This Week in Social (Weeks of August 24)
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.
Facebook Tests GIFs on Select Brand Pages (Read more at AdWeek)
GIFs are now available to a handful of Facebook brand pages, including Wendy’s, TechCrunch and German soda Kuat. People have been able to post them to their personal profiles for some time but never brand pages. Now, while these posts are in testing Facebook is allowing them to be promoted.
GIFs are something many marketers are understandably interested in, especially as they look to capitalize on people’s growing attention for and expectation of video-focused content. Facebook has worked rapidly over the past year to build up its video capabilities, and advertisers have followed suit. Now, with GIFs becoming a common and very sharable language among people, brands are ready to bring them to their Facebook Pages.
Twitter Blocks Services that Save Deleted Political Tweets (Read more at Venturebeat)
Politwoops was a service that grew into prominence as a way to track deleted tweets from politicians. The service aggregated and archived any tweets that were deleted, perhaps due to spelling errors or perhaps due to opinions that were otherwise unpopular.
Twitter has discontinued the API that allowed Politwoops to work after what it said was a “thoughtful internal deliberation and close consideration of a number of factors.” Twitter doesn’t allow any service to archive deleted tweets, and it claims that politicians should be treated no differently from any other user.
This decision by Twitter came as a bit of a surprise, considering it’s been one of many tools used by people to hold governments accountable. Critics of Twitter’s decision argue that tweets by politicians, even those that are deleted are a matter public record and should be available to anyone.
This move appears to be another careful tight walk by Twitter to appeal to the developer community in terms of managing access to its API, advocacy groups who see it as public record and politicians who don’t want something they deleted to come back to haunt them. Screenshots are still possible to archive these tweets, but the process is now far less automated.
Google Launches Twitch Competitor (Read more at The Official YouTube Blog)
Viewing video game play throughs is immensely popular and something Amazon-owned Twitch has become well known for. Now, Google wants in on some of that action, so it has launched YouTube Gaming that will allow live video streaming, live game streaming, chatting and video archiving.
Twitch was, for a time, targeted by YouTube for acquisition, but Amazon stepped in before anything was finalized.
A significant portion of people like watching others play games, commenting and being part of a gaming community. Twitch has filled that void with 1.5 million broadcasters generating 100 million viewers per month. They watch an average of 106 minutes per person per day. That’s just Twitch.
And that’s a massive amount of time and viewers going there instead of YouTube, and now YouTube is able to at least start to claim some of those users and time for itself.
Facebook’s Digital Assistant Gets Closer to Being Real (Read more at AdAge)
Facebook’s rumored digital personal assistant is getting a bit closer to reality now that the social network has officially announced M. M is an artificially intelligent digital assistant that users will be able to task with simple requests like making reservations, ordering flowers, suggesting products to purchase and offering recommendations. The service will exist within Facebook Messenger.
M will use algorithms to address user needs as well as people who will help M with more nuanced questions.
M would join a growing group of personal assistants like Siri, Cortana, Google Now and Amazon’s Echo. According to Facebook, M is still early in its journey to becoming reality, but now, we know it’s being made.
Facebook entering this category could be big for Messenger as it would show even more of an investment in the platform. This also shows that Facebook is preparing for a future of interacting with our devices by voice, not by touch, mouse or typing. Facebook is partially ensuring its future by bringing this type of interface into its platform.
Instagram Allows for Portrait and Landscape Images (Read more at Digiday)
Instagram has become known for the square. From square photos to square videos, that’s what Instagram has been known for. It’s changing all of that by allowing users to upload photos and videos shot in both landscape and portrait modes. Instagram will then display them as they are uploaded instead of working to fit them into a square format.
According to Instagram, about one in five posts uploaded to Instagram is already in one of those formats.
Instagram making this move is certainly welcome, especially by advertisers like movie studios that hope to make use of a widescreen format. But it’s also removing a limitation that made Instagram differentiating. Now, it’s just like every other platform out there.
The important thing for brands will be, no matter what the format, to keep the images beautiful and to add value to people’s Instagram experiences. This isn’t the place for a commercial or banner ad.
News Quick Hits
- Mashable and Vox will soon be added as channels to Snapchat Discover. Snapchat has also updated its advertising policy, allowing Discover publishers to sell no more than five sponsorship takeovers per month. The takeovers give advertisers a presence on channel title cards as well as video ads interspersed within channel content. (Read more at AdAge)
- Google started displaying tweets in mobile search results several weeks ago following a new partnership between it and Twitter. Now, desktop search results are starting to display tweets as well. (Read more at Recode)
- Facebook has added a new “Donate Now” call-to-action button for nonprofit Facebook page posts and link ads. (Read more at SocialTimes)
- Facebook is testing a new story post format that allows users to upload an album, which then displays as an auto-play slideshow within user News Feeds. (Read more at SocialTimes)
- Facebook is rolling out new video matching technology that will allow the social network to better detect unauthorized uploads of video content. Facebook Video has taken off but some of the most popular pages sharing videos are ripping content from YouTube and uploading it to their pages. (Read more at TechCrunch)