When Meta decided to shut down the ability for Facebook advertisers to serve ads based on religion and ethnicity, Muslim brands struggled to find an alternative solution. At Muslim Ad Network, we were able to help you to a certain extent with our guide for serving ads to Muslims on Facebook.

But after more privacy-based restrictions forced Meta to trim down its ad-targeting capabilities even further, they have moved in another direction to make its advertising machine even stronger than it was before.

In this article, we take a look at what steps Meta has taken and what this means for you as a business that serves ads to Muslims.

A quick word of warning before we start though. Meta specifically decided to remove the ability to serve ads based on religious interest, ethnicity, and political affiliation. So, this article does not aim to show you a way around it.

Disclaimer!
Using AI-driven advertising to serve ads to Muslim audiences necessitates cultural sensitivity and respect for diversity. It is critical to avoid stereotyping and assumptions about any group, including Muslims, and to tailor advertising to each person's individual interests and needs, rather than solely based on their religious affiliation. Furthermore, it is critical to prioritize user privacy and ensure that any data collected is used ethically and transparently.

So What Has Meta Been Up To?

It all started with Apple’s iOS privacy changes in April 2021, which Meta predicted would cost the company $10 billion in revenue, in 2022. The privacy feature stops the behind-the-scenes mechanics of many mobile advertisements.

It’s on the order of $10 billion, so it’s a pretty significant headwind for our business.

– Meta CFO, Dave Wehner, as reported on CNBC

In response to these developments, Meta launched Advantage+, which uses AI to automatically generate multiple advertisements based on the marketer’s specific objectives.

Advantage+ makes ad creation easier by handling audience selection and ad creative elements for you. Simply enter the campaign dates and budget, as well as your creative assets and Meta’s machine learning-powered processes will take care of the rest. That’s it!

According to Meta:

Rather than manually testing many campaigns and parsing through separate targeting, creative, placements, and budget setups, advertisers can now more quickly and efficiently create up to 150 creative combinations at once by setting up a single Advantage+ shopping campaign.

Why Advantage+ is Not Advantageous for Serving Ads to Muslims

Let us look at the three main features that Advantage+ offers as outlined by Insider Intelligence:

1. A single shopping campaign allows you to create 150 creative combinations as an advertiser. Based on where customers are in their purchasing journey, machine learning models learn which creative resonates best with them.
2. Advantage+ makes prospecting and retargeting customers easier by combining new and existing audiences into a single campaign as, according to Meta, 52% of surveyed consumers want to discover new brands and products that match their shopping preferences.
3. Advantage+ serves the highest-performing ad variation to the highest-value shoppers, while automated optimization ensures campaigns continue to improve at matching individuals to the right advertisement at the ideal moment.

The three trillion dollar question is: how will you specifically target Muslim audiences while relying on Meta’s automated targeting? Instead of you selecting your own audience, the system uses the data that it has available. Furthermore, due to changes in data collection processes, Meta may not have enough data to reach those segments in the first place. 

Here is the entire Advantage+ catalog.
An article in the Financial Times, published in February 2023, highlights the differences in opinion between marketers who have used Advantage+. While people like Roberto Mendoza of iProspect mention that their clients earned $7 for every $1 spent on a website advertising campaign through Advantage+, one UK-based game company declared that

We have now made the active decision not to use the Advantage+ feature due to the amount of control that you have to give up as a marketer.

This quote should resonate with Muslim brands and marketers because relinquishing so much control can lead to forgoing Islamic Advertising Principles that do not only protect the Muslim consumer but also your brand’s reputation with Muslims.

Over time, Meta intends to use generative AI. Generative AI is an artificial intelligence technology that can generate various types of content such as text, imagery, audio, and synthetic data. 

Meta plans to use this in its ad systems to generate content such as graphics, allowing it to rapidly tweak text and images in campaigns based on user responses at a quicker pace than ever before.

In April 2023, Meta announced plans to release a generative AI product that can be utilized to build ads for its platforms by the end of the year.

