Facebook announced an ambitious plan to launch a cryptocurrency named Libra, a new digital currency similar to bitcoin (a way of sending money across borders without incurring significant fees) for global use, one that could generate more e-commerce on its services and boost ads on its platforms.

Libra, is being developed by Facebook, but the company intends to share control with a consortium of organizations, including venture capital firms, credit card companies, and other tech giants.

Libra could also open online commerce to huge numbers of people around the world who currently don't have bank accounts or credit cards. Read the press release

The digital currency is scheduled to launch sometime in the next six to 12 months. Here’s a sneak peek at what the experience of using Calibra will be like:

Did you know that you can use the Facebook Leads Ads form so that users can make their appointment directly? Adding this type of question to your form improves the user experience and also allows you to generate higher quality leads.

Adding a date / time preference question on your potential customers form can increase the quality of your leads. This question allows people to enter a date / time preference for when they want to participate with you.

This information not only increases the flexibility you have to act with these contacts, but also provides a better experience for the client. By knowing the date / time preference of a potential customer, you can follow up on the requested time window or send a potential customer to the correct person on your team.

You can do the set up directly from Ads Manager, creating a lead ad. When you get to the Custom Question (Optional) section, click + Add Custom Question.

Create a question that prompts people to send you...

Instagram revealed a new branded content option. Brands can now promote organic branded content posts from creators as ads within the photo- and video-sharing platform’s feed.

"68% of people say they come to Instagram to interact with creators. With branded content ads, businesses have an opportunity to tell their brand stories through creators' voices, reach new audiences and measure impact. Using the tools available on the Facebook ads platform, businesses can reach targeted audiences beyond the people who follow the brand and creator accounts. And by running ads, they'll have access to measurement and can optimize and test their campaigns against their set goals for more effective marketing campaigns. When these ads appear in feed and stories, people will see “Paid partnership with” along with the brand name on each post—which is very important for ads transparency" - published Instagram.

Once brands gain access to the new option, they must complete...

Facebook is - finally- launching a new feature: Avatars, a playful way for users to represent themselves in Messenger chats and News Feed comments. This feature lets you customize a virtual lookalike of yourself for use as stickers in chat and comments.

You can personalize your Avatar’s face, hair, and clothes. Here you can see an example:

Avatars is currently only available to users in Australia, but all Facebook users will be able to create them sometime at the end of 2019 or early 2020. We would love to be able to create our avatar now! 

Facebook is making ThruPlay the default option for all video placements in Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Audience Network (including in-stream, Stories and News Feed).

The ThruPlay video option, launched in September, optimizes ad delivery to target users who are likely to watch the entire video or at least 15 seconds of longer videos. The 10-second delivery optimization option focused on users likely to watch ten seconds or more of a video.

Facebook wrote, “Making ThruPlay the default optimization for video views campaigns will help simplify our video ad buying options and better align our offerings with what advertisers value. Starting in May, we will begin a phased migration from 10-second video views to ThruPlay optimization. And starting July 31, we will pause existing campaigns that use 10-second video views optimization, so be sure to adjust any campaigns you're running using 10-second video views optimization to now use ThruPlay optimization”.

So take note and...

The feature I'm going to talk about in this post is not new (was released a couple of months back). However, on daily conversations with E-Commerce Owners and marketers, I noticed the vast majority of them still don't know about this easy and free trick.

Since all the Cambridge Analytica scandal was uncovered, which had its decisive or critical point on March 2018, Facebook is working on being more transparent. That's one of the main reasons why the Info and Ads section was added on Facebook Fan pages. The era of "dark posts" is close.

Going straight to the point, if you want to spy on your competitor's Facebook Ads, go to their fan page and on the right side column, look at Page Transparency (normally the last one) -> See more.

By clicking "Ads From This Page" you will see the latest Ads of your competitor. 

Eventbrite and Facebook announced the launch of a new “Ticketing on Facebook” product that brings ticketing functionality to Facebook Events. Facebook users can now sell tickets to events “without ever leaving the app” with this functionality. The idea is that people will be able to buy tickets without being chucked out to a third-party site.

The new feature allows anyone with a Facebook page to “Create Tickets” when setting up an event, easily adding paid or free tickets to their event. Tickets will also be shown on the Facebook Event Page quite prominently, and users can buy tickets directly on Facebook, or register for free events as well.

“700 million people use Facebook Events each month and partnering on this initiative is our effort to better serve the people responsible for bringing those events and gatherings to life—including small businesses and entrepreneurs whose core business is not throwing events”, said Pat Poels,...

As it was announced more than a year ago, Facebook will launch in the months to come a new privacy feature called Clear History. This was a direct response to the repercussions generated after the Cambridge Analytica where the European authorities demanded a more intense focus on users data privacy.

The Clear History feature is designed to deliver more transparency for users, showing them a list of the apps and websites they have visited that employ Facebook business tools like the Facebook Pixel, SDK and API.

Impact on advertising

It is not clear yet when it will be released and how easy it will be for users to implement Clear History; so there are a lot of questions yet. Far from being an obstacle in the digital marketing world, this could be seen as an opportunity to design strategies more creative and innovative.

The feature itself will allow a stricter separation between the internet browsing and Facebook profiles for the users that choose so. In a blog post, the company...

The latest development of Apple includes the latest version of Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in the beta versions of its software. The launch has been announced on webkit.org and details the complete changes in ITP2.1. Apple says that these changes are driven by privacy, security and performance.

Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.1 (ITP2.1) limits the length of client side cookies to seven days. In short, this means a Safari user that visits your site today will be viewed as a new/separate user if they don’t directly interact with your site within the next seven days.

This latest version of ITP has very significant implications for web analysts, and everyone whose job involves implementing or maintaining digital analytics software should be aware of the changes.

During the Facebook F8 developer conference in San Jose, California, Facebook announced several updates to Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and Whatsapp. So in this article, I’ll run through five of Facebook’s major announcements for marketers:

1. Instagram Stories Create Mode and less prominent likes

Instagram has new camera features. The camera in Instagram Stories is getting an overhaul, making it easier to find and use some features. Create Mode will let you create an image for Stories that isn’t a photo or video. Now, it’ll be easy to just post a solid color background with text or GIFs over it. 

Instagram will test hiding the like count from photos and view count from videos in an effort to get users to pay attention to the content itself and not their associated engagement metrics. The account owner will still be able to access their own metrics and see the total likes or...