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Facebook will pay TikTok and YouTube creators up to $3,000 a month to post Reels on its platform

May 18, 2026 No Comments

Meta’s Creator Fast Track programme guarantees three months of pay for established creators willing to build a following on Facebook, after the company paid out a record $3 billion to creators in 2025.

Facebook has a creator problem that three billion monthly users cannot solve. The platform is enormous, but the creators who drive the short-form video economy, the ones building loyal audiences on TikTok and YouTube, have largely looked past it.

Starting on a new platform from zero is daunting, and Facebook’s history with creators has been complicated enough that even those who’ve heard the pitch have reason to hesitate.

On Wednesday, Meta launched Creator Fast Track, a direct attempt to address that hesitation with cash. The programme offers established creators with audiences on other platforms guaranteed monthly payments for three months in exchange for posting Reels on Facebook.

Creators with at least 100,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube can earn $1,000 per month; those who have crossed one million followers on any of those platforms get $3,000 per month.

The eligibility requirements are not onerous. Creators need to post at least 15 Reels on Facebook within a 30-day period, spread across at least 10 different days. The content does not need to be Facebook-exclusive and can include AI-generated material, as long as it is original to the creator.

Participation also unlocks immediate access to Facebook Content Monetization, the broader invite-only programme that pays based on content performance, which means earnings continue even after the three-month guaranteed period ends.

The programme lands alongside a figure Meta is clearly pleased with: in 2025, Facebook paid content creators nearly $3 billion through its monetisation programmes, a 35% increase from the previous year and its highest annual pay-out on record.

That compares with $2 billion in 2024, a figure Rest of World independently confirmed in February. The number of creators earning more than $10,000 annually on Facebook grew by over 30% year-on-year.

The breakdown of where that money went is also notable.

Sixty per cent of the $3 billion went to Reels, while the remaining 40% was split across Stories, photos, and text posts. That last detail matters for the Creator Fast Track pitch: unlike TikTok and YouTube, which are fundamentally video-first platforms, Facebook Content Monetisation pays for almost everything a creator posts.

A writer who shares text posts, a photographer posting stills, or a creator who mainly works in Stories can all earn from the platform without committing to video production.

Facebook Content Monetisation itself has expanded dramatically over the past year. According to Rest of World’s analysis of data from the Meta Monetisation Archive in February 2026, the programme grew from roughly 2.7 million participants to 12 million in just over a year, with Indonesian-language accounts representing the second-largest cohort after English.

The global scale of that expansion is part of what makes the $3 billion figure credible, and part of what Facebook is hoping to leverage to attract creators who might otherwise dismiss the platform as irrelevant to younger audiences.

Meta is also introducing new metrics alongside the programme to help creators understand their earnings more precisely.

These include a Qualified View metric, views on content eligible to earn money, an Earnings Rate showing approximate pay per 1,000 qualified views, and a Non-Qualified Views breakdown explaining why certain views do not generate revenue.

The clearer feedback loop is designed to help creators optimise their content performance rather than simply guessing why their pay-outs vary.

The strategic logic of Creator Fast Track is not subtle. Facebook has been pushing Reels hard since 2020, positioning them as its response to TikTok’s dominance in short-form video.

But Reels require content, and content requires creators willing to invest the time to build on the platform. The guaranteed payment model removes the risk that typically stops established creators from experimenting with a new home: the fear of posting consistently for months and earning almost nothing while an audience is still being built.

For Meta, which reported advertising revenue of roughly $160 billion in 2025, writing cheques to a few thousand established creators is a rounding error against the potential payoff of a more creator-rich Facebook feed.

Whether creators bite depends on something harder to measure than the cash: whether Facebook’s audience and long-term monetisation potential are worth the effort of maintaining yet another profile.

The $1,000-a-month tier, which requires 100,000 followers to qualify, is not a transformative sum for a creator at that scale. The $3,000-a-month tier is more meaningful, though most creators at the million-follower level will be weighing it against what they already earn.

What the programme does offer, unambiguously, is a no-downside trial run, three months of guaranteed income to find out whether Facebook’s reach can surprise them.

By Ana-Maria Stanciuc

Sourced from TNW

In News

Meta projected $16 billion in scam ad revenue. Now the lawsuits are piling up.

