4 Recent Facebook Updates Businesses Should Know

1. Updates to the News Feed Algorithm (Again!)

Facebook has announced two major changes to the News Feed algorithm in the last couple of weeks. Both affect businesses and how you craft your Facebook posts.

Earlier in August, Facebook quietly told advertisers that they were going to allow twice as many ads to appear in the News Feed of users, whether or not they’ve liked the brand running the ad.

Technically this is good for businesses and gives you a chance to get your ads in front of more eyes, more often.

More recently, Facebook announced that they’re working to continue cutting down what users consider spam  including “click-baiting” headlines and posts.

According to Facebook, “Click-baiting headlines is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see. Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed. Over time, stories with “click-bait” headlines can drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about.”

Secondly, Facebook noted that they’d be showing preference to links that are shared within a post. They plan on prioritizing links in the link-format, and showing fewer posts with links shared in captions or status updates.

Our advice: Make sure your links include a large, attractive image that will drive your audience to click through. Link share post image size is 484 pixels by 252 pixels.

2. You Can No Longer Like-Gate or Fan-Gate Apps or Content

In one of the most significant Facebook announcements to date, the social network has said that as of November 5, 2014 businesses will no longer be able to like-gate or fan-gate their custom Facebook Page apps or content.

While scary for some marketers, this is a big step in the direction that we see most businesses moving: wanting to build a valuable and engaging online audience.

According to Facebook, “You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.”

Any apps that are currently installed and running a like-gate will continue to show the like-gate until November 5, 2014. Starting November 5, Facebook will adjust their API to not read whether a visitor to an app is a fan or non-fan.

Our advice: Turn your like-gated strategies into action-gated strategies. Action-gating is when you reward your audience after they fill out a form, sign up for a newsletter, vote or perform some other action. By doing this you’re collecting data you can use to engage with your audience outside of Facebook.

3. Save Articles for Later

You may have read that Facebook users would get up to 1,500 posts a day in their News Feed if Facebook didn’t use an algorithm to cut it down to around 300. That’s still a LOT of posts and a majority of those posts are links to news articles or interesting reads from your favorite brands and Pages.

In July, Facebook released a new feature that allows you to save items that you find on Facebook to check out later when you have more time.  As of today, you can save links, places, movies, TV and music. You can choose to share your saved items with your friends or keep them private.

Our advice: Encourage your fans to save your posts to read later. As a business, make sure you’re saving interesting articles and links you see so you can share them with your audience at a later date.

4. Updates to Facebook Advertising

There have been a variety of changes to the Facebook ads platform in the last several months. We could easily dedicate an entire article to these changes but instead we’re going to leave it up to our favorite Facebook ads guy, 

We’ll still do a quick run-down of some of the bigger advertising changes we’ve seen lately.

Cross Device Ad Reporting

This feature allows advertisers to see how different devices influence a website conversion or mobile app actions.

Facebook Video Ads

New video advertising capabilities make it so businesses can include a call-to-action on their video ads. You can also set a campaign goal to see video views and build an audience based on people who have previously viewed a video.

Bigger Right-Hand Column Ads

Right-hand ads are now nearly three times larger than they were before. This doesn’t affect the flow of creating ads, you just have more space to work with now! 

Boost Posts with Custom Audiences

You can now “Boost” a post to a saved target audience. To make a custom audience head to the Power Editor and create a Saved Target Audience for each Custom Audience you have.

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Facebook Video Ads: Why They Could Be Make or Break for Facebook

Over the past 12 months, Facebook have come under a lot of criticism for their advertising. Both in terms of the products they offer, as well as the way their targeting works. Brands have seen their ads placed on pages promoting violent or sexual content, members have complained about the sponsored stories being misleading, and key word targeting has often led to ads being shown next to less than positive status updates - just ask EE. With many of these factors combined, along with the fact that the number of products offered even led to advertisers becoming confused, Facebook eventually cut the number of products in half.

There are of course, a number of positives and negatives to any new ad format, however with Facebook, these could be more powerful than people may expect. Many members are already becoming annoyed at the number of ads being shown on the social networking site, so how can a more impactful, intrusive and disruptive ad do anything but increase members dislike of Facebook's ad offering?

