← Social Media Marketing Talk Show
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- [00:01]
Mike Stelzner
Thinking of attending Social Media marketing World, but you need to persuade your boss. I have really good news for you. We've crafted the ultimate resource to get a yes from your boss. It includes talking points and a scripted email that really works. Imagine yourself in sunny San Diego this spring as you join thousands of marketers at our upcoming Social Media marketing world. Simply visit socialmediaexaminer.com boss to get all the amazing resources so you can get a yes from your boss.
- [00:37]
Jerry Potter
Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Talk.
- [00:40]
Tara Zuercher
Show, your guide to the ever changing.
- [00:43]
Jerry Potter
World of social media.
- [00:45]
Tara Zuercher
All right, on today's show, we're exploring the most important meta Facebook updates, including Facebook removing the option to have public followers on personal profiles. Also, one country has banned all social media for anyone under 16. We'll update you on that and what some of those implications could mean. Is meta developing a search engine? Well, they are and we'll tell you why. And they had their Q3 earnings call, which is always kind of good to know with, you know, when we're deciding how much of our time and money to invest in a platform in the coming year. So we'll update you on the most important parts of that. My name is Jerry Potter, host of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a production from Social Media examiner, where we always break down all the latest social media news and what it means for marketers like you. Today I'm joined by Tara Zuercher. Tara is a Facebook ads expert and founder of the Successful Ads Club, a membership site designed to help marketers improve their Facebook and Instagram ads results. Tara, welcome to the show.
- [01:40]
Jerry Potter
Hello. Thanks for having me, Carrie.
- [01:42]
Tara Zuercher
So let's talk about this. Facebook removing the option to have public followers on personal profiles. So first explain what exactly is happening here with this.
- [01:50]
Jerry Potter
Yes. Okay. So for especially for a lot of founders and things like that, you might find that you have a lot of followers. People that follow you on Facebook, they're not necessarily friends with you, but they have the option just to follow. Facebook has decided if you don't have a professional profile that you're not going to have to retain those followers. So basically, if you switch your profile into professional mode, all of your followers and everyone just kind of gets combined. So everybody that you're friends with, it all turns into one thing. Now, the commentary on this is, well, are they blending personal like business pages and Facebook profiles? Is this going to become what this is? We don't know yet, but you definitely want to retain your business pages for now. And we'll just kind of see where.
- [02:33]
Tara Zuercher
This Goes well, it is interesting because on personal profiles with Professional Mode, which were, I don't know, 18 months, two years into, I think when they first started rolling this out, you can boost posts, right. You can have public followers, like all these things. And so it feels like they're, you know, if they expanded the paid part and added reviews, it would pretty much be a business page.
- [02:54]
Jerry Potter
They pretty much would, yeah. Yeah. I think with a lot of people establishing personal brands, you have content creators. I think that they're just kind of pacing towards the future of what they think the Internet kind of becomes, with all of these content creators popping up everywhere and people really leaning more and more into their personal brand, even if they do have a role in a business, you know, I think people are recognizing it's important to build that up.
- [03:22]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah. Well, it sounds like it's time to at least decide whether you want to have Professional mode on or not. And I don't want to start any conspiracy theories, but I feel like since this announcement came out, my reach on my personal profile is going down. Maybe my content's not as good, I don't know. But it does seem, you know, as if they are sort of becoming personal business pages. That would. Charlie, the next. The next thing we would expect. So, on a related note, broadcast channels are now coming to profiles, but only with professional mode, right?
- [03:55]
Jerry Potter
Yes, that's exactly right. You have to have 10,000 followers in my mind. And we're going to talk about a few changes happening with messenger and broadcast channels and things like that. This is a little bit of a play towards apps like Telegram and GroupMe. You see a lot of functionality coming in that is unique to those platforms. So that's kind of exciting and I think there's a lot of opportunity with that.
- [04:20]
Tara Zuercher
It's interesting that they're having that 10,000 person minimum to get going. And I got why they did that with links on Instagram stories back in the day to kind of prevent abuse. But this could, you know, I feel like it's a different enough medium that a brand could build up to that, you know, if that was their. Their best way to communicate. So, okay, lots more updates and of course, we're going to be talking all about Facebook at Social Media Marketing World. If you wish you could travel to Social Media Marketing World, you should do everything you can to be there with us in San Diego. It is the best way to experience the conference, but sometimes travel is not an option. With a virtual ticket, you can stream all the keynotes in sessions live, including Tara's session 13 New Winning Strategies for Facebook and Instagram Ads in 2025. So she'll be there speaking. Plus you'll get access to the recordings of every keynote session and workshop. It's the next best thing to being in San Diego. So if you are ready to experience life changing content from social media marketing, you're ready to attend virtually. Get your ticket now at Social Media Marketing World Again, Social media marketing world. All right, paid ad updates. First, let's talk about these things they're calling flexible media ads.
