Instant Articles Now Available For All Facebook Publishers

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Instant Articles

Facebook is bringing its Instant Articles to all developers and content producers. The social media platform has been slowly testing its feature, which allows publishers to share content on Facebook mobile that is fast-loading and easy to read.

During Facebook’s F8 conference, the company announced that publishers of any size or kind can now publish via Instant Articles while also sharing some statistics showing how Instant Articles have been performing so far.

According to Facebook’s data, Instant Articles leads to

  • 20% more clicks on links to content
  • 70% reduced likelihood of abandoning content once clicking on it.
  • 30% more shares compared to the average mobile web articles.

Instant Articles are Facebook’s response to Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages and other fast-loading content platforms that streamline pages to ensure they load almost instantaneously on mobile devices. Facebook’s Instant Articles are unique though, because they also allow publishers to control ad placements within their content.

Publishers can even publish native ads as Instant Articles, which are distinguished from traditional content through unique styling options and the ability to add your company’s logo.

“Facebook’s goal is to connect people to the stories, posts, videos or photos that matter most to them,” the company says. “Opening up Instant Articles will allow any publisher to tell great stories, that load quickly, to people all over the world. With Instant Articles, they can do this while retaining control over the experience, their ads and their data.”

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Facebook Updates Its Policy On Branded Content

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Facebook is changing its mind on branded content, though it isn’t ready to completely dive in. The social media giant is revising its policy on branded content, which is anything that specifically “mentions or features a third party product, brand, or sponsor.”

With the latest change, Facebook is allowing any verified page to share branded content, however, the content must be labeled as such. This is a significant turn from the company’s previous stance against branded content and ads.

To help brands with verified pages label their branded content, Facebook is also offering a new tool to assist in tagging brands mentioned in the content. The company says the tool must be used every time branded content is published.

By changing their policy, Facebook is allowing companies with existing partnerships or sponsorships to bring their relationship into the world’s largest social network.

Notably, branded content can also be pushed via sponsored posts or leveraged in paid ads. The company says the new tool will hopefully lead to greater transparency while continuing to help users find valuable information.

When a brand is tagged in a piece of branded content, they will also receive access to post insights and can share the boosted post themselves.

While this is a notable change, Facebook still has some restrictions. Here is what Facebook will still not allow:

“…our branded content guidelines prohibit overly promotional features, such as persistent watermarks and pre-roll advertisements. Additionally, cover photos and profile pictures must not feature third party products, brands, or sponsors. Branded content integrations that are allowed to be posted on Facebook include content like product placement, endcards, and marketer’s logos.”

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Hit The Sweet Spot With Your Social Media Content Length [Infographic]

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When it comes to social media, less is often more. That is especially the case for word counts of your social media posts and blog articles, according to an infographic recently shared by Express Writers.

Twitter has a cap of 140 characters per tweet, but that doesn’t mean you need to use every character available. The infographic explains that “tweets that are 100 characters or shorter enjoy 17% more engagement than longer tweets.”

“So-called ‘medium-length’ tweets (between 71-100 characters) are re-tweeted more often than large (101 characters or longer) or small (41-71 character) tweets.”

Meanwhile, you may think of Facebook as the place to go for long-form posts and blog-style content, but you would be wrong. In fact, brevity is the soul of Facebook, with the ideal length for a post being just 40 characters or fewer.

“Facebook posts with 40 characters earn 86% more engagement than longer posts,” according to the infographic, and “the second-best length of a Facebook post is 80 characters or fewer. These posts receive 66% more engagement than longer posts.”

Want to make sure your content is hitting the right notes and not exhausting the short-attention spans so prevalent on social media? Find out exactly how long your content should be in the infographic below:

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How To Make The Perfect Facebook Ad [Infographic]

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While most users still think of Facebook as mostly a way to interact with their friends, post selfies, and share information, many businesses and marketers are starting to realize just how powerful Facebook’s advertising platform is.

While Facebook ads can be an incredibly powerful way to boost your content and your brand’s recognition, it can be hard to stand out among the over 3 million advertisers on the platform.

Creating the perfect ad to rise above the noise and grab the attention of your audience means balancing several different factors, including the optimal amount of text, creating images and videos with the perfect dimensions, and knowing where to best reach users on the page.

For a brand just getting started with Facebook ads, it can all be a little overwhelming. Thankfully, WebpageFX recently shared the infographic below, which details everything you need to know to make the perfect Facebook ad.

