New Facebook Features: What Marketers Need to Know

Are you using Facebook for your business?

Are you wondering how Facebook's newest features can help your business?

To learn about what these new Facebook features mean for marketers, I interview Mari Smith for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Mari Smith, who is known as the Queen of Facebook. She's the world's leading authority on Facebook marketing and author of The New Relationship Marketing and co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day.

Mari shares how the new Facebook features can work for your business and what you should pay attention to. You'll learn how to use the new hashtags and how to make the most of your cover image.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Facebook Features for Marketers
Has Facebook rolled out a lot of changes recently in response to Twitter and Google?

Mari states that there are many reasons for these new changes, although not necessarily in response to Twitter and Google+. However, Mark Zuckerberg and his entire team do keep a very close eye on the competition.

When it comes to features that have been around for a while, Facebook tends to be late with their release simply because they are a much bigger machine. They have a lot more complexity to deal with.

With Facebook being a public company, they have to make money for their shareholders. They've made a lot of changes to their ad product and it seems like they move things around to try and get the marketers attention.

Listen to the show to find out why most of the features are there to predominantly improve the monetization aspect.

What Facebook hashtags are and why marketers should care

Mari explains that the simple definition of a hashtag is that it's a way to group conversations together, around the same topic. This makes it easy to discover and follow conversations. Just like you see on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn.

If you think about TV ads 2-3 years ago, the call to action would be an invite to join the brand, where they would give out their Facebook Fanpage. Now the call to action is a hashtag.

You'll hear Mari talk about the reason behind why some TV shows have niche hashtags appear throughout their broadcast, instead of one main hashtag.

As a business owner you need to start to experiment with hashtags. Find one or two hashtags that can help you ride a wave. There's a term called newsjacking. It doesn't sound very nice but it's a very popular way to get your business in front of people who are talking about something anyway.

The great thing about Facebook's hashtags, is that they are clickable. So if you click on any, whether it's on a Post or a Comment, it opens up into what is called the Hashtag Feed. This feed displays other posts with the same hashtag.

However, recently they have introduced related searches into this feature. So not only will you see the exact verbatim hashtag but also similar ones.

As a strategic marketer, Mari highly recommends every business owner make good use of hashtags. Even if you don't have them personally, they are active for other people.

Listen to the show to find out how clickable hashtags can get you in front of new people.

Tips and creative uses for Facebook hashtags

Mari uses two generic Facebook hashtags which are #facebookmarketing and #facebooktips. You'll hear what hashtag Mari uses to separate herself away from her peers.

It's where you'll find all of her posts.