Meta Wants to Run More of Your Marketing — But Should They?

0:00I'm Mari Smith, known as the premier Facebook marketing expert, aka queen of Facebook, and this is actually my 14th time because I have been at every single social media marketing world. There is no amount of sophisticated technology that can ever take the place of live, in person, IRL, heart to heart, face to face. You could very well meet some of your best friends, clients, joint venture partners, alliances, have opportunities, podcasts, speaking engagements, it's extraordinary. So come on in for this beautiful, in-person experience. Get tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info.

0:37Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. This is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales, helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today, Jerry Potter and I are exploring important updates from Facebook with our special guest, Tara Zerker, who is returning to social media marketing world 2027.

1:18Take it away, Jerry. Thanks, Mike. It is great to be here. Some important Facebook changes to discuss. There's been this growing tension between meta, letting AI handle more of the ad decisions if we wanted it to, but now there are signals that it's removing some of the human control options entirely. So I think it's important to not only know where meta is headed with Facebook and Instagram, but also understand which parts we should take advantage of the AI smarts and which parts we should try to retain human control of. So we're very excited to be joined by Tara Zerker. Tara is a Facebook ads expert and founder of the Successful Ads Club, a membership site designed to help marketers improve their Facebook and Instagram ads results.

1:55Today, Tara, Mike, and I are going to explore what these latest updates from Facebook mean for small business marketers and owners like you. Tara, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. You guys always love being here. So it feels like it's the first time we're kind of seeing Meta say, hey, we're not even going to let you choose this anymore. And so one of the things that is in play right now is removing advertisers ability to exclude individual placements from ad sets. And this is just something that people have started to see popping up in ads manager. This includes not being able to say, I only want to advertise to people on a mobile device or only on desktop or only to iPhone or Android users.

2:31So I guess to start, is this surprising to you? Because I feel like if you removed a placement, there's been a pop-up warning you not to do that for years and years and years. Yeah, for sure. I think this was always going to be coming. Meta is rolling this out. I don't have any accounts where it's absolutely set in stone that you can't remove placements, but apparently the rumor is this is going to happen. And I think there's a little bit of, you know, always when there's things removed, people kind of worry about it. But the truth is, we've been testing this for years. And I will tell you that choosing Advantage Plus placements, generally speaking, is a much better option for advertisers.

3:11So you get better results, you get higher quality results. Meta really dislikes it when we go in and edit and choose our placements. And sometimes I think we We think that we can game the system, but it's really hard to do at this point. They just know us, or I should say they know our consumer so incredibly well right now. Tara, can you explain what Advantage Plus is for those of us that maybe don't have any idea what that is? Yeah, for sure. So Advantage Plus placements is simply saying, hey, we're going to let Meta control this. They're going to use all of their algorithmic AI to decide which ads should go on which placements and when.

3:48And so what we typically see is the majority of your ad spend will go to Instagram. That's probably usually for most advertisers around 60%, sometimes even higher. And then another lion's share will go to Facebook. And then very small percentages of your ad spend will go to things like the audience network. That's where your ads are on third-party websites and things like that. And so very small percentage will go there. And like I said, sometimes people think they can game it and they get rid of it, you know, the audience network and this and that. But it tends to only make your ads more expensive and overall kind of reduce the quality of leads or sales.

4:30So we've just seen it be more advantageous to choose the Advantage Plus. What about some of the other apps that they've got like Threads and WhatsApp and Messenger? I mean, are those also selections that are just automatically taken care of? Those will be automatically taken care of. So if your ad formats will play nicely with those platforms and now with the AI, they'll make sure that they do, then it's going to go everywhere. Now, you can control some of this. You can tell Meta on the back end, hey, at an account level, I don't want to have anything on audience network and things like that. And we do see that there's some businesses that are maybe in the financial space, credit, that sort of thing.

5:11They have to be able to control things a little bit more. So they are giving us some account level controls, just not the ad set level controls. So I know when I worked at an agency, I always thought, well, we don't want to waste money on this because this isn't going to work. And it's been a number of years and meta AI probably knows better than I did then or now. I think I know less now. But, you know, I always see sometimes these placements where a brand's ad looks terrible. Like I think of those sidebar ads on desktop, on Facebook. And I just think, oh, poor company. They're, you know, here they are wasting money, although I feel like I don't see that as much anymore.

