Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – April 2018 Edition

by Ana Gotter

Facebook has made a lot of big changes lately, and it’s generated a ton of conversation and questions from both users and businesses on the platform wondering exactly what this will mean moving forward.

The short answer: these changes are very good, even if they feel a little inconvenient while we adjust to them.

Ultimately, they’ll improve Facebook Ads for users and marketers alike, creating a win-win situation for everyone involved.

In this special edition to our Facebook Updates post, we’re going to be taking a look at the new “Facebook 2.0” and what it means not only for users but for the advertisers trying to connect with them.

We’ll have some of our top experts weighing in about the potential impact and how to prepare for it.

To keep users’ information safe and secure, Facebook is changing the way advertisers can target their adverts.

We are in full support of these changes because we believe they are critical to maintaining trust between advertisers and Facebook users.

Some of these changes will impact your Facebook advertising strategy, so our Facebook round up this month focuses just on the recent updates that affect marketers.

Note that these changes are actively happening and are a work in progress, as you can see from the infographic below, so we’re going off the information we have now. We will, of course, update you as we know more.

These are the big Facebook updates we’re going to go over that you need to know:

New Privacy Protections to Everyone, No Matter Where You Live

It’s not shocking that Facebook’s biggest concern right now is privacy with all the chaos happening. Now there will be new privacy protections extended to everyone, no matter where you live (which previously had affected certain privacy features).

These new protections and actions will include:

Asking users to review how Facebook uses their data to display ads and giving them the option to opt out of targeting like partner categories or personal profile information like relationship status or political affiliation.

Allowing users to turn off face recognition technology on Facebook

Special protections for teenagers, which will include limiting ad categories that can be displayed to them
Updated terms of service that correlates with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Not sure what all this means? Here’s what our in-house expert Paul Fairbrother had to say:

GDPR is an important topic for marketers as it’s essential for advertisers to be compliant before it’s rolled out on 25th May 2018.
Although GDPR only covers the rights of European citizens it applies to companies worldwide if they have customers or prospects in Europe, therefore for a global platform like Facebook it’s good news that they are now compliant.Most users will accept the current settings so it should be business as usual for advertisers. Giving users more control of their own data is a far better option than governments imposing restrictions on advertisers so the privacy check that Facebook is rolling out should be welcomed”.

Facebook Now Rewards for Reports of Data Abuse

Facebook is proving exactly how much they want to shut down data sharing that violates their policies by offering bounties to users who report data abuse.

They’re primarily looking for:

instances where data that was “legally” obtained was then stolen, sold or misused
3rd party companies who are obtaining user data in a way that violates Facebook’s terms of service

They’re offering actual cash rewards if your information leads to significant impact. The actual reward will depend on how significant the lead was, but they’ve paid up to $40,000 for information that led to bug fixes in the past.

Want to learn more about the program? Check out their FAQ here.

Here’s Paul’s take:

Ever since Facebook has allowed ads to be targeted using custom audiences there has been a game of cat and mouse where unscrupulous advertisers have developed tools and apps to scrape user data and Facebook has been doing it’s best to shut these down. With the new changes Facebook will now be in the driving seat, this means that ethical advertisers will no longer be at a disadvantage to the spammers, creating a level playing field will help a majority of advertisers. As always, if users have trust in the ads they see this will increase the effectiveness of ads”.

The (First) Nine Barriers to Prying Apps

One of the first announcements that came out regarding the privacy changes was that Facebook was putting a hold on app reviewing. This makes sense, since apps are an easy way for users’ information to be accessed without their full knowledge.

Moving forward, Facebook will be restricting data access to apps on Facebook. These changes include:

No longer allowing apps to view the guest lists or posts of events users attended or hosted.
All third-party apps will need approval from Facebook directly and a group admin before being able to access a group’s members list, and other information they could access like conversations is being kept off the table.
Apps will need Facebook approval before being able to access the Pages API, which allowed them to read posts or comments from any Page.
Facebook will need to directly approve all apps that request information like check-ins, likes, photos, posts, videos, events, and groups. They’ll also forbid apps from getting information like user religious or political affiliation.
Instagram’s API is being deprecated, taking a few steps back on the changes they’d recently made making it more accessible.
Search by email and phone numbers has been disabled: Until today, people could enter another person’s phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them. However, malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information so Facebook has disabled this feature. They’re also making changes to account recovery to reduce the risk of scraping as well.
User call and text history will be limited, and Facebook confirmed it does not collect the content of messages and that logs older than one year are deleted.
Targeting through partner categories has been shut down.
Ease of app review is being put in place so that users can easily see which apps can access their information, and quickly remove those they don’t want.

Here are Paul’s thoughts regarding these changes:

This doesn’t affect advertisers but could have a large impact on third party apps used for Facebook and Instagram management (though their functionality for other platforms will remain intact) while we see where the chips fall“.

As part of this process, Facebook is also telling users if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

The messages Facebook is sending to people whose privacy could have been affected by the app “This Is Your Digital Life.”

Increased Transparency and Accountability for Ads & Pages

In all of these changes, Facebook is directly addressing one of the biggest issues they’ve faced: the political controversy.

Now, they’re testing a feature that lets users see all of the ads a business is running on their Page, even if they’re not in the ad’s audience. This is designed to increase transparency.

This was meant to help protect users with political ads in particular, but it could end up applying to all ads and Pages, and here’s what Paul had to say:

This is already being tested in Canada where users can see all ads a page has run, not just political ads. Feedback so far has been minimal, it doesn’t seem to have had any major impact for either advertisers or users”.

