FB Preferred Marketing Revamped To Improve Member Connections

On the heels of Twitter’s aggressive appeal to mobile developers, Facebook is trying to strengthen ties within its own developer community.

Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer program -- which was hatched to help businesses scale their marketing efforts on the network -- is being restructured to improve connections between members.

The program -- soon to be renamed Facebook Marketing Partners -- will now help marketers find partners to overcome specific shortcomings ranging from scaling issues to insufficient data analysis.

“The new structure also helps businesses find partners with expertise in particular countries and industries,” Facebook’s Partner program explained in a blog post.

Businesses looking for a marketing partner can use the program’s revamped matching tool to search by specialty, country and industry and then contact partners directly. Facebook is also improving access to its Ads API, so developers can build better tools.

With the rise of mobile platforms and rival developer programs, Facebook is at risk of losing its grip on the developer community. Along with the launch of Twitter’s new developer platform, this week, app makers have been increasingly exploiting the contact lists on users’ smartphone to bypass Facebook.

Facebook continues to come up with ways to improve its position among mobile developers and advertisers. Per a recent change, for example, Facebook marketing partners can now target the owners of specific mobile devices, from the Samsung Galaxy S5 to the iPhone 5s.

Previously, advertisers had been able to target users of specific mobile operating systems like iOS or Google’s Android, but extending that reach to specific phone models was not possible.

In addition to using device-level targeting, advertisers and developers can now create Custom Audiences consisting of their mobile app users. As a result, a developer with multiple apps can now cross-promote their portfolio of apps to those consumers that they know that like their apps.

As part of its broader mobile strategy, Facebook also recently strengthened ties between its mobile app ads and other formats by connecting them to a Facebook page -- adding social context as well as like, comment and share buttons.

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