Facebook Adds New Tools For Publishers

[engine]

Facebook is out to win the hearts and minds of publishers and to encourage their greater use and participation with some new tools.

These look rather interesting, and I have to say it's going to be worth investigating.

What do you think of these tools?

Today, we’re excited to respond to publishers’ requests by introducing ways to target posts, remove posts that are no longer relevant and identify popular links that you haven’t shared.

1. Interest Targeting – To help you reach precisely the right people, we now offer the ability to target posts to a subset of the people that like your Page. For example, a publisher can use Interest Targeting to post a story about a sports game that will only be shown to people that like the teams playing.Facebook Adds New Tools For Publishers [media.fb.com]

2. Post End Date – Post End Date allows Page admins to specify a day and time to stop showing a post in News Feed. This tool prevents people from seeing out-of-date posts in News Feed, but posts will continue to appear on your Page.

3. Smart Publishing – Until now, it has been challenging for large publishers to predict which stories will resonate with their audience. Smart Publishing is a new, optional tool that identifies and publishes stories that are popular with people on Facebook.

Improvements to Insights

Accurate and actionable analytics are critical for media organizations to understand and optimize how their content is performing on Facebook. 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.

[breeks]

Nothing about showing your posts to more of the people that like your page.

[weeks]

It's sad news publishers are falling for this. I've seen the data working with Associated Press and readers ARE interested in the headlines and the first paragraph, but the vast, vast majority do not go past that. (Dirty secret is the readers haven't changed, same was true of print. It's the nature of news.) I don't have a solution, but Facebook isn't it.