This Week in Social and Digital (Week of June 27)
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 Events are Getting Human Curation (Read more at TechCrunch)
Facebook is expanding on its Events platform by offering better recommendations on what people may want to do based on human curation in addition to curation from an algorithm. Previously, the recommendations were based on a user’s interest as well as the interests of a user’s friends.
The update brings together human-generated as well as algorithm-generated recommendations, so a team at Facebook will actually be selecting some of the best things happening in specific cities and highlighting those as recommendations. Because this is human curated, it is rolling out slowly, initially to 10 cities in the United States. It really sees itself as weekend or weekly source that users can turn to for what to do in their own cities.
Facebook is taking on sites like Eventbrite and Field Trip, but it’s also dipping into the territory of local tastemaker digest publications. One could easily see Facebook adopting a Yelp-like model where it selects users in local communities to do the ground work and select the events as they’ll be closer to the action. But we’ll have to wait and see if Facebook notices a noteworthy pickup in Events before moving forward.
Twitter Launches Stickers (Read more at Twitter’s Blog)
Twitter is giving users the ability to add Stickers to their images. There are hundreds of Stickers, which are little drawings and emojis that users can add to the photos they tweet. Stickers can be resized, rotated and placed anywhere on a photo, but beyond that they act as visual hashtags.
Users who see a sticker an a photo can tap it to open a feed full of photos using that particular Sticker.
The move follows a trend in Stickers that was really kicked off by the messaging app Line. But today, users can send stickers in Facebook Messenger, and Snapchat has been allowing users to add Stickers to their photos as well.
This definitely feels like a ‘me too’ feature for Twitter, but the added element of making Stickers searchable is certainly an interesting idea that only Twitter can do. The Stickers add an element of fun to the platform, which may make be attractive to more casual, every day users.
LinkedIn Launches Programmatic Buying (Read more at AdAge)
LinkedIn is rolling out programmatic display ad buying for desktop ads using an open auction or through LinkedIn’s Private Auctions. Advertisers can target their audiences using first- and third-party data as well as LinkedIn’s audience segments.
This is one tactic LinkedIn is implementing to simplify and extend its advertising offering, and the scale it can offer along with information on logged-in audiences is especially valuable to b-to-b marketers.
This is the first time LinkedIn has offered programmatic display ads, but it has been doing this with sponsored content for awhile. That has been a critical part of LinkedIn’s 80% year-over-year growth in Q1. So this move makes sense, especially in light of Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn, which has the potential to bring in a lot more data.
Pinterest Adds New Shopping Bag Feature for Online Transactions (Read more at The Next Web)
Pinterest is now releasing buyable pins on desktop, but along with the launch comes a new shopping bag for desktop, Android and soon, iOS. Shopping Bag allows users to add buyable pins to a single shopping bag and then check out with a single transaction versus having multiple transactions with multiple buyable pins.
Today, Pinterest has 20,000 merchants offering 10 million products on Pinterest, and it’s making every effort to bring those buyable pins to the top. With its new Pinterest Shop experience, Pinterest has an in-house team of editors selecting the best pins, and users can shop by top shops, sale items, popular products and shipping deals.
Pinterest has evolved quite a bit from being a place where you pin things you’d like to do or plan to do later to becoming something much more actionable, an evolution that really kicked off with Rich Pins. Now, it is clearly focused on commerce and for retailers, it’s a big opportunity to integrate into a platform where people are shopping less by retailer and more by product. It will be interesting to see how that evolution affects retail brands as products take center-stage.
Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Gets Another Update (Read more at Facebook Newsroom)
When Facebook updates its News Feed Algorithm, brands and publishers pay attention, and that remained true this week when Facebook made another announcement regarding its News Feed. Facebook shared that it plans to prioritize content from friends and family in users' News Feeds moving forward. This means content from publishers will see a significant decline in reach moving forward.