It remains to be seen whether any of the AI advertising tools that Meta will continue to launch can aid in the specific ad targeting of Muslim consumers in any way. As always, Muslim Ad  Network will keep you updated with the latest relevant news for advertising to Muslims. Feel free to subscribe to the MAN newsletter to get all the news and trends about the Muslim consumer market.

The post What Muslim Brands Must Know About  Meta’s AI-driven Advertising appeared first on Muslim Ad Network.

FOR THE LATEST UPDATE ON A SOLUTION FOR FACEBOOK ADS GO TO: 7 Benefits of Serving Ads to Muslims Using Muslim Ad Network vs. Google Ads & Facebook Ads

So you want to know how to target Muslim audiences after Facebook removed the ability to run ads based on religious interests and politics?

As a result of a series of Senate hearings regarding documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen, Meta – the company that now stands behind Facebook – faces increased scrutiny. This is the main reason why Meta took such drastic measures.

As a business that targets Muslim consumers, you may be grappling with this issue. We wanted to reassure you that there is still an efficient way to target Muslim audiences on Facebook.

Solution: Target Muslim Consumers Through Facebook Custom Audiences

FOR THE LATEST UPDATE ON A SOLUTION FOR FACEBOOK ADS GO TO: 7 Benefits of Serving Ads to Muslims Using Muslim Ad Network vs. Google Ads & Facebook Ads

You can use three different  sources of data for your Custom Audiences:

• Your customer lists
• Visitors to your website
• Your App users

Your Customer List

Facebook will create target audiences based on your existing customers when you upload or connect your existing lists.

Upload a list of your customers and run a campaign to encourage their next purchase. You can use this same list to recruit new Muslim customers by creating campaigns that reward your list members for bringing in new customers.

For first-time customers think about what they would typically buy next and when they tend to do so. Use this data to advertise their next product within that time frame.

So if your first-time customer bought kitchen accessories for Ramadan and you have established a pattern that your typical customer usually buys dining sets as presents for Eid-ul Fitr, use this data to create ads for the product in the days leading to Eid-ul Fitr.

Easy Steps to Upload Your Customer List on Facebook Ads:

1. Go to Ads Manager
2. Click on “Audiences”
3. Click on “Create a Custom Audience”
4. Select “Customer List”

Make sure you format your customer list correctly.

Your Site Visitors

You can target Muslims on Facebook who visited your website or specific pages on your website. This targeting option is referred to as “website custom audiences”. You can also dig into site behavior data such as page depth, time spent on the site, and bounce rate. This, of course, makes sense if you are a typical Muslim business or organization and if the overwhelming majority of website traffic is made up of Muslims.

Facebook Pixel

Adding the Facebook Pixel to your website is the first step in creating and running your campaign. With the Facebook Pixel, you can track user behavior on your site, as well as specific audience segments that you can target with future Facebook ads.

Abandoned Carts

The average shopping cart abandonment rate for desktops is  69.57% and 85.65% for mobile. Given the fact that most visitors to your site are probably on their mobile phones, you may have a relatively large audience to retarget on Facebook.

Abandoned carts are excellent opportunities since your potential customer has already done all the work to get your product in their cart. It may be easier to recover abandoned carts than to attract new customers since the website visitor already has knowledge of your brand, is interested in your products, and just needs a little extra nudge.

You can customize product recommendations based on the visitor’s cart or offer discounts on abandoned products.

Sequential Retargeting

Through Facebook ads, you can target your audience with a series of advertisements based on their website behavior. Facebook ads using sequential retargeting are effective because they acknowledge the stage of the buying journey of your website visitor. For example, a visitor to your halal restaurant reservation page is far more likely to commit than someone who only visited your homepage.

Your Facebook App Users

Target Muslim audiences who have engaged with your Facebook app or have taken specific actions on your Facebook app. Your brand is already familiar to them, so it’s mostly just a matter of nurturing and sealing the deal.

