New Updates to Facebook
What We Love
When posting to a Facebook Group, you now have the option to format your text with bold, italic, headings, bullet points, and other formatting options. Simply highlight your text while you’re creating your post to see the formatting options. We hope Facebook eventually adds this option for regular profile and page posts.
Facebook is highlighting diverse businesses by adding diversity info to Pages. You can mark your page as Black-owned, women-owned, LGBTQ-owned, and other options. By adding diversity information, people can discover your business in “Businesses Nearby” and through Facebook’s Support Black-Owned and Women-Owned Business initiatives.
What We Wish Was Better
Facebook Business Suite still leaves a lot to be desired. The app is clunky, slow, and difficult to figure out. Its design is not user-friendly or intuitive at all. We actually recommend posting manually to Facebook each day, rather than scheduling posts, because it’s much faster than using Business Suite. By posting manually, you also have a new option to share your post to three groups immediately after publishing. Essentially, the difficulties in Business Suite lead us to do what social media platforms want us to do – go back often to post.
Additionally, Facebook’s inclusion of Instagram in their Business Suite is confusing and difficult to navigate. It’s already nearly impossible to post on Instagram via browser, so we know this is Facebook’s way of keeping themselves relevant as their app usage decreases and Apple iOS updates threaten their ad business.
What Has Us Curious
The Groups posting feature shows that Facebook is well aware that Groups is one of its most popular features that is keeping users on Facebook. Even though many businesses use Groups to host classes and workshops, Facebook doesn’t make any money directly from Groups. However, we believe that Groups offer Facebook interesting data. It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on how Facebook continues to ramp up its Group offerings, including potentially adding a paid tier.
While we find Facebook Business Suite frustrating, we’re curious to see if this update starts competing with, and eventually replacing, scheduling tools like Later and HootSuite. Because it’s so difficult to post on Instagram via browser, many marketers have relied on these paid social tools to organize and schedule their posts, but Facebook is now giving you an option to do that for free.
Facebook is currently testing some new features that promote “more informed sharing” with a small percentage of users. If you share a news article without clicking on it, Facebook will prompt you to read the article before you share, saying “Sharing articles without reading them may mean missing key facts.”
Facebook has come under fire in the past few years due to the rampant spread of misinformation on the platform. We’ll be curious to see how these features work and if they repair Facebook’s reputation.
