This Week in Social (Week of April 13)
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.
LinkedIn Launches Employee Advocacy Platform Called Elevate (Read more at LinkedIn)
LinkedIn wants to help businesses get their employees involved in sharing brand-related content with a new platform called LinkedIn Elevate.
LinkedIn Elevate is a standalone app that businesses can use to curate content and then encourage their employees to share that content to their own social accounts like Twitter. The service will be managed by businesses through designated “curators” who will be able to set up various topics that employees can then subscribe to. From there, employees will be served content based on their selected topics that they can share from within the app. On the backend, brands will be able to measure how employee engagement is driving results.
The platform does cost money for brands to gain access.
One of the best ways for businesses to participate in social channels often isn’t through their brand channels. It’s through the channels of their employees. They carry more credibility and authenticity than a brand can by itself.
A platform like this allows brands to have some control over what is shared, and it makes sharing easy for employees. The thing marketers will need to make clear to employees is that sharing is optional, not a requirement.
Foursquare Launches Pinpoint (Read more at Fast Company)
Foursquare has introduced cross-platform location-based ad targeting technology that it calls Pinpoint. Pinpoint will allow advertisers to target their ads based on where individuals have been. Foursquare gathers this data from its Swarm and Foursquare apps.
According to Foursquare chief revenue officer, Steven Rosenblatt, “There’s a lot of noise out there about using location data for ad targeting, but we think we can bring quality and accuracy to the market that doesn’t exist today."
Early partners for the program include Samsung, Olive Garden, FedEx, Coors Light and others.
Foursquare’s location data is its greatest asset, and it’s been leveraging it more as of late. Much of it is volunteered by users checking in, and it’s able to gather even more by passively collecting user data from the Foursquare app.
The challenge Foursquare faces is getting the data for non-users. That may be where third-party data comes in as Foursquare is already working with Twitter, Microsoft, HTC and Pinterest.
Twitter Launches New Homepage (Read more at Recode)
Twitter has a new homepage that’s designed to make Twitter useful even for users who aren’t signed in.
Users who visit Twitter.com without signing in will see several curated timelines that aggregate content around themes like animals, space news, business news and celebrities. Once a user clicks on a timeline, they’re taken to a feed of tweets from accounts curated around that theme. Non-users can also search for topics they’d like to follow along with.
Twitter has worked to make the case that its value isn’t in registered users but instead, using total impressions as a sign of its strength. It’s in people seeing tweets all over the place, whether they’re users or not.
The new homepage takes this idea and focuses on it by allowing Twitter.com to be a resource for real-time news and topical information. If a news event is happening, Twitter can easily put a new timeline on its homepage and allow non-users to follow the events just like users are.
This presents opportunities to deliver more advertising and maybe, just maybe, convince a few non-users to decide to create an account.
News Quick Hits
- Twitter is going to discontinue access to its full data firehose for authorized resellers, which include Datasift, NTT Data and Twitter-acquired Gnip. These resellers were able to resell the data to other platforms who needed access to Twitter data. The move is a potential blow for these data resellers and is expected to be complete in August. (Read more at The Next Web)
- Instagram is now allowing retailers to link to product pages from their Instagram ads. Linking out from Instagram in ads was first made available in March when it launched carousel ad units. Now, the ability to link out is becoming more widely available. (Read more at AdWeek)
- Snapchat will no longer sell Brand Stories to advertisers. The company is taking the product in house to re-develop it and make improvements. Instead, Snapchat is directing advertisers to focus on creating ads for its real-time Our Story feeds, which Snapchat will likely be renaming soon. Our Story allows three to four advertisers to integrate their promotional content into real-time content feeds related to an event, such as the American Music Awards. (Read more at The Next Web and AdAge)
- Several companies in India have discontinued their involvement with Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, citing concerns over Internet.org violating net neutrality principles. Internet.org involves giving users in developing countries unrestricted access to certain websites at no cost. Special treatment for these websites is a concern. (Read more at Quartz)
- Spotify has announced that advertisers will be able to target users based on the playlists they’re listening to starting May 1. The targeting will allow for targeting by activities, such as working out or partying, and moods. (Read more at Venturebeat)
- Yahoo and Microsoft have renewed their deal that includes Yahoo displaying Bing search results for its desktop users. The renewal, however, is no longer exclusive, so Yahoo can include search results from others in its product. Yahoo is also now free to rebuild its own search capabilities. (Read more at AdAge)
- Tumblr has released a new ad product called Sponsored Day. Sponsored Day units appear at the top of users’ dashboards for 24 hours. The ads link users to additional content such as videos. Sponsored Day can be purchased at the global or country-specific level. Nike is the first brand to sign on to try the product. (Read more at AdWeek)