Let’s talk about bells and whistles, or balloons and yeehaw if you’re in the same camp as Bo. We all know that social media is a dynamic landscape, in fact, I’m still FUMING about the Twitter update that changed the favorites to likes #icant. An afterthought to the new and shiny, however, is the new opportunity to showcase your ads and products. Facebook has rolled out a slew of new ad features as they continue their quest for web domination, but I’ll only touch on 3 because I’m a talker and no one wants to read a novel.

1. If you’ve posted a link to Facebook recently, you’ve probably noticed the new image display. This nifty little update has been dubbed the carousel, and I have feelings of ambivalence towards it as far as credit unions go. Carousel gives you the option to feature 3-5 ads in a single frame, lending (lol loan pun) you the option to showcase a range of products or promotions. Example time: you want an ad that redirects to your loan page; you now can feature your auto, personal, home, etc. loans in one post. All the user has to do is scroll through the images and click to the various web anchors to see the information they want. Just like me in Macy’s, people can’t resist something new, so they’ll click and scroll – thus increasing engagement. That’s great and all – in theory. You have an average of two seconds to grab a user’s attention on the web to retain them, and while this will grab attention and potentially keep them there, they may not realize there’s a scroll option or just keep moving if what’s relevant to them isn’t the first image. Now you’ve lost them and their non-existent attention span. This dilemma brings me back to ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.’ Balloons and yeehaw aren’t so fun when the balloons pop and the yeehaw is annoying at best. This feature is best leveraged in specific instances. For everyday use with credit unions, it’s clunky and distracting.