Facebook has initiated a major online push to help brands, agencies and small businesses improve their ads and ad performance on the site.
The company has launched an online learning center called Blueprint for brands and agencies. There’s also parallel site for small business or Facebook newbies called Learn How.
Blueprint is a mix of online and in-person training — and now certification. According to the company’s blog post:
The foundation of Blueprint is its eLearning center, which features over 35 online courses and has tracks organized by category, such as direct response marketing, as well as tracks designed for specific roles, such as digital buying. Blueprint eLearning easily integrates with other learning and development programs and offers reporting to track progress and results.
Blueprint is currently available only in English but will be appear in other languages later this year. It can be accessed online and on mobile.
There’s a parallel learning center for small businesses or marketers totally new to Facebook called “Learn How.” It seeks to further simplify and demystify marketing on Facebook and covers four primary topic areas:
Your Facebook Page
How Facebook Ads Work
Measuring Results
Creating an ad
Each of these sections drills further down with examples and explanations of best practices and FAQs. Unlike Blueprint Learn How is already available in 14 languages.
Finally the company has relaunched its Facebook for Business site, which offers some of the same explanatory material but is also a doorway into ads creation. As before there are also “success stories” and campaign examples that can be sorted by geography, ad unit type, industry, campaign objective and business size.
Despite the two new sites, Blueprint and Learn How, the company says “Facebook for Business remains the primary resource hub for businesses using Facebook.”
Most of Facebook’s two million advertisers technically qualify as “small businesses” and many of them are outside the US, hence the “day one” launch in a variety of languages. The company is trying to migrate more of the 30 million SMBs with Facebook Pages over to Facebook Ads.
What’s most interesting to me about all of this — the new resources and examples are very helpful — is the certification. This appears to follow in Google’s footsteps to some degree. I wasn’t able to find much information about that process or what’s involved. I will update this post after I receive more information from Facebook.
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