How to find an ideal Facebook influencer in 5 steps: a complete guide for marketing teams

22 minutes read

Facebook is not exactly the first platform that comes to mind when we hear the words "influencer marketing", is it? And that’s despite its status as the biggest and most popular social media network on earth, boasting around 2.91 billion users across the globe. Usually, as experts in the marketing sphere, we find that influencer marketing is often being implemented on other platforms, such as Instagram and YouTube, but that doesn’t mean that Facebook influencer marketing isn’t a worthwhile part of your marketing strategy. 

Facebook's worldwide growth 2008-2021

Of course, neither the size of the platform nor the surface-level marketing trends should affect your influencer marketing game plan: what should affect it is the understanding of your target audience, where they hang out and what they’re posting. After all, the best influencer marketing is one that connects with your audience in an organic way. 

Facebook, as one of the largest platforms out there, is a great way to reach all kinds of people via Facebooks ads, posts, and groups—with the possible exception of Gen Z, as this is the market the platform lost to the other platforms mentioned above, along with TikTok. Struggling to keep up on which platform will be the best fit for your business and audience? Check out these handy marketing tools in the form of our secret guide.

Now that you’re ready. Let’s dive right in. How to get started on your Facebook influencer marketing journey? First, consider using a social monitoring tool. This covers major social media networks to see which platforms get the biggest number of posts mentioning your brand and/or relevant keywords, thus identifying where people who might be interested in your brand communications. This may also help you find influencers already active in the sphere.

So, let's say you did some research and checked out the data from social listing, maybe even used Awario to see which social media platform hosts the biggest number of keywords relevant to your brand, and decided that Facebook is THE PLACE for your influencer campaign to begin. 

Or maybe you're a Facebook influencer marketing expert who wants to try their hand with a new platform. Either way, this article is for you! It will walk you through every step of finding the right Facebook influencers for your campaign.

Facebook influencer campaigns: why should you look for Facebook influencers?

The current leading platforms for influencer marketing are Instagram and YouTube, followed by TikTok, Twitch, Facebook, and some others. However, Facebook shouldn't be at the bottom of your list when looking for influencers, in fact, it can be a handy addition to your marketing tools and key to your best influencer marketing program. Here's why:

Facebook community dedicated to retro gaming

Influencers on Facebook: who are they?

So, is there any difference between Facebook influencers, and, for example, Instagram influencers? The answer is yes and no—and this kind of matters when it comes to how you do Facebook influencer marketing. 

If we have a look at the top Facebook influencers, it will be pretty much similar to the most popular profiles on other platforms: famous people, media, and several lucky brands make the list.

Obviously, these are not the types of Facebook influencers you are trying to find unless you have Nike-level money—nor do you need to for your Facebook influencer campaigns to be a success. Here, we are looking for micro-influencers, those who have a smaller, but much more dedicated community. This type of influencer marketing, even when it’s in the form of influencer ads, can be very effective as micro-influencers seem genuine and trustworthy, think ‘girl/boy-next-door vibe’, not faceless Facebook ads or unrelated promotional posts.

Undoubtedly, the nature of the platform affects the posts and, as such, people on it. Facebook is a very content-oriented platform, so you'll more likely find influential Pages focused on content rather than people who manage the page. Plus, Facebook's functionality encourages sharing, yes, even with Facebook ads, i.e. it's the best platform for viral content, as such pages that share sensational content, memes, and relatable posts also will have a lot of influence—which can be part of your growth marketing strategy on Facebook. 

So, the portrait of an influencer will be as follows:

And now that we know what kind of influencers are more likely to be on the platform let's figure out how to find Facebook influencers that will be right for your company so you can set that Facebook influencer marketing campaign in motion. 

Facebook influencers: Where to look at?

So, you've decided to try your hands into influencer marketing. Where do you find influencers to collaborate with? Well, we could divide Facebook influencers into three categories: those who run personal pages, public pages, and Groups. 

Influencers with personal Facebook pages are usually opinion leaders who have a lot of connections in a specific niche. They regularly post their thoughts and share their opinions online, but they haven't set out to become an influencer from the get-go. That's why their page can be a bit of a pick-and-mix of personal and professional posts.

Influencers with public pages treat their profiles more like a brand would. They understand that they have an audience on Facebook and set up this page to communicate with them, so keep this in mind if choosing this influencer marketing approach.

Influencers that run Facebook Groups focus on building a community. They are interested in encouraging interaction between their followers and creating a place to share specific interests with others.

Matt Navarra's Facebook Group dedicated to social media

You can decide which kind of Facebook influencer would fit your goals best—whether you want to keep a genuine and informal attitude or engage a community, Facebook influencers can help. Now that we know where to find your social media influencer stars, let's figure out the how.

How to find influencers on Facebook

Finding great influencers on Facebook can be quite challenging: the platform's native search options are limited and somewhat inconvenient. Even the hashtag research features, the most straightforward way of finding the important people on other influencer marketing platforms, are practically useless here since very few people use hashtags on Facebook. Basically, you'll have to use actual marketing tools to find influencers.

You have two options here: use influencer marketing software or some influencer search tool. The first option is a bit simpler: influencer databases are categorized and you can search them based on your niche. However, there are several downsides:

Some social monitoring tools eliminate the problems that come with using a ready-made database, but it will require a bit more effort on your side. While using a database is intuitive and helps you expand your prospects: you log in, you tweak some filters and categories, and you get a list of Facebook influencers, you'll need to take several steps to find influencers with a social monitoring tool. Let's go through them!

