Since the Cambridge Analytica story, I'm sure everyone has noticed one of our favorite social networking sites dominating headlines around the world. At this point, the number of changes being made at Facebook are equal to the number of news stories being written about them.

Most of these changes are related to the privacy of individual accounts, but there are a few that will affect business pages and how we advertise.

While under scrutiny, Facebook is being extra cautious about the ads running on their platform. There's a team of people manually reviewing ad content and targeting options and they've noticeably slowed down in recent weeks. If you're submitting a Facebook ad, try to schedule it at least one week in advance to ensure there's enough time for it to be approved and still run during your specified timeframe.

As punishment for causing all of this chaos, Partner Categories are being removed from Facebook ad targeting altogether. Partner Categories are the targeting options provided based on data collected from third party sources (i.e. most of Facebook's Behavior Categories such as purchase history or frequent travelers).

But rest assured, Facebook remains the most cost-effective social advertising platform. A combination of detailed interest targeting and geo-targeting options will still yield terrific results for most ads. And that #DeleteFacebook movement? The platform says there's been zero noticeable drop-off, so your audience remains fully intact.

We'll be sure to keep you up to date with further changes as they develop, but if you have questions or concerns in the meantime, please don't hesitate to reach out. We've answered a few of the most common below.

Is Facebook tracking your calls and texts? If you have an Android, yes.
Are they storing video and photos you never got around to posting? Yes.
Are they reading your Messenger chats? Yep.
Are they listening to your phone conversations? No.
Is this conversation about big data and the election almost over? Not even close.