The social media company’s apps have 3.43 billion unique active users globally and its AI-driven tools help create personalised ad variations, image backgrounds and automated adjustments to video ads, making it lucrative for advertisers.

A brand could provide a product image and a budget, and Meta’s AI would generate the ad, including image, video and text, and then determine user targeting on Instagram and Facebook with budget suggestions, the report said.

Meta also plans to let advertisers personalise ads using AI, so that users see different versions of the same ad in real time, based on factors such as geolocation, according to the report.

The owner of Facebook and Instagram, whose majority of revenue comes from ad sales, referred to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public remarks about AI-driven ads, when contacted by Reuters.

Zuckerberg last week stressed that advertisers needed AI products that delivered “measurable results at scale” in the not-so-distant future. He added that the company aimed to build an AI one-stop shop where businesses can set goals, allocate budgets and let the platform handle the logistics.

Social media firms such as Snap, Pinterest and Reddit are increasingly investing in AI and machine learning tools to attract advertisers in an intensely competitive ad market.

Meta’s shares were up nearly 1 per cent in morning trading, while stocks of ad giant Interpublic Group and Omnicom Group fell 1.9 per cent and 3.2 per cent, respectively.

Shares of France’s Publicis Groupe SA slid 3.8 per cent. US-listed shares of WPP, the owner of agencies GroupM, Ogilvy and VM, were down 2.2 per cent.

Technology firms such as Google and OpenAI have also launched video and image-generation AI tools, but their widespread adoption in advertising remains in doubt as marketers weigh concerns over brand safety, creative control and quality.

• Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo, of Reuters.

The post Meta aims to fully automate advertising with AI by next year appeared first on Inside Small Business.

1. Your ad campaigns won’t exit Meta’s learning phase
2. Your campaigns will fail to reach new customers

The importance of overcoming Meta’s learning phase

If you fail to invest enough budget or time into Meta ads, your campaigns will struggle to exit the learning phase. This means the algorithm won’t be able to gather enough data to effectively serve your ads to the right people in the right way, making it almost impossible to scale your account.

Meta requires 50 events to exit its learning phase, which should ideally occur within a 14-day period. Think of these events as actions like purchases, leads and link clicks. They will differ depending on your campaign’s objective(s).

Once the campaign or ad set exits the learning phase, you will experience more consistent results and be in a better position to scale your budget and grow revenue. This is by far when you will see the best results.

Audience limitations with low-budget campaigns

In addition to the learning phase, having a low budget will limit who sees your ads.

With its Advantage+ features (AI targeting), Meta will take the easiest route to find the best audiences. It will usually default to your existing customers, or those who have recently engaged with your brand. This means that rather than reaching new prospects, you’ll be targeting customers who would’ve purchased something from you regardless of whether they saw your ad.

You won’t see Meta do this with larger budgets. Instead, you’d attract more new customers and increase your return on investment.

Monitor, monitor, monitor!

A common misconception many businesses have with Meta is that they can ‘set and forget’ their advertising campaigns. A lot of marketers and businesses run ad campaigns in the background, without making optimisations or testing/adding new creative.

To ensure your ad spend is properly utilised, Meta campaigns need to be carefully monitored and where applicable, optimised. You need to constantly ‘feed the beast’ with new creative. After all, your business could have the most well-structured campaign, but if your creative falls short, so will your overall ad performance, given Meta’s strength across AI targeting.

Allocating budget

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to Meta ads, with so many factors at play, including budget and business objectives. To generalise, however, you want to allocate your budget accordingly:

• 10-20 per cent to prospecting new customers with ‘non-conversion’ objectives like traffic, awareness and leads
• 60 to 70 per cent towards prospecting new customers with conversion-based objectives (sales and leads)
• 10 per cent of your budget on nurturing existing customers and retargeting engaged shoppers

If resources allow, your conversion campaigns should be a mix of Advantage Shopping Campaigns (soon to be renamed Advantage Sales Campaigns) and manual targeting campaigns.

Your strategy should also allow for creative diversity, meaning you have a strong variety of ad types and hooks that are constantly being tested and optimised.

