Social Media – Linx

Facebook Will Fact-Check Its News Feed and Shame Fake Posts With 'Disputed' Tag

Linx — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 16:01:22 +0000

Finally, Facebook is taking action and fact-checking news articles and labeling them with a disputed tag. This not only helps the consumers gain real factual information, but also the ad companies who continue to post ads on the site.

The Facebook feed is about to get fact-checked.
The social network on Thursday said it will implement new measures to combat the so-called fake news and lies spreading via its platform. Facebook has been under intense scrutiny ever since Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, an upset that some say was at least partly fueled by a mess of misinformation on social media services including Facebook, Reddit and Twitter.
Facebook was used for circulation by fraudulent “news” sites, whose operators posted false headlines that were shared widely, driving web traffic and generating ad dollars.
Now Facebook has a plan to cut off phony sites masquerading as news sources and to clearly label fake news. In the process, it might help restore programmatic ad revenue to legitimate publishers that have seen marketing dollars siphoned off by bogus sites.
Facebook is deputizing reputable, third-party fact-checking sites to label posts as “disputed,” a warning that will appear prominently in the Facebook feed and pop up when someone tries to share the post. The fact-check organizations include Snopes, FactCheck.org and Politifact, which are part of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network.
“We believe providing more context can help people decide for themselves what to trust and what to share,” Adam Mosseri’s, Facebook’s VP of product for News Feed, said in a blog post on Thursday. “It will still be possible to share these stories, but you will see a warning that the story has been disputed as you share.”
The process for flagging fake news starts with Facebook’s everyday users, who will be able to report any posts they consider suspicious. Once flagged, independent fact-checkers will determine whether it deserves the “disputed” tag or not.
Facebook also is going after the money that funds the fake news. Facebook said it will shut down links to spam websites, which often use spoof domain names that sound like reputable news sources. When people click on the “spoof” domains they mistakenly go to sites that are covered in ads and fake news.
“We’ve found that a lot of fake news is financially motivated,” Mr. Mosseri said. “Spammers make money by masquerading as well-known news organizations, and posting hoaxes that get people to visit to their sites, which are often mostly ads.”
Programmatic ad technology has been blamed for helping fuel the proliferation of fake news. During the election BuzzFeed uncovered overseas schemes with people making money by hosting websites filled with outrageous stories and driving traffic to them through Facebook.
“The most important thing is to give users the information at the time they are deciding whether to click, whether to share,” said Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
“Cutting off the ad flow is obviously important,” Mr. Jarvis added. Advertisers don’t even know where their ads are appearing, he said.
The blowback from this election cycle has forced brands in the largely automated programmatic ad ecosystem to pay closer attention to where their messages appear. Kellogg, for example, set a new policy against its ads showing up on Breitbart, a right-wing website, because it determined that the site wasn’t “aligned” with Kellogg’s “values as a company.”
Facebook did not say whether its new measures would impact a site like Breitbart. The social network is going after sites that are the worst of the worst, Mr. Jarvis said.
“The most important thing is to give users the information at the time they are deciding whether to click, whether to share,” Mr. Jarvis said.
Source: AdAge December 15, 2016

Snapchat's Latest Moves Are Making It Look More Like a TV Disrupter Than a Social App

Linx — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 16:48:20 +0000

TV, Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Snapchat. You are able to watch TV shows on all of them. With Snapchat being new to the group, they are catching up pretty quickly. As the saying goes “if you can’t beat them, join them”.