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Want to make the perfect Facebook ad for your business and guarantee you reach your audience? TMO can help. Contact us and we can review your advertising efforts and tell you how to optimize them to get the most out of your advertising.

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Facebook Announces ‘Your Business Story’ and Advertising Milestone

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YourBusinessStory

Facebook announced a new video offering for small businesses called Your Business Story, which would allow Pages to easily create and share montage-videos incorporating still images and music. At the same time, the company let slip that it now has over three million advertisers.

Your Business Story is a simple tool similar to the previously announced SlideShow offering. The company didn’t say anything about ads being included in the platform, but the note about their recent advertising milestone suggests the new offering will eventually work its way into Facebook Ads.

In the announcement, Facebook said:

To celebrate the businesses that use Facebook to grow, we created Your Business Story — a tool that makes it easy to create a video that shows what your business brings to the world. Because we believe the best way to tell the story of three million businesses is to empower each one to share their own.

Three million advertisers is a significant milestone for the social media platform. In September, the company announced it had reached 2.5 million. Before that, it claimed two million advertisers in February 2015. That means Facebook has been bringing in about half a million advertisers every six months for about the past year.

The announcement also said the majority of the businesses that use Facebook’s ad services are small businesses, also saying “50 million small businesses now use Pages on Facebok.”

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Facebook Brings New Look, Important New Stats To Video Metrics

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Facebook is overhauling its Video Metrics section of Page Insights with several new improvements and features to improve how it allows users to track video engagement. To start with, the company is completely redesigning the entire interface to the Video Metrics section. But, it is also launching a few highly requested metrics to better gauge how users are watching videos on the platform.

Since Facebook has launched the video portion of its platform, it has allowed Page owners to track total view counts on videos. However, it did not provide any information on how long people watched for or if they clicked away at some point in the video.

Now, Facebook will display the total minutes viewed watching a video, so Page Owners can tell if they are losing viewers mid-watch and get a better perspective on the effectiveness of their videos. The company says it was the number one most requested feature.

In addition to this, Page owners are also now able to track views more closely with the new 10-Second Views metric, which shows how many viewers watched for at least 10 seconds. This is big for two reasons. On one hand, Facebook has received criticism for counting any view over three seconds in their video counts, compared to YouTube’s harsher 30 second standard for view counts.

The new 10-Second Views metric is also important because Facebook announced last summer that advertisers will only be charged for ad views if their video was watched for more than 10 seconds.

Alongside these view-length metrics, Facebook also rolled out an interesting new metric that gives Page owners a better idea of exactly how users are watching their videos.

Within the Insights view of individual videos, Page owners can see the amount of people that viewed a video with the sound on vs with the sound off. This lets Page owners get an idea of their audience and how their videos are being interacted with.

For example, if the majority of views are coming from users with the sound off, there is a good chance your audience is primarily watching videos at work, school, or in another public space where sound shouldn’t be turned on. You can take this into account with your future ads by being sure to optimize sub-titles and perhaps take a more visual approach with your content.

These changes allow Page owners and advertisers to gain a much deeper insight into how their ads and videos are performing, and that means allowing them to make even better ads and videos for their audience. If you want to make sure your ads are really successful, you should consider giving these new video metrics a look.

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Facebook and Instagram Launch New Holiday Shopping Ad-Targeting Segment

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If you’re looking to boost your share of holiday customers at the last moment, Facebook and Instagram have a new feature that will be of interest to you.

The companies are rolling out a new ad-targeting segment aimed at helping brands focus in on shoppers who are engaged with content related to holiday shopping, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The ad segments, which will run from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, act like any other ad format on their advertising networks.

Facebook says it will compile this audience by watching for holiday-related keywords in posts that people publish, like, comment on, and share. From there, the audience is aggregated and anonymized, like all Facebook ad-segments.

The holiday ad segment is available now within Facebook self-service ad dashboards, in the “Behaviors” section under the “Seasonal and Events” category.

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Why Are Retailers Ignoring Their Customers On Social Media?

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Businesses are increasingly using Facebook to advertise their business to one of the largest audiences in the world, but a new survey suggests many businesses are forgetting social media is a two-way street.

According to a Sprout Social study, the majority of retailers are ignoring their customers’ requests on social media, a finding which is very troubling considering consumers are turning to social media to seek customer service and find information about businesses.

The statistics from the Sprout Social Q4 2015 index say retailers failed to respond to over 80 percent of consumer questions and requests on social media over the last year. Perhaps surprisingly, retailers were least likely to respond during the holiday shopping season. Throughout Q4 of 2014, only 16.35 percent of customer queries to retailers received any form of response.

