What Brands Need To Consider As They Look Beyond Facebook
Ross Shelleman is the CEO of Aisle Rocket, a full-service performance marketing and creative services agency.
getty
Facebook’s overwhelming dominance in the social advertising space has been well established for years now. But as demographics and media behaviors shift and Facebook continues to come under scrutiny for its practices, brands and agencies are beginning to question the platform’s dominant position within their digital media budgets.
Without a doubt, Facebook continues to deliver the targeting at scale on which many marketers have come to rely. But as marketers look to future-proof their strategies for the years to come, they’re realizing that diversification beyond Facebook and onto other growing social platforms makes infinite sense. As they do so, it’s imperative that they recognize that moving beyond Facebook isn’t as simple as just migrating creative and ad spend to another destination.
Facebook has achieved its dominance within the marketplace for a reason: Advertising on the platform is effective, at scale, regardless of where in the funnel you’re targeting consumers. At the top of the funnel, brands can drive awareness and consideration. At the bottom of the funnel, they can drive sales and even facilitate the purchases themselves via their Facebook ads.
When it comes to advertising, other social platforms tend to be more specialized based on their unique value propositions to their users. Make no mistake: This specialization is a good thing. It fosters greater connections with users and enables brands to tie into those connections in a unique way. But it also means that brands need to be thoughtful when devising their approaches to each individual platform. What delivers on Facebook won’t necessarily deliver on TikTok — or YouTube, Pinterest or Snapchat, for that matter. Let’s take a look at the distinctions among these platforms and what they mean for advertisers and their messaging on each.
TikTok And YouTube: Top-Of-Funnel Superpowers
During the pandemic, consumers’ video viewing habits have diversified and skyrocketed — and TikTok and YouTube have been the beneficiaries. TikTok usage has been growing at a staggering rate since the onset of Covid-19, and advertisers are beginning to pay attention in a big way. Meanwhile, ad spending on YouTube surged impressively in the third quarter of 2020.
That said, TikTok and YouTube, for all their popularity, are not the same as Facebook. The nature of video content has always been and continues to be one in which an audience prefers to lean back and be entertained or educated. We see those behaviors translate to even short-form, social viewing environments, which viewers are reluctant to leave for an advertiser’s site. As such, these platforms play most heavily at the top of the advertising funnel, driving awareness and brand favorability rather than direct conversions. Advertisers need to acknowledge this as they set their creative and attribution strategies.
Pinterest: Unique Mid-Funnel Appeal
On the flip side, Pinterest and its boards continue to serve a unique role within the social media landscape — one of education, inspiration and influence. When people come to Pinterest, they’re coming for ideas, making the platform a particularly good place for product discovery and driving consideration.
The mid-funnel is too often neglected within brands’ media plans, but it serves as a vital connector between high-level awareness and driving conversion. As such, a smart Pinterest play can be the glue that ties a brand’s cross-channel media strategy together, provided brands play to its strengths.
The biggest issue for Pinterest as a platform is that it scales quite poorly for large advertisers. While we have seen it perform well for small to midsized accounts, it almost never performs at a scale that is particularly relevant for large enterprises.
Snapchat: Finding Its Place
Snapchat continues to wow the industry with its user and revenue growth figures, but the platform’s place within the marketing funnel is still being established. Without a doubt, the company is aiming to replicate Facebook’s full-funnel success, offering everything from single-image and story ads to AR lenses and filter ads. However, the evolving nature of the platform, not to mention its comparatively younger target demographic, means the proper role for brands on the platform is still being established. Snapchat is attractive for advertisers, no doubt, but it’s also an area where experimentation and continued optimization are warranted.
TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest and Snapchat can offer the same walled-garden benefits as Facebook when it comes to advertising: the ability to granularly target known users and closely monitor the effectiveness of various creative. However, the mindsets in which brands are reaching consumers on these platforms are vastly different from Facebook. As brands look to diversify their efforts beyond Facebook, they need to ensure they’re playing to the individual strengths of each platform.
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Every week over 1 billion people connect with businesses on our messaging apps. Many of these conversations are made possible by the thousands of developers who build innovative and engaging experiences on Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Since opening access to our Llama family of large language models, we’ve seen lots of momentum and innovation with more than 30 million downloads to date. As our messaging services continue to evolve, we believe the technology from Llama and other generative AI models have the potential to enhance business messaging through more natural, conversational experiences.
At Connect Meta announced that developers will be able to build third-party AIs – a term we use to refer to our generative AI-powered assistants – for our messaging services.
We’re making it easy for any developer to get started, so we’re simplifying the developer onboarding process and providing access to APIs for AIs that make it possible to build new conversational experiences within our messaging apps.
All developers will be able to access the new onboarding experience and features on Messenger in the coming weeks. For WhatsApp, we’ll be opening a Beta program in November – if you’re interested in participating please sign up to the waitlist here to learn more.
We’ll keep everyone updated as we make these tools available to more developers later this year. We look forward to your feedback and seeing what you create.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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