- [05:34]
Jerry Potter
Yes. Okay, so I've been working with these. We have a lot of accounts now that have rolled out this feature and we've seen a lot of accounts where the feature was rolled out and then also pulled back. So you can tell they're still kind of refining it. But every time that we've tested it, there's definitely pros and cons. It mimics very closely the dynamic creative options that we had before where you could upload up to 10 images, videos and gifs, you know, several ad text variations, headline and copy, and this mimics that very, very closely. The thing that's probably different is you're giving Facebook a lot more control over what they do with the creative. So they may combine, they may pull in like text overlays to your imagery or your videos, things like that. And we've seen that, you know, whenever you turn on your ad optimizations for the creative, the advantage plus creative, you are giving them that same flexibility. So it seems like they're just taking these few features and kind of combining them. The thing that is a little buggy about it and that irritates me is that you're not able to do the breakdowns as well as you can when you're just using old feature called dynamic creative. So we'll see. I'm hoping that they evolve that. I'm assuming because it is so dynamic and they are being very creative with your creative. I'm assuming that we may not see those breakdowns. So that's kind of the bummer. I love. And anybody who goes through any of our material, you know that I love that feature and I'm happy it's still going to be there. It's just going to have a different name and a little bit of a different functionality.
- [07:15]
Tara Zuercher
So you do recommend checking it out, testing it. Okay, okay. Because I, you know, the thing with those is they always kind of say, yeah, we're going to mix and match and find the best stuff that works. And the best stuff that works sounds great, but I Sometimes will see ads. And I thought if the brand knew that they were spending money on this, they would be really upset. Right. Like, do you ever see those? And it's usually in, in stories or reels or something.
- [07:38]
Jerry Potter
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And that is actually what Facebook is working to overcome with all of these. You know, there's a lot of AI now built into the platform, more coming. And you know, you can see in the newsroom, like, they are really wanting to be able to take our creative and use it very efficiently. So resize things. There's so many ad placements now. And so they want to be able to take your creative, resize it, make sure that it fits the right platforms and that, that it's pulling the attention that you want it to as an advertiser. So I think it's getting there. But yeah, I think everybody has experienced, like there's a random picture in stories with absolutely no context. And okay, it's sponsored and yeah, it makes no sense.
- [08:21]
Tara Zuercher
Somebody lost money on this. Yeah. All right. As people who work in social media marketing or use social media marketing, these stories are definitely ones that we want to kind of pay attention to. In just a second. One country has decided to ban all social media for anyone under 16. But first, this has kind of been going on in Europe for a while to where there's much higher privacy restrictions. And basically people could pay for an ad free subscription to Facebook and Instagram, and now they're lowering the cost of that. So what are you seeing with this story?
- [08:56]
Jerry Potter
Yeah, okay, so we know that the EU regulations are much stricter, much tougher than here in the US and basically you have the ad free version that you pay for, or you can opt for a free version of meta, the meta platforms, and you're going to have far less ad personalization. They were throwing a lot of shade in their article where they were talking about this, basically saying, listen, we know it's good for business, we know it's good for commerce when you're able to personalize ads to people and make them relevant. So their way, it seems, of overcoming this and similar to what we see on YouTube in the US for example, where there's going to be mandatory ad breaks. So if you're not paying for an ad free experience, then you're going to have ads that are far less personalized, which means they might not be as relevant. And for Facebook to overcome that, what they're going to do is mandate that, you know, you have to watch a few seconds before you're able to skip the ad and move on. So and that's to make sure the advertisers at least have a shot, at least have a shot with their target audience.
- [10:04]
Tara Zuercher
And so I don't know if you have clients that ad that target anyone in, in the eu, but do you feel like this is good for marketers? Like we'll be able to reach people we couldn't six months ago?
