Farewell 20% Facebook Ad Text Rule
It was a pain. Facebook hates seeing text on ad images. It used to constantly tell you off if you added it. It would threaten to stop your ads or not show them to as many people.
They used to use a complicated system to assess whether your image contained more than 20% text. That changed years ago when they introduced an even more complicated system that decided, was your image light, medium, or heavy on text.
Now, according to sources within Facebook, they have abandoned the text rule altogether.
But before you start adding a tonne of text to your ad images. Facebook still claims that ads with less text work better. And I’d agree, particularly for mobile. Small text is hard to read and excludes people who rely on screen readers.
So yes use text, but use it gently.
New Business tool from Facebook
You’ve got so many ways to manage your business using Facebook. There’s Business Manager for desktop, Creator Studio for desktop, Creator Studio app, Ads manager app, Pages manager app, Instagram. We can do some stuff through the regular Facebook app.
It’s messy, slow and confusing.
Facebook just announced they are launching ‘Business Suite’, which looks like it will bring all those elements together.
One place to manage everything on desktop and mobile.
It’s being rolled out to small businesses first and will replace business manager on desktop and the pages manager on mobile.
LinkedIn may copy Twitter’s conversation controls
As LinkedIn grows in popularity, conversations could get out of hand. At least that’s what LinkedIn seems to think.
It could be considering conversation controls, just like we’ve seen on Twitter, to combat this problem.
The test, spotted by Alessandro Paluzzi, could see the option to limit the people who can comment on posts to; your connections or ‘no one’.
I’m really not a fan of the ‘no one’ option on either Twitter or LinkedIn. If you use it you want to be sure to give people some call to action like a poll to get them engaging.
WhatsApp Multi Device
WhatsApp is growing as a business tool but there is one big problem. It’s tied to a phone number. That means, as a business only one person has the keys to the app.
Yes, you can use the desktop version but your phone needs to be nearby to access it.
Thankfully this could soon change.
Linked Devices will allow you to add up to four devices to your WhatsApp account making it easier for small businesses to stay on top of customer enquiries.
https://www.androidauthority.com/whatsapp-linked-devices-1160492/
IGTV gets automated captions
Captions are essential for online videos. Both for accessibility and for getting more views from people who watch with the sound off.
A few weeks ago we saw a test from Instagram to add captions to stories, now it’s IGTV.
The captions will be created automatically which means they’ll be full of mistakes (probably). But Instagram is confident its AI will learn from users over time and the captions will improve.
Facebook live now has live automatic captions, the technology is within Facebook so it seems odd it’s taking so long to roll it out to Instagram.
At the moment it’s unclear if you’ll be able to edit the captions. If you can’t you’ll still need to rely on burnt in captions.
Facebook refreshes video insights
Is it worth posting your videos on Facebook? It can be hard to tell. I sometimes wonder if Facebook hides stats away from us.
This week Facebook is rolling out new video stats called ‘Details Explorer’. You can access them from Creator Studio by clicking the video you want to analyse.
Much of it is the same info we’ve always had but reformatted so it’s easier to access.
One new stat that will be helpful is being able to see how many people watched over a period of time. So after launch are people still watching 2 days later? You’ll even be able to break this down by the hour.
It could give you a better idea of when to post your videos.
One snippet is that the presenter mentions getting people to watch for 1 minute is important. The first 60 seconds of your video are crucial, make sure you keep people engaged. It also hints that this could be important to the Facebook Algorithm.
New emojis for 2021
Emojis are an important part of our online communication. They can help express the context of our words, make good shorthand and add a bit of colour to otherwise dull text posts.
Every year sees new emojis added to the library. This week we found out what some of the 2021 emojis would be.
These include ‘Head in clouds’ ‘Heart on fire and ‘woman with beard’. Some of the others may need a bit more work to interpret.
https://blog.emojipedia.org/217-new-emojis-in-final-list-for-2021/
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