Before we move further, make sure you download The Ultimate Guide to Understanding and Marketing to the Muslim Consumer. Your brand’s guide on breaking into one of the fastest-growing untapped consumer markets in the world.

Lookalike Muslim Audiences

You can create Facebook Lookalike Audiences by selecting segments of people who have similar characteristics to your existing users. We ask you to do this with caution because so far we have talked about audiences from your customer list or website visitors. The lookalike audience you end up with highly depends on the interests they share with your customer list and site visitors.

The lookalike audience should really be specific to products that most probably only Muslim consumers would buy. Lookalike audiences are however a  great ad targeting option to expand your reach to new potential Muslim customers. 

Since they share similar characteristics to your Custom Audiences, you already have an idea of what works and what does not—so you only need to repurpose and optimize as needed.

Easy Steps to Create a Facebook Ads Lookalike Audience:

1. Go to your Audiences. 
2. Select the Create Audience dropdown and choose Lookalike Audience
3. Choose your source. 
4. Choose the country/countries where you’d like to find a similar set of people
5. Choose your desired audience size with the slide.
6. Select Create Audience 

Source: Meta Business Help Center

Conclusion

These are frustrating times for those who have targeted Muslim audiences on Facebook for many years. Facebook’s decision to close off options for targeting religious interests has come at a high price for many.

However, if we are talking about a warm Muslim audience there are still a few options to target them on Facebook as we have demonstrated in this article.

So what do you do if you want to advertise to a new Muslim audience that has not warmed up to you yet? The answer to that is you partner with the largest, most experienced ad platform for targeting Muslim consumers in the world.

For more than a decade, Muslim Ad Network has helped brands, businesses, and organizations reach over 250 million Muslim customers online globally, and has served over a billion ads.
Feel free to contact Muslim Ad Network today and we will help you reach Muslim customers in the most efficient manner.

The post How to Target Muslim Audiences on Facebook – A Quick Solution appeared first on Muslim Ad Network.

Part 1- Facebook

Part 2 – Twitter

Part 3 – Instagram

A few months back we looked at How to Leverage Muslim Consumer Behavior Online with Social Media Marketing and gave you the tools to help you know if your social media marketing for Muslim audiences works.

Today we want to embark on a series that looks at the other side of the coin and help you understand how to leverage the news feed algorithms on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We believe that understanding how they work will help you target Muslims on social media platforms more efficiently.

Every Muslim user on social media is connected to hundreds of people — in some cases even thousands — on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. At the same time, they don’t want to be bombarded by every single update from every single connection.

Social media platforms have done plenty of user research to validate that feeling. That’s exactly why the news feeds and the algorithms exist in the first place.

The main social media platforms have gravitated toward an algorithm-based feed in an effort to create more customized and relevant experiences for their users. The issue for you as a marketer or business owner is that each algorithm works differently. On top of that, they’re constantly changing, requiring you to stay updated all the time.

To help you reap the most benefits, we’ve put together this easy-to-understand guide on how the algorithm and news feed work on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Keep in mind that the algorithms are constantly changing. So keep your eyes peeled and stay updated.

Let’s dive in!

How Social Media Algorithms Work in General

Social media algorithms are a way of sorting posts in a users’ feed based on relevancy instead of publishing time.

Source: SproutSocial

Social media platforms prioritize content a user sees in their feed first by the likelihood that they’ll actually want to see it. Pre-algorithms, social media feeds displayed posts in reverse chronological order. The newest posts from accounts a user followed showed up first.

Algorithms use machine learning and data science. They’re capable of parsing data and ranking posts based on criteria that can be a mystery to marketers. But nevertheless, it makes the user news feed more relevant.

So if you really want to engage with Muslim users on social media, you need to provide content that they find interesting and beneficial.

Before we move further, make sure you download The Ultimate Guide to Understanding and Marketing to the Muslim Consumer. Your brand’s guide on breaking into one of the fastest-growing untapped consumer markets in the world.

