Facebook F8 Insights : What is Relevant to Myanmar
REVO’s Business Director, Yan “James” Aung shares his experience and thoughts regarding F8 2018, which he attended as a representative of REVO, and how it is relevant to Myanmar. Let us take a quick tour through his recounting of the important details from the event and the insights he wrestled with his busy schedule to share with us.
F8, the annual developer conference organized by Facebook, is where the biggest social network of our time usually announces its exciting new features and products. This year’s F8 happened to be a two-day conference with 2 major keynotes and 50+ break-out sessions around the three main topics; Keeping People Safe, Platform Updates and Future Tech. My schedule did not permit me to attend all those interesting break-out sessions but fortunately, here is the link to all the videos from F8 2018. For those who do not have enough time to go through all the videos or who do not care enough — read on.
Keeping People Safe
It’s not so surprising that keeping people safe was the headliner topic throughout F8. For this mission, Facebook is looking at these three areas: elections, fake news/accounts and data privacy.
To ensure the integrity of the upcoming mid-year election Facebook is not only deploying new technologies but also employing 20,000+ people. This is a such massive effort that it makes me wonder what we are doing to protect the integrity of our own upcoming Myanmar election.
To tackling fake news/accounts, Facebook is deploying AI to identify, penalize and delete content and users that do not follow its community guidelines, and is embedding fact checkers: Myanmar pseudo-media publishers will be facing more obstacles in sustaining their businesses.
In keeping audience data private, Facebook is limiting data requests by developers and giving more control to the users. The user will soon have an option to delete all the historical data on Facebook. This may have the highest impact on those advertisers who rely on custom audience and audience targeting.
Platform Updates
Facebook announced tons of updates during the conference. I will not be able to cover everything but here are some toplines –
One interesting thing Facebook is launching is Comment Upvote/Downvote, just like Reddit. This may mean that in the future, Facebook may track not only the engagement of the posts but also the quality of the engagement of the posts.
The new features such as Match, 3D Photos, Live Video Watch Party and Commentary are remarkable in their own rights. And as part of their 10 years plan, they are putting Market Place, Group, and Messenger platforms into the spotlight. Messenger got so much attention this year that I think it deserves to have its own separate sub-title and discussion.
Group is something all digital marketers should be exploring into now. There are three reasons why Group needs your attention.
1) It is a good place where you can listen to your audience’s authentic voices.
2) It is also where you can gather user-generated content if played right.
3) And none of Facebook’s drastic changes will affect Facebook group any soon.
If you are worrying about investing all your marketing spending into Facebook pages, Facebook group is another obvious option.
Messenger
Facebook has reached its final phase of testing messenger ads. You will definitely be seeing more and more messenger ads in the future. Back in February, Facebook took out the minimum limit of Messenger interactions to be able to advertise on Messenger. I also suspect the reason for the new Messenger UI is to be able to deploy the ads in a more efficient and user-friendly way.
Another upgrade coming to the Messenger is AR. With Augmented Reality, you will be able to see and trial the products using Messenger’s Camera function. An interesting point is that AR functionality can only be used with bots at this current stage, meaning Facebook is also looking forward to the developers and agencies to deploy more and more bots.
Other Updates
Instagram Explore page will be getting a new face-lift where they will categorize users’ photos based on their hashtags. Captions on Instagram will become less important while using relevant and trendy hashtags becomes more crucial.
Instagram usage is growing in Myanmar and the user base is no longer small nor insignificant. Instagram is a place for you to explore if your business is lifestyle or consumer related.
WhatsApp is launching WhatsApp Business where marketers can advertise using the standalone Ads Dashboard. But with very limited usage in Myanmar, I do not see WhatsApp taking off in the foreseeable future.
Group Video Chat is now available on WhatsApp and Instagram. And their Stories features were upgraded with third-party integrations.
Future Tech
Facebook has this audacious 10-year plan and they are into their third year now. If you are a digital marketer working with Facebook, you should keep an eye on how they are progressing into it. AR/VR and AI are the new future techs that headlined and they are integrated with every single product of Facebook.
AR/VR
Since the debut of Google Glass till now, we have yet to a large-scale marketing campaign that has been successfully pulled off using AR/VR. But I think the time is coming soon.
Messenger Camera is now available for Augmented Reality in the closed testing environment. Once it is launched, it will become the largest AR platform in the world. Nike, Sephora, Kia and ASUS tested their campaigns, and they looked very impressive. That is why Myanmar marketing agencies should definitely start looking into 3D visualization and AR/VR capabilities.
AI
Facebook is deploying Artificial Intelligence in their back-end process of every single product. It is usually not user-facing features, but we all are already seeing the effects from it.
Facebook has been updating its content monitoring system with AI and it was deployed in March 2018. Reaction baiting posts will be detected using said AI technology. There may be some ways to hack around the news-feed change, but it is only a matter of time before the machine recognizes it. The pages or ads will not be directly affected but if you regularly break the rules, Facebook will take action. Facebook is also working on AI vision to drive AR/VR development and content management.
In conclusion, it is safe to say the star of F8 2018 was AI, and its capabilities — AI reasoning to deploy in the back-end processes to minimize human labor and man-made errors, and AI leveraged natural language processing to understand, translate content and ultimately, connect more people.
Here at REVO, we are bonding creativity with state-of-the-art digital technology to preach brand messages across every and all platforms. Holla at us at hello@revotech.co .