The next-generation television company may be in your pocket. Snapchat, once pegged by the public as a social-messaging app and recently self-declared camera-based platform, is actually starting to look more and more like TV for young viewers who prefer smartphones over flat screens, industry players say.
Last week, Snapchat’s Discover section—already chock-full of content channels from the NFL, MTV, Food Network and others—added Bleacher Report to the U.S. version of its app, while striking a larger deal with the sports publisher’s parent, Turner Broadcasting. The two partners will collaborate on original-scripted and reality-based video programming from Turner properties such as TBS, Adult Swim and truTV. What’s more, Snapchat today will reveal that Discover is also adding Mitú, a popular English-language content platform focused on Hispanic-American youth culture.
“You will see videos [on Discover] that are freestanding as well as ones that belong to an episodic series,” explained Mike Su, chief product officer at Mitú, which averages 160 million viewers a month. “It is definitely going to be video-heavy.”
That should fit in well on Snapchat, which gets 10 billion-plus daily video views and has been transforming into a TV disrupter. During summer, the company inked deals with NBC, ESPN and CNN to create shows for the app. And in late October, parent company Snap Inc. posted a job listing for an in-house development manager of original shows.
“Snapchat is a brilliant, mobile-age Comcast or Time Warner in terms of being an always-on content delivery platform,” remarked Scott Symonds, AKQA’s managing director of media. “The nonsocial content is very traditional media content.”
Indeed, Snapchat’s largely Gen Z and millennial users, which total 150 million daily, are not only drawn to Discover content but even more so to their personal channels, where—via wacky filters and other digital overlays—they and their friends are the stars. “Snapchat is everyone’s personal reality TV show,” said Zach Glass, vp of digital advertising at RED Interactive Agency.
Ken Kraemer, CEO of Moment Studio, added, “You’ve got different content voices from different companies in Discover and you’ve got live stories from events and people you care about, all interspersed with ads.”
Snapchat’s 2017 revenue, per eMarketer, will skyrocket 155 percent year over year to $935.5 million thanks to the recent implementation of its Snapchat Partners ads API. The addition of Mitú, which has ad clients such as Captain Morgan, Chevy and Boost Mobile, can only help make Discover ads attractive to Latino-minded marketers.
“If we are looking for somebody to reach somebody under the age of 35, I am not expecting [linear] TV to do much,” commented Brandon Rhoten, vp, head of advertising, media and digital marketing at Wendy’s. “Cable TV and Snapchat aren’t the same. But it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t swap one for the other—I have. I have taken TV dollars and put them into Snapchat.”
Snapchat recently was dinged by a report that viewers had significantly dropped for a few Discover partners following the section’s redesign earlier this fall. The company counters that the median number of daily Snapchat Discover users is up almost double digits since the changes were made. Either way, advertisers don’t care whether they hit the app’s young demo on Discover or in users’ personal streams, Kraemer noted.
“Snapchat’s approach is doing a great job of monetizing both user- and publisher-created content, and they’re making no secret about that,” the Moment Studio chief said. “They’re signaling clearly to the market that that is how you play on Snapchat as an advertiser.”
Meanwhile, there are additional challenges afoot for Snapchat competing more heavily for television budgets, given that Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other tech notables have similar aims. “The interesting question to me is whether Snapchat can host what I like to call destination content—content so compelling that new users want to use the app to experience it,” said Noah Mallin, head of social at MEC USA. “That’s certainly their ambition, and in that sense, they become a competitor to any other sources of content from YouTube to Amazon to Netflix to Twitter.”
It’s clearly something the messaging app is taking seriously. Snapchat’s vp of content Nick Bell acknowledged as much, noting his team “will continue to work with media partners to develop more shows for Snapchat.”
Source: AdWeek December 12, 2016

Facebook Just Owned Up to Misreporting Likes, Reactions and Shares to Brands

Linx — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 16:41:09 +0000

Facebook is ending 2016 off with a bang… actually a dud. With multiple misreporting and inflated metrics issues, Facebook might face an issue with fewer brands trusting their site for advertising.

