According to Facebookit’s recent State of Small Business Reportmore than half (55%) of small businesses say they use digital tools to communicate with customers.
In the wake of this research, the platform announced several new tools and features to help businesses connect with their customers online and grow their communities more efficiently.
Building Community
For businesses already using the redesigned Facebook Pages experience, originally unveiled last January, the platform is introducing more ways to manage your community and find relevant content from other businesses without having to deviate from the app.
More specifically, businesses can engage as a business profile streamlining routine tasks including commenting, posting, and liking. Once a user takes the time to check or hover over a particular update or post, she can tap into a new dedicated feed of listings from these pages that may align with her main interests.
To further help you save time managing your business account, Facebook suggests leveraging the Professional Dashboard which serves as a central hub for all your key tools and actionable Page Insights. One last tip: don’t overlook the ability to set activity-based permissions for admins to further monitor who has access to your Page.
Discovery on the rise
“The need for digital business communications and transactions isn’t slowing down, and we’re continuing to build products that meet the ever-changing needs of people and businesses as they seek to do more online,” Facebook shared in official announcement. Along those lines, it’s rolling out some noteworthy updates that emphasize quality over quantity of leads.
A new ‘Conversion leads‘ for Lead Ads allows advertisers to optimize for leads and most likely versus pure volume. In other words, emphasizing the functionality of lead ads instead of just targeting reach. You can also integrate your CRM data with Facebook. According to the platform, lead ads that used Conversion Leads quality optimization averaged more than 20 percent Increased lead-to-sale conversion rate over existing optimization.
To foster long-term relationships, Facebook has also introduced the option to convert Lead Ads module to Messenger templates. As part of the testing phase, Newsome Interactive added Messenger to their lead generation strategy and saw more than one 13 percent increased volume of lead.
finally new ‘Call announcements‘ will allow advertisers to display a ‘Call Now’ call-to-action button in their ads. Not only does this allow advertisers to connect with consumers in real time, but it also helps improve overall call ad performance and reduce cost per call. In testing, Facebook reports that it observed a cost per quality call reduction of more than 30% during testing, compared to running call ads with the goal of optimizing link clicks.
Business Suite Enhancement: Scheduling Stories and Editing Scheduled Posts y
Last year, Facebook launched Business Suite with the primary goal of taking the headache out of managing their online presence so they could focus solely on making meaningful connections.
A recent survey revealed that two out of three users said Business Suite helped them connect with more customers. Post 2020 however, as more people and businesses focus their efforts online and with the future leaning heavily towards digital communications and transactions, the platform wants to take those efforts to the next level.
In his last pushFacebook is focusing on helping brands streamline content creation by scheduling, and these new features are designed to do just that.
Here’s what’s new:
- The ability to compose stories within the app, then schedule them to post to both Facebook and Instagram. The scheduled posts will then appear in the content calendar within the Business Suite app.
- The ability to save all Facebook and Instagram posts as drafts, adding even more scheduling flexibility to your approach to Stories.
- Coming soon: The ability to post and manage Facebook photos and albums from Business Suite by accessing the ‘Posts & Stories’ tab.
