Facebook are holding their annual two-day developer conference – Facebook F8 – this week. While a lot of the announcements are aimed more at developers, with plenty of technical updates, there are always several announcements made of upcoming features and changes to the Facebook platform that would be of interest to people working in marketing. Here are the announcements from Facebook F8 that are worth a look at for marketeers. Facebook Quote Sharing Facebook Quote Sharing Facebook’s upcoming Quote Sharing feature is new way for people to easily share quotes they find around the web or in apps with their Facebook friends. Highlighting a few lines of text brings up a Facebook button that lets you post the quote directly to Facebook, along with a link to the article using Facebook’s familiar rich card format. Facebook is playing catch up here as there are lots of services to make quote sharing for platforms like WordPress already in existence, as well as features like Twitter’s recently introduced Quote Tweet feature. With Facebook’s new Quote Sharing, it might be worth lining up soundbites from blog posts, quotes from speeches or presentations, or publishing key facts and insights that fans might want to share using this new feature. What other soundbites, facts and figures, or key insights could you share on your Facebook page? Save Button The Save Button lets people save interesting articles, products, videos, and more from around the web into their Saved folder on Facebook, where they can easily access it later from any device. While we’re not sure if the analytics for how many people use the Save Button will be available for publishers, this would be useful to see which type of content gets saved by your fans for later reading or watching. facebook f8 conference Bots for Messenger If you’re a user of Slack and love the variety of bots you get for the platform, then you’re going to love Bots for Facebook Messenger. As part of Facebook Messenger, bots will be provide anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages — all by interacting directly with the people who want to get them. If you have an ecommerce or customer service offering, this might be a great way to help customers with commonly asked questions and enquiries, as well as transactional messages like shipping updates or replies to customer service questions. Third-party developers are likely to release bots for Messenger in the coming months, so rather than roll your own it may be better to sit back and wait to see what bots become available that fit your particular needs. Instant Articles Facebook’s Instant Articles is now open to all publishers of any type, anywhere in the world. At F8, Facebook shared new data illustrating how Instant Articles is better for people and publishers, introduced a group of Instant Articles partners to support the publishing process, and shared more detail on how branded content works in Instant Articles. This is worth looking at if you already see lots of traffic directed to your site from Facebook to see if Instant Articles directs even more traffic for you. This is especially true if you use WordPress, as the WordPress plugin for Instant Articles becomes available later this month. You can sign up at instantarticles.fb.com and join the program today. Keep up with Facebook F8 For more details on Facebook’s updates, head to their Developer Blog, Media Blog, and Engineering Blog, and you can watch all the keynotes on the Facebook for Developers page. We’ll be keeping this post update as the F8 conference continues, so make sure to check back for more or subscribe to our newsletter below to receive more updates as they come in.
