Another big couple of months of changes at Facebook has once again caught advertisers and business owner’s reassessing their marketing strategy to stay up to date with the constant iterations that Facebook are making to their suite of products.

Facebook Ad Transparency

The most notable of all recent changes, Facebook has now introduced the ability for everyone to see every active ad a page is running. This update is available worldwide and you can see all ads regardless of whether you’re in the page’s target audience or not. Currently, it doesn’t not allow you to see overall ad performance or metrics (political advertisements do have this capability) though but it’s great to be able to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to with their marketing efforts…

Ad prices fluctuation

Average ad prices continue to fluctuate, particularly around key holiday periods and in the lead up to the end of each quarter. This is mainly due to larger spends from big agencies that are looking to make sure every cent of their client’s budget is spent by the end of the quarter so they can secure budget for the next quarter. Simple math says that its a supply and demand equation that drives up the demand (cost) for smaller businesses.

Promoting organic Instagram ads

We LOVE this update. Finally, Facebook is giving you the ability to promote organic posts on your Instagram profile. Previously, you had to use the Instagram app to promote individual posts that had limited objectives, budget and targeting options. Adding the functionality in ads manager opens up endless possibilities to integrate popular Instagram posts across your whole Facebook advertising strategy.

To be able to use the new functionality, you need to have:

• An Instagram business profile
• Your profile must be connected to your Facebook Page
• Be using the Instagram ad placement in your adset

Easier to review purchases from pages

Facebook have introduced a feature to crack down on advertisers that misrepresent products or quote things like incorrect shipping times. Facebook will now send a notification to users they can track that purchased from an advertisement and allow them to leave a review about their purchase.

The tool prompts the user with a brief questionnaire and if a business receives a high volume of negative feedback, Facebook communicates that with the advertiser. If the business continuously receives negative feedback then Facebook will restrict their capabilities to run advertisements.

IGtv

Instagram made two large recent announcements. First, they’ve grown to a userbase of over 1 Billions users and secondly – but most importantly – they’ve launched a brand new feature for watching long form vertical video. The announcement came with a brand new IGtv app, but also allowed you to watch it from the native Instagram app.

The app itself is pretty simple, featuring videos from people you follow but it also allows you to swipe up to see and explore more videos.

So now, people can consume different content from Instagram profiles in three different spots. Their news feed, their Instagram stories and now Instagram TV.

Paid subscriptions for Facebook Groups

Facebook has often recognised that the strength of their company lies in its community and particular those that manage and admin Facebook groups. They’ve gone as far as to hold community days in person with group administrators around the world to better understand how they can help them. One of the outcomes it seems is the introduction of creating a paid subscription in exchange for being part of groups.

Some people don’t realize how much effort goes into moderating groups and this is a great step forward to create more positive environments for group members.

New creator tools:

Facebook have taken another step forward in their attempt to lure influencers away from Youtube by introducing a range of tools that allow them to created branded content, monetise content and future plans to allow fans to pay a monthly fee for exclusive access to content.

They’ve improved features in their Facebook Creators app such

They’ve also announced two new upcoming features:

• A tool that helps advertisers and creators easily connect for branded content opportunities.
• A way for fans to become a supporter of the creators they love with paid subscription options.

Keyword snooze

No more having your old high school friends ruining the next Game Of Thrones before you get a chance to illegally stream it (😏), you can now hit the snooze button on keywords to prevent any posts mentioning that topic for up to 30 days.  

What change do you think will have the biggest impact on your advertising strategy?