In a blog post today, Facebook admitted to miscalculating more of its marketing stats that companies look at to gauge the effectiveness of their efforts. The move marks the third time since September that the digital giant has revealed that it’s misled brands.
The company has been miscalculating the number of likes and shares it shows for web links via its API, or application programming interface. It has also been misrepresenting the number of likes and reaction emojis marketers see for their live videos.
Facebook detailed the latter situation this way:

In page insights in the column for “Reactions on Post,” however, we show only one reaction per unique user. We misallocated the extra reactions per user that happened during the live broadcast to the “Reactions from Shares of Post” section, instead of counting them in the “Reactions on Post” section, so we’re making a change to correct it. Note that total counts were and are correct; some of them were just captured in the wrong reporting column when broken out. The fix for this issue will apply to newly created Live videos, starting mid-December. It will increase “Reactions on Post” by 500 percent on average and will decrease them on “Reactions from Shares of Post” by 25 percent on average (actual impact to specific videos may vary).
However, the latest issues do not rise to the level of some of Facebook’s higher profile problems like conceding that its video view metrics had been inflated or admitting to misreporting stats for Instant Articles.
The blog post also included an update to Facebook’s ad-creation system, as it will now be able to estimate the potential reach of a campaign more accurately. Facebook said it has enhanced its accuracy for sampling and projecting the estimated number of consumers an appeal will reach.
Source: AdWeek December 9, 2016

Facebook Increases Transparency By Updating Video and Third-Party Viewability Metrics

Linx — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 15:41:53 +0000

In todays marketing world, transparency is playing a bigger role than ever. If a company is not completely transparent from the beginning, it will most likely hurt their reputation later on. The goal of Facebook’s lately transparency move is to give marketers more transparency and verification into their Facebook campaigns, which they can then analyze on their own through third-party partners. Here at Linx, we are all about strategy, and this is a great move for Facebook.

In light of its recent video fiasco and growing pressure from advertisers to open up its so-called walled garden for more third-party verification, Facebook today is announcing a ton of changes to its measurement system.
Facebook has added a new metric called “video watches to 100 percent,” which tracks both completed views and completed audio. “Video watches to 100 percent” replaces a previous stat that was called “video views to 100 percent.” With the addition of the new metric, Facebook estimates that there will be a 35 percent increase in the count of watches to 100 percent.
Mark Rabkin, head of ads engineering at Facebook, told Adweek that his company has underestimated these views and is adding the new metric because, “when audio and video plays on the phone, sometimes the audio track and the video track get a few milliseconds out of alignment,” he said. “Then you have to make a choice—when do you count the video as finished? Is it when the audio track ends or when the video track ends?”
Facebook will pro
vide new insights into campaigns, and it also cut deals with comScore and Nielsen to track display viewability.
Facebook initially began offering third-party video viewability about a year ago with Moat and Integral Ad Science and now plans to open up third-party display viewability to measure text and photo ads through its new partnerships with comScore and Nielsen. Similar to video viewability, display viewability will track when and how long ads appears on a page; these measurement offerings will begin rolling it out in the first quarter of 2017.
The display viewability stats will not change how marketers pay for ads. Instead, the goal is to give marketers more transparency and verification into their Facebook campaigns, which they can then analyze on their own through third-party partners.
“This is our No. 1 requested third-party verification feedback from clients,” Rabkin said. “Together, these four partners cover the vast majority of the market share in terms of what we’ve heard from our top customers and which providers they’re choosing to use.”
