Social media platforms are constantly evolving and they can be tricky to keep up with if it’s not your job to know everything that’s new. Fortunately for you that is our job and we’re happy to share our knowledge! So without further ado, here’s everything that’s new with Facebook so far this year.
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Facebook’s new features and updates
So far in 2017, Facebook has:
- Expanded auto-captions: Facebook Extends Auto-Captioning to Videos From Pages (SocialTimes)
- Expanded advertising opportunities: Facebook is going to start showing ads in the middle of its videos and sharing the money with publishers (Recode)
- Expanded VR research: Facebook Conducts New Research into the Benefits of Social Virtual Reality (Social Media Today)
- Created new features for journalists: Facebook Looking to Work More Closely with Journalists, Adds More Publishing Tools and Live Options (Social Media Today)
- Expanded Live beyond mobile: Facebook now lets you livestream from the web (VentureBeat)
- Changed edited posts: It’s now much harder to see if someone edited a Facebook post (Mashable)
- And they’re migrating to a new tracking pixel for advertisers next month (Social Media Today)
What these updates mean for marketers
Most of these updates will effect brands’ video strategies; as Recode put it, the new mid-roll ads have implications for how video is planned and executed:
“But the new Facebook ads can only run once a viewer has watched a clip for at least 20 seconds. And they can also only appear in videos that run for at least 90 seconds. In other words, Facebook is telling publishers that in order to make money, they need to make clips that go on for a while and keep users’ attention.”
Facebook wants brands to put effort into their video strategy and they’re expanding the tools they offer- like Live- in order to encourage that. Brands don’t have to worry about a VR strategy just yet either, since 360 video acts as a nice “stepping stone” into that while more research is done and those with the drive and resources invest more in figuring out how audiences will respond to different VR experiments.
The journalism partnership could lead to some of those features being available to brand Pages in the future, such as different brand reps being allowed to go Live on behalf of a Page as journalists can now do.
Measure your impact on Facebook
It’s difficult to know what’s resonating with your audience on Facebook- or anywhere- if you’re not paying attention to how your posts are performing. If you’d like to be able to see your Facebook performance alongside all of your other social channels, then you want to check out our Social Suite.
And as always, let us know if you have any questions!
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