After a successful alpha with Nanigans, Mediamath, and Tellapart, desktop Page Post Link Ads are moving into beta on Facebook Exchange (FBX)—a solution for direct response campaigns where the targeting, conversion objective and measurement are outside of Facebook.

In late March, members of Facebook's Creative Council gathered in New York to review hundreds of campaigns submitted for the second annual Facebook Studio Awards. Serving as the jury, they debated work submitted by brands and agencies from 59 countries around the world to decide this year's winners. Take a look at the winning work here.

This year, there was a noticeable shift from application development to a focus on content that tells a story in the News Feed through compelling copywriting and photography:

"Every day we work with brand and agency partners to help them understand the benefits of Facebook and leverage its creative canvas and unmatched scale. Last year, brands tried to push the technical limits of Facebook, and digital platforms overall. Now, in just one year’s time, we were pleased with the renewed focus on the craft of great storytelling through publishing.” – Mark D’Arcy, Head of Global Creative Solutions, Facebook

The Oreo Daily Twist campaign mastered that approach and the jury selected it for the Blue Award. To celebrate the brand's 100th anniversary, Oreo used Facebook to create 100 Page Post ads in 100 days. The ads were beautifully designed, timely and relevant, referencing current events from around the world, such as the Olympics and Mars Rover Landing.

According to D’Arcy:

"Oreo, 360i and Draftfcb were successful because they had an approach that used creative talent designed around a marketing structure to keep pace with, listen to and connect with people. The structure is like a current-day version of a newsroom environment and people love it—and the numbers prove its success.”

Congratulations to the agencies and brands behind this year’s outstanding work. See you next year!

At Facebook, we are always working to improve the service we deliver to marketers. That means being in constant contact with our industry partners, listening to their needs, and working together to help make their marketing efforts on Facebook more effective and efficient. Today we are announcing the creation of the UK Advisory Board, a formal body that will further enhance that working relationship. The board, which includes representatives from several brands and agencies, will meet approximately four times a year to discuss product development, campaign measurement and insights, and marketing best practices.

The formation of the UK Advisory Board is the latest step in our ongoing commitment to the country's marketers and our desire to give them the support they need to get the best results on Facebook.

Under the leadership of Christian Hernandez and Stephen Haines, our UK brand and agency teams are able to offer a complete range of marketing solutions – from brand building to direct response advertising. In the past year we have also created industry-specific teams, with specialized knowledge across different fields, including telecom, FMCG, automotive, and fashion.

Facebook UK Advisory Board members are:

Brand Representatives

• Matt Atkinson – Tesco

• Sarah Mansfield – Unilever

• Spencer McHugh – EE

• Jason Richards – PepsiCo

• Jon Woods – Coca Cola

Agency Representatives

• Karen Blackett – MediaCom

• Gerry Boyle – ZenithOptimedia

• Phillippa Brown – Omnicom

• Mark Creighton – Mindshare

• Pippa Glucklich – Starcom MediaVest

• Rob Horler – Aegis

Each day, millions of people visit Facebook Pages—and almost half access them from their mobile phones. This is why we developed a new mobile Pages layout tailored to the way people look for information on their mobile devices.

A Page is a business’s identity on Facebook, so we’re making it easier for your current and potential customers to interact with your Page in a way that’s both efficient and useful.

Design improvements to mobile Pages include:

For people

• A cleaner, simpler look, with better Page layouts for mobile viewing

• More relevant information up front so people can see the information they care about most—such as location and photos—at a glance

• Streamlined and prominent ways to interact with Pages, including actions such as Like, Call, Message, and Share, all of which now appear at the top of Pages

For Page owners

• Higher-appearing pinned posts, where admins can pin important posts (including offers or videos) from their desktops; these posts are now front and center when Pages are accessed on mobile devices

• Easier mobile management, allowing Page owners to easily switch between public and admin views directly from their mobile Pages/devices

Starting today, these updates are accessible via mobile browsers and the Facebook iOS app. New mobile Pages on the Android app are coming soon.

As a Page owner, there’s no need to do anything to prepare your Page in advance of these updates, but it’s important to make sure the information currently listed on your Page is complete and up to date.

For more information on these updates and Facebook Pages, click here.

Come hear directly from the team that built mobile app install ads about the new features and best practices for using the product. You’ll also have a chance to ask live questions. We will be holding this live event on Wednesday, April 17 at 10:00am PST/1:00pm EST.

The main goal of Facebook’s Ads Manager is to give advertisers insight into how their ad campaigns are helping them to achieve their marketing goals. Every month, hundreds of thousands of marketers use Ads Manager to monitor campaign performance and optimize their ad budgets, delivery, bids, targeting, and creative.

Today we're announcing updates to Ads Manager to make it even easier for advertisers to see how they're performing against specific goals and to calculate their return on investment. These updates address feedback we’ve heard from advertisers who use Ads Manager to monitor their Facebook campaigns.

We've enhanced our device targeting to allow you to reach people on specific versions of Android and iOS mobile operating systems and devices with Wi-Fi only connections.

Now you can tailor specific messages to people based on which operating system version they are using (e.g., iOS 6 or Jelly Bean 4.2), which means that you can reach people with the version of your app that will work best on their device. 

You may also want to target campaigns to reach only people who are connected to Wi-Fi, because it signals a person may have more time and bandwidth to download and check out your app. This new targeting option is a particularly good fit for apps that require significant data usage. 

The ad create tool is an easy way to design ad campaigns.  Just like you create ad campaigns for sponsored stories and Page like ads, you can now use the ad create tool to get a mobile app install ad campaign up and running in minutes. 

These updates to the ad create tool will be available starting in the English version of the tool, and will roll out to other languages soon.

We hope that these updates will help businesses more effectively design mobile campaigns. Brands across verticals and countries have already seen great success using mobile app install ads. For example, O2, a UK communications company, used mobile app install ads to catapult its new music app, O2 Tracks, to #6 in Apple’s App Store just days after launching and reached an audience of over nine million people during its three-day marketing campaign on Facebook. And Poshmark, an online retail business, has seen 3x greater ROI from Facebook mobile app install ads compared to other advertising channels.