Facebook is also extending some viewability stats to non-advertisers so that publishers and users can track video views. As Facebook has grown as a video platform in the past few years, video clips have increasingly taken over more real estate in news feeds, causing publishers and brands to crank out custom content for the site. However, up until now, publishers and brands have not been privy to some of the same stats that advertisers get access to.
Now, Facebook video and Facebook Live video will be counted in Nielsen’s digital content ratings in a way “that’s comparable to television,” Rabkin said.
More metrics issues
In addition to new viewability options, Facebook is also working to become more transparent about its stats after reporting it found a few mistakes recently that could lead to big changes for marketers. All told, Facebook’s ads manager provides advertisers with more than 220 metrics, Rabkin said.
Most notably, Facebook reports that it found a bug with one metric that miscalculated organic daily reach for Pages. Up until now, Facebook has reported daily reach as the sum of daily users that visit a Page over weekly or 28-day time periods. However, that stat does not account for users who visit a Page multiple times. So the same folks were sometimes getting counted again and again. Going forward, reach stats will factor out repeat visitors, which Facebook estimates could cause weekly visitor counts to decrease by 33 percent and 28-day visitor stats to shrink by 55 percent. The company said it expects to fix the issue in the coming weeks.
“We intended for that total to be de-duplicated for repeat visitors, but instead in that one summary number repeat visitors were counted,” Rabkin said. “All of our reach data that we show on Page view insights was unaffected and all the underlying data is fine.”
Also on Pages, Facebook is beginning to calculate reach counts based on viewability. Previously, Facebook has tracked reach count based on when someone refreshes the news feed and a post is placed in a feed—now it will track views under stricter viewability guidelines. Under Facebook’s current guidelines, that means reach count will be calculated instantly when a post appears in a news feed or after it’s been viewed for 10 seconds. With stricter rules, Facebook warns marketers that they may see up to a 20 percent dip in reported reach, and it plans to make the update in the coming months.
In terms of Instant Articles, Facebook’s fast-loading mobile pages for publishers, the company claims that it has overestimated the average time spent per article by 7 percent to 8 percent since August. Facebook says it miscalculated the number because it was using a histogram of average time spent instead of calculating the average time spent reading an article divided by total views.
For the past nine months, Facebook has worked on clarifying the vernacular of its metrics to make terms easier for marketers to understand, with a few of those changes being announced today. For example, the term “three-second video view” is replacing the more generic “video view,” and “website view of content” is replacing “view content.” With video views, Facebook is tacking on the word “aggregate” to its three-second, 10-second and 30-second definitions of video views to explain to marketers that these views represent at least—and possibly a bit more—the specified number of seconds.
Marketer feedback
To convey all of this across to the advertising community, Facebook is launching a measurement council that consists of agency, brand and tech execs who will regularly discuss measurement issues like viewability, attribution and video standardization issues. Facebook says that it will announce the measurement council’s members in the coming weeks.
Facebook is also launching a new blog called Metrics FYI that’s similar to Facebook’s News Feed FYI blog, but it will focus specifically on measurement changes.
Facebook already has a group called Client Council that entails brand CMOs and agency leaders that give input about the site’s advertising options. There are even regional and global councils.
“Our goal is to collect back what are the most pressing issues for our customers right now—some of them are, of course, already known, and then we’ll be working from there,” Rabkin said. “I think the primary focus will be representatives from agencies and the large advertisers who actually have to integrate these measurement results into their real business outcomes. But of course, we’ll have representatives and feedback on the council about the whole flow and everyone who is helping out at every step of the way.”
Source: AdWeek November 16, 2016

