Today Facebook silently announced that brands now have the ability to seamlessly drive targeted paid media support behind 3rd party influencer posts.

For the last 2 to 3 years many marketers have been making tough decisions whether to pay an influencer to organically drive awareness through their own audience or pay Facebook/Instagram to reach consumers through targeted paid media

With continued and growing pressure as a public company it’s clear $FB needs to find ways to drive even more growth … and being left out of a growing marketplace on their own platform is an easy thing to solve.

My prediction: Whenever an influencer tags a post as sponsored (which now needs to be done in order for a brand to boost it), Facebook will undoubtedly suppress that content in the newsfeed . Translation: If a brand wants an influencer’s sponsored post to be seen at scale it will need to support it with paid media, no paid… no scale.

This will eventually render an influencer’s audience useless…(just like a brand’s “owned audience has been useless for quite some time”) No longer will Kim Kardashian fetch $500k for a sponsored “skinny tea” post based on the “old model: that a brand would get her endorsement and massive audience in one fell swoop.

What to expect: brands will rush to quality and seek out tried and true celebrities (people with true influence outside their followings or those easily recognized on the street) so that when they support their efforts with paid it will reach a broader audience familiar with the subject.

Just like posts from brands pages on Facebook/Insta have long been “pay to play” so now are posts from influencers… and “influencer marketing” will never be the same

Thoughts?