Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) launched a new small business product bundle this week. It’s designed to help the 90 million small businesses using it. The new products integrate on both Facebook and Instagram.
New Facebook Small Business Marketing Tools
Small Business Trends spoke with Nikila Srinivasan, Director of Product Management at Facebook. She explained about the three new offerings.
Automated Ads
Automated Ads creates ads that can run across Instagram and Facebook. Campaigns are created in four steps. First, small businesses can use existing images and business pages. Best of all, you can customize these to specific business goals.
It works like this. Facebook pulls in a small businesses’ Instagram and Facebook images. The SMB picks 6 from these. After that, the business picks a target market they can change later. There’s also a recommended marketing plan and ongoing optimization.
“We do this optimization as time goes on so we can communicate back with the business,” Srinivasan says. “We can even make improvements for them on the back end.”
She explains the reason behind this.
“This was built for small businesses without the time or marketing expertise to think about these strategies . This is the product that’s going to do the heavy lifting for them.”
It’s important since most of Facebook’s 7 million active advertisers are SMB’s.
“One small business even calls it a co-pilot,” she says. “I thought that was a really appealing way to describe what this product does.”
Appointments
Service-based small businesses will want to pay attention to this. Appointments allows you to accept and manage customer information. What’s more. they make appointments from their phones for free. You can even set reminders. Srinivasan says Facebook launched this globally.
It’s an excellent addition for SMB’s like online freight brokers, digital marketing and a variety of consulting services. Having that kind of reach over several platforms is great for your bottom line.
Customers click the “book now” button to choose services . They can make the appointments right on the Facebook or Instagram page. As well, they can connect to a different site or have a Messenger conversation.
Video Creative Tools
These keep pace with the trend where video is increasingly important for marketing. These tools help build mobile phone videos in only minutes.
Choose from three tools. The first is automatic cropping. This changes the video to the right aspect ratio the advertiser chooses.
The second aspect is a manual trimming tool.
Srinivasan explains, “This allows an advertiser to take a 6o-second video and cut it down because we know that shorter videos tend to do really well.”
The third tool allows advertisers to add imaging and text overlays over video. This is excellent for your branding efforts. You can add logos and get boosted recognition.
Image: Facebook