At Webfluential we have a global community of over 8000 influencers. As our community continues to grow we want to ensure that we keep you up to date with changes on social media platforms that may affect you. The most recent change to have taken place is Facebook allowing businesses and influencers to be verified. Being verified not only gives you credibility but it also ensures you are taking the necessary steps to meeting the Facebook guidelines of posting sponsored content.
The blue badge is the new symbol of Facebook approval – pages with this tick have been confirmed as authentic pages or profiles for a public figure, media company or brand. The grey badge indicates that the Facebook page is a verified page for a business or organisation.
So how can your brand get verified? It’s easy….
Establish your status
If your Page is categorised as a Local Business or as a Company & Organization, then you will probably need a grey verification badge. The blue verification badge is only available in certain regions so you may not be able to apply for it at this stage.
Find the verification
Go to the top of your Page and under the General Tab, click on Page Verification. Then select Verify this Page and Get Started. You will enter your publicly listed phone number for your business, your country and location and your preferred language. Then click Call Me Now and wait for Facebook to buzz you with the verification code. Enter this four-digit code, click Continue and enjoy the awesome new badge on your Page.
Hot tip: Link your Page to your website and ensure your About section is complete
Need an alternative?
If you don’t fancy getting a call or you don’t have a publicly registered phone number, you can use a business document. Just follow the same steps as above and select the Verify this Page with Documents instead button, upload the picture of your official document and make sure it clearly shows both your business name and your address. This process takes slightly longer as Facebook needs to verify the information against public records.
Hot tip: You can use a driver’s license, passport and birth certificate as well as articles of incorporation
What happens if you don’t?
If you don’t verify your Page, then you can’t post sponsored content and for influencers and brands this is not a great thing. You can post your own content, sure, but you can’t link to someone else’s services or solutions unless you have a badge. The verification process is easy and critical for influencers with their own brand pages. If you read through the Facebook Branded Content Policies, you can see that posts which ‘disclose the content is sponsored or provided by a third party’ are only allowed for Verified Pages.
Instagram is also at the party
Instagram is undergoing a number of changes (some of which have caused utter social mayhem) and one of these is a Facebook-a-like type profile with a new contact button, a location tag and category for easier business classification and identification. It’s a pretty nifty new design which can mean a great deal for the brand and the influencer in terms of being easier to contact and increasing potential reach.
Facebook owns Instagram. Facebook wants you to verify your business. It seems only logical to assume that, once the dust has settled on the Facebook platform, Instagram will follow suit. Getting verified today could save you a lot of hassle down the line and may well see you sorted across multiple platforms from the start. While you’re at it, you may as well verify on Twitter too. It pays to be prepared!
Hot tip: Don’t pay someone to verify your brand or Page for you. This is the land of the con artist and will only waste your time and money.
This post was written on behalf of Webfluential by a Webfluential contributor.
This blog post was originally written by Ruan Fourie.
When we think of Mercedes-Benz we think of luxury and the high life. Casey Neistat is a YouTuber and he will happily admit that neither luxury or the high life is part of what he does. How does a luxury car brand like Mercedes and Neistat end up working on an advertising project?
Two words: Influencer Marketing
As other digital marketing efforts are becoming less and less effective, brands want to reach audiences that are engaged. Influencer Marketing is a great way of doing this, but sometimes the brand restricts influencers to what can or can not be done.
Problem is: Influencers know their audience best.
In a way it’s similar to how Hollywood works. Creatives create something for an audience, then producers, the production studio and network executives apply changes as they see fit, because they are, after all, fronting the bill.
Too many cooks really do spoil the broth, especially when the most vocal cooks don’t know what the people in the restuarant want to eat.
Mercedes-Benz have had multiple commercials for many cars over the years and most of these commercials cater to the same audience: High LSM males. If you’re in advertising you’ll know that target market well!
