This Week in Social and Digital (Week of March 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 Launches New Ad Unit Called Collections
Facebook has launched a new ad unit called Collections, which combine the product showcasing attributes of carousel ads with the storytelling functionality of canvas ads. The ads pair engaging video content with products offered by a brand.
When a user sees the ad, he or she will notice the video is highlighting a story and communicating a message, while photos of up to four products are showcased below. Picture a Nike video capturing the story of an Olympic competitor and below that video are products featured in the video. From there, users can click to view an even more immersive page of up to 50 products. When users find something they’d like to purchase, they’ll be taken off of Facebook to finalize everything.
These ad units point to an ongoing shift by Facebook to becoming more and more of an advertising platform for brands. It is a place to reach high numbers of users with brand-specific content, and in this case the ads both grow awareness and encourage conversion. That may be where these ads fall short.
They ask a lot of a user to both spend time viewing video content and then additional time browsing products. That may be more than users are willing to welcome, but if they are successful, it’d really provide brands with an option that offers the best of both worlds.
Facebook Clones Snapchat Stories in Core App
If you were hoping for a week in which Facebook doesn’t blatantly copy Snapchat, this was not the week for you.
Facebook has added a Snapchat Stories clone to the Facebook app with an invitation for users to participate using Facebook’s new camera feature. The new Facebook Stories are viewable at the top of the Facebook News Feed, giving the new feature significant prominence in one of the world’s most popular apps. At the core of Facebook Stories is the new Facebook Camera, which is available in the top left of the Facebook app. Users can snap photos and then decorate them with filters, “masks” (basically Snapchat Lenses) and other features.
Any photos can be added to a Facebook Story, which can only be viewed once, unless a viewer chooses to replay them one more time. Everything in a Facebook Story disappears in 24 hours. Users do not have control over who can see their Facebook Stories, however, which is a difference from Instagram Stories, which allow some control in this area.
Brands can’t play a role in Facebook Stories just yet, but they likely will be able to soon as has been the case with Instagram Stories. Facebook is continuing its shameless copying of Snapchat features, and it’d be easy to criticize if it wasn’t working so well. Facebook continues to grow in revenue and users, while Snapchat user growth has flattened as revealed in its IPO documentation.
Twitter Adds Pre-Roll to Periscope
Twitter is adding pre-roll ads to Periscope videos. Publishers will now have the option to turn on short ads that will run before users can watch their live or recorded Periscope streams on Twitter. The offering creates a fairly easily implemented ad offering for advertisers to latch onto and implement. This is in addition to the pre-roll options Twitter already offers through its Amplify program, Promoted Tweets and other live streaming options.
The ads on Periscope will be available to all advertisers over the coming months.
Twitter’s looking for revenue to build up its business, and in an age of news literally breaking on Twitter, adding some pre-roll to Periscope content makes sense. After all, it allows Twitter to monetize existing content without cluttering up feeds with more Promoted Tweets.
This alone, however, will do little to turn the ship for Twitter. Live video can be difficult to monetize in general as it’s at its best when its live, but the chance for it to gain the biggest audience is after a stream is over. And with brand safety being a looming concern, advertisers may be leery to sign up to have their brands featured before any live content.
Pinterest Launches Small Business Program
Pinterest is officially going after small and medium-sized businesses with a new program called Pinterest Propel. Propel provides businesses committing $100 a day on ads extra support, education and even design help on some ads.
The reason for the move is users often go on Pinterest looking for niche, bespoke solutions, which most commonly come from smaller companies, and Pinterest sees small businesses as being a powerful value add for its platform when active in aggregate. The move is meant to diversify Pinterest’s revenue as it looks to hit bringing in more than $500 million in revenue this year.
Pinterest is finding itself in the same place Snapchat is. There’s scale in going after smaller brands in mass numbers. With Snapchat focusing those brands on Geofilters, Pinterest is focusing on education, partnership and even some creative help to get businesses off the ground and using the platform.
News Quick Hits
- Twitter’s currently mulling over a paid subscription package as a way to generate revenue. The package was hinted at in a survey sent out to users, which also revealed that users would get access to an enhanced version of Twitter-owned Tweetdeck. That version would include trend analysis, analytics, posting tools, alerts and more in a dashboard. Currently, nothing more has been revealed beyond what is included in the survey.
- Google is launching a header bidding alternative called exchange bidding dynamic allocation (EBDA) with a beta program beginning in May. Header bidding has grown in popularity with the latest support coming from Facebook, which gave the offering a lot more credibility and placed pressure on Google-owned DoubleClick. Before this new competition, Google worked with pretty much every publisher, but now header bidding makes bidding more transparent, raises ad prices and reduces DoubleClick’s inventory, hence Google’s need to adapt.
- Facebook Messenger is allowing users to share their real-time locations with friends for up to one hour thanks to its new Live Location feature. The feature is available via the More icon in the app. The update comes just a week after Google Maps launched the ability to share your location with friends through it as well.
- Facebook is currently testing a new feature that would allow brand Pages to interact with Groups. Pages even have the option to be admins of groups. Groups have been largely closed off to brands up to this point. The only way for a brand to create and participate was to use personal profiles. Facebook sees Groups as under appreciated, so this is part of a larger effort to draw more users to the product.
- Periscope has launched three new features, including an analytics dashboard, activity tab and moment videos. The analytics dashboard includes metrics like replay views, live views, time spent watching, average time each viewer watched, all metrics that were available before. The dashboard, however, adds new metrics, including how many hearts the video earned. The overall goal of the dashboard is to curate all the metrics in one place. The activity tab notifies users of new followers, favorites and who has watched a replay. Finally, moment videos allow users to add their Periscope streams directly to Twitter Moments.
- Pinterest’s visual search technology is powering Samsung’s new AI assistant Bixby and the Galaxy S8. The technology will allow the phone to take a photo of anything and then get ideas related to that photo from Pinterest, including where to purchase it. The features are already part of the Pinterest app, but now, they are actually integrated into the phone’s hardware. The move could give Pinterest a bit of a leg up on Google, which is the dominant player in mobile search.
- If you want to fit more characters into a tweet, you’re in luck as Twitter continues to relax its 140-character limit. Usernames will no longer count toward that character limit when a user taps or clicks the ‘Reply’ button within the Twitter website or one of its apps. When users hit that button the replies will only contain the tweet itself, while the handles being replied to will be included in a separate section, which is causing user frustration as it makes it look like people are tweeting random sentences when in actuality they are replying to people.