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How Facebook’s New Smart Publishing Tool Predicts What You Should Share

Facebook's new "content auto-pilot" tool may be the best gift that brands receive this year.

Greg Finn on December 11, 2014 at 8:48 am

The context of Facebook’s reach for publishers in 2014 has been rather negative, up to this point. With decreased reach, a drop in promotional posts and the push for paid exposure, brands haven’t been the biggest fans of Facebook this year. This all may change however thanks to a new feature announced yesterday that is essentially an auto-pilot for content that will match the best stories to a brand’s audience.

Called “Smart Publishing,” this new tool helps identifies stories that will resonate with their specific audience and in turn publish stories automatically. The new tool won’t push the identified articles to your Page, rather the stories identified by Facebook’s algorithms will be displayed directly in the News Feed.

How Smart Publishing Works

The tool predicts which stories will be a hit with a publisher’s audience by looking at links currently being shared on Facebook from that website. When the setting for Smart Publishing is enabled, Facebook will then begin displaying the best, most popular content to a brand’s audience automatically. This may be a huge boon for marketers as they no longer rely on their curation, but can instead allow Facebook to help them cast a wide net based on what Facebook thinks their audience wants. Again, this should be music to the ears of all brands, especially those that have evergreen content or content that has a more cyclical life-span.

The tool is only currently available to a limited number of organizations, but Facebook “hope(s) to make it more broadly available in the coming months.” Admins can see if they have the option to opt into the program by heading to Page Settings -> Publisher Tools -> Smart Publishing.

For more information see the official release from Facebook.

About The Author

Greg Finn

Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.