Information is the lifeblood of internet marketing. Business owners want to use their social media and websites to gather information like phone numbers, emails and home addresses of potential customers. Unfortunately, getting people to fill out forms on mobile devices can be challenging. Facebook is testing a new autofill feature that can help business owners get more forms filled out by mobile consumers.
Facebook has a lot of information on people and they are testing a new native signup flow that can help customers sign up for a variety of things on their favorite pages. Reducing the steps needed to fill out a form will increase the number of forms filled out and leads gained.
“Lead ads make the mobile signup process easier by automatically populating contact information that people have given Facebook, like email addresses,” Facebook wrote in a post announcing the test of the feature. “We’re testing different versions of lead ads that would let people sign up for things like newsletters, price estimates, follow-up calls and business information.”
Adding this feature will be very helpful for business owners trying to market to consumers on mobile devices. Using this native autoflow will help avoid a lot of the pain points usually associated with filling out forms on mobile devices, like having to leave one app and start a form in another app, and having to enter all of their information from scratch. Just a few taps and people are done.
As Facebook is constantly criticized for the way they use consumers’ information, they built this ad type with privacy in mind to proactively address those concerns with this new feature.. People can edit their contact information, and information isn’t sent to the business until a person clicks the “submit” button. So no information is sent to retailers automatically, the consumer always has a chance to review before submitting.
There are also safeguards based on what marketers using the feature can and can’t do. Advertisers may only use this information in accordance with their privacy policies, which will be shown by Facebook in the lead ad before people click submit. Advertisers are also restricted from re-selling lead information to third parties.
This new mobile feature is in the early stage of testing and is currently limited to a small group of businesses pages around the world (which is notable in itself since most test begin in U.S. markets and then spread to other countries after the full launch). Facebook will use the feedback from these early test to finalize the feature, though they haven’t given an indication of when that will be.
Social media marketers should keep an eye out for the native signup flow feature to be added to their accounts. It will increase by the amount of leads generated by making the process easier. When it becomes available, marketers should consider setting up forms within Facebook for all their Facebook ad campaigns with signups, registrations, and subscriptions.
For more recent news about Facebook, read this article on Facebook’s new plan for video content revenue sharing and longer view thresholds for video ads.