Facebook Launches “Brand Collabs Manager” for Instagram Creators

With the world of Influencer marketing exploding, particularly on Facebook and Instagram, Facebook has now launched one of its most impressive collaboration tools to date. Just this week, Facebook introduced its Brand Collabs Manager platform, which will serve as a granular search engine for brands, helping them find relevant, compatible influencers to connect and partner with.

What does this mean for creators? Well, Instagram’s goal is to help them turn their passion into a living, and this comprehensive marketplace tool will be another step in enabling them to do just that.

What does it mean for brands? For too long, brands have had to manually weave through Instagram to find Influencers that may potentially be partnership fit, and with this new tool, brands will now be able to take away that heavy lifting and quickly search for who they wish to work with.

As explained by Facebook on their blog:

“We’re opening up Facebook’s Brand Collabs Manager – a marketplace tool previously only available to Facebook creators – for a select group of Instagram creators. They’ll now be able to share insights and engagement with brands and find partners that will resonate with their audience. Creators in Brand Collabs Manager can also search for like-minded brands looking to partner on content creation. They can source new deals, manage partnerships, and automatically share insights with them”

That last element is specifically interesting in the context of Influencer marketing, taking into consideration the removal of public like counts on Instagram over the past 6 months. There has been a lot written about how the removal of likes will significantly affect the Influencer marketing industry as a whole, considering that creators would now have to rely on sending screenshots to brands of their account analytics, however, through Brand Collabs Manager, they potentially may be able to avoid this.

With this latest update, Instagram is now making it possible for brands to see insights and analytics once they are tagged in content that is related to them within Brand Collabs Manager, which will be very helpful for the brand when deciding if they want to continue to work with specific creators.

It’s one of Facebooks biggest Influencer marketing plays to date, and is most likely as a result of the rise of Influencer marketing as a now viable marketing channel for a lot of brands. Facebook has stated multiple times over the past number of months that “promotions” will be a key part of their focus in 2020, and Brand Collabs Manager seems to be the start of that.

Currently, there are plenty of influencer discover tools on the market, however, Facebook will clearly be able to offer both more insights and data to brands in relation to creator performance, and broader influencer marketing trends as a whole, this alone will make the tool very attractive for brands of all sizes.

As Facebook rolls this out to all brands over the coming months, it will be interesting to see how businesses begin utilizing the tool.

In addition to this new tool, Facebook also announced that they are putting procedures in place to provide additional transparency to its users and protect their community when it comes to the promotion of certain products. The announcement came as a result of Facebook updating their rules to include clearer rules for paid promos of certain goods and services, which include, vaping, tobacco, alcohol, and dietary supplements. Branded content that now promotes these goods or services will not be allowed, however, they did mention that they are currently building tools that will help creators comply with these new policies, which will be most likely be focused on restricting promoted content to certain ages.