Tag: Facebook

Facebook Offers Local Businesses Two New Awesome Ad Tools

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook’s local ads are about to get more powerful. On Thursday, the social network introduced two ad products that can greatly benefit local businesses. One is a free analytics tool called “Local Insights” that shows SMB owners the foot traffic around their stores, collected anonymously via the Facebook app’s location services. The other is a location-based ad tool that enables brands and multi-location businesses to dynamically change their Local Awareness Ads so that a user would see a slightly different ad copy depending on the store that they’re closest to.

What Brands Need To Do
The foot traffic tracking tool can help businesses better understand the groups of people near their store. By looking into aggregate demographics and local trends, which the “Local Insights” also provides, local businesses can see when their store would likely be busiest and adjust staffing and retail strategies accordingly. The new location-aware dynamic ads allow businesses to select which stores they want to run ads for, making ad targeting more effective. This also means businesses should create multiple Facebook Pages for different stores so that the call-to-action button in those ads can correctly direct users to the designated store’s Page.

 

Source: AdWeek

Facebook’s Mobile Ads Are Killing It On Every Front

Posted on by Lab Team


What Happened
Facebook reported its quarterly earnings yesterday and, all things considered, the social network is doing splendidly well, especially in regard to its mobile ad revenues. The company reported a 45% year over year increase in ad sales in the Q3 2015, bringing total ad sales to $4.3 billion, of which mobile ads took up about 78% ($3.4 billion). Moreover, Facebook also reported 8 billion average daily video views from 500 million users, up from just 4 billion video views per day in April.

Facebook Q3 Growth Entirely Fueled by Mobile Ads

Market Impact
With mobile ads now accounting for the majority of its ad revenues, Facebook’s transformation into a mobile company is now more than half complete. The majority of users are accessing the social network via mobile devices, and its monetization focus has also shifted toward mobile. Although part of that 8 billion views is no doubt fueled by the autoplay videos on user timelines, the impressive number still indicates early success in Facebook’s ongoing efforts to build out its video platform, which bodes well for Facebook as it competes with YouTube for the TV commercial dollars that are shifting to digital video.

 

Source: AdWeek and TechCrunch; Chart from Statista

Global Watch: Facebook Debuts New “Slideshow” Ad Unit For Emerging Markets

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In its latest bid to capture its “next billion” users in emerging global markets, Facebook is introducing a new ad unit designed to adapt to the limited mobile bandwidth in those markets. Aptly named “Slideshow,” this new ad product allows brands to replace video ads with 3 to 7 still images to create a slideshow up to 15 seconds long. Coca Cola, the first brand to try out this ad unit, successfully reached 2 million African consumers via Facebook and raised brand awareness by 10 points for its Coke Studio Africa project.

What Brands Need To Do
Facebook has long been working to capture consumers in emerging global markets, starting with the Internet.org project it launched in 2013 to provide free internet access in less developed countries. Earlier this week, the social network announced a new initiative that slows the internet connections at its company headquarters on Tuesdays to give engineers and employees a better understanding of what it’s like to use Facebook with a 2G connection.

For global brands that wish to conquer these emerging markets, Facebook’s approach provides a great example of how brands can work around the technological and infrastructure limitations in those markets and design a user experience that’s tailored to the realities of those consumers.

 

Source: AdAge

Facebook Revamps Its Notifications Tab With Customized Information

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Monday, Facebook announced that it has started to roll out an expanded, personalized notifications tab in the Facebook app that will surface personalized information alongside the regular notifications. The revamped tab will now include your friends’ birthdays, your upcoming events, as well as sports scores and TV reminders based on Pages you Liked. Moreover, users will also have the option to add localized information to their notifications tab, such as popular events and news based on the city they live in, movie showtimes in nearby theaters, and restaurant recommendations, if they enable the Location History feature in the app.

What Brands Need To Do
Notifications alert users of new happenings, and the notifications tab naturally receives a lot of user attention. So it makes sense for Facebook to take advantage of this prime real estate in its mobile app and turn it into a customizable feed of relevant, hyperlocal information. For brands, this new notification feed provides a brand-friendly channel to reach consumers. Sports or entertainment brands can use it to engage fans with notifications of new content, whereas local businesses can use it reach potential customers and target them with relevant value offers. For the latter, it is crucial to make sure relevant information like store locations and business hours is properly indexed by Facebook.

 

Source: Facebook Newsroom

Facebook Has A Potential Answer To Twitter’s Moments

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier this month, Twitter launched an important new feature called “Moments,” which has curated collections of tweets based on live events and news items. Now Facebook is reportedly testing a similar feature that categorizes posts into different feeds by topics,  therefore improving ad relevancy and targeting users based on interests. The topics currently available in pilot testing include Animals & Pets, Food, Health & Fitness, and Sports.

What Brands Need To Do
Like Twitter’s Moments, this new feature can provide brands with specific channels to reach different audience segments based on their interests, such as a snack brand reaching foodies in the Food feed, or a pet store chain reaching potential customers by posting cute pet videos, while also amplifying the reach of their branded content. Combined with Facebook’s rich sets of user data and diverse ad products, this new feature may turn out to be a great marketing channel with strong behavioral targeting capabilities that brands should pay attention to.