Finding Facebook influencers with social listening

Or social media monitoring, (as it's also called) is the process of using a tool to find and analyze posts with your keywords on social media and the web. It is incredibly diverse in its application — you can use it for everything from product development, competition analysis to SEO. Almost every listening tool on the market can also be used as an influencer marketing tool. 

Simply finding public conversations containing industry-specific words and phrases wouldn't help you with identifying Facebook influencers — most of these posts are created by regular internet users with no audience besides their friends. Luckily, these types of tools offer powerful analytics that lets you look at the collected data from different angles. Awario, for example, can analyze the reach of your mentions, their location, language, sentiment, words associated with your keywords, and so on.

Step 1: Come up with keywords related to your niche

This is probably the trickiest part that will require your creative skills and a good knowledge of the market. You need to come up with a list of words and phrases that are used in your niche quite often. For example, if you want to promote your new yoga app, you can choose such keywords as yoga, exercise, fitness, meditation, and some others based on the preferences of your consumer list. Your imagination is the limit! 

Awario's Topic cloud

One of Awario's analytics features is the Topic cloud which might help you a bit with compiling the list. You can just draft a couple of keywords and phrases and then check out the Topic cloud to see more relevant keywords which people often used alongside. 

You can also look for posts that contain your brand name if you're an established company. This will help you find influencers who have already mentioned your brand (hopefully favorably) and are more likely to work with you. You can do the same for your competitors to see what influencers talk about them

Step 2: Set up keyword monitoring

Once you have your list of keywords, it's time to start monitoring! You can choose how you want to find influencers: group all the keywords together in one topic, or divide them by topic (for example, one alert for vegans focused on recipes, the other on vegan food reviewers).

You can specify the demographics, country and language of an influencer, and add some negative keywords to make the search more precise.

Step 3: Check out the Influencers' report

Some SL tools have a separate report dedicated to identifying influencers. Those with the biggest reach are the real gold mine, but you might want to focus on influencers with a smaller audience who talk about chosen topics more often, or, alternatively, those who have access to a bigger community but aren't passionately involved in your niche yet. 

You can also use this tool further to research influencers you identified by setting up alerts with their names, gathering mentions of their name and page, and seeing how popular they are, who talks about them, use it also to count the reach of their posts (that's useful for the analysis).  

Step 4: Look at the mentions

There is another way to find influencers with Awario that allows for even more flexibility. You can go to your Mentions Feed and click the Filter mentions icon. There you can choose from various ways to filter out the posts.

Once you do that, you can sort filtered mentions by reach. Logically, the posts with the biggest reach will come from the most influential accounts. When you click on a mention, you'll see an author card on the right that will help you learn more about the social media influencer.

Step 5: Choosing the right Facebook influencers

A good Facebook influencer marketing approach consists of three stages: discovery, evaluation, and outreach. 

The evaluation will help you determine the influencers who will bring you the highest ROI. Here are the points to consider when screening them:

Awario can also help you with the evaluation. By monitoring their name, you can find out how they are perceived on the rest of the Internet. All the analytics you get for your topical keywords you can also get for a specific influencer—this will help you to determine whether they are the best person to represent your brand. Remember, it’s always best to keep an eye on this, as PR disasters can and do happen, so make use of those smart tools.

Influencers on Facebook: what to avoid

Focusing on vanity metrics

When you select influencers for your next marketing campaigns, remember not to take the numbers at face value. Vanity metrics such as followers and likes can be bought. To check if the creator actually has a large audience, you can look at the comments on their posts—see if they sound genuine and how many of them there are. You can also use Awario to monitor their name and find out how often they get mentioned online.

For example, famous YouTuber PewDiePie has more than 9 million followers, but his last post only got 28 comments and even fewer shares—a small amount compared to his audience. Perhaps picking him as your Facebook influencer on choice wouldn't be the wisest.

The screenshot of PewDiePie's post

Disregarding tone of voice

Finding the right influencer is not just about finding someone who has an impact on your target audience. Remember, this person will represent your brand and it's important not to scare your existing clients away with your choice. Don't choose a cheeky and sarcastic video gamer to promote a wholesome product or a gleeful housewife to launch your edgy TV show.

Not tracking the results

Obviously, you set expectations for each influencer campaign— a number of leads or sales. But there are many more social media insights that can go unnoticed. Use Awario, your native social media analytics, and Google Analytics to understand how an influencer marketing campaign affected your brand awareness, sentiment around your brand, traffic, keyword suggestions for your websites, and more. Gather as much data as possible to get valuable conclusions for your next campaign. Highlight what worked and what didn't and figure out how to improve your strategy in the future.

Facebook influencer marketing—next steps

Now, armed with this guide to Facebook influencer and social marketing campaigns, all that is left after these five steps is the hardest part: reaching out, building relationships with a real influencer (or influencers), negotiating the conditions of your partnership, and launching an influencer marketing campaign of your own. Scary, but also so exciting and, fortunately for you, know you have this guide, and we also wrote a guide to influencer outreach — check it out to get started on the best marketing campaign ever!

Remember, starting your journey to create a new influencer marketing campaign is no small step. But it is one giant stride to expanding prospects for your businesses and increasing influence and your social profile to meet your organization’s latest goal or objectives. Whether you’re selling digital products, services, or even some experience, social media influencers can be a great asset to your brand and collaborations can prove fruitful in the long- and short-term. Even better than Facebook ads. So, if you think of increasing your social cred or growing online popularity— it is about time to dive into influencer marketing!