Group items tagged

After Facebook Watch, Lasso, and IGTV failed to become hits with teens, the company has been quietly developing another youthful video product. Multiple sources confirm that Facebook has spent months building LOL, a special feed of funny videos and GIF-like clips.

LOL is currently in private beta with around 100 high school students who signed non-disclosure agreements with parental consent to do focus groups and one-on-one testing with Facebook staff.

Facebook confirmed it is privately testing LOL as a home for funny meme content with a very small number of US users. While those testers experience LOL as a replacement for their Watch tab, Facebook says there’s no plans to roll out LOL in Watch and the team is still finalizing whether it will become a separate feature in one of Facebook’s main app or a standalone app. Facebook declined to give a formal statement but told us the details we had were accurate.With teens increasingly turning to ephemeral Stories for sharing and content consumption, Facebook is desperate to lure them back to its easily-monetizable feeds.

By 2014, “Facebook the big news machine” was in full swing with Trending, hashtags and news outlets pouring resources into growing their Pages. Emphasizing the “news” in News Feed retrained users to wait for the big world-changing headlines to come to them rather than crisscrossing the home pages of various publishers. Many don’t even click-through, getting the gist of the news just from the headline and preview blurb. Advertisers followed the eyeballs, moving their spend from the publisher sites to Facebook.

In 2015, Facebook realized users hated waiting for slow mobile websites to load, so it launched Instant Articles to host publisher content within its own app. Instant Articles trained users not to even visit news sites when they clicked their links, instead only having the patience for a fast-loading native page stripped of the publisher’s identity and many of their recirculation and monetization opportunities. Advertisers followed, as publishers allowed Facebook to sell the ads on Instant Articles for them and thereby surrendered their advertiser relationships at the same time as their reader relationships.

This is how Facebook turns publishers into ghostwriters, a problem I blew the whistle on in 2015. Publishers are pitted against each other as they make interchangeable “dumb content” for Facebook’s “smart pipes.”

Make the most of these remarkable CTRs by decking out your App Store listing. Optimize for the App Store by writing a winning description, listing key features, including app screen shots, etc.

Instagram user demographics show them to be young millennials, with over half of users between the ages of 18-29.

In a study using over 400 global campaigns, ad recall was 2.8x higher on Instagram sponsored posts than other online advertising mediums. Snail Games saw a 339% lift in app installs using Instagram ad videos (as well as 5x higher in-app purchase rates).

Advertisers on Snapchat will now have access to goal-based bidding for app install ads, an industry term that means an advertiser can target Snapchat users who are likely to install its app. Snapchat is targeting its app install ads, which ask users to swipe up on full-screen video ads, using machine-learning technology it developed in-house.

Aside from app install ads, Snapchat is also beefing up its ad targeting. For the first time, advertisers can target Snapchat users who have previously interacted with other ads they've previously ran in the app.

if an advertiser buys one of Snapchat's more expensive selfie filters (which the company calls Lenses) for a national campaign, now the buyer can later target those same users again with one of Snapchat's full-screen video ads.

Along with merging the Messenger version and Facebook version of the sharing style originally created by Snapchat, Facebook will also now allow Groups to post inside Stories, and will also gradually bring the tool to Facebook Lite.

Messenger will still have a place to share Stories, but those posts will also be part of Facebook Stories and vice versa, instead of requiring users to post content separately to each. That means Messenger users will also notice that the feature is no longer called Day, but will share the name of Facebook Stories.

Stories that are viewed in one app will be marked as already viewed in the other app. The change, Facebook says