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May 27, 2019
Upcoming Facebook Changes You Need To Know About
The annual F8 conference held by Facebook to announce upcoming changes to the platform happened a couple of weeks ago, and this year even more news than usual was dropped on us. Time to reshuffle that 19/20 marketing budget!

With algorithm changes, AI coming into play and the goal posts for business on Facebook changing constantly, it can feel impossible to stay on top of what’s important and what you can afford to ignore. We’ve done a wrap up of the key things you need to know moving into the second half of the year. You’ll also find some advice for each change – easily implemented changes that you can make straight away to get this fickle app working for you and your business ASAP. 

It’s all about groups

With Facebook copping a lot of flack about privacy issues, spam and the sharing of inappropriate or offensive content, it’s gone back to it’s mission statement of staying connected with friends and family, and building a community to bring the world closer together. They know that the most meaningful and engaged interactions happen in groups – so say hi to their main focus for 2019.

You may have already noticed the group feed option at the bottom of your app? This has been redesigned to make navigating group content even easier, and the discovery tool points you to other groups based on your data that Facebook thinks you’ll be interested in.

What does this mean for business? Our prediction is that Business Pages will take a backseat to Groups and that focus should be shifting over to how you can create a group that’s meaningful to your target audience. For some businesses, this plays very easily into their offering. For instance a health food brand will be able to create a group for people who love that space (of which there are many). For others though, you might need to think a bit outside the box and start a community for people who are broadly interested in something to do with your industry but not necessarily your product directly. For instance, if you’re selling mattresses there are only so many topics of discussion you could start… but start talking about sleep in general? The options are endless. 

Additionally, Facebook will be rolling out different kinds of groups. For the health space, members will be able to post anonymously so that the potential issue of asking a question that’s particularly personal is taken out of the equation. 

OUR ADVICE: Start a group. Add your mates, your clients… anyone from your existing network who would be engaged with what you’re doing. Start doing a Monday post at the same time every week to get the discussion rolling.

How many times can you say VIDEO?

Our clients are sick of hearing it but guess what? It’s only getting more important guys! Early adopters of high quality video content will be rubbing their hands together as Facebooks updated video best practices guidelines have been released. It’s time to up the anti big time. The recommended standard is now one piece of video content that’s at least three minutes long every week (yes, we know. Insane.) to be complemented with a shorter, more casual piece every week too. There’s too much to cover here so we’ve written another piece on video changes alone.


OUR ADVICE: Read the video blog.

Messenger gets a facelift

The app is about to get faster and lighter, with a desktop app being released soon. Importantly for business, we’ll have access to new lead generation templates for us in messenger. You’ll be able to load your most common Q&A’s into the app for an even better customer experience. The integration of appointment booking will be improved so that viewers can get any information they need and make a time without even having to leave the app. Other plug ins are coming to messenger so stay tuned!

OUR ADVICE: Start playing around in ads manager to get yourself familiar with the new options. Load your top 10 most asked questions and answers up.

eBay, Seek & Tinder, watch out…

Here’s where it starts to get just a tad creepy. The new features are slowly nudging out the need for a lot of other hugely popular platforms. Shopping and marketplace (including buy and sell groups) will become much more sophisticated with the full purchase journey being able to occur in app as opposed to the current experience that takes you out of app to complete the order.

Facebook Dating is soon to be launched in more countries (it’s already been tested in a few). Think about it… all the data Facebook has collected about you since the day you joined up will be used to match you to other users. It has the potential to be incredibly accurate and certainly to make other dating apps irrelevant. 

Another form of Group that will be released is for job advertising and seekers. You’ll be able to advertise and apply for jobs in app from start to finish. 

OUR ADVICE: Stay on top of these new features and think about how you could use them in relation to your business. If you sell a product, the shop changes could be huge.

Overwhelmed? Get in touch and we can chat through how these changes can be used to your advantage.