This Week in Social and Digital (Week of December 3)
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 Launches Messenger Kids
Facebook has launched a new app that isn’t creepy at all. It’s called Messenger Kids, and it marks the first time Facebook has launched a service officially for children under the age of 13.
Essentially, Messenger Kids is a simplified Messenger app with parental controls baked in. The app lets kids send messages, make video calls, send GIFs, post selfies and play with stickers, but all of those interactions can only happen with people on a parent-approved friend list. The app has no ads, and data will not be shared with advertisers.
According to Facebook, it involved child development and safety experts to determine what controls to include and how to execute on them. These include children’s accounts being tied to parent accounts, parents approving all friend requests from their account, parents needing to be friends with parents of children their child wants to message and parental notifications if their child blocks or reports an account.
Facebook will have a team of moderators to manage any reports coming from children’s accounts. Facebook says the app is meant to fill a user need. Parents often have children who want to be on the platform, but parents are understandably concerned with safety.
There are other reasons Facebook might want to introduce the app. It starts to onboard a new generation of Facebook users. Yes, these kids are left out of the Facebook ad network, but once those kids are old enough, they’re a new, valuable group of users in the pipeline.
Facebook’s joining other apps meant for kids like YouTube Kids, which has proven to be a valuable service for some parents but has also faced backlash driven b y content not suitable for children making its way into the app.
Instagram Lets Users Keep Their Stories
Instagram has updated its Stories feature so they don’t necessarily have to disappear after 24 hours. Now, it has two new features that let users archive Stories for private sharing later and highlight Stories in their profiles indefinitely.
The archive feature works similar to Snapchat memories. It downloads stories to account archives automatically before they expire alongside other posts a user has archived manually. Users could always download their Stories, but now, Instagram is doing it for them. The second feature lets users choose Stories to create a highlight film of sorts for their profiles that’s always available.
Stories has proven to be a major win for Instagram with more than 300 million daily active users, so it’s no surprise the platform is continuing to look at what it can do to offer its users more options. Again, however, this is a very similar workaround to ephemerality that Snapchat launched with memories, which raises a larger question on ephemerality.
The ephemeral trend may have come and gone. The ability to share expiring messages is still there across social platforms, but now, there are multiple failsafes to archive messages for later. Even Snapchat, which brought in the era of ephemerality, has altered its approach. Maybe users don’t want content to expire after all.
Instagram Separates Messaging into Separate App
Facebook is in the process of testing a stand-alone app for Instagram direct messaging called Direct. The test is limited to six countries: Uruguay, Chile, Turkey, Israel, Italy and Portugal.
According to Instagram, the aim is to make it more fun and easier to connect directly with friends by using a camera-first app. Once users install Direct, messaging disappears from the Instagram core app, and to entice users a bit, Direct features four exclusive filters.
It’s hard not to see the parallels between what Instagram is doing here and what Facebook did with messaging when it launched Messenger. Decoupling those two features paid off big time for Facebook, and maybe that will be the case with Instagram.
It’s clear that Direct is meant to be an even more on-the-nose competitor with Snapchat by being a camera-first messaging application. Instagram has become more and more Snapchat-like so separating the two may give each app its own identity as Instagram’s point of difference has certainly faded over time. Still, many users are upset by the test. Now, we see if that anger translates into user attrition or acceptance.
News Quick Hits
- YouTube has set the goal of having 10,000 content moderators by next year. The moderators will be responsible for vetting channels and videos for the purposes of advertising. They’ll also be looking to ensure ads are running where they should be. The move is meant to address brand safety concerns. More details on exactly how this will work are to come.
- Pinterest has launched a Messenger bot and chat extension for Facebook Messenger. This will allow full Pin images to display in messages and a more integrated experience will be delivered when users tap on them, essentially allowing users to engage with Pinterest through Messenger, including browsing and searching for related content.
- Facebook is celebrating the anniversary of Instant Games on Messenger with new features and games. Several, new games will be making their way onto Messenger, including Angry Birds. It’s also enabling live streaming and video chat. Live streaming lets gamers stream their gameplay. It’s also launching video chat to a few games, starting with Words With Friends. The feature lets users video chat while they play. Currently, there are 70 Instant Games on Messenger.