3 Things Brands Should Know About Gen Z—and They're Not All About Snapchat

Linx — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 15:01:36 +0000

Millennials will soon be phased out as the target demographic for many industries to make room for the new kids in town, Generation Z. Brands will have to get creative to catch the focus of these digitally-reliant, advertising embracing, fad-chasing consumers. Predictive marketing is going to play a huge role in this transition phase and Linx is fully prepared to take on the challenge with our new marketing model.

Marketing has a new buzzword: Gen Z. Younger than millennials, the next generation is more reliant on digital than its predecessor, forcing brands to get more creative in their marketing.
A quartet of marketers from Gatorade, GE, AwesomenessTV and NBCUniversal spoke about what’s driving the shift Wednesday at Advertising Week.
Here are three things brands need to know if they want to be prepared for Gen Z:
They know what sponsored content is, and they’re cool with it
As with most millennials, Gen Z knows that sponsored content is an ad disguised as a video series—but that’s OK, said Brian Robbins, founder and CEO of AwesomenessTV.
For example, the multichannel’s most popular series, Royal Crush, is about two teens who meet and fall in love on a cruise ship. The series is sponsored by Royal Caribbean and has run for four seasons.
AwesomenessTV worked with Nielsen to compare the digital series creative to that of TV and found that the digital version being 30 percent more efficient.
“If Royal Caribbean didn’t want to make the show anymore, I would still have to make the show because our audience loves it so much,” Robbins said. “Our audience knows that it’s a little bit of a commercial, but they don’t care.”
Snapchat is hot, but it won’t be forever
Snapchat has made inroads with millennials and Gen Z faster than any other social network—notably, Twitter and Facebook. But it won’t always be that way, panelists said.
“I think Snapchat is a really important channel to think about today but it’s not the only one,” said Sam Olstein, GE’s director of global innovation. “Messaging is super exciting and particularly represents so many new opportunities to innovate around format.”
For example, AwesomenessTV’s Robbins said, his company is experimenting with short, influencer content on Kik that “you could sort of engage with and have a two-way conversation or group chat around.”
Still, Snapchat has the massive reach and engaged users brands want, said Gatorade’s head of consumer engagement Kenny Mitchell.
For the Olympics, Gatorade created an animated film with runner Usain Bolt that ran as a seven-minute video on Snapchat. Mitchell didn’t say how many total users watched the ad, but one-third of those who saw it in Discover channels swiped up to watch the spot. And nearly 40 percent watched the entire video.
They like traditional advertising—well, kind of
Even with messaging apps, Snapchat and Instagram, nothing replaces putting a product in consumers’ hands, GE’s Olstein argued.
That’s why the tech giant has made moon sneakers and hot sauce, and created a 12-foot meat smoker at South by Southwest in 2014 and took it on a college tour targeting engineering students on campuses including Georgia Tech and Boston College.
“GE is a complicated company and has really important technology that touches people—it’s hard to convey some of that stuff in the fragmented media and the world of social media,” Olstein said. “As exciting as digital is, it’s hard to duplicate a real-world experience.”
Gatorade also replicated its SXSW activation geared toward young athletes from this year. The installation showed a project launching in 2017 in which consumers can design their own water bottles and sports drinks.
“Our intent was to educate and showcase something that’s a lot harder to be demonstrated in a commercial or a bespoke content piece—we wanted to have a tactile experience,” Olstein said.
Source: AdWeek September 28, 2016

8 Eye-Opening Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

Linx — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 13:19:08 +0000

We all love stats… this story is chock full of them… enjoy!

The media world for months has been all Facebook, Donald Trump and ad blocking, so why would the past week in digital marketing be any different? Check out these eight data points that jumped off the page during the past several days.
1. If social is any indication, Hillary is in trouble
According to analytics player 4C, the Republican primaries and Donald Trump’s successful run at the nomination have garnered nearly 130 million social media engagements (likes, comments, replies, etc.) on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Meanwhile, during the same period of time, Jan. 1 through July 21, the Democrats—chiefly nominee Hillary Clinton and runner-up Bernie Sanders—have only generated 37 million engagements.
2. Men block ads
An IAB report said 26 percent of desktop users and 15 percent of mobile consumers employ ad blockers to zap promos from publishers’ websites. Thirty-two percent of ad blockers are males between 18 and 34, and 22 percent are women of the same age.
3. Facebook Inc. commands the world
There are supposedly 7.4 billion people on Earth. After Facebook Inc.’s earnings report on Wednesday, it became clear the company has attracted an unbelievable chunk of our possible, human audience.
If you add up its four chief platforms—Facebook (1.7 billion monthly users), Messenger (1 billion), WhatsApp (1 billion) and Instagram (500 million)—they total 4.2 billion users. There’s most likely a ton of overlap—between Facebook and Messenger, in particular—but the numbers are staggering, nonetheless.
4. With a grand audience comes grand revenues
And thanks to those huge stats, Facebook continues to make a load of money from advertising, bringing in $6.24 billion in ad sales during the second quarter. Eighty-four percent of that amount came from mobile ads, the social giant also said Wednesday in its earnings report.
5. UnFacebook-like growth
Twitter’s life on Wall Street has been considerably bumpier than Facebook’s because the former is constantly compared—unfairly, perhaps—to the latter. According to Twitter’s second-quarter earnings, its revenue totaled $602 million, a 20 percent year-over-year increase, but fell short of expectations ($607 million). Advertising revenue grew 18 percent to $535 million, with mobile now accounting for 89 percent of total ad revenue.
The San Francisco company’s monthly user base is also growing slowly but steadily, increasing by 3 million over the past three months to total 313 million. Mobile users now account for 82 percent of total users, down 1 percent from the first quarter of 2016.
6. Adidas gets ahead of Olympics game
The shoe brand kicked off its #SpeedTakes campaign for the Olympics on March 27. Adidas has posted 21 videos featuring its sponsored athletes on its YouTube channel. Once a video is posted, the sports gear marketing team has then published messages promoting the video to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
According to Origami Logic, here are Adidas’ average likes per post so far:

Facebook—414
Instagram—74,355
Twitter—524
YouTube—114

What can we learn from those numbers? Well, mainly that Adidas is doing especially well on Instagram when it comes to engagement.
7. It’s all about repetition
Sailthru recently surveyed 125 retail brand clients to find out what’s on their minds, discovering that 60 percent consider repeat purchases a top priority this year.
8. Listen up
Pandora wants advertisers to focus more on weighing the effects of how many people listen to their ads via mobile devices, instead of focusing on, for instance, how many listeners merely see a display ad on a desktop. Here’s why: Ninety-one percent of the company’s 85 million monthly unique users listen on smartphones or tablets. Check out this story about how the digital music player is tackling ad view ability and audibility issues.
Source: AdWeek July 28, 2016

Facebook Combats Ad Blocking by Giving Users Control Over What They See

Linx — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 17:29:08 +0000

Another brilliant strategy from Facebook. And it goes with the mantra of allowing users to drive their experience. Instead of service up advertising that is unwanted, they now allow users to predefine their interests, further enhancing the value of their super targeting platform. It’s a win-win-win.

Facebook thinks it has the antidote for ad blocking.
Today, the social media giant and advertising darling is introducing a tool that could help users have more control over the ads they see, which Facebook says could help users view online ads as something to be appreciated rather than blocked.
To do this, the company is giving users more controls over the ads they see in their news feed. The tool, which debuts today, lets users add and remove interests from an “ad preferences” section based on their what they like and don’t like. According to Andrew Bosworth, Facebook vp of ads and business platform, the updates are meant to help people better hide from data-driven marketing.
“When they’re relevant and well-made, ads can be useful, by helping us find new products and services and introducing us to new experiences—like an ad that shows you your favorite band is coming to town or an amazing airline deal to a tropical vacation,” Bosworth wrote in a blog post. “But because ads don’t always work this way, many people have started avoiding certain websites or apps, or using ad blocking software, to stop seeing bad ads. These have been the best options to date.”
Facebook commissioned research firm Ipsos MORI to better understand what drives people to use ad blockers in the first place. After surveying more than 2,000 people across six countries—the U.S., the UK, France, Germany, Brazil and India—Ipsos found that the majority of people (69 percent) said the main contributing factor to using ad blockers is disruptive ads.
“While people want a personalized online experience, they dislike ads that are disruptive, however personalized,” wrote Adam Isaacson, research director of Ipsos Connect. “Those that block the content on the page, that pop up with sound and that slow the content on the page were all seen to be disruptive by our qualitative sample.”

Personalization does seems like it could help. The Ipsos study found that 79 percent felt they should be able to opt out of specific types of ads. That could mean good news for marketers who would rather spend to reach consumers who actually want to read about them rather than wasting money on those who don’t.
In a statement accompanying the news, IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg praised the move as “spot-on.” He said the approach to “respect advertising as an essential ingredient in connecting users worldwide” should be adopted by others across the Internet.
“For hundreds of years, advertising and marketing have been central to the delivery of entertainment and services that are otherwise free to consumers,” Rothenberg wrote. “In addition, advertising is essential to the functioning of democratic capitalism; it is how consumers and citizens learn about better prices, better features, better job opportunities and even better political candidates. Facebook should be applauded for its leadership on preserving a vibrant value exchange with its users.”
As Facebook offers more tools for personalized ads, it’s also expanding where users see them. Now, users that have ad blockers on their devices will begin seeing desktop ads on Facebook. That doesn’t mean it’s letting up on mobile. Earlier this year, it began making its Facebook Audience Network available outside of native apps, allowing publishers and advertisers to use Facebook’s targeting across the mobile web.
Here’s what the ad preferences page looks like:

Snapchat Is Letting More Brands Run Ads Between Friends' Stories

Linx — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 17:05:51 +0000

As social moves to the Dark Side (Dark Social) from open social platforms it would be expected that Snapchat leverages their base and uses the same strategies as Facebook is using with its messenger platform.