- [10:16]
Jerry Potter
I mean, Facebook is, I will say, very good at turning these things into ultimate advantages. So think about, for example, what comes to mind is all the iOS updates that were made and they really double down on a lot of in platform features that used to be really junky, to be honest, like a total waste of money. And now those features are doing incredibly well because they really doubled down. So I do feel like Facebook is very good at turning these disadvantages or things that roll out and they will eventually make it right, make it good. So I guess for my European advertisers, you know, the advantage there might be that these ad breaks really do gain them a lot more attention from people who might otherwise be harder to reach. So we'll just kind of have to see how it plays out. But privacy for sure, and this is going to roll out to all countries is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. So you just want to be thinking, if you're on the advertising end of it, if you're not able to target as specifically with the features inside of, of Facebook, how can you do it in your copy, how can you do it in your creative? Right. So you need to be a little bit smarter in order to keep the edge.
- [11:27]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah. Okay. So meanwhile, in Australia, Australia, if you target young teens, Australia has banned social media for children under 16. So what are the details around this?
- [11:40]
Jerry Potter
Yes, so there's a lot of opinions, as you might expect, around something like this, but basically, and I think it's going to be hotly contested, obviously they're going to move this up through their judicial system and make sure that it's, it's legal. So there could be, there's some debate around whether or not that's even possible for them to ban, you know, under 16 year olds. But this is for the Meta Family suite of apps. This is for X, this is for TikTok. And basically the government's point here is that we are seeing that social media is harmful for especially kids that are impressionable in this age group. And you know, their kind of quote was, we just want our kids here in Australia to be kids and have childhood. So we'll See, I think it's got to go through a lot of judicial review and, and we'll see how that turns out for them. I think there is probably support and opposition from both sides. I mean, from parents all the way to regulators. I think it's going to be very controversial.
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Tara Zuercher
I will definitely be bringing it up the next time my 14 year old tells me he needs social media. And I don't know when we were having our meeting for the show this week, we were like our kids because they're saying to verify you're going to have to upload an ID, show that you're at least 16 to have an account. And we were thinking like our kids going to go out and get fake IDs to get on TikTok now. Like, no, no, I don't need to be 18 or I don't need to be 21. I just need a fake ID that says I'm 16 please, so that I can get on X. So that's so, so bizarre. All right, quick analytics update for if you use third party ads tools, a quick update to the Ads Insights API. A couple things that are going away. The unique actions and the cost per unique action type fields are going to be going away. So if you see those, don't get mad at your software. Meta decided not to include them in the third party tool. So in other analytics news, Facebook did what they did on Instagram previously and they're trying to simplify overall everything that's on Facebook in terms of, in terms of analytics and metrics, or insights as they usually call them. And so now views are the primary metric for measuring content. So explain for anyone who didn't see this on Instagram, explain a little bit deeper with what they're doing with this.
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Jerry Potter
Yeah, exactly. So there's always been a bunch of breakdowns, you know, plays and impressions and things like that. I think they're trying to just simplify it across the whole family suite of apps. Well, Facebook and Instagram specifically. And so now everything is going to be just views. Views is going to be your primary metric. So that replaces impressions, that replaces like watch time and things like that. Or excuse me, minutes viewed will replace watch time and average watch time. So I think they're just trying to make it easier for people to understand and not have to move between different KPIs as they look at different platforms.
- [14:28]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah, okay. And they say those will be rolling out in the coming weeks, so you may not see it yet. It'll be interesting with minutes viewed. When you think about how much like 12 second content. That is true. Yeah, I haven't seen. I don't know if it's going to be a percentage or what, but. All right. Messenger is another area where meta is just keeps doubling down. And they have said more on Instagram, but across platforms that they want this to be a place where people connect with their friends privately. And this may be in response to some of the outcry over the privacy stuff that's public lately. But some new messenger features that are coming out. So can you run down these for us?
- [15:04]
Jerry Potter
Yes. Okay. Well, first of all, and you can just see that messenger is becoming a more important platform for them. First of all, they're allowing us to upload more file, bigger file sizes and like crisper photos, HD photos and things like that. So there's probably. That's a great signal that there's a lot of sharing going on in messenger and they want to make that easier and easier. Honestly, my opinion is that these messenger plays are a little bit of a play on apps like Telegram or GroupMe. But essentially now with messenger you can create these groups that you don't need to have phone numbers or things like that, like you do need to have in WhatsApp. And so you could create a PTA group or friend group or things like that where you're just adding people based on your, you know, searching by name. Like it's based on the social graph. So if you're connected to them, you can add them to these groups and then you can do a lot more sharing in these groups. So to me, as I kind of look at it and I think about, you know, the features that I love on apps like Telegram or GroupMe, they're trying to make sure that messenger is your go to app. Like you don't need all of these other third party apps. Like you can do everything that you can do there inside a meta, which is very typical for them to look at what's going on and copy it. Basically.
