Social media, its a constant evolution. Every day how people interact with the platform changes, as do the features available on the platforms. Therfore as marketers we have to keep up with these updates to ensure that you social platform is always reaching your audience in the best way possible.

As Facebook and Instagram roll out new features and add new functions it is our job to keep tabs to ensure that campaigns are successful and how these new features can best be implemented within a digital strategy. So what are the latest batch of changes?

Connecting with a Business through Whatsapp

With 42% of smartphone users on Whatsapp, plenty of users will reach out to a business through this channel. In the latest update connecting with your customer base should be easier than ever. For example, you can now feature QR codes on a site, chat or packaging that once scanned a customer can start a chat through Whatsapp.

Here you can now also share your business’ catalogue or use featured items as links to answer questions and drive sales.

If you are an ecommerce business using the catalogue feature on Facebook this could be a new way of building product awareness and increasing sales through Whatsapp.

Ecommerce Eligibility Changes

Instagram has changed their commerce eligibility requirements, so we should also expect a similar update on Facebook soon. With this new update, any business or creator with one eligible product will be able to use the shopping features and tags. In turn this will allow customers link with your posts to make a purchase and right now US business’ are testing a new feature that will allow customers purchase directly within the app. Something to look forward to on these shores in the future.

Another plus with this update is the fact that you won’t need to setup a Facebook store or wait for approval.

New Calls to Action

Using the right call to action can increase your conversions and help to encourage your audience to act. Now there are more specific Call to Action Buttons that you can use on your page and to add these simply click “edit” under your cover photo and choose the CTA you wish to use.

After you choose the button that suits your needs, you can then customise it and choose where you want it to send your visitors. Some of the new Call to Action buttons are:

• Booking appointments
• Making a reservation
• Contacting your businesses via email, phone, or chat
• Downloading an App
• Making a purchase

Royalty-free music

Using music in your videos has previously been a bit of an issue on Facebook due to copyright law. That’s fine because Facebook has added a couple of thousand royalty free song collections to it’s Creator Studio. This means when you are creating new video content on Facebook you can save time from having to find your own royalty free music and you don’t have to worry about getting your video barred for copyright infringement.

This update is very positive as it makes creating engaging videos much simpler and it encourages users to create and edit videos within Facebook.

Creator Studio updates

The addition of royalty free music is not the only update for the Creator Studio. Other updates include a new analytics screen to highlight your loyal followers and repeat visitors as well as improving messaging features in the app that allow you to connect with these groups. Video content insights have also been improved, including average minutes watched and video retention rates.

Creator Studio now also supports auto-captioning for 13 new languages, including Chinese, German, Arabic, Italian, Malay, Hindi and more.

Facebook Pages to Watch

The Pages to Watch feature lets you keep tabs on your competitors pages to see how your company is stacking up. If you go to “insights” at the top of your Facebook page, you can add the competition pages that you wish to keep an eye on.

Here you will be able to see metrics such as engagement rates, page likes and how many times they are posting per week. If you add multiple competitors to watch, you can see all of their analytics side by side.

Conclusion

Platforms like Instagram and Facebook have millions of users daily, which in turn means this is a potentially lucrative place for companies to reach their key audience. Many of the recent updates have the end user in mind but we decided to focus on the ones that matter for marketers.

Business focused updates seems to be an area that Facebook are focusing on at the moment, especially given the changing nature of business at the moment people are searching for new online methods of running a business. Don’t be surprised if we see more new and improved features of the coming months.