May 13, 2026 No Comments

By Alina Maria Stan

In short: Meta faces a convergence of lawsuits across the US, Australia, and the UK alleging the company knowingly profited from scam ads on Facebook and Instagram, with its own internal documents projecting that 10% of 2024 revenue, roughly $16 billion, came from fraudulent advertising. The cases span a $500 million pump-and-dump scheme, deepfake celebrity endorsements, financial professional impersonation, and cryptocurrency fraud, while leaked internal assessments show Meta calculated that scam revenue would exceed the cost of any regulatory settlement.

Meta is facing a convergence of lawsuits, class actions, and regulatory investigations over scam advertisements on Facebook and Instagram that, according to the company’s own internal projections, generated roughly $16 billion in revenue in 2024, approximately 10% of Meta’s total advertising income. The legal actions span the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and collectively allege that Meta knowingly profited from fraudulent ads including AI-generated deepfake celebrity endorsements, pump-and-dump stock schemes, fake investment platforms, and unauthorised impersonation of financial professionals, while maintaining ad moderation systems that were structurally inadequate to prevent the fraud and, in some cases, deliberately weakened to protect revenue.

The most financially significant case, filed in February in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Meta facilitated a pump-and-dump scheme involving Jayud Global Logistics, a Chinese stock listed on Nasdaq. According to the complaint, scammers acquired 50 million shares at discounted prices in December 2024, then used targeted Facebook and Instagram ads to drive the share price to nearly $8 before dumping their positions in April 2025. Consumer losses exceeded $500 million. A California federal judge dismissed the class action on 25 March, ruling that the plaintiffs had not sufficiently alleged Meta “co-created” the ads, though the dismissal appeared to be without prejudice.

The pattern across jurisdictions

A separate class action, filed by Scott+Scott on behalf of financial professionals John Suddeth and Sara Perkins, alleges that Meta allowed scammers to use their names, images, voices, and professional personas in paid advertisements, causing client diversion, reputational harm, and regulatory inquiries. A bipartisan coalition of US state attorneys general had warned Meta in June 2025 that impersonation ads and fraudulent WhatsApp investment groups were being used for widespread fraud. According to the complaint, materially identical impersonation ads continued running after the warning.

In December, the US Virgin Islands attorney general sued Meta in Superior Court, alleging the company “knowingly profited” from scam ads and “charged fraudsters extra for the right to advertise scams” rather than removing them. The Virgin Islands suit joined actions by 42 other state attorneys general who have taken Meta to court, primarily over child safety but with increasing overlap with advertising fraud. In April, New York attorney general Letitia James issued an investor alert specifically about investment scams on Meta platforms.

In Australia, the Competition and Consumer Commission has been pursuing Meta in federal court since March 2022 over cryptocurrency scam ads that used the likenesses of businessman Dick Smith, television presenter David Koch, and former New South Wales premier Mike Baird. A single victim cited in the complaint lost more than A$650,000. Meta failed to get the case dismissed in 2023. In the United Kingdom, the Financial Conduct Authority found 1,052 illegal financial advertisements on Meta platforms in a single week in November 2025. A leading UK bank found that 80% of its fraud cases originated on Meta’s platforms, with Facebook Marketplace accounting for 60% of purchase fraud, Instagram responsible for 67% of investment fraud, and WhatsApp impersonation scams up 300% year on year. Meta’s platforms account for 61% of all authorised push payment scams in the UK, according to UK Finance, with criminals stealing £485.2 million.

The $16 billion question

The scale of the problem is defined by Meta’s own internal documents. A Reuters investigation published in November 2025 revealed that Meta projected 10% of its 2024 global revenue, roughly $16 billion, derived from scam and fraud-related advertising. The company served an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam ads per day. Nineteen percent of Meta’s ad revenue from China, approximately $3 billion, was linked to scams. Internal documents showed that when enforcement staff proposed shutting down fraudulent accounts, Meta sought assurance that “growth teams would not object given the revenue impact.” A subsequent Reuters report in January found that Meta had developed an internal “playbook” to neutralise regulators and manipulated its ad library to make scam ads harder to find.