5:47So is that a reflection of meta AI being able to reformat ads in a much better way as opposed to when they first started placing image ads in the stories or the reels feed? And it was like, oh, what is this? This is terrible. Exactly, Jerry. So now the AI is so good and or they will just simply not place your ad in a placement if it's not going to render properly. So they just have better detection systems that, you know, if your ad is going to be too small or whatever, and they can't rework it, they're just not going to place it there. So it's so good at this point that it's like I said, pretty hard to game it.

6:25I used to do the same thing, Jerry, I'd be like, Oh, we're going to put, you know, these ads on Instagram and these on Facebook. And we used to like do all of that as well, but it just doesn't outperform anymore. So it's easy now just to let Meta kind of control it. So you mentioned that generally you're just leaving all placements on with the Advantage Plus, but obviously not all the time. So for the ones that you're removing now, is it niche specific or is it like, what are the exceptions to who should just not have Advantage Plus on all the time? Exactly. We have some clients in enterprise healthcare and things like that.

7:03And some of them are very sensitive to where their ads are placed. And so we have a lot of control set up for those accounts. And Meta is going to continue, especially if you are a categorized account. Health and Wellness, for example, is a great example of that. They're going to leave those placement options open. So if you have an account that is categorized by Meta in a sensitive industry, you're likely going to continue to have control over that. Am I hearing you say, though, it's mostly like a lot of it is just client preference, like we don't we uncheck them to keep the client happy? A lot of it is compliance.

7:38So, yeah. So in those cases, those would be compliance. So now Meta has rolled out these categorizations. If you're in a category, then you have different levels of control that you have access to and don't have access to. If you're in one of those categories, they're going to give you different controls. And if you're just in kind of the general bucket of meta, you won't be able to control it supposedly once it rolls out, but you can control it at the account level. As someone who empowers business owners to manage their own ads, what are you telling people right now that meta AI does well versus what they should keep manual control of?

8:15I am so surprised at how much has advanced, even since last I was on the show. So we definitely tell our students, we tell them, hey, just turn on Advantage Plus. Turn on all of the AI creative options. We feel they're excellent at this point. And interestingly enough, I was just on a client account that had some advanced AI features that they were beta testing. I was kind of testing them out. Imagine this, you guys, using images that the account had uploaded, not videos. The account only had images on it. They created two AI generated videos with AI avatars that were excellent. Not only were these avatars excellent, and I mean, my human eye was not detecting any glitches or weird things.

9:03It was like perfection. Not only were they excellent, they were talking through all the clients' pain points, benefits, objection, overcoming objections, and walking through the intro offer. This was crazy because I didn't hand a meta, a script. It was just pulling from all the data that it had. And not only that, composed from images only, it did a full walkthrough of the facility. So these AI avatars were actually walking through the facility and it looked pretty darn close to the actual physical in-person location. And it did that from images, images that were already on the account. So it's kind of wild where this is going.

9:48You know, I was pretty surprised that, and again, they were just, this was like a beta testing feature. I was pretty surprised that it didn't, you know, have any sort of like disclosure that they were AI avatars. This was meta zone creation, but there you go. The future is before us. I mean, things are getting interesting. Is that even available for review? Because I'd be concerned. Yes, you have to review it. Okay, good. Because the last thing I want is my money being spent on ads that are AI generated that I don't get any oversight on. Okay, so you get to review it. Okay, good. Phew. As of right now, yes.

10:24You know, if I stocked up 20 accounts and the advantage of what we do is we get lots and lots of accounts to look at. If I stocked up 20 accounts there, I can promise you I would see at least three or four different iterations, like the AI options and things like that. Like how they're rolling it out, you know, how they're encouraging people to go through the AI options. They look different. Yeah, I was really excited to see this one that created full avatars and walkthroughs. And I mean, it was so advanced, it was crazy. But in those cases, yes, you do have to approve it. Some of the approvals are a little bit more, like a little more obvious.

10:58And some of them, you know, if I, again, if I stacked up all these accounts, some of the ways that they are testing, having people approve it is a little more subtle, but in general, you have to approve it. Wow. I'm just picturing watching a video of a place. And then, I don't know, I would be the uptight person who showed up and be like, wait a minute, that table's supposed to be over there, or I don't know what the business was. But so do you see, I mean, in all your years as a meta ads expert, do you see them insisting on taking away more controls? Because obviously they'll do whatever gets people results because people who get results keep coming back and spending more.

