Monday 30 April 2018

Facebook F8 2018: What Marketers Need to Know Ahead of Facebook’s Annual Conference

F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, returns this week (May 1 and 2) in San Jose, CA at the McEnery Convention Center.

F8 offers developers, marketers, and anyone with a keen interest in the future of social media, a glimpse into what’s ahead for Facebook in both the short and long-term.

Last year, Facebook wowed onlookers with a range of eye-catching VR features, Messenger updates, and camera upgrades. So what’s ahead for this year’s conference?

Recap: Check out our full F8 2017 rundown here.

Here’s everything you need to know about Facebook F8 2018, including some key sessions to keep an eye on and predictions for F8 2018.

We’ll be sharing of all the most important Facebook F8 updates once the conference is completed, check back on Thursday for the full roundup. If you’re keen to watch F8 live you can attend one of its international viewing events in your area or watch it online.

What to look out for at F8 2018: 3 key areas of focus

1. The future of the News Feed

The News Feed is ever-evolving and back in January, Facebook announced its ‘meaningful interactions’ update—one of the largest, most consequential News Feed updates of recent years.

The update stated that Facebook will be prioritizing posts that create meaningful conversations, especially those from family and friends. This means that Facebook will be favoring posts from family and friends over public content from Pages as they believe a person-to-person connection is more valuable than a person-to-page connection.

The below video from Facebook explains a little more about this update and how the Facebook News Feed works:

Off the back of this update, many marketers and brands were curious whether their organic reach would take another hit. During F8, I expect Facebook to address the News Feed and their focus on improvements for the coming 12 months and beyond—maybe we’ll even see a hint that Facebook could eventually move away from the News Feed altogether.

More on the ‘meaningful interactions’ update: The New Facebook Algorithm: Secrets Behind How It Works and What You Can Do To Succeed

Relevant F8 sessions:

  • What’s New with News Feed (Tuesday, May 1 @ 1pm PST)
    Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri outlines the future of News Feed, from the shift to connection to how his team is improving experiences on the platform.

2. Instagram for Business updates

Facebook recently opened up Instagram’s API for the first time, enabling Instagram business profiles to schedule Instagram posts, view analytics and more.

With more than 25 million active business profiles and more than 2 million advertisers on Instagram, it’s clear that Facebook sees a huge opportunity for Instagram to deliver further value to its business users. At F8, I expect we’ll learn a lot about the future of Instagram’s API and how Facebook will look to better serve business users and differentiate between business and personal profiles on Instagram.

Relevant sessions:

  • The Instagram Graph API – What’s In It For You? (Tuesday, May 1 @ 1.30pm PST)
    Meet the Instagram Graph API, a way to better manage your business on Instagram by scheduling posts, viewing organic insights and much more. In this session, you’ll learn how our past informs our future and leave with a clear picture of our vision for developers on the Instagram Platform.
  • How Stories Ads and Business Profiles Help Grow Your Business on Instagram (Tuesday, May 1 @ 1.30pm PST)
    Learn how businesses are using Instagram Stories Ads and Actions on Instagram business profiles to drive value. Hear Instagram Stories Ads best practices and learn about business profile partner integrations.

3. Privacy, security, and data at Facebook

Whilst previous F8 events have focused on the long-term future of Facebook and “what’s next”, showcasing plenty of eye-popping concepts like VR hangouts, drones, and more. At F8 2018, it feels like Facebook might focus a little more on the “here and now” and how they might fix some of the privacy and security issues that have been widely discussed in recent weeks.

Facebook has already made some positive progress here by making privacy tools easier to find and introducing new privacy experiences for everyone on Facebook as part of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Relevant F8 sessions:

  • Security at Facebook Scale (Tuesday, May 1 @ 1pm PST)
    You’ve heard that Facebook is investing heavily in security and safety in 2018. Come learn how we approach security to protect our community and company.
  • Keynote (Tuesday, May 1 and Wednesday, May 2 @ 10am PST)
    Little has been announced about the contents of the keynote sessions just yet, but I would imagine privacy, security and data sharing might be key topics for one, or both, sessions.

