As Facebook becomes a public company, it is more focused on businesses than ever before. Over the years, it has served as a incredible tool for businesses, but now the company is concentrating more on Facebook ads and Facebook Pages than any other time.
Certainly, brands are not going to go for Facebook unless they have the tools necessary to reach a wider audience. Facebook recently revealed three new marketing tools for pages via their developer blog, which include scheduled and unpublished page posts, as well as more specific permissions for third-party access.
Facebook pages, widely used by businesses to promote brand awareness, as well as provide forums for direct interaction with consumers and users. The company recognizes that the brand page is the face of the company so that is the major reason they have added “several powerful features that streamlines managing and sponsoring Page posts.”
The first is the addition of scheduled page posts. Post scheduling especially can be a huge boon for admins, who sometimes get stuck with too much content and too little time. Besides, it was a highly requested feature and now it is available via the Pages Graph API.
Facebook is diving deep into the future with this feature allows admins to create posts and schedule them for publishing anytime between 10 minutes and 6 months from the post creation.
According to a post on the Facebook developers blog, if you find an error in the post or just change your mind about the scheduled publish time of the post, page admins can also delete the said post as long as it is more than three minutes away from publishing.
Another interesting update that Facebook has rolled out will now allow administrators to create posts that do not show up on a Page’s Timeline. This includes sponsored posts, which often contains information that is only relevant to a certain portion of the brand’s demographic (50 percent off women’s shoes in Bay Area stores, for example). With unpublished page posts, posts will only appear on the right-hand column, not in the newsfeed.
More so, the social media giant also announced the introduction of specific permissions for third-party apps often used for Page content creation, moderation, engagement, or ad creation.
“For instance, imagine an ads management platform that creates page posts sponsored stories and monitors Pages’ insights,” said Facebook’s Omid Saadati. “Such an app requires permissions for managing ads for the page and reading the page’s insights, but it does not need permissions for creating page posts and monitoring posts’ comments. The Page admin can add the admin of the ads platform as a Page admin with Ads Creator permission.”
Of course, for Facebook to continue their growth while keeping investors cheerful, they need to keep the ad revenue pouring. Hence, these simple steps will give more control over pages to the brands and likely increase their spending on the Facebook platform. It will definitely be interesting to see how advertising has shaped Facebook’s revenue this quarter.
To start developing your brand pages with these new features in mind, check out the Pages Graph API documentation.