Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – May 2018 Edition
At the beginning of this month, Facebook celebrated a slew of releases through the Facebook Developer Conference (also known as F8).
These included things like their new dating option, the ability to clear your ad history, and enhancements around AR and VR.
Our team was even there to take part in the breakout sessions!
Now that all the fuss has died down, we’re ready to go back to business as usual – in this case, it means even more updates from Facebook post-F8.
Let’s dive into them now!
While the number of updates isn’t high, each one is packed with serious updates for marketers.
From Facebook live updates to political and issue ad rollouts, we’ll cover them one by one to give you the info you need to know to survive in the ever-changing ad landscape.
Here’s the list of the Facebook updates we are going to cover in May:
- Facebook Live: Crossposting
- Stream Keys and Live Rewind
- Video Retention Metric
- Video Best Practices
- Updates to Issue Ads
- Facebook Publishes Enforcement Numbers
Oh and just in case you were wondering if we really were at F8, this picture puts both AdEspresso and Hootsuite teams at the scene of the crime:
Left to right, top row: Cristiano Pio (Product Manager), Michelle Au Yeung (Associate Product Manager, Channel Integrations) Greg Bell (VP, Software Development), Tory Wenger (Ads Growth Associate). Bottom row: Rei Colina (Manager, Software Development), Mik Lernou (VP, Product).
Updates for Facebook Live: Crossposting
As a way of helping the community adopt and grow their Facebook Live strategies, Facebook has released 2 new feature for Live – Persistent Stream Keys and Live Crossposting.
While going Live is easier than ever, some problems still arise around the ability to share these posts on other pages you might manage.
So far, once you have ended your Live video on your page, you’d have to share it across all other pages manually.
If you only have one or two Facebook pages, this might not seem like too big of a problem. But if you’re a large business with multiple pages, you can see how this would be time-consuming and… a bit of a hassle.
With the new addition of Live Crossposting, all Pages can now easily publish a single Live broadcast across multiple Pages as an original post – meaning more Live viewers and a bigger potential audience.
Only broadcasts created via the Live API (Publisher Tools and facebook.com/live/create) are eligible for Live crossposting. Broadcasts originating from mobile cannot be Live crossposted.
Before you can start to Live crosspost you need to establish a crossposting relationship with another Page, and that Page will also be able to choose how your Page can crosspost their Live videos. Creating a crossposting relationship covers both VOD (video on demand) and Live broadcasts.
You can establish both Manual and Automatic Crossposting Relationships. In this second scenario, all of the Page’s broadcasts which enable Live crossposting will automatically publish on your Page. Facebook suggest selecting this option only for trusted Pages. Anyway, if you don’t want a specific crossposted Live broadcast to appear on your Page, you can delete it.
If you have an automatic Live crossposting relationship established with a Page and each broadcast has different targeting, Facebook suggests using manual crossposting. Both for Manual and Automatic Crossposting, you should edit the broadcast’s metadata as soon as the original broadcast automatically goes Live.
Expiration has no impact on crossposted broadcasts. If the original Live broadcast is deleted, all of the Live crossposts will also be deleted. If the broadcast is deleted after the Live broadcast has ended, only that specific broadcast is deleted. All other crossposted Live broadcasts including the original broadcast remain available for playback.
Ready to start crossposting? You can check out the setup guide here.
Updates for Facebook Live: Stream Keys and Rewind
The second part of this update is to Stream Keys (and it’s a tad more technical so, if you want, you can skip ahead to the next Facebook update!).
Before this update, Stream keys were random and meant that a new key had to be added each time you wanted to go into production.
Facebook has now released permanent keys, meaning the key can be sent in advance of a shoot, making it easier than ever to stream to your fans.
This means if you’re a publisher or creator that goes live regularly, you now only need to send one stream key to production teams, and because a Page’s stream key is permanent, it can be sent in advance of a shoot — making it easier to collaborate across teams and locations for live productions. Broadcasters can also save time by using the same stream key every time they start a new Live video.
Does this still sound obscure? Gaming creator Darkness429 (in the video), who goes live every weekday at the same hour, explains how using a persistent stream key has made this easier:
Streamers want to get their content out to their fans as quickly as possible without having to worry about going down a checklist of things to do, and with Facebook allowing streamers to have a persistent stream key, it gives the streamer the ability to quickly and effortlessly start streaming while also giving them less to worry about before starting their stream.” – Darkness429
Last but not least, Facebook is starting to test the ability for viewers to Rewind Live videos from Pages while they’re still live.