What are your predictions for F8 2018?

Facebook F8 is right around the corner and I’d love to hear what you’re excited to learn about and any predictions you might have for Facebook’s flagship developer conference.

What exciting, fun news do you think Facebook would share at the upcoming F8 conference? Do you have anything on your wish list?

If you’re keen to learn more about F8 or check out the full schedule you can do so on the F8 website.



source https://blog.bufferapp.com/facebook-f8-2018-preview

Tuesday 24 April 2018

How to Schedule Facebook Posts to Save Time and Get Better Results

Imagine this scenario: You have planned to post once a day on Facebook this week.

On Monday morning, you log in to Facebook and navigate to your company’s Facebook Page. You spend some time crafting the perfect post and wait for the supposed best time to post. You read that 3pm is a good time as people are taking a break from work and checking Facebook. So you wait…

At 2:55pm, you go back to the browser tab that has been opened since 10am. When the clock strikes 3pm, you hit “Publish”. Woohoo!

And then you repeat that for the next four days.

If that’s not too far from your day-to-day experience, I would love to suggest a simple tactic that can help you get better results and make you a better marketer…

Scheduling your Facebook posts.

Keen to find out more? Let’s read on.

How to Schedule Facebook Posts to Get Better Results and Save Time

Buffer can help you with Facebook scheduling, managing multiple Facebook Pages, and more. We would love for you to give it a try and see the difference.

3 benefits of scheduling your Facebook posts

You might be wondering, “the way I post on Facebook is just fine. Why do I have to change?” Well, here are three top benefits of scheduling your Facebook posts, compared with publishing it manually yourself.

(Oh, and if you are thinking that Facebook might penalize you for using a third-party tool, we’ll discuss that in just a moment.)

1. Maintain consistency and quality

The biggest benefit of scheduling your Facebook posts is to ensure that you’re posting consistently and to maintain the quality of your posts. Quantity and quality.

When you are scheduling your Facebook posts, you’re essentially planning ahead.

Buffer scheduled Facebook posts

For example, on Monday, you plan out all five posts for the week. Because you’re scheduling the posts to be published automatically, you won’t miss posting something even if you are busy — consistency. And because you dedicate time to crafting your posts in advance (rather than thinking of something on the spot every time), you can create higher quality content — quality.

2. Reach a wider audience

Publishing a post on Facebook directly is mostly fine… until you want to post at a time outside of your working hours to reach your audiences at different times of the day. You might have to excuse yourself from a dinner just to hit the publish button. Or worse, wake up in the middle of the night to do that.

When you schedule your posts, your posts will be published automatically at your chosen times. Whether it’s 7pm or 2am, it’ll almost seem like you published it manually yourself.

This way, you’ll be able to reach more people around the world who are checking Facebook at various times of their day. This is especially helpful for businesses with an international audience but also businesses in places where the population is spread across several time zones (e.g. US and Europe)1.

US population by time zone

3. Become more efficient

Finally, scheduling your Facebook posts can make you a better marketer.

According to the American Psychological Association, numerous studies have found that multitasking reduces one’s productivity. While switching between crafting a Facebook post and your other tasks for the day might not seem like much, research has found that “even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time”.2

Multitask vs Focus

Just consider the things you can do if you get back that 40 percent of your time!3

Does Facebook penalize posts from third-party tools like Buffer?

While scheduling Facebook posts sounds attractive, many people have a concern once they research into scheduling…

Facebook doesn’t seem to like third-party tools.

It is often said that Facebook penalizes posts from third-party tools by showing the posts to fewer people organically than posts published directly on Facebook.

How true is that?

We recently did an experiment with Buffer, Hootsuite, and CoSchedule to see if that’s true. We found that there wasn’t a significant difference in reach whether we scheduled posts using a third-party tool or published posts directly on Facebook. Some scheduled posts from third-party tools even reached more people than the Facebook posts published directly on Facebook.

How to schedule Facebook posts with Buffer

So how do you schedule Facebook posts? There’re several methods.

