With 2018 just around the corner, businesses everywhere are gearing up to organize and implement a highly efficient Facebook marketing plan.

We all know just how many things have changed on Facebook over the last few months, not to mention this past year, but this constantly evolving social media platform still continues to hold a significant place in marketing campaigns, so brands have to be prepared for what next year’s going to bring.

• Personalized Content

It is a known fact that generic content is not getting the drawing it used to, which is why businesses should start implementing more personalized content and start building a more authentic connection with their audiences. People want to consume information that is geared towards their specific needs, rather than getting a rush of advertising.

Facebook, of course, will welcome this dominant trend for next year with open arms. They are featuring new and improved analytics tools that will enable brands to get more detailed information about their customers, and based on those results, they will be able to craft more personalized content. This will help them to build up trust and authenticity with their audience.

• Mobile Optimized Offerings

With 90% of daily users logging on via mobile, it’s now more important than ever for brands to make sure that the ads and content they are posting are created for the mobile revolution. Let’s not forget the fact that 80% of Facebook ad revenue comes through mobile, and with mobile users on the rise, this trend is only going to increase…

Which is why in 2018, Facebook is planning to take a step further to become even more mobile friendly. Yes, mobile optimization has been a necessity for savvy Facebook marketers for quite some time now, but this will become essential as the platform heads towards a potentially mobile-only feature.

This means that advertisers will no longer have an excuse for not implementing mobile-friendly ads and content on Facebook in 2018.

• Campaigns

The way marketers determine if an ad they run on Facebook is effective or not is by analyzing if the ad meets their advertising goals at the end of the campaign without necessarily looking at the social prove (likes, shares, comments). However, according to Facebook, given their core objective, an effective ad is an ad that tends to get big social proof, because this is an indication that the content of the ad is valuable to the target audience that it is being shown to. On the other hand, if in several hours or even one day after the campaign is launched the ad has low interaction, it is believed that either the ad has been targeted to the wrong audience or is not of much value.

Since Facebook is trying to fight bad content on its platform, they will make the ads cheaper for brands that they believe are running ads that are valuable to the users, decreasing the CPC to reach more people, but they will increase the CPC and charge more brands that serve ads that are not as valuable.

Brands should use strategies like inbound marketing when they are launching an ad, in order to indirectly put out their sales information. Users are more likely to engage with information that educates or entertains them, and it is more likely that they will share it. This will increase brand awareness and it will be an indication to Facebook that the ad is of high relevance which will of course lead to more purchases.

• Flexible Edge Rank Mechanism

Edge rank is an artificial intelligence placed by Facebook to monitor the user’s interaction on the platform and always provides content of the same or similar nature to that on the news feed. As more people use Facebook, the Edge rank has to become stronger. The prediction is that it will become more intelligent in the future and every news feed will be customized based on each individual user.

Did you know that it takes less than 3 seconds for a user to identify and continue consuming a particular piece of content? For this reason, marketers and businesses have to make sure that their content impresses the users within that 3 second timeframe. This was most likely the key motivating factor as to why Facebook applied a 3-seconds rule to its video view time.

• Visuals and creative

Even a nice piece of content that is presented in an ugly way will more than likely be ignored. Businesses should make sure that they have well-crafted visual designs for their brand.

Also, when running an ad, it is the best for brands to play by the 20% text rule and use high-resolution images to gain users interest. Ads should not put out the sales message directly.

• Even more limitation on business page reach

With the invention of advertising on Facebook in 2015, the organic reach of business accounts on the platform was reduced. Although Facebook was critiqued about this decision, they added this feature to push businesses to boost their content to their own fans.

In 2018 and beyond, the limitation of organic reach will be more intense with so much information battling for space on a user’s newsfeed. This will result into much content to consume, which over time will turn into bad content that is not relevant to the users, misleading information, non-appealing visuals, crowded newsfeeds, and a multitude of other detrimental things.  Since Facebook’s basic objective is to provide value to its users while monetizing the platform via ads, it is in its best interest to show valuable content in the news feed, so that people will keep coming back.

When it comes to looking into the future of Facebook marketing for advertisers, we need to stress that Facebook really does have a strict and protective trade marketing policy towards its advertisers.  One of their biggest issues are the resellers of the traffic they provide. Their overall goal is to cut the middleman from the traffic tradings where Facebook is not the final sales point. This is understandable as Facebook doesn’t like any third party networks to put a margin on top of its own selling traffic. This process of eliminating the middleman has been underway since early 2016. Therefore, there are numerous traffic providers that have been banned from the Facebook network as advertisers. This is mostly in the case of mobile campaigns, which are much easier to control in terms of the attribution of the incoming traffic. Hopefully, this will not happen with the online providers of traffic as Facebook has become one of the most lucrative sources on the open market for them.

On the other hand, businesses should be very excited about these changes because it will be much easier to build connections with customers, reach more people, and generate more leads. The only question is, how are they going to prepare their marketing plan to align with this evolution?