Highlights from Facebook’s F8 2016 Conference: What Marketers Need to Know

This year’s annual Facebook developer conference was full of exciting announcements pertaining to marketers. Here’s a rundown of the most important takeaways:

Messenger Platform: Facebook introduced new APIs that allow brands to create custom experiences on Messenger. These APIs allow brands to build their own Messenger bots, such as automated on-demand content like weather or traffic updates, or customized messages such as receipts and shipping notifications.This API is currently open to a select few partners, and will broaden to everyone at a later unspecified date. For more information, visit: https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-tips-messaging-for-page-admins and check out this video from F8.

Branded Content: Facebook updated their branded content policy to enable verified Pages to share branded content on Facebook. They also launched a new tool for brands/pages to “tag” a marketer when they publish branded content, allowing the marketer to see data from the tagged post and have the option to share and boost the post. For more information, visit: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/branded-content-update.

Rights Manager: Facebook launched a new tool to help media companies monitor and protect intellectual property on Facebook. Publishers can upload their full library of videos to Rights Manager, monitor them, and use rules to tell us about how each video can be used. Learn more: https://media.fb.com/2016/04/12/introducing-rights-manager/.

Facebook Analytics for Apps Improvements: Improvements to Facebook Analytics for Apps include deeper audience insights, push and in-app notifications (beta), powerful breakdowns, and an App Events Export API to analyze data offline.Most interesting for app marketers is the push and in-app notifications beta. You can now set up, create, send and measure push and in-app notification campaigns directly through Facebook. Request access to the beta by going to the Push Campaigns screen in Analytics for Apps.

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