Rob Leathern, Meta’s former senior director of product management who led business integrity operations, said of the findings: “The levels that you’re talking about are not defensible.” Meta described the Reuters projections as “a rough and overly-inclusive estimate” and said the documents presented “a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams.”

The economics are straightforward. Implementing universal advertiser verification would cost Meta approximately $2 billion and reduce revenue by up to 4.8%. Internal assessments reportedly noted that “revenue from risky ads would almost certainly exceed the cost of any regulatory settlement,” a calculation that treats fines as a cost of doing business rather than a deterrent.

The deepfake dimension

AI-generated deepfakes have become central to the scam ad ecosystem. Deepfake fraud attempts have surged by 3,000% as generative AI tools have become cheaper and more accessible, enabling scammers to create convincing fake video endorsements at scale. Martin Lewis, the UK’s most prominent personal finance campaigner, was targeted with a deepfake video promoting a “Quantum AI” investment scheme. Deepfakes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders were used to promote fake government benefit schemes. In Brazil, AI-altered images and voices of prominent physicians promoted fraudulent healthcare products.

The Tech Transparency Project identified 63 scam advertisers responsible for more than 150,600 political ads and $49 million in lifetime spending on Meta. During a 90-day period in mid-2025, at least 45 scam advertisers spent over $18 million. Meta says it protects images of 500,000 celebrities and public figures through automated detection and is testing facial recognition technology to compare faces in suspected scam ads against public figures’ profile pictures. EU lawmakers have agreed to ban AI-generated non-consensual deepfakes through amendments to the AI Act, signalling increasing regulatory appetite to legislate against synthetic media that platforms have failed to police.

What Meta says it is doing

Meta recently rolled out new scam detection tools across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. The company says it removed 159 million scam ads and took down 10.9 million accounts linked to scam operations in 2025, with 92% of scam ads caught proactively before any user report. It disabled 150,000 accounts associated with Southeast Asian scam centre networks and partnered with the Royal Thai Police in disruption operations that led to 21 arrests. Meta is targeting 90% of ad revenue from verified advertisers by the end of 2026, up from 70%. In February, it filed its own lawsuits against scam advertisers in Brazil, China, and Vietnam, and sent cease-and-desist letters to eight former Meta Business Partners offering “un-ban” services to fraudulent advertisers.

The gap between Meta’s enforcement claims and the data in its own internal documents is the through line connecting every lawsuit. The company says it catches 92% of scam ads proactively. Its own projections estimated $16 billion in scam-related revenue in a single year. It removed 159 million scam ads. It served 15 billion higher-risk ads per day. It is investing in facial recognition to detect deepfakes. Its internal assessments concluded that scam revenue would exceed the cost of any regulatory settlement. The numbers do not cohere into a story of a company that failed to notice the problem. They describe a company that noticed the problem, measured it, calculated the cost of fixing it against the cost of not fixing it, and chose the option that preserved revenue. The lawsuits are, in that sense, not about whether Meta knew. They are about what it did with what it knew.

By Alina Maria Stan

Sourced from TNW

In News

Podcast: the future of platforms and marketing

April 17, 2026 No Comments

By Chris Sutcliffe,

Social platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook offer huge opportunities for marketers. They are the new de facto gatekeepers to huge audiences, and there are very few other means to reach younger audiences at scale with ease. But that access comes with trade-offs, and different platforms emerge and disappear rapidly. As part of our Predictions season, The Drum Network seeks to examine where brands and agencies fit into that environment.

TheDrum · The Future of Platforms in Marketing

To discuss that rapidly evolving landscape, and how we can ensure the primacy of brands when it comes to marketing on platforms, we’re joined by three experts from across the industry. Amy Gilbert, head of social at The Social Element; Tahir Rashid, paid media manager at UNRVLD; and Callum Gill, head of insight and innovation at DRP Group, join The Drum’s senior reporter Chris Sutcliffe to discuss all things platform-related.

The Drum Network Podcast can be found on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play and your favourite podcast app.

By Chris Sutcliffe,

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Scam ads on Meta in UK likely worth more than all online news advertising

January 22, 2026 No Comments

By Dominic Ponsford

Meta likely made more than £600m from fraudulent UK advertising in 2024.

Meta likely made more money from fraudulent advertising in the UK last year than the entire news industry made from legitimate online marketing.

