Social Media News Roundup: Facebook Adds New Adverts

Social Media News Roundup: Facebook Adds New Adverts

James Allen brings you the latest in social media marketing news, including Facebook’s new adverts, Instagram’s newest change to image CTAs, Twitter’s new ‘hours of availability’ feature, and more.

Facebook Adds New Type of Advert

Facebook has recently added a new type of dynamic advert to its social media platform – Retail ads.

Facebook’s new adverts, named ‘Dynamic Ads for Retail’, are designed to help boost retailers’ in-store sales. In a recent report released by the US Department of Commerce, it is said that up to 92.5 percent of sales are made in-store, as oppose to the small amount made through e-commerce.

Facebook’s director of monetisation product marketing, Maz Sharafi, said:

For us, solving this mobile-to-store challenge is one of the biggest and most important opportunities for us to be spending our mindshare on.

Facebook’s new ad format highlights specific products that are available in stores, and has a way to target local people who are likely to visit the store. A number of brands have already tested the new ad format, including Argos, Target, Abercrombie & Fitch and more.

Twitter Relaxes 140-Character Limit

Twitter has relaxed its 140-character tweet limit, allowing users to include photos, quoted tweets, and other media types without exceeding the strict character limit of 140 characters.

Earlier this year on 24 May, Twitter announced that they would be changing the rules upon the 140-character tweet limit. Twitter said it would discount media attachments as characters and stop counting targeted usernames as characters. Now, the changes have come into play.

The changes to the character count have not increased the amount of characters a user can tweet, but just removed a number of character counting elements. Users can now include media files, quoted tweets and targeted (@) usernames without breaking into their 140-character limit.

A button allowing users to quickly and easily retweet or quote tweet themselves has also been added as part of the update.

Instagram’s New Call to Action Increases Conversion Rate

Instagram has redesigned the call-to-action that can be found on direct-response ads, which has resulted in increased conversion rates.
In June 2016, Instagram reformatted the call-to-action button, and turned it into a full-width bar. Only one month after this, in July, 20 gaming advertisers who run image-only app install ads saw an increase in conversion rate of 32 percent.

Following this success, Instagram is now working on a bunch of features for direct-response ad call-to-actions ready for release. This was announced on Thursday 15 September on Instagram’s official business blog.

Twitter Introduces New Brand Availability Feature

Thanks to a new update, business profiles on Twitter now have the ability to display their hours of availability on their page, with a button allowing them to send it via direct message.

Twitter’s new feature allows brands to display the hours they are available to reply to tweets on their page, such as ‘24/7’, or ‘4am-11pm’. Along with the addition of on-page availability hours, comes a button that users can click to send a direct message.

The feature was released on Thursday 15 September, and can be used by any business profiles, as long as their settings are configured to allow messages from anyone.