This Week in Social and Digital (Week of February 12)
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 Gives Verified Users Analytics
Snapchat’s giving its users audience analytics that breaks down story views, engagement and demographics. Not so fast, though. The feature isn’t for everyone. It’s only for verified users who have “cultivated a large audience.”
The data breaks down audience and engagement insights by year, month or week. It will also show how much time viewers spent watching content.
Snapchat’s needed to do this for awhile, but the platform drug its feet on really embracing influencers. But now those influencers have a ton more insight on who follows them, which will enable them to create better content for the followers but also establish stronger partnerships with potential advertisers.
Given Facebook’s recent cutback on content from Pages, embracing influencers could be a wise strategy for Snapchat to bring creators to its platform, treat them right and help them garner audiences.
Google’s Ad Blocking Chrome Browser Launches
The updated Chrome browser launched this week, and its biggest selling point is that it automatically blocks annoying ads based on criteria from the Coalition for Better Ads. These ads include full page ads, autoplay ads that run with sound and flashing ads. The hope is that this will just result in fewer of these ads even being available on the web.
Google is evaluating all sites and giving them a pass, warning or failing grade. Site owners can access all the evaluations through an API to address any issues. Sites that violate the stipulations will have 30 days to fix them or Chrome will start blocking them. 42% of sites that did not meet the standards have already fixed their sites to meet the standards.
Users don’t have to do anything as the ad blocker works much like a pop-up blocker.
This is Google throwing its weight around a bit, but ultimately, this seems to be a business saving move to a degree. Google makes much of its revenue through advertisers, and if users are blocking all ads, Google doesn’t make money. So Google’s cleaning things up a bit and removing the reason to install ad blockers in the first place by filtering out the major offenders and letting everything else through.
Snap Extends Marketing API
Snap’s Marketing API was once available to only a handful of partners, but now, it is available to any ad agency, ad tech firm or brand to build tools and tap into the API for ad delivery. Using the API, targeting and measurement can be improved by incorporating first-party data, and ads can be optimized programmatically based on product inventory, for example.
This move is a big deal for Snap, which is now selling almost all of its ads programmatically. Over 90% of its ads in the last quarter were purchased programmatically, which is a huge jump from the 10% of ads bought programmatically the year prior.
There’s very little that’s novel here on the part of Snap as opening up a marketing API has been implemented by Facebook, Twitter and others. But it is aggressive in the sense that is really boaters Snap’s ability to take in more ad dollars and serve stronger, more diverse and more targeted advertising. Snap needed to do this, and this allows it to continue its momentum coming off of a strong quarter from a Wall Street perspective.
News Quick Hits
- Facebook’s updated branded content guidelines introduced on January 25 go into effect March 1. The updated guidelines stipulate that page owners cannot accept “anything of value” in exchange for sharing content they did not help create through their Facebook Pages. Celebrities and influencers like George Takei, Marlon Wayans and Lil’ Wayne actively take part in pay-to-share programs. Publishers have looked to these third parties to boost site traffic through Facebook, but the change coincides with Facebook’s other moves to cut back on publisher content in the News Feed.
- Snapchat is continuing to break its features out of its app. Now, Snap Maps are getting a mobile version at map.snapchat.com. The feature works the same as it does in the app with users able to zoom in and tap map sections to view stories. Users can also embed maps on their websites, which Snapchat is encouraging news organizations to do. Snapchat’s becoming less precious about what stays within its app and what can be distributed more widely. This update to maps follows Snapchat’s move to allow Stories to be shared outside of Snapchat to social channels as well as text messages.
- Google launched AMP Stories, a new feature that lets publishers take their AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) articles and turn them into Instagram or Snapchat Story-style content. AMP Stories currently run without ads, but they likely will in the future. Right now, they’re a mobile-first way of telling stories and a new way for publishers to engage readers.
- Facebook is inviting users to create lists and posting them to their News Feeds. Lists can be customized with emojis and colors. Lists can range from goals for the year to desired travel destinations to anything else a user can think of.
- Wired revealed that at least seven of the 13 experts Facebook tapped for advice on its Messenger Kids app received funding from Facebook. Messenger Kids has been critcized as not being good for kids, but Facebook has contended it consulted experts. While financial links may not have had an effect, the lack of transparency has raised more than a few eyebrows.
- Facebook’s video chat hardware may be making its debut as early as July with an announcement preceding it in May. The rumor is the device will be a speaker with a 15-inch touchscreen called Portal.
- Pinterest released a few new updates. Now, users can archive boards they no longer need like boards they planned for a wedding. Archiving boards will stop Pinterest from serving up pins you might be interested in based on the boards you’re currently curating. Users can also reorder sections within boards as well as rearrange pins’ placements within boards. Lastly, users can sort boards based on alphabetical order, most recently saved to, newest boards, oldest boards or custom.