Watch Out For Malware Ads

If you see an ad on Meta, tread carefully.

Fake profiles that mimic big tech companies are running social ads that when clicked, attempt to install malware on your computer that gives access to your passwords and crypto wallet (if you have one).

These ads don’t exclusively seem to promote AI but by hitting on a hot topic and masquerading as Google Bard, Chat GPT, and Midjourney amongst others they are fooling many people.

And it’s not just Meta that is being hit with these fake ads. The same is happening in Google and Bing search ads.

What is Meta doing to prevent this fraud? You’d imagine that setting up a page that includes a major brand name would be a strong signal that there is shady stuff going on, it can’t be that hard for Meta bots to identify.

https://blog.checkpoint.com/security/facebook-flooded-with-fake-ads-for-chatgpt-google-bard-and-other-ai-services-tricking-users-into-downloading-malware

https://www.techradar.com/pro/google-and-bing-search-ads-hijacked-to-spread-malware

3 Billion Facebook active users

Facebook is not dead, it’s not even on its deathbed.

There’s just under 8 billion human beings on the earth and 3 billion of those are active Facebook users. Yes Facebook, not Instagram or WhatsApp, just Facebook has over a third of the people in the world logging in every month.

It rises to 3.88 Billion when you include the full sweet of Meta Apps.

Which is great if you rely on Facebook for your marketing but also scary.

With so many accounts being randomly removed, and access to business tools inexplicably disappearing, this powerful network is becoming a more risky tool to rely on.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/26/facebook-3-billion-users/

Get a headstart on Google Analytics 4 & understand the lingo with the GA4 phrase book

Reels is a moneymaker for Meta

Meta will be pleased, its thieving is paying off.

The latest figures show that views on Reels are up from 140 billion views a day to 200 billion. And that has generated $10 billion dollars in ad revenue.

That’s actually more than TikTok, they got a mere 9.9 million in ad revenue.

https://www.tubefilter.com/2023/07/28/meta-facebook-instagram-reels-200-billion-daily-views-q2-2023/

We hate chronological feeds

People want chronological feeds on their social media. They talk about it all the time, they tweet it, and they mention it in the comments every time Mosseri posts anything on Instagram.

But when reality hits it seems actually… we don’t like them.

Back in 2020, Meta ran an experiment where it showed a segment of users chronological feeds. It turns out, those in the segment spent less time on the network and caused them to log off.

Which… may not really be a bad thing.

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-just-proved-people-hate-chronological-feeds/

Spot the ad on X

If people don’t know it’s an ad are they more likely to click?

That seems sot be the thinking behind Twitter… I mean X’s policy. It is making it harder to spot ads on the network. Instead of a big ‘promoted’ label at the bottom of the post, there’s now a smaller AD label at the top left of it.

Could this make ads more effective and drive more advertisers back to the network?

Hmmm

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-promoted-tweets-new-ad-label-format

Instagram ad messages tab

How can you keep up with all your direct messages particularly if you are running ads?

How do you know which messages on Instagram to prioritise because they are coming from paid ads?

How do you know if they are more effective than your organic messages?

It looks like Instagram is going to make it easier to track them. Spotted by agency owner Ahmed Ghanem and shared on Twitter a new ‘from ads’ tab will appear in your Instagram inbox. This will make monitoring, responding and of course, measuring much easier.

#Instagram is testing a new messages tab for messages that come from sponsored ads pic.twitter.com/lbHfdYrKU8
— Ahmed Ghanem (@ahmedghanem) July 27, 2023