New rules for Facebook advertising: what Swiss experts say
"Quality before quantity" in the future
Thomas Hutter is the owner and managing director of Hutter Consult GmbH. He is considered one of the most renowned experts for Facebook marketing in the German-speaking world and advises various leading companies, agencies and organizations. "Mark Zuckerberg's announcements come as no surprise to insiders," says Hutter. The decline in organic reach for brands and companies has been a reality for some time, while at the same time many users have complained that they are missing out on messages from family and friends in their News Feed. "The subsequent reaction is therefore positive for the actual user group, i.e. the people, and probably better in the medium and long term," says the consultant. However, many advertisers will have to (possibly massively) rethink their Facebook strategy: regularly publishing "shallow" or "light" content to amuse the community was already the wrong approach in the past, but was actually rewarded by the platform thanks to sometimes very high reach. In future, according to Thomas Hutter, the strategy should be "quality over quantity": "This means that it is better to have a few targeted posts that are properly advertised to the right target group instead of lots of unadvertised posts. For Facebook itself, the move will mean more advertising revenue in the medium term and advertising competition on the platform is likely to increase massively."
"Facebook does not want to scale back advertising activities"
Prof. Ivo Hajnal is a university lecturer and founder of the Swiss Text Academywhich offers courses in digital publishing and marketing writing, among other things. He has intensively studied the specifics of advertising on Facebook - focusing on both the business and academic aspects.Hajnal comments on Mark Zuckerberg's announcement: "Facebook's core business remains personalized advertising, which must become increasingly intelligent. The company has already taken many necessary steps in recent months to refine user profiles with the help of big data. The knowledge that Facebook has gained about its users can now be made available to paying advertising customers for precise marketing. "If you look at the analysts' forecasts, it is clear that most of them believe in an increase in advertising prices and at the same time believe that Facebook wants to increase the quality of individual posts," says the expert, concluding: "On the one hand, advertising on Facebook should once again have an impact - which is only possible if the quantity of ads on the individual user feed is reduced and they are of high quality, because users only see high-quality content. And quality rather than quantity has its price, which will increase ad prices. In return, Facebook is opening up its data pool for advertisers and improving the individualization of each ad."