Facebook itself offers a native feature that allows admins and editors to schedule posts to a Page or a Group. Here’s a quick guide from Facebook on how to schedule Facebook posts.

If you are managing multiple Facebook Pages (or multiple social media profiles), we hope the best way for you would be to use Buffer.

How to schedule a Facebook post in four simple steps

  1. Go to your Buffer dashboard
  2. Select your Facebook Page or profile
  3. Craft your Facebook post
  4. Schedule your post

1. Go to your Buffer dashboard

Once you’ve signed up for Buffer and connected your Facebook Page (Group or profile), you’ll be brought to your Buffer dashboard. Here’s how it’ll look like:

Buffer dashboard

2. Select your Facebook Page or profile

Next, select the Facebook Page or profile you want to post to, in the left-side column and click on the composer (“What do you want to share?”). A popup where you can craft your tweet will appear.

Buffer dashboard: Create a post

Here are two quick tips for you:

  • If you have connected multiple social media profiles to your Buffer account, be sure to select the Facebook Pages(s) that you want to schedule posts for.
  • If the post is suitable for other social media networks like Twitter, you can also select those profiles and create scheduled posts for them at the same time.

3. Craft your Facebook post

Next, let’s create some content!

What content should you be sharing? Here are some ideas (and examples) for your inspiration:

Post edu-tainment content. We found that content that is either educational or entertaining often performs well on Facebook. Best if it is both educational and entertaining (hence “edu-tainment”)!

Curate top content. Curating and sharing top posts from our peers in the industry has helped us grow our Facebook reach significantly. These pieces of proven content have often become our best posts in terms of reach, which also grew our engagement and Page Likes.

Share videos. Video has been and still is the most popular content type on Facebook. Buzzsumo conducted a research on 880 million Facebook posts found that video posts have the highest average engagement and twice the level of engagement of other post types on average4.

If you schedule videos with Buffer, your video will appear just like you uploaded it directly to Facebook — which is important for reach and engagement.

4. Schedule your Facebook post

Once you’ve crafted your post, you have a few scheduling options:

  • Schedule Posts: Schedule the post for a specific date and time
  • Add to Queue (default): Add the post to the next available posting time on your posting schedule
  • Share Now: Share the post immediately
  • Share Next: If you are on one of our paid plans, you can add the post to the top of your queue and have it published next.

Scheduling options

Yay! You have just scheduled a Facebook post!

Bonus: Buffer browser extension

You can also create a Facebook post via the Buffer browser extension. For example, whenever you see a great piece of content that’s relevant to your Facebook audience, you can click on the Buffer browser extension button and share that piece of content as a scheduled Facebook post.

Here’s how the browser extension looks like:

Buffer browser extension

3 Facebook scheduling quick tips

Now, scheduling your Facebook posts is only half the story. To maximize your results on Facebook, here’s the other half: tips and tricks to ensure that your Facebook posts reach and engage as many people as possible.

Let’s go through them one by one.

1. How often to post on Facebook

When you are setting up your posting schedule, one question you might have is “How often should I be posting?”.

(The other question is likely “what times should I be posting?” We’ll cover that next!)

There likely isn’t a definite answer to this question as it depends on your audience’s preference and your capacity for creating new content. But in case it’s helpful to have a benchmark to work from, we recently studied our own Facebook Page and found that posting one to two Facebook posts per day helped us grow our reach by three times!

Facebook reach growth

This recommendation is similar to the findings of Coschedule’s research, which looked at 12 different studies on posting frequency for Facebook.

2. Best time to post on Facebook

The next question, “what times should I be posting?”

While there are many studies that suggest the “best times to post” (including ours), we’ve learned that there isn’t a set of universal best times to post on Facebook. That’s because every business has their own unique audience. What industry are you in? Where is your audience based? When are your followers checking Facebook?

All these different factors influence your best times to post. So instead of the universal best times to post, look for your best times to post.

A way to find your best times to post on Facebook is to post when your followers are online and see if that increases your reach. When your followers are active on Facebook, there might be a higher chance of them seeing and interacting with your posts. You can find that data (the following chart) in your Facebook Page Insights, under the “Posts” tab.

