This Week in Social and Digital (Weeks of March 13 and March 20)
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.
Google Takes Steps to Protect Advertisers from Offensive Placements
Pressure has been growing for Google to do more to protect advertisers from having their content placed next to controversial content that essentially amounts to hate speech.
Following decisions from some ad agencies to discontinue spending on YouTube and other Google properties except search until the issues are fixed, Google has laid out a plan to protect creators and advertisers. It will broaden demonetization policies and remove ads from content that attacks people based on race, religion, gender or other factor. It will also make it easier for brands to exclude a wider range of content or more accurately pinpoint where they want their ads to appear.
Beyond that, Google will work to protect content creators by accelerating appeals when creators’ YouTube channels have been demonetized and protecting creators from channels that impersonate their content.
Brands have not been shy about separating themselves from potentially offensive content as of late, and Google is the latest platform to contend with this shift. When advertisers spoke with their wallets, Google was quick to speak up, as advertisers will more and more not only look at the creative and the media but also the context in which an ad will be viewed.
Still, this move appears to largely be lip service until Google can prove it's done more. In many ways, this puts the onus on advertisers to more carefully control their placements to exclude or include certain content. These tools give them more control but really do little on Google’s part to prevent mistakes from happening.
That is why a growing list of advertisers like Verizon, Johnson & Johnson and AT&T have suspended advertising with Google, except for search. Nothing is 100% error proof, but it looks like Google will have to take some serious steps and invest in keeping brands as safe as possible moving forward.
YouTube Simplifies Ad Metrics
YouTube will now focus advertisers on three metrics: unique reach, watch time and audibility. According to YouTube’s Debbie Weinstein, “These are the core things marketers really need to focus on. We are trying to help them understand what really matters.”
YouTube is joining Facebook and Twitter to provide greater accountability to advertisers with verification of ads being run and more accurate measurement. Unique reach will focus advertisers on awareness, watch time will focus on time spent with the content and audibility will tell advertisers how much a video was watched with sound, which isn’t always a given in the mobile landscape.
Measurement with digital can be viewed as straightforward because so much can be measured, but choosing the right things to measure and interpreting those measurements appropriately is what can be challenging. More data isn’t better.
YouTube’s shifting from providing a wealth of data to providing a few select data points that will tell advertisers a fuller story of what is actually going on. Just because you can measure something, it doesn’t mean you should, and YouTube’s making the decision of what to measure that much more straightforward.
Reddit Launches Profiles
Reddit has just launched profile pages, which are similar to Facebook or Twitter profiles in that they are attached to a user, and they house any posts the user has shared along with a personal avatar. Right now, profile pages are limited to a handful of users, but they will be rolled out to all soon.
Users will not see a counter of their followers, but their “karma” will be displayed, which is generated by commenting and creating positive content within the Reddit community. Once a user posts something to his or her profile, they’ll also be able to cross-post it to a subreddit of their choosing.
The goal of these profile pages is to enable users another option in which to share what they want to share and not be tied down to rules within various subreddits on the platform. Beyond that, it kind of offers a gateway into Reddit with a Facebook-like interface new users may be more used to. Now, every user profile essentially becomes a subreddit of sorts but with content shared by one user.
The potential is certainly there for Reddit to generate revenue from this by creating an influencer-like structure, similar to YouTube stars in which brands could potentially place themselves. The Reddit community is notorious in calling out brands who don’t fit on the platform, so this could be one way to make the platform more friendly to brands. Beyond that, brands can create profiles of their own. Although, unless the brand is dedicated to one of Reddit’s core focus areas like gaming, that brand will be hard-pressed to gain a lot of traction.
Instagram Expands Shopping Tags to More Businesses
Shopping Tags are becoming closer to reality for more brands. The product allows certain brands to tag images featuring their products with a call to action for users to “Tap to view products” in the bottom left of the image. Then users see the products available along with their prices within the image, and if a user wants to make a purchase, they can be linked to the product page.
Now these tags are becoming available to “thousands of businesses that sell apparel, jewelry or beauty products int he coming weeks.” Beyond that, they’ll be able to be implemented through Instagram’s self-service tool if brands connect their product catalogs to their Instagram accounts.
Social commerce has had ups and downs with downs being the shuttered buy buttons from multiple social networks. The social network with the greatest amount of promise has been Pinterest, but what Instagram’s offering is a very unobtrusive way of reaching people in their feeds with content they’re already used to looking at with an added ability to make a purchase. Instagram’s grown in users significantly, so this has potential for brands with online commerce available.
