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December isn't just about closing out 2025. It's about deciding what kind of marketer you'll be in 2026. Will you be reactive, always scrambling to catch up with algorithm changes and the AI tools? Or will you be visionary, the marketer who sees what's coming and prepares for it? That's why I created so Social Media Marketing World. Here's what Jennifer Morton said after attending quote, it was solid gold. I spent an entire day organizing all of my notes and running everything through AI to help me come up with a fantastic game plan to move my business forward. Now the marketing landscape in 2026 will reward the prepared head to social media marketing world.info right now. The decision you make this month will echo through all of 2026.

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Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Talk show, your guide to the ever changing world of social media. All right, on today's show we're going to explore some big Facebook updates. Zuckerberg and team have been busy. After most of the year, it seemed like they were mostly focused on the Instagram side. First, a big redesign for Facebook. Some of it feels like it's slowly becoming Instagram. Also a big opportunity for Facebook groups where you can do something that we've never been able to do before, which may be a great asset for some brands and marketers and of course, some new ways to use AI to make everything easier and faster. My name is Jerry Potter, host of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a Social Media examiner production where we break down all the latest social media news and what it means for marketers like you. All right, let's talk about this Facebook redesign. So they're redesigning the feed, search creation tools, all these different things. So first of all, Facebook is simplifying its feed and navigation, including full screen content views. So if you're scrolling Facebook, if users scrolling Facebook and they can tap on something, it'll blow up to full screen basically. Obviously this looks nicer. They're also moving to grid based layouts. Sounds very Instagram like. And the ability to double tap on a photo to give it a like. Also something that's been on Instagram for many, many years. So those are the parts that are making it start to feel like, okay, are we just becoming Facebook Facebook a gram? Is that what we would call it? Another thing, and basically a redesigned content creation flow, making it easier to create stories and feed posts with better access to the most popular tools. So rather than having to sift through a whole menu, some of the most popular tools in creating Content are tagging people, adding music audience settings. So now those are going to be more prominent right away. And it looks like just from the screenshots at least that it's all just going to feel a lot more natural like it does on Instagram. For anyone who is trying to make reels in the early days, like, it was hard to even get to the reel creation screen in the very beginning. But yeah, everything is coming around and going to be a lot more accessible and easy to use now and then. This one is interesting and definitely feels like Instagram. This feels like one of those updates that can't believe they haven't done it before. Search. When you go to search on Facebook, it'll surface more content types, but rather than just having it be a list of text, it will actually show up as an immersive grid layout. And they're testing a full screen viewer as well. So that means when you search for something like the more visual it is, the more likely somebody is to click on it. So something to keep in mind, text posts are probably not going to do as well as in search as they may have at one time. And then Facebook is also enhancing profile features. So this is interesting. The way they describe it, we're enhancing profile features to show shared interests with friends, making it easier to connect based on hobbies or plans. So how do we use this as marketers? Basically the way that it works is if I went in and I said I am a Seattle Seahawks fan, I can say that this year because we're doing good. If I say I'm a Seattle Seahawks fan, basically update my profile to say that it will show me which of my existing friends or my existing network on Facebook also happened to show interest in the Seattle Seahawks or maybe other NFL teams. I don't know. So imagine if I'm a marketer, I'm going to make sure I go in and add all of the things that are related to my business, to my industry as interests, because then it will surface. The other people around you that you already know, or at least you know went to high school with, but they're Facebook friends with you that also have that same interest. So that's the idea behind it. This idea of how to use it for marketing that I'm talking about is just hypothetical, but we'll see how, how it goes. One thing that's not hypothetical, you know, we've been talking a lot about social media marketing world coming up here soon in Anaheim. And, you know, one person learns tactics. If you send your whole team to Social Media Marketing World, you're going to be able to create transformation. Like when your team goes, they multiply their results exponentially because if you have more than one person there, you can cover more sessions, share more insights, cross pollinate the AI and marketing ideas in real time, make more valuable connections that can lead to exciting new opportunities. Plus, your team will have a built in support plan for implementation because they were all there, right? Stacy Brown, who goes to Social Media Marketing World, said, this conference gave me a new vision for my work and opened my eyes to where I could take my career. And Noah Stanley said, the mindset, openness and amount of time your experts gave to us was head and shoulders above other conferences. I will bring multiple members of my staff next year. I was just in a group the other day and somebody said, hey, what digital marketing conferences are you going to next year? And I was like, well, I'm biased. But there is nothing better than Social Media Marketing World. Don't learn alone. Multiply your team's marketing power by bringing them all to Social Media Marketing World 2026. Go to Social Media Marketing World right now to learn more or get your tickets. Again, Social Media Marketing World, you can buy up to 10 at a time. Again, go to Social Media Marketing World and the limit there is 10. All right. Something that we've never been able to do on Facebook that might be an opportunity if you already have this existing asset. So Facebook is now introducing a feature that allows group admins to convert a private group to public. Now, you've never been able to do this before. We've always been able to create a Facebook group and then you could, if it was public at first, you