Five Facebook updates that are best for the business

Facebook marketing is one of the most important aspects of online marketing nowadays. 80% of the global marketing professionals use the Facebook as a preeminent marketing channel for their business. Big brands love Facebook for promotion. 97% of the top 100 brands have their personalized Facebook page and 91% among them post once or more in a week. Marketers have also started using facebook for paid marketing. That is the reason for the increase in Facebook ad price and demand both. Majority marketers prefer to allocate more ad budget for the retargeting.

Facebook does many changes in its user interface and application every year. Facebook has announced an update in news feed in November 2014. According to that update they were decreasing the priority of the promotional organic posts in the news feed. That was a big blow for rigorous facebook marketers. Marketers were forced to find out new techniques. Facebook has also announced few more facebook features around the end of 2014. These new features are likely to create a huge opportunity for online marketers. Following are the new features of facebook that can help your business to grab the maximum attention on Facebook.

Facebook keyword search

Facebook has updated the facebook graph search into keyword search. Now people can search any specific post from their timeline, photo, video, event or any news from their feed using the keyword related to that post. Facebook provides unique search result for each user related to their search query after the keyword search update.

Marketing possibilities become endless with this new post search feature of Facebook. You can now search your any post you have done in the past. The only requirement is that you need to use this feature from your personal profile. You can also search any post shared with you through the news feed when you are using facebook as yourself. You can also search any post of your friend or from the page you have liked.

Organic post targeting based on Interest

Words from the facebook: “To help you reach precisely the right people, we now offer the ability to target posts to a subset of the people that like your Page. For example, a publisher can use Interest Targeting to post a story about a sports game that will only be shown to people that like the teams playing.

This is really a cool feature that allows you to precisely target the right audience. Now you can target the audience for specific posts. But you only target the pages that your fans have already targeted. The best you can do is identifying your audience interest from the audience insights and create the post targeting that group of audience only. For example, you found that your fans have also liked the page of HubSpot and SEO Moz. Now if you have any exiting post about the Inbound Marketing that you want to post, you can benefit the post by targeting these interests. This will definitely increase the engagement as it reaches to the right audience. Another way you can benefit your business is by targeting your competitors. If you have a new product or services under your belt, then why not target the people who have liked your competitors’ page? This could become an effective strategy.

End date for organic posts

As per the Facebook: “Post End Date allows Page admins to specify a day and time to stop showing a post in News Feed. This tool prevents people from seeing out-of-date posts in News Feed, but posts will continue to appear on your Page. For instance, a publisher can use this to remove yesterday’s weather report from News Feed.

You can control the post visibility on news feed using this feature. It is incredibly handy for someone who uses facebook to promote current events. It is a great way to show the posts on your timeline during active time of the post. Suppose you are offering a special weekend giveaway on your page. This new feature will keep your weekend giveaway post visible in weekends only. Nobody will be able to see that post after the end date you have set for that post. This feature is best if you are promoting one time event or if you want to do live question answers on your timeline.

Further updates to Facebook Insights

According to Facebook: “We’ve added a new Top URLs section, which displays URL-level reporting and shows when other Pages and influencers share a post you’ve made to Facebook. For example, if a celebrity shares one of your URLs, you’ll know why that URL may have reached more people than other URLs. We also made the interface more intuitive and provide a way to segment data for specific time ranges, including hourly.

New insights update provides you the URL-level reporting. That helps you understand how a specific post is performing and who is sending the maximum traffic to that URL. You can also generate the report for specific time frame including the hourly reporting. This feature is not available for all pages as of now.

Call to Action button for page

Words from facebook: “Designed to bring a business’s most important objective to the forefront of its Facebook presence, call-to-action buttons link to any destination on or off Facebook that aligns with a business’s goals.

Facebook now helps you to put your best foot forward by allowing adding a custom call to action button right on the cover photo. You can add custom call to action button on cover photo that will lead users to specific destination clicking on the button. You can get seven options for call to action buttons as of now. Book Now, Contact Us, Use App, Play Game, Shop Now, Sign Up and Watch Video are the currently available options for call to action buttons. Facebook is also tracking the CTA clicks and provides the separate report for it. I will recommend using a separate landing page to get better insights of custom CTA button of Facebook.

What do you think about these features of Facebook? It is possible that you may not have the access to all these features while you are reading this article. But you will surely get it soon. How much these new features are going to affect the social media marketing strategy for 2015? Share your thoughts with us in the comment box below.

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