Maja Martin, DMG, director of marketing, discusses what Facebook’s influencers’ patent means for marketers.

I suspect we all have a select group of friends that seem to appear disproportionately on our Facebook feeds. Their updates garner dozens of likes and the content they post gets plenty of shares and comments. Clearly the creative minds at Facebook have taken note of these influential users and have been busy working out what value their activity can bring to the company. The answer came this week with Facebook announcing a patent to identify and monetise influencers.

Facebook is the first major tech company to offer a clever way to build a database of 'influencer marketing'. Google, Yahoo and other players with huge amounts of data currently rely on the number of connections an individual has on their platforms to determine who is an 'online VIP'.

However, these companies know that a high number of connections does not necessarily equate to a high influence rate. Facebook’s patent shines because it looks at who shares popular content (the influencer) and identifies the origin of popular content (the experts).

Facebook’s patent  up a number of interesting scenarios and potential developments for marketers. The first is the acceleration of the burgeoning online hierarchy.

Facebook users have long had value to different brands based on simple factors like their gender, age and where they live. By identifying and assigning value to their ‘influence’, Facebook has potentially opened a Pandora’s Box of new factors marketers will need to consider when identifying targets for their campaigns. Factors such as what content these influencers share, when they share content, who reposts it, why they repost it, where the content originated and whether the user’s influence is increasing or decreasing could just be the tip of the iceberg. Marketers will need to adapt fast to these changes.

Marketing campaigns will become increasingly complicated to sell to brands, and ad tech will need to adapt quickly with a lot of testing to work out the best ROI.

‘Influencers' and 'experts' are incredibly important designations for brands, especially in the online world. However, these labels and positions are very dynamic. The influence of a user can increase or decrease rapidly. This poses a further challenge to marketers: how do they insure that an ongoing marketing campaign remains flexible enough to adapt to the changing fortunes of influencers?

Similarly, Facebook has a challenge to ensure that they maintain an environment which is conducive to growing the number of influencers on its site. This may become more difficult as social media users are notoriously fickle. Users may not enjoy having more content shared on their news feeds, especially if there is a noticeable increase in marketing material.

The challenge for Facebook is to ensure that the quality of content targeted at its influencers and subsequently shared is of a high quality. This may mean that Facebook puts a higher burden on brands and marketers using its database to supply better content.

For ad networks, this development is good news. However, there is a potential issue that some users deemed as ‘influencers’ may feel uneasy at the fact that their popularity has been commoditised.

Similarly, ‘regular’ users may not be keen to learn that they aren’t as valuable to Facebook as their influential counterparts. Some influencers could resent their new position and decrease the amount they share. Other users could become suspicious about whether the content their influential friends are posting is actually of interest or purely marketing material.

Although it’s likely these concerns will only be felt by a minority of users, it will be important for Facebook to bear them in mind. The upshot of Facebook’s new patent is that it opens the door to even more targeted marketing campaigns. Facebook will be able to charge a premium for its influencers and other social media platforms are likely to quickly follow suit.

However, plenty of questions remain to be answered about how marketers and Facebook will demonstrate the ROI on targeting influencers and what degree of transparency there will be in relation to pricing. The reaction of Facebook’s user base will also be interesting to note.

When a new development in advertising technology is announced it takes time for the dust to settle and all the potential pain points to be identified. Facebook’s patent is potentially very good news for marketers however until we see how it will work in practice it’s very difficult to know whether it’ll be a game changer.