This Week in Social and Digital (Week of July 16)
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 Forms Partnership with News Sharing Platforms
Snapchat’s adding a few more holes to its walled garden. In its latest move, it’s partnering with four news sharing platforms, including NewsWhip, Storyful, SAM Desk and Tagboard.
These platforms will have access to publicly shared Stories from users, and they can take that content to distribute it on their platforms. More specifically, news organizations that subscribe to the platforms, like The Washington Post, Vice or Al Jazeera, will have access to publicly shared user Stories.
The goal is to take news-focused content created by users and get it outside of Snapchat to potentially expose non-users of Snapchat to the platform.
Snapchat’s grown less precious with its content in its bid to gain new users. Exposing users outside of its platform to the type of content they can find there is one way to get some earned attention, and it’s a way for Snapchat to make the content of its users into more of an asset.
This is well-worn territory for social platforms. Twitter is pervasive across news sites, and Facebook is more and more every day. Snapchat’s working to show that it too is a place to find original content from users experiencing news and events first-hand.
Snapchat Partners with Nielsen in Ad Targeting
Snapchat and Nielsen are expanding their partnership. Now, brands advertising on Snapchat will be able to target audiences based on offline behaviors. For example, makeup brands could target someone who purchased lipstick offline.
Now, Snapchat’s joining the ranks of Pinterest and Twitter in making such an offering. It also comes at a time where competitor Facebook is focusing less on targeting users based on offline purchase behaviors in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica controversy.
Snapchat is and needs to continue to catch up in the data and ad targeting front. Unfortunately for them, the other big players in social had a major head start and were able to take their time ramping up their offerings. Snapchat doesn’t have time for that. It needs to compete now, and partnerships like this will help on that front.
Facebook to Start Removing Posts Encouraging Violence
2018 has been a great year for Facebook financially but on the PR front, it hasn’t been good. It’s dealt with accusations of standing by while its platform is used to spread misinformation and even outright falsehoods.
Now, Facebook appears to be taking a small step toward greater censorship of content. Facebook will now be updating its policy to remove content that has “contributed to physical harm.” This means Facebook will review posts for inaccuracy, being misleading or shared with the intent of leading to violence and physical harm.
Facebook will be partnering with local organizations on the ground in locations like Sri Lanka where violence was stoked when falsehoods were spread on the platform. Intelligence agencies will also be involved in evaluating threats. The system will work by partners reporting posts it knows are false. From there Facebook will verify the report, remove the post and police any duplicates.
This is not a position Facebook wanted to find itself in, and even in this instance it’s taking baby steps by putting the onus on local and intelligence agencies to flag the content in the first place. Facebook wants to be an open platform, and it doesn’t want the responsibility of policing content. But the tides have shifted over the last eight months, and this step may just be the beginning of more policing of content on the platform. There are no easy answers here.
News Quick Hits
European Union antitrust regulators have hit Google with a $5.04 billion fine. The fine is for Google leveraging its leadership in smartphones to continue to dominate as a search engine. Not only that, Google must stop these practices within 90 days or the penalty will increase. Regulators argue that Google’s requirement for manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Chrome on their products as a pre-requisite for licensing the Play Store constitutes an abuse of power. Beyond that Google will not allow any manufacturer who has Google apps pre-installed on any products to sell an alternative product running non-Google approved version of Android.
Skype users will soon be able to record calls, something users have been clamoring for for a very long time. The recording option will be cloud-based, and if a call is being recorded, everyone on the call will be made aware. Once the recording is done, it will be available for download. This is particularly important to podcasters who often host interviews and collaborate on podcast episodes over Skype but have to find workarounds to record the conversations.
LinkedIn is launching captions for videos to make it possible to view the videos without sound. Video creators need to add the captions themselves, unlike Facebook which has automated captioning as imperfect as it is.
LinkedIn has added new features to messages. Now users can change the size of the message compose box to get more room to write a message, different file formats like PDFs and PowerPoints can be sent via the mobile app and users can now use @ mentions to call out specific people in group messages. It’s also allowing screenshots to be copied and pasted and then sent over messages.
Twitch is partnering with Giphy. Now streamers will be able to select a location on their screens where users can add GIFs. Once the stream starts, viewers will be able to use Giphy to drop in reaction GIFs to the streamers’ gameplay. GIFs are queued up and delivered in the stream one at a time.
Instagram has a new feature that lets a users’ followers see when they’re on the platform. The feature works by adding a green icon next to the username. The goal is to encourage chat within the app.