This Week in Social (Weeks of October 5 and October 12)
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.
Pinterest Expands Buyable Pins (Read more at AdAge)
Pinterest is now offering 60 million Buyable Pins on its platform and thousands of new merchants, including Bloomingdale’s and Wayfair. Buyable Pins are also available through three new commerce platforms, including Magento, IBM Commerce and Big Commerce.
Buyable Pins are not a revenue generator by themselves as they are free to implement, but their expansion is sparking advertisers to increase their spends with Pinterest to get Buyable Pins in front of users.
It’s not too much of a surprise that Buyable Pins are taking off. Clearly, advertisers were ready to embrace them, but users are too. They use Pinterest to plan events and life stages, so they are in a mindset, similar to search, that is ready to buy or at least close to buying.
Twitter Launches Moments (Read more at Digiday and Wired)
Twitter’s long-awaited Project Lightning is here, and it’s called Moments. Moments is a media platform that curates tweets in the form of video, Vines, images and coverage of live events and trending conversations from users and news organizations alike.
Moments is a new tab within the updated Twitter app, and the idea behind it is curation. Twitter’s editorial team will aggregate the most relevant tweets around a topic and curate them for users, so they don’t have to worry about what accounts they should follow. Users who choose to follow a particular Moment will have the option to have the tweets from that Moment (even those from people they don’t follow) included in their Personal Timelines. Once the Moment is over, those tweets will stop.
Moments will not feature advertising, but advertisers will be able to purchase Promoted Moments, which will be real estate owned by them where they can curate tweets and Vines to tell a story. These Moments will be available for a 24-hour period and updated over the course of a day. These will be best, initially at least, for brands launching new products, sponsoring events or holding events themselves.
The power of Moments is its ability to give users instant value with the platform. They don’t have to worry about who to follow and what to do when they log on to Twitter. It’s right there for them, so new users will be able to use it to assimilate into the platform and, hopefully for Twitter, create accounts and become active users.
Google Launches Accelerated Mobile Pages (Read more at AdAge)
Google has launched Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP, which speeds up the load times of publisher websites that include a piece of Google code by 15 to 85%. AMP will work when users come across a publisher’s site through a Google property, such as search It won’t, however, work if a user goes directly to the website.
Google joins Facebook in offering faster load times for publisher partners. Facebook’s version of this is Instant Articles but with one key difference. In order to participate in AMP, publishers simply need to place the open code on their websites. Buzzfeed, The New York Times and others have already gotten on board. And Twitter is incorporating the code to enable fast loading stories opened through Twitter.
In the age of mobile, speed is a factor, and the more publishers can increase load speeds, the better the experience for users. It’s good to see Google doing this and doing it in a way that any publisher can do without a partnership as is needed with Facebook.
Facebook Tests Reactions (Read more at Engadget)
It’s no dislike button, but Facebook has followed through with its promise to give users another option outside of liking and commenting on posts when it comes to responding. Facebook is in the process of testing a new feature called Reactions in Ireland and Spain. Users in those countries can now hold down on the Like button to choose among various emojis to express a different sentiment.
Counts for each type of response are displayed below each post. These posts will display on brand’s pages as well, and advertisers will be able to gauge the overall sentiment of their posts within Facebook Insights.
Facebook’s response isn’t novel, but it should certainly address the need for users to have a more nuanced way of responding to friends’ posts, even though commenting has always existed. The responses are similar to those that currently exist on Path, but now, Facebook users have another option that’s just as easy as liking.
From a brand perspective, Reactions could be an important way to gauge fan responses to brand content and posts. Social sentiment analysis from tools can be inaccurate, but when users are actively submitting their own reactions, accuracy will be helped. However, now that people have a way to disapprove of brand content beyond commenting, they may be more likely to do it.
