Sharing Facebook News The Influencer Way

Ah, the Facebook News Feed. While it remains a lucrative platform for reaching an audience, it’s gone through more changes than an awkward teenager in recent years. In an attempt to make its News Feed more relevant to users, Facebook is not only cracking down on click-bait, but prioritizing personal posts over sponsored ones. This often results in a brand’s news story, regardless of how relevant you think it is, being pushed to the bottom or worse yet—not shown at all. Sure, you could purchase ads, but with new Facebook ad blocking, there’s still no guarantee your stories will make the cut. The solution? Have someone famous share your content instead.

A number of brands are now turning to influencers, particularly celebrities, to share their content at a price much lower rate than advertising directly on the Facebook platform. Publishers from click-bait “viral” sites to even Rolling Stone have turned to paying for shares and clicks by the world’s celebrity elite. George Takei, for example, who has 9.8 million followers on Facebook, frequently shares a number of articles from publishers known to pay for influencer promotion. While this technique for getting more traffic and interactions may be rising in popularity (and effectiveness), not all influencers are created equal.

Influencer + brand relationships succeed when they both share a unique voice and core value system. That’s why progressive brands seek out ION’s Brand Soulmates™ technology. Using a mix of social and data sciences, the ION team is able to identify and recruit the best influencers for a brand within all 6 audience tiers of content creators. When matched up with the right influencers, branded content can reach the right audiences and increase engagement without striking at the influencer’s authenticity. This is real influencer marketing, not just paid ad placement.

We all learned in high school that following the popular kids around made us popular too, right? Yeah, me neither. It turns out that having a ton of followers isn’t enough to make an influencer partnership successful. While influencer communities remain strong despite ever-changing algorithms and advertising regulations, choosing the right person to represent your brand should be part of every social media budget.

Featured image source: Adobe