- [16:25]
Tara Zuercher
Now these are still rolling out, so we don't know all of the information yet. But these messenger communities, as they're talking about these, this is. They say you don't need a Facebook group to have one and they can have up to 5,000 people. So is it like a giant group chat?
- [16:40]
Jerry Potter
Okay, so you've got like this personal and then business application, right? So you can create instead of having a Facebook group so you can have these messenger communities. And I actually have been experimenting with one this week. I've been included in a couple this week just Trying to really get my arms around this. I think it's pretty cool though. So I see that I think we need to see if this sticks and how people interact with this. But I think I could see a use case where a lot of groups and especially pop up groups and things like that could very easily become these messenger groups.
- [17:16]
Tara Zuercher
Okay. Yeah. I was just excited for the bigger file sizes because I like to send personal videos to people like network and it was always like really, really limited before and then you're going to upload it somewhere else. So there's definitely some marketing applications for that.
- [17:31]
Jerry Potter
Absolutely.
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Tara Zuercher
So, all right, Meta is adding labels to business chats in messenger to increase transparency about data collection. So what exactly does that mean? What's happening here?
- [17:42]
Jerry Potter
Okay, so it's, it's pretty subtle actually, but basically when you start a chat with the business, it's going to label it as a business chat. And so it's just right under the name of the person where the name or the business name would be located. It just says business chat. I think that's just to make sure. It's probably a transparency move to make sure that, you know that you're interacting with a business profile or business page and that it is a business conversation. So more transparency and more, you know, more refinement of that messenger app.
- [18:15]
Tara Zuercher
And it's good to know too for anyone who's managing any of these brands. So personal chats on messenger are end to end encrypted and Meta supposedly can't see them, but they say business conversations allow Meta and businesses to collect user data for ads and marketing purposes. So yeah, so the transparencies there, obviously they're still looking at everything, which is, I'm sure helps with targeting quite a bit. So. All right, Meta has always been really vague in their community guidelines and their terms of service. And you know, for years I would have somebody say my page got shut down, I don't know what happened. Look at it. And they didn't say anything in there. They've been vague, obviously on purpose for legal reasons. Now they have updated their terms of service again with stronger wording about platform misuse. So what do marketers need to kind of know about this?
- [19:02]
Jerry Potter
I mean, you know, hopefully, and I think everybody listening would not be too surprised by any of this and probably would not be the type of person that is being targeted with the stronger language. But they don't want marketers scraping data whether or not you are logged in or out of Meta. So no scraping data. They want to make sure that if you are using an AI avatar that all of those meta policies apply to your avatar. Likewise, anything that you're doing with the AI systems inside of Meta, you know, they want to make sure that they cover all liabilities around that. So you're being much more specific about just calling out what the misuse is. Could be covering a lot of AI and AI avatar type things. It's nice actually to see it be so strong and to see it be so specific because I think one of the big complaints about meta, whether it be ad policies or you know, just general usage policies, is there has always been a lot of gray area and they have always been very vague. And so it's really great when they're super specific and make it well known what the exact conditions are.
- [20:15]
Tara Zuercher
This is interesting and I. You kind of touched on it here. This probably is partially in response to what some of these AI tools can do now.
- [20:21]
Jerry Potter
Absolutely.
- [20:22]
Tara Zuercher
Where you can tell an AI tool every day or every hour, go to this website and gather all the information and put it in a spreadsheet and summarize it for me. And so it's. There are things that would have taken a human a long time to do 10 years ago, so nobody did it that now people are starting to do so. Well, I recently got one of those surveys in my Facebook feed where it's like, hey, do you have a few questions to answer question about meta? And I always like when those come up, I always say yes, but they just announced their third quarter results. So I'm always curious about this, especially as we're thinking about how much time and money are we going to invest in meta in 2025. So what were some of the highlights that we should know about in that?
