How Do You Amplify Influencer Content?

Have you been managing a Facebook page for your business to increase brand awareness? Until recently, Facebook pages were great at giving you the visibility you need.

They could help you reach your target audiences easily and allow them to engage with your posts. Recently, however, you may have noticed a decline in the engagement on your posts.

If you’ve been tearing your hair out trying to analyze what you’re doing wrong, I have some news for you. It’s not you, it's them.

There are a few things you can do to improve the engagement. However, it’s most certainly not your fault that the engagement has gone down.

In fact, if you check the number of people who can see your content, you’ll realize that Facebook has greatly restricted the visibility of your posts.

It’s inevitable that your influencer generated content shares the same fate as well. Here’s an example of a recent post on celebrity influencer, Kylie Jenner’s Facebook page.

The post has received just about 1.3K reactions, 22 comments, and 19 shares.

Image via Facebook

With over 21 million followers on her page, can you take a wild guess as to what her engagement rate is? It’s only 0.006%!

And that brings us to the topic that I’m going to talk about today. When social media platforms are plagued by declining organic reach, how do you get decent ROI from influencer marketing?

The answer is by amplifying the content from social media influencers. Let’s take a closer look at why you need to, and how you can boost influencer content on social media.

Why Should You Amplify Influencer-Generated Content?

Organic reach on Facebook has been steadily decreasing for some time now. Which affects your engagement rates too.

The Chicago Tribune, for instance, witnessed a massive decline in their organic reach from November 2016 to January 2017.

Image via Medium

As if that wasn’t enough, Facebook recently announced their new News Feed algorithm update – “Facebook Zero.” This update is meant to minimize the number of posts you’ll see on your News Feed from Facebook pages.

The idea behind it is to improve user experience by prioritizing posts from people close to you rather than from brands.

So, what does this mean for brands and marketers who rely on social media for their marketing strategies? With the new update, it's going to be even more difficult for brands and influencers to reach their target audience organically.

Clearly, Facebook wants you to pay to promote your business content.

Even on Instagram, most brands and social media influencers have been struggling since they changed their chronological algorithm. The new algorithm wouldn’t show your posts to all your followers.

Although Instagram never openly revealed how the new algorithm works, it is clear that posts were not being shown to all followers. As a result, engagement on the platform took a massive hit.

After months of pleading to bring back the old chronological feed, Instagram finally announced a new update to their algorithm recently.

The good news is, your posts will now be seen by your followers with newer posts at the top of their feeds.

However, considering how volatile social media platforms can be, you never know when they will decide to change this again.

So it is even more important for brands to develop marketing strategies to amplify content from influencers on social media platforms.

Amplification is really the only foolproof way to make sure your influencer content is seen by more people.

Here are some of the key benefits of content amplification:

1. Improve Reach and Visibility – Amplification helps brands expand their reach and increase their visibility. When you amplify content from influencers, you can drive more people to your website.
2. Monitor and Track – Amplification of influencer content allows both brands and influencers to keep a close watch on the performance of the posts. Monitoring and tracking these results can help you make any adjustments needed to your marketing strategies.
3. Retarget Relevant Audiences – Using the targeting feature in paid Facebook ads or Instagram ads, you can reach relevant audiences. You can select your audience by relevant locations, age groups, gender, or interests. This ensures that your ads are seen by people who truly matter to your business.
4. Access New Audiences – Amplification also helps you get access to new audiences. When you promote your content using Facebook Ads Manager or Instagram ads, your brand gets exposed to new audiences. These audiences may have never heard of you, and may not even be following you. However, if your posts are attractive and engaging enough, they’re likely to share them or start following you.

How Do You Amplify Influencer Content?

Now that you understand why you need to amplify content from influecers, let’s look at some of the best ways to do so as part of your marketing strategy:

1. Branded Content Tool

The Branded Content Tool on Facebook or Instagram allows brands and influencers to collaborate easily for sponsored content. It can be used for posting content by influencers which is sponsored by brands.

 

It’s important to note that “sponsored” is not restricted to monetary benefits alone. If brands are compensating influencers non-monetarily, influencers still need to disclose it in their posts.

Branded Content on Facebook

Facebook first launched their Branded Content Tool in April 2016. This allows brands and influencers to create a verified page to run their marketing campaigns.

Recently, Facebook updated their Branded Content Tool. With this update, they made it compulsory for influencers to tag brands in their posts.

If this policy is violated by influencers, Facebook will hide their posts from News Feeds until it is resolved. The change in the policy encourages transparency between brands and influencers.

The branded content is labeled as either “paid” or “sponsored.”

Image Source – Facebook

Pros of Branded Content on Facebook

1. Facebook Branded Content helps you run ads to promote influencer-generated content directly – without needing access to an influencer’s Facebook account.
2. When influencers tag brands in their posts, it allows both of them complete access to view the performance of the post. Both of them can see how a post performs with respect to organic or paid reach and engagement.
3. Branded content allows influencers to post many forms of content such as videos, photos, 360-degree videos, Live videos, and Instant Articles.
4. With the help of this tool, you can make sure that your influencer content reaches a large number of relevant people. You no longer need to rely on the poor organic reach and can get better returns from your influencer marketing spend.

