This Week in Social and Digital (Week of February 19)
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 May Be Rolling Out Social Selling
Snapchat is reportedly working on a solution that would let advertisers sell products from within their Snapchat ads. Within Stories users may soon be able to swipe up to trigger a purchase or subscription sign-up.
Snapchat’s experimented in the past by allowing users to scan Snapcodes to then view and purchase products with commerce functionality powered by Shopify. It also has a store in Snapchat that it uses to sell branded Snapchat merchandise.mStill, Snapchat commerce up until this point has been relegated to experiments and limited partnerships.
What Snapchat may be doing now would be a much broader and more fundamental shift for the platform. Snapchat’s case to advertisers up to this point has been reach, especially reach for younger users. Focusing more on conversions and direct sales would certainly open up Instagram to an entirely new set of direct marketers and allow Snapchat to show greater parity with other social platforms.
Twitter Looks to Give Promoted Trends a Refresh
Twitter’s Promoted Trends, which launched in 2010, have fallen out of favor over the years, and Twitter aims to reverse that. Promoted Trends let advertisers elevate topics they’d like Twitter users to pay attention to in the trending topics section of Twitter.
Twitter’s currently testing a redesign that would update Promoted Trends and make them more visual in a way that makes them stand out from organic trends. Currently, Promoted Trends are made up of text.
With a cost of up to $200,000 per day, Twitter needs to sell advertisers on the potential of Promoted Trends. It’s certainly a place that gets a lot of attention, but Promoted Trends are all too easy to ignore. This update would give them a greater visual presence and potentially, reinvigorate advertiser enthusiasm in the product.
Facebook Launches Local News Subscriptions Accelerator
As part of its Journalism Project, Facebook is dedicating $3 million to helping local news publishers grow their numbers of digital subscriptions in the form of an accelerator.
The $3 million will go to helping 10 - 15 news sources, and some of those publishers include The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Omaha World-Herald and others. Participants will meet once a month to get insight and training on digital subscriptions and marketing, and as these publishers test new techniques, their findings will be shared with the accelerator as a whole.
Facebook continues to be under significant scrutiny, and this effort, while noble, certainly has an air or PR crisis containment. Still, Facebook has shared that it is dedicated to helping local news publishers in a variety of ways, including giving them more prominence in the News Feed, while other publishers and brands fall to the wayside. These publishers would be wise to take Facebook up on its offer, but it’s also good to keep Facebook at a distance and not rely on them too heavily. Facebook is notorious for pivoting away from projects and partners as its priorities shift and change leaving those partners to figure things out from there.
Facebook Ends Experiment Separating News Feed
Facebook’s been testing a separate news Feed for posts from Pages since October. The test separated content from Facebook friends and content from Pages. The test gave an overwhelming answer: People don’t want separate feeds, so the experiment will end and no further action will be taken.
“…having two separate feeds didn’t actually help them (users) connect more with friends and family,” stated Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri.
Facebook is also removing the Explore feed, which surfaced content from Pages users may not have liked or followed but Facebook algorithms determined may be of interest.
According to Facebook, the recent updates its made to its algorithm which restricts content from Pages and highlights content from friends and family does a better job of addressing Facebook’s goal of connecting users with each other.
This update does little to impact Pages of brands and publishers. The platform continues to be pay-to-play if any Page hopes users actually see its content.
It’s no surprise both experiments failed. The News Feed is about spoon feeding content to users. Users don’t open their News Feeds in search of content, and creating separate sections of the News Feed made consumption an active behavior vs. the passive one users have become accustomed to.
News Quick Hits
- Pandora is now allowing advertisers to buy audio ads programmatically. It’s behind Spotify and iHeartRadio in offering such capabilities, but it argues that its able to reach 92 million monthly active users versus Spotify’s 89 million and iHeartRadio’s 30 million.
- Google has combined Google Wallet and Android Pay into a single app called Google Pay. The service lets users store credit, debit and rewards cards to make purchases online and in store, just like Apple Pay. And it will soon allow users to send and request money from friends and family like Venmo and PayPal.
- Snapchat has two new features. It partnered with Giphy to let users search its entire library for animated GIFs that can be added to snaps. The second feature is on the way but not yet available. Tabs will be added to the Friends and Discover sections to let users easily see friends with active stories, group chats and current subscriptions to Discover.
- Instagram has updated its direct messaging. Now, users can choose if messages they send can be viewed once, replayed temporarily or be permanently available. Up until this point the only option was to replay things temporarily. Optional ephemerality has been an area Snapchat’s continually won, so Instagram is working to build that feature set in to a greater degree.
- Google has updated its AdSense system to allow publishers to add a snippet of code to their websites and then allow Google to use AI to place ads automatically, even where ads weren’t originally displayed before. AdSense will calculate what and where ads will perform well based on content and audiences.
- YouTube’s adding new features to its live streaming capabilities. The first is chat replay, which allows users to watch the live chat that unfolded during a live stream even if the live stream has concluded. YouTube’s also launching automatic captions.
- Twitter is allowing businesses to send up to five direct messages using the Twitter API to users within 24 hours of a user initiating a private conversation. The update is a welcome addition to brands that have come to rely on Twitter’s customer service potential.
- Twitter launched its new Bookmark feature that lets users mark tweets for following up on later.
- Amazon acquired Ring video doorbell for more than $1 billion. Ring will maintain a level of autonomy, but the effort is part of Amazon’s overall efforts to play a central role in the connected home.
- Spotify is now a public company. The company launched its IPO this week.
- Google launched its Slack competitor, Hangouts Chat. It works similar to Slack but has integration with other Google products like Docs, Calendar and Slides.