Facebook Launches New Publishing Tools; Improves Domain Insights

In a bid to give more teeth to advertisers and those who want to promote posts on Facebook, the social networking site has launched new tools that allow a greater ability to target posts and promote content.

The biggest tool for advertisers is interest targeting that will use Facebook's data mine to create areas like locations, celebrities and sports teams to add to posts.

Social managers will also now be able to put end dates for when posts should stop receiving promotion in News Feeds.

The purpose of this tool is to encourage news publishers to post more timely stories.

After the end date, promoted posts will remain on Facebook but will not be promoted.

Smart publishing, the third tool which will initially be available only to a limited group, will track stories users are posting to Facebook, and then will then add them to the news feeds of people who like the company.

The tools have been built in collaboration with media partners after requests came for improvements to the publishing platform.

With more and more users, especially on mobiles accessing the website, Facebook aims to use that traffic well and make it pay.

Detailing improvements to insights, Facebook said, "We've made a variety of improvements to Domain Insights to show how Pages and social plugins drive traffic to websites. We've added a new Top URLs section, which displays URL-level reporting and shows when other Pages and influencers share a post you've made to Facebook. For example, if a celebrity shares one of your URLs, you'll know why that URL may have reached more people than other URLs. We also made the interface more intuitive and provide a way to segment data for specific time ranges, including hourly."

Written with inputs from IANS