Meta announces a highly requested feature…but is it worth it?

On October 10th, Meta announced that a highly requested feature - the ability to turn off comments on ads - will soon be available through their platform.

According to the release, these controls are initially available to a select number of businesses, seemingly targeting campaigns dealing with sensitive issues or in periods of ‘heightened sensitivity’. What qualifies as ‘sensitive’ does not form part of the release, but we can assume the usual suspects of politics, religion, and medicine.

In my time working on Meta campaigns, one of the most frequent questions I have had from clients is ‘can we turn the comments off?’ Based on the above, the answer is likely to remain ‘no’ for the vast majority for some time to come.

This raises an important question: Why advertise on a social media platform if you don’t want people engaging with your brand? Anecdotally this seems to mostly stem from a fear of criticism, and brand protection. However, as a marketing or paid media manager either in an agency or client-side, you should be used to all sorts of criticism and vitriol – it goes with the territory.

Frankly, I feel more harm could be done by a brand being seen to want to insulate themselves from their customers, rather than face potentially negative comments. To that point, it’s questionable as to how many people bother to see your ad and then go to the effort of reading through the few cretinous comments left by people with nothing better to do.

This does depend on your industry and following though. For some brands it is all important to maintain a direct relationship with their end customers. For them it may be somewhat more noticeable should that little comment button be taken away, denying current and potential customers the opportunity to pass on feedback, be it good, bad or indifferent.

But what to do about those trolling, ugly comments on your ads? By and large it is best to ignore them. But if you’re concerned about vulgarity, whatever form it takes, do remember you can set safety controls on your page to filter out any profanity.

For performance marketers though, our focus should be on driving greater business outcomes for our clients. Getting stuck in the weeds of social media comments is not conducive to this.

So, whilst this is undoubtedly an interesting development from Meta, to be handing more control back to advertisers, for the vast majority it will remain business as usual and so it should be.

Comments are somewhat at the heart of the Meta business model, and they will likely remain so for some time to come.