11:33Yeah, I think everything we're going to talk about today is a result of the new algorithm that they're headed towards, which is called GEM. And if you read the AI engineering blog, which is thick and hard to get through, but it is where... Which we all do, obviously, right? Yes. It is where they drop these breadcrumbs of what's coming. And so how I kind of like to look at this, and I had shared my hypothesis on this at last year's Social Media Marketing World, is we had Advantage Plus, which was kind of the entry into where they eventually wanted to go. Advantage Plus was like, you know, point A and Gem is point Z.

12:11So we're on our way there. So we started with Advantage Plus and, you know, there was just a few of those little features. They're taking over a little bit more control, a little bit more control. Now we're in the era of Andromeda, the newest algorithm that hit everybody's account in October of 2025. It was globally in everybody's account. And that is a algorithm, how I've explained it to people, it's almost like they put an organic algorithm and they popped it into everybody's paid algorithm. So it tends to favor high quality content. It tends to put you in the highest quality traffic when you have the highest quality content and people are engaging with your ads in a positive way.

12:58So this pay to play kind of now has tiers and gates and things that you have to go through in order to get to the highest quality traffic and get the lowest costs for your ads. So that's been very interesting to play with. And the TLDR on that one is the more creative diversity you can give that algorithm, the more effective your advertising will be. Now, this is important, I believe, because they need bazillions of data points on all of the accounts, which is why they're demanding creative diversity. They're demanding higher quality creative in your ads because where they want us to go to the point Z is an algorithm called GEM.

13:42And this is a generative model that basically we are going to put in an image. We are going to put in a budget. and it should be able to generate all of the creative, should be able to iterate by itself. It sounds so next level, but when you see kind of all these AI features I know we're about to discuss as well, now it starts to make sense. They're taking away more and more control, but they also have so much data about your account and they want more data about your account so that they can get to this place where advertising is just, I mean, it's almost automatic, you know? All we need to tell them is what we want out of them and what the budget is, and they're going to go and get it for us.

14:26And the other crazy thing is, while they have so much data about us already, they also have so much data about our customers and our clients and who's on the algorithm. So now it's starting to create or mold our creative to that individual's preferences. If they're the type of person who interacts with large font headlines, then they can take are ad creative and they can make that for that individual person. So it's becoming a wild world out here, gentlemen. I just got to say, I'm excited about that because this is kind of bringing the power of a really huge agency down to the masses. Don't you agree?

15:06Oh, 100%. Yeah. It's existential for agencies and we could talk about that too, but absolutely. Yeah. I'm like, I think Tara's making me want to buy Facebook ads. I don't know what I'm going to advertise, But this is, yeah, just for the tech alone. So it's interesting this shift because, you know, once upon a time, it was like, okay, I want to target this age range and this gender and these interests and people who follow these pages. And, you know, the targeting seems to be disappearing. And we're moving towards data, as you said a few times. Meta is starting to use activity data shared by third-party businesses, not only for ad targeting, but also to personalize content recommendations in feed and AI-generated responses.

15:45They say they're not tracking anything new from anyone, just using more of it to create custom experiences, which should help get better results for advertisers. The old school pixel, of course, is now AI enhanced. So is the competitive advantage for businesses and marketers to think about what data we can give to, you know, ethically and legally to Meta in order to combine with what they know to get the best results? 100%. And so there's a few things, tactically speaking here. So, you know, every time when you log into your account and it says enhance your data by, you know, there's usually some sort of error.

16:25If I look at most people's account on their pixel, something that needs to be cleaned up or, you know, the pixel needs additional levels of access. There's all sorts of little errors. The more that you can clean that stuff up, the more that the pixel can access the data it needs from your website, the more that it's going to be able to use those AI enhanced features that are now kind of built into the pixel. So it used to be that if you, let's say you have an e-commerce company, this is the most obvious use case, you could kind of pass along like rich data to the pixel product descriptions and just really, you know, almost like SEO level descriptors about your products.

