With a new day, come new things. That is especially true in the world of social media. Facebook, the world’s biggest social network takes no exception to that and like it or not is bringing more new tools to its platform for businesses. Here are a few of the new features that are either currently available or will be coming soon that can hopefully create more business for you and your company.
Interest Targeting
Does your firm offer a variety of products and services that target to a variety of different audiences? If so, you may want to utilize the new Interest Targeting tool that Facebook recently rolled out. With Interest Targeting you can reach specific followers by identifying their tastes using categories such as demographics, locations and interests for your organic posts. Before, only available with paid ads, now you can create specific messages on your company wall that will only get seen by specific people. This way your audience with no interest in that specific product or service will not have to see it. In addition it will prevent fans from potentially even unliking your page.
End Dates
Does your company hold a lot of timed events? Isn’t it even more frustrating when your fans see an event on their newsfeed that happened yesterday? That potential embarrassment can now be avoided with Post End Dates. With this new feature, page administrators can specify dates and times when posts are to expire on live news feeds. This can help prevent disturbing your audience with outdated information instead of current news.
Call-To-Action Buttons
Social media is all about engaging and building brand awareness. They now are going to take that engagement one step further with call-to-action buttons. This new feature will provide a business page with a button that will be able to link to any destination on or off Facebook. Some examples you can (or will be able to) utilize include buttons that read “Book Now”, “Shop Now” and “Sign Up”. This new tool is big as it the first time Facebook is really promoting a user to actually leave Facebook and engage with a business on another destination including their website. This new feature is currently being rolled out throughout the U.S. and around the world in the coming months.
Video Tab Overhaul
Facebook wants to now be more than just a news feed where readers can get information. It wants to become a video on-demand destination. In the coming weeks businesses will be able to choose a featured video to be displayed extra-large with a comment feed on their page. Very similar to what a YouTube channel layout looks like, this new video look allows businesses to also organize their videos into playlists so fans can easily navigate and watch what they want when they want too.
With video content continuing to make leaps in the Facebook universe, Facebook is making sure users see videos that are of high quality and relevant. That includes videos from brands. To help ensure this Facebook will be launching Anthology, which is basically a new group of leading video publishers who will work with brands to produce amazing advertising content for Facebook.
While brands are free to work with any content provider, Anthology publishers are Facebook Marketing Partners which means that in addition to offering creative and production services, these vendors are specially trained to get the most of out of the Facebook platform by analyzing your business’s Facebook ad insights.
Businesses on Messenger
Instant messaging on Facebook makes it even easier for people to connect with their friends. Soon it will be able to connect businesses with their customers. In the near future Facebook’s Messenger will enable businesses to send messages such as order confirmations and shipping information notices to customers who choose to participate. Customers will also be able to reach out to businesses with questions and receive quick responses.
Analytics for Apps
For the first time Facebook will provide analytics for native mobile apps. This will help developers and marketers understand their app’s audience across devices and help businesses measure how the app is used. Are people just viewing your business from the app or are they making a purchase? This new data can provide data that will help improve performance.
New International Ad Targeting
Many people use Facebook as a way to connect and share memories with loved ones living abroad. Facebook is now opening up those opportunities for businesses to market to expats. These people are people living in another country from where he or she was born but aren’t citizens. This targeting can be very beneficial for the airline and tourism industry.
Product Ads
For a business that sells a variety of different products to a variety of different audiences can get complicated and time-consuming. To uncomplicate things Facebook has now announced Product ads. This new feature will allow businesses to showcase more products to more people that are relevant to them. A business can upload their product catalog and create campaigns targeting certain products to specific audiences.
If though you are tight on time, Facebook can automatically deliver the most relevant people to the most relevant audience. Products can be viewed as single or multi-product ad units. In addition Product ads will be able to utilize features such as being able to automatically turn off ads for specific products when they are out of stock. This new feature means money spent correctly and not on products you can’t provide to your customers.
As you can see, Facebook is constantly updating its platform with new features for a business to optimize for. With 1.44 billion monthly active users these features can’t be overlooked. The more you are aware of the new updates the more opportunities you have to really target your specific audience. It should be interesting to see what additional new features and updates they will unveil as we move through the year.
What feature would your business like to see Facebook rollout?
Images: “LISBON – JANUARY 14, 2014: Photo of Facebook homepage on a monitor screen through a magnifying glass/Shutterstock.com“
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