Live Streaming Gets More Competitive
The live streaming space got more competitive this week with both Facebook and Twitter making updates to their live capabilities.
For its part, Facebook has expanded beyond mobile to allow users to stream live video via desktop in an effort to compete with gaming services, including Twitch and YouTube. Users can hook up external hardware and other streaming software to capture footage, add graphics, create picture-in-picture and more to stream to the desktop. For users who want something a little less complicated, they can just stream through their webcams.
Twitch allows streamers to monetize their content, which Facebook is working on. It still, however, has work to do.
Twitter, on the other hand, has launched its live streaming API, which will make it much easier to stream from cameras and other equipment. This means you’ll be seeing the ability to stream to Twitter or Periscope launch across more hardware, software and other cameras as it has with GoPro and different drone partners. The move follows Facebook, which launched an API for third parties last year.
While, both of these updates can be leveraged by everyday users, they are squarely aimed at bringing higher-quality live content to both platforms. Facebook is looking to bring in the game streaming community, which will be a hard sell considering the entrenched nature of Twitch and, to a lesser extent, YouTube Gaming. And Twitter’s looking to attract more high-quality live streaming content, especially at a time in which Facebook is doing the same with the launch of mid-roll ads.
News Quick Hits
- Twitter has launched new notification filters that allow users to block content from potential trolls. Users on Android and on the Web (with iOS to come) can now mute content from accounts they don’t follow, accounts with no profile picture, accounts that have not confirmed their email and accounts that have not confirmed a phone number.
- Google has launched Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat for businesses. Meet is designed to allow colleagues to easily connect over video. Chat is more text-based and meant to compete with Slack and similar platforms. The potential for both products lies in their ability to integrate with G Suite, which means access to Google Docs, Drive and other services.
- Facebook has struck a deal with Major League Soccer that will allow it to stream 22 live MLS matches during the 2017 season. The stream will feature Facebook-only commentary as well as interactive features like fan Q&As and polls.
- Twitter has updated its Gnip API that allows select platforms to access Twitter’s data firehose. It now allows those with access to pull data on public like events, which could lead to the ability to create custom audiences based off of people who have liked content shared by a brand, better identify trending topics and better optimize content based off of like events.
- Facebook is clarifying some of its privacy guidelines for developers. It is explicitly prohibiting them from data collected on users to build surveillance tools, including using data to monitor protestors and other activists. This policy has been in place before, but Facebook said its working to make that policy more explicit.
- YouTube is shutting down its annotations editor on May 2 in favor of emphasizing Cards and End Screens. This means that starting May 2, annotations will not be able to be added or edited, only deleted. End Screens and Cards offer a mobile-friendly solution for content creators to link to other work. Annotations have fallen out of favor as video has grown more mobile.
- If you go live on Instagram, you can now save your video thanks to a new “Save” button in the upper-right corner that displays at the end of a broadcast. The saved videos will be saved to a device’s camera roll. Comments, likes and interactions will not be saved.
- Instagram now has 1 million monthly active advertisers, growing from 500,000 in September.
- Apple has launched a new app called Clips, which allows users to combine photos, videos and music into shareable clips. From there users can add filters, emojis, shapes and speech bubbles before sharing through the Messages app and social channels.
- Publishers can now leverage Facebook Audience Network using their header bidding technology, which allows multiple buyer pools to place bids and compete all at once. This means publishers like the Washington Post and Daily Mail can now display ads bought through Facebook’s offering, which is important as it competes directly with Google Doubleclick, which has worked with header bidding for some time. Using header bidding, the ad space goes to the highest bidder, increasing publisher revenue.
- Google Maps users can now share their real-time locations with anyone for a limited time to let them know where they are and potentially, when they'll be arriving. Users can stop sharing their locations at any moment.
- LinkedIn has rolled out Trending Storylines on mobile and desktop as a way to highlight developing stories, stories related to interests that you can learn more about, different story perspectives and hashtags associated with the stories.
- Instagram is currently testing an offline experience for areas with low bandwidth. This would allow people to use the service in parts of the world that don’t have the best connectivity and create more opportunities for Instagram to deliver advertising whether users are online or off.
- Foursquare is opening up its Foursquare Analytics tool to more brands. The tool allows them access to a dashboard that shows foot traffic into stores to identify demographic-based patterns and behaviors.