Facebook Insights: When your fans are online

If you would like to read more about finding your best time to post on Facebook, here’s a completed guide on that topic.

3. What can be scheduled (and what cannot be)

Finally, another crucial information to know is what can be scheduled to Facebook (and what cannot be). Knowing the limitations will allow you to better plan your social media posting in advance.

Things that can be scheduled

  • Text updates
  • Images (up to four images with Buffer)
  • Videos
  • Links

Things that cannot be scheduled

  • Photo albums
  • Events
  • Check-ins
  • GIFs

Another great thing to note is that many social media scheduling tools do not have the more advanced settings such as tagging, choosing a preferred audience, or adding a product tag. If you would like to use these features, you can do so by creating and publishing your posts on Facebook directly. (Thanks, Cara Parrish, for mentioning this!)

Over to you: What do you think of scheduling?

For many social media managers, social media scheduling tools are a lifesaver. These tools help them improve their social media performance and save them time (and their evenings and weekends).

If you have always been going to Facebook to publish your posts, scheduling your Facebook posts might sound like an unusual recommendation. If you have any thoughts or concerns about scheduling your Facebook posts, I would love to hear and discuss them with you in the comments section below.

If you would like to see how scheduling Facebook posts can help you with your Facebook marketing, we would love for you to give Buffer a try and see the difference.

Image credit: Photo by Kaylah Otto on Unsplash



source https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-schedule-facebook-posts

Monday 16 April 2018

What Do the New Twitter Rules Mean for Social Media Managers (and Buffer Customers)

Keeping Twitter safe and free from spam is a top priority for us. — Yoel Roth, API Policy and Product Trust at Twitter

This year, the team at Twitter has taken additional action to keep Twitter free from spam. Specifically, they have introduced new rules around automation and the use of multiple accounts.

You might be wondering, “why is this important to me?”

In short, Twitter might suspend your account if you fail to comply.

These rules are also encouraging good sharing practices on Twitter and will benefit everyone in the long run.

And since this is such an important topic, we would love to explore it together with you. In this blog post, we’ll share the rationale behind the new rules and what the rules would mean to you — as a Twitter user and a Buffer customer.

It’ll be great to hear your thoughts in the comments section below, too.

What Do the New Twitter Rules Mean to Social Media Managers (and Buffer Customers)

Why did Twitter introduce these new rules?

First, let’s understand the rationale behind these rules.

Spam has been an issue on Twitter for a long time and you might recognize these two common types of spam:

  1. A single account posting identical (or almost identical) tweets
  2. Multiple accounts posting identical (or almost identical) tweets

 
Spam example

Such tweets often don’t provide the best experience to Twitter users, especially since Twitter still show most tweets in the reverse-chronological order. Such aggressive spam from others can prevent your followers from seeing your thoughtfully-created tweets.

That’s why the team at Twitter wants to tackle them with the new rules.

As you’ll find out below, the new rules may create some extra steps for you as a social media manager — regardless of whether you use automation or not. But overall, we feel that these changes will benefit Twitter as a whole and benefit you as a marketer.

What are the new Twitter rules (and what do they mean to you)?

Yoel Roth, who works on API Policy and Product Trust at Twitter, published a blog post about the new rules. The blog post, however, is targeted more at developers than marketers. Hence, we would love to share what the new rules mean to you.

The easiest way to understand the rules is this:

The Twitter Rules prohibit posting duplicative or substantially similar content — both on one account and across multiple accounts.

Let’s break that down further. Here are the four key areas:

  1. Posting to multiple accounts
  2. Posting multiple similar tweets
  3. Posting multiple tweets to a trending topic
  4. Simultaneously perform actions such as Likes, Retweets, or follows from multiple accounts

1. Posting to multiple accounts

What Twitter said

Posting duplicative or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts you control, or creating duplicate or substantially similar accounts, with or without the use of automation, is never allowed.

