The biggest social media platform on Earth is aimed at publishers and marketers.
Recently, Facebook has launched a new set of publisher tools that is able to target posts and promote timely content, as well as greater automation. The update comes at a time when publishers are basking in the massive amount of traffic that Facebook sends, while also voicing some concern about increasing reliance on the social network.
The biggest addition is the interest targeting, which uses Facebook’s vast trove of data to create subject areas that can be added to posts. Just about anything can be a target, including locations, celebrities and sports teams. Social media marketers will also be able to put end dates for when posts should stop receiving promotions in News Feeds. The purpose of this tool is to encourage news publishers to post more timely stories, such as weather forecasts or game recaps. The stories will remain on Facebook, but will not receive promotion after the set end date.
The third tool, called Smart Publishing, takes some of the guesswork out of which stories to post on Facebook. The tool, which will be available only to a limited group of media outlets before a broader audience, tracks which stories users are posting to Facebook, and publishes them to the News Feeds of people that have liked that organisation’s page. However, these stories will not automatically appear on the Facebook pages of a given media outlet; rather, it will appear in the back-end analytics that social media managers use. That dashboard, called Domain Insights, is also getting a refresh, with a new interface and greater detail on referral traffic.
These tools have been in the works for about six months and were built in collaboration with media partners that made a variety of requests for improvements to its publishing platform. It is hard to overstate Facebook’s importance to online publishers. It was already widely known that Facebook is a major traffic driver for online publishers, moving about 20% of traffic to news sites.