What is Whitelisting on Social Media? Things You Need to Know

Influencer marketing may be a relatively new concept in marketing, but it has quickly caught the fancy of digital marketers all over the world. In fact, according to Google Trends, it’s already surpassed the popularity of print marketing and has become nearly as popular as video marketing.

But that’s not all.

According to a survey, nearly 84% of marketers said that they find influencer marketing effective. One of the major reasons for this being that influencer marketing is perceived as more authentic by consumers as it involves a third-party promoting the brand.

This helps drive results that are better than those of traditional marketing because it’s not outrightly promotional.

But, what if there were a way to improve your influencer marketing results?

That’s where influencer whitelisting on social media comes into the picture. It helps you take control of your campaigns in a better manner.

Let’s take a closer look at what is influencer whitelisting on social media and how you can do it for your brand.

Pro Tip: Always take the influencer’s opinion into account before changing things in the whitelisted post.

What is Whitelisting on Social Media?

Before we get into what influencer whitelisting can do for you, let’s try to understand what is whitelisting on social media.

In its most basic sense, whitelisting is the process through which social media influencers give brands unfettered open access to advertise on their social accounts.

So, what can this do for you?

When you do influencer whitelisting right, it can help you create and pay for social media promotions on the influencer’s behalf. Through this, you can boost the effectiveness of the influencer’s content and grow your brand awareness.

What are the things you can do through influencer whitelisting?

Let’s take a look:

Control the Post

When the influencer whitelists a post, they essentially give the brand full control over it. As a result, you can promote the content the way you want by adding an appropriate target audience and reaching an audience that doesn’t follow the influencer.

This influencer content amplification can help you increase brand awareness. Through this way, you’ll be able to optimize paid media.

Create Dark Posts

One of the unique things that you can achieve through whitelisting on social media is the ability to create dark posts. These are posts that don’t come up in the influencer’s regular feed.

However, these posts are specially created for your paid advertising, and you can design the creative to reach this audience through the influencer’s profile.

What’s more?

You can create the content yourself by consulting with the influencer rather than getting them to create them from scratch.

Edit Posts

When you do influencer whitelisting on social media, you’ll be able to edit the influencer content. You can make minor edits to the branded content and make it appear just the way you want it to.

So, what is the right way of doing this?

Once you’ve made the edit in the content, you should reach out to the influencer and ask for their opinion on it before putting it online. This way, you’ll be able to take care of their interests as well.

Extend the Life of Posts

Through influencer whitelisting on social media, you get the ability to increase the life of a post. This is because the promotion will help you reach more people, and this way, the content will remain on the feeds of your target audience. As a result, your brand awareness will grow and use your analytics to determine underperforming content.

Why is this important?

Posts tend to die out over time. This is especially true when it comes to Stories, which are only visible for 24 hours. When you boost them, you extend their life and continue reaching people even after 24 hours.

Now that you understand what is whitelisting on social media, let’s take a look at how you can do it.

How Can You Do Influencer Whitelisting on Social Media?

Here’s how you can do whitelisting on social media:

1. Identify the Right Influencers

For influencer whitelisting to work, you need to first find reliable influencers for your influencer marketing campaign. This is a challenge in itself because social media is plagued by fake influencers. Major brands like P&G and Disneyland have been affected by fake social accounts too.

So, how can you find reliable influencers for your brand?

You can leverage our tool, Fourstarzz Media, to find genuine influencers for your influencer campaigns. It lets you filter influencers based on their location, reach, engagement rate, niche, and even target audience interests. Additionally, you can use the tool’s advanced search to find influencers by hashtags, handle, name, and mentions.

Image via Fourstarzz Media

2. Walk Influencers Through the Process of Whitelisting

Once you’ve found the right social media influencers for your campaign, you need to run them through the process of whitelisting on social media. The process for whitelisting branded content on social media platforms like Facebook is pretty straightforward.

Here’s what influencers need to do:

• Go to business.facebook.com and login to your Facebook account.
• Create your Business Manager account.
• Head to “People and Assets” in the Business Manager.
• Click on Business Manager Settings and go to Instagram -> Instagram Accounts.
• Tap on “Claim New Instagram Account” and sign in using your Instagram credentials.
• Click on “Assign Partner” and add the Business ID number of the brand.

Now that you’ve understood what is whitelisting on social media and how you can do it, let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages.

Benefits of Influencer Whitelisting on Social Media

Here are the benefits of whitelisting on social media:

Benefits for the Brand

1. More Authority: When more people see what the influencer has written about the brand, it’ll grow the credibility of the brand.
2. Can Amplify Influencer Content: Promoting the post on social media can help expand its reach beyond the organic reach. This increases the reach of the campaign and helps in improving brand awareness.
3. Can Reach New Audiences: Paid ads allow brands to set their target audience. This helps you get your campaign across to an entirely new audience.

Benefits for the Influencer

• Better Reach: When brands amplify influencer content, the influencer will benefit from a higher reach. This can help them grow their personal brand.
• Growth in Follower Base: When more people see the influencer’s branded content, they'll be inclined to follow them. This can grow the influencer’s follower base.
• More Engagement: Greater reach of the posts mean that more people will engage with them. This leads to increased engagement for the influencer.

Challenges of Influencer Whitelisting on Social Media

Here are the major disadvantages of influencer whitelisting on social media:

Problem With Edits: Editing the influencer’s post without their permission, or changing it completely, might become really problematic, especially if it doesn’t fit the influencer’s natural voice. This could lead to a dispute and disrupt your campaign.

Vague Contracts: If you’ve created a contract for the whitelisting on social media, it might create issues if the language in it is vague. This could lead to disputes at a later stage between the brand and the influencer. So, you must ensure that you define terms like the level of access, duration, frequency, additional payments, etc.

Oversaturation of Audience: You run the risk of oversaturating your target audience if you repeatedly target the same audience over and over again with the same post. This can harm both the brand and the influencer’s reputations.

Ready to Get Started with Whitelisting on Social Media?

Influencer whitelisting on social media can be a great way to amplify your influencer campaign. Through it, you can take control of the influencer’s posts, edit them, create dark posts, and launch paid promotions.

You can grow the authority of your brand and reach more people and new audiences. The influencer will also benefit from the added reach, and their number of followers may grow too.

However, you should be careful when editing the influencer’s posts. Always get their permission to avoid conflicts.

Also, ensure that your agreement is not confusing to avoid disputes. Lastly, make sure that you don’t end up oversaturating your audience.

Do you have any questions about influencer whitelisting on social media? Let us know in the comments. To find genuine influencers, subscribe to our tool, Fourstarzz Media, now for $59/mo. Cancel anytime.

Originally published post at https://www.fourstarzz.com/.