After years of criticism about the types and amount of content allowed—particularly in the political arena—Facebook has taken steps to once again enhance the environment on its platform.
Facebook introduced new brand safety controls for advertisers designed to create a “safe environment for users and advertisers” alike. The updates were announced at the end of November and are supposed to create a safe and welcoming community for users, maintain a high quality ecosystem of content, publishers and ads and allow more proactive collaboration with businesses.
“The best way to contribute to brand safety is to prevent harmful content from ever appearing on our services in the first place,” Facebook said in the announcement. “We’ll never be perfect but we continue to make investments in technology and people to limit as much as we can.”
Facebook bolstered its community standards and now claims to have 35,000 people working to ensure those are met and the online community is a safe and secure place where all can have a voice. They have invested in technology to detect and remove fake news, and have reportedly removed millions of pages throughout the year. They detail these efforts in a report released last month.
This past year they also provided:
- Additional control over where their ad appears
- Lists so advertisers know where their ads might appear before they run
- Delivery reports so they can understand where their ads actually ran
- Block lists to prevent an advertiser’s ads from delivering on specific publishers
The features, they said, contribute to the safe environment they are striving for.
What does this mean for marketers? In the long run, this means you will have more control over where your ads go, the types of places you don’t want it to appear and the ability to work more with third parties to capitalize on mutual interests.
However, if you’re the type of business that makes unwarranted and un-verifiable claims—or if you are generally dishonest—it will catch up to you in the end. For example, if you promise fast shipping on a product that you know is on back order and will not arrive when the customer expects it, you will run afoul of the new brand safety guidelines.
What do you think? Will this help or hurt your business marketing efforts? Let us know in the comments!