Whether you think Facebook’s new posting feature is totally useful, a little bit scary, or something your business will never use, it does signal a continued change in the digital marketing world of anticipating the intent of the consumer.

In short, what happens now when posting directly on Facebook is, the site will anticipate the intent of your post by interpreting the context of the accompanying text and/or link. Let’s take a closer look at exactly what that means.

Let’s start with the totally useful school of thought. While putting together a catering post for a local restaurant, we were prompted with this window:

You’ll notice that you are given the option to both publish as a regular post, and preview the post with the call to action button and decide if you would like to move forward. You may be thinking, why would I not want to use Facebook’s call to action button when it matches the desired action? If your page is formatted in such a way that you can accept online orders, it may only refer out to those apps and not a custom link like catering or some other special you may want to promote.

At the other end of the spectrum we have a misinterpretation, on the same day we put together a lease application link and were prompted to make said post into a job posting:

Best we can tell this link happened because the content of our caption included the phrase “you can apply… right on our website” and/or the link it was referring to ended with /apply-now. Either way, while an incorrect assumption, Facebook was anticipating the intent of the company posting and providing the best action for the consumer.

While searcher intent is mostly attributed to the SEO world, this updated to Facebook essentially takes the intent of both the person posting and the end user into account. So, it is very important to make sure that the person posting on your behalf, be it an employee or a third party, understands what your business is trying to accomplish, and that they understand how the call to action works. Without those conditions being met, it can lead to a poor experience for both the user and the business.

For a great post on searcher intent check out this Moz Whiteboard Friday (https://moz.com/blog/how-google-gives-us-insight-into-searcher-intent-through-the-results-whiteboard-friday)