Surprise, surprise – Facebook is updating their policies again. You might have heard, as of January 1, 2015 Facebook will be sending each of their users a long email outlining new privacy settings and an interactive user tool called Privacy Basics. The new tool will allow users to effectively pick and choose who sees their content, and which ads they are served. This initiative comes in the middle of several yearlong debates over Facebook’s privacy capabilities for its users.
Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform with just around 1.5 billion active monthly users. Despite it’s ubiquity, Facebook is constantly battling user distrust. Unfortunately for us marketers, a lot of that distrust is in advertising and the way in which Facebook is sharing personal information.
For those of you who have done Facebook marketing before, you know as well as I do how amazing it can be. The highly targeted capabilities are unlike any other digital platform. But, with the launch of Privacy Basics we may find that less and less people are being served ads. Now, people will have more control over the ads they are seeing. As a user I think is greatand as a marketer it is a little scary to me. I believe that these changes are going to present a unique challenge for us (challenge accepted!). To learn more about how users will be able to customize ads they see, you can visit here.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think these updates are great. I commend Facebook for giving more power to their users because frankly if people feel they are not in control they will eventually leave the platform rendering it useless. I am however intrigued to see where this will leave us as marketers in the New Year. Stay tuned for updates!
