Facebook Giving Brands New Ways To Convince You To Sign Up For News
It seems Facebook’s design and layout changes almost every other week, which must be a huge headache for Facebook brand owners trying to advertise their products and entice people to sign up for news on those products. Luckily for those owners, Facebook is introducing a bunch of new sign-up tools that will hopefully help Facebook brands get attention from potential customers.
As Venture Beat noted, one of these new Facebook sign-up features is something called a context card, which is a tile that can be made to appear after a Facebook Ad is clicked on, but before any actions are required of the user. This allows people to find out more about a product before they agree to anything such as signing up for a newsletter, and is a completely optional feature that brands can use on their Facebook pages. The feature is especially good for Facebook ad-makers whose products might need a longer description than what can be shown on one Facebook page.
Facebook also introduced a new feature entitled Lead Ads that let advertisers grab sign-ups for their newsletters using just a single click (or touch, depending on the device used). When a Facebook ad captures someone’s interest, they only need to click the link to sign up for news about that product; their email and other personal information, such as where they live, are automatically added through Facebook.
While this will probably prove extremely useful for Facebook’s advertisers, it may be a hindrance to the average Facebook user, especially if they don’t realize that they’re being added to a newsletter or e-mail list. Additionally, some Facebook users do not even approve of letting Facebook store their information, let alone lending it out to advertising partners. It is possible that privacy concerns could lead to this feature being changed, as has happened in the past with other Facebook privacy features, or even eliminated altogether.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iziHXRHYN_c
Facebook is also formatting their ads so that they can be more easily seen on desktops, which would allow advertisers to reach a wider audience. This might also help them find out which devices are most effective to advertise on, thus letting them adopt their Facebook strategies accordingly. Additionally, Facebook might be able to attract more marketers by making their ads platform easier to use and display on any screen.
Facebook’s lead ads are now available on desktop: https://t.co/vAvxM2GUBy pic.twitter.com/EbEwbFeia4
— Marketing Land (@Marketingland) January 20, 2016
Facebook’s new ad platform might also mean that advertisers will have to be more attention-grabbing than before to get clicks. With Facebook’s old system, advertisers had a Facebook “fan page” and a short, maybe 100-word, description to advertise their products. While fan pages aren’t going anywhere, the name of the game is now going to be getting as many clicks as possible for advertisers, and that will mean their short descriptions will have to offer more verbal and visual eye candy to be worthy of a click.
On Facebook’s older platform, many ad “hooks” to grab users were usually generic, “we noticed you like X, so we thought you might also enjoy X” type lead-ins. This may no longer be enough to get clicks once users realize that clicking an ad sacrifices a good deal of their personal information, and auto-subscribes them to a newsletter.
So, will users be swearing off Facebook for the long-term? Probably not. Statista notes that Facebook had 1.55 billion users, as of November, 2015, more than any of the other social networks that were monitored. Facebook has done a fantastic job of attracting and keeping both users and advertisers alike, and it seems this trend will continue regardless of its new marketing tactics.
[Image Via Tara Hunt, Flickr.com, CC-BY SA 2.0]