If you still can’t increase your budget

Businesses not yet in a financial position to fully invest in paid ads can instead use smaller budgets to run solo lead generation campaigns, with a focus on building your email database. From there you can nurture leads and move them down the purchasing funnel through email automations and regular personalised campaigns.

It should be noted that Meta ads is only one part of scaling revenue and growing your business. If you’re serious about acquiring customers for your product or service-based business, ensure your whole ecosystem is set up with strong foundations; from a high-converting website experience, clear unique selling points, strong average order value, customer retention, strong customer service, timely email automation and more.

The post The Meta ads mistakes too many SMEs make appeared first on Inside Small Business.

In a statement, Zuckerberg promised simpler and more lenient moderation policies on Meta’s platforms, criticising the existing system as leading to “too many mistakes and too much censorship”. This means that Meta will shut down the existing fact-checking system, remove restrictions on certain controversial topics, and make content filters less strict, among other moves.

Meta’s moderation changes have raised concerns around the world, including in Canberra: Treasurer Jim Chalmers called them “very concerning” in an interview with ABC News Breakfast last week. But how could the new policies actually impact businesses?

Why should small businesses be paying attention?

Many Australian small businesses rely heavily on Meta platforms for marketing, sales, customer engagement, networking, and much more. Aside from opening the doors to less safe online communities and potentially driving users away, Meta’s new policy direction could raise issues around brand safety and reputation.

When X relaxed its moderation policies in April 2023, the platform experienced a 60 per cent decline in US advertising revenue in just three months. One reason for this was an exodus of advertisers due to concerns around brand safety: businesses were unwilling to have their materials appear in conjunction with controversial, political, or offensive content.

ISB spoke to digital marketing professionals who work with small businesses. Shannara Goddard, Marketing and Events Manager at Groei, added that the removal of fact-checkers could make it harder for customers to trust content shared online by businesses.

“The reduction in fact-checking is definitely concerning, especially with the rise of AI-generated content and imagery,” said Goddard. “It makes it harder for people to trust what they’re seeing, and that could become a real issue for businesses trying to build credibility online, especially in an already crowded market place and crowded platform like social media.”

Should Australian small businesses be worried about the potential consequences of the Meta moderation changes and the impact they could have on business?

Should SMEs be worried?

Of all the marketing professionals ISB spoke to, none were particularly concerned about about the impact of Meta’s moderation changes on their small business clients – though they were closely monitoring the developments.

“Meta remains a powerful advertising platform,” said Ben Willee, General Manager and Media Director at Spinach advertising agency. “At the end of the day, this policy change might save Meta a few bucks, but let’s be honest – fact-checkers were never stopping dubious posts from Auntie Doris or some guy named ‘CryptoKing42,’ and this shift won’t change much.”

Jason Le, founder of the digital marketing agency JRNY Digital, shared a similar sentiment.

“I believe it’s unlikely to have a major negative impact on small businesses overall,” said the marketer. “It’s also worth noting that X’s ad revenue decline post-policy changes isn’t a perfect comparison. Elon Musk’s leadership style and the platform’s shifting reputation are likely key factors in that outcome. Meta, on the other hand, has a more established and diverse ecosystem, which is less reliant on any one individual’s influence.”

Le also noted Meta’s history of adapting to policy changes to maintain its position in the advertising landscape.

“Following the iOS 14.5 update and its impact on data targeting, many predicted Meta’s decline,” he said. “However, Meta adapted, and advertisers continued to achieve strong results over time.”

As a result, Le’s business isn’t making any significant pivots based on the new policy changes. 

Shannara Goddard said that her business is watching how the changes play out.

“We’re watching how these changes play out and how they impact conversions,” she said. “If things shift too much or trust in the platform drops, we’ll definitely look at other advertising options or strategies that are more reliable.”

In sum, a ‘wait-and-see’ approach is probably the best course of action for small-business owners right now.

Small-business owner Viktoriia Karakulova says she is following this course of action.

“If I find that ad placements negatively impact my brand or reduce ad effectiveness, I’d likely adjust my strategy,” said the founder of Two Cubs. “This could involve shifting focus to platforms like TikTok or Pinterest and collaborating exclusively with trusted influencers and creators to maintain brand alignment and reach.”

