New Facebook Features Provide Training for Marketers

To accommodate its most frequent request from advertisers, Facebook launched Blueprint and LearnHow today, two new training resources for marketers.

A follow-up to last month’s Ads Manager app, Blueprint consists of three dozen online courses about things like campaign optimization, leveraging video on Facebook, and how to effectively measure ads. In addition to specific courses, Blueprint also has tracks on broader topics such as digital buying and direct-response marketing.

“Educating clients, employees, and keeping up with the velocity of change is demanding,” says Patrick Harris, director of global agency development at Facebook. “The Blueprint eLearning program provides the necessary curriculum to help our partners learn more and grow their businesses on Facebook.”

The feature was beta tested by more than 900 marketers from 54 agencies around the world, including iProspect, Starcom, PHD, MediaCom, and Mindshare.

“Facebook designed education to help PHD not only manage our current global talent, but to also equip our employees with the best skills to know how to leverage Facebook for our clients effectively,” says Mike Cooper, chief executive (CEO) of PHD, which included test participants from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, Singapore, and Dubai.

A bit less sophisticated, LearnHow is aimed at new marketers and small businesses. LearnHow focuses on the basics of advertising on Facebook, with instruction about how Facebook ads work, how to create a page or a custom audience, and how to measure results. The resource’s content library is set up in such a way so that marketers can take online courses or just use it as a reference for questions that may come up.

The two educational tools are accessible by both desktop and mobile. While LearnHow is available in 14 languages, Blueprint is only available in English for the time being.