Facebook & Instagram (Meta)

All groups that want to tap into the platforms’ powerful reach, targeting capabilities, and available campaign objectives.

• A campaign with a small digital budget might use Facebook Ads to boost their organic posts to potential supporters in their district or area to increase awareness.
• A campaign with a mid-sized digital budget might rely on Facebook for their fundraising efforts.
• A campaign with a large digital budget might run a targeted video campaign to persuade undecided voters.

• Ability to build effective campaigns on any budget
• Intuitive user interface is easy to learn
• High potential reach
• Powerful targeting capabilities
• Combined ad platform for Facebook and Instagram means more inventory, reach, and efficiency
• Relatively low cost for many objectives, especially considering the platform’s reach and other abilities
• Measure real-time performance based on engagement, organic reach, or conversions
• While Facebook definitely skews older, access to Instagram helps expand reach across age groups

• Often nonsensical decisions from Facebook leadership have created an overall environment that favors the conservative content machine
• Complicated, multi-level political verification process
• Unclear at times why the algorithm prioritizes certain ads over others
• Constantly evolving policies on political advertisements that impact both planning and execution, especially campaign targeting
• Busy environment that can make it harder to break through and make an impact, particularly with issue or candidate messaging
• Recent changes to Facebook’s ability to track actions off of the platform have made it more difficult to set up the technical aspect of tracking and have make the tracking less effective

• Facebook’s political ad policy is quite broad, covering everything from ads about “social issues” (ie: “civil and social rights, crime, economy, education, etc.) to ads about a candidate, election, or ballot referendum.
• In order to run political ads on Facebook, you must be personally authorized and the organization or candidate paying for the ads must be verified and set up a disclaimer.
• Individual authorization requires submitting an official form of identification to Facebook and verifying you live in the US via a code that’s mailed to you. This process can take up to 2 weeks or longer to complete, so we recommend getting certified ASAP to prevent campaign delays.
• All pages running ads related to politics or issues of national importance must be verified by a Facebook authorized admin and claimed by a Confirmed Page Owner, which is a business or organization that has completed Facebook’s verification process. Once a page is verified, only Facebook authorized advertisers will have permissions to publish ads from a page, and all ads must have an appropriate disclaimer associated with it.
• Aside from authorizations and disclaimers, Facebook also has some additional restrictions on ads about social issues, elections, or politics; political ads can’t run on the WhatsApp, Messenger and Audience Network inventory.
• For the last two cycles (2020 and 2022), Facebook has instituted an outage period in the week leading up to the election. During this time, advertisers are prevented from launching new ads that fall under the political ad policy. Advertisers must make sure that all ads they want to run through Election Day have delivered impressions before the outage period begins, and once they’re running, advertisers are not able to make significant changes to the ad set or any changes to the ad without sending the ad back into re-review and getting it shut off. While Facebook has not formally announced that they will be continuing this outage period policy in perpetuity, it is likely that this will be a recurring thing.
• All political ads and ad spending is publicly available in Facebook’s Political Ad Archive.

• Acquisition, including both fundraising and list building
  
• Awareness
  
• Persuasion
  
• Mobilization