The owner of Facebook and Instagram has revealed in internal documents (exposed by Reuters) that around 10 per cent of its annual revenue comes from advertising placed by fraudsters.

This equates to $16 billion a year in annual revenue from enabling the fraud industry and at least $790m (£600m) in the UK alone. Press Gazette has estimated that Meta made at least £6 billion in UK advertising revenue in 2024.

Online advertising across the entire UK national and regional news industry was just under £600m in 2024 (according to Advertising Association data).

Meta is the largest online publisher in the UK, with the average Briton spending more than an hour a day on its platforms.

Press Gazette has repeatedly highlighted scam investment ads running on Facebook which steal the identities of high-profile business journalists and others in order to lure users to join Whatsapp investment groups which are purportedly run by the likes of FT commentator Martin Wolf, Martin Lewis or CNN’s Richard Guest.

These may be so-called pig-butchering scams whereby people are fed real investment advice over a weeks or months to win trust, before they are then lured into making a fraudulent investment and losing their money.

Press Gazette joined the “Richard Quest” investment group and began receiving investment tips and daily messages from a fake persona called Alyssa Mendez.

The scams are effective because Facebook allows fraudsters to create promotions using trusted public figures which look exactly the same as real promotions running on the platform from the likes of Fisher Investments, RBC Brewin Dolphin and UBS.

Meta will sometimes take down scam promotions when notified. But advertisers simply create identical pages again and again using Meta’s self-serve advertising technology.

According to the Reuters investigation, Meta will only block an advertiser if it is 95% certain they are committing fraud.

Reuters also reported on a May 2025 presentation by Meta safety staff which estimated that the company’s platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the U.S.

The UK Payments Systems Regulator found Meta platforms were linked to 54% of payments scam incidents in 2023.

Reuters reports that Meta has taken action to curb scam advertisers (but only in a limited way). One internal document reported that the Meta team responsible for vetting questionable advertisers had a cap of 0.15% on the amount of total revenue they were allowed to impact.

Another internal Meta document revealed that the company ignored 96% of 100,000 weekly scam reports it was receiving in 2023 from Facebook and Instagram users

A recruiter from the Royal Canadia Air Force had her Facebook account hacked in 2024, Reuters reports. It was taken over by a scammer who stole her identity and purported that she was now promoting cryptocurrency investments.

Meta ignored her repeated attempts to get the scam Facebook profile taken down. One former colleague of the woman was conned out of $28,000.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters that the documents it had seen “present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams”.

He said the 10% revenue estimate was “rough and overly inclusive” adding: “We aggressively fight fraud and scams because people on our platforms don’t want this content, legitimate advertisers don’t want it and we don’t want it either.”

By Dominic Ponsford

Sourced from PressGazette

In News

You can now block stolen video reposts on Facebook and Instagram

December 4, 2025 No Comments

By Manisha Priyadarshini

New Content Protection tools let you spot, block, or claim copied videos.

What’s happened? Meta has launched a new Content Protection tool on Facebook to help creators stop people from reposting their videos without permission. It automatically scans Facebook for copies of your reels or videos and alerts you when a match is found.

When someone uploads a video that looks like yours, Facebook will flag it and show you details like match percentage, view counts, and the other account’s audience.
You can then choose to either block the repost, claim it for yourself, or allow it.
The feature is rolling out globally on mobile first, with desktop support coming soon inside the Professional Dashboard.

Why it matters? Creators have been frustrated for years with people re-uploading their videos, earning views or money off someone else’s hard work. Meta is trying to fix that by giving creators more control and real-time visibility.

The system uses matching tech similar to Rights Manager for identifying exact and near-exact copies.
It gives creators options beyond takedowns, and you can claim credit or decide whether to allow the reuse.
Meta’s goal is to reduce spammy or recycled content across feeds and make original videos stand out more.

Why should I care? If you’re a creator, this tool helps you protect your videos without constantly hunting for reposts.

You’ll get alerts as soon as your video is reused, so you stay in control.
Creators who rely on credit, reach, or monetization get a better shot at protecting their work.
If you’re not a creator, this still affects you as a viewer by showing fewer low-effort duplicates in your feed and more genuine content.