 

Source: AdWeek

Facebook Rolls Out Instant Articles To All iOS Users, Tests Full-Screen Mobile Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
After a five-month trial period, Facebook has officially launched Instant Articles today, rolling it out to all iOS users while announcing a beta version for Android devices. Though first announced in May, Instant Articles had a rather slow roll-out and has only started to pick up steam in the last month. With this wide roll-out, it will no doubt further impact the online publishing and content ecosystem.

In related news, Facebook continues to test a new form of full-screen, interactive mobile ads, which bear some design similarities to Instant Articles. Earlier this week, fast food franchise Wendy’s became the latest brand to experiment with this new ad product, touting out a mixture of text-layered images and vertical videos – a format often associated with Snapchat – to fully utilize Facebook’s new ad unit.

What Brands Need To Do
With over 60% of Americans now using social media as a news source, content discovery is becoming increasingly dependent on social. About 40% of Facebook users access the social network through mobile apps only, therefore it is important for media owners and brands alike to test Facebook’s new mobile publishing and ad products. With this official roll-out, it is time for brands to start publishing their Facebook content with Instant Articles to take advantage of the rich, quickly accessible reading experience it provides.

 

Source: Facebook Blog

Facebook To Challenge YouTube With Dedicated Video Feed

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following the debut of a “shopping feed” earlier this week, Facebook has also started testing a dedicated video feed that is designed to provide Facebook users with a lean-back viewing experience. In the test, a new “Videos” tab replaces the one for Messenger in the Facebook iOS app, and divides the video feed into separate channels for clips shared by friends, pages a user Liked, trending videos on Facebook, previously watched, and more.

In the past few months, Facebook has been touting out several new features to strengthen its video offerings, such as Suggested Videos, unlisted Secret Videos, and picture-in-picture video playback, which are all incorporated into the new video feed. The company also hinted at possibly expanding this video experience to other platforms such as smart TVs down the road.

What Brands Need To Do
This move signals Facebook’s ambition in building out its platform to attract more video content, so as to better compete with YouTube in the booming online video ads market, which is forecast to increase by 23% to reach $13.8 billion this year, according to a recent study by IHS and Vidiro. Therefore, it is important for brands to adjust their video ad strategy accordingly and choose the most suitable platform for distribution.  

 

Source: Marketing Land

Facebook Ramps Up Mobile Commerce With New Shopping Feed

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following its partnership with Shopify to add “Shop” sections to companies’ Pages last month, Facebook continues to dive deeper into mobile commerce with the debut of a new shopping feed and a wide roll-out of its new “Canvas” ad format. Now Facebook users can find a “Shopping” tab in their feed menu, which provides a feed of various products that businesses choose to highlight and is customized to match individual user’s connections, Likes, and interests. Moreover, Facebook is also rolling out its immersive full-page ad format, now called “Canvas,” to more businesses to showcase different products in a fast-loading, full-screen experience in the news feed on mobile.

What Brands Need To Do
According to a recent study, Facebook ranks as the No.1 app that consumers spend time in, taking up 13% of all time spent on mobile. Therefore, it is important for retailers to reach customers where they already are and start utilizing these mobile commerce features to build a presence on Facebook. Besides, Facebook also provides some data-driven personalization options, which retail and CPG brands would be wise to make use of.

 

Source: TechCrunch
Header image credit: Promotional Image from Facebook

Facebook To Expand Like Button With Six New “Reactions”

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Thursday Facebook unveiled “Reactions,” a set of emojis designed to convey empathic feelings other than a simple “like.” The six new reaction emojis are laughter, love, cheer, shock, sadness, and anger, and they will be treated the same as “Likes.” They will also influence Facebook’s news feed algorithms. The company will test these new reaction buttons in Ireland and Spain before rolling them out globally.

What Brands Need To Do
For brands, this expansion of the Like button presents a new way to accurately gauge customers’ reactions and more accurately measure their sentiment. Previously, brands would usually turn to sentiment analysis services with semantic analysis of comments provided by third-party analytic firms to get an idea of how people are reacting to their content on social media. Now, brands will be able to see reaction counts within Facebook’s page insights tool, something that any brand with a Facebook presence should definitely look into.

 

Source: AdAge

Header image courtesy of Facebook

Facebook Lures Live TV Viewers With New Features

Posted on by Richard Yao

What Happened
To better compete with Twitter as the go-to second-screen platform for live TV viewers, Facebook has announced several new features that media owners can use to better engage with fans. Included in the announcement are new voting features – either through hashtags or native polls embedded in posts – and a new UGC curation tool that allows producers to review audience-contributed content and share them via Pages. Plus, Facebook is introducing custom icons that denote partner shows, clearly taking a page out of Twitter’s emoji playbook.

What Brands Need To Do
Continuing to court brands with new tools and high-performing ad units, Facebook is quickly becoming a brand-friendly platform for media owners to connect with their audience. With second-screen viewing, audiences tend to tune out during commercial breaks and turn to their mobile devices, therefore rendering TV ads ineffective. Therefore, brands should consider cross-screen targeting on popular second-screen platforms like Twitter and Facebook with sponsored posts or branded content.

 

Source: The Verge