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The most successful marketers invest in staying ahead. And that's exactly what happened at Social media Marketing World 2025, where industry leaders shared their proven strategies to AI implementation, organic social growth, and a whole lot more. If you couldn't attend in person, I have very good news for you. Every single session, keynote and workshop is available only through Friday, April 18, after which you won't be able to get tickets. Make the investment in your personal growth atsocial media marketingworld.info and watch 2025 be the year your marketing career reaches new heights.

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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 the most important Facebook updates we need to know as marketers, including Facebook making the announcement that they now have a friends only feed. And unlike previous versions, it's pretty easy to access. So we'll explain how it works and more importantly, how we can adapt our strategy as marketers and businesses for it. Also, more details on Meta's latest AI tools designed to help keep people on the platform longer and some pretty important ad targeting updates for some parts of the world. If you are running paid ads or planning to in the next quarter or so, you'll definitely want to make sure that your campaigns are ready for these updates. My name is Jerry Potter, host of the Social Media Marketing Talk show from Social Media Examiner. We break down all the latest social media news and what it means for marketers like you. Let's start with AI Meta AI, which is sort of the parent name for all of Meta's AI things are now rolling out to 41 European countries and 21 overseas territories. So this is essentially the ability to talk to Meta's AI bot. The initial release includes an intelligent chat function in six European languages and of course they're going to continue to expand that as they go. And this is accessible in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and in messenger as well. So what happens if you've never seen it? There'll be a little blue circle icon where I love the wording they use, where users can summon Meta AI in group chats as well by typing at Meta AI followed by their query. And that also works in WhatsApp along with other platforms very, very soon. So there's a few ways you can use this one is just like you'd chat to ChatGPT or any other one. You can just ask it questions, ask it for help with things. And one of the cool things about this is it is free, like it's just included for meta users, so I think if you are tight on budget, that's an opportunity there. Right. But it's also set up to help discover relevant content from across meta platforms, including reels and posts from friends and things like that. So I'm seeing it kind of as a well amped up search engine. We know if anyone's ever searched on Facebook, you know, you can search the whole platform, you can search within groups, and it's been decent for a while, but this has the potential to take it to a whole new level. So I'm curious to start playing around with it and just kind of see what's included there. But also know it also includes web search capabilities so it can pull information from the web and include context, all in a conversational format. So that's one big update. Also, we have this new Friends tab, which I do think we can take advantage of as business owners. We'll talk about that here in just a second, but all of us here at Social Media examiner are coming off of Social Media Marketing World. Earlier this week, our 12th annual conference was really amazing. All of the presenters there got to show up and share their best stuff. I was lucky enough to be there and speak about podcasting and YouTube, and attendees walked away with all kinds of actionable insights that many are already putting into place in their businesses. Some of them started doing it on site. If you weren't able to be there though, there's not much time. But you can get access to all the recordings. These are the exact same things that people you know travel thousands of miles and pay thousands of dollars to see in person. But you can still get the virtual ticket. So just minutes from now, you can be watching whichever sessions are most relevant for you at a fraction of what it costs to attend in person, including Mari Smith's talk about how to combine MeTa, AI and Facebook features for maximum impact. So don't wait because these are only available for a limited time. You can go to socialmediamarketing World to access all of the keynote sessions and workshops Right now. When you get there, you're gonna see a big button at the top that says get the recordings. Then scroll down, you'll see a button that says start your journey to social media success. So you can grab those now. Again, go to SocialMediaMarketing World. So one of the things people were talking about this week was Facebook's new Friends tab. So starting a couple of weeks ago in the United States and Canada, the new Friends tab is a place where you can just see content from your friends. Now, I don't have it on desktop, but I do have it on mobile. And one thing they've done this time, because in the past when they've added these types of feeds for Facebook or Instagram, that has made it a little bit difficult, right? Like you got to go over to this tab, then you got to choose from a dropdown, which one you want to see, and then every time you load the app again, you got to choose it again, right? There was no default to just have that this time there's still no default. But essentially the friends tab that's been in the Facebook mobile app, where you go to see your friends and friends requests, now is stopped by a feedback of stories, reels, posts, birthdays, and more from everyone's friends. And so to utilize this as a business, you know, on one hand, if you're using business pages, you're like, whoa. So now our reach is going to go down even more, which obviously is something that we need to be aware of. But essentially it is going to include things from profiles as well as what they're doing in groups and things like that. So a few ways to utilize this. First of all, if you do business using your personal