OK, what’s next? Before using this feature, here are a couple of things you should know:

Content Protection only covers videos originally posted on Facebook; it can detect copies on Instagram, but only if the original reel was uploaded to Facebook first.
The feature is rolling out to creators in Meta’s monetization program who meet its “enhanced integrity and originality standards,” along with creators already using Rights Manager. Others can apply for access directly.

Meta has been rolling out a wave of creator-focused updates lately, from adding a disappearing-posts feature on Threads to dropping the language barrier on Reels with automatic translations, and even letting friends join your Marketplace chats to help negotiate better deals.

Feature image credit: Meta

By Manisha Priyadarshini

Manisha likes to cover technology that is a part of everyday life, from smartphones & apps to gaming & streaming…

Sourced from digitaltrends

In News

Meta Announces Updates to Advantage+ and Shopping Ads

May 20, 2024 No Comments

By Andrew Hutchinson.

Meta has announced a heap of new ad updates, primarily focused on retailers and those using its automated Advantage+ campaigns.

And there are a lot of niche use cases within these new updates, which could apply to your business.

The first update is “Advantage+ creative optimizations”, which will automatically optimize your video ads for viewing on Reels, or the mobile Facebook and Instagram apps with 9:16 ratio.

That will help more brands tap into the popularity of the various Meta video formats, with Reels being the key focus.

As per Meta:

“Reels and video on our apps continues to grow as daily watch times across all video types grew over 25% year-over-year in Q4. In fact people now reshare Reels 3.5 billion times every day.”

The new process will also enable advertisers to dynamically create multiple variations of an ad, so the system then has more options to display to users, depending on what they respond best to.

Meta’s also updating its Advantage+ catalogue ads, with the added capacity to import and use branded videos or customer demonstration videos, instead of just static images.

Advantage catalogue ads, which Meta first launched in beta testing last year, provide personalized recommendations to users, based on what Meta’s system detects that each will be most interested in, and this new process will provide more capacity to showcase relevant products within the display.

Meta’s will also now enable brands to upload a “hero” image in the centre of their catalogue ads, which Meta’s AI will then use to show people the best products from their catalogue to drive performance.

Meta’s also adding more eCommerce ad options, with users of Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud now able to create Shops ads within their management systems. Meta’s also integrating its Shops ads and branded content ads (now called “Partnership ads”), which will enable direct purchasing from collaborative campaigns.

And there’s also new elements in Reminder Ads on Instagram:

“Now, advertisers can include external links to a new product or sale in their Reminder ads to help turn a person’s interest into a purchase. This summer, we’ll also give advertisers ways to notify people when an event starts and before it ends.”

Meta’s also looking to expand Reminder ads to Reels in the coming months.

There’s also new Promo Codes promotions on Facebook and Instagram, as well as ads with product tags:

“In March, we’ll bring ads with product tags to Facebook Feed (currently Instagram only), and in April, we’ll launch the global availability of ads with product tags to all businesses, whether or not they maintain a Shop.”

Meta’s also updating its Collaborative ads offering, to provide more analytics on performance, while it’s also testing the ability for advertisers to use Collaborative ads with Advantage+ shopping campaigns.

Finally, Meta’s also working on Advantage+ Catalogue ads with omnichannel brand and product level reporting as a new managed service solution “to help RMNs prove that ads on Meta platforms drove sales online and in-store”.

So yeah, a heap of updates, all with varying levels of applicability and use. And while there may not be some huge, headline change that will get the most attention, there’s a lot of value for specific brands within these changes.

By Andrew Hutchinson.

Sourced from Social Media Today

In News

48,000 companies sent Facebook data on a single person

February 16, 2024 No Comments

By Wes Davis,

A Consumer Reports study found that thousands of companies contribute to Facebook’s data stores on each person.

Facebook gets data on individual users from many thousands of companies, and a new study (PDF) from Consumer Reports tried to put more exact numbers on it.

Researchers found that, on average, Facebook received data from 2,230 different companies for each of the 709 volunteers. One extreme example showed that “nearly 48,000 different companies were found in the data of a single volunteer.” In total, Facebook data archives showed that 186,892 companies had provided data on all of the study’s participants.

