At the beginning of May, Facebook held its every year F8 conference. This convention is in which Facebook discusses the overall destiny of the platform and unveils its upcoming trends and features to developers, entrepreneurs, and different professionals. This yr, Facebook announced several upgrades to its Messenger provider and new, advertising-centered features. These changes and additions to the messaging platform are crucial to look at, specifically on the subject of how they’ll impact our current advertising efforts.
Let’s see what’s coming to Facebook Messenger and how we can begin making ready and strategizing for these adjustments.
1. Messenger Desktop App
This is perhaps the least vital replacement, however nonetheless well worth citing. Facebook is creating a laptop app for Messenger. The cause I don’t find this modification that is existence-changing for organizations is because you could already use Messenger on a laptop tool. Log in to Facebook and head over for your messages. However, Facebook did point out that one of the number one capabilities and dreams in the back of this computing device model of Messenger would be as a collaboration device. The laptop Messenger empowers groups to “have video calls, collaborate on tasks or multitask even as chatting.” We ought to start seeing Messenger used extra with teams to proportion thoughts and have weekly conferences.
2. Lighter, Faster, Leaner
Facebook is redesigning its Messenger app to be faster and much less strenuous on tool storage. They’ve labeled the task “LightSpeed,” and the aim is a Messenger app that launches in beneath 2 seconds and requires only 30MB to put in. To reap this, they’ve “rebuilt from the floor upon an entirely new code base,” which means we’ll have a Messenger app. This is just extra optimized for these days’ want for immediate loading and immediacy.
While this can now not directly affect advertising and marketing, we could see extra humans the usage of Messenger with this lighter, faster app. Not most effective because the rate could be extra aligned with what’s predicted these days, especially within the mobile environment, but also because it’s miles 70MB smaller than the old Messenger.
This makes it less difficult for humans with low garages on their devices to locate space to house the app. And offers an even greater motive for organizations to take a check out Messenger bots and funnels.
3. Close Friends Groups
One future function that might be troubling to companies is close to pals businesses. It’s unclear what the professional call for this selection will be. Still, the recognition is to help Facebook users have a “devoted area” to attach and percentage content with their closest pals and own family. Users had been capable of designating a close pal listing inside the past or even seeing a feed of handiest content posted with the aid of individuals of this organization. The difference between this new characteristic is privateness.
Facebook needs its users to proportion content material with close buddies without the fear that others will see or that it may be held in opposition to them in the future. Based on early screenshots, it appears that customers can create multiple corporations. This is every other distinction from the “Close Friends” function of the day before this, where users had most effective a single listing. Those companies feel like miles greater, more advantageous institutions chat with a heavier cognizance on the content material over undeniable text communique.
It wasn’t clear whether businesses may be blanketed in those businesses, or maybe create their personal. I really hope so, especially the latter, because this has a lot of ability as an effective advertising channel. It could permit a commercial enterprise to talk with an organization of precise clients or audience phase right away.
Another manner I see this being really impactful is for organizations with a couple of saving places or branches. Groups might be created for every vicinity to allow these man or woman branches to speak and proportion content material without delay to their nearby clients.
While this is plausible, it would be a far greater seamless enjoy with this group function with region-unique Facebook pages. Plus, we wouldn’t need to war with the shortage of organic posts displaying in News Feeds. Alternatively, B2B marketers may want to use these groups as a handy, committed area while speaking with all involved events at a prospective consumer’s enterprise.
4. Better Group Video Viewing
A communal video looking is a growing fashion. The proof is within the fulfillment of streaming structures like Twitch, with 15 million day-by-day lively customers and YouTube’s thriving community.
Facebook also has its eyes on enhancing its users’ ability to engage with video content together. People have a preference to watch films and interact with the content creator and other viewers. We’ve first visible this happen itself on Facebook through stay streaming.
Then, closing July, Facebook created Watch Parties. This characteristic allowed corporations to host a Watch Party, wherein users view and chat about website online-hosted films collectively and in real-time. These events create tons more engagement, as excessive as 8x the feedback than a regular video published to Facebook.
For Facebook, the logical next step for Watch Party and communal video looking is Messenger. According to Facebook, customers will “be able to seamlessly percentage a video from the Facebook app on Messenger and invite others to watch together whilst messaging or on a video chat.”