The post Meta’s new moderation policies: What SMEs need to know appeared first on Inside Small Business.

This follows Twitter’s Twitter Blue service which charges US$8-a-month ($11.65 AUD) in return for premium services, such as SMS-based two-factor authentication which is set to take effect on 20 March.

Meta Verified’s monthly subscription bundle is slated to cost creators and individual accounts $240/year ($20/month) and will include account verification with impersonation protections and access to increased visibility and support.

While Meta has stated that businesses are not eligible to apply for Meta Verified at the moment, digital marketing presence provider Localsearch believes it will only be a matter of time before a business version of Meta Verified will be made available, though to what extent remains a question. As such. Localsearch says that small businesses seek further consideration and clarification as to how it will impact their operations.

Daniel Stoten, Executive Chairman of Localsearch, explained, “We at Localsearch have concerns about this proposed feature and its implications for small businesses and digital marketing. It comes across as yet another blockade big corporations have imposed without giving consideration to the players it might stamp out – we can only imagine it being a matter of time before this rolls out across Meta business profiles (across Instagram and Facebook).”

He added, “As a company, it is safe to assume the subscription would be considerably more expensive for businesses, potentially irrespective of their size – which is concerning for the 2.5 million small businesses, many of which are Mum of Dad run operations, in Australia. Coming out of COVID restrictions has led small businesses to endure more than they ever have, and a betting battle for a legitimate place on social media is the last thing they need.”

Localsearch noted that fixed costs such as rent and insurance that allow a business to exist at all have increased dramatically, not to mention the expenses for staff, maintenance, and the demanding nature of being one of the few or only employees at a small business. ”This has a snowball effect onto the rightly disgruntled consumer, negatively impacting the market as a whole,” Stoten says.

Although half a million users left the platform in late 2022, Facebook remains one of the biggest social media platforms currently in the market. Foc Localsearch, closing the market on small businesses reduces the ways they can reach their potential future customers.

“For small-business owners who critically rely on social media platforms as a means of connecting with and selling to customers, we ask that Meta take a more holistic approach to this feature and consider the future implications on local and small business operations,” Stoten concluded.

The post Small businesses seek further clarification on Meta’s verification system appeared first on Inside Small Business.

But with anything in the social media space, rivals will continue to release new features, functions and offerings in a bid to drive more users away from players like Facebook. These aggressive tactics make it difficult for small businesses to decipher which platforms they should be using and where to focus their marketing efforts toward.

Meta’s plunge on Wall Street is a perfect case study in why small businesses cannot put all their eggs in one basket and use only one platform for their digital marketing efforts. In the last year, SMEs have battled through Facebook and Google news bans where businesses were effectively banned on the platform, changes to privacy limits and iOS updates restricting advertising opportunities, and continued outages across platforms. Social media continues to be a dogfight between all the heavy hitters, but knowing where Australian businesses can operate effectively to speak to their closest customers remains paramount.

It can be easy to fall into the trap of copying what other businesses are doing when it comes to marketing. But, what works for one company won’t necessarily work for another. Small businesses need to be actively monitoring these changing trends to see where they can grow and tap into new audiences on different platforms. Marketers need only look at Twitter’s resurgence since it’s beginning in 2006, with 70 per cent of businesses planning to increase their investment moving into 2022 to see that previously dismissed platforms are presenting new opportunities that could be overlooked.

Using a multi-platform marketing approach will keep your business afloat during these unexpected changes while simultaneously challenging your competitors and capturing customer interest at every touchpoint. Use your customer profiles to understand where they’re interacting and make sure you’re present at these points to interact with customers but to also allow them to evaluate and share their experiences about you.

Creating a plan can be daunting for owners who have minimal resources available for research and development. Start with the most basic, but crucial marketing tool for any business in the world: Creating a Google My Business profile. This not only lets your customers know trading hours, contact details, and location but keeps a constant direct to customer communication where audiences can reach your business for general enquiries.

Despite Meta crashing, Facebook is still an important tool for small businesses to utilise. Keeping in mind a diverse marketing portfolio can ensure they are reaching their customers regardless of what the current landscape looks like.

The post Facebook Meta changing the way small businesses market themselves appeared first on Inside Small Business.