3 Must Know Facebook Updates

Welcome to episode 311 of Hit the Mic with The Stacey Harris.

Yay Facebook changes! I know you're excited, I'm excited, we can hardly contain it. Let's jump right in. We're going to talk about three big Facebook changes happening rolling out now, and over the coming weeks. They're all going to have an impact directly on you. I want you to pay attention. This one would be a good one to bookmark, and maybe highlight for your Evernote some spots in the show notes. We've got the full transcript. Because these are going to be some things that are going to impact you again as they roll out in the next few weeks.

Update number one. There are some brand new call to action buttons coming to Facebook pages.

Up until now you could do things like visit a website, sign up, watch video, call, those kind of things. Now, Facebook is actually hooking up with some third party apps to make that call to action button even cooler. Right now, they're talking about the current list of services for appointment booking, or requesting contact. Home Advisor, Microsoft Bookings, My Time, Booker by Booker Software, Booking Bug, Front Desk Porch, Setster, Simplybook.me, and Talk Local. These are going to be appointment booking softwares.

If you want to have a call to action to book a consult with you, free 15 minute call, you could hook it up through these services. They simply hit the button. Yeah. How cool is that. That's going to be a really powerful thing. There's also going to be some Foodorderdelivery.com, and Slice. They're also going to be able to buy tickets through things like Eventbrite. If you have an event happening, maybe you run a networking business, maybe you do workshops, and you sell your tickets through Eventbrite. That's going to be really amazing. Also Ticketmaster and Fandango, which are probably going to be less helpful for you.

I'm really excited about the Eventbrite connection, and the appointment booking connections. I think that's where you are going to see the biggest impact. These call to actions are going to be that big blue call to action button that sits under your cover image on your Facebook page. Again, if you want to send people right to booking a 15 minute consult, or right to booking an event ticket ... In addition to being able to connect them with lets say your phone number, or a contact form, or a sign up for a program or whatever, you're going to be able to send them right to actually doing something.

It's a really cool integration. I'm excited that they're taking this in this direction. I'm excited to see how it evolves. I'm really impressed with what they've got going on. If you want to add the button, it's the same process as adding your button now, however there's going to be some sections you can choose from like booking your service, get in touch with us, learn more about us, make a purchase or donation, use an app. If you go to book our services, you can see book now, and then you'll actually be able to select options, and see which booking service you want to connect to.

I haven't mentioned this yet, but you are going to need to have an account with that third party service. I shouldn't need to mention this, but if you don't have a Microsoft Bookings account, you won't be able to set up bookings. This may be a premium service that you need to pay attention to depending on who you're using it through. This is brand new, so some are still rolling out. It's coming soon when you look at the partner app and services area, but it's rolling out. I'm really excited about it. Especially for those of you who I know listen to the show that are health coaches, business coaches, relationship coaches, confidence coaches, and you're working one on one with clients. Or for those of you who are in the service base space, but you still offer that get to know me, let me answer your questions, 15 minute consult. This is going to be a game changer because it's going to allow somebody to find you, and connect for a consult really easily.

Of course, you can also run ads to your call to action button, right? You guys have seen that. Why wouldn't you be able to do that now? That's right. Think about it. Running an ad directly to the call to action button to your fans. Getting them to book calls with you, buy tickets for events. That's killer. I'm really amped about this. I'm really excited. I wanted you guys to see that because I think it's going to be ... it really is going to be one of those shifts for a lot of you with how you're using your Facebook page.

Number two. Facebook live is getting a massive upgrade.

It's starting to roll to to some pages this week. If you're not seeing it yet, pay attention over the next few weeks. It's rolling out now. You know how Facebook rolls things out slowly because they have a massive user base. You can now schedule your Facebook lives. Yes. That means prep your audience before it's actually time to get in front of them. You're going to allow them to see, "Hey, I'm going live", and they can request a reminder. You can say, "Hey! Stacey's going live at 2pm today, get a reminder!". They hit a button, and they get a notification, "Hey! Stacey's going to be going live soon.".

I'm so excited about this because I think one of the big complaints I hear from a lot of you guys about Facebook Live is that people aren't getting on live with you. Yeah you're getting some value from them watching the replay, and yeah you get the news feed bump, but you feel like you're talking to yourself for a lot at the beginning. This may be a very helpful way to get around this. This is also going to be a really powerful way to build Facebook Lives into your launch sequence along side things like webinars, and things like that. Because again, you're telling people when you're going live. You could do Q and A's about your program. You could do a weekly feature. You could do a ton of things, and actually build the audience before you hit the live button. I 'm so excited about this. To do it though is a little bit different than actually going in and going live. You're actually going to do it from your desktop.

