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?
Twitter launched a bunch of updates, Facebook Exchange says goodbye and daydreaming is made easy on YouTube. Watch SMCF!
Transcript:
Remember that 140 characters shit we told you last week, yeah it’s happening’ Twitter made it official Tuesday! Also, the “retweet’ button will be available on your own tweets so retweeting and quote tweeting yourself will be easier. NOW you can have full-blown conversations with yourself! Next, Adios to the (.@) period at symbol! Now it will work at the beginning of the tweet without the period. Finally, Twitter wrapped their blog post by saying they are telling us this now to give developers time prep before it rolls out.
Also, after we shot SMCF, a Twitter Audience Platform update became available to all performance advertisers around the world. Changes include:
-greater reach on and off Twitter on any device
-New ad formats
-TellApart technology for U.S. Marketers to test campaigns on website and mobile apps AND ads will automatically be formatted for mobile and web
Changes are now available to all advertisers driving website clicks or conversions and will soon be available for Mobile app installs.
Twitter announced Wednesday that Heron, the new distributed stream computation system, is open sourcing under the permissive Apache v2.0 license. Twitter chose to build Heron new from the ground up rather than update Storm to increase performance, flexibility and the ability to grow. I’m not an engineer sooo… check out the full scoop on the Twitter Engineering Blog.
Snapchat is a foreign to many brands and they are eager to learn about the platform. Researcher L2’s published a report with insight on the leading industries and brands making waves. Top industries according to L2 are Activewear, Consumer packaged goods, consumer electronics, beverages, beauty, retail, fashion and food. Top brands aren’t at all surprising: Nike, Little Debbie, GE, Pepsi and TRESemme (ou la la). L2 provided a chart of estimates showing ad prices and placements. As the platform grows more brands are expected to hop on board.
In March of this year, FOX promoted a Sponsored Snapchat Lens for it’s hit TV show “Empire”. According to analysis from Millward Brown, the results are pretty dang impressive. Snapchat reported, “Fox’s campaign boosted brand awareness by 16 points when comparing a group who saw the ad versus those who did not. It also increased tune-in intent by 8 percent. Those results are based, however, on a fairly small scale compared to the number of times the ad was interacted with.” Those numbers might not sound too impressive, however getting a response like that on a single platform is. Snapchat is still new to the advertising game, and even though they have a bonkers number of users and potential ad cruisers, many businesses are still trying to see the potential beyond simply reach. It’s the conversion that counts, namsayin’?
Snapchat raised a hella impressive 1.8 billion dollars in a Series F fundraising round. As Snapchat chugs along towards monetization, venture capitalists are backing the platform more than ever. This latest funding fact is in line with an estimated 20 billion dollar valuation for the social platform. In layman’s terms, 20 billion dollars converts to about 20 billion snap replays.
Facebook has officially responded to claims from conservatives that their “Trending News” section has been showing a liberal bias. Facebook says after its investigation they have found that liberal and conservative news has virtually the same approval rate and that there is no evidence of a systematic bias. They do however admit that there is potential that rogue employees may have shown bias in isolated incidents but could not substantiate any individual claims made. Facebook is still responding by retraining employees, updating the language in their guidelines, and adding additional oversight for their review team.
YouTube is gearing up for the release of Daydream, Google’s new and upcoming VR headset. In the past few months, YouTube has been dabbling with VR integration into it’s platform with 360 degree video, VR video, and Spatial Audio. Soon, all of those pieces of the puzzle will come together to power Daydream. For now, I guess we’ll all just have to sit around and look at the boring world through our boring, low-def, stupid eyes, that don’t come with a cool remote or any sweet apps.
A young buck by the name of Elliot Murray, who heads innovation at The Social Chain, decompiled Instagram’s newest application and, based on his discoveries, made some bold predictions about Instagram’s upcoming features. Here they are, in no specific order: ONE) Similar to Facebook, users are expected to soon be able to pay to boost posts. TWO) Organic insights will roll out, allowing users access to key metrics. THREE) Businesses will have to convert their accounts from personal to business. Of course, none of this is coming from Instagram itself. Yet Elliot has seemed to convince a whole lot of folks in the tech space that he could be right… The only question we really have is: dude… Elliot, how old are you?
Sources:
Coming soon: express even more in 140 characters, Twitter Blog
Drive more scale for your performance campaigns with Twitter, Twitter Blog
Open Sourcing Twitter Heron, Twitter Blog
Snapchat Advertising Data Reveals What Kinds of Brands Have Bought Into the App, AdWeek
Fox’s Sponsored Snapchat Lens Boosted Brand Awareness for Empire by 16 Points , AdWeek
Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round; leaked deck reveals revenues, user numbers, @ingridlunden, @Katie_Roof, Tech Crunch
Response to Chairman John Thune’s letter on Trending Topics, Facebook Newsroom
Facebook Is Shutting Down Its Desktop-Based Ad Retargeting Exchange, AdWeek
A YouTube experience like nothing you’ve seen before, YouTube
Â
Â
Â
