At the end of last year, Facebook not only announced to change the company name to Meta, but other changes were also announced. Let’s take a look at what’s affecting digital marketing on Facebook that online marketers need to understand and adapt their marketing strategies.
- Termination of third-party cookies in 2022 and changes of Privacy Policy. Moreover, there is also a change in Apple’s iOS14 that doesn’t allow applications on the system to track user data without the user’s permission. This makes it more difficult to keep user behavioral data, resulting to less effective of the Facebook’s back-end AI to find the target audiences who will see your ads.
- Facebook plans to remove targeted advertising on ‘highly sensitive’ keywords such as health, race, politics, religion and sexual orientation. The company plans to start removing these sensitive keywords in 2022, thus businesses using these keywords will face difficulty to run ads.
- Detailed targeting is limited in target ads for people under 20 in Thailand. If the target audience of the advertising campaign in Thailand is under 20, only some information can be set. We can no longer set the information related to the interest of the target audiences. As a result, it is less accurate to run advertising campaigns that we want to reach the people under 20.
- Page review becomes more important. Pages that are rated or get good reviews from customers will get more advantage in reducing advertising costs than those with less score.
- Gradually removing many functions on Facebook Fanpage since last year and changing to use on Business Suite. Releasing of various tools to support in planning more marketing strategies on Business Suite. Changing conditions of AI to be more complex and efficient. As a result, online marketers need to accelerate learning and understanding of these tools in order to gain more advantage and lead their competitors.

There may be many things that will be announced in this year. These are mostly bad news as the traditional Facebook online marketing will no longer be effective as it used to be. However, if you consider carefully, you will find that the changes of the overall policy are mostly focused on entering the Privacy-First Era and giving priority to the quality of marketing and customer care. Online marketers have to pay more attention to the following topics for effective marketing from now on.
- Really understand the needs of target customers
- Communicate with customers sincerely and transparently
- Win the hearts of your customers
- Try to build brand engagement
Finally, let’s think about the following phrases from a book “Brand Storydoing Wins” written by Donlachai Boonyarattavech, a famous brand builder in Thailand.
“Good companies are storytellers. Great Companies are storydoers”