As user needs continue to evolve, Facebook has been introducing new features and processes to make their experiences more engaging and rewarding. For marketers, it’s important to be aware of these new changes in order to stay ahead of the curve in developing campaigns and content strategies.
Get in front of these updates and have them work to your marketing advantage by seeing what’s new.
Five Facebook Updates You Want To Know About
1. Rounded Page Profile Pictures
To make profiles more engaging, Facebook is rounding the corners of profile pictures and thumbnails. This rollout started in August, but it’s now more widespread.
To make the most of this change, choose bright, lively colors to make your profile picture feel energetic or blue hues to highlight your loyalty and trustworthiness. If you’re using an image, carefully crop it as closely as possible so it’s easy to recognize.
2. Updates to Ads Manager
Ads Manager and Power Editor have been combined to make it easier to create and manage ads in one place. Updates include:
- A new workflow that gives more control over the creative process by allowing you to create a draft of your campaign before you put in ads and ad sets.
- You can now review and confirm any changes made to your ads to ensure your final ad post looks exactly as you intended.
- Charts and activity history from Power Editor have been added to make Ads Manager a single stop to meet all of your ads needs without jumping back and forth.
- In addition, Facebook has added a “pay to play” platform intended to encourage businesses to promote their posts and pay for ads in order to get exposure. It’s important to keep in mind that exposure is not based on how well you can use Facebook, but instead on how much you pay.
3. Faster Loading Links Will Place Higher on Mobile News Feeds
This update will be rolled out slowly in the next few months, and will prioritize links that load faster on mobile News Feeds. Links that load faster will appear more often at the top of the feed, slower links will appear lower and less often.
Facebook will take into consideration the user’s device usage, network connection, and Wi-Fi capability when estimating link load time. If you’re concerned about this change affecting your placement in the News Feed, check out Facebook’s guidelines for improving mobile site load time.
4. Updated Reporting on Clicks and Ad Impressions
Facebook campaign metrics will no longer be counting unintentional clicks in its reporting. Audience Network, Facebook’s platform to run ads in other apps, will no longer be charging for unintentional clicks. Facebook will be measuring the “drop off rate” as spending less than two seconds on an ad’s landing page when determining if a click is unintentional.
This update should give businesses a clearer understanding of an ad’s performance and give more confidence in the value of their ad impressions.
5. Two New Video Platforms: Watch and Show Pages
Facebook’s outdated Video tab is being replaced with a new platform called Watch. Watch allows users to watch shows, keep track of shows they follow, organize shows into personalized sections, and help them discover new shows. Currently, it’s availability is limited, but it should be rolling out to a larger audience in a few weeks.
In addition, Facebook is also releasing Show Pages. Show Pages will be a place for users to publish new show episodes and information about the show, making it easier for users to connect with communities forming around the show.
With these recent (and upcoming) changes, Facebook continues it’s quest to become a one stop shop for users to get everything they need from social media.
