Social giant Facebook has announced that it will reduce the number of advertisement types available to marketers after admitting they have**more** caused confusion.

The site, which tops the social media popularity list, will still have advertisements on the sides of its pages and in users’ news feeds, but the options available to marketers will be reduced and simplified.

Facebook’s product manager, Fidji Simo, spoke about the decision at the firm’s headquarters in California last week, saying:

“What we realized is that even though every ad product is really good on its own, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. It should really be simpler.”

Facebook is expecting to roll the updates out within the next few months, but some changes could be made sooner. The company explained that the changes wouldn’t affect pricing at all but refused to comment on whether overall revenue would be impacted.

Advertising is crucial to Facebook’s survival, and accounts for around 85% of its revenue. The company is also trying to kick-start revenue growth after it hit a slow period in early 2012.

Part of this drive has seen it switch its attention towards a growing mobile user-base, with a particular emphasis put on ensuring advertisements are formatted properly to be displayed on handheld devices.

On top of this, Facebook has started to let advertisers access users’ web search histories to display relevant promotional content, and has unveiled tools which enable marketers to measure the effectiveness of the ads they publish.

While pushy adverts aren’t exactly loved by the average consumer, businesses can use Facebook to break down barriers between themselves and their target audiences. This is often achieved most successfully with the help of original, relevant and shareable content – this could be in the form of videos, useful articles or even podcasts.

Graeme Parton

Graeme has experience creating content for online sources and for the radio, and at university he studied Multimedia Journalism.