Facebook fans will love our festive throwback as we bring you the platform’s top updates that have happened throughout 2021! With plenty happening, it’s been a busy 12 months in Facebook HQ!

It’s all under control

Facebook introduced a handful of new features to offer more “control and context” for the news feed. This included a tweak to how you share. Now, you can control your commenting audience for public posts by choosing from a menu of options. Limit commenting privileges to those who can see the post, those who have been tagged or other specific audiences. It’s also now easier than ever to sort and browse the news feed, thanks to the Favorites tool.

It’s been a testing time…

More elements were added to Facebook’s organic post testing tool to help optimise performance. Providing a more direct insight into what Facebook users respond to best, this feature allows you to either grow your audience or drive more clicks, dependant on your goals!

A bite of the Apple

One of the biggest updates to Facebook this year was iOS update and change to Business Manager, which brought the following:

• Changes in Mobile Web Advertising – Apple has created the PCM (Private Click Measurement) protocol for web attribution. This protocol will strongly contribute to restricting data that businesses and platforms can access.

• Optimization and Targeting – With iOS 14.5 there is an eight-pixel event cap per domain for optimization. This means that an advertiser is only able to use a maximum of eight conversion events per domain for optimization. As an advertiser you need to prioritise the eight events that are important to you.

• Measurement –When it comes to ad reporting data, there is a three-day delay on data display for the data that comes from iOS 14.5 users.

• Business Manager Tool Setup – The Facebook Business Manager interface had a change in design. This was required as Facebook couldn’t have a separate interface for Android and iOS.

Watch out…something BIG is coming!

Facebook Smartwatch is due to arrive in Summer 2022! This will be the platform’s first attempt at releasing hardware specifically for the wrist and is expected to open up another area of competition with Apple. Whilst final details of the device are still under wraps, we know it will feature a display with two cameras that can be detached from the wrist for taking pictures and videos, which can then be shared across Facebook’s suite of apps including Instagram and WhatsApp. We’ll be bringing more details on this exciting news, once we receive it, so ‘watch’ this space!

What’s in a name

Finally, on October 28th, Facebook went live with a major rebrand that included changing the company’s corporate name to Meta. The new name reflects Facebook’s plans to focus future developments around the “metaverse” (a virtual space where users can digitally interact with others and with their surroundings).

So there you have it, these past few crazy months have been very productive for the team at Facebook and we can’t wait to see what treasures you have in store for 2022!

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