It’s been known for a little while that Mr Zuckerberg is incredibly excited about live video on Facebook and the newest update “Facebook Live” is a clear indication of this.
Importance: [rating=3] (If you use or manage Social Media Accounts)
Recommended source: Social Media Management Checklist
He sees it as the next step in social media and clearly isn’t the only one, Twitter have also dabbled by developing their own Standalone streaming service, whilst Snapchat have recently updated their software to include a live chat function.
Zuckerberg began pooling a lot of his internal resources to help build this new feature and has clearly put a lot of effort behind this. So what will stop this feature becoming an overhyped, semi-flop, much like Meerkat and Periscope?
And what does it mean for us marketers?
What is Facebook Live?
It's likely you've already seen a Facebook live broadcast,…
Taking you through setting up Facebook's new Canvas ads
The Facebook advertising juggernaut moves on with yet another huge product roll out. This time it's Canvas Ads. As with Instant Articles for mobile, the idea is to provide an "immersive" experience with a rich media combination of images, videos, gifs, text, products, carousels and more for mobile users. As usual the idea is to keep users on Facebook, scrolling through this "canvas"of fun rather than bumping them off onto other website (and likely experiencing poor load time as part of the process). Think of Canvas as very deep web pages on mobile with the added benefit of interaction such as panning and enlarging.
With all those variables it sounds complicated right?
Well actually not so much. I actually had a lot of fun experimenting with the new tool albeit that creating a Canvas is time consuming and once you've hit the "Finish" button there's no way…
Start targeting even more precisely with new Facebook ad-option
Top of my wishlist from Facebook for the last nine years (yes that's how long I've been advertising on Facebook) has been the ability to use the magic "AND" word rather than "OR" when it comes to selecting Interest targeting. I've called this "Boolean Targeting" or "Overlap Targeting" and it became the holy grail for me as a Facebook advertiser. This level of targeting would mean targeting those people in the Venn Diagram overlap - the people that liked ALL the things I was listing in interests rather than just some of them.
OR vs AND, Boolean targeting, Overlap targeting, Detailed targeting: Confused already?
Let me explain. When you select interests (for instance you are looking to target people that like social media marketing so you'd probably have selected some of…
Facebook rolls out instant articles to everyone on April 12th
Importance: [rating=5] (For Publishers)
Recommended source: Facebook Media
Facebook’s Instant Articles is only nine months old. But, given its great success over that gestation period, Facebook has now deemed it developed enough to be unleashed on publishers of all stripes.
What is Instant Articles?
If you not all that familiar with Instant articles, it’s probably because it works so seamlessly you haven’t really noticed it. When you click on an article from a news publisher that uses Instant articles whilst on a mobile device (most of the bigger publishers do now), then instead of being taken to the publishers site and waiting for the whole thing to load, which can often take a fair while on a mobile device and consume a considerable amount of data, you are taken to an Instant articles page hosted by Facebook. This massively improves load times and keeps…
Facebook reactions to roll-out worldwide after testing
Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Bloomberg article announcing roll-out and explaining the approval process
What's the change??
You may remember that this change was first mooted back in the early Autumn - Marie Page covered the new alternative Facebook Reactions in her Smart Insights post where she showed how Facebook were testing these different Emojis to supplement Likes. Facebook had tested a 'dislike' button but it was thought that this would generate too much negativity.
So, after testing, Facebook Reactions has now been fixed as a Like button alternative that comes in the form of six emoji with the following sentiments: Angry, Sad, Wow, Haha, Yay and Love.
This change will have a HUGE impact in terms of the number of online consumer interactions each day, and it will affect Facebook…
Use the latest Facebook ads with ease
There's been an exciting new development in the world of Facebook advertising - video ads made up from a sequence of static images. They are called Slideshow Ads and are an option for a number of the common ad objectives.
Video has been where it's at on Facebook for some time now. And new (novel) ad formats generally tend to get good traction anyway, so I decided to try one in anticipation of our Black Friday sale at Musicademy.
What you need
A series of static images
Power Editor (and a bit of knowhow on using it)
Copy, landing page etc etc as per usual
What you do to create an ad
Create your Campaign and Ad Set (targeting, etc) as you usually would in Power Editor. Check the Instagram placement at Ad Set level if you want the ad to show there too.
Create an Ad - select "Ad with…
A reminder of Facebook's changes during October
Since a relative lull of announcements about new developments in August and September Facebook has been busy with releasing a bunch of updates since and some are well worth knowing about. The biggest from an advertiser perspective is the launch of Lead Ads and Facebook retail listings, but the one that will get the most media coverage once rolled out is the so-called Dislike or “Emotion” buttons. Local business verification is also an important one for many brands.
Here’s a quick roundup with links to articles that explain the topic in more depth.
Facebook Lead Ads
Lead Ads look like other Facebook ads except that when you hit the call-to-action button you stay on Facebook with a Facebook form collecting the customer data. This is particularly useful on mobile as it reduces the load time an external page is likely to suffer and enables Facebook to auto-fill many…
A tutorial example of using Facebook Ads for Event Promotion
Promoting live events might be the most challenging form of digital marketing campaign you will ever work on. Or so it’s been my experience over the past few years with our monthly MnSearch events and one-off events like LocalU Twin Cities.
Not only do you have to try to market an event based on features, benefits and price points, but you also have to try and convince someone that it’s worth taking time out of their work day or personal life, and drive across town to attend. And all for 'One Night Only!'.
This is the exact opposite from most Paid Search campaigns that can be built to be relatively 'Evergreen'.
Because attendance can fluctuate greatly, and breaking even is often the priority goal, we are continually looking for very cost effective means of…
Examples of how to start getting results from Facebook
This post is an introductory guide to setting up your business on Facebook if you don't already have a company page or it has been neglected! If you are looking for more advanced content to optimise your use of Facebook, check out our other posts on Facebook marketing and related guides.
Setting up a Facebook business page takes less than 30 minutes and is super-simple (if you’re yet to get started, we’ve included a handy “how-to” infographic below that will take you through what to do) however Facebook marketing isn’t all plain sailing - the tricky part is in understanding what to do to utilise the network to its full potential.
Let’s take a look at a few insider tips that will get you on the right road to mastering the art of Facebook marketing and give you an introduction to Facebook for business …
How…
How to add Calls-to-action to your Facebook business page and ads
Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Facebook Help: Enhanced Calls-to-Action for your Adverts
Another day, another update from Facebook.
Today it's a relatively minor ad change.
But an opportunity to remind you about the similar, but more significant change relevant to all page owners, i.e. the ability to add organic call to action button options from your home page which was introduced earlier in 2015.
For example, here is the Smart Insights Facebook page with a 'Sign-up' Call-to-action (CTA) selected.
To learn more about how to implement these company page CTAs, see this Facebook help advice.
Now brands are now given the ability to promote the CTA with an ad. The benefit of this is that you can more prominently drive business outcomes rather than page likes.
Open up Facebook and you'll likely see this:
…
