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May 13, 2015

The State of Social: Facebook’s Latest + Greatest

 

We’re almost half way through 2015 (wait, what?) and the ever-changing digital landscape has been as busy as ever. With Facebook being one of the most important channels for the brands and clients we work with, your Delucchi Team is always staying up to date with the landscape’s latest changes.

Below are the latest 11 new and improved features the Facebook has rolled out in the last few months:

1.    Dynamic Product Ads

Back in February, Facebook rolled out Product Ads – a new ad type that offers businesses a number of ways to highlight products, features, and services on Facebook. The new ad unit allows marketers to showcase a single product/feature – and also gives the option of a multi-product ad type that gives marketers access to a dynamic image carousel of 3-5 images driving traffic to individual pages.

We’ve already rolled this ad unit out amongst our clients and have seen a huge improvement in CTRs and CPCs.

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(Source: Facebook)

 2.    Calls To Action for Business Pages

This feature was rolled out in late 2014 so we’re including it in our 2015 highlights to date. Facebook launched Calls to Action for Business Pages as another way for marketers to drive business objectives through user engagement from the Page.

By setting up this quick button, marketers can drive traffic inside Facebook or off-site to their website by using any URL desired. The call-to-action buttons also provide a strong variety of options such as Sign Up, Play Game, Use App, Shop Now, Book Now, Watch Video and – of course – Contact Us.

Want to set this up for your page? Find out how here.

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(Source: Facebook)

3.    Interest Targeting

One of Facebook’s greatest strength is found at the intersection of targeting and content. With the Interest Targeting, both publishers and advertisers can define their target audiences based on their listed interests, activities, hobbies, Pages they like and groups the my belong to.

Facebook identifies interests from information that users add to their Timeline, keywords associated with Pages they like or apps they use, and ads they’ve clicks one in the past.

Coming soon: The ability to target customers based on some of the websites and apps they visit.

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(Source: Facebook)

4.    Post End Date

The new Post End feature gives Page Admins more control by allowing them to specify the day and time to stop showing that content completely in News Feed. This tool is perfect to prevent people from seeing posts that are out-of-date as they scroll through their News Feed while still keeping the post on your Page.

For example, Page Admins can use this feature to set an end time for posts relating to promoting an event, promotion, sale, etc.

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(Source: Facebook)

5.    Smart Publishing

We now live in a world where content is king and publishers are working to figure out how they fit into that landscape when it comes to the digital world – where tons of content is published, shared, and engaged with every second.

Until now, large publishers have struggled to predict what content will work best and resonate with their audiences. With Facebook’s new and optional Smart Publishing tool – the guess work is a thing of the past.

Once the setting is enabled, frequently shared links to your website will start appearing in News Feed for people who like your Page but will not appear on your Page’s timeline. With access to a new dashboard full of insights and analytics on the performance of these ‘ghost posts’ – the publisher can decide what content to post to their Page.

This tool is currently only available to a limited number of large media organizations (the New York Times is an example and Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore spoke about it during Social Media Week), but we imagine this informing similar features for smaller businesses in the feature.

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(Source: Facebook)

6.    Better Insights

Facebook has recently made a lot of tweaks to their Domain Insights offering – giving the publisher more information on why something did or did not perform well and giving the advertiser more ammo for their targeting arsenal.

With the updates, you are able to see all referral traffic to your domain derived by Facebook Pages and social plugins, including when people shared one of your URLs and/or clicked the Like or Share button.

7.    Remarketing Plus

Custom Audiences and Remarketing are two features we love to use when running campaigns for our clients. So it was exciting to find out that Facebook has made changes to their Remarketing offering that make creating those audiences more customizable than ever. With four preset options give to include/exclude users from our audiences, we can now choose to group ‘Anyone who visits your website,” ‘People who visit specific web pages,” ‘People visiting specific pages but not others,” and ‘People who haven’t visited in a certain amount of time’ separately and strategically.

This allows advertisers more control and opportunity to exclude existing customers (and spend ad dollars more wisely) and bring potential customers back to complete an action.

8.    Video API Updates

In late March, Facebook announced some updates to their Videos API to give publishers and marketers more control over their video content and how it’s shared among audiences.

Among these new features we have:

  • Restricting audience of a video by age, gender, location
  • Publish to a Page without distributing in News Feed
  • Set an expiration date
  • Manage featured videos and playlists for Page
  • Add custom thumbnails for videos
  • Enable subtitles

(Video API currently only works through their Video Publishing Partners.)

9.    Facebook Search Updates

With updates to Facebook Search functionalities, users can now find posts, links, videos, and photos – past and present – that have been shared with you.

As marketers, this small little tweak of an upgrade can provide an opportunity to get creative when engaging with audiences (e.g., “share an old memory”)

10. Page Likes That Matter

In March, we let our clients know that we would likely see a dip in Page Likes. This was due to Facebook completely removing inactive accounts from Pages’ Like counts. For marketers, this means that the audiences available to us are real people – which sets us up for improved success and insights when launching campaigns.

11. Embedded Video Player

Up until the introduction of the Embedded Video Player at F8 in late March, you were only able to embed a Facebook Post or Page stream to your website. Now, with video content more important than ever, you’re able to embed native Facebook videos into your website.

So – want to keep that video on Facebook and not have to worry about uploading it to YouTube or Vimeo just to be able to embed it? No longer a problem. Check out the how-to here.

This doesn’t just make it easier for you to share your Facebook content on your site, but it also opens up great possibilities when it comes to driving traffic to and from Facebook to your other online properties.