Cons of Branded Content on Facebook

1. The Branded Content Tool does not allow brands to target the influencer’s audience or followers. You cannot expand your reach beyond your own target audience.
2. The Branded Content Tool will only amplify an existing post, and it does not allow brands to add a call-to-action or links.

Branded Content on Instagram

In November 2017, Instagram introduced their Branded Content Tool. Using Branded Content on Instagram, there is no need to add #ad or #sponsored to an influencer’s post.

Influencers can simply tag their business partners or brands following a certain procedure. It will then appear at the top of the post as a “Paid partnership with <brand name>” as you can see in the image below.

Image Source – Instagram

Instagram’s privacy policy mandates that influencers disclose their brand collaborations clearly in their posts. Such collaborations may be in exchange for monetary or non-monetary compensation.

Pros of Branded Content on Instagram

1. By tagging brands on sponsored content, influencers can develop more transparent partnerships, leading to better collaboration.
2. Such transparency in disclosing the nature of collaboration between brands and influencers helps win the trust of audiences.
3. Brands can monitor the organic performance of sponsored posts in which they have been tagged by influencers. They can keep track of the engagement and reach.
4. Instagram allows influencers to leverage the Branded Content Tool for both posts and Stories.

Cons of Branded Content on Instagram

1. For Instagram Stories, brands have access to the performance analytics for only 14 days.
2. Branded Content on Instagram does not allow brands the option of amplifying sponsored content by running ads for it. The only way brands can achieve this is by paying influencers to run ads for those posts. However, there’s no way for you to track if an influencer actually promotes the content or not. Clearly, it is quite risky for brands to invest money if they don't know if it’s going to be used as intended.

2. Whitelisting

As you can see, there are a few disadvantages of the Facebook and Instagram Branded Content tools.

In both cases, if brands want to expand their reach, they need complete access to the influencer’s account. If they can get access, they can run ads to amplify the influencer-generated content.

Whitelisting allows brands to keep a watchful eye on the performance of the content – both paid and organic.

Apart from posting ads, brands can also modify the captions or add call-to-actions like “Shop Now” or “Learn More.” This will help them optimize these posts for lead generation and conversions.

However, as you can imagine, most influencers will be apprehensive and won’t be keen on providing brands and marketers access to their accounts. This is the key drawback of using whitelisting to boost influencer content.

3. Lumanu

There are certain drawbacks of using Branded Content as well as whitelisting. Neither option is a foolproof method of amplifying influencer content.

The core priority and objective of most brands is to gain new audiences and expand their reach.

Most of them would like to track the number of visitors to their sites and conversion rates.

However, as a brand, you need to think of long-term goals as well. So you need a marketing strategy that focuses on increasing brand awareness as well as lead generation.

Lumanu is the most effective influencer content amplification platform that can help you overcome the issues with Branded Content and whitelisting.

It allows brands to boost influencer content easily without needing access to an influencer’s account.

The platform is quite simple and easy-to-use. It has only two sections that you need to navigate between – Influencer Manager and Content Manager.

In the Influencer Manager section, you need to add the list of influencers whom you have teamed up with. The Content Manager section allows you to amplify your influencers’ content.

Image Source – Lumanu

Using Lumanu’s integration with Social Cert, your influencers will be asked to authorize the use of their account data for amplification.

Using this data, Lumanu can help you promote your influencers' posts to custom audiences – these could be a lookalike of your influencer’s audience or your own website visitors.

Image Source – Lumanu

You can promote your influencers' posts using Facebook or Instagram ads right from Lumanu’s Content Manager dashboard. You can even add a compelling call-to-action to your influencer’s Instagram posts.

And, with pixel tracking, you can track and monitor the performance of your ads too.

The Smart Boost feature allows to put your ad budget to optimal use. You can choose between audience groups such as “Exact Instagram Audience,” “Lookalike Audience,” or “Exact Influencer Audience.”

You can also choose a specific objective for your campaigns such as reach, brand awareness, engagement, or conversions.

I'm not exaggerating even a little when I say that the Lumanu platform is one-of-a-kind. It’s the most effective solution to amplify your influencer content.

Ready to Amplify Influencer Content?

For the success of your influencer marketing campaigns, you need great content from genuine influencers. And you need to boost influencer content to boost its visibility and effectiveness.

Amplification can multiply your reach, brand awareness, and even conversions.

It helps you get your influencer’s content in front of your target audiences – the people who truly matter and who are likely to become your customers. It also helps you gain new customers.

So, if you don't already have one, you need to get an influencer content amplification strategy in place.

Have you tried any of the above-mentioned methods to boost influencer content? I’d love to know your experiences or thoughts in the comments below.