This Week in Social and Digital (Week of March 1)
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.
Instagram Makes Live Bigger
The effects of Clubhouse on product teams are being felt in a real way, and Instagram is the first to try to replicate some of what makes Clubhouse work.
Instagram just launched Live Rooms, an update to its live feature to now allow up to three additional co-hosts in a broadcast, bringing the total hosts to four. Instagram has seen a 70% increase in Live views in the midst of the pandemic, and they say this feature has been requested by users for some time as streamers wanted ways to bring more people into their broadcasts.
Then Clubhouse came along, which Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has not been shy about wanting to replicate.
But Facebook's not alone. Twitter is adding a community feature to its Spaces audio platform, which is in testing.
Clubhouse is the new Stories, and soon enough every platform will have some kind of Clubhouse-like capabilities.
The upstarts are competing on innovation, while the big platforms are competing on parity.
Google Leaves the Cookie in Crumbs
Google confirmed this week that it will be phasing out the ability for companies to use cookies to track users across the web next year. Along with that plan, it committed to not coming up with an equally invasive replacement.
Google's announcing moves before it has to. The cookie was falling apart before this announcement with Safari and Firefox restricting access within their browsers. Currently, Google's Chrome is one of the few holdouts, but even it will end the practice.
This will have an impact on how we think of and approach digital advertising moving forward. Advertising will likely become much more contextually targeted than user-targeted.
While Google is making a sacrifice here, it's also best positioned to weather the storm with a trove of first-party data that will allow it to organize users into cohorts based on interests called FLoCs that advertisers will be able to target. Users won't be able to be identified individually through this practice because they'll be part of a massive group, but the very fact that Google can do this positions it better than almost anyone else for a cookie-less future.
Google will also still allow the targeting of users logged into Google accounts across its own properties, which is important with tools like search and YouTube still getting massive traffic. Advertisers will, of course, still be able to use their own first-party data for targeting, and this move makes collecting first-party data all the more important to businesses who don't want to be overly reliant on Google or Facebook with the demise of the cookie.
News Quick Hits
TIkTok is testing a new Topics section within its discovery tab. Users with access to the menu can tap a topic to view related videos. The move may signal that TikTok is looking to give users more ways to choose the content they see, rather than relying primarily on its content algorithm.
Facebook's experimental products team has a new app, and it's called BARS. BARS helps creators create and share raps by allowing them to rap over professionally-created beats and auto-suggested rhymes. It's hard to say if this will remain a standalone app, if learnings from the experiment will roll into other apps or if it will be cancelled altogether, but Facebook sees an opportunity to give more creators more tools to develop content.
Following Google's decision to lift restrictions on political advertising after the Capitol insurrection, Facebook is doing the same. Advertisers are now able to buy ads related to "social issues, elections or politics" on Facebook.
Twitter is testing shoppable tweets. The test adds a "Shop" button on tweets with links to products featured in the tweet. Twitter's following a similar path to that of Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok in making content shoppable. Twitter has a strong influencer community, so this may be one way to monetize their sharing.
Square has acquired a majority stake in the music service Tidal. It's really unclear how or why this makes sense, but according to Square CEO Jack Dorsey Square wants to help the economy work for artists the same way it has for sellers. So this may be a way to make Square more embedded in the music economy with artists on Tidal using Square to monetize their talents.