Welcome to this week’s Social Marketing Cluster Facts! Every week we dig into the social media marketing news scene and uncover the goods. What’s up this week?
Facebook launches a 46-yard long solar-powered internet drone, Twitter stakes claim in pro sport game streaming and Pinterest takes on ad measurement science and insights. Watch SMCF!Â
Transcript:
Facebook has a big ass drone. The solar-powered internet-powered flying device, Aquila, has a wingspan the size of a Boeing 737. Woah. That’s 46 yards! FORTY SIX YARDS. The drone successfully flew over Arizona for 96-minutes before landing due to a structural failure. The move takes Facebook one step closer to its goal of covering the skies with 10,000 flying devices, providing internet to the most remote areas of Earth.
LinkedIn has acquired PointDrive, a platform that allows sales professionals to share sales content and track user interaction. Neat.
Pinterest made a big advertising move, hiring Snapchat’s head of quantitative ads, Gunnard Johnson. Johnson will take on measurement science and insights at Pinterest with a focus on creating ways for advertisers to clearly see the return for money spent on ads.
Do you ever wish you could add a selfie emoji to your selfie Snapchat? Well now you can as Snapchat acquired bitmoji for 100 million dollars. The new feature lets users customize emojis and place them in snaps.
Snapchat is throwing around ideas for uses of facial recognition on its platform. They recently filed a patent for technology that “modifies a photo and restricts its distribution” depending on the users privacy settings. Basically, the patent technology would work something like this: a user takes a photo, the facial recognition scans said photo for Snapchat users’ faces. Then, if any of the faces are Snapchat users, it would check those users privacy settings to see if they want their likeness to be public, and if not, it would modify the picture so that user wasn’t recognizable. The future is NOW!
Twitter has gone batty! They announced the expansion of their live sports plans to include weekly, live streamed games from the MLB, NHL; and for users in the UK and Ireland Sky Sports will show highlights and goals of Premier League Football aka Soccer matches on their SkyFootball Twitter account. MBL and NHL fans will have access to live streams that will be viewable whether of not you are logged into Twitter and like the NFL deals Twitter will be crashing the net in Ad sales.
Sources:
Facebook reports successful flight of full-scale Internet-delivery drone, @pbdes, SpaceNews
Facebook Gets Strong Majority of World’s Social Ad Spending, eMarketer
LinkedIn buys PointDrive to boost its social sales platform with sharing, @ingridlunden, Tech Crunch
Pinterest poaches Snapchat’s ad research boss Gunnard Johnson, @petersontee, Marketing Land
Snapchat is adding a custom emoji feature it reportedly bought for $100 million, @ArjunKharpal, CNBC
Snapchat turns facial recognition technology on its head, Alison Booth, Naked Security
Twitter links with Sky Sports to show Premier League highlights, The Guardian
Twitter will livestream weekly games from MLB and the NHL, @anthonyha, Tech Crunch
