Today’s connected consumer represents a sharp departure from the consumer of the past: relentless in pursuing information, sceptical, savvy, and suspicious of traditional advertising approaches. That being the case, marketers in both the B2C and B2B environments have increasingly begun relying on the strength derived from the trusted third party, the influencer. With 85 percent of marketers now using some form of influencer marketing, there’s little question that it has become an immensely powerful tool and a practical necessity. Whether this is a long-term phenomenon seems to have been pretty well settled last week when Facebook launched its new Brand Collabs Manager. “We want to help creators be discovered by brands for new branded content collaborations,” Facebook said in a blog post. “The Brand Collabs Manager lets brands search and find creators to potentially establish deals and partnerships with. We’ve been testing this with a limited set of partners, and will now be opening up more broadly.” This wholehearted embrace of influencer marketing by the world’s largest social network promises to trigger imitation by other platforms, and clearly places influencer marketing in the mainstream, if it wasn’t there already. Streamlining the discovery process Simply put, the new search engine will...
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