with a strong, strong analytics bench will be able to provide way more value than this tool. And the second thing is building the relationships with the influencers themselves. Um, yes, the influencer could potentially earn more through Facebook, but not if it's a waste of their time.

If, you know, if the the marvelous Jarvis and the instant curry pot uh folks are getting inquiries from brands that are just doing sort of spray and pray or seeing project briefs that are all over the place, at a certain point, you know, only the folks who don't have a good professional infrastructure will be using this tool, which means that there's going to be a lot of crap on both sides. Those who folks who are professional influencers who do this stuff for a living, uh call them brand ambassadors, call them uh ad partners, whatever you want, whatever the name you want to give them, are going to be look at this and go, okay, this would be a nice, maybe supplemental uh tool, but it's not where you're gonna base your business on. So that's that's what influencer marketing agencies and influencers themselves should be thinking about. Yes, these tools are are supplemental, but in no way should they, as of today, replace the a uh the relationship that you have with a credible uh agency. Agencies, pay attention.

Facebook is coming for your lunch. You have got to build your analytics infrastructure. You've got to build your clients' analytics infrastructure, and you've got to be able to show business impact far and away above what Facebook is gonna is cranking out. Because we know what metrics Facebook's focused on. You've got to be able to show how those metrics are not always relevant or connected to business outcomes and be able to do better.

If you are an agency and you do not have deep analytics experience, you are in trouble. And of course, on the human side, build and maintain and grow those relationships. Show campaigns that go way beyond a Facebook post or an Instagram post, right? Uh we're talking collaborations, we're talking uh co-authored content, webinars, events, things that go far above and beyond of uh an Instagram post or an Instagram story or an Instagram video. That's how you're gonna continue to create value in this ecosystem.

So lots to pay attention to here. It's interesting. Uh, and and the Zuckerverse is coming for your lunch, so you gotta run faster. That's true for all of us across the board. As always, please leave your follow up comments in the comments box below.

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