My key insights from Facebook‘s Global Partner Summit
— Personal connections, creative content, and enriched measurement results
Being bold and growing together are key to meeting the future of social media. Facebook invited us to join their biggest partner event: The Global Partner Summit — Build Beyond. Here are the key insights that we brought home with us.
The Facebook Global Partner Summit is the biggest partner event hosted by Facebook for their 250 partners around the world. As Komfo — the first Preferred Marketing Developer in the Nordics with badges in Community Management and Ad Tech, we were invited to join them between Oct. 4–5 at the beautiful Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco. The conference is primarily focused on talks about the direction where Facebook is going in terms of product roadmaps, APIs, and relevant verticals that help partners work closer with Facebook and be a part of their growth journey.
At the same time, the conference also provides a great opportunity to gain valuable insights into the newest stats on Facebook and Instagram that are relevant for everyone working with social media or having an active social presence. I will share some of the key takeaways from these talks by dividing them into three themes: 1) Creative content; 2) Personal connections; 3) Enriched measurement results.
1) Creative content
Comparing the stats from last year and this year, there is no doubt that both Facebook and Instagram are still growing at a rapid pace. The growth for businesses using Instagram is particularly worth noticing: from 1,5 million businesses last year compared to 15 million businesses now.
The development of Instagram over the last couple of years has meant that the standards of the content we’re sharing have risen. It has also meant that both people and brands were missing the opportunity of sharing so many other things than just the perfect picture. This is when Instagram Stories occurred! When Instagram talks about their development right now, their focus is on ads in Stories. Instagram Stories is the fastest growing product they have ever launched and ads were launched six months ago.
Let me highlight the following: more than 50% of the 15 million businesses that use Instagram actively has created a Story in the last month! This puts things into perspective for brands. However, to get the most value out of Instagram as a business, you should think about content on all three levels of communication: posts, Stories, and ads. Here are some of the things you should focus on: re-arch your content for time (max. 15 seconds in length because you want to match the consumer’s attention on mobile, increase engagement, and be eligible for all placements), craft for space, and play with all the elements.
It wasn’t a surprise that many talks were focused on video. With the emergence of Instagram Stories, we have moved away from the #1 rule when shooting a video- “Never go full screen vertical” to producing video content for a vertical experience.
2) Personal connections
David Marcus, VP of Messenger products, talked about the Messenger roadmap. If any companies out there are still not using Messenger for engaging in a dialogue with their customers, the only thing to do is to get started asap. The rich experince in Messenger enables your brand to maintain a personal relation with your customers even though you are scaling as a business. The current stats reveal how big Messenger has become: 1,3 billion people using Messenger every month. Add to these numbers the fact that 67% people say that they prefer to talk to businesses over Messenger apps instead of all other types of communication channels.
Besides providing a more personal customer service, Messenger (together with Instagram Stories) is also the new highlighted placement for advertising. If you have not played with these features yet, there are two types of ads to consider:
- sponsored messages in Messenger (if a customer has already initiated a dialogue with you in Messenger)
- Click to Messenger ads (News Feed ads with the objective of sending people to Messenger)
With more than 200K active bots on Messenger, there is no doubt that bots are the biggest hype right now. Especially the solutions where bots support the customer service agents and help lower the response time are increasing in popularity.
3) Enriched measurement results
The highlight of the measurement talks at the summit was integrating offline conversions to support omni-channel measurement. Facebook is very much focused on integration for all ad campaigns so, moving forward, you should only have one campaign that tracks all your conversions on social. This will give you an even better overview on where to spend your money.
Offline conversions have been proved to be highly effective and it has shown that is not too complex to work with. It works similar to a custom audience: whatever data you have on store purchases, you can upload it, and it will be matched in Facebook. The richer the data, the better the match rate, of course.
Gad Alon, Director of Data & Measurement Partnerships at Facebook, also shared insights on offline conversions in his talk about measurement based on real people insights. We need to focus on the metrics that matter (not mass click and total reach).
I hope this article has been helpful in terms of providing insights into the event and the current focus of Facebook and Instagram. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions about the event or the findings presented in this article. I am also looking forward to my next trip to Web Summit in Lisbon together with my colleagues from Komfo, so stay tuned for more insights!
