This is a quick how-to, to remove the advertising options that allow people to use you in their ads, aka “sponsored stories” on Facebook. I recently noticed some friends showing like they endorsed a certain company’s fan page, but when I checked, they were not even fans of that business’s fan page. Here is an example of an ad side by side with a “sponsored story”
So I whipped this together for those like me who do not wish to be used in this fashion. When consulting we advise businesses to avoid doing these sponsored story kind of ads.
First Go to your account settings, located under the drop down menu top right under account.
Next select Facebook Ads
Next visit and edit Third party ad settings and social ad settings
Read both completely as they are pretty self explanatory. Once you have visited both and marked them both to “no one” you have declined being used in such ads. I hope this helps all our friends and customers of Head of Lettuce Media “we do social media” 🙂
The latest path to make this change is: Settings => Ads => Ad settings
This link should take you there directly
https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_settings_screen
I could not get the above to work after many attempts ??
Keith, it is possible that they have made it harder to accomplish, we will look into this and post an update as soon as we know more.
I have had my settings like this for quite sometime. Recently, my Zynga activity began showing up on other peoples pages under a Sponsored Story. They can close the feed so they don’t see it but there doesn’t seem to be any way for me to stop my Zynga activity information from being shown to them.
what gives?
good question, I will look into it and get an answer up here soon if I can.
Performing the above recommendations will not prevent your appearance in Sponsored Stories advertisements, only Facebook Ads and Social Ads. These two ad types are distanct from Sponsored Stories, a third (and highly profitable) ad type started January 25, 2011. The Account Settings options have no effect on Sponsored Stories, only on Facebook Ads and Social Ads. If you are confused, you are in good company, as Facebook double-speak makes this difficult to understand. But in short, there is no way to prevent your appearance in a Sponsored Story short of not taking any Facebook action whatsoever.
Jonathan, thanks for the note, we will continue to look into this. We have noticed that after following this procedure we seem to not be included in the sponsored stories, if your friends with us on Facebook and see us being used, grab a screenshot, and we will do the same for our clients that we are teaching this to. If we can bust Facebook doing this after opting out, I’m sure we will get some attention brought to this subject. We appreciate you taking time to weigh in, Thank-you.