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It is understandable that retailers are swamped during the holiday season, and may not have the extra man-power to closely watch social media. However, totally ignoring your customers on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms can create a tidal wave of unhappy customers and lost potential buyers.

Retailers saw a 21-percent increase in inbound social media messages in the last quarter of 2014, but the majority of those went unanswered.

“Social media is an integral part of consumers’ daily lives and a critical communication channel for brands to engage in conversation with their customers during the holidays,” Sprout Social CMO Scott Brandt said in a release. “Whether answering a product question or confirming a customer’s gift order, brands have an opportunity to positively influence awareness, customer loyalty, positive sentiment and seasonal sales through social media engagement.”

One problem appears to be that retailers aren’t paying attention to where their customers are trying to reach them. In the past, Twitter has been the primary social media platform for customer service related questions and requests. However, Sprout Social’s study suggests a shift is occurring as more shoppers rely on Facebook to contact brands.

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It appears retailers haven’t picked up on the shift though, because the new statistics show retailers sent out 114 percent more messages on Twitter in the last six months.

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“It’s worth taking a deeper look at customer service on Facebook since it is generally where people are seeking answers from retailers,” said Brandt. “Bottom line: You should be able to improve your response rates and times if you understand where people are reaching out to your brand in the greatest numbers.”

For more interesting findings from the study, download the full Spout Social Index for free here.

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Facebook Is Challenging YouTube With New Video Features

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Before long, Facebook’s video service is going to look a lot like YouTube. Facebook announced several new features to their mobile app that will seem very familiar to YouTube users and will make videos an even larger part of the Facebook platform than before.

Among the features is the new ability to collapse videos into a floating window, so you can browsing your Facebook seamlessly while you watch a video. The change will make watching videos on the platform less of an interruption and more a part of the experience.

Facebook is also testing implementing a new list of recommended videos to watch next after users finish watching a video. If you don’t see something that piques your interest, you can also look in the all new dedicated Facebook video feed, where you’ll find nothing but user shared videos.

The dedicated video feed acts much like your normal News Feed, but exclusively for video and can be found by tapping the “Videos” icon along the bottom navigation menu of the Facebook app.

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If you see something you think you might want to watch, but can’t at the immediate moment for some reason, you can now save it for later, allowing you to easily return when you are someplace more suitable for watching video. All your saved videos can be easily found in the “Saved” bookmark in the menu.

Facebook is still working out the kinks on most of these new features, so don’t expect them to be rolled out too soon. Instead, it appears the new features will see a slow testing and rollout phase, with no telling when we will see a full launch.

 

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Facebook Officially Announces A ‘Dislike’ Button

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 Facebook Dislike

The day has finally come. Facebook announced the feature users have been asking for since nearly the very beginning of the site, and it could entirely change how users interact across the largest social media platform in the world.

That’s right, during his live Town Hall Q&A’s yesterday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially announced a “dislike” button is coming soon. However, he did say the process of adding the button is more complicated than most people would think.

Nonetheless, the button is already being worked on and tested by the company, and will be released at some point in the future.

Zuckerberg said the company decided to add a dislike button as they realized their users were clamoring for ways to express other emotions than the classic ‘Like’.

The statement was also quite different from Zuckerberg’s statements given during a similar Q&A session in December, where he said he had strong hesitations about adding a feature that was designed to spread negativity.

Zuckerberg still hopes to prevent the button from being used to hurt others or spread negativity, as he said he hopes it can be used primarily to empathize with others.  Only time will tell, as there’s currently no telling when the feature will actually arrive.The day has finally come. Facebook announced the feature users have been asking for since nearly the very beginning of the site, and it could entirely change how users interact across the largest social media platform in the world.

That’s right, during his live Town Hall Q&A’s yesterday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially announced a “dislike” button is coming soon. However, he did say the process of adding the button is more complicated than most people would think.

Nonetheless, the button is already being worked on and tested by the company, and will be released at some point in the future.

Zuckerberg said the company decided to add a dislike button as they realized their users were clamoring for ways to express other emotions than the classic ‘Like’.

The statement was also quite different from Zuckerberg’s statements given during a similar Q&A session in December, where he said he had strong hesitations about adding a feature that was designed to spread negativity.

Zuckerberg still hopes to prevent the button from being used to hurt others or spread negativity, as he said he hopes it can be used primarily to empathize with others.  Only time will tell, as there’s currently no telling when the feature will actually arrive.

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