This Week in Social and Digital (Week of May 15)
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.
Sponsored World Lenses are Here
A few weeks ago Snapchat launched World Lenses that let users place augmented reality 2-D and 3-D objects in the world around them. Those objects include animated characters and objects. Essentially, what Snapchat did for the selfie, it did for the world around you.
Now, advertisers can buy these world lenses and target them to specific audiences based on age, gender and lifestyle. Snapchat also updated its geofilters capabilities to allow advertisers to target geofilters by high school, college, airport, state, city, neighborhood and zip code.
When Snapchat first unrolled its advertising products, it positioned them as mass reach mechanisms, but more and more, it’s giving advertisers the ability to personalize their messaging and add greater contextual relevance through smart targeting. But right now, Snapchat’s working to maintain its momentum. After a disappointing earnings report by Wall Street’s standards, Snapchat’s working to roll out updates to bring more advertisers onto the platform.
Instagram Adds Selfie Filters
Instagram’s continuing its favorite pastime, copying Snapchat features, and this latest move is a big one. Instagram just launched new selfie filters as a way “to turn an oridinary selfie into something fun and entertaining,” according to Instagram.
Currently, there are eight filters with more on the way, and if you were expecting them to behave any other way than they do on Snapchat, think again. Filters can be used by one person or multiple, and they’ll be updated regularly.
This is all happening in the context of a shaky Snap Inc, which just wrapped up a less-than-stellar first earnings report since becoming a public company. Beyond that app downloads were down 16% in April for Snapchat, which has not been the case for Instagram.
This is as much an offensive move by Instagram as it is a defensive one. It’s doing what it can to keep advertisers from shifting over to Snapchat by taking away reasons to do so. Its argument being it has the features, the users and the targeting. Of course, Snapchat’s counter to that is the devotion and focus it has in its user base.
Google I/O Doesn’t Skimp on Announcements
Google held its annual I/O conference, and it wasn’t short on announcements.
A huge part of its plans for the future is in artificial intelligence, which isn’t a huge surprise. It launched Google.ai, which will be all about progressing what we know about artificial intelligence. Google.ai is an an initiative that will distribute and share research papers, tools and resources to propel the technology forward.
One way AI’s coming to life more is through Google Lens. Now, when you look at an object through your Android device, it will know what it’s looking at. And that technology’s likely to get better. It developed its second generation Tensor processing unit for machine learning.
Google Assistant was a huge theme of the event in its various iterations from user phones to Google Home. It will now be much more conversational and will be integrated into things like Google Lens, so you can look at something and say, “What’s that?” And if that wasn’t enough, it’s now available on the iPhone, so Siri has some competition, even though it can’t be set up to be the default option. Google’s not stopping at the iPhone, either. Google Assistant’s SDK will now be available to include more third-party platforms and services. Google Home has a version 2.0 that will offer proactive assistance, such as a heads up on traffic, the ability to call people using the Bluetooth speaker and support for more music services.
Google Photos has just gotten more useful. It will use facial recognition and offer suggestions on what photos to share and when. Users can also order photo books.
In other announcements, YouTube’s TV app is getting 360 video support. Google’s Tango Project now lets users locate themselves within buildings, like stores, museums and malls with a positioning feature called VPS. And Google’s going after job finding services with its search engine. Users can now go to Google for Jobs and look for new roles. Lastly, Android O (the latest version of the mobile operating system) is available in beta, but its official name has not been announced as of yet.
All in all, Google didn’t announce anything earth shattering, but the foundation it’s setting, particularly with AI sets the stage in a big way for the future. It’s clear where Google is going and that’s in proactive assistance for users.
One thing that didn’t get a huge focus was YouTube, but that may be more about the nature of and content shared at I/O than it is about the emphasis Google has placed on YouTube’s future.
News Quick Hits
- Facebook is cracking down on live videos that aren’t actually live at all. Live streams of only images or polls “with unmoving or ambient broadcasts” are being called out in Facebook’s Platform Policy. Publishers who violate the terms may have access to Facebook Live limited.
- Bing is now highlighting bots from Facebook Messenger, Skype, Kik, Slack and Telegram in search results. The bots are surfaced in an elevated search results section when users search for bot-related terms.
- Twitter cofounder Biz Stone has rejoined Twitter after leaving the company in 2011 to work on other projects. Stone will be working to guide Twitter’s culture and instill more energy and positivity into the business.
- Promoted Pins will now display when users put the new Pinterest Lens to work. This will be done automatically, so there’s no need for advertisers to change their approaches to Pinterest. The Promoted Pins will display automatically.
- Facebook has come forward with another measurement issue, following through on its efforts to be more transparent in its measurement shortcomings. This latest oversight came from a bug that miscounted some clicks on video carousel ads as link clicks, so advertisers who had bid based on link clicks were charged when users simply clicked to enlarge the videos to watch them. Affected advertisers are receiving credit for the charges.
- You won’t believe what Facebook’s doing to combat click-bait… Okay, maybe you will. Posts that exaggerate information or omit specific pieces of content will be getting less emphasis in user News Feeds. Facebook did this previously by deemphasizing Pages that published this type of content. Now, it’s actually deemphasizing individual posts.
- Facebook is integrating notifications, so when users log into Facebook, they’ll see notifications from Instagram and Messenger as well. The move makes sense as users often switch from app-to-app anyway.
- A new Your Twitter Data section on the Twitter website and within the platform's applications aims to give users more control over what data they share with Twitter and how advertisers can target them. The update allows users to personalize their settings, including what interests they want to be targeted by.