At the F8 Refresh Conference – Facebook’s biggest public event of the year – developers unveiled several new, business-focused tools for key platforms, including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Let’s take a look at what this news means for social organisations.
Login Connect with Messenger Offers Engagement, Personalisation, and Customer Care
This is essentially a separate portal for users where they can opt in to connect and engage with businesses, letting customers communicate with businesses through the messenger platform directly from the Facebook Login flow. The idea is to create a new entry point for customer message threads, to allow businesses to send personalised welcome messages/discounts/offers directly to customers, and make customer care more accessible and effective.
This tool is currently in development in a closed beta, but the rollout is planned in the next few months, so it’s a good time for businesses to explore how to use this option to its full potential.
WhatsApp Messenger Functionality Gets a Business Boost
WhatsApp, with around 2 billion users worldwide, is also getting more business-orientated functionality. This includes supporting more types of messages – for example, allowing businesses to send a push notification to a customer when a requested product is back in stock.
It’s also getting plenty of features that allow businesses to speed up their responsiveness on a business account, including customer care tools that allow you to write up 20 pre-written messages for responses, and reply buttons with pre-populated replies from customers. It’s also faster than ever to set up an account – all it takes is 5 minutes.
Instagram Insights is More Informative Than Ever Before
Tracking ROI on Instagram Insights is one of the best ways to see how your content is connecting with your audience, helping to tailor social campaigns for greater impact. You can now track the content effectiveness of Reels by looking at Likes, Comments, Shares, Saves, Plays, and Accounts Reached. For Lives, you can get analytics on Accounts Reached, Peak Concurrent Views, Comments, and Shares. You’ll get more detailed information on Reach to understand who you are connecting with and who is driving your content performance.
The Turn-Off Likes feature is still in development and will be an interesting challenge for Instagram businesses, as it allows users to decide whether they prefer an experience where they can see like counts on posts or not.
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Jordan is the Chief Commercial Officer at Otto. Jordan is here to help clients remove roadblocks and achieve the business goals they’ve set out. Jordan’s biggest focus is Customer Experience, Business Relationship Management, Risk Management and Strategy.