What it means to social media managers

There are three key takeaways from this guideline:

  1. You cannot post identical (or even almost identical) content to multiple accounts.
  2. You cannot create multiple accounts that are very similar to one another.
  3. The above applies to you whether you use an automation tool (which includes scheduling) or you manually post your tweets.

Here’s an example of what’s not allowed:

Identical tweets from multiple accounts

If you have multiple distinct accounts, which you wish to post the same content to, Twitter recommends that you retweet the content from one account using the remaining accounts (like Brian did in the below example).

Retweet similar content

Be aware, however, that “bulk, aggressive, or very high-volume automated Retweeting is not permitted”. In other words, retweeting from a few accounts is fine. Retweeting from a hundred accounts will probably raise a red flag.

What it means to Buffer customers

Buffer used to allow you to post the same content to multiple Twitter accounts using the composer. With this new guideline, we have implemented three changes to help you stay clear of this guideline.

First, you can no longer select multiple Twitter accounts in the composer.

When you try to select more than one Twitter account in your Buffer composer, you’ll see a message about this new change.

Buffer dashboard Twitter message

Second, you can no longer use the drag-and-drop copy feature to copy posts from one Twitter Queue to another. We hope that by removing this feature, we can prevent users from unintentionally posting similar content to multiple Twitter accounts, thereby violating the new rule.

Third, you can no longer Re-Buffer previously published Twitter posts to Twitter accounts using drag-and-drop. You can still use the Re-Buffer button, which allows you to modify the post before sharing it again.

2. Posting multiple similar tweets

What Twitter said

Twitter rule tweet

What it means to social media managers

This rule means that you cannot post or schedule identical tweets (including replies and mentions) over several hours or days.

It isn’t clear if you can post an identical tweet after a longer timeframe such as a month or two. It seems best to avoid that, too.

Here’s an example of what’s not allowed:

Multiple identical tweets

Here’s an example of what we try to do when we want to share a blog post several times:

Re-Buffer examples

What it means to Buffer customers

To help you prevent instances of sharing similar content multiple times unintentionally, you can no longer schedule posts for Twitter multiple times using the Power Scheduler feature.

Here’s how the Power Schedule feature looks like:

Power Scheduler

You can still use the Power Schedule for other social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn. You just can’t use it for Twitter anymore.

You can also still use the Re-Buffer feature in the Posts Report in your Buffer analytics. We’ve added a short note to remind you to modify your tweet before scheduling so that you aren’t posting “substantially similar” tweets.

Re-Buffer example

3. Posting multiple tweets to a trending topic

What Twitter said

Posting multiple updates (on a single account or across multiple accounts you control) to a trending or popular topic (for instance, through the use of a specific hashtag) with an intent to subvert or manipulate the topic, or to artificially inflate the prominence of a hashtag or topic, is never allowed.

What it means to social media managers

This rule means that you cannot post multiple tweets on a trending topic with the intention to dominate the topic “to drive traffic or attention to unrelated accounts, products, services, or initiatives”.

This applies to you in all of the following circumstances:

  • Whether you are posting to a single account or multiple accounts
  • Whether the content is exactly identical or slightly different
  • Whether you are using a hashtag or not

Here’s my best guess of what’s not allowed (e.g. when #bufferchat is trending):

Multiple tweets on trending topic

What it means to Buffer customers

The product changes mentioned above will help you avoid posting duplicative content to a single account or multiple accounts.

4. Simultaneously perform actions such as Likes, Retweets, or follows from multiple accounts

What Twitter said

The use of any form of automation … to perform actions such as Likes or Retweets, across many accounts … (whether or not you created or directly control those accounts) is not permitted.

What it means to social media managers

This rule means that you cannot use tools to help you like, retweet, or follow from multiple accounts.

For example, some tools allow you to like a tweet using several accounts with just a click. Some tools even automatically like tweets using several accounts. These are no longer allowed, and using these tools can risk your account being suspended.

What it means to Buffer customers

Buffer doesn’t have any features that allow you to do any of that. So you don’t have to worry about violating this rule while using Buffer.

