Social media managers are happy.
Today, Facebook announced the addition of new features to its Business Suite management platform, including Story programming for both Facebook and Instagram, along with a new business discovery process in the News Feed.
Let’s start with the biggest – Facebook is launching a new option in Business Suite, the newest business management platform, that will allow users to compose and plan Facebook and IG Stories within the planning element.
As you can see here, the new option will allow you to compose Stories within the app, then schedule them to run on both Facebook and Instagram. Your scheduled posts will then be displayed in your content calendar in the Business Suite application.
This is the first time Facebook has offered story scheduling – in one of the other management tools, Creator Studio, you can schedule feeds and video posts (IGTV) in both applications, but scheduling stories is not yet an option, which has long been a frustration for social managers. Some third-party tools provide solutions to this, but native programming could be a significant update to the process, allowing you to better plan your complete content strategy using a single calendar tool on Facebook and IG.
As you may have noticed in this example, Facebook will now allow Business Suite users to save their Facebook and Instagram posts as projects, adding even more planning flexibility to your approach to Stories.
Given the growing use of the Stories format, more brands are logically looking to incorporate the more mobile-native vertical format into their information strategy, and as such, it makes sense for Facebook to offer more planning tools to better enable Brands to Maximize Approaches Their Stories.
Although this was also a point of contention. The ethos of the Stories is that they are less polished, facilitating actual updates at the time, and it makes sense for any use, even by brands, to better align with this off-the-cuff approach, as opposed to building more glossy and polished promotions.
But flexibility is essential, and as the Story format has evolved, improving digital creation tools has made them inevitably seem more professional in both directions.
As such, storytelling now seems more appropriate. And it will definitely be more beneficial for marketers.
In addition, Facebook wants to add a new element of business discovery, through the recommendations of related pages, below posts in News News.
As you can see here, the new process will highlight the related content on the Facebook pages below the posts, when users take the time to check (or skip) certain updates in their feed. This will allow people to access a new, dedicated list of image feeds on these pages that may be similar to their interests.
Facebook has been trying for years to introduce recommendations on topics in the News Feed for years, even testing separate listings of News Feed, aligned to the topic. This new approach is slightly different in that it focuses on business discovery and is more related, in this regard, to the wider promotion of Facebook eCommerce through stores and other tools.
Facebook says the new recommendations will appear in feed posts related to topics such as beauty, fitness and clothing, as well as restaurants, allowing users to explore content from related companies.
The recommendations are tested with a small group of users at this stage.
In addition, Facebook is launching several new advertising options, including:
- A new “Conversion Opportunities” goal for potential customer ads, which will allow advertisers to optimize for potential customers with the highest probability of conversion compared to pure volume. This could make potential ads more functionally valuable, as opposed to covering.
- Option to convert potential ad forms to Messenger templates to track potential leads
- New “Call ads” that will allow advertisers to display a CTA “Call now” button in their ads
I mean, that won’t work for Millennials, who like notoriety on phone calls, but will provide more connectivity and require direct contact from your Facebook promotions.
These are some good, valuable additions that will have significant implications for many brands. It will definitely add to your planning options – and no doubt there will be a new rush on users moving to Business Suite, unlike Facebook’s other planning tools, to capitalize on the new Stories programming capability.
You can learn more about Business Suite, which can be accessed on the desktop or through dedicated mobile applications, here.