According to Facebook‘s recent State of Small Business Report, more than half (55%) of small businesses say they’re using digital tools to communicate with customers.On the heels of this research, the platform announced several new tools and features to help businesses connect with their customers online and grow their communities more efficiently.

Building community

For businesses that already use the new redesigned Facebook Pages experience, originally unveiled this past January, the platform is introducing additional ways to manage your community and find relevant content from other businesses without having to deviate from the app.

More specifically, businesses can engage as their business profile streamlining routine tasks including commenting, posting and liking. Once a user takes the time to check out or hover a particular update or post, they can tap through a new dedicated feed of listings from these Pages that may align with their top interests.

To further help you save time managing your business account, Facebook suggests leveraging the Professional Dashboard that serves as a central hub for all the key tools as well as actionable Page Insights. A final tip – don’t overlook the ability to set task-based permissions to admins to further monitor who has access to your Page.

Upping discovery

A new ‘Conversion Leads’ goal for Lead Ads allows advertisers to optimize for lead and most likely versus pure volume. Put differently, emphasizing functionality of Lead ads as opposed to going for reach alone. You can also integrate your CRM data with Facebook. Per the platform, Lead ads that used Conversion Leads quality optimization saw on average greater than 20 percent increase in lead-to-sale conversion rate compared with existing optimization.

To drive longer-term relationships, Facebook also introduced the option to convert Lead ads form into Messenger templates. As part of the testing phase, Newsome Interactive added Messenger to its lead-generation strategy and saw more than a 13 percent lift in lead volume.

Finally, new ‘Call Ads‘ will enable advertisers to display a ‘Call Now’ CTA button in their ads. This not only allows advertisers to connect with consumers in real time, but also help improve the overall performance of Call ads and lower the cost per call. In testing, Facebook reports observing a greater than 30 percent cost reduction in cost per quality call during the test, compared to running Call Ads with the Link Clicks optimization goal.

Improving the business suite

Last year, Facebook rolled out Business Suite with the primary goal of taking the headache out of managing their online presence so they could focus purely on establishing meaningful connections.

A recent survey revealed that two out of three users said Business Suite helped them connect with more customers. Following 2020, however, as a growing number of people and businesses focus their efforts online, and with the future leaning heavily towards digital communications and transactions, the platform wants to take these efforts to the next level.

In its latest push, Facebook is focusing on helping brands streamline content creation by planning, and these new features are designed to do just that.

Here’s what’s new:

• The ability to compose Stories within the app, then schedule them to go live on both Facebook and Instagram. Your scheduled posts will then be displayed on your content calendar within the Business Suite app.
• The ability to save all Facebook and Instagram posts as drafts, adding even more planning flexibility for your Stories approach.
• Coming soon: the ability to publish and manage Facebook Photos and Albums from Business Suite by navigating to the “Posts & Stories” tab.