Other rules and resources

Besides these four rules, Twitter has a page where it lists all their rules. It’ll be great to check that out, especially the section on spam.

If you would like to read further on this topic, here are a few more resources:

If you have any questions about the rules, feel free to mention them below. While I cannot guarantee that I know the answer, I’ll be happy to discuss them with you.

Over to you

Overall, we are optimistic that the new Twitter rules will be beneficial to the entire Twitter ecosystem.

Reducing spam on Twitter can also greatly benefit marketers in many ways. First, there’ll be a higher chance for your quality content to be seen. Second, as you no longer have to compete with the spam for your followers’ attention, you can post fewer tweets and spend more time making each one even better. Third, when the overall quality of tweets improves, people might be more likely to interact with tweets or click on links in tweets, bringing you more engagement and traffic.

Are there more benefits that you can think of?

We understand that many of you are used to the features that we’ve just removed and these changes will cause much inconvenient for you. If you have any thoughts and feedback, we would love for you to share them below. Thank you.

Image credit: Photo by Slava Bowman on Unsplash



source https://blog.bufferapp.com/new-twitter-rules

Wednesday 4 April 2018

How Much Does Social Media Influencer Marketing Cost?

Do you know how much an influencer marketing campaign costs? Or how much you should be paying an influencer?

If you’re not quite sure, don’t be worried. I’m like you. I didn’t know much before I did the research for this blog post.

And in truth, there’s no exact science to figuring out how much you should pay influencers, as one social media executive explained to Digiday: “We have no idea what to pay them. That’s the problem.”1

While there isn’t a clearcut answer to this question, there are some guidelines used by marketers, agencies, and influencers themselves. There are even tools to help you calculate how much to pay specific influencers.

We are going to share all these in this blog post. If you are interested, let’s dive in.

The Quick Guide to Social Media Influencer Marketing Cost

6 factors that affect the cost of influencer marketing

Before we dive into the guidelines used by marketers, agencies, and influencers, I would love to briefly cover the factors that affect the cost of each influencer marketing campaign.

This is because the guidelines below might not always apply to your influencer marketing campaign. Understanding these factors allows you to adjust your rates accordingly so that you can find a price that works for both you and the influencer.

Influencer marketing cost factors

1. Social media platform

The social media platform chosen for the campaign is one of the key factors that influence the cost. As you’ll read below, the cost of influencer marketing varies across channels. It’s as though each social media platform has its own “market” rate.

Instagram tends to be the top choice for social media influencer marketing, followed by YouTube and Snapchat. Generally, influencer marketing is less common on Facebook and Twitter.

musical.ly, a less well-known yet massive social media platform, is becoming more popular for influencer marketing. Companies like Coca-Cola have partnered with influencers on musical.ly for their campaigns.

2. Following

Traditionally, brands look at the potential reach of an advertising channel to decide how much to pay for an advertisement. Hence, the number of followers of an influencer became a consideration when deciding how much to pay an influencer. The idea is that the more followers an influencer has, the more people the brand could reach. So influencers with a larger following will usually charge more.

According to Digiday’s state of influencer marketing report, ‘The number of followers is still the gold standard for a social star’s “influence”’2.

But as it’s possible for people to buy fake followers to inflate their follower count, brands are also looking at other metrics to price their influencer marketing campaign.

3. Engagement

Engagement is one of the alternative metrics that brands have been using. While it’s easy to buy fake followers, it’s harder to buy fake engagement (though, it’s not impossible). When influencers can get their followers to engage with their social media posts, the influencer marketing campaign becomes more effective for the brand as those followers are essentially engaging with the brand.

Furthermore, social media algorithms are prioritizing engagement. The more positive engagement a post gets, the more people will see the post. Influencers who have higher engagement rate are more likely to have a greater reach.

Hence, the higher the engagement rate the influencer gets, the more expensive the campaign will be.

4. Product

The product you’re selling (or the industry you’re in) can also affect the cost of your influencer marketing campaign. Hiring an influencer to promote a sports car will generally cost more than hiring an influencer to promote a fruit juice.

