Facebook, Twitter, and the other giants of social media are still in the midst of a period of transition following all the fallout from scandals related to election meddling. It remains a challenge for web marketing firms in the US to understand how the ongoing changes will affect social media advertising, and thus how they should adjust their business models to accommodate those changes. One thing is for sure, though: Things will ultimately not be the same as they were in years past, and every web marketing firms that make no adjustments will be doing a disservice to their clients.

If you represent such a firm or you are one of its clients, you may have to revisit the issue and the near future and undertake new strategic planning to make sure that the marketing team and client are still on the same page. For most clients, the changes will probably seem arcane and the effect on strategy will appear far from drastic. But good web marketing firms will understand the importance of small shifts in how social media operates, and thus they will recognize that those changes can be either profoundly beneficial or profoundly detrimental, depending on how one has prepared for them.

The changes to Facebook and Twitter aren’t yet set in stone, but some trends are clearly well established in the wake of the past several months of controversy. A recent article at Entrepreneur explained three “key changes to Facebook advertising” and hinted at how web marketing firms might need to adjust their approach in order to keep delivering the same sorts of outcomes.

Among the developments highlighted in the article is a tighter set of regulations regarding “custom audiences” for Facebook ads. This means that users will essentially have to provide advance consent before web marketing firms can deliver ads to them based on their membership in some sort of lead list that the marketers wish to target.

At a glance, this may seem like it puts clients at risk of losing access to those leads. But if you see the glass as half full you might conclude that it restricts the advertising efforts of web marketing firms to those users who actually might be interested in the product or service that’s being sold. In this sense, a lead list might fade to nothingness once consent has been refused, but it clearly signals to web marketing firms that it is in their client’s interest to move on and pursue someone else.

One might also argue that this specific change is indicative of a more general trend associated with the burgeoning obsession with transparency in social media. That is to say, web marketing firms’ work is actually becoming more personalized, as a focus on awareness and consent among customers leads to the need for more frequent and significant instances of direct communication with those customers in order to make sure that they are interested in buying what is being sold.

If web marketing firms can successfully adjust to that new reality, it is fair to say that the outcomes they deliver to their clients will only be greater than they were prior to the travails of 2016.