17:05So you give that to the pixel and then it could go and do more work for you. Now with the AI enhancements, it's just going to read your website. It's going to read your website, your product offerings, your SEO. It's just going to go in there, deep dive, and it's going to be able to deliver more of that data in a usable way back to Meta so that it can go and match to the right consumer. So it's really cool what it's doing. And then on the consumer side, Meta has recently said, hey, guys, it used to be that you would kind of opt in for your organic feed and then separately your ads feed for personalization.

17:45Now it's just going to say, you're kind of streamlining it and saying, hey, do you want personalization in your account? Yes or no. And that's going to include your ads and your organic and all of that. If you don't want personalization, great. The algorithm is just going to deliver random stuff to you. But if you want it to personalize, then it has to be organic plus ads. Pretty smart of them, actually, because, you know, folks would turn off their organic or their ad personalization, be super anti-ads. Then they realized, well, they're just getting random ads that they don't care about. And if they're going to get ads anyway, they may as well get stuff they care about.

18:21So they're streamlining that. So they're kind of doing all these enhancements everywhere to make sure it's just getting a better customer match is what they're doing. Yeah. And that is very clever way for them to do it. So if I'm hearing you correctly, businesses don't necessarily have to submit more data to Meta. Meta is going to be, Meta AI is going to be looking for it. Exactly. Yep. It's just smarter pixeling, same pixel, same code, and the pixel just got 10 times smarter. Hi, my name is Mandy Hedrick and I'm here at Social Media Marketing World. My first time attending Social Media Marketing World and I had won my ticket.

18:58And so I attended online and the impact it had in what I could do for my business immediately. It was my goal as a business owner to be able to earmark the dollars. This is my second time in person. So I just love being in a room full of people that are like-minded. It's a big investment, but I'm not just investing in myself, but I'm also investing in my clients and I will be coming back every single year. I'm already ready to buy my next ticket and book my hotel room. Get tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.com info. So another thing is they've said product data for companies with catalogs is becoming more like a core input across all the sales campaigns.

19:38So now AI can automatically generate and optimize the most effective shopping ad formats in real time. And I would imagine, like you described for some of your clients, Tara, that it'll even do it individually per customer if it has enough data. Does that sound right? That's exactly right. In fact, they're doing a lot with those product catalogs and just product in general, Meta has realized that across the family suite of apps, that people are using it as a shopping experience. We think about TikTok shop, right? And in certain other countries where shopping across social media, it's just, it's a built-in e-com situation and is starting to become more popular here.

20:16So they're trying to make that catalog, which for, is primarily an e-com play, but there are other businesses that use catalogs. They're trying to make that catalog as usable as possible. So they're enhancing it with AI. Somebody clicks on a product, for example, the meta AI will come up with, you know, potential questions they might have. Is it good? Let's say it's a lotion. Is it good for sensitive skin? What are the reviews saying? And so that stuff will now populate inside a meta instead of taking people out to another website. And then there's other things they're doing with the product catalog too.

20:53For example, let's just say you've got 200 SKUs in your product catalog, you maybe are, you know, a department store, you've got shoes, you've got shirts, you've got pants, but really, you're having a big shoe sale right now. And so you can tell Meta, hey, I don't want you to display my whole product catalog, I don't want you to, you know, go into everything I offer, I just want you to focus on shoes. And so there's lots of really cool things they're doing to make that product catalog as valuable as possible by enhancing with AI, giving us more control over what we're advertising within the catalog, which has otherwise been more difficult to do and things of that nature.

21:36I think that e-com is delighted, but there's still ways to go before the e-com experience is as integrated in meta as it is, let's say in TikTok, for example. Meaning further integrations into Shopify and WooCommerce and things like that. Yes, and they do tell us that Shopify is coming. So I think we're getting there. Okay. If you have been kind of blown away by some of the stuff Tara is sharing, as I have been, like buckle up because there's some other things that we're going to talk about. So one of them is a lot of new superpowers are being added to meta AI. So for example, you'll be able to connect your Facebook and Instagram account and your ad campaigns and your Google workspace.

22:18And so the meta AI assistant can provide recommendations using like actual context from your entire business. Like one of the suggested prompts that they suggested trying was, what types of content have worked best for my Instagram account over the last month? What can I do differently? And you can even set up, this almost gets into being agentic where you can set up and say, send me a report every single Monday on whatever it is that you just asked them. So if a marketer is sitting down with meta AI for the first time, let's say it's two weeks into an ad campaign, right? Give it some time, get through the learning phase.