A good rule-of-thumb is that the more expensive your product is, the more expensive the campaign will be.

5. Direct partnership or through an agency

Chelsea Naftelberg, associate director of content and partnerships for the social media agency, Attention, shared with Digiday that “if you are working with a talent agent instead of directly with an influencer, expect to pay a little more to take their fee into account.”3

Working with a talent agency is more expensive than working with an influencer directly.

This is because the talent agency would usually to charge a commission for connecting you with the right influencers. In addition, influencers that are part of a talent agency are usually more experienced with influencer marketing and would command a higher fee.

If you want to save some money here, here are two ways to find the right influencers for your campaign yourself.

6. Campaign

Finally, the extent of the campaign will also affect the cost. Here are some questions to think about:

  • How many posts do you want from the influencer?
  • Who creates the content? You or the influencer?
  • Do you want the influencer to cross-post to their other social media profiles?
  • Do you want the influencer to keep the post on their profile permanently? (Some influencers delete their sponsored posts after the campaign.)

Simply put, the more work the influencer has to do, the more expensive the campaign will be.

Section separator

How much does influencer marketing cost?

$5,000 to $10,000.

According to HYPR, an influencer marketing platform, that is the price you can expect to pay for a post by an influencer with 500,000 to one million followers across their social media profiles4.

But what are the “market” rates for each social media platform?

Or what if you want to work with smaller influencers — micro-influencers?

From my research, I discovered insightful guidelines from various sources such as Digiday, Quora, and blogs. In some cases, marketers and agencies shared how much they pay for influencers. In other cases, influencers themselves disclosed how much they charge brands.

Here’s what I found:

Influencer marketing cost summary

Instagram

$10 per 1,000 followers

According to Digiday’s findings, a good guideline for Instagram influencer marketing is $1,000 for every 100,000 followers (or simplified to $10 for every 1,000 followers)5.

Chelsea Naftelberg, associate director of content and partnerships for social media agency Attention, estimates how much her team should pay an Instagram influencer based on $1,000 per 100,000 followers.

Langer thinks that brands can start with $250 per Instagram post for social stars with less than 50,000 followers, then add roughly $1,000 per 100,000 followers per post.

This matches what lifestyle blogger, Lee Anne, charges for her Instagram sponsored posts. The formula she uses and recommends is $5 to $10 per 1,000 followers6.

$250 to $750 per 1,000 engagement

Another guideline is to look at the average post engagement that the influencer gets.

As most people have more followers than the amount of engagement they receive per post, you’ll generally pay more for each engagement than each follower. Tony Tran, CEO and co-founder of influencer marketing platform, Lumanu, suggests paying around $0.25 to $0.75 per average post engagement (or $250 to $750 per 1,000 engagement)7. That means that if the influencer usually gets 1,000 engagement for each post, you’ll want to pay him or her about $250 to $750.

A tool you can use to help you is the Instagram Money Calculator by Influencer Marketing Hub.

Simply enter the username of the Instagram influencer that you’re interested in and the calculator will estimate the earnings per post (or the cost per post for you).

Instagram Money Calculator

It seems like a post on our Instagram account is worth about $200. Would you pay that much for a post on our Instagram profile? (Perhaps a new revenue source for us? 😉)

Another tool is InfluencerDB. InfluencerDB suggests a media value per post (or cost per post for you) based on the engagement and reach of the Instagram account.

YouTube

$20 per 1,000 subscribers

It’s common for YouTube influencers to charge more than Instagram influencers as creating a YouTube video can require much more effort than creating an Instagram post. Furthermore, YouTube videos are often longer than Instagram videos.

Henry Langer, a lead account manager of influencer marketing platform, HYPR, shared with Digiday that YouTube influencers usually charge $2,000 for every 100,000 subscribers they have (or simplified to $20 for every 1,000 subscribers)8.

For YouTubers with more than 50,000 subscribers, marketers can add roughly $2,000 per 100,000 followers per video, up until around 1 million subscribers, at which point a dedicated video could cost upwards of $25,000-$50,000, according to Langer.

