Webinar highlights: Facebook New Ad Rules & How to Survive Them

We hosted a free webinar on March 29, 2022 to discuss the latest updates of Facebook Ads made in late 2021 which has an impact over the political online campaigns and the digital advocacy ecosystem.

The webinar’s speakers were Mikey Franklin, Senior Partnership Strategist at New/Mode, and Lisa Moretti, Business Development Lead at SpeechifAI which is an online social sharing platform. Both New/Mode and SpeechifAi help a variety of users, non-profit organizations, small businesses, startups and grassroots campaigns to reach their target audience with digital organic reach. 

With a focus on the latest changes of Facebook Ads rules, Lisa and Mikey went through the new targeting criterias and their impacts on reaching the audience for political ads on Facebook.  

What you can do and what you can’t do with the new Facebook Ads rules:

1. You can’t target the audience with some demographic characteristics like race or religion. 

2. You can’t target the audience based on their ideology like liberal or socialist etc. 

3. You can’t target the audience based on their interests. 

4. You can still target the audience with some selected interests criterias like people who spend time following the local news and who are politically engaged. 

5. You can upload your own audience to Facebook if you have a mailing list.

6. You can create a new list of followers through buying audiences. 

With no doubt, Facebook is an important social platform for many people, and it's a powerful digital tool for building up audiences, reaching people, and raising money, however it started to change its algorithms and systems to drive users to rely more on paid ads more than organic traffic. 

For these reasons and more, Social media is not the only way to build up your audience list.

Watch the On- Demand Webinar Now >>

In the second half of the webinar, Lisa and Mikey discussed the benefits of putting more efforts into the organic social media reach and digital advocacy, in the context of these recent changes and restrictions that Facebook put on political campaign builders. Here are some brief notes on what make organic social sharing valuable for the purposes of social advocacy and civic engagement online.  

Organic Social sharing VS Paid Facebook Ads 

Organizations shouldn’t rely only on social media ads to reach their goals and create successful political and social campaigns, they need to make sure their audience and followers are engaged through the different platforms. 

Here are some simple actions and tips to create a successful social campaign organically through social media platforms and digital marketing tools. 

1. Clearly ask and motivate the audience. 

2. Give regular people a voice to share their opinions and experience (not only influencers).

3. Send out reminders and milestones through targeted emails and newsletters.

4. Make the core messaging easy to share among people, and so it goes viral then. 

User generated content UGC has become an important part of the marketing strategy, many case studies have shown that it leads to high share and engagement ratios compared to the static posts. That’s why making sure your audience is engaged and reacting to your content is key to reaching the intended outcomes of the online campaign. 

New Mode is an advocacy platform that connects supporters to decision-makers via email petitions, optimized targeted emails, personalized calls, faxes, press releases to media editors and journalists, and campaign tweets that go viral on Twitter. Checkout more about New/Mode services for advocacy and campaigns solutions here New/Mode