Every year, Facebook holds an annual developer conference to roll out new products and features. This year’s conference — F8 — has just concluded and there were some exciting new features that will allow law firm marketers to connect with prospects better than ever.

Here are some of the new Facebook features and how to use them for law firm marketing:

Messenger Platform. More than 900 million people around the world communicate via Facebook Messenger. It was the fastest growing app in the U.S. last year and now Facebook has opened up messaging to all businesses to enable them to communicate to customers in a new way. Using Messenger “bots,” companies can offer automated subscription content, customized communication as well as live automated messages with clients/customers who opt in. This new tool also supports sending and receiving text and images. This is essentially a shift from public to private social media.

Live Video. Facebook has been spending a lot of time enriching the video experience on its site, and it’s paid off — Mark Zuckerberg shared that users are watching more than 100 million hours of video every day on Facebook! Businesses are now able to stream Facebook Live broadcasts from a number of devices. Using this tool, your next presentation could go much further than you ever thought possible.

Video Profiles. You can now bring your profile to life on your law firm Facebook page by using Facebook’s Profile Expression Kit. Repurpose the videos you’ve created for your website and YouTube for your Facebook profile to connect more authentically with potential clients.

Instant Articles. This is a wonderful way to extend the reach of your blog or newsletter content and get more engagement from your audience on Facebook. Instant Articles are better than mobile web articles because they load much faster while accommodating video and image zoom. Facebook has been beta-testing Instant Articles for almost a year, and their research says they receive 20% more clicks and are shared 30% more than mobile web articles.

There were several more features introduced at F8 that you will find useful in your everyday life, including a “Save” button that gives you the ability to save web clips to any device, Quote Sharing that allows you to easily share quotes or text directly from an article or book to Facebook and a mobile video browsing hub/search engine that enables you to browse videos by topic.