Volunteers recruited with help from The Markup pulled their personal data from Facebook using its Download Your Information tool and shared it with the researchers.

An infographic showing information going from a person to their apps, to servers, then to Facebook, who uses it for targeting ads to you.

Image: Consumer Reports

Companies using Meta’s advertising platform upload customers’ personal information and buying habits, which Meta uses to serve targeted ads to those people or people with similar profiles. The researchers believed that the ease of “microtargeting” campaigns to specific user data accounted for the fact that 96,000 of the companies listed were only targeting one of the volunteers.

An infographic showing how businesses work with data brokers who aggregate your personal info from several sources before providing it with Facebook for ad targeting purposes.

Image: Consumer Reports

Ninety-six percent of the study participants’ archives contained information shared by a data broker called LiveRamp, but it wasn’t all data brokers. Large retailers like The Home Depot, Walmart, or Amazon showed up, too, while other smaller businesses were “surprisingly well represented,” such as a car dealership in a 24,665-person town in Texas that covered 10 percent of the study’s volunteers on its own.

Most couldn’t be identified, though, as they used nonsense combinations of characters like “Bm 5 100tkqc nlm” or generic names like “Viking.” But the name doesn’t really matter, does it? Acxiom, the number two data broker that appeared in the study’s data, says it can reach “over 2.5 billion of the world’s marketable consumers” and boasts about its “ability to build a complete view of the consumer for improved consumer recognition.”

We’ve all heard someone say our smartphones are listening to us, and that must be how they know which ads to show us. The truth is, companies aren’t just sitting around waiting for us to talk about jeans — they already know we want the jeans, what size we wear, which brands we like, and roughly what time of year we usually start buying them.

Correction January 20th, 12:30PM ET: This story previously said Acxiom owns LiveRamp. While Acxiom did purchase LiveRamp in 2014, it later adopted the LiveRamp name and sold Acxiom Marketing Solutions in 2018. We regret the error.

Feature Image Credit: Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

By Wes Davis,

A weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.

In News

Maximize Your Facebook Ad ROI With These Three Proven Strategies

October 17, 2023 No Comments

By Jonathan Durante

Imagine you’re standing at the edge of a bustling marketplace where billions of potential customers are shopping. In this digital age, that marketplace is none other than Facebook, a vibrant hub of connections, interests and endless possibilities. It’s here that businesses big and small vie for attention, hoping to captivate the hearts and minds of their target audience.

But amid the flurry of ads competing for attention, how can you ensure that your Facebook advertising campaigns stand out from the crowd? How can you unlock the secret to maximizing your return on investment and turn your advertising efforts into a flourishing success story?

Below I’ll share three proven strategies that will help you navigate the dynamic realm of Facebook ads. My agency uses these strategies to guide our clients toward success.

1. Change Your Creative Frequently

Frequently changing your creative is important for keeping people engaged with your ads and getting more clicks. It helps keep things fresh for potential customers, so they will not get ad fatigue from being bombarded with ads featuring the same message or visuals every time they scroll through their social media feeds.

Changing your ads up also provides you with the opportunity to experiment with different types of content and gain valuable insights into what works best for your target audience. Try creating several variations of your ad creative, testing each one for a period of time and then switching it out for something else.

This will allow you to make more informed decisions when creating future campaigns, which will ultimately lead to higher ROI from your advertising efforts. By regularly modifying and testing different ad content, you can ensure that you are always making the most of your campaigns and getting the best possible results.

2. Use Strong Calls To Action

Effective calls to action can increase your click-through rate and drive conversions. They help guide potential customers through the sales process and encourage them to take actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for an email list. So make sure to include a CTA in every ad you create. This could be something as simple as “Sign up now,” “Learn more today” or “Get started here.” Make sure your CTAs are clear, concise and direct. Keep them simple, but use powerful language to encourage people to take action.

Another key tip is to create urgency. Include phrases like “Get it now,” “Limited time offer” or “Ends soon” to prompt people to act quickly before the opportunity passes.

Try experimenting with different CTAs and tones of voice in order to see what resonates best with your target audience. Remember, a strong CTA can be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful campaign.

3. Scale Your Budget Incrementally

If your ad campaigns are successful, you may be tempted to scale up the budget quickly. However, it’s usually best to take a slower approach and test each budget increase before committing fully. This will help ensure that you don’t overspend on campaigns that aren’t performing well and will also give you a better idea of the budget you need for maximum success.

