Meta said it is expanding its business subscription program to users in India.
The tech giant last year introduced Meta Verified for businesses on Facebook and Instagram, and recently started offering subscriptions for businesses on WhatsApp.
“Meta’s expanded Verified business offerings on Facebook and Instagram include a verified badge along with enhanced account support, impersonation protection, and additional features to support discovery and connection,” Meta said in a blog post on Monday (July 22).
“Together, these features provide opportunities for businesses to drive growth and support a wide range of business needs and activities on our app.”
According to the blog post, the company has been improving its offerings for the program based on feedback from businesses and market research. Business owners have said they want to be verified because it gives them credibility and makes customers more confident in using their services.
“In fact, the verified badge continues to be one of the most reported reasons for subscribing to Meta Verified,” the company said.
As PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, “social media apps are increasingly involved in retail sales, with younger generations disproportionately involved in social commerce.”
Research from last year’s PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Tracking the Digital Payments Takeover: Monetizing Social Media,” found that 43% of consumers browse social media to search for goods and services, while 14% ultimately purchase those goods and services. Those percentages increase to 68% and 22%, respectively, for Gen Z and to 64% and 22% for millennials.
Additionally, a recent PYMNTS Intelligence special report, “Generation Zillennials: How They Shop,” found that 28% of Gen Z consumers had made a retail purchase in the previous 30 days at least in part because of a social media influencer or celebrity, while 39% had done so at least in part because of an ad they saw on social media.
Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last week about Meta’s decision to withhold its latest multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) models from the European Union, a move that stemmed from uncertainty around compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), particularly when it comes to training AI models using user data from Facebook and Instagram.
“Under GDPR, an individual essentially has the right to object to any automated decision. However, as AI grows exponentially, human knowledge and understanding have yet to keep pace,” David McInerney, commercial manager at Cassie, a consent and preference management platform, told PYMNTS.
The main problem facing companies like Meta is whether they can explain the AI decision-making process, the report added.
“Companies can say they trained their AI, and it made automated decisions. But if they can’t explain exactly how those decisions were made, they can’t meet their legal obligations under GDPR,” McInerney said.
