Here is our third and final article covering the expansion of Brand Collabs Manager, this one is specifically for Influencers, written by Albin Lix, Xavier Schillinger, and Winnie Chan. Enjoy!
In 2018, Facebook launched its influencer management tool, Brand Collabs Manager, and to this day it is still limited in terms of accessibility. Fast forward to December 2019 when the Brand Collabs Manager announced that it is set to expand its service to Instagram Creators in 2020. Upon reading the announcement article, a few things stuck out to us such as “Brand Collabs Manager – a marketplace tool” or “we will be investing even more resources in 2020 to help them [the creators] build their businesses on Instagram”. The strong choice of words by Zuck’s team caught our attention. This is why we would like to put in perspective how Facebook will change the influencer marketing world in 2020, leveraging its Brand Collabs Manager platform.
Assistance to the Content Creators
From Facebook’s perspective, the more guidance they can provide Influencers, the better. This is why they do not only see Brand Collabs Manager as a “business” tool, they also see it as an educational platform.
To better bridge Creators with brands, Facebook is offering educational content and guidelines for Influencers. It intends to help them in structuring their relationship with brands and ultimately optimizing their collaboration management, from branded content to payments. For example, they have released the following “lessons”:
- Earn money through brand partnerships – https://www.facebook.com/creators/earn-money-through-brand-partnerships
- The benefits of using Brand Collabs Manager https://www.facebook.com/creators/benefits-of-brand-collabs-manager
- Your Creator Studio Playbook
Monetization of Brand Collabs Manager for Influencers
Now, here is the game-changing portion of the whole series of articles: the cash (literally!) from Facebook to Influencers. Facebook monetization tools are introduced by Facebook as a flexible solution to earn and collect money while respecting the personal terms approved by the Creators. Let’s dive deeper into this!
- With Collabs & Facebook for Creators, Facebook is trying to shorten the value chain between brands and creators. To do so, Facebook protects Influencers’ interests by offering flexible terms and conditions.
- At this stage, Facebook does not take a commission or fee. It is a pure partnership deal between the Brand and the Creator. By receiving the Creators Sponsorship first, Facebook will be able to collect ‘engagement vs cost’ metrics to enrich its insights. This data capture strategy reminds us of the way Google did to strengthen Google Adwords, enabling website owners to analyze 360-degree data in Google Analytics. On the other hand, Chinese platforms like Little Red Book have been announcing since 2019 that they will start collecting a percentage on top of the KOL fees in a move for a more transparent and robust market but have yet to implement it according to our sources.
- How and when do Creators get paid? Well, here’s the thing, it’s not directly. Payments are sent to Creators but locked up for a duration between 22 to 49 days. For instance, for work executed on 10.02.2020, Creators may not start getting paid until 21.03.2020.
We have no doubt that Facebook’s financial engine will do well to make their money grow through financial investments, leveraging the “hold” on significant amounts of cash for such a long duration.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/creators/payments-deep-dive
New collaboration opportunities with Brands
Branded Content is not the only way for Brands and Creators to partner up, in fact, Facebook announced new unexpected partnership formats such as:
- Enabling cross-tagging from one Facebook Page to another Page. At this stage, Pages can’t tag other Pages outside of the Branded Content tool.
- Facebook is also considering and testing the viability of tagging other Pages through Paid Partnerships (Creator to Brand) and Non-Paid Partnerships (Creator to Creator). Zuck’s team hopes to roll this out sometime this year.
- Both of the above functions could help Marketers & Creators implement and monitor earned media/co-branded collaborations from brand to brand, brand to supplier, and even brand to event. This widens collaboration opportunities. Brands and Creators will also be able to better track partnership & sponsorship performances with more social media data. For instance, “new audience” or “new reach” could be added to the traditional marketing KPIs.
- Brands such as Red Bull, being an “event-machine”, would benefit from the cross-tagging performance data on Facebook to decide whether to allocate more or less support/budget/efforts to specific events.
To explore new ways to introduce Sponsorship and Paid Marketing collaborations, the firm is examining the possibility of highlighting a partnership by integrating a brand message into existing Creators’ content instead of using the “Paid Sponsorship” label that Instagram uses already.
