With influencer marketing on the rise, Facebook's looking to help facilitate brand and influencer relationships - which, ideally, will help them attract more prominent creators to the platform, while also better enabling brands to boost their messages.

This week, Facebook is officially launching its new ‘Brand Collabs Manager’ dashboard, which will highlight relevant influencers to brands, and enable them to make connections.

The platform, which was first spotted in testing last month, highlights relevant influencer matches based on your specific promotion requirements – as you can see from the above image, you can filter the listing by a range of qualifiers, including those who already like your brand on Facebook.

The creators highlighted will have a percentage match on their profile thumbnail, relative to your brand and your entered requirements, while it’ll also display their audience reach and category.

When you click through on a profile, there’ll be a range of additional insight on that creator, including specific details on who they are, where they’re based, their preferred content type and website.

Creators will be able to create specific Brand Collab profiles, complete with intro videos and a media kit (as shown above). To do this, creators will need to sign up to Brand Collabs Manager and fill out their details.

Brands will be able to access data from the users’ past brand collaborations, while creators will also be able to Like a brand’s Page, in order to appear as a suggested partner in future.

It’s a good initiative from Facebook, and works with the growing trend of influencer marketing. And definitely, influencer marketing is becoming more… um, influential. Just this week, Unilever announced that it would stop working with any influencer found to have purchased followers, a major step in the development of the form.

While brands clearly see the benefit in influencer marketing – which is only set to grow as algorithms put more emphasis on engagement – they also need to know that they’re getting effective ROI, which will likely be the next big focus for the approach. As such, you can expect the platforms themselves to add in new safeguards to eliminate bad actors - and through Brand Collabs Manager, Facebook will simply be able to remove questionable users from their lists, making it a more effective and beneficial business tool.

In fact, Facebook will need to do this to ensure brands see it as a viable option – while allowing creators to add their name to the list will help facilitate the process, Facebook will also want to make sure they’re legitimate in order to get brands using the connection tool. The ability to see the past performance of brand collaborations is a good indicator on this, while Facebook's also detecting and removing more fake profiles than ever, which will decrease the allure of those who’ve cheated their way to high follower counts.

Really, it’s a logical step for Facebook – and while Facebook won’t be taking a cut of any partnerships arranged through the tool, it’ll obviously benefit from the subsequent ad campaigns being run on its platform.

But the big focus here is the creators themselves. For Facebook to win out, particularly in terms of video content, it needs prominent, popular creators posting content to the app. At present, YouTube’s monetization model is far more advanced, giving it the lead in creator appeal, but Facebook has a lot more total users, and total reach, than YouTube can provide.

If Facebook can give those creators more opportunity to monetize their work – and not just through in-stream ads – that could help them get more creators across, boosting engagement and time spent in-app.

Brand Collabs Manager is being opened up to more users this week – you can find out more, and express your interest in joining, here.