The Latest News from Facebook for Business

Over the last few months, we’ve launched new messaging features for Pages in an effort to help people and businesses easily communicate on any device. As we’ve introduced new features and heard from Page Admins on how messaging is working for them, we’ve added a few additional tips to our messaging guidelines for Page Admins and given the guidelines their own page on the Facebook for Business website.

Each of these businesses has a unique story and mission. Whether it’s fashion or fitness, confidence or creativity, each business offers something to its customers and communities that no one else does.

To celebrate the businesses that use Facebook to grow, we created Your Business Story—a tool that makes it easy to create a video that shows what your business brings to the world. Because we believe the best way to tell the story of three million businesses is to empower each one to share their own.

Joining Instagram is like walking into a party, says Jason Peterson of Havas Worldwide in Chicago. In the second episode of Pub in Pub season two, hear Jason explain his theory on how brands must learn to speak “the language of the party” to connect with people on Instagram.

He also discusses the importance of brands creating content for Instagram that is immediately recognizable as their own. Watch the video to see how he uses the @reynoldskitchen Instagram account to do this for the iconic Reynolds Wrap® brand.

Whether you’re in finance or the auto industry, gaming or ecommerce, the carousel format can help you connect with your audience and accomplish your goals. With room for up to five images and videos in a single ad, the carousel format is available on Facebook, Instagram and the Audience Network and gives you a larger canvas to tell your story and show your products.

Since we launched the carousel format last year, businesses have been using the carousel format to accomplish a variety of goals. Lands’ End used carousel ads to increase online sales and attract new summer shoppers, boosting total sales by 4.4% in less than a month. Direct Energy used carousel ads to build product and service awareness, increasing engagement 2.5X over previous link ad campaigns.

Here we’ve compiled creative guidelines for designing the best carousel ad for your goal. Read on before creating your next carousel ad.

Just as fashions change and evolve, so does the fashion in which people shop for clothes. People are increasingly buying their outfits online. In fact, according to a recent study commissioned by Facebook, one in three shoppers say they’ve increased their online spending on clothing in the last year.

Read the Facebook IQ report to find out the facts and learn what this means for fashion retailers.

It’s fairly well understood now that of the time people spend online, they’re spending it on mobile and in just a handful of apps, including Facebook. What’s remained top of mind for advertisers is how challenging it is for them to tell compelling brand and product stories on mobile in ways that are enjoyable for people and effective for their business. The data tells them people are discovering content, brands and products in mobile apps, so advertisers are looking for new and creative ways to share information with people there.

We’re committed to building great mobile experiences for people and doing so also opens up new creative possibilities for advertisers. We’ve invested in engaging experiences like video and the carousel format to empower advertisers with more creative space to share their brand and products on mobile. But the website that opens after someone clicks on an ad is often slow to load and not always optimized for mobile, creating a disjointed and frustrating experience for people. And website pages are only growing in file size. In 2015, the average website page was three times bigger than it was in 2011,¹ and slow load times are a top reason people abandon a website.

These trends tell us that advertisers need a better way to share information after people click on their ad, and the information offered after someone clicks needs to load quickly, look beautiful on mobile and allow people to take action easily.

We built Canvas—a new post-click, full-screen, immersive mobile ad experience on Facebook that loads nearly instantaneously—to solve this problem. Canvas was created with input from the creative community at every step and is designed to help businesses tell stories and show products on mobile devices in a beautiful way. Canvas is available to advertisers around the world starting today.

More and more of life is happening online, including personal relationships. In a recent study commissioned by Facebook IQ, insight and innovation experts Crowd DNA surveyed people in Nigeria, South Korea, the UK and the US and found that more than half of them said that they enjoy their online interactions with friends and family members as much as their real-life interactions.

Learn how marketers can celebrate relationships and connect to people online in creative ways in this second installment of Facebook IQ’s report on tech transformation.