could make it private, but you never were able to make it public because if people were sharing in what they thought was a private group, all of a sudden it was made public. That's not really fair to the members of that group. So this new system is going to basically preserve privacy safeguards for existing members. And so if you had a face, I'll tell you how it works in just a second. But if you have a private Facebook group that's maybe really good, has lots of good content in it about your brand or your business, and you're like, I wish I could take it public now you can. And the reason you'd want to do this is because public Facebook group stuff can show up in the feed. You know how we see so much content now from people that are not our friends? Well, same thing. Public Facebook group stuff has an opportunity to show up there as well. So the way it works is when the private group goes public, all past posts and comments only remain visible to admins, moderators, or existing members, and the member list remains visible only to admins and moderators. Okay. And so to do this, you would go into the group settings page. When you do it, other admins will get notified, of course. And there's also a three day review window during which the conversion can be canceled. And then after the conversion, any new posts or comments or reactions will be visible to the public. And members are notified of the change as well, including a prompt when they post for the first time in the now public group. So this feels like one of those things that Facebook really thought through. Sounds like if you're not that active in a group and all of a sudden you go back six months from now and you start posting, it'll let you know, hey, this is public now. Just keep that in mind. Speaking of privacy in groups, Facebook has now also introduced nicknames for Facebook groups. So a lot of threads, whether it's Reddit or Discord or different places like that, you've always been able to go in and use a username, right? A nickname instead of your actual name. So now Facebook is allowing users to post under custom usernames instead of their real names. Here's the weird thing about this. You know, on one hand, it lets people kind of go in, maybe have something that reflects their personality, but their boss doesn't recognize. You know, for example, although I guess if your profile picture was still there, that would kind of ruin that illusion. But the whole idea is you can go in and kind of be yourself or have something that maybe reflects your personality or something like that. And you can have a different nickname for every group. Sounds good, right? But you can also change your nickname every two days. So somebody could go into a group, do whatever, change their nickname a couple days later, do some more, change their nickname, a couple days later, do some more. I'm trying to think like what a terrible person would do, and nothing's coming to mind. But you can obviously imagine the potential downside of this. Now, the feature does exclude access to some tools. So if you're using a nickname, you can't do live streams in the group. You can't content share, you can't private message or, or anything like that. And by the way, this is not turned on by default. A group admin has to approve and activate this feature. So just so that, you know, I didn't see anything about whether it was on by default or not. So maybe worth checking the settings. All right, an update for Facebook reels. So people are stealing reels and using copywritten content. All the time. We say copywritten content or is it copyrighted content? I think it's copyrighted content either way. So now they've launched content protection. So this is a mobile first tool in the professional dashboard that will automatically protect against reels posted to Facebook and then flags matches across Facebook and Instagram. So there's something very sophisticated like this on YouTube and now it's great to see it coming to other platforms. So you can choose if something is flagged and it's your content. You can track it, you can block it, or you can release detected matches and apply attribution to it. So then if somebody took your content but it was doing really well and it was promoting your brand, you could say, okay, yeah, cool, you can keep doing that and we're just going to track it. Or you could add attribution to it and then keep doing it. Or you can, you know, block it. So there's a feature built in that's nice for brands that work with more than one account with an allow list, as they're calling it, where you can approve certain accounts to automatically put up the same content. So if you are putting the same content or parts of the same content on more than one account, you add that account to the allow list. So it's not constantly getting flagged as you go through all of it. Okay, all right. I didn't know this still existed, but if you've been in marketing for a while, you remember when we all had to have this on our company websites, the Facebook like and comment plugins. Right. So this was a little thing that you could add to your website and people could click the like button or comment with their Facebook account. They're both being discontinued February 10, 2026. So if you have them, you might want to take them down. The cool thing is Meta has been smart about this. Basically, if it's still there after February 10th, it's just going to be a zero by zero pixel sized element. And so it shouldn't show up at all. So it shouldn't break your site. Basically, anyone who has worked in web design or web management has absolutely had a plugin go bad and it broke the entire homepage. That's not going to happen here. But if, you know you have one of those old like button or commenting tools on there, you might want to go ahead and take that off sometime before February. All right. Some incredible ads updates. So they've added a lot of AI tools with ads. And first up, this is for creator brand ad campaigns. One of the big breakthroughs that we've had the last few years in social media is closing the gap between using a creator or an influencer for your brand and the company itself. There's more transparency, there's more ways to find each other. You know, a lot of it several years ago was just kind of done on trust. Like, I, I guess this account looks good. They've got followers and they're getting comments and hopefully this campaign will work. So inside the partnership ads hub, there's a new AI powered tool that will essentially help you view performance insights like how many likes, comments and shares organic creator content is already getting. And then you can look at that and decide which ones you want to go ahead and boost. Then creator eligibility has been expanded to include Facebook profiles that are using professional mode. So just business pages. So there's more creators available now for partnership ads. And