The Latest News from Facebook for Business

The way people learn about new products has changed. Read this Facebook IQ report to find out how people across generations and cultures are discovering consumer packaged goods (CPG) and where CPG brands should be connecting with shoppers.

People around the world are adopting visual language, like photos and videos. This Facebook IQ report explores how Europeans use Instagram and how brands can connect with them there.

People come to Facebook and Instagram to share and celebrate everything from birth announcements to meals. Read this conversation between Facebook IQ’s Erin Sills and and Ann M. Mack to learn how brands can join the moments people share online.

People have shifted to mobile. It’s the fastest adoption of a communication technology in history, and it’s changing how we connect with each other and discover new things. Businesses, however, are still making the shift.

Marketers are challenged to reach their customers and drive sales on mobile. The majority of time spent on mobile is in apps, and people spend the majority of that time in just a handful of apps, including Facebook and Instagram.¹ For people, the mobile shopping experience is often difficult to navigate. Customers can experience slow load times and too many steps on the way to checkout. This is bad for people and bad for marketers.

On Facebook we’ve seen that people are coming to our platform not only to connect with friends and family but also with products and brands. In fact, a survey suggested that nearly half of people come to Facebook to actively look for products, with a majority of them discovering new products in News Feed, Pages, and Groups.

This behavior—that’s already happening on Facebook—gives us a chance to make people and marketers’ experiences better. We want to build native experiences that make it easier for both people to discover products on mobile and businesses to drive more sales. Some of our efforts are fully launched and are already creating value for people and businesses. Others are in early test phases. These tests will evolve as we get more feedback.

These days people expect to be able to do everything from their phones. Mobile phones are where people communicate and discover the things they like, but historically, it’s been difficult for people on mobile to signal to businesses that they want to learn more about their products or services. That’s why a few months ago we announced that we were testing a new solution called lead ads that gives people a quick and privacy-safe way to sign up to receive information from businesses, like newsletters, quotes and offers.

Now lead ads are available to advertisers everywhere with a host of additional features that make signing up for business information easy for people and more valuable for businesses. Here are the details on this new ad type that connects businesses with the people who want to hear from them.

After Facebook, Instagram is the leading social network where the most people in the US are spending their time.¹ While people come to Facebook to connect with friends and discover things from people they know, people turn to Instagram for visual inspiration and to explore the world through imagery, giving businesses the opportunity to connect with people in an environment where they’re open to learning about new things.

Since we started running brand awareness ads on Instagram a year and a half ago, businesses have seen impressive results, with 97% of campaigns generating significant lift in ad recall.² Over the past few months, we’ve been working to extend the power of Instagram ads to more advertisers. Now marketers around the world have access to Instagram ads and can purchase them through most Facebook ad management tools.

Since February, we’ve seen 25% growth in the number of active advertisers on Facebook. With 2.5 million advertisers now using the platform, people and businesses continue to connect more and more through Facebook.