Facebook Summer Session Recap: Emphasizing The Customer Journey

On Thursday, August 23rd, Team Jelly attended Facebook’s annual “Summer Session” in Vancouver, which highlights new and upcoming products, tools, and solutions that may help drive value for your company’s Facebook advertising campaigns. At Jelly Digital Marketing & PR, we are constantly educating ourselves and trying to become better marketers and advertisers, so the team jumped at the chance to learn more about Facebook directly from the source. Over one-hundred marketing professionals throughout Metro Vancouver attended the event to observe, learn, and mingle.

The theme of the event was #FBROADTRIP which emphasized the user’s journey from the initial product interaction on Facebook, to purchase. Statistics have shown that forty-five percent of brand lift occurs within the first two seconds of interaction, with forty percent of users abandoning an interaction if it takes longer than four seconds. These numbers tell us that without proper advertisement optimization, the odds of a user becoming a customer is low.

To combat this problem, Facebook has created “Facebook Canvas”, an all-in-one advertising tool with the potential to turn a user into a customer in under four seconds. In the words of Facebook, “Facebook Canvas loads instantly, is mobile-optimized, and is designed to capture the complete attention of your audience”. With Facebook Canvas, people can watch engaging photos and videos, swipe through carousels, and explore lifestyle images with tagged products all without leaving the platform, essentially building a mini-website within your Facebook advertisement.

The event also discussed the benefits of deep linking your Facebook Canvas ads. Facebook says, “…deep linking sends people directly to the information they are interested in when they open the app for the first time. By using deep linking for your Facebook app ads, you are removing the extra steps between clicking the ad and getting to the content that interested them, providing a seamless customer experience”. Without deep links, users will have to search for the content they are looking for manually, creating the risk that they will drop off.

The event closed with upcoming projects regarding new user interaction with Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp. With both Facebook and Instagram promoting the extremely popular Stories feature, Whatsapp, a Facebook-affiliated social media app, has yet to be included in this trend. However, in 2019 users will be able to create “Whatsapp Statuses” which lets users post images and videos in a short stream that friends can watch. This includes brands who use the app now having the ability to place their campaigns directly in the app.  

I thoroughly enjoyed how user-oriented the Summer Session was. Everything covered during the conference benefited the user and therefore, will benefit marketers and advertisers. As Millennial as this sounds, I personally find that if I am on Facebook interacting with a brand, it is an inconvenience to be redirected off the app if I want to learn more or complete a purchase. I believe the introduction of Canvas advertisements and the use of deep linking will convert users like myself into avid online shoppers and brand loyalists.