Staying in Good Terms with the Facebook News Feed Algorithm 

Before I tell you what to do, how about I tell you exactly what not to do.

Facebook recently explicitly discouraged a practice called engagement baiting. This practice looks innocent and I am sure many of you reading have done this or are still doing it. However, doing it today may get you in a lot of trouble and that’s why I want to start here.

This is what Facebook has to say about it:

“Engagement bait is a tactic where you goad people into interacting through likes, shares, comments, and other actions, in order to artificially boost engagement and get greater reach on your stream.

Examples of engagement bait tactics are:

• React baiting: posting spammy content such as “Love react if you’re into PC gaming!”
• Follow and share baiting: telling viewers to “Like, follow, share, and subscribe!” in your description.
• Comment baiting: telling viewers to comment a number or letter on your stream.
• Monetization baiting: Asking for Stars in return for something, like doing push-ups or eating something objectionable.

These tactics are not allowed and can result in your Page or post being demoted. Instead, learn best practices for building engagement.” 

Source: Facebook Business Help Center

Here is an example of a post that Facebook may deem an engagement bait:

Capitalizing on the Facebook News Feed Algorithm to Engage Muslims

The Like button, since it was first introduced in November 2007, has helped Facebook’s engineers figure out which posts are delighting users and which are not.

However, the algorithm today is much more sophisticated. It isn’t just about the Like button anymore — and this is not just because they introduced more reaction buttons. Facebook’s algorithm is by far the most complicated of the three social media platforms covered in this series.

Here’s a quick rundown of the most important components of Facebook’s algorithm and tips to capitalize on them.

Relevancy Score

The relevancy score takes into consideration hundreds of variables to predict whether a given user will like, click, comment, share, hide, or even mark your post as spam.

It predicts each of these outcomes and quantifies them into a single number called a “relevancy score” that’s specific both to you and to that post.

Once every post that could potentially show up in a user’s feed has been assigned a relevancy score, the sorting algorithm ranks them and puts them in the order they end up appearing in your Muslim audience’s feed. 

So every time they log in, the post they see at the top of their News Feed was chosen over thousands of others as the one most likely to make them react and engage.

The ads you run on Facebook are also given relevancy scores. This way Facebook can show users the ads that matter most to them. 

Tip: Facebook users can prioritize a person or page to see first. That way their posts will appear at the top of their News Feed. Make sure you make your superfans aware of this feature if they don’t already use it and ask them to prioritize your Facebook page.

Time Spent on Your Post

Muslim audiences spending more time on a particular post of yours in their feed compared to the majority of other posts they look at is a sign of relevance.

How does this play out to your advantage? It amplifies your reach on Facebook.  When your targeted Muslim audience spends more time on a particular post, Facebook shows that post on their friends’ News Feeds.

You then have access to a wider Muslim audience with the same interest as those you have already targeted directly.

Tip: Create compelling content and boost them as ads whenever you can. This is one of the best ways to get more users following your Facebook page.

Video Engagement

To understand whether users found a particular video interesting, Facebook started monitoring different forms of video engagement — like turning on the audio, switching to full-screen mode, and enabling high definition.

This is because they noticed that most users who are interested in a certain video didn’t necessarily Like it, comment on it, or share it with their friends.

So now users who engaged with your video-related content will see more of your videos in their News Feed.

Tip: Create awesome video content. Facebook will give precedence to videos created natively on the Facebook platform itself. So make sure to make videos part and parcel of your Facebook strategy.

With Ramadan here at the time of publishing this article, you may also benefit from the following article: Using Social Media to Gain Ramadan Buyers.

Let Muslim Ad Network help you find and engage Muslim customers on all online platforms including social networks.  Muslim Ad Network can help connect your organization or product with Muslim consumers on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn! Contact us today!

The post Advertise to Muslim Audiences on Facebook by Capitalizing on Social Media Algorithms appeared first on Muslim Ad Network.