The social media world is always full of updates.
What’s new for this week? Here’s a summary of the latest updates across your favourite platforms.
Facebook Adds New CTA Stickers for Page Stories and incorporates the e-commerce experience with Facebook live
Keen to work with the stories feature, Facebook has now released a new set of CTA stickers for Pages, enabling businesses to make more effective use of the option via direct response tools.
The new buttons mirror the CTA options available in the main header of business Pages. You can now prompt Stories viewers to ‘Shop Now’, ‘Get Directions’ or ‘Book’ directly from the Stories feed.
The option will no doubt be of interest to those businesses considering how they can utilise Stories within their digital marketing process – and whether Facebook Stories is worth the effort.
If Facebook continues to push Stories usage, through in-feed promos and other awareness efforts, that could help boost exposure for your brand Stories content, with less competition currently in the space. And with these new CTA buttons, along with links in Stories (still in testing), the benefits for business promotion may be significant.
On another note; The e-commerce fever affecting social media lately is definitely hard to miss. Facebook has been particularly active in adding more social selling tools to both FB and IG. This latest update, Live Video Mode for Sellers, is an extension of the Shop section for Facebook Pages. It will let you showcase products via live stream and allow users to buy them by taking screenshots. Hopefully, the next step includes a dedicated CTA button!
YouTube is rolling out a new button for video ads
January 2019 is coming with some exciting news for YouTube: get ready to say goodbye to the old CTA buttons! The new update is designed to make ads more integrated and more interactive across all video ad formats. This new, clearer CTA format also fits perfectly with YouTube’s recent major change to remove video annotations. All the pop-up CTAs which appear during playbacks will be deactivated too. Advertisers, you can now sleep tight.
What’s the difference?
Not much, except that ad extensions can be applied to new and existing ads, while the overlays are created as part of an ad. Just like the overlays, the call-to-action extensions are aimed at getting viewers to click through to the advertiser’s website to take further action. The button can be customised with an appropriate call-to-action, such as “Book Now,” “Get a quote” or “Sign up.”
What campaign and ad types will be affected?
This change will apply to campaigns with branding objectives. The new ad extension will be available first for TrueView in-stream ads and eventually to bumper ads and TrueView video discover ads.
Why would you use this ad extension?
Why wouldn’t an advertiser just choose to use the relatively new TrueView for action ad format instead of the call-to-action ad extension? Designed for performance campaigns with conversion or click objectives, TrueView for action ads have calls-to-action built in. TrueView for action ads are only available in the in-stream format and when using the Leads or Website traffic campaign goals and they use automated bidding and targeting.
This change is relatively a minor one. However, if you are currently using and finding success with call-to-action overlays, or felt limited by having to build them into the ads themselves, be ready for the switch and availability of the new call-to-action ad extension at some point next month.
Stay tuned to #SocialSpeak for more on the latest social media trends, and for the inside scoop on what’s happening in 2019.
