Facebook has slowly been rolling out features to win small businesses over again. After experiencing some negative feedback on the difficulties caused by a lack of follower engagement, which Facebook makes businesses pay for now, Facebook still has some tricks up their sleeves – and continues to play the long game.
Most recently, Facebook has given business pages a Call-To-Action button. By default, this is a “Call Now” button, but it can be customized to accommodate most relevant actions.
What’s the strategy for Facebook here?
They want to make the Facebook page sexy again. From a business standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. If Facebook’s Ad platform continues to be a cost-effective way to target customers, driving ad traffic to Facebook pages keeps all users inside the single ecosystem, which in turn, allows Facebook to be a full-service platform for everybody.
We’ll see if advertisers will be given a discount to direct traffic to these new CTA’s. If I were Facebook, I’d be publishing case studies, and offering promotions to get businesses in the door with this concept.
There’s no doubt that this can work. The next obstacle for Facebook will be making sure they effectively track the return on investment for these businesses so that they can help guide their ad dollars toward the right demographics. This will come with more visibility to user engagement and the fluctuation of ad prices on the platform.
I can’t wait to see where Facebook takes their business platform in the future. Rumor has it, they’re making an email killer slated for launch next year.