You're going to go to publishing tools, and you're going to need to copy your stream credentials, so your stream key and your server URL. If you don't have those available now, and you need to get them later, you can edit that. You can craft your actual announcements. You can write your copy out and say, "Hey this is whey I'm going live. This is what we're going to be talking about. Join us for whatever.". Then you're going to schedule it. Create an image, whatever you want to do, and there you go. How exciting is this?

Again verified pages are getting it this week. Or I'm sorry, got it last week. All the other pages are going to be getting it over the next few weeks according to Facebook in their announcement. It's going to be a really cool thing you're able to do through the Facebook live API. You can actually schedule these things. Then you can go in, jump in, go live, and engage with your audience in a scheduled way. This is going to change the way people are doing webinars specifically, and the way people are using video during launches or big promo pushes. Whatever that looks like for you.

For me, I don't have traditional launch schedules because we've got the membership site, and it's open all the time. But we do have built into the calendar, times where we have a real push for new members. We're actually rolling into one as we close out the year. That will allow me to say, "Hey! On this day I'm going to do a public office hours. Get what it's like to be in Backstage's Office Hours. Things like that. Schedule it. Make it available to people, and promote it before we go live. Instead of playing catch up once we go live. It's going to be really cool. I will link to these announcements by the way in the show notes page for this episode.

The third thing I want to talk about, is something I actually found via following Buffer on Facebook. They're saying it's now confirmed by Facebook. They're going to be testing removing the page like count from some users and pages.

You may not see that page like number on pages anymore. There's already a lot of back and forth about whether this is going to be valuable or not in the comments on the Buffer page. Some people hate it because they have clients who have paid thousands in ads to grow their likes and credibility on their page.

Personally, I fall into the other camp. I fall into the camp of man am I glad this total vanity metric might be gone. Because the reality is the metric is not all that useful. Because you can do things like dump a ton of money into ads, or other way less ethical ways of growing that number where it's not really representative of anything valuable. It's a false credibility builder. It's a false number from a perspective of oh I have this many people who like my Facebook page. Great. That doesn't really mean very much. How much of them are doing something? The things that I check when I look at my Facebook stats are not my page like number, but are the clicks on the links I'm getting, the engagement.

That's what I look at when I see client stuff. We don't look at the page like number first, we look at what are those page likes doing? Then we go in and we look at who are those page likes. So that we can see whether it's even going to be valuable to offer ads to that community because in some cases what's happening is yeah you've paid a fortune for Facebook like ads, and you've got a great number, but guess what, they're not representative of who your ideal clients are. They're not representative of who you want buying anything.

We've had brick and mortar clients who've got thousands of Facebook page likes, and none of them are in their physical area. That's not actually helpful to get people in your door. Make sure you're paying attention to that. This is something again they are testing out. Removing it for some users and some pages, so you may or may not see this change. You may or may not see what comes of it. But I want you to be aware. More than anything, why I wanted to talk about it, was I really wanted to put in your mind that the value is not solely in that number. The value is in what's happening on the page. So don't put too much credence in oh I hit 100, oh I hit 1,000, oh I hit 10,000. Put more credence in the hey I got 100 clicks, 1,000 clicks, whatever on this link to a podcast episode, a blog post. I got 50 comments on a post, whatever that is. That has a lot more value than that number on the side that says so many people like your page. Okay. All right.

Those are the three things. Just to recap real quickly. New call to action buttons, Facebook Lives can now be scheduled through the API, and Facebook is testing likes no longer being shown on pages. Huge, huge news. I'd love to hear your thoughts on these things.

Guess what? The really cool thing is if you were a member of Hit the Mic Backstage, you already knew all this stuff. Because we talked about it in the community. We talked about it in the brand new private forum that's right on the membership site. Why aren't you joined us yet? This community is actively getting better than ever, so head over to hitthemicbackstage.com, and join us right now. Because this is the place to stay up to date with these kind of changes. You don't have to keep chasing and hoping you don't miss anything, because it's all inside of Hit the Mic Backstage. All right. I will see you on Tuesday.

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