via [Hubspot]
The social media giant, Facebook, is dramatically changing the way its users advertise. Right now Facebook offers 27 different ways to advertise. Many of these are redundant or inefficient. In order to address this issue Facebook is dropping or changing more than half of the ways to advertise.
The biggest change will focus on how the Sponsored Stories advertisement works. Up to now Sponsored Stories has worked by generating content for you to see based on what your friends have “liked”.
In the coming months Facebook will phase out Sponsored Stories and will replace it with Social Context. Facebook will automatically add social context to ads to help streamline creation of ads and improve performance.
In late June, ad units will have a more consistent visual display intended to reduce the number of formats marketers have to select from. This will make it easier to run many different ad formats and test which one works best. This will also help to optimize desktop and mobile interaction.
Fidjo Simo, a product manager for Facebook, in a blog post stated, “As the services we provide to marketers have grown, so have our new products; while each product may be good on its own, we realized that many of them accomplish the same goals. “When we work with a marketer, we always start with their business goals … our vision is that over time, an advertiser can come to Facebook and tell us what they are trying to achieve, and our ads tools will automatically suggest the right combination of products to help them achieve it.”