Start with a small budget and gradually increase it as you get more data on the effectiveness of your campaigns. Analyse the data to identify areas where you can improve, and then adjust your budget accordingly. Scaling gradually by 10%-20% is a good rule of thumb we use at my agency.

As you start to see results, you can increase your budget more aggressively. Remember, digital advertising is a science—take your time and be patient to maximize your ROI.

Stand Out To Make Your Ad Dollars Count

In the vast virtual marketplace of Facebook, where billions of potential customers roam, it’s critical to make your advertising campaigns stand out. Refresh your ad creative frequently, and experiment with various visual styles and copy techniques to discover what works best for your audience. Use compelling CTAs to motivate users to take action. Lastly, don’t overlook the importance of strategically scaling your budget over time. Make every ad dollar count.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Jonathan Durante

Co-founder at Expandify Marketing, a leading digital marketing agency. Read Jonathan Durante’s full executive profile here.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Facebook, Instagram face Norwegian ban from tracking users for ads

August 23, 2023 No Comments

By Clothilde Goujard

Meta’s social media platforms will be barred from behavioural advertising in August.

Social media giants Facebook and Instagram will soon be temporarily banned in Norway from tracking users online to target them with advertising.

The Norwegian Data Protection Authority ordered U.S. technology firm Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to stop showing users in Norway personalized ads based on their online activity and estimated locations. The ban kicks in from August, according to an order obtained exclusively by POLITICO and sent to Meta on July 14.

Meta’s advertising practice on Facebook and Instagram currently involves the “processing of very private and sensitive personal data through highly opaque and intrusive monitoring and profiling operations,” wrote Norway’s Datatilsynet agency.

The ban on so-called behavioural advertising will last three months, starting from August 4. Facebook and Instagram will be able to show people customized ads but only based on information given by users in the “about” section of their profiles.

Meta will face daily fines of 1 million Norwegian Krone (€89,500) if it doesn’t comply with the order.

The temporary ban could be lifted if Meta finds a way to legally process personal data and give users the rights to opt out of targeted advertising based on tracking, the order said.

The restriction comes after the Court of Justice of the European Union on July 4 ruled that Meta was unlawfully collecting people’s data to target them with ads without their explicit consent and based on the firm’s “legitimate interest.”

Meta is also currently under scrutiny from its lead privacy regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission, over its advertising practices. The Dublin-based authority fined the social media company in January a total of €390 million for infringing Europeans’ privacy. It ordered Meta to find a new legal basis for its business model. The tech company has appealed the decision.

The Irish Data Protection Commission plans on making a decision on Meta’s legal basis for its targeted advertising operations “by no later than mid-August,” said the agency’s Deputy Commissioner and Spokesperson Graham Doyle.

The Irish regulator oversees Meta under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for the whole of Europe because the tech company has its regional headquarters there. Other European countries such as Norway are able to issue national decisions for a time limit of three months in a “case of urgency” under the GDPR.

“The persistent state of non-compliance following the [Irish] decisions demand[s] immediate action to protect the rights and freedoms of European data subjects,” wrote the Norwegian data agency in its order.

The Norwegian regulator is the first European privacy authority to severely restrict Meta’s data-driven business following the EU’s top court ruling. It said it also plans to request an urgent binding decision from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) — the region’s network of privacy regulators — to decide on final measures.

The Irish Data Protection Commission said it has consulted with other European authorities and sent them a provisional assessment of Meta’s compliance with the GDPR for targeted advertising following the new court ruling. Authorities have until July 21 to make their submissions to the Irish DPC, Doyle said.

In a response, Matt Pollard, spokesperson for Meta, said: “The debate around legal bases has been ongoing for some time and businesses continue to face a lack of regulatory certainty in this area … We continue to constructively engage with the Irish DPC, our lead regulator in the EU, regarding our compliance with its decision. We will review the Norway DPA’s decision, and there is no immediate impact to our services.”

