Engaging Influencers On Facebook

Someone asked me today about engaging influencers, or rather other pages through Facebook. Here’s a quick overview of ‘how to engage influencers on Facebook.


but first let’s get a common misunderstanding about messaging out of the way.

Posting Messages To Pages On Facebook

You can post a public message to a Facebook page. It appears very small on the right hand side (as shown in the green circle below).  These messages can be targetted and useful for the audience of the page as in this example.


Unfortunately they are, however, often spammy in nature.  Many Facebook page managers choose to turn public messages off.


But there’s a better way so use public messages to a Facebook page with care.
 Facebook Engaging Influencers - Posts To Influencers Page

So what’s the better way to engage influencers?

Firstly carefully identified other organizations with Facebook pages, whose audience overlaps with yours.  As usual it’s all about understanding customers.

Once you’ve identified relevant influencers on Facebook here’s how to engage them without being creepy:

3 Alternative Ways To Engage Facebook Influencers

1. Send Your Influencer’s A Private Message

Open a dialog about something of shared interest.  This message is sent from an individual, not a Facebook page. Pages can’t send messages to other pages.

To do this navigate or search for the Facebook page in question, then choose the “Message” button towards the top of the page.Engage Influencers On FacebookBy Starting A Conversation Of Shared Interest

2. Share A Partners Or Influencer’s Status Update

From your partners or influencer’s Facebook page, carefully select a status update (also called posts) that’s of interest to your audience. This way you are both serving your own audience and doing them a favour.

This method is called ‘curating content’.  (Content curation often makes up a core part of professional content marketing plans).Engage Influencers On Facebook By Sharing Something Of Theirs With Your Audience

Sharing causes the influencer’s page to be notified privately.

Check out your own Facebook page notifications to see if someone has already mentioned your page.  In this example you can see 11 shares.  See here for more on Facebook page messaging.Facebook Notifications

3. Tag Influencers On Your Facebook page

Share something of relevance to both your and their audience. Tag/mention the influencer’s page them using @.

As in number 2 above, this causes the influencers page to notified privately.

It’s very important (and sometimes a pain) to use the correct name of the page. The web address in your browser windows shows the exact web destination of facebook pages.

  • For example, the JEM 9 page on Facebook is: https://www.facebook.com/jem9dotCom
  • To mention JEM 9 you would type: @jem9dotcom  It will often pop up before you complete the typing.

If you’ve done it correct, their page name automatically convert to a blue link (show below in the green eclipse).
Engaging-Facebook-influencers-mentions

Should your targeted influencer sees your post as relevant for their audience, hopefully they will reshare.
Resharing a status update is matter of a few clicks (although sometimes you may wish to limit the audience to keep content tightly aligned to the interest of your audience).
So there’s you have it; a few simple steps to get you started in engaging other pages/influencers on Facebook.

Now go and
  • identify your particular influencers on Facebook
  • carefully note their Facebook page name (and save for future use),
  • carefully select or compose status updates of relevance to both your and their audiences

and

  • share an update!

About Jane Morgan

With 20+ years high-tech marketing & product development experience from Boston to Billund, Berlin to Bangalore, Jane has managed teams and tech products with millions of installs, and millions of revenue (annually). She's researched and developed market strategy for global markets, and established the blueprint for product management in many new teams. As an intrapreneur turned entrepreneur, she changed vowels in 2014 and founded JEM 9 Marketing Consultancy. Today she works with CEOs & business leaders to assist them in understanding and reaching customers. Speaker on market research, technology marketing and product management.