Facebook has made several changes to its policies in the wake of May’s GDPR deadline and the Cambridge Analytica political scandal earlier this year. The data-breach story was so well publicised that Facebook had to take a proactive approach to how they handle users’ data in the future, and this API update is part of this renewed approach.
A lot of the changes are small, specific technical details and we don’t want to bore you, but you can read all about them here if you’re interested. It’s useful to keep in mind that these changes have been put into place to help preserve user privacy and make it harder for companies to misuse users’ data. These policy changes have been made to complement the GDPR measures everyone was worried about back in May. Read our blog post if you’d like a recap of GDPR and what it might mean for companies working in the tourism marketing industry.
Facebook’s API update was announced back in April, but it’s coming into effect as of the first of August. There are two main changes with this update:
Publishing to specific Facebook profiles will be deprecated
It will no longer be possible to schedule posts to be published on specific users’ profiles. This was a useful feature for some businesses but others may not have used it or been aware of the feature.
The targeting feature for Facebook posts has been limited
When publishing to Facebook Pages, you will no longer be able to target users by gender or language. Changes have also been made to age targeting; you won’t be able to target specific ages, but you can still specific a minimum age requirement of 13, 17, 18, 19, and 21.
How will this affect your Facebook Ads?
The short answer is that the API update won’t affect Facebook Ads and sponsored posts. If you’d like a little more help understanding Facebook Ads and how to take advantage of them, read our Facebook Advertising Strategy blog. It really is a fantastic way to target your brand’s specific audience.
This API update isn’t a huge deal, but we wanted to write a short blog about it to help all of our clients and followers. If you have any questions about it, or about your website’s digital marketing strategy in general, please feel free to get in touch. We’re always happy to hear from new brands who need help turning lookers into bookers!
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