$50 to $100 per 1,000 video views

Thanks to the analytics provided on YouTube, you can also look at the average video views of the influencer.

Not every subscriber would watch every video by the influencer so each video view would generally cost more than each subscriber. Tony Tran of Lumanu recommends paying around $0.05 to $0.10 per average video view (or $50 to $100 per 1,000 video views). He suggests looking at the 30 most recent videos by the influencer to get a good average of his or her video views9.

If you don’t want to go through the trouble of pricing your campaign, you could use a platform like FameBit (by YouTube). On FameBit, you can set a budget and have YouTube influencers reach out to you with their proposal. Here’s a great Quora answer on how to set your budget based on metrics like customer lifetime value and conversion rate.

FameBit

Snapchat

$10 per 1,000 followers

There is less influencer marketing cost data for Snapchat than Instagram and YouTube but here are some data points that could be helpful.

According to Captiv8, an influencer marketing startup, a Snapchat influencer with three million to seven million followers can charge, on average, $75,000 for a snap while one with 50,000 to 500,000 followers can charge, on average, $1,000 for a snap10. That is about $11 to $25 per 1,000 followers for influencers and $2 to $20 per 1,000 followers for micro-influencers — or a ballpark figure of $10 per 1,000 followers.

Snapchat influencer marketing cost

Marketers in the UK seems to pay Snapchat influencers much more — about $70 to $100 per 1,000 followers.11.

$100 per 1,000 views

As Snapchat doesn’t reveal the follower count, that number is often estimated using the number of views of the first Snapchat story. Some brands and agencies prefer to look at the number of views directly. After gathering insights from more than 30 Snapchat influencers, Snapchat influencer, Cyrene Quiamco, shared the following rates with Digiday12:

  • $500 for 1,000-5,000 views
  • $1,000-$3,000 for 5,000-10,000 views
  • $3,000-$5,000 for 10,000-20,000 views
  • $5,000-$10,000 for 30,000-50,000 views
  • $10,000-$30,000 for 50,000-100,000 views

That is about $100 per 1,000 views.

Have you worked with a Snapchat influencer before? It’ll be great if you are up for sharing some of your numbers.

Facebook and Twitter – maybe not

From my research, influencer marketing seems to be less common on Facebook and Twitter.

Tony Tran of Lumanu actually advises against it13.

Facebook: you should never pay for a Facebook-only influencer. Facebook is a channel for content amplification — thus it only makes sense to pay an influencer to post on Facebook if you are already paying her for content creation on one of her other channels. Facebook organic reach is notoriously bad, so there really is no value in paying a Facebook influencer no matter how large her reach is – unless you can get permission to boost the content (at which point it’s your own money anyways!)

Twitter – forget it, stop, turn around and RUN do not walk away. Twitter is a sinkhole for tossing any marketing dollars, much less influencer marketing. Unless you’re getting a free shoutout on Twitter, don’t even think about spending influencer dollars here.

This matches my personal experience. I don’t remember seeing any influencer marketing posts on Facebook and Twitter. Have you seen any?

If you have done influencer marketing on Facebook or Twitter, I would love to hear your experiences! Would you recommend it?

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How much would you pay for influencer marketing?

From my research, one thing is clear. There isn’t a clearcut answer to the cost of influencer marketing. It is influenced by many factors such as the chosen social media platform, follower count, engagement rate, and more.

Fortunately, there are some guidelines that you can refer to and adjust according to your particular situation.

  • Instagram – $10 per 1,000 followers or $250 to $750 per 1,000 engagement
  • YouTube – $20 per 1,000 subscribers or $50 to $100 per 1,000 video views
  • Snapchat – $10 per 1,000 followers or $100 per 1,000 views

Do these numbers match your experiences? How much have you paid or how much would you pay for influencer marketing? Let’s share what we know and help one another.

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Topics: Influencer marketing, Social media strategy

The awesome featured image is by rawpixel.com and was taken from Unsplash.



source https://blog.bufferapp.com/influencer-marketing-cost