Increased Authenticity and Transparency for Pages

Facebook is also requiring that individuals who manage pages with large follower count are verified by Facebook, making it much more difficult for people to use fake accounts to admin big Pages. This is designed to protect user identity and increase identity further, and yes, prevent election interference.

These features will still apply to non-political Pages, too, however, extending the protection to all users.

Here’s what Rob Goldman, VP, Ads and Alex Himel, VP, Local & Pages wrote:

“People who manage Pages with large numbers of followers will need to be verified. Those who manage large Pages that do not clear the process will no longer be able to post. This will make it much harder for people to administer a Page using a fake account. We will also show you additional context about Pages to effectively assess their content. For example, you can see whether a Page has changed its name.”

Here’s our expert’s comment:

The important thing to note here is it’s the page admins not the page that needs to be verified. For legitimate advertisers this is a good move, the more trust there is in Facebook pages the more users are likely to trust and engage with Facebook advertisers. However, many companies use fake personal profiles as an easy way to administer company profiles.
As a priority it’s now time to use real profiles and instead use Business Manager to keep business and personal profiles separate”.

Privacy Tools Are More Accessible

One of the biggest complaints users had about Facebook’s privacy settings was that they were too difficult to find. Unsurprisingly, Facebook has made changes to this, making it easier for users to findand adjust their privacy settings.

The new Privacy Shortcuts menu is a menu where you can control your data in just a few taps, with clearer explanations of how our controls work.

The goal of Facebook was to create an experience is now explicit, more visual, and easy-to-find. Specifically, they’ve redesigned their entire mobile settings layout so that it’s simpler and faster for users to find what they’re looking for.

Instead of having the settings spread across 20 different screens, they’ll now be located all on one. There will also be a new privacy shortcuts menu, which will be highly visual and simple to navigate (as seen in the screenshot below).

This will include the ability to:

Control who sees your profile information
Make your account more secure, like adding two-step authentication
Review what you’ve shared in the past, and delete it if you choose
Control the ads you see by choosing what information Facebook can use to show you ads

Paul believes this is actually an excellent opportunity for advertisers.

This makes it easier for users to update their ad preferences. Although some users might opt out of advertising that is targeted using their data it’s just as likely that users will take the opportunity to tidy up their list of interests, this makes advertising more relevant for them and makes interest targeting more accurate for advertisers”.

Shutting Down Partner Categories

The “Partner categories” targeting feature has previously allowed advertisers to use info obtained from third-party data companies to target users through Facebook Ads. Now, Facebook is shutting down partner categories.

If advertisers want to target certain users, they’ll have to use Facebook’s behavior targeting, interest targeting, or custom audience, with email addresses obtained “Facebook legally.”

Fortunately, most advertisers don’t use Partner Categories, so this won’t affect too many of our users. According to Paul, this likely won’t be too big of a deal for that exact reason.

Partner categories are not a key component of targeting for most advertisers, with lookalikes and interest targeting often providing better results. Data partners such as Experian and Acxiom are focused on the US market so outside of the US the effect of removing partner categories will be negligible”.

New Tools Against Misinformation in News Feed

Facebook is taking big steps to protect users against misinformation that has a tendency to spread like wildfire on most social media platforms. Satire has been misinterpreted as fact, and unreliable sources can look like they’re credible.

Last year, Facebook tested a feature that gave users more knowledge about the publishers of the information they’re seeing, and now they’ll be rolling that out to everyone in the US.

People will be able to see that the Onion is a satire site, for example, so they quickly know not to take it too seriously. Users will also be able to see which of their friends have shared the article.

Facebook is also testing a new feature that will let users find out more information about an article’s author so they can evaluate the credibility of that exact article in addition to the publication.

People will be able to click the article’s author in Instant Articles to see what else they’ve written, giving users more context.

I was thrilled to see this news, and our expert agreed that this was good news.

Clickbait has been around on Facebook ever since the platform has allowed business pages and more recently this has evolved into fake news. Facebook have a fine line to tread as banning all fake news could be seen as censorship, that’s why they’d prefer to let the reader make their own judgement.
Previously this has been hard for users to do as checking various third party sites – especially on mobile – is time consuming so a solution within the newsfeed is welcome.With Facebook looking to create a newsfeed with less sensational content this is a good time for advertisers to evaluate their style of ad creative.
Advertisers relying on clickbait style ads will find that their ads will look more and more dated and out of place in the newsfeed. Consider moving to a content first approach where useful information is given in the ad itself so that users can decide whether it’s worth clicking on to learn more”.

Conclusions

That’s a lot of information that we just dumped on you, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Don’t worry, though, because Paul’s final thoughts on the changes are positive:

Facebook advertising doesn’t have a set price. Instead, the platform uses an auction for every ad served. Simply put, this means that if demand for advertising falls then ad prices also fall. would attract more advertisers, and ad demand would quickly stabilize.
For every advertiser that decides to leave Facebook, another will see this as an opportunity to take their place”.

Last but not least:

The other conclusion from recent events is to move away from micro-targeting and instead build funnels. Cast a wide net at the top of the funnel, by starting with an audience of approximately 1 million people the CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) is low and from this build custom audiences of engaged users to retarget.”

What do you think? How do you feel about the latest changes? Which are you most excited about? Share your thoughts, knowledge, and questions in the comments below!

https://adespresso.com/blog/top-updates-facebook-monthly-need-know-now/ https://adespresso.com/blog/top-updates-facebook-monthly-need-know-now/

Tuesday, 22 May 2018