This is gonna be a true game-changer for some businesses. Read what CrossFit Games, one of the first beta tester, said:
Video Retention Metric
It’s no secret that video is one of the best ways to grab a user’s attention on Facebook.
In an effort to help advertisers better track how their audience is interacting with their videos, Facebook has announced a new update on video retention metrics.
Soon Page admins will be able to access the following new metrics in their video retention graph:
- Followers vs Non-Followers: Breakdown of audience retention by people who follow your Page and people who don’t follow your Page.
- Audience Demographics: Breakdown of audience retention by gender.
- Zoom Chart: Zoom into the chart to get a closer look at the data, so you can better visualize the engagement throughout the video to see how key moments affected viewership.
The new chart will look like this:
Facebook has also solved an issue related to the graph displaying data incorrectly for videos longer than 2 minutes – a welcome surprise to anyone affected.
Video Best Practices
In addition to the recent updates for Facebook Live and Video Retention Metrics, Facebook has also released an updated guide to video best practices and even included a few thought-provoking questions to ask yourself.
Among the recommendations, 3 seem to stand out and reconfirm Facebook’s ultimate goal of connecting people:
- Create content that is likely to drive discussion. Focus on content your audience will connect and engage with. While shorter, meme-related content can often see more shares, this content may not necessarily encourage deeper interaction among people around that content.
- Look closely at engagement around each video. Eyeball and evaluate the volume of reactions, shares, and conversations. You can also use tools like CrowdTangle to identify what’s working and what’s not.
- Encourage your social team to communicate directly with your audience. Respond to comments, ask your fans what they want to hear about, solicit feedback, and source topic ideas. Help your fans get to know you by introducing yourself directly.
You can find a full list of their recommendations here.
Updates to Political and Issue Ads
On our last update, we mentioned the increased transparency on political ads, but another new update has come into view – this time around ‘Issue Ads’.
Axios has recently released a new list of issues which will have the same increased transparency requirements as political ads. This list includes:
- Abortion
- Budget
- Civil rights
- Crime
- Economy
- Education
- Energy
- Environment
- Foreign policy
- Government reform
- Guns
- Health
- Immigration
- Infrastructure
- Military
- Poverty
- Social security
- Taxes
- Terrorism
- Values
Any businesses planning to post political or issue ads (like the list above) will need to verify their identity via mail, in addition to disclosing who paid for the ad.
You can find the new verification requirements here.
Facebook has also finally released their newly updated format for political and issue ads.
In addition to mentioning the sponsor of the ad, they also prompt you to view other ads from that advertiser as well as their active times.
For those of you who are running these ads, the format will look like the above.
Special care must be taken in terms of image and ad copy. Our own Adespresso customers are reporting recent escalated activity in disabled ad accounts for violating the new policies – a sure sign Facebook is taking the recent Cambridge-Analytica scandal quite seriously.
Facebook Publishes Enforcement Numbers
Post-Cambridge Analytica, Facebook has been overwhelmed by a negative media blitz, citing fake users and troll accounts and Zuckerberg’s inability to prevent these accounts from being created.
In response, Facebook has decided to publish their enforcement numbers for the first time. For example, take their numbers on fake accounts:
While the numbers for fake account removal are positive, it seems Facebook is still struggling with other nuanced user behavior, like hate speech:
All in all the changes being made are positive, but as you can see Facebook still has a long way to go before they can deem this project a success.
For full results, you can read their report here.
What does this mean for advertisers?
We can bet that as the algorithm continues to be improved that this will also start to affect ads in the same way.
Evidence of this can be found in the increased transparency and procedures around issue ads, engagement baiting, and the well-known Facebook banhammer.
If you have never taken the chance to read Facebook’s full Ad Policies, now is the time to do it to prevent your account from being disabled.
Conclusion
Big changes are on the horizon – both for Facebook as a company, and for us as advertisers.
With increased transparency around sensitive subjects, how Facebook reports on data, and hard questions raised around privacy we’re sure to see some more interesting news as the year continues.
As always, we’ll be here to help you digest every bit!
