Facebook is still the king of social media.
Love it or hate it, Facebook remains to be the most famous social media platform in the world. Maybe because of convenience, user friendliness, or just plainly because of its popularity that people tend to use it more than any other social media platforms today.
But you are maybe one of those guys who are annoyed every time an ad appears on your timeline. Especially ads that are not only obstructing you of the things you want to see, they are also talking about things that are too far away from your interests.
Don't you know that Facebook to their credit has provided a way for you to manage the ads that are showing on your timeline? This can save you several frustrating minutes of seeing ads you don't want. And for people living in the US, Facebook and Instagram also are giving you options to turn off political ads altogether.
Here are a number of things you can do:
- find out why you’re being targeted
- change your ad preferences
- hide ads
- hide all ads from certain advertisers
- hide ads about certain ad topics
- remove interests
- remove categories
- and a lot more.
Even if you're not changing anything, it would be interesting to see for yourself how you are being targeted by Facebook and its advertisers. Especially if you're a marketer it would be worthwhile to check this information. You can see the targeting parameters and you can change it so that you only see ads that are relevant to your interests.
The way to do it.
Here is a simple way to do it. You can do it with both of your desktop and mobile applications. First is to go to any Facebook ads displayed on your timeline. Then you click the 3 dots located on the upper right corner. Next is to select the menu that says "Why am I seeing this ad?". Once you are on that screen, you can choose to hide all ads from that advertiser or you can just manage by selecting "Make changes to your ad parameter". You will be amazed on how much you can actually manage it. You can hide certain topics, deselect any topics and review categories Facebook has put on your profile.
This way you also optimize and help Facebook advertisers showing you only ads that you are actually interested in and plan for buying. You can also get to this section anytime by going into Settings > Ads on desktop. Or type facebook.com/ads/preferences into your browser. Or, on mobile, go to Settings & Privacy > Settings > Ad Preferences).
Not only that this will improve your user experience, this step is actually in line with Facebook's goal. Mark Zuckerberg said years ago that "the goal is to make your ads as relevant and as timely as the content people see from their friends." You are giving everybody a good favor just by doing this.
So the next time you visit your Facebook account to check on family and friends, why not start tweaking around your ads settings and make the online world a little bit of a better place.
Enjoy your connections!
