Have you ever noticed that Instagram promotions are very similar to the content on your feed? You can be scrolling through Instagram and find yourself liking a promotional advert post without even realising it is not someone that you follow.
Instagram receives a lot of information by what you search there, the trends that you follow, and the posts that you like, and tailors their promotional content to you very well, in addition to what Facebook does with your searching information. Bear in mind that Instagram and WhatsApp are owned directly by Facebook and all the information from whatever you type into these services will be used to market to you.
Facebook’s own advertising works slightly differently to this, they advertise at the side of your screen, with text and words and they tailor it to you by the things which you buy online. It is well known that Facebook uses your browser cookies to advertise to you related to your searches. Facebook even tracks what you do on your smartphone to help with their advertising, including friends, online searches, location information, music from Spotify, videos from Youtube. It is clear that there is a huge interest in what you do for work and entertainment on your phone and it comes through in the advertisements. You can’t do anything to stop Facebook adverts but you can stop them getting your information by protecting your cookies and location etc.
They had a marketing scheme a while ago to give you free adverts for a new company or business to get thousands more views than you would organically. But who gets your advert through to them? Facebook is the one that decides. There is also a few levels to how far the reach of your advert can go in terms of location and "relevance" of new clients. Facebook is also trying to work as a social media marketplace, where users can even upload old items of clothes for sale, as well as cars and properties.
Twitter works in a unique way, you pay a monthly charge for promotions on all of your personal advertisements. This way, companies advertise to their current followers and then Twitter boosts it up to other relevant followers. For instance, if you follow someone who is seeing an advertisement from a company, if it is promoted, it is more likely that you will see this promotional tweet as well. Twitter says: “Your activity on Twitter, the information you provide to Twitter, and our relationships with ad partners all help make promoted content more relevant for you”. The difference is that on Twitter you can opt out of promoted tweets by clicking “I don’t like this ad" if they don’t resonate with you. Facebook and Instagram don’t offer the same option and will continue regardless.
