Facebook Policy Change: How STP Will Survive And Thrive

The live broadcasting component of Smashing the Party (STP) can trace its origins to Facebook Lives, which allowed me to capture the anger and frustration I experienced during the Trump administration. Ever since that time, I have been growing our audience using a combination of content generation and paid Facebook advertising. For a highly political and instigative platform like STP, we have had a large amount of success in a short time. In the last year utilizing Facebook and Instagram, STP has achieved almost all the milestones we have created for ourselves.  STP has increased my follower count over the previous year by about 200%. For a highly political and instigative platform like Smashing the Party, we have had a large amount of success in a short time. This workflow has been an excellent launching pad and has set us on the right trajectory for growth.

The Changes

Facebook recently decided to make a significant change in their policy, effective January 19, 2022, which will primarily affect the way we've been doing our advertising and how we operate. The good news is that Facebook has always been considered a training ground for STP. This place has a low barrier to entry, a captive audience that was already mostly available, and easy to get up and go.  STP has its name on most of the major platforms, and having the ability to stream live will not be hampered. If you are curious about where else you find our STP content, check out the following links.

Starting January 19, 2022 we will remove Detailed Targeting options that relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation. Examples include:

Health causes (e.g., “Lung cancer awareness”, “World Diabetes Day”, “Chemotherapy”)

Sexual orientation (e.g., “same-sex marriage” and “LGBT culture”)

Religious practices and groups (e.g., “Catholic Church” and “Jewish holidays”)

Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and figures

The better news is that it shows a meager attempt by Facebook to acknowledge the consumer damage its algorithms have done both domestically and abroad. These changes should have a net positive for their consumer experience (aka, the actual product).

This isn't the first time Facebook has changed its advertising targeting options. Before 2016, a marketing person could target behavior traits, and other sentiment metrics in order to guide a consumer experience. This was largely taken advantage of by Russians, Republicans, and rascals.

The Great Migration

This policy change has just expedited our migration to YouTube and pushed up the dates for STP to get serious about TikTok and LinkedIn. It doesn't mean that we won't still serve our Facebook and Instagram party people, rather it simply puts more pressure on STP to generate content specifically for other platforms and push hard to get people to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We also need to get to 1000 subscribers on YouTube so we can utilize all the features the platform has to offer.

Starting this Friday, STP will begin publishing archived videos en masse from FaceBook live to the STP YouTube channel. I have considered using a 3rd party re-streaming platform to avoid the chaos, but we are very interested in keeping costs down (unless of course the time value of using a 3rd party service warrants it). The old videos are most likely not contextually relevant; however, it isn't as important as getting enough content onto the platform so its algorithms can do their magic.

We will continue to publish content here, and you will see a lot more activity before the end of the year as we get ready to launch Afterhours, a new format that will be conversational with other folks with no topic off-limits. Stay tuned as we release more details in the upcoming weeks.

In addition to the new show, STP will be generating more microcontent, such as memes, short videos, Snap Videos, TikToks, and microfilms. The goal is to use any means necessary to grow our audience so that we can be a megaphone for real change.

The most important component in this migration is you! Everyone should do their best to subscribe to the YouTube channel, follow me on TikTok, Snapchat, etc. Even if you don't use those platforms, your follows and subscriptions show value to future party people - the more people that sign up, the more people will want to be a part of the movement. Here are some other ways you can continue to support this migration.

• Shop for merchandise
• Write a blog post and submit it for publishing. Please send me an email or DM to get you set up as a contributor.
• Ask to be a valued contributor so you can push content.
• Get your friends to subscribe to this blog! Paid subscriptions are a way to show they care.

I love what I am doing, and I plan on pushing hard to reach my goals of touching 1,000,000 people every year. Let's get this party started!