This Week in Social and Digital (Week of April 17)
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.
Snapchat Launching Self-Serve Snap Ads
With self-serve sponsored geofilters under its belt, Snapchat’s looking to launch self-serve Snap ads by May 1. Snap Ads run by taking up a user’s entire screen with vertical video. The ads are interspersed within Snapchat Stories and Discover.
A self-serve option would make Snap Ads a more viable option for more advertisers, which until January required buyers to purchase ads through Snapchat representatives directly. In January, advertisers had a handful of third-parties they could work with to place the ads. Those third-parties, however, can be restrictive and often add service charges.
Snap Inc.’s now under pressure from two different directions, investors who want to see value in their investment and advertisers who are demanding more control over their advertising partners. That means Snapchat has to bend to the will of advertisers to a degree it hasn’t had to in the past. This self-serve option would certainly make Snapchat a more attainable buy for more brands, and it would allow Snapchat to scale its advertising efforts more quickly.
Facebook F8 is All About the Camera, AR and VR
Facebook held its annual developers conference, F8, this week, and Mark Zuckerberg and team were not short on announcements.
One big area Facebook is focusing on is in augmented reality. Now, artists, designers and developers have access to Camera Effects, a platform meant to build custom graphics for Facebook Camera. This means developers will more easily be able to create masks animations and other lense-like features that compete directly with Snapchat Lenses.
The next focus was on virtual reality. Facebook just launched Spaces, a social VR app for Oculus Rift that lets users interact in virtual reality with digital avatars of their friends. Users create their own personalized avatars using Facebook photos. Users who aren’t in VR can also be interacted with through Messenger. Those users are displayed as floating 2D screens.
Messenger has a new platform dubbed Messenger 2.0 to make bots easier to implement and develop. They’re also working to make bots easier to discover by suggesting bots based on user interests and location. Beyond that, a new game tab is making its appearance on Messenger as are Spotify and Apple Music integrations. That means users will able to listen to music from Messenger.
Facebook Workplace is getting file sharing, legal compliance and video tools to make it more competitive with the likes of Slack and other enterprise communication platforms.
More on the developer side of things, Facebook is now offering free access to its Places Graph, which is a repository of data on more than 140 million locations. Apps using the Places Graph would be able to pull in location-aware data into their own platforms.
Facebook made it clear that it is going after the user camera. Everything about this presentation was about being the one stop shop for using the camera and messaging friends, as well as bots. That leads to Facebook’s second area of focus, Messenger. If anything is clear, Facebook’s immediate focus is in these two areas, and it’s focus beyond that is in the VR space. What was notably missing is Facebook Live, which, while still a feature, has largely taken a backseat when it comes to where Facebook is placing its efforts.
Facebook Sets Sights Beyond Its Core
Day 2 of F8 was about a lot more than where Facebook stands today. It was about the future, and that future has Facebook looking far beyond social networking.
It announced two 360-degree cameras, but that’s not the only hardware its working on. Facebook’s also planning to create AR Glasses that will bring together visual and contextually aware AI. These glasses are at least five years away form being available, and they’re not alone in being a ways out. Facebook also showed off the work it’s doing on Tether-tenna, which is a small helicopter attached to a fiber line that can be used to create towers for connectivity anywhere.
They also showed off "brain mouse" for AR, which will allow users to think and have typing done at 100 words per minute—5x faster than the average person can type on a smart phone today. It does this by sending wireless signals between your brain and computer. If that wasn’t enough, Facebook also talked about a new technology that lets users listen with their skin. It does this by mimicking the job of the cochlea in the human ear, so this theoretically would allow those who are deaf to hear.
This was a big F8 for Facebook. It clearly showed that its sights are set far beyond social networking and messaging. Facebook is getting into Google’s territory of placing big bets and pushing technology to the next frontier.
Snapchat Launches World Lenses
Snapchat Lenses got a big update that makes them less about selfies and more about using augmented reality to place virtual objects in the real world. The feature is called world lenses, and they use a phone’s rear camera to add augmented reality images to any scene or video, similar to the lenses users can already apply to their faces.
The update already has sponsored lenses form Jeep and L’Oreal. As is the case with selfie lenses, Snapchat will continue to update the app with new world lenses moving forward.
This announcement came at the same time as F8, positioning the battle for the camera between Facebook and Snapchat front and center. Facebook has hijacked many of Snapchat’s features across Messenger, Instagram and Facebook itself, so Snapchat was wise to attempt to upstage Facebook when it took the stage. Who will win? That probably doesn’t matter as much between the two platforms. But this shows the potential for augmented reality to continue to gain traction and grow.
News Quick Hits
- If you like your Instagram with a bit of flavor from Snapchat, get ready because now you can have it with some flavor from Pinterest as well. Instagram just launched a private collections feature. They allow users to save posts to specific collections or categories of posts. Posts can be saved to collections by holding down on a bookmark icon and then placing the post in an existing collection or creating a new one. Collections can be given custom names from their users. This offers excellent potential for posts like recipe content or even vacation ideas, which are constantly shared on Instagram but may not be able to be acted upon immediately.
- Former Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer has focused his energies on creating a new organization aimed at analyzing government spending and making it easier to understand. The reports can be found at USAFacts.org. The goal is to create a space where “reasonable people, who may disagree, can look at the same data…” That makes it easier for those users to grow closer together.
- Facebook is testing colored backgrounds for links shared on its platform. The colors match the overall color of the link image and give the links a little more prominence in the News Feed.
- Tumblr has a new video viewing app called Cabana, which is designed to allow users to watch videos and chat with up to five friends in real time. The service allows users to browse YouTube videos and then watch them in “rooms” with friends. Cabana joins a group of similar apps, including YouTube Uptime. An iOS version is now available with Android coming in May.
- F8 included a series of updates to Facebook analytics. The goal is to help brands better understand how channels used to interact with customers help them complete the customer journey. Much of this is still in beta. That being said, the highlights include analytics support for Facebook Pages and offline conversions, AI is now automatically surfacing some insights, and Facebook dashboards are now more customizable. For example, brands will be able to measure how interactions people had with a Page correspond to activity on a website, app or with a bot. Online interactions will be translated to offline conversions, and marketers will be able to build custom dashboards.
- Twitter’s rolling out in-stream video ads that will run as pre-roll or mid-roll content alongside Twitter content partners that include news outlets, TV networks and sports leagues.
- Google has briefed some publishers who have signed NDAs that it is working on a browser with ad-blocking capabilities built in. The browser would allow users to block ads from loading that Google has blacklisted as delivering a poor experience, including auto-play videos. It may also potentially allow users to donate to publisher sites in which they have the blocking technology enabled. Google’s carefully laying this plan out because many of the its biggest ad tech partners are publishers that run these ads.