- [20:57]
Jerry Potter
Yes, and to be totally clear, I mean in my opinion Metta is still the best platform, the least expensive for most industries, for most businesses. And I think it will be for, for a while. Okay. So I think when it comes to actual conversion, I think meta is amazing. I mean right up there with Google and in many cases even less expensive than Google. But Q3 and I'm sure everybody kind of felt this also brought, at least in the US in particular, a lot of election budget. And so it's no surprise. And also Q3 is sometimes a little bit trickier to navigate on meta and all ad platforms. So average price per ad increased 11% year over year when comparing Q3 to Q3 and ad impressions also rose 7%. So you have more advertisers. And again, I think a lot of this was likely driven by, I mean, just absolutely mind boggling election budgets this year, which definitely started to ramp up in Q3 and that probably had quite an impact. But overall they grew users. So let me tell you the exact number. We are at 3.29 billion average monthly users, an increase of 5%, which, I mean, when you think about it, how many people are on Meta and it's staggering. I mean, it's staggering. Right. And so nearly half the world population. So when you think about that, it's incredible that they can still grow 5% year over year, which I think is amazing. So if that's a signal to, you know, how much these platforms are growing and how relevant they still are, I mean, use that for all it's worth in your business and in your careers. But that's a really good signal. And then like I said, average price per ad was up, average impressions were up. So more people were advertising and they had a great revenue cycle. So overall, I think Meta is on the rise and doing extremely well right Now.
- [22:57]
Tara Zuercher
Well, in Q4, ad prices are probably going to be up again too. Oh, between the holidays and of course the last month before.
- [23:02]
Jerry Potter
Yeah. And especially November, well end of October into November. I mean, you had the remainder of the election budgets being spent combined with your Black Friday, which is not just a US thing. Black Friday is growing everywhere in most, well, I should say Western countries across the world. And so you're starting to see that becoming more and more competitive across so many more markets.
- [23:28]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah. And the other thing that came out of, I saw Instagram has now surpassed Facebook's active users in the eu. So you know, Facebook is still growing along with everything else. But that really caught my eye.
- [23:39]
Jerry Potter
So that's actually a really big one because most people aren't aware just how important and relevant Facebook still is. In fact, Social Media examiner did a survey. I remember Mike pointing this out at Social Media Marketing World. How many marketers had shifted their opinions to realizing when they looked at the data, seeing just how important Facebook was to their business, even more important than TikTok, even more important than Instagram. I think there is, there's been a subtle shift. And so that's a huge deal that Instagram actually surpassed Facebook.
- [24:13]
Tara Zuercher
Yeah. All right. And a moment ago you mentioned Google and now Meta is developing its own search engine. So why are they doing this?
- [24:21]
Jerry Potter
Meta, AI tools. Basically they will crawl, Bing and Google. But I think Meta wants to be a little bit more independent than that. So if you were to search for a recipe, for example, they're going to give you the recipe, if you like search for it in the Meta AI tool. Then they're going to cite where or reference where that recipe came from. And usually they're using a Bing or a Google. So I don't know. It's a very, very ambitious project. I'll be curious to see if this really goes somewhere. But they are considering, they're in the later stages of considering working on a their own search engine. So that will be huge if that happens. I can imagine that would really shake up search and that would allow their AI tool to use that independently.
- [25:08]
Tara Zuercher
Time to go back and reoptimize all your profiles, right? Because they would probably emphasize their own stuff, just like Google emphasizes YouTube. So get, get those keywords in there just in case. Take 10 minutes today and get all that stuff lined up. All right, Quick reminder. Learn more about an all access ticket or a virtual ticket to Social Media Marketing World today. Just go to Social Media Marketing World again. Social Media Marketing and Tara, where is the best place for people to connect with you?
- [25:36]
Jerry Potter
Thank you so much. Yeah, you can learn more about our program at successful ads club.com or find me at Tara Zerker on Instagram. All right.
- [25:44]
Tara Zuercher
And if you want to add another podcast to your listening lineup, feel free to check out the Social Media Marketing podcast as well as the AI Explored podcast. Until next time, may you be wise with your marketing decisions. Thanks everyone. Bye.
- [25:56]
Jerry Potter
The Social Media Marketing Talk show is.
- [25:59]
Tara Zuercher
A Social Media examiner production.
- [26:01]
Jerry Potter
For more social media insight, Visit Social.
- [26:04]
Mike Stelzner
Media Examiner.com Make 2025 your best year ever. Grab your discount tickets to Social Media Marketing World right now by visiting Social Media Marketing World dot info.