Mercedes commercials look fantastic, but for most of us it just leaves us wishing we could actually afford one of those beautiful luxury cars. The marketing team at Mercedes realised this, and so set out to reach a new audience – but to do this they had to try something they hadn’t done before.
This new audience is not the usual target – they are people like you and me, people like Casey Neistat, people who just want to have fun, people that Mercedes-Benz don’t really understand. This can be a problem, for any marketing team. Luckily the solution is obvious. Just find someone who understands the audience and let them create – no strings attached.
Casey Neistat stepped up to the plate and Mercedes-Benz armed him with the new CLA Class and bags full of money. Their instructions to Casey? Nothing.
“There’s a huge insecurity on my part that my audience might perceive this as: this is something a company is directing, or this is a company that wants to be something else, or this is something that a company is pushing in a certain direction.” said Neistat about his fears when taking on this project.
Right from day one, Neistat and his team did not hide a thing from their audience. They made a four-part video series to help showcase their process and the production of the CLA Class commercial. Like any good influencer, Neistat had all cards on the table where his audience could see them.
The resulting commercial is probably the best commercial that has even been made for Mercedes-Benz. Instead of making you feel like you need to earn more, the commercial makes you feel like you want to have fun.
It’s because of this honesty that influencers have with their audience, that there is a different type of connection. A connection that can change behaviour and influence purchasing decisions.
The audience also want to support the influencer, especially if branded content is not forced on them under false pretenses. Even though content might be paid for or sponsored, the audience will not mind if the content has been created for them. In fact, in most cases the audience will support the brand, because the brand supports the influencer.
This shows us that trust between brand and influencer is key.
It’s only natural for a brand to be concerned about what will happen to their brand when placed in the hands of an influencer. Influencer Marketing is the future of marketing, but it will be critical for brands to identify influencers that understand branding and marketing as well as they understand their audience.
A real influencer builds his own audience using branding and marketing skills. If a brand can trust an influencer, and give them the creative freedom they deserve, not only will the campaign be a success but a mutually beneficial relationship will blossom between the two parties.
Once a mutually beneficial working relationship is created between brand and influencer, the influencer becomes a brand ambassador for life – and that is more valuable than any other form of media a brand can buy.
Influencer Marketing guidelines toward branded or sponsored content has recently been addressed by both Google and Facebook. As an Influencer, we advise familiarising yourself with recent updates made to the branded posting guidelines issues by these two major networks.
We’ve summarized the updates below for our community of influencers to read. At Webfluential we pride ourselves for being in the forefront of this growing industry, and therefore want to make sure we communicate all the rules and guidelines as they come into play.
Google guidelines for bloggers
In a blog post released on the Webmaster Central blog Google advises bloggers to add the nofollow tag to links that were created in exchange for goods or services, stating that these links are against the Google guidelines on link schemes.
“Influencer engagement isn’t necessarily about receiving links but more about reaching the audience of a particular blogger or online ‘personality’,” says Henry Ellis, head of SEO agency Tamar.
There has been speculation on how Google can determine the difference between an organic link and a link that has been placed in exchange for goods or services. Nonetheless it would be advisable for all marketers and influencers to familiarise themselves with Google’s guidelines on the matter.
Top Tip from Webfluential:
Use the nofollow tag on links in your blog posts about brands, and disclaim to your audience that content is sponsored in a note at the end of your post, be that on social or native channels.
Facebook updates Branded Content Policy
Facebook used to prohibit third party advertisements on Facebook pages without their prior permission. Branded content will however be allowed since a new update to branded content policies was announced on 8 April, also in a blog post: “Today we’re updating our branded content policy to enable verified Pages to share branded content on Facebook.”
Both announcements by Google and Facebook are clear indicators that Influencer Marketing is on the rise. We live in an exciting era, but in order for us all to move forward together and produce the best content for brands that honour the platforms the content is created for, we must be sure we’re keeping in line with the rules and regulations that surround our Influencer Marketing trade.