Facebook Testing New Shopping Section (Read more at Bloomberg)
Facebook’s never backed away from a little testing, and now, it is testing more ways for advertisers to sell on its platform with a product called Canvas. Canvas allows users to click a Facebook commerce ad on their mobile news feeds and then open up a Canvas that allow them to browse products on a page all hosted by Facebook. The goal here is to cut out any load speed issues when users are redirected to an ecommerce website and turn interest into sales. Once a user finds a product he or she likes within Canvas, that user can click through to the retailer’s website to complete the purchase.
Beyond Canvas, Facebook also announced a new e-commerce section that will become available on Facebook mobile called Shopping. The Shopping section will curate all products being made available for sale on News Feeds, Pages and Groups.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has attempted to sell products, but those previous efforts were housed within clunky tabs on retailer Facebook pages. It seems Facebook is focusing this time on the user experience and making it as seamless as possible. What’s interesting this time around, however, is Pages take a back seat and Facebook becomes akin to a mall where they can browse different products and services that make sense serendipitously instead of going to a specific brand page.
Facebook Launches Videos Tab (Read more at Venturebeat)
Video has been at the top of Facebook’s agenda for more than a year now, and it hasn’t stopped pushing in this area. Now, it has launched a new Videos tab within Facebook’s mobile app where the Messenger button used to be.
The Videos tab will feature a stream of videos from Pages followed by a user, videos from friends and saved videos. Users will also have the option to share videos.
Facebook is also updating its Suggested Videos tool to pull up related videos to the one a user has been watching, and it is continuing to test floating videos that follow users as they continue browsing on the site.
Up until this point Facebook video has been about discovery viewing and not destination viewing. The Videos tab gives users a place to go for the sole purpose of watching videos. That, more than anything Facebook has done up until this point, is in direct competition to YouTube, which wants users to view it as the destination for video content.
News Quick Hits
- Jack Dorsey has officially been named CEO of Twitter after serving as interim CO since June. Dorsey is Twitter’s co-founder and previously served as CEO. He will continue to serve in his role as CEO of Square. Dorsey comes in at a time when Twitter is working to redefine its product to make it more palatable to a wider range of users. (Read more at The New York Times)
- Facebook is releasing Advertiser Outcome Scores to app publishers to serve as ad report cards. The scores will allow advertisers to assess performance and make specific changes to improve the ads that are running within Facebook’s ad network. The report card will reveal specific recommendations like when to run an ad within an app and compare the ads to all other placements. (Read more at AdAge)
- Reddit has launched Upvoted, a collection of 10 - 40 new stories per day shared within a separate section of Reddit. The stories are created by a team of staff writers, designers and creators but inspired by what is being shared on Reddit. The content will be selected by that team and not by the Reddit community. (Read more at Venturebeat)
- Facebook Lead Ads are now available to all advertisers. Lead ads are especially useful for direct response advertisers who want people to sign up for newsletters, claim offers, register for events or request more information. The ads allow users to automatically populate their contact information. (Read more at SocialTimes)
- Periscope has launched embeddable On Air buttons for websites that alert web page viewers that the owner of that website is streaming live at that moment on Periscope. (Read more at The Next Web)
- Pinterest has updated its search functionality to customize results by language and country. This means users in different countries will see different results when searching on the platform. (Read more at SocialTimes)
- Snapchat is shutting down its original content channel hosted within Snapchat Discover alongside publishers like CNN and People called Snap channel. Snap was Snapchat’s play at creating original content for its users, but the experiment has come to an end. (Read more at Deadline)
- Pinterest is updating Place Pins to include more information, including directions through Google or Apple Maps, the ability to call a business, visit a website, view hours and view top reviews. Pinterest is also going to recommend places users should visit that are nearby to places they've pinned. (Read more at Venturebeat)
- Facebook has updated its On This Day feature, which reminds users of what they were doing and sharing on Facebook on the same day in the past. Users can now block out content from specific users, dates or date ranges and related content to stories that have been shared in the past. The goal is to prevent On This Day from reminding users of past events they’d rather not remember. (Read more at SocialTimes)