Meta Expands Business Subscription Program to India

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 began offering subscriptions for businesses on WhatsApp.

“The expanded Meta Verified business offering on Facebook and Instagram includes the verified badge along with enhanced account support, impersonation protection, and additional features to support discovery and connection,” Meta said in a blog post Monday (July 22).

“Together these features give businesses an opportunity to drive growth and support a wider variety of business needs and activities on our apps.”

According to the blog post, the company has enhanced its offerings for the program based on feedback from businesses and market research. Business owners say they want to be verified as it lends them credibility and makes customers more confident to patronize them.

“In fact, the verified badge continues to be one of the top reported reasons for subscribing to Meta Verified,” the company said.

As PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, “social media apps are becoming more and more involved in retail, with younger generations disproportionately engaging with social commerce.”

Research from last year’s PYMNTS Intelligence report, “Tracking the Digital Payments Takeover: Monetizing Social Media,” shows that 43% of consumers browse social media to find goods and services, while 14% ultimately purchase those goods and services. Those shares climb to 68% and 22%, respectively, for Gen Z and to 64% and 22% for millennials.

In addition, a recent PYMNTS Intelligence special report, “Generation Zillennial: How They Shop,” found that 28% of Gen Z consumers had made a retail purchase in the prior 30 days at least partially because of a social media influencer or celebrity, while 39% had done so at least in part because of an ad they’d seen on social media.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last week about Meta’s decision to withhold its latest multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) model from the European Union, a move that stems from uncertainties surrounding compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), especially when it comes to AI model training employing user data from Facebook and Instagram.

“Under GDPR, an individual essentially has the right to challenge any automated decision. But as AI has grown exponentially, human knowledge and understanding has not kept pace,” David McInerney, commercial manager at Cassie, a consent and preference management platform, told PYMNTS.

A key issue facing companies such Meta is whether they can explain AI decision-making processes, that report added.

“Businesses can say they trained their AI, and it made an automated decision. But if companies aren’t able to properly explain how that decision was made, they cannot fulfill their legal obligation in the GDPR,” McInerney said.