When Snapchat unleashed its ad-tech program Snap Partners in June with plans to serve video ads between stories, observers wondered how users would respond to seeing ads alongside their friends’ videos and photos. Two months in, Snapchat is already expanding its initial pilot to include more advertisers eager to reach the app’s 150 million daily users.
The ads appear between strings of photos and videos that users have share with their followers. Snapchat caps the amount of ads so that each person is served three so-called Snap Ads Between Friends promos per day—one in the morning, one in the afternoon and one at night.
Over the past few weeks, the number of ads has steadily increased. Based on Adweek’s own testing, each Snapchat user views the same number of daily ads, regardless of how much content they consume. In other words, someone who watches 100 stories per day is exposed to the same number of ads as someone who watches a handful of clips. Snapchat declined to comment about its ad load.
Ten brands—including Verizon, Express and Procter & Gamble—piloted the ad format earlier this summer, and now the format is available to a wider group of marketers. Dunkin’ Donuts, Unilever’s skin care brand Simple, L’Oreal-owned Maybelline, Starbucks and JCPenney have all run ads between snaps in the past week.
Similar to Snapchat’s broader Snap Ads format that runs within Discover and Live Stories, the length of a skippable video ad in between snaps is limited to 10 seconds. They can also be targeted by age, gender, location, type of device, carrier and content affinity. But unlike Discover or Live Story ads, vertical videos between snaps don’t include options to “swipe up” to watch a longer video clip or visit a website, which Snapchat has been pushing advertisers to experiment with in recent months.
The move to limit the number of daily ads is part of what many see as Snapchat’s steady but aggressive advertising push to reach $350 million in revenue this year and $1 billion by the end of 2017, according to leaked documents. To get there and compete for budgets alongside Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and others, the rollout of ads on Snapchat has been gradual in order to avoid ruining the user experience. The ad formats mimic the app’s popular features like lenses and filters that its millennial-heavy audience loves. In 36 days in June and July, Snapchat sold 14 sponsored lenses in the U.S. that can cost upwards of $600,000 for a one-day takeover on non-holiday days.
“We have to be thoughtful about the inventory, ad load and the ad experience,” Peter Sellis, Snapchat’s head of monetization product, told Adweek in June when launching its API. “By doing this the right way, focused on creativity and doing it early, it allows us to be extraordinarily conservative. Something that I think often gets lost is that ad effectiveness can be inversely correlated with the number of ads that the viewer sees. If you see 50 ads in a day, the probability of you remembering them is low.”
Source: AdWeek August 10, 2016

Instagram Distinguishes Itself in Social Commerce by Touting Product Discovery

Linx — Fri, 12 Aug 2016 13:18:15 +0000

A buyer’s journey typically starts with information gathering… Instagram has created a great niche in the area as way to discover products and quickly gain insights to competitive options. Any new item should leverage this platform.

