I just hung up the phone with my Facebook rep and here are the latest updates for you…
1. Lead Ads (lead generation campaign objective)
The MASSIVE announcement for lead ads this week is that you can use videos in your lead generation ads. This is HUGE! Whether you are offering a lead magnet report, a free webinar, a free quote, consultation or whatever you do to add value in your ads you can now close the gap between what you are offering and why they should tap submit on your lead ad and give you their personal information. 
Video with lead ads is a great way to build value for your offers within the Facebook newsfeed without the pain of manually filling out web forms. This combination should enable us to drive down our cost per lead and Facebook loves video so you’ll get your ad inventory for less also.
If you currently are using video ads that drive folks to a traditional landing page I’d highly recommend that you recreate those ad campaigns with lead ads (lead generation objective) and start testing them right away.
Also, if you have videos on YouTube or someplace else I recommend that you start testing lead ads ASAP. With image ads we’ve been generating leads for about $1.50 each for months now. We are super excited to start testing this ourselves to see if we can increase the number of leads per day while also driving down our cost per lead.
Lastly, if you don’t have any videos at all and you want to get started, simply upload up to 7 images with the “Create Slideshow” option and Facebook will create a video for you out of those images. It’s amazing! We’ve been having great success with these video types in our ads.
Obviously, you can use SyncSumo to pull those leads out of Facebook in real-time so you can fire off your email marketing campaigns and also push them into a Custom Audience to show them “Thank You” ads so you can get them to your lead magnet and pixel them after they’ve opted in. You don’t want to rely solely on the email to get that done.
2. Engagement Targeting
Facebook is starting to roll out “Engagement on Facebook” Custom Audiences. This means you can create a list of people who have engaged with your videos on Facebook. This is amazing because if they’ve viewed your video(s) then they already have an interest in your “stuff” so retargeting those folks based on their engagement with your videos.
Here is a glimpse of what I mean…
My Facebook rep is talking to other folks at Facebook to get an official rollout date for this feature so you know when it will be available for everyone across the globe.
Lastly, if you’d like to read more about this topic, Jon Loomer put together a great blog post on the “Engagement on Facebook” Custom Audiences.
3. Instant Articles WordPress Plugin
Facebook launched Instant Articles some time ago to allow publishers to create great content that would load lightning fast as do images and videos within the Facebook newsfeed. Now Facebook has brought Instant Articles to everyone by creating a WordPress plugin that enables you to turn any of your blog posts into Instant Articles on Facebook. This is phenomenal! You can download the plugin here on GitHub (it’s not in the WordPress plugin directory yet).
The plugin’s full functionality will launch on April 12th but you can go ahead and install the plugin today!
I hope that you can take these new Facebook updates and start applying them in your business to get more out of your advertising and marketing efforts 🙂
