This Week in Social (Week of March 7)
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 Atlas Gets Major Update for Measurement (Read more at Atlas Solutions)
Facebook’s ad server that works with apps and websites outside of those owned by Facebook, Facebook Atlas, has gotten a major update. The update allows businesses to upload point-of-sale data and view it next to ad campaigns. The goal is to show advertisers if Facebook Atlas campaigns are driving offline sales.
This kind of integration was previously only available to Atlas advertisers who ran promotions on Facebook’s site or app.
That update was followed by the announcement of a new metric called Path to Conversion. Path to Conversion shows whether ads on desktop, mobile or a combination of the two drove a digital sale. The new metric will allow marketers to understand what’s working in campaigns and make optimizations as they see performance.
Atlas’ updates will certainly appeal to retailers as well as packaged-good brands who will be able to understand how their campaigns run through Atlas are driving toward the bottom line. The move is also noteworthy because Facebook is clearly interested in growing its online advertising presence, whether that means sending dollars to Facebook.com or not.
Pinterest Opens Self-Serve Ad Platform to All (Read more at The Wall Street Journal)
Pinterest has been testing a self-serve ad platform for advertisers, and now the tool is finally available to small to medium-sized businesses in the U.S. Along with the launch, Pinterest has also revealed that its upped the number of interest-level targeting options from 30 to 420, creating more nuanced targeting options for advertisers.
According to Pinterest, it knows “more about the interest of its users than any other platforms.” The announcement comes less than a year after the company launched an API to allow ad-tech partners to sell Promoted Pins, making this move a nice follow-up to making the platform a more robust advertising solution.
The self-serve ad platform is targeted to small to mid-sized companies. Large companies still need to work directly with Pinterest to launch their campaigns. Still, this could be the beginning of a self-serve tool from them as well. But overall, this is a step that makes advertising on Pinterest a more viable solution for more advertisers, which creates potential for a much more competitive marketplace on the platform.
Facebook Acquires MSQRD (Read more at MSQRD’s blog)
Facebook has acquired the augmented reality selfie app MSQRD. The app allows users to add filters to photos and videos, which are very similar to Snapchat’s filters.
According to MSQRD’s CEO, the technology will be coming to Facebook’s 1.6 billion users, giving the app more scale than the team ever thought possible. MSQRD’s founders will work out of Facebook’s London office.
This acquisition is driven by one thing: Snapchat. Facebook has shifted its competitive focus from Twitter to Snapchat as has been evidenced recently with upgrades made to Messenger and an emphasis on private messaging overall. MSQRD allows Facebook to immediately implement one of Snapchat’s most defining features and at least encourage users to stay on the Facebook platform vs. go to Snapchat to use the feature. It’s a move Facebook’s followed before when it acquired Gowalla to compete with Foursquare or Instagram to compete with… Instagram.
News Quick Hits
- Facebook’s F8 Developers Conference is set for April 12 and 13, and rumors are circulating that Facebook will be announcing the ability for publishers, specifically, to share stories via Messenger. One thing is obviously clear by Facebook’s most recent actions. Messenger will be a primary focus of the platform for a long time to come, so this would be among the first of many announcements. (Read more at MarketingLand)
- Twitter has announced that any time an AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) is available, it will send mobile users to that page in an effort to speed up and improve the mobile experience. AMP is akin to Facebook’s Instant Articles. They speed up load times by limiting the number of JavaScript tags. Publishers without AMPs will not be penalized. (Read more at AdAge)
- Facebook Lite, an Android-exclusive version of Facebook designed to minimize data usage and space on a user’s phone, has reached 100 million users. The app is designed for users in emerging countries and has gained its greatest traction in India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and Philippines. (Read more at CNET)
- Facebook’s lead-gen ads have gotten an update that adds call-to-action buttons within video units to drive users to contact from. In addition to that announcement, they announced that CRM vendor partners now include Salesforce, Sparkroom, Constant Contact and InfusionSoft. They’re also allowing advertisers to duplicate lead-ad forms and edit form fields across campaigns. (Read more Facebook for Business)