Feature Image Credit: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images

By Clothilde Goujard

Sourced from Politico

In News

The power of Facebook – can it really be on the wane, asks media expert John Jewell

June 30, 2023 No Comments

By John Jewell

Remaining relevant will be key as other platforms such as TikTok surge in popularity…

I doubt whether this will come as much of a surprise to anyone, but the ubiquity of Facebook continues, seemingly unbound. At the beginning of this year the company, since 2021 rebranded under the name of Meta, released figures which placed it’s number of monthly active users at 2.8 billion worldwide. This figure is made all the more remarkable by the fact that it doesn’t include users for either WhatsApp or Instagram, which are also owned by Facebook.

In global terms, India has the biggest overall number of users with 351 million. Which, as online statistics company Statista says, if India’s Facebook audience were a country then it would be ranked third in terms of largest population worldwide. In the US, 71.43% of the country spend time on Facebook, in the UK the number is 66%. In terms of time spent using the platform, the average user will spend is 33 minutes a day on it, three hours 15 minutes a week and 16 hours 30 minutes a month.

The impact of Facebook upon the lives of those who engage with it is remarkable. It is, in fact, a massive database of information which collects vast quantities of personal material. Facebook records everything that’s done. Everything that’s favoured, every single page visited, every profile. Think of what is personally volunteered when someone signs up: name, age, marital status, city of residence, employment and education, all these details are harvested and stored. This information can then be used.

It’s not sold on to advertisers as such, Facebook says. It states on the online help desk: “We don’t sell your information. Instead, based on the information that we have, advertisers and other partners pay us to show you personalised ads on the Facebook family of apps and technologies.”

However, as the New York Times reported in 2018: “Facebook can learn almost anything about you by using artificial intelligence to analyse your behaviour,” said Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights non-profit organisation in the US. “That knowledge turns out to be perfect both for advertising and propaganda.”

Over the years the company has found itself at the centre of major scandals involving what it does with user data. The most high profile of these occurred in 2018 when the Observer newspaper revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based consultancy firm, had used the personal data of millions of US Facebook subscribers to build profiles of potential voters for the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump in 2016.

And just a matter of days ago, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which acts for the European Union, announced that it had fined the company 1.2 billion euros for transferring information from its European users to its US servers. In one of the biggest fines of its kind ever delivered, the ruling, according to the Columbian Journalism Review, calls into question “not just Facebook’s data-collection apparatus—and the multi-billion-dollar business model that it supports—but the similar data-handling and monetisation practices of almost every other global social network and online service”.

So, despite the mind-bending usage figures quoted at the beginning of this article, and the fact the net worth of Facebook is around $320 billion in 2023, there are signs that it is in decline. Indeed, in 2018 it lost around one million users in Europe and, in the US, it’s market share among social networks dropped to 50.8% from 54.3% in 2019.

In the UK, usage has been steadily dwindling for some years. The Daily Telegraph reported in July 2019 that “the number of online interactions made on Facebook’s mobile app in the UK plummeted by 38 percent between June 2018 and June 2019”.

So, why are Briton’s leaving the platform? There are a number of reasons, some of them explored by Mark Whitehead of Aberystwyth University. He has found that the public scandals Facebook has been involved in, contrary to his own assumptions, are rarely the “primary reasons for leaving the network”. Some explanations are relatable and perhaps speak of a growing distrust of social media in general. People are asking: Why am I spending time and so much energy constantly comparing my life with others?

Amongst the younger generations the issue is choice. Teenagers, who let’s remember have grown up with the online world as a constant companion, see Facebook as outdated and the area where their parents gather. Instagram, also owned by Facebook’s parent company, is clearly much more geared toward younger users. It has a basic, understandable design which focusses on imagery rather than self-involved narrative.

Then there is the Chinese-owned phenomenon of TikTok. TikTok allows its aficionados to make and broadcast short videos. It is unbelievably popular with 18-to-24 age range. Forty percent of its users are in that age bracket and it is now the most downloaded of all the apps – more than three billion times, in fact.

So, whilst some may say that the age of social media is in entering its death throes, the popularity of the newer forms, with an evolving audience, suggests otherwise. And maybe Facebook will find a way to stay relevant. After all, its global range and presence is startling. It also offers so many things that its younger competitors don’t. It still appeals to people of all ages – and we all grow up, unfortunately.

Feature Image Credit: Western Mail