12 RECENTLY LAUNCHED FACEBOOK FEATURES FOR MARKETERS IN 2015

Over the last few months, Facebook has made numerous improvements to its existing features and also introduced several new ones to help businesses get better results. Believe it or not but these changes and new features could completely change the way how you use Facebook to market your business.

Here is a close look at several improvements and new features that Facebook has brought to help you take your social marketing to a whole new level.

1. DYNAMIC PRODUCT ADS:

Around a month ago, Facebook rolled out their long-awaited advertising unit, called Dynamic Product Ads, to let marketers dynamically promote their most relevant products or even entire product catalog to buyers on any device. With the new advertising unit, marketers can advertise their products either in a single ad unit containing only one product, or in a multi-product ad unit featuring a dynamic carousel with a set of three or five products.

To get your hands on Dynamic Product Ads, you need to sign up for a Business Manager Account so you could upload and manage your product catalog/feed on Facebook. Once you upload your catalog, Facebook would automatically start delivering the right products to the right audience on the right time. According to some famous marketers, Product Ads can improve your website’s conversion by 20%.

2. CALLS TO ACTION FOR BUSINESS PAGES:

Facebook has introduced several calls to action for marketers to help them drive business objectives via their business pages. Using this great feature, Page Admins will now have the ability to add call-to-action buttons – like Sign Up or Contact Us – to the top of their business pages.

Designed to encourage user engagement and drive more traffic to websites, the call-to-action button can be linked to any URL inside or outside of Facebook. The seven call-to-action buttons available to Business Pages are Sign Up, Play Game, Use App, Shop Now, Book Now, Watch Video and Contact Us.

3. INTEREST TARGETING:

To help marketers reach the right people more precisely, Facebook now allows for defining target audience on the basis of their listed interests, activities, hobbies, Pages they like and groups they belong to. For instance, if a marketer is posting a story about a social media event, he could target people who have keen interest in social media news and events.

Using this amazing feature, which is currently only accessible on laptop or desktop, you can target specific content to subsections of your Page Likes. To take advantage of Interest Targeting, you need to enable “Targeting and Privacy for Posts” under “settings”of your Page.

4. POST END DATE:

The Post End Date feature allows Page Admins to set an end date for a post. You can specify a day and time to prevent a post from showing in News Feed. People will not be able to see an outdated post in News Feed, but it will continuously be visible on your Page.

For example, you can use this feature to remove a deal post from News Feed to prevent your customers from seeing old deal price. Like Interest Targeting, the Post End Date feature can be accessed only on laptop or desktop and is available for “Targeting and Privacy for Posts”enabled Pages.

5. SMART PUBLISHING:

With this new optional tool, you now can foresee which content resonates with your target audience. Once enabled, links having a large number of shares would appear in News Feed of your audience on Facebook. Currently, Smart Publishing feature is available to a limited number of publishers in the “Publisher Tools” under Page “settings”.

For instance, if a news post published by The New York Times receives a significant number of shares, Facebook will automatically start showing it in News Feed of the people who like NYT’s Page on Facebook. However, the news post will not appear on your Facebook Page.

6. SUPERCHARGED INSIGHTS:

Facebook has made a lot of improvements to Domain Insights to show all referral traffic derived by Pages and social plugins, including when people share one of your associated URLs or click on the Like or Share button, and more. Also, you will now find the user interface of Insights Dashboard more intuitive than ever.

The company has introduced a new section, Top URLs, which shows URL-level reporting and displays when other famous people and Pages share or like a link that you’ve posted to Facebook. Leveraging this new feature, you can know why a particular URL performed better than other ones.

7. CUSTOMIZE REMARKETING AUDIENCES EVEN MORE:

Recently, Facebook has added several advanced features to custom audiences in order to make remarketing audiences more customizable than before. Now you can choose from four preset options to include/exclude people from your audience. These advanced features have been brought to help you exclude existing customers and bring potential customers back to complete a purchase.

8. VIDEO API UPDATES:

A few weeks ago, Facebook announced several updates to its Video API to help marketers better reach their audiences by giving them more control over videos and customizations. Not only can you now add a featured video to your business page to grab and hold visitors’ attention but also create video playlists to encourage users to share more content. Other things that you can do with videos are adding custom thumbnails, setting an expiration date, using various restrictions to limit the audience etc.

9. UPDATES TO FACEBOOK SEARCH:

With a recent update made to Facebook Search, now you can find anything – posts, links, videos and photos – that have been shared with you. Unlike scrolling down an endless stream, you can easily get back to a blog post that matters to you, a funny video from your farewell, or photos from your birthday party last year using Search.

All your search results would be unique and personalized; you would see only things that your friends ever shared with you. Needless to say, this minor feature upgrade would provide marketers a greater opportunity to better engage users in liking, commenting and sharing their posts.

10. MEANINGFUL PAGE LIKES THAN EVER:

As of March 2015, Facebook has updated the way Page likes are counted to make audience data, which marketers surf via Audience Insightstool, even more valuable and meaningful. The company has completely removed inactive accounts from Pages’ like counts. As a marketer, this small change helps you better target your audience by ensuring you consistent and up-to-date insights on who your real followers are on Facebook.

11. DEDICATED WEB INTERFACE FOR MESSENGER:

Following the launch of WhatsApp web interface in January, some days ago, Facebook launched a dedicated web chat interface: Messenger.com. Keeping you away from distractions like News Feed and notifications while you read a message, it helps you to be more productive as a marketer. Using Messenger from your web browser, you can do a number of things – like recording and sending voice messages, making HD calls anywhere, instantly sending photos and videos – which you were not able to do before.

12. EMBEDDED VIDEO PLAYER:

Until now, you were able to embed a Facebook Post or Page into your website. But with the introduction of Embedded Video Player at F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, you now can add any public video directly to your blog or website. All you need to do is to copy and paste the embed code, which you get from the video post itself, into your web page wherever you want your video to be displayed. By embedding a Facebook video into your site, you can enhance interaction with your audience as well as drive a massive amount of traffic to your site.