22:51And maybe that's too long, you tell me. But like, what are the first few questions you'd suggest asking? Yeah, you can ask it. Actually, the meta AI is pretty cool. I'll be excited to see how it develops, but it has like meta-specific insights, which is very helpful and can be a differentiator than let's say, for example, Plod or ChatGPT or something like that, right? So essentially, and I just actually was on the meta AI, so I'll give you the use case that I did. But if you're a brand new advertiser and you're a couple of weeks into your campaign and you want to understand its performance and what you should do next, you're just going to ask it.

23:28You're going to say, hey, I want you to connect to my ad account. Here's my ad account. And tell me, you know, what's working, what's not working, and what can I do better? And it's going to come up with some specific recommendations for you. Now, what I did today, I've been doing some competitive analysis for a very large account that we have. And I uploaded an entire folder that we've been building of competitor analysis and like that. And now granted, I've already gone through Claude and gone through chat and gone through, you know, my own personal process of competitor analysis. And I just said, hey, here's kind of everything I have.

24:09How would you evaluate this? And it was so cool. It went in and looked at kind of the top performing ads and this and that. And in fact, it shared some, you know, this is its longest running. ad that this company has is this exact ad and here's what they're saying. And then it offered to create five different ad angles that would differentiate from all of its competitors. And so I think having that like meta insight is very helpful and it can definitely give you some unique and different angles that you're just not going to get from the other AI platforms. So I think the skeptic in our audience is thinking, okay, so I'm going to ask the company that wants me to spend more money to what I should do.

24:52Are they ever going to say, roll back your ad spend? Probably not. So I guess it's one thing to ask AI, hey, help me interpret the data. What are you seeing? What you just described sounds amazing. But how much do you trust the actual advice? Because I can say using, for example, YouTube's tool like this, I'm regularly going, well, actually, I don't think that's true. and you get the AI responsive, you're right to push back on that, Jerry. Yeah, you have to, I guess with any of these platforms, you have to know the context, right? Likewise, we just connected Claude to an account last week for analysis.

25:30And it had excellent recommendations that if you didn't know the context of the account, you might go and try and then realize those recommendations had already been tried or there's reasons, you know, where we deal with a lot of sensitive accounts. There were compliance reasons why we weren't doing XYZ recommendation. So you always have to filter it through the context that you know and your own experience. But I do say if it's something that you just simply haven't tested and you feel skeptical of the test, you should test it and see. Because I have been surprised many times by ideas that I thought seemed too basic or too complex.

26:07And then went and tested them and was very delighted by the results. So I think if it's context related and it just doesn't make sense, that's one thing. If it's a test that you haven't tried or just, you know, feel uncertain about, it might be worth it. I want to let everybody know how they can access it. You just go to meta.ai and if you're, you need to log in in order to access your account. And if you're already logged into Facebook or Instagram, it should just log you in. But I just did a little test. I said, look at my reels on Instagram and tell me about the best performing ones. and it basically said, here's your top five.

26:43Here's why they performed really well. And it's just giving me some kind of interesting analysis. So I think that's kind of cool, you know, and asking Meta what it thinks about what I should do is probably smart because it has all the data. So that's kind of cool. And Tara, you can do this obviously with anything, I would imagine. Have you messed around with meta.ai very much or no? A little bit, yeah. I think I've probably experimented more with asking it questions related to its product. But yeah, a little bit. And I definitely, you know, we're starting to use it more for that kind of like account level.

27:17And sometimes just second eyes because we do use a lot of Cloud and ChatGPT and we have skills and projects and all that built up. But sometimes it's helpful just to get like another angle on it. Yeah, and I've asked it if it can look at my ads account and then it says, do you want to enable access to Meta Business Manager? And I click enable. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, bada boom, I'm in. So that's kind of exciting. It's so easy. That's really interesting that it is just their regular chat bot, if that's what we want to call it. I thought I was picturing it was going to be something in Ads Manager.

27:48Now, by the way, these tools that we're talking about, at least as of this recording, are all free to use. But they have said businesses seeking greater usage will eventually be able to subscribe to their MetaOne tool, which gives increased AI tool usage, among other things. And I know listening to Mike's other show, AI Explored, it is, you know, I've heard a lot of your experts say, hey, we're getting everything really cheap right now. The prices on all of this stuff is going to go up. But it sounds like this would be a good tool to use now, even if you couldn't use it in the future, right? Like, because it helps you right now.

