This Week in Social and Digital (Week of April 10)
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 Steps Up Push Against Fake News by Paying Fact Checkers
Facebook’s plans to combat fake news are getting more concrete by the day. The social network announced that it will be paying fact-checkers to evaluate news being shared on its platform. The fact checkers will come from Politifact, Snopes, AFP, BFMTV, L’Express, Le Monde and Correctiv.
Beyond that, it will be launching ads meant to inform and correct misinformation being shared. This will take the form of a 14 country-wide campaign designed to help users be “more discerning readers.” The ads will be designed to help users identify misinformation by advising them to take headlines with a grain of salt, check URLs, identify sources, review dates, and check grammar and images.
Combatting fake news on Facebook has certainly been a challenge for Facebook, but thanks to a series of partnerships, it appears to be making some significant progress. The fact that it’s paying these organizations is a good thing. That way they can dedicate staff and ensure they have the resources to meet the demands from a network the size of Facebook’s. Now, a lot of this is going to fall on deaf ears as readers will believe what they want to believe in some cases. But this is another step among many to stem the flow of fake news.
YouTube Restricts Paid Creators to Those with 10,000 or More Views
In its efforts to tighten its platform and protect brands from having their ads next to disparaging content, YouTube is making some changes to its partner program. The partner program allows those who upload content to the platform to make money by attaching ads to their content.
Now, craters will need to hit 10,000 lifetime views on their channels to be eligible for the program. The goal is to find a number that’s high enough to keep out upstarts that released a random video but low enough so as not to keep out new up-and-coming creators. Once creators hit 10,000 lifetime views, YouTube will review their content, and, should everything check out, ads will begin to be served against that content.
YouTube’s walking a fine line here. It wants to continue to be a platform built for open, unrestricted sharing but it also has some reputation management work that needs to be done. This effort seems to be heading down the right track with a combination of raising the requirements, vetting the accounts and then letting them make money.
Instagram Direct Gets Snapchat-Inspired Upgrade
Instagram Direct has gotten an update. Now, users can share disappearing photos one-to-one or to groups in the same threads as all messages sent on the platform. So these disappearing photos and videos will appear with all of the texts and shares in a thread, which is a different approach than before. Previously, disappearing photos and videos were in a separate section from the message threads.
After a photo or video has disappeared from a message thread, the actions taken with that content will still be displayed, meaning users will be able to see that something had been sent in the past.
There’s not a clear reason why disappearing messages were in a different section than other messages in the past, but this certainly makes them feel much more part of the app. This isn’t a groundbreaking feature, but it is another stake in the ground by Faebook-owned Instagram to eat Snapchat’s lunch. It’s continued to grow in users, while Snapchat remains at 161 million daily active users according to the latest numbers.
Snapchat Launches Snap to Store
Snapchat has a new ad measurement product meant to use data to take aim at Facebook. The product is called Snap to Store, which will allow advertisers to measure how their Snapchat advertising is converting to in-store purchases.
The offering gives advertisers a dashboard to display who saw their ad and how many of those users went to a store location. The information included is primarily demographic being broken down by gender, age, state and type of ad seen on Snapchat, from lenses to geofilters. In the future, advertisers will also be able to see the interests of those who went into the store.
Snapchat’s quickly shifted from being cautious about leveraging user data to embracing it. Facebook can certainly be to blame for this as it’s led advertisers to demand more advanced targeting and stronger data associated with ad campaigns. Snapchat users still have the option, however, to opt out of location-based targeting.
News Quick Hits
- Facebook is currently testing a tab on Facebook that highlights groups related to the brand or company on the Page. For example, the HBO Page contains links to groups related to specific HBO shows.
- Google is now displaying fact-checking tags on Google search results. So if you search for a topic, Google will display a tag about an article’s authenticity if it’s been checked by a fact checking service.
- Facebook is working to make Instant Articles more attractive to publishers, and its latest effort is the launch of call-to-action units within Instant Articles. The CTA units allow publishers to solicit email sign-ups and generate likes for their Facebook Pages. Facebook’s also testing app install ads and free trials for subscriptions. Publishers have cooled on Instant Articles, so this is a bit of an olive branch to help them get more from the product.
- Periscope is letting brands create custom hearts to appear in on-demand and live broadcasts. The hearts are activated by a specific hashtag. They can be paired with pre-roll ads or leveraged on their own. Brands need to work directly with Twitter to make these custom hearts and integrate them into the app.
- Facebook Messenger just launched group payments to allow users to split bills, pay someone back for concert tickets, handle lodging and so on. Messenger previously allowed one-to-one payments. Now, it’s open to groups.
- Facebook Messenger reached a new milestone. It now has 1.2 billion monthly active users. One year ago, it was at 900 million.
- Instagram now has 200 million users of its Stories feature, which is a massive feat considering it built the feature to compete directly with Snapchat. Snapchat has 161 million people on its entire app, let alone using a single feature. It appears Instagram’s approach to copying Snapchat feature-for-feature is doing the job Instagram had hoped it would. Instagram paired this user announcement with a few new features that, once again, copy Snapchat. The first is geostickers are now available in more cities, including Chicago, London, Madrid and Tokyo. The second is stickers can be pinned to specific parts of videos, so they stay in one spot while the video moves. Lastly, Instagram is offering selfie stickers, which let users create custom stickers of their faces.