Facebook is punching its social network with big surprises with every passing day post IPO. The recent changes that have been made are associated to the Facebook brand pages. So to make the life of a Facebook page admin easy, I thought of listing the recent changes that have been announced and which are being rolled out gradually.
1. Promoted Posts: When Facebook had announced that it is testing “Highlighted Status Update” on user profile pages, it was quite a clear indication that it would be bringing the same feature to brand pages. Promoted Posts, is a way to display content or posts to a larger set of fans. These posts would be appearing in the news feed both in the web and mobile versions, labeled as “Sponsored”. The new feature is not only for new posts but will also allow you to promote posts that are three days old. For a complete understanding of the Promoted Posts, please check the Mashable step-by-step guide.
The “Promoted Posts” is also live in India as reported by Pluggd.in, though I am yet to see it on our page. The new feature should bring smiles on the faces of brand managers. Brands who have always complained about the miniscule percentage of fans seeing their content can now heave e a sigh of relief. However, I would love if Facebook makes the content more targeted the way LinkedIn has done. I am sure that the next in line is the “Facebook Offers” to be promoted on the same lines.
2. Page Admins: The second big change that was announced was that Facebook has introduced different levels of page admins such as Manager, Content Creator, Moderator, Advertiser and Insight Analyst along with their set of roles. The below screengrab should give you an idea on the different activities that have been assigned to different roles.
A much needed feature for bigger brands that have multiple page admins controlling the page.
3. Schedule Posts: Along with the different roles assigned to page admins, Facebook has also launched “Scheduled Posts” which would allow scheduling of posts in future. As a page admin, you can schedule posts up to 6 months in advance at 15-minute intervals. The below screengrab from Facebook help center should give you a fair idea on how to schedule posts.
Even though the design of “Schedule Posts” appears not so cool to me and is already being criticized as way too complicated. However, I still wish to post content manually on our Facebook brand page.
4. Instant Insights For Posts: Promoted Posts will also come with instant insights so that the effectiveness of the paid content can be judged. As reported earlier about the new feature by Simply Zesty it would allow page admins to see instant insights on how many people the content reached and out of the total number of people who liked your page, what percentage of your fans managed to see your content. A screengrab of the new feature looks like this.
Instant insights of promoted content for brand pages is valuable information for now. Good news for social media agencies to highlight it in the review meetings with their clients.
5. Re-design of “Like”: According to a recent post from Simply Zesty, Facebook is planning to completely redesign it’s “Like” feature for mobile users. Facebook had made it clear during the filing of IPO that advertisement in going to be a challenge on mobile due to the lack of space. Till day Facebook was pushing the ads in the user news feed in mobile without making it a nuisance for the users. But the latest change is a complete re-design to the “Like” button. The screengrab attached below should give a fair idea.
It is a full screen sponsored story that Facebook plans to introduce in the coming days. However it would be interesting to see the reaction of people to such full-page ads being pushed on their news feed. It comes as no surprise to me that Facebook is investing lot of time to strengthen it’s Mobile Strategy but let’s hope it is not pushing too hard. May be GM would be happy seeing such full-page screen ads at least in the mobile devices.
Barring a few of them, most of the latest changes were pending from a long time and required too. So what do you think of the latest changes and doest that make your life easy as a Facebook page admin?