28:23Like, instantly, it almost seems like. 100%. And maybe even just running through some of those prompts that Jerry, you had mentioned, you know, evaluate my organic from the last, you know, 30 days or last week, and then give me a monthly report or a Monday report every single week and just see what valuable insights it might drum up for you. I think that's a great place to start. And is there a way to connect your ads account directly to Claude and ChatGPT? Yes, you can. Uh-huh. Yep. You can do that now. So it's all so easy. It's an MCP connector. So basically inside of these things, there's this thing called multi-context protocol or connector.

29:04And basically it allows you to connect meta. And I mean, I don't personally do it, but I know I've had plenty of people talk about it and allows you to bring all that data in. But what's really fascinating about meta is like, it's actually telling me, okay, you spent$3 ,500, you had 352 ,000 impressions. I mean, And so it sounds like I can get really specific. And for somebody who maybe isn't into wanting to actually look at the metrics inside of the ads manager or whatever they call it these days. I mean, this is kind of exciting. Yeah. How cool would that be, Mike, just to have a Monday report with all your, you know, all of your key advertising metrics right there.

29:41I mean, this stuff is so easy through the meta AI. I do think it's pretty cool. And I do hope everybody experiments with it to see what they think. I'm curious, do you have a sense of if you go to meta.ai, are you going to get better advice versus asking through a chat GPT or a Claude account that's connected to your ad account that's maybe more trained on your business? I think you're going to get a different angle of great, like, because it's going to pull in meta specific data. Like, I don't know if it's remarkably better, but I think it is different. I think it's different enough that it's worth paying attention to, you know, so for me, it's not groundbreaking, but it's different enough.

30:25It's cool enough. It's pulling in enough meta insight that it's very valuable for me. Well, and a little tip for folks that, because I'm brand new to it, but they have just like Gemini and just like a lot of the other platforms, they have a selector tool. So you can, it's default to instant, but they have a thinking mode. So if you click under that and you choose thinking, and they also have a shopping thing too. But if you choose thinking, then it's going to actually think a little bit more and it's going to put a little bit more energy, electricity, processing power into it. So you could probably experiment with it.

31:00And my guess is you might be hitting limits on Claude and you can head over to Meta and maybe see. The other side of the equation is my guess is that there's data that Meta has access to that they're not sending over the MCP. So it might be worth an experiment. Yeah, it's hard to test those things out because you could ask the same tool the same question three times and get three different answers. But over time, I think you absolutely could. And I think that's one of the strengths is either being able to train the AI to do what you need to do or figuring out which is the best tool, at least this week.

31:34Right. So so we've been talking a lot about ads and a little bit about organic that meta AI can, you know, do stuff for you in the business. But they actually want to go a step further to help businesses. They're launching what's called meta business agent, which is an AI powered assistant that can help you do things across, you know, WhatsApp. Like, Mike, you mentioned WhatsApp earlier and Messenger, Instagram. And it can answer customer questions specifically about your business. Like I remember the old multiple choice ones we used to have in Facebook business page messengers where it's like, what are your hours?

32:04And you could have a pre-programmed thing. But this is obviously, you know, on a whole new level. It can make product recommendations from your catalog. It can book appointments. It claims that it can qualify incoming leads, claims that it can actually close sales, which I'm assuming is more on the e-comm side as opposed to, you know, something high ticket like that. Let's you decide when a team member steps in to provide additional support. They said it'll support you with operational tasks like summarizing customer conversations, providing insights, delivering daily briefings, like all of these different things.

32:36So I guess my first reaction to this is being a little bit skeptical of this kind of stuff is does it feel safe to build more systems around Meta AI? Or we know Meta's not going anywhere. So does it feel like this is absolutely worth experimenting with at least? I think so. Right now, we just actually launched some experimentation. So this is a newer thing for us that we're experimenting with specifically from the ads. And let's just say if we have a client doing lead gen ads, so those are in the on-platform ads, don't have to leave meta in order to give your contact details and opt into something.