profile, I do, I certainly connect through networking and things like that, then this may be an opportunity to actually get seen more. Now, as somebody who's kind of been craving the friends feed after, you know, being forced all of this content from people, I don't follow recently, I even since then I do find myself going to the default feed. But one thing you could do is encourage your followers to browse the friends feed to make sure they see your content. Make sure you don't miss out on what we're sharing. If you are primarily using a business page, I think one of the best things you can do if you've been thinking about this for a while and haven't done it, is to enact an employee advocacy program where you encourage your employees to share the business pages content. Make it as easy as possible, right? Send them the link, include instructions on how to share it, maybe offer some internal, you know, incentives to do it. I think for some businesses it could just be a temporary thing like, hey, we want to try this out for the next 60 days. Every time you share, you'll be entered to win XYZ or, you know, something like that. Check local laws, of course. But if your employees share the business page content, it can be so much more impactful, especially if they add their own personal thoughts on top. Right. Always with humility. But I'm so proud of this. I can't believe this. I'm so grateful. Another thing I think that we can do as business pages is really start trying to focus on share worthy content. And sometimes that's tricky. But I will tell you, as a psychology geek, of all of the things that get someone to share something on Facebook or Instagram or anywhere else, identity is tied to most of them. So if you can create content that's kind of like for people like us or for people like this or different things like that, that stuff is always much more likely to be shared. And then even if you're not marketing with your personal profile, you can still jump into Facebook groups. Groups are going to continue to have high visibility, especially stuff with lots of engagement, including in that Friends Only feed. So you can go into groups for your industry and just kind of raise awareness about what you do or what the company does with things around that. So. All right, we have reached the phase now. Meta is starting to test community notes in the US So they announced a few months back that they were eliminating all the third party fact checking programs on Facebook, Instagram and threads. And now they are testing the community notes. So this is where people can basically just add notes to anything that they want that they don't believe is true or inaccurate or anything like that in any way. Now, unlike fact checks, they say that the notes will not reduce content distribution, which is an interesting thing to think about, you know, so they also haven't said it'll increase content distribution the way that engagement sometimes does, whether it's good or bad. So that's one thing that's interesting. I don't know if this means we should be adding our own notes to our content if we are given the opportunity or not, but notes will not also initially appear in public, so this is important to know. So as Meta is testing the system, people can leave notes and the notes can be specifically up to 500 characters. You can include links. They won't display author names initially, so people can submit them, but they won't show up publicly. So it's just going to be a backend thing. Right now, apparently they are gradually admitting people to be these community note takers off of a wait list of 200,000 plus people. So it'll be interesting to see the way that this goes out. One more thing to know, and I know this is really important for the marketers that work in some of these niches and industries that can sometimes be flagged or more controversial contributors do have to be over 18 to be contributing notes, but also all the accounts have to be older than six months. Now, anyone doing anything nefarious on Facebook probably has plenty of profiles they've created to do bad things with, but somebody won't be able to just create an account and then start leaving notes about things right away. All right, Facebook Stories. I'm curious how many businesses are utilizing Facebook Stories, but they are working, people are consuming them. And so now Meta is enabling creators in the content monetization program to earn money from views on their public stories. So this was something that they rolled out last year, a new version of a way to let people who are putting up content monetize and apparently this year they are going to offer open enrollment. So previously it was sort of an invitation only thing when you had content that was reaching a lot of people. And now apparently Facebook Stories is going to be part of it. So I would say if you have a business that gets into the program or qualified for the program, and you have some really interesting day to day behind the scenes stuff, might be an opportunity to not only reach more people, show them behind the scenes, but it'd be a nice incentive if it gets a lot of reach to earn a little extra money on the side as well. All right, let's talk about ads in just a second. If you are running ads, there are some really important targeting updates that we all need to be aware of just to make sure that our campaigns don't fall off the edge of what we want them to do. But first, they've announced a bunch of AI powered business tools, some ad stuff, some really cool stuff in here. First of all, Meta is expanding access to omnichannel ads and these are designed to drive both online and in store sales. So with these you can use your ads to direct people to the store nearest the person viewing it. So if you've never seen this before, if you have a brick and mortar store and you set up these omnichannel ads, you can have the different things in your ad and then down below it'll literally show them where their nearest few stores are. I've seen where you can scroll through, it seems like three to five of them as well as how many miles away from the user that they are. So they're expanding this program. If you have brick and mortars, this could be a really cool opportunity. Also