New Product? Give It A Try

You can say a lot of positive and negative things about Facebook 15 years into its existence, but it’s a powerful platform for business marketing right now. The targeting is strong, and the product suite is diverse. You don’t reach 2 billion global users without being smart around decision-making. Heck, they’re even intentional about how they manage their Monday mornings.

New products on Facebook

Facebook has a huge variety of products. Now, some of them have flopped over time, including currently a product called “Lasso” which seems to be an opportunity for Facebook to compete with Chinese app TikTok. 

But, most of their core products are very reliable for helping with business growth. And what we always tell people is that, relative to your bandwidth, whenever Facebook rolls out something new, you should try it. They are rolling it out because they want people to use it. Why else would they have dedicated so much developer and marketing time internally to that product?

Facebook Events

A good example is Facebook Events. Even if you previously had a different system for events, such as Eventbrite or emails, Facebook Events works really well as an addition. On Eventbrite, there’s a way to link your FB Events page. 

Almost every client we’ve worked with on Facebook Events, even if they were initially scared to use it, has found success there. There’s more engagement, it’s easier for people to share, and Facebook’s algorithm will put your event in front of friends who have already marked themselves as “Going” or “Interested,” which expands the event’s reach greatly. 

One of our colleagues actually knows of a brewpub in DFW area that created an event hoping to get about 350 people through the door in the course of the day; they got 1,500 people through the door. The logistics were challenging, but the revenue for the day was 18 times what they had projected. The credit it almost entirely to Facebook Events and the ease of sharing. 

This theory works for other platforms too.

Instagram rolls out new stuff all the time -- “Threads” is a new one -- and so does Pinterest, including native video and cinematic pins. 

The broader advice is that whenever a platform you’re on rolls out something, give it a try. Even if you only try it for 10 minutes a day just to see what the feature is all about, you should still try it. They want users for a new feature/product, and if you see usefulness to that new feature, you could be an early adopter of it. Then your business social starts looking a little bit different than everyone else, because of this new feature, and that’s going to attract some attention. “What’s happening over here?” 

Social media at base is about iterating and exploring and changing your approach, because social media companies are always changing their approach via competition and audience taste. So when they (the parent companies) zig, you should zig too. If you miss the curves within the new products, you can fall behind other companies in how social is getting used. No one wants that!