This Week in Social (Week of January 5)
This Week in Social is a weekly digest of some of the biggest stories in social media marketing news. These stories are the show notes for the Brave Ad World Podcast. Each story is discussed at a deeper level on the podcast.
Twitter’s FAQ Shows Signs of Native Video Player (Read more at The Verge)
Twitter’s FAQ has been updated with some information for what appears to be a much rumored upcoming native video player from Twitter. Under ‘What video formats are supported?,’ it says .mp4 and .mov files are supported and should have an aspect ratio of 16:9.
YouTube URLs will not be able to be reused for videos. Twitter is also going to require users to upload videos directly to Twitter videos.
In addiiton, all editing must be done prior to uploading.
Other reports from AllTwitter reveal additional information. Twitter video will likely be similar to Vine, but clips will go up to 20 seconds and will include autoplay functionality.
As for ads, only advertisers who are Amplify members will be able to share ads through the native video player. Twitter is considering automatically playing 6-second previews of ads that display in user feeds, according to AdAge. This news comes after Twitter’s video ad beta test that launched for select advertisers in August 2014.
Video is where everyone seems to be focusing in 2015 as social networks look to attract some TV ad dollars. Based on this information, ad dollars are clearly Twitter’s primary motivation. However, it’s unclear how Twitter will no longer allow YouTube URLs. Perhaps, it will no longer play videos within user timelines.
One thing is clear, the battleground for at least the first half of 2015 social ad dollars will be in video, and Twitter is ramping up.
Facebook Acquires Wit.ai (Read more at The Wall Street Journal)
Facebook has acquired Wit.ai, a company that has created an API for voice-activated interfaces. Right now, developers can add lines of code from the API and easily incorporate voice-recognition into their software without having to rely on their own expertise.
The API will continue to be free and remain open to developers, potentially drawing them more into Facebook’s development ecosystem.
But the big question is around how Facebook will use the company.
Mark Zuckerberg tends to think many years out. We’ve seen this with the acquisition of things like Oculus Rift. This acquisition likely has the potential to position Facebook for a voice-activated future where better voice-to-text is enabled for services like Messenger and Facebook is better able to learn from not only what people write but what they say. It also helps to prepare Facebook for a wearable future in which people do less tapping and more talking to their smaller devices.
Facebook’s Growth in Video (Read more at AllFacebook)
Facebook announced that it was going to focus on video last year, and its focus appears to be paying off.
The social network revealed that users are watching more than a billion clips per day. In addition, the number of video posts per user are up 75% worldwide, videos from brands are up 3.6x over last year and more than 50% of U.S. users are watching at least one video per day.
To support even more video consumption, Facebook acquired QuickFire Networks this week. QuickFire offers a solution that reduces the bandwidth needed to view online video, while maintaining quality.
YouTube is certainly watching this very closely. The video giant has dominated online video for many years, but now Facebook appears to be giving it a run for its money. That’s good news for advertisers, and this should serve as a signal that just as Facebook was focusing on images for a time, video should play a prominent role in content creation.
News Quick Hits
- Millward Brown and Snapchat teamed up to conduct a study on how receptive Snapchat’s users are to Snapchat ads. The study looked at six campaigns and found that 60% of users found the “Our Stories” campaigns favorable, while 44% found the “Brand Stories” campaigns favorable. Advertisers running the campaigns saw increases in brand favorability and ad awareness. (Read more at BusinessWire)
- Google is going to start communicating to advertisers and publishers whether or not their video ads have been seen through view ability reporting. The data will be available through campaigns served using Google’s DoubleClick ad system. (Read more at AdAge)
- Facebook-owned WhatsApp has jumped from 600 million monthly active users in August to 700 million monthly active users. The service has grown by 200 million users since Facebook acquired it. Still, there are no plans to monetize WhatsApp. (Read more at Recode)
- Facebook admins of pages for places are now being given the option to add maps, check-ins and rating systems to their pages. (Read more at Inside Facebook)