Roger Wigington: How to actually engage influencers on Facebook

Monday, 6 June 2016

How to actually engage influencers on Facebook

Being the largest social media network in the world, Facebook is a natural choice when it comes to nurturing connections and building relationships with industry influencers.

Influencer reach is undeniable. It isn’t the simple matter of getting popular people to talk about you. It is building relationships that lead to other relationships, and so on and so forth. This is both on the B2B and B2C end, and applicable regardless of industry.

So how to use Facebook for influencer outreach? Here are a few actionable ideas!

Research what works for your competitors

Any strategy starts with brainstorming and continues with competitor research which is supposed to improve and expand your initial ideas.

There are not many tools allowing for a competitive research on Facebook but here the two I am aware of…

BirdSong Analytics provides an indepth engagement report for any Facebook page you provide. My favorite part is day-of-the-week and time-of-the-day report showing time slots when your competitor’s followers engage with them on Facebook:

Another cool report here is the list of the competitor’s posts sorted by engagement:

Fanpage Karma is nnother great tool for Facebook competitor research: it shows the list of most engaged page supporters. These are people you may want to start building relationships with too:

For monitoring your own Facebook pages and different types of engagement, nothing comes close to Cyfe.

The beauty of the tool is that you can monitor several pages and various types of engagement metrics (likes, comments, views, etc.) within one Cyfe dashboard which is incredibly time-saving:

It’s a good idea to set up the monitoring dashboard prior to starting your influencer campaign on Facebook to see the trend and estimate your growth.

Make influencers a part of the content

If you are doing Facebook marketing right, it is closely integrated into your content marketing. So the influencer marketing campaign should involve both too.

Including an influencer in an article is the most powerful way to engage anyone in sharing the piece. So why not make the influencers a direct part of the content to sweeten the deal? Ask them to contribute to posts, or link to their work in the text of a blog post.

Or do what so many others have found success doing and create an expert roundup post. Come up with a question that is relevant to your readers. Then ask various experts (i.e. influencers) to share their opinion on the matter.

Apart from an expert roundup, you can invite an influencer to:

Get interviewed on your blog
Appear in a Blab video or a podcast
Host an exclusive webinar for your customers (This could be a paid gig)

Here’s a great example of an influencer interview as part of the main landing page:

Tool alert: SERPstat is a great way to come up with popular questions on any topic to engage more influencers.

Just type your core word, then click [Search suggestions] and from there [Only questions]

Once your article featuring an influencer goes live on your blog, make sure to share it on your Facebook page and tag the influencer(s).

Here’s an example of the recent expert roundup I was featured in when posted to Facebook:

[I got both an email and a Facebook notification of this mention which is incredibly hard to miss. Additionally, I am getting a Facebook notification on each new comment on the post I am tagged in. This means I get reminded of this mention again and again and I am most likely to like, comment and share it]

A word on Facebook name tagging…

Now, since Facebook tagging is such a huge part of Facebook influencer marketing, let’s clarify how it works:

To tag anyone on Facebook, use @ and then start typing their name until you see them in the drop-down:

You won’t be able to tag anyone on Facebook using a third-party app (like Hootsuite or Mavsocial). You’ll need to share the post using Facebook interface.

You will only be able to tag a person if you are friends on Facebook. Most influencers have business pages on Facebook which you’ll be able to tag instead: