Will Facebook Ads be Impacted by Meta?

When Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of the organisation that oversees Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, it was arguably the biggest digital marketing news of 2021. Exhibiting a movement in focus for the brand, the rename better suits the company’s visions and ethos moving forward. The brand-new vision seems to be devoted to the metaverse, which is an experimentally new social media channel that relies on VR technology and augmented reality to deliver a unique experience for its users. Metaverse has the potential to completely change the digital marketing industry forever. What are Facebook Ads? As an essential tool for social media marketing, Facebook Ads allow brands to advertise their products and services, enabling them to increase their reach and potentially boost conversions. This form of advertising is useful for businesses as they offer more options compared to other advertising platform such as Google. Facebook obtains user characteristics and then can show ads to users with your target characteristics. For example, if your company sells coffee machines, you can target an older audience that are homeowners that have expressed their interest in coffee and coffee machines. Facebook ads do cost money; however, we have found that it is often cheaper to get traffic compared to other advertising platforms. There are different payment methods that your business can choose from. The most popular way is pay-per-click (PPC), which means that you only get charged when a user clicks on your ad. Many digital marketers will choose this strategy because you only pay when you engage with your customers. Changes to Facebook Ads There was a lot of criticism when Facebook rebranded because of issues with privacy credentials. However, the criticism increased when Zuckerberg promised that their privacy policy would be tightened up, as this hadn’t happened before the rebranding. Once the metaverse was introduced to us, Facebook announced that they would be restricting some advertising options which removes the ability for advertisers to target sensitive factors. This was not welcomed by some businesses as it meant that advertising could become more difficult. They implemented this change on the 19th January 2022 and have removed some commonly used targeting options. These included sexual orientation, religious practices, political beliefs, and health causes. There are changes to Facebook Ads, Will Others Follow? Currently, there have only been changes to Facebook Ads so far and it has been confirmed that the changes that they have made to Facebook will not be the same across the Metaverse ecosystem. This indicates that the privacy changes may not be part of a wider plan to make advertising less targeted. It may just be a plan to improve the reputation of Facebook as a lot of users were pushing for. On Instagram, there are currently no adjustments to how their advertising works. However, Meta has been working on increasing its privacy across all its channels including WhatsApp, where they are pushing for a marketing campaign to boost users of its encryption protocol. As Facebook has strengthened its privacy policy, other social platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter will most likely follow suit. Meta’s reputation came under threat the most regarding privacy, however, now these changes have been made, the focus will now be on others to improve their privacy credentials. How will these changes Impact your Facebook Ads? This will depend on your target audience and the product or service you deliver. Like the example, we provided earlier, a coffee machine shop isn’t likely to be affected and is expected to continue to run ads to Facebook users. However, businesses like vegan restaurants, LGBT awareness organisations, and political parties are likely to be heavily affected and won’t be able to reach their target audience easily. These types of businesses will have to review their social media marketing campaigns to ensure that they can still run Facebook ads. Conclusion It will be interesting to see how the changes that the Metaverse has made will impact digital marketing. Meta has provided these changes because the targeting options that they have removed can be seen as sensitive characteristics of an individual. Advertisers could potentially discriminate using the targeting and removing them can make the social media platform a safer place for all.

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