Facebook wants to help you grow your business

Looking to market your business on social media? Facebook’s Creative Shop aims to boost marketing ROI, assisting businesses, (big and small), with their Facebook and Instagram ads. Facebook Creative Shop describes how, “Telling the story of your business on Facebook can be as challenging as it is important.” We’re all in the storytelling business. The way your company is perceived and recognized is through the art of storytelling. With over two million advertisers using Facebook, it’s important to make your ads stand out above the rest. Facebook Creative Shop is here to help.

Cinemagraph Ad by Sherif Mokbel

What is Facebook Creative Shop?

“Facebook says it wants to help marketers and brands be more creative and increase the impact of their work by collaborating with a growing team of specialists who work at a special division within the company,” says Matt Kapko, senior writer for CIO.

Consisting of 130 employees around 30 global locations, Facebook Creative Shop provides marketing skills, specific insights and creative production to companies looking to market their business on Facebook and Instagram. Their goal is to ultimately help businesses succeed by working to improve the quality of campaigns.

They’re the brains behind the social platform. They know how Facebook and Instagram operate. They have access to the data, and they know what makes a social media marketing campaign successful. The best part: the consulting is free. The payment comes in the form of ad buys.

Cinemagraphs: The Secret Weapon

According to Mark D’Arcy, Facebook’s CCO, there is a massive shift in the way we connect with our consumers, as we now “have the ability to connect in real time with the people that we care most about in the world.” Being bombarded by ads is tiring, and people have learned to tune it out. Advertising is used to advert attention, as the word itself gives away. Facebook Creative Shop wants to help brands play a more engaging, yet less intrusive role in the way that they advertise, and the answer is cinemagraphs.

Cinemagraph Ad by Michel Molder

Cinemagraphs are both non intrusive, yet highly engaging. They drive more CTRs than still images, yet don’t disrupt like a standard video. Not simply photography, not simply video, but a hybrid of the two.

This fixed attention that cinemagraphs create is actually ingrained in us from our “hunter/hunted” ancestry. Our eyes are trained to pick up on slight movements in an otherwise still scenario. This is exactly what a cinemagraph is; a still photograph in which a minor and repeated movement occurs. Not only are they beautiful and mesmerizing, they are an effective medium for driving engagement. People love staring at them. It’s like an interactive game of Where’s Waldo; viewers instinctively search for these movements, thus staring at the content for longer than they would have, had it been a still photo.

Video Marketing

Video is hot right now. Still photography is stale photography on Facebook. Earlier this year Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, noted that video is growing significantly on Facebook, with more than 3 billion views daily. The move towards video marketing is now.

Facebook Creative Shop isn’t all talk; they’ve got numbers to prove their success. Remember that beer brand, Newcastle, around the time of the 2015 Superbowl? If you don’t, check out the video below for a refresher. It was a smash hit. Newcastle couldn’t afford a TV spot during the Super Bowl, so with the help of Facebook Creative Shop, as well as Anna Kendric and ad agency Droga5, Newcastle’s ad became a sensation.

“On Facebook alone, the campaign garnered 56 million impressions, over a million video views, as well as 69,000 Likes, 16,000 shares, and 8,000 comments,” says David Zax, writer for Fast Company.

Cinemagraph Ad by David McCormick

Using video in your Facebook marketing strategy will get you noticed. Using cinemagraphs will gain you the engagement and CTRs that you’re aiming for. Try creating your own cinemagraphs today for free.