Social Stalking: is Facebook’s new feature a game changer for music marketers?

Facebook rolled out a new feature overnight to bring more transparency to Facebook Ads and Pages. But it also could be a gamechanger for music marketers.

The new ‘Info and Ads’ tab, visible at the bottom of a Pages’ menu, allows users to view all active Ads running across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Facebook partner networks.

You are able to toggle between locations to view different campaigns run across territories.

An article posted this morning on Facebook’s newsroom says that greater transparency surrounding organisations and the ads they are running “will mean increased accountability for advertisers, helping to prevent abuse on Facebook.”

Jaden Social’s digital advertising and SEO manager Brian Lawlor says “You constantly need to be evolving your campaigns and checking what is going on within your industry and beyond.

“The new feature will make marketers really look at what the competition is doing and put more pressure on them to up their game in terms of their advertising.”

As part of the rollout, users can view information about Pages such as recent name changes and date of creation (with more info to come over the next few weeks) – a clear push towards its crack-down on fake news and fraudulent activity.

How will this help music marketers?

Take the major labels, for example.

A quick squizz at the Info and Ads tab on Universal, Sony and Warner’s Australian Facebook pages immediately shows their priorities.

Well… it shows Universal and Warner’s.

It seems the new feature is a bit buggy – Sony appears not to be running any ads in Australia right now, which is hardly conceivable, especially given that it’s new music Friday.

(Even our own pages are buggy – TMN‘s sponsored posts are visible, while our sister site Radio Today‘s are not.)

A closer look at Universal shows that they’re pushing the new track Boo’d Up by Ella Mai via two sponsored video posts; early access to Florence + the Machine’s Australian tour via a video touting pre-sale tickets and her new album High As Hope; social-first video content featuring Joe Jonas and DNCE (one embedded in Facebook, one linking back to YouTube); Julia Michaels’ Behind the Track interview; and Thundamentals’ latest drop I Miss You.

Warner’s content diversifies from video posts, pushing a warner.link to stream/buy Dan + Shay’s new album, and a merch bundle; 20% off Bruno Mars merch; two internally published Warner articles announcing Why Don’t We’s tour dates, and the upcoming 2018 Warner tour calendar; a GIF for an excerpt of Day Drunk by Morgan Evans; a lyric video compilation for The Greatest Showman and more.

As for the benefits for artists, Lawlor suggests that this transparency will make clear the priorities for labels when it comes to social spend.

For indie labels and artists without the budget to hire a social media specialist, the ability to view the competition’s ads is a massive boon. “You can look at the competition and go: ‘They are doing XYZ, but we’re only doing X,’ so it will potentially make advertisers re-assess their digital advertising strategy and give smaller players some great tips and ideas for their own campaigns.”

It’s also a big plus for digital marketing companies, who no longer need to spend hours trawling through the competition’s socials to pull ideas about how to best pitch to new clients.

Lawlor says that when doing competitor analysis, you should be on the lookout for “the volume of ads running, the types of ads – video, link, image etc., their key brand message and the copy they’re using, as well as trends and patterns the brands and their industry are following.”