Video has been around for years, and it's something that catches people's attention. What it hinges on, however, is how it's delivered to the consumer. A video which 'pops up' when scrolling down your feed will not be welcomed, but on which is embedded and part of the content will work much better. People use their news feed for content, both rich and text-based, so a video ad with an appearance similar to a YouTube clip or Facebook video upload will be no different.

For brands, it also offers them the opportunity to match television advertising with real-time content their audience is pushing out onto Facebook. Running an ad on TV during the X-Factor for example is one thing, but being able to reach those people again on Facebook and deliver them the same ad, after they have posted a comment about how they loved the ad or even the programme is a different matter. This could give brands a unique opportunity to extend the reach of a TV based ad, and ensure that people are watching it.

The make or break for Facebook comes with their management of the product. The rumoured prices of up to $2.5m a day is staggering. In any business, there comes a time when a company or person will get greedy, and that's what Facebook much watch out for. There is a very fine line between commercial opportunity, and the happiness of your consumers. As a user of a number of social networks myself, I know there's a point where the consumer will decide there's too much commercialisation, and will leave. There's such a vast wealth of websites, social networks and news outlets now, that people aren't tied to one specific place. Should the ads be to great in number, and too frequent, members will close their accounts and leave, it's that simple. Facebook need to take a good hard look before that launch this product, about how much they really value their members.

What could also affect the offering is Facebook's audience. When I joined, I was in the majority demographic, now however, this has changed. Facebook is attracting a large number of so-called older members, or Generation X, who are not as receptive to advertising in this form. Unlike the Generation Y users, who are exposed to ads almost every minute of the day, the Gen X members are used to seeing ads on TV or in the paper, they're not used to them being as intrusive as online ads now can be. The same goes for the younger audience. A brilliant piece entitled 'I'm 13 and None of My Friends Use Facebook' by Ruby Karp last week, highlighted just what the younger generation think of the site - Facebook just isn't trending anymore.

Ruby points out, and rightly so, that in a few years, her generation will be the ones who are keeping the site going. Alienating them now, through to many ads and irrelevant content is a mistake Facebook cannot afford to make. Get it right however, and the next generation will be the ones who help take Facebook forward

Whatever the new offering brings, it's going to be a big few months for Facebook. Get it right, and they'll hit the jackpot, get it wrong however, and we could see both brands and consumers walking away from the social giant.

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Video Ads Predicted to Bring $1 Billion in Ad Revenue to Facebook

What’s the future of advertising on Facebook? Video ads. As Patrick mentioned in a recent blog for us here at CEM, a report by Morgan Stanley predicted that video ads will generate over $1 billion of revenue for Facebook in 2014. When you consider the fact that video ads do not even exist on Facebook yet, this number is quite impressive. On the downside, these ads are also predicted to cost advertisers more than the amount it cost to advertise during the 2013 Super Bowl, the advertising highlight of the year.

The Numbers

You may be wondering how Morgan Stanley could possibly make such a huge prediction, considering that video ads aren’t even available yet. The report conducted was based upon data from various sources, including The Financial Times and Bloomberg. In addition to the prediction of $1 billion in revenue for 2014, the report also estimates $6.5 billion by 2020. The ads will likely appear later in the year and will only be available in the U.S., with Europe to follow in late 2014.

The Video Ads

Many are skeptical about the success of video ads on Facebook, as they may become more of an annoyance to users. Facebook has stated that video ads will be 15 seconds long, and that they will start automatically but have no sound until the users taps on the ad. It will then start over with sound. Users will only find one advertiser in their News Feed per day, with up to 3 different ads appearing. Studies conducted about the Bud Light ads that appeared on Facebook found favorable results, indicating that users will probably react positively to video ads.

The Super Bowl Prices

What remains most unbelievable about the introduction of video ads is the reported prices for advertisers. Facebook will be charging anywhere from $1 million to $2.5 million each day for an advertiser to run the 15 second ads. These are Super Bowl level prices, with a 30 second ad during the 2013 Super Bowl costing $4 million each. Facebook is justifying the incredible prices based upon how large their audience is, particularly during primetime hours.

While Facebook has been improving its Pages feature to the benefit of small, local businesses, the advent of video ads is likely to leave those clients behind. Small businesses will not be able to afford these outrageous prices, effectively fencing in video ads to only major corporations. Time will tell if less expensive options will be available, perhaps during different time slots or to smaller, local audiences on the network.

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