starting this summer, Meta is going to introduce a simplified checkout experience for shops ads where people can actually complete the purchases on the advertisers websites, but still build their cart on Meta. So we all know the key to more online sales, higher conversion is minimizing the amount of friction. And anything that is running on Facebook or Instagram basically in shops runs really quickly, right? Because it's built into the app, it is still reliant, but less reliant on Internet speed just because things will move so quickly, because it's built in. So this is great news. But then the checkout would still happen on your website, which we think could affect tracking, among other things, but also where you don't have to necessarily set up checkout on Meta's shops. Also, Meta is allowing advertisers to combine partnership ads with Advantage plus catalog ads. So now this is going to be an even better opportunity to combine creator content if you are working with influencers along with campaigns that you are already running. So that should be really cool. And in the next few weeks, or I should say they're saying sometime this spring, so I'll say in the next couple of months, Meta is going to begin testing ads in Facebook notifications, giving advertisers a new way to engage people and drive product discovery and reconsideration. So as if we don't have enough notifications already, you know, I could literally have posted nothing in a week and I log into Facebook and I've got 22 notifications, right? And it's a lot of stuff that they think we might be interested in. So it'll be interesting to see how this doesn't get lost in the shuffle. But maybe it'll have a special designation, right? Maybe, I mean, I assume it'll say paid or sponsored, but maybe it'll have a red box around it or something that grabs attention. But that is one more place that they are testing for new placements with ads. So I would imagine it would be to direct to actual ads. I could see where maybe a notification goes out if one of our friends comments on your ad, that might be interesting. Right? Where it just said Miriam just commented on this post and then you click on it and it happens to be the ad that Miriam, my fictional friend, just engaged with. And then Meta is also introducing the ability for advertisers to request emails before sharing promo codes in promotion ads. So again, another chance to get an opt in before you do that. And then site links will soon be available globally on Instagram, allowing marketers to highlight multiple landing pages in a single ad. So this is really powerful. If you have lots of different products, people are looking at them in a carousel and whatever they click on goes straight to that product instead of just to the homepage or to search results or something along those lines. Okay. Meta is also expanding access to the Google Analytics integration. So in Meta Events Manager now you can use aggregated Google data to establish more context for web traffic. So this works along with the metapixel and the Conversions API. As always, they say after you set these up, double check that everything is of course working properly. And by the way, this integration is still rolling out gradually. You may not have it quite yet, but everyone is supposed to be getting it here very soon. Okay, a couple of really important targeting things to know about. First, if you target anyone in Singapore, most advertisers are going to have to get verified in a new way by they're saying early April. So now right up through June. June is when the deadline is going to be. And so what's going to have to happen is if you are targeting in Singapore, you need to verify details about who benefits from and who is paying for the ads targeting people. Singapore. Now, if you already have an existed verified business portfolio, they're saying you may get to skip the verification step. But this new information like who's benefiting and who's paying for the ads is going to be visible on the ads info sheet and in the ad library. So it's obviously there for more transparency based on some updated laws, it sounds like in Singapore. And then one more thing, this one actually only affects targeting one person, believe it or not. But the ripple effects, I'm sure are going to go far further than that. A woman named Tanya O'Carroll went to court to ask Meta to stop using her personal data for targeted advertising. Now, Meta originally said it's not targeted advertising the way that we're doing it. They said it's not direct marketing, it's not that specific basically. Well, it was heard in the English High Court recently and Meta now has to stop using specifically Tanya's data for ad targeting when they use her services. But we know that this is going to roll out wider. Of course. O'Carroll anticipates that Meta will likely shift to what they're doing in the rest in the eu. They'll start doing this in the uk, which is basically users either have to consent for tracking or pay for the ad free versions of its services. So just things are going to continue to get locked down a little bit tighter in Europe. So if you are targeting people there, just be aware of that so you can make the proper adjustments to your campaigns when that happens. All right, quick reminder, grab your virtual ticket now. To get all the replays from Social Media marketing world@socialmediamarketing.world you can get them for a short time. If nothing else, go to that link and just see all of the amazing talks that were given and you'll look at it and you'll go, okay, this is worth it. I want to see these. Or maybe you won't. But if the people walking out of the event this week were any indication, a lot of powerful stuff in there. I saw some live. I'm going to be going to watch some more replays as well. And if you want to add a podcast to your listening lineup, a couple of you to check out the Social Media Marketing Podcast as well as the AI Explored podcast. Of course, we appreciate you listening to this podcast as well. Until next time, may you be wise with your marketing decisions. Take care everybody. Bye. The Social Media Marketing Talk show is a Social Media examiner production. For more social media Insight, visit social mediaexaminer.com Foreign.