More good news for businesses as Facebook unveils a slew of new tools to help companies engage with potential consumers in a more direct manner. These new tools have a particular focus on personalized communication. The company also wants to enhance the ways users discover businesses and give new administration choices to optimize business activity.
These new tools are a section of Facebook’s latest efforts to make the platform better suited for businesses. Another initiative with these efforts is Facebook Shops. The goal of which, according to Facebook itself, is to make Facebook “The best dollar people spend each day.” This new update contains additional similar components which may become crucial for businesses in the future.
Among the new introductions is the new click-to-message ad choices that will increase a businesses’ ability to interact with clients across multiple messaging applications. Many businesses often purchase advertising on multiple messaging platforms such as Messenger, Instagram Direct, and WhatsApp. The goal is to encourage users to message these business pages by clicking on the ad. To make that process simpler, businesses can now select every one of the messaging apps. The ad will then display the messaging app where the potential customer is most likely to message.
When a messaging ad is built, Facebook’s algorithms will now determine the platform which is preferred by the user and display that platform’s prompt in the message section. According to one of Facebook’s internal studies, it was found that 75% of adults preferred contacting a business through text. This new feature of optimizing the platform displayed on ads is likely to be a success and generate higher response rates.
Businesses may also now add a “WhatsApp” button to their profile. This is to encourage profile visitors to contact the business via WhatsApp, which is the go-to texting app for a lot of people. While Facebook’s latest introduction of features focused a lot on WhatsApp and other messaging platforms, Instagram remains the key visual platform for businesses. That is why Facebook is also bringing ads that can be displayed on Instagram and directly link to WhatsApp.
The new “Get Quote” button adds more context to business conversations and streamlines the process of customer responses. Customers can now directly view the prices and services of the business before engaging in a detailed conversation. This automates the process of customer support and makes the communication process more efficient. As a result, businesses can experience a smoother experience on the platform while enjoying higher response rates. This could possibly be the next big thing after Facebook’s automatic reply choice function. Similar features will also be coming to Instagram in the next few months.
Other new features include being able to upload four different versions of a post for Facebook to run tests on a sample audience and reporting back with analytics, thus optimizing the post that will have the ad spend. “Work Accounts” is another new feature being tested by Facebook which will allow the usage of Facebook’s ad tools through a separate work profile.
A common theme among the newly introduced tools is establishing a better connection between brands and consumers to drive up business activity. Going along with this theme is the official introduction of the “Business Explore” feature that was being tested since April. Business Explore allows users to do what the name suggests, explore new businesses on the platform. This is done by showing related content from different businesses under posts of the user’s feed which they take time to hover over and view.
All in all, it looks like Facebook as a platform is getting better and better for businesses, with more innovation likely to come in the future.
