Facebook Launch Call To Action Function

After a successful trial period last year, social network Facebook has rolled out the addition of call to action buttons for all of their business pages.Business users can now choose from one of the following seven calls to action (CTAs) depending on their company’s current objective.

• Book Now
• Contact Us
• Use App
• Play Game
• Shop Now
• Sign Up
• Watch Video

As you can tell from the various options available, each CTA has been chosen with a specific purpose in mind. If you’re in the services industry, a restaurant or hotel owner for example, you might opt for the ‘Book Now’ or ‘Contact Us’ CTA. Similarly, software developers wishing to market their products digitally can choose from either ‘Play Game’ or ‘Use App’. Facebook selects the destination URL of the call to action automatically, however this can be changed in the page settings, as we go on to explain below.

The inclusion of the call to action button brings with it a multitude of advantages for smaller businesses, not least of which is the fact it facilitates traffic between their social profile and their website. The CTA, which appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the cover image, is now one of the first things users see when they access the business page. This takes precedence over the standard web-address feature, which was set to the left-hand side of the page, opposite all of the interesting new status updates.

Furthermore the choice of calls to action available means that users feel like they’re getting a more unique experience. If you’re an e-commerce business for example and a customer ‘Likes’ your Facebook page, the ‘Buy Now’ CTA is much more directly tailored to the service they’re looking for than a standard ‘Visit Us’ link.  Additionally your choice of call to action isn’t fixed or permanent. This means you can change it depending on your current business objectives; maybe you’re looking to develop a customer database before launching a new promotional video to them? In this case you would select the ‘Sign Up’ call to action for a period of time before changing to the ‘Watch Video’ button.

How to do it
1. Log on to your business manager page, and access your Facebook profile.
2. Look towards the bottom right-hand corner of your cover image (at the top of the page) to see the ‘Create call-to-action’ button.
3. Select the relevant call to action from the list and copy and paste the web-address you want your customers to land on in the box below.
4. Follow these steps to update the style and landing URL of your call to action whenever you need to.