Retailers seem to love Instagram, which is now drawing 300 million daily users and 500 million monthly users. The vast majority of its 200,000 advertisers, per the social media platform, are small-to-medium-sized businesses—and it probably stands to reason that a good chunk of them are either ecommerce or multichannel players.
Over time, Instagram has upped its ad offerings for retailers, from unveiling Shop Now buttons about a year ago to rolling out call-to-action buttons as recently as this month. Its ecommerce promos let visitors click through to an advertiser’s home page or specific product page. But the Facebook-owned platform has been reluctant to offer end-to-end commerce, complete with a shopping cart and users’ stored credit card information—capabilities its parent, Amazon, Google and now Pinterest offer merchants.
James Quarles, global head of business and brand development at Instagram, explained why his team hasn’t closed the transactional loop, proclaiming more than once that the mobile app’s focus is on user discovery when it comes to all content, including commercial items.
“The ability to buy now—we’ve deliberately not gone down that path,” Quarles said, speaking with Adweek last week at Instagram Beach at Cannes Lion. “People just don’t see an image and say, ‘OK, got it, done.’ There’s the research phase, the merchandising … that’s where we want to invest time with the retail partners to try to figure out what information is needed in that intermediate space that we can help provide.”
His company has said that 60 percent of its users stated that they discover products and services on the platform, while 75 percent of them said they take action after being inspired. But inspiration is only part of a consumer’s path to actually charging his or her own credit card for a pair of corduroys or a cool T-shirt, Quarles suggested.
“And where does the person really want to purchase? Do they want to go into the boutique? Do they want to go directly to a desktop and save and do it later? Or do they want to go into their favorite app on their phone? I think there’s a number of ways for the best transactional experience,” Quarles said. “Right now, we are not trying to build and compress all of that into Instagram.”
From an outside perspective, it’s not difficult to imagine his platform testing a pure shopping cart down the road, but Quarles said the real emphasis is on the customer journey and listening to advertisers.
With that in mind, Salesforce and House of Blues represent two brands doing a great job with Instagram ads, Quarles pointed out. In terms of the music-venue chain, the House of Blues in Charlotte, N.C., tested targeting people with ads on the mobile app that drove a significant lift in tickets sold, and then the brand rolled the Instagram strategy out to 40 markets.
“People on Instagram are twice as likely to go to shows,” he added.
But it doesn’t seem likely that they will be buying the ticket to get into performances directly via Instagram any time soon.
“I think the journey is more circuitous, and it’s really interesting for us to try to solve that with the retailers and the brands themselves,” Quarles said. “That’s the fun part. [Developing that process] will be our strategy for the coming years.”
Source: AdWeek June 29, 2016

As Publisher Reach on Facebook Goes Down, Video Is Going Way Up

Linx — Fri, 29 Jul 2016 15:43:03 +0000

We have finally moved from Content is King to Video is King when it comes to social marketing. Learning how to communicate in 5 second snippets is a core competency and required skill set. Where is your video messaging?

Even as Facebook plans on de-emphasizing publisher-posted content in users’ news feeds in favor of posts from friends and family, video seems to be on the way up.
According to data compiled by SocialFlow, a social analytics company used by many major publishers, video content posted by publishers on Facebook is gaining quite a bit of traction. The company—which posts more than half a millions stories a month to Facebook and other social media channels on behalf of publishers—analyzed 30 days of video content to determine the total reach, likes and shares. And while a report last month highlighted a 42 percent drop in reach for publishers from January to May, SocialFlow found reach had grown by a factor of eight in the past month.
According to the data, which SocialFlow presented via Facebook Live on Tuesday, video accounted for just 0.9 percent of posts but for 7.15 percent of reach, 5.2 percent of likes and 11.1 percent of shares. And while the results don’t represent all publishers, SocialFlow said there might be some outlets that are seeing even better results.
“It’s clear that media companies are increasingly turning to video to maximize their reach and audience engagement,” SocialFlow CEO Jim Anderson said in an email to Adweek. “We’ve heard plenty of anecdotal reports of strong video performance, and now we have the data to back up the anecdotes.”
The data doesn’t include Facebook Live video, which is becoming increasingly prominent on the platform, especially since Facebook began paying some publishers millions of dollars to use the format. (According to a Wall Street Journal report earlier this month, Facebook is paying more than $50 million collectively to news outlets including The New York Times, Mashable, CNN and Vox to create video content.)
Anderson said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if video posts grow to account for 5 percent to 10 percent of total post volume over the next six to 12 months.
That rapid growth would be in line with Facebook’s own estimates. Earlier this month, a Facebook vp in Europe said at a Fortune event that she thinks most content on the platform will be “all video” within five years and that it will all be on mobile.
Source: AdWeek June 30, 2016