Facebook is about to release their first quarterly earnings as a public company. Their responsibility is to their share holders now who expect the social networking giant to keep bringing in the money. One of those methods is by getting more brands on board. Of course, brands aren’t going to go for Facebook unless they have the tools necessary to reach a wider audience.
A lack of tools shouldn’t be a problem as Facebook revealed three new marketing tools for pages last night via their developer blog. The company recognizes that the brand page is the face of the company so that’s why they’ve added “several powerful features that simplify managing and sponsoring Page posts.”
The first is the addition of scheduled page posts. It was a highly requested feature and now it’s available via the Pages Graph API. Facebook is looking deep into the future with this feature as brands are able to create a post and schedule it for publishing between 10 minutes and 6 months from the post creation. If you find an error in the post, page admins can also delete said post as long as it’s more than three minutes away from publishing.
The second feature is called Unpublished Page Posts and it should be really handy for those brands that have made the move to Timeline. The folks at Facebook realize that there might be a post that’s not for everybody who likes your page. There might be an offer that’s only available to a few hundred of the people who follow your brand. For those posts, the page admin can sponsor a post, but have it not show up on the brand’s Timeline. This feature is also accessed via the Pages Graph API.
The final new feature is nice for those pages that have multiple admins. They point out a potential security flaw in admins being granted access to pages through a third-party app like ad management platforms that require admin permissions for managing ads, but doesn’t require such permissions for creating posts. To prevent abuse, permissions can now be extended to these people so they only have access to relevant parts of the page.
For Facebook to continue their growth while keeping investors happy, they need to keep the ad revenue flowing. These simple steps will give more control over pages to the brands and likely increase their spending on the Facebook platform. It will definitely be interesting to see how advertising has shaped Facebook’s revenue this quarter.
To start developing your brand pages with these new features in mind, check out the Pages Graph API documentation.