Content from brands has been pushed out of the News Feed for some time now, but publisher content like articles and videos has gained a foothold until now. “Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages,” stated Facebook. That’s bad news for publishers which are relying more and more on Facebook for traffic. Facebook did add, however, that content that is shared by friends will see less of an impact than content shared from publisher pages. Shared content should be okay, but engagement coming directly from publisher Pages will be negatively impacted.
It’s clear why Facebook is making the change. People turn to Facebook to keep up with each other, and a decline in personal sharing on Facebook, which has been widely reported, is likely partially the result of news and publisher content flooding News Feeds. Stories from friends and family drive more stories.
For brands this really means operating as has been the case up until this point. Without paid support, the ability for content to be seen is drastically diminished. But from both a brand and publisher standpoint, the content that is shared, commented on, liked and discussed among friends will be rewarded by the algorithm, whether it’s paid or not. Ultimately, shareable content is the goal. But sharing isn’t a guarantee and the need for paid support continues to maintain its position in Facebook marketing.
From a larger perspective on News Feeds, we’re going to see less news shared within our Facebook feeds. Content that is happy, personalized, entertaining and highly shareable will take its place. Publishers will be creating content people want to talk with their friends about. Whether or not that is good for society is up for debate. What isn’t up for debate is that this is the new reality.
News Quick Hits
- Foursquare and Twitter are making good on their deal to use Foursquare location data in tweets. Twitter is now rolling out Foursquare location data to iOS users with other platforms to follow. (Read more at TechCrunch)
- Facebook is currently testing a new layout for Pages, which features a larger cover image, smaller profile picture, Page Insights below the cover image along with a menu for Page admins and information for the Page appearing in the lower right-hand side rather than the higher left-hand side. This is just a test with no confirmed rollout. (Read more at SocialTimes)
- Facebook has a new feature called Slideshow, which allows users to create, you guessed it, simple video slideshows. Users need to sync their photos and videos with Facebook and if they’ve taken five or more photos in the past 24 hours, Facebook will generate a slideshow that users can preview and then publish to their Timelines if they so choose to. Slideshows can be customized by order, title and the tagging of friends. Users can also choose between ten different themes. (Read more at The Next Web)
- Facebook has updated its share and save options for developers. It has just launched Save to Facebook and Share to Facebook buttons for Google Chrome. The buttons allow users to either private bookmark content to view later on Facebook or share the content to Facebook Timelines, groups or Facebook Messenger. (Read more at Facebook’s Blog)
- Small businesses just got a new app to make it easier and faster to manage their Twitter presences. The app is called Twitter Dashboard, and it is designed to help small- and medium-sized businesses track and interact with audiences on Twitter. The app is available on iOS and desktop but is still in beta at this time. The app can be used to schedule tweets and set up custom feeds. (Read more at AdWeek)
- Twitter recently hired former Apple designer Alessandro Sabatelli as Director of AR and VR. The move could confirm Twitter wants to get more into the VR space, a space Facebook and other players are already heavily involved in. The move follows a 360-degree NBA video hosted on Twitter earlier this month. (Read more at CNET)
- Facebook has updated its Business Manager to allow advertisers to block their ads from running on certain sites and applications when advertisers make use of the Audience Network. (Read more at Facebook Help Center)
- Facebook is releasing a button that will allow users to fundraise for nonprofits. The feature adds a button to users' Facebook profiles to encourage friends to donate to a particular cause. The feature is currently only available to about 1 percent of U.S. users. (Read more at TechCrunch)
- Facebook announced that since its chatbot platform launched in April, 11,000 bots have been added to Messenger, and more than 23,000 people have created accounts for the Bot Engine Tool, which is Facebook’s natural language processing service. In addition, users can now rate Messenger bots with stars and write reviews. Those reviews are currently only being shared with developers and are not public. Another update allows chatbots to send videos, audio, GIFs and other files. Beyond that, developers can give users the ability to interact with bots using up to 10 response buttons to make interacting with bots easier. (Read more at Venturebeat)