On the 18th and 19th of July Facebook organized “Facebook Accelerate” in Dublin, to inspire advertisers and agencies and to inform them about upcoming features and products. We’ll give you a brief summary!

Facts & figures

  • 7 million Belgians use Facebook vs 4,2 million Belgian Instagram users
  • 89% of consumers expect that brands/companies respond to messages within 24h -> 56,5% of companies cannot be contacted via social media
  • 80% of Instagram users follow companies
  • 60% of Instagram users discover products or services via Instagram
  • The most used hashtag worldwide: #love
  • Stories behaviour:
    • 40+% of Instagram Stories contain video
    • 1 in 3 Stories receives a direct message

Coming soon

  • Instagram Checkout in app in 3 taps (currently only tested in USA)
  • Dynamic ads for travelling, cars & retail (lead generation, appointment booking, conversation commerce)
  • More creative tools in Instagram Stories (a.o. Storify templates tool to build Stories)
  • Branded ad content influencers (currently only in feed, not in Stories!)
  • New advertising formats in 2019:
    • In stream for Direct Response (Facebook)
    • Dynamic ads for Stories (Instagram)
    • Polling Sticker in ad Stories (Instagram)

Facebook Accelerate - New Formats

Trends

  • Facebook has a clear increase in 1-to-1 and group communication and Facebook will respond to this in the near future. They will also fully commit to the so-called closed environments.
  • 3 shifts
    • Stories, stories and stories (= ephemeral content): 1 trillion
    • Messaging explosion: 100 trillion
    • Video – Social watching > long form engagement: 400 trillion
  • 4 C’s:
    • Curation: newsfeeds are going to be more tailor-made, so that everyone’s newsfeed will be different and unique
    • Community: the Apple community example was used
    • Conversation: messaging is on the rise, yet only 2 in 10 think companies are communicating with people
    • Commerce: technology allows us to do commerce on a larger scale (e.g. native checkout on Instagram -> link in bio caused friction, and therefore they are evolving from product tagging to instashopping.

Facebook Accelerate Stories

Tips & takeaways

  • Highlight the swipe up in Instagram Stories advertisements, bet you’ll get more results?
  • Don’t use undersized target groups -> Facebook itself searches for the best converting individuals, even within a broad target group
  • Try to avoid overlap between Facebook advertising target groups -> if you have multiple ads aimed at the same people, Facebook will only include one ad in the auction (= highest ranking ad). This prevents you from bidding against yourself, but can also cause underdelivery
  • Don’t make any changes to your advertising campaign before you reach at least 50 conversions
  • Holiday season -> start your preparations in time, e.g. in June
  • Facebook doesn’t recognize a difference between a B2C and a B2B approach for your target groups: in both cases it is about a person who has to go through a process
  • Try to avoid friction at all cost and shorten the path towards checkout
  • Check https://business.instagram.com for inspiration

Cases

Oh their Pitch, Play & Plunge model is still stuck in our heads. A strategy in which you combine different assets to get better results.

  • Pitch: make it an immediate get to the many
  • Play: make it interactive for the curious
  • Plunge: make it immersive for the interested to dive in

Pitch Play and Plunge

That’s Facebook Accelerate 2019 in a nutshell. Cheers ?