they've also created new ad code sharing capabilities that let creators proactively give advertiser permission to use their content in partnership ads so it can happen later on. So I did a deal with a brand actually last week and went through this for the first time and they just said once it's up. This was on Instagram, actually, but once it's up, just give us your ad code and then we'll take care of the rest. So nice to see those things happening. All right. Over in Europe, Meta has agreed to give EU users a choice regarding personalized advertising on Facebook and Instagram starting January 2026. So Europe has much stricter privacy laws than a lot of the world. And originally, you may remember, we reported on the show about how Facebook was like, you can pay to use Facebook or get it for free and we're going to use your data. Like that's going to be our agreement. So starting in January, users will be able to choose between full data sharing to get personalized ads right, the way they sell it to us, or limited data sharing for less personalized experiences. So that's the latest agreement on that. We'll see how that shakes out in Q1 of 2026. Personally, as a marketer, I want to know when I'm being retargeted. I want to see what people are doing. So whenever that prompt pops up on my phone, ask app not to track. I'm like, nope, it's okay, you can track. I want to see what everybody's doing. All right. Meta has added some new tools to its Lead generation suite. So if you use Facebook ads for lead gen, there are some great updates here. First of all, Advantage Plus Leads campaigns are now globally available. So this is where you get to use Meta's AI to automate and optimize lead generation for really cost effective, high quality results. You know, it's a mixed bag, but I would say more of the people I talk to say this works wonderfully than people that have had issues with it. But now that's globally available, so if you're one of the regions you didn't have it before, now you do. Also, CRM integrations are increasing and can be done really easy via zapier and Salesforce Sales Cloud. So now you can have less setup time and technical barriers for basically tracking and get everything where it needs to go. Also new lead verification tools. I love this because, you know, if you've ever run Facebook ads, you're kind of going, okay, well how many of these are going to be spam and how many of these are, you know, how many, how many leads are we paying for that are not good leads? So now verification tools include sms, phone number, you can require a work email or address verification to improve lead quality and then reduce spam. And then Meta is also testing automated messenger agents and integrating third party lead nurturing tools like Manychat and Bot Cake so that you can do 24, 7 follow ups. So really putting the technology to use. You know, I opened the show today saying, yeah, we've got a lot of updates from Meta, you know, and this year it seems like they focus more on Instagram stuff than Facebook. But I will say they certainly continue to invest in the paid ad side. Obviously that's where they make a lot of their money. So, all right, a couple of API updates if you use third party tools. Meta has introduced in the enhanced Opportunity Score feature in its Marketing API. So now that if that connects to whatever third party tool you use, you will have access to the Opportunity Score features, which is nice. And then also Meta introduced a new feature in the Marketing API that allows advertisers to allocate up to 4,5% of ad spend to placements they've marked as excluded when the system identifies potential performance benefit. So if you go in and you say, yes, I want to be in the feed, I want to be in reels, I do not want to be in the sidebar, for example, then this is an opportunity for if the AI thinks yeah, you could probably be okay in the sidebar because we're seeing similar campaigns work well, you can basically say, okay, yes, you can use up to 5% of my ad spend on that or 3% or 1%, whatever you decide that you want it to be. So that's coming to third party tools that connect through the marketing API as well. All right, are you using Meta Verified? They have added something pretty potentially cool to their highest tier. So a lot of people run Meta Verified and I'm trying to remember what it starts with at now. You know, 12 bucks, 20 bucks depending on where you sign up a month. But Meta has this Meta Verified max plan that is 3,49amonth or 4 99amonth if you want both Facebook and Instagram. And they've added personalized content strategy advice to that tier. So if you're in that tier, you can now book a strategy call with Meta's content team every six months per verified profile. Now, I certainly wouldn't necessarily say that's affordable. I think anyone who's been in marketing at one point maybe got on one of those free calls with a Facebook expert and as a marketer you might have even felt like you knew more than they did. Hopefully this is really good strategy, but you'd have to find other benefits. I think, you know, if you're paying $500 a month, six months to get a single call, you know you're talking three grand there. So hopefully it's a valuable call. But according to Meta, the session offers tailored feedback to help optimize content strategies based in Meta platform priorities. So there you have it. If you're already on that plan though, great new benefit, or maybe if you're at the one right below, that might be worth upgrading and seeing what it's all about. And then also for account security. This is so important for us as marketers and brands. Meta has launched a centralized support hub on Facebook and Instagram, making it easier to report issues, get AI assisted answers and access account support tools in one place. So it's an AI support assistant that's being tested globally on Facebook to provide instant personalized help for tasks like account recovery or profile management. If you remember how hard it used to be to get an account back, this is hopefully good news. Apparently account hacks have dropped by over 30% globally in the last year and AI driven improvements have increased hacked account recovery success rates by more than 30% in the US and Canada. So should only be a good thing, right? All right, quick reminder. Bring yourself and if you want bring your whole team, learn about an all access ticket to social media marketing world today, go to SocialMediaMarketing World. Again, that's SocialMediaMarketing.org, and if you want to add another podcast to your listening lineup, check out the Social Media Marketing Podcast. Just search for that title wherever you get your podcasts. And until next time, may you be wise with your marketing decisions. Thanks everyone. Bye. The Social Media Marketing Talk show is a Social Media examiner production. For more social media Insight, visit social mediaexaminer.com.