33:13So we just recently launched some experiments with these agents on those that are qualifying the leads and helping people to select the correct product for them. I don't even have enough data to tell you if it's, you know, where it's going, but we're starting to see these agents work on our clients behalf. So it's kind of cool. This happens primarily through the chat features within Meta. So Messenger and like that. And we're just going to have to play with it and see where this leads us. But I think it's actually very cool. A lot of businesses have a really hard time getting to those DMs in a timely manner, as well as staffing somebody to answer them in a way that's going to convert.

33:59So this is where I think we might be able to lean on AI pretty heavily to just kind of get in there and get the job done. You know, they have the data on our accounts. They know what, you know, just even from previous chat conversations, they know how our tone, how we answer, how we like to respond to things. And so I think this is actually going to be a great gap closer for so many small business owners, especially. I love AI support agents personally. I know not everybody is a fan, but I love to be able to just go in. And I don't know, part of me is the people pleaser knows, like, it's like, hey, I can ask questions and I'm not bothering anybody or they won't think it's a dumb question.

34:37But from the clients and members that you work with, you've obviously said you've implemented this with some of them. Are others feeling more resistance around having AI agents talk to their clients and customers? Oh, for sure. For sure. Yeah. What if they don't respond properly? This and that, you know, I think that with AI in general right now, I feel like there's those of us who are just like, let's do this. And there's definitely plenty of folks that feel nervous, skeptical, and, and, you know, very resistant to it. There's a whole range in between those, those two places as well. So I definitely feel there's plenty of people that are nervous to try And there's also lots of people are saying, this is a huge relief for me.

35:19Thank you. Do we think there's a certain size of company, and I'd love to know your take on this too, Mike, just, you know, again, as humans, a certain company size where agents become acceptable to most customers? Or is it certain industries? Like when I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking mostly like software tools where I'm trying to figure out how to do something. But where do you think, just from a human standpoint, that barrier lies where consumers are okay with it versus not? Okay, I'll just share my quick thought on this as we're all being trained towards AI agents. And I think that the convenience level is going to ultimately be the thing that helps us all to embrace them.

35:58They're getting so good. Honestly, there are certain companies where I deal with AI agents quite a bit. And it's almost annoying now to have to wait for a human. The AI agents are great. They're answering things thoughtfully. They're getting the answers I need. One of those is in a software platform. I'm thinking another is actually in a retail brand that I'm thinking of. So I think ultimately we're all going to be so trained on it that that will become the consumer expectation probably within a pretty short period of time. Well, first of all, I can speak for Social Media Examiner. We have two, I'm going to call them bots.

36:31Okay. They're not really agents because agents work autonomously. But these bots live on Social Media Marketing World and the AI Business Society sales page. and they are ridiculously good at doing lots of things. For example, we have trained up our AI business society bot to be trained on every training we've ever done. And we're talking a lot of content. And now we actually encourage in our sales page for someone to ask specifically about any particular kind of training. And this thing knows every tool that we've ever mentioned. It can recommend very specific things. We also trained it up on all of our customer support stuff.

37:08So now what it's doing is it's handling customer service inquiries and prospects, you know, inquiries immediately and instantly. And that's the key thing. Like everybody wants, from a customer perspective, instant answers to questions. And if you can train AI to do that really well, then of course, like no one's going to complain, you know. And on the agentic side, I also think that all of us who are marketers are going to be using agents to enable us to do a lot of work. And I think that's where the obvious near-term applications are going to be like, Tara, I wouldn't be surprised if you've got a bazillion of them doing activities for you already.

37:45Am I right? All 100%. So with the AI, you know, these agents or the bots, as you said, Mike, are the companies who don't implement this, whether it's from meta or somebody else going to potentially fall behind? They're going to have a huge disadvantage, a huge disadvantage. Okay. Yes. Because if you sell anything that is slightly complex, which is what we do with social media marketing world, for example, people have a bazillion questions. Where do I stay? What's the weather like? All these kinds of things, right? Having instant access to a system that's been trained up on this and is powered behind the scenes by a large language model.

38:23You know, back in the day, we had to hire people around the clock to actually literally, you were talking to real humans, you know what I mean? And those humans were limited by their knowledge base. But yes, every business that has a live interactive bot that someone can talk to, that's really smart and not like these ridiculously horrible ones that we've all experienced, you know what I mean? But one that's really, really good, they're going to have a massive competitive edge because they're going to qualify or disqualify people much quicker, which is exactly what you want. You don't want someone who asked for a refund.

38:53You want someone who knows this is a hundred percent for them. It's interesting because part of me is like, I'm a good person. I can wait. I can be patient. But as I'm saying this, I'm thinking about, you know, one tool. I ask it a question and I already know it's AI and it literally comes back and it's like, hey, I'm an AI agent. Let me look into it for you. And I'm like, ah, just tell it. Like, what do you need to look into? Just tell me. We want the answer. We already know you're an agent. Exactly. But it does give more thorough answers there. But yeah, I mean, that's something to think about because this conversation has gotten me thinking, gosh, yeah, if you can't get the answers for people, then they're going to move on as they always have.

39:33But now you don't need a team of people around the world so somebody can answer questions at 2 a.m. local time about social media marketing world. Tara, question for you. I would imagine a lot of your students that sell complex products have these little bots on their sales pages, don't they? Oh, yeah, many. Uh-huh. For sure. And we always recommend them. I mean, we do see that it makes a pretty big difference. The bots and video are really, really helpful on any sales page for sure. When you say video, you mean a video of the product, demoing the product or something? Video of the product. Yeah.

40:05So we always think of video in like the, you know, kind of the hero section or somewhere on the page, right? There's also like you can use, oh, I just lost the name of it. Maybe Mike, you'll think of the tool where you pop in a little video, just a little corner video from the founder, or it can be from the marketing team answering questions and like that. Can you think of the tool? Video ask? Yeah. Video ask. Uh-huh. Oh, I'm not familiar with that. Tell me about that. Yeah. It's just a little tool and you can also map it to different, like if you have this question, it can map to a different video that answers.

40:39So imagine on like social media marketing world page, for example, I can imagine someone saying, so it has like different options, like, what's the weather going to be like? Are there discounts if I bring my team like things like that? And it could route to a little video that then answers that specific question from you or team member or whoever. So that's a cool tool that we have seen do very well. There's lots of there's lots of little plugins like that. Folks, we're all marketers, hopefully that are listening to the show. And what we desire more than anything else is to move people down the journey towards ultimately making a purchase.

41:16And if AI can assist us in any part of our job, either the analysis side or the friction side, you know, with us and prospects by giving them exactly what they need to know, that's going to make us look like champions. And that's the whole reason why it's really, really important for everyone who's listening to embrace these tools, because these tools are designed to help you. And some of them are very good and some of them are not very good. I set up a task literally during this call to assign one of the people on my marketing team to literally go check out meta.ai and see if it can provide any further insights into our ads, because why not?

41:53Right? So these are the kind of things that I hope everybody who's listening listens to the show for to pick up these little tidbits like video ask from Tara and Jerry. Okay, that's another thing to put on your checklist. I mean, it's one thing to just absorb information. It's another thing to act on it. And what's great now is we have no excuse not to act because we can build things in an instant now with the support of AI. Would you agree, Tara? 100%. And I would just add to that and say, our job is to reduce the friction. AI will reduce the friction. And the company that's going to be around in two or three years has made it an even more frictionless experience for their customer or their client and the folks who won't be around, they continue to allow that friction to exist.

42:43AI really does create a pretty frictionless environment when you start using it in the right ways. Well, the stuff you shared about where this is all going makes me just so anxious to see your talk at Social Media Marketing World 2027 because obviously we're going to be a lot further along when we get to that point. Thank you for joining us today, Tara. if people want to learn more about you or explore working with you, where do you want to send them? Yeah, they could go to successfuladsclub.com. That's where we have our membership and they could learn about us there. We'd love to have them. Tara and Jerry, thank you so much for being on the show today.

43:16And hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 736. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a listener for a little while, we would love a review. Do check out my other show, the AI Explored podcast, if you want to go down the AI rabbit hole. This brings us to the end of the social media marketing podcast. I am your host, Michael Stelzner. I was joined today by my co-host, Jerry Potter. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. Catch you next time.

43:44The social media marketing podcast is a production of social media examiner.

43:52Hey, before you go, we just announced our first speakers for social media marketing world, 2027, two dozen practitioners. every single one personally recruited every session pitch free. Go see the lineup and grab your discounted tickets right now at socialmediamarketingworld.info.