Facebook believes that it can charge marketers more money to advertise to “influencers,” the individuals responsible for sharing information that often causes spikes in the local share rate. The social network recently patented a new method to determine exactly who those influencers are. Unlike the methods of other Internet companies, Facebook does not measure the influence of an individual by the number of followers or connections, but rather the percentage of followers who re-share content.

The patent explains how the new method is able to identify both influencers and the experts that initially present information and get influencers to share it. Facebook can determine which people are influencers based on their followers’ rate of sharing for each piece of information.

Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have developed similar influencer marketing techniques, but their methods usually use the number of connections, not the quality of their interactions, to determine a person’s influence.

Marketing to influencers could help companies target customers more precisely and help the company sell products. Influencers and experts may be more likely to buy from a company that sells products related to their specific interests.

For influencers and experts who are interested in Canon cameras for example, “Virality could make influencer demographics even more juicy than people who’ve shown buying intent by visiting Canon purchase pages,” according to TechCrunch. Perhaps these experts and influencers will share what they buy and their followers will, too.

Facebook would be able to integrate influencer marketing into its existing marketing products rather easily. And the company could probably charge a premium for this type of specialized marketing.

In a related TechCrunch report, Facebook also suggests that advertisers should only be paying for online ads that are seen by human eyes, rather than relying on numbers calculated for pages viewed with ads at the bottom that may not actually be seen.

“Facebook laid out its position on the issue in a new blog post titled ‘The Value of Viewed Impressions,’ which makes two main points — that advertisers should focus on viewed impressions, not served impressions, and that Facebook already works this way,” notes TechCrunch.

“We measure an ad impression the moment an ad enters the screen of a desktop browser or mobile app,” wrote Facebook. “If an ad doesn’t enter the screen, we don’t count it as an ad impression.”