Facebook recently opened up its Timeline features to brands, which they see as a key part in transitioning from an advertising platform to a marketing platform. “We are evolving from ads to stories,” said Facebook’s director of global business marketing Mike Hoefflinger.
Facebook also showed off new ad units and tools designed to transition brands to engage with existing and new fans better. One of the enhancements is the Reach Generator product letting brands amplify content posted to pages, since only 16 percent of fans see a brand’s post on average, guaranteeing the tool will spread a post to 75 percent of a brand’s fans over the course of a month is a big deal.
Unfortunately, brands might not realize how large the reach gap is. “[Rather than focus primarily on engagement rates] people are worried about reaching quarterly or annual ‘like’ goals,” said Ian Schafer, CEO and founder of digital agency Deep Focus. “[Facebook’s push toward more content-oriented ads] might be the nail in the coffin with Facebook saying [acquiring fans is] not the most important thing.”
“[But for brands to succeed with a storytelling strategy] requires a completely new approach to content creation and media that is specific to Facebook and not likely to fit in an existing internal department or external agency very neatly,” said Jamie Tedford, CEO of social marketing firm Brand Networks.
This could potentially impact the cottage industry of companies built entirely to service Facebook advertising. However, there will still be a rejiggering required to migrate to the new layout. “The transition burden will fall most heavily on creative and user experience professionals,” said Sav Banerjee, executive strategy director at digital agency Rokkan.
Source: AdWeek
