In an effort to help publishers better connect with their audience on Facebook, the company announced today a new set of tools and and improvements to insights and analytics.
Here is an overview of the new tools:
Interest Targeting
Facebook is making it easier for Pages to target posts more precisely. Similar to how you can target ads and boosted posts based on specific audience interests, Facebook is extending that ability to organic posts.
Post End Date
Now you can set an expiration date on your posts, so to speak. While the posts will still be live on your page, you can set a date for it to stop being displayed in peoples’ news feeds. For example, if you’re posting a sale that’s only on today, it wouldn’t do any good for people to see that post tomorrow. That’s when you could set an end date so your audience doesn’t end up seeing posts with dated content.
Both the Interest Targeting and Post End Date features are now available to all Pages that have enabled the Targeting and Privacy setting, but are only accessible on desktop at the moment.
Smart Publishing
Facebook is taking the guess work out of deciding what stories on your website to share with your audience. This new feature, which is currently only available to a limited number of media organizations, will automatically display your most shared content in the news feeds of people who like your page. The company indicates they hope to make smart publishing more broadly available in the coming months.
Improved Insights
Did one of your articles recently explode in popularity and you’re not sure why? It could be because an influencer or a popular brand shared it on their Facebook page. That’s among the insights you’ll have access to with the improvements announced today.
More accurate and actionable analytics features include a new Top URLs section, which displays URL-level reporting, and a way to segment data based on specific time frames, including hourly insights.
These new features are accessible from your Domain Insights dashboard.