Once again, Mark Zuckerberg has shaken up the Facebook advertising world by altering algorithms to promote more personal content rather than news or sponsored ads. Social media marketing is an important aspect of Facebook, and staying on top of these changes is necessary to maintain good reputation and visibility. The new algorithms also aim to turn Facebook into a “video-first” platform, where video content that is engaging will be prioritized over motionless content.
Social Media Marketing
When ads on Facebook are made or posts on a Page are boosted, Facebook reviews the content of such posts for any illegal content, as advised by their Facebook Policies.
Companies that rely on likes and shares for boosting their content are being penalized, as well as are content on Page’s which is made up of mainly engagement-bait. A Business Page that asks their fans to like or share content in order to boost their reach will be penalized. Demoting posts from people that do a page’s bidding, as well as the page themselves. Facebook has created a machine-learning model that can detect different types of engagement bait, and posts that use these tactics will be shown less in News Feeds. This new algorithm also prioritizes video-based content over content that contains too much text or motionless photos.
Fighting Fake News
The main idea of this change in social media marketing, according to Mark Zuckerberg, is to create more meaningful content. Facebook believes that companies or individuals that are asking for engagement are effectively ‘clogging up’ people’s News Feed with undesirable content, making Facebook less user-friendly.
This move is actually similar to a previous move by Google, that aimed to reduce websites that aim only at making users click and don’t actually provide useful content.
Facebook has stated it will begin using stricter demotions on pages that ignore its reprisals and continue to post engagement bait.
Facebook advertising
What follows is a list of certain types of Facebook advertising or actions on your Page. These have a high chance of your ad being disabled or your Page being banned from use of ads by Facebook. If you do your best to adhere to these guidelines, your Page should be safe to operate.
- Too much text in an ad
- Mentioning Facebook
- Using Before & After images
- Emulating Facebook’s features (i.e. a fake ‘Like’ button)
- Using non-existent functionality
- Dating and relationship ads, or anything overly sexual or illegally targeting minors
- Affiliate marketing or third party advertising opportunities
- Finance related pages involving ‘make money online’ or ‘work from home’ advertisements
- Promoting websites with forwarded URLs
- Using a Facebook ads coupon bought from other websites i.e. Fiverr
- Creating a new Facebook account and advertising with it immediately
- Changing your funding source
- Having a billing address different than your business’ address (i.e. different cities, countries)
- Creating ads using a proxy server or from a remote location
- Advertising a URL that has a 404 or is extremely slow
- Editing or changing an ad multiple times after submitted
As a company managing ads on behalf of our clients, we take these policies very seriously and have reviewed them. To ensure we are posting legally and within the standards of Facebook’s policies. Our social media marketing experts stay on top of any changes made to Facebook’s algorithm, Instagram changes, and new ways to improve the visibility of your business. Facebook reserves the right to remove any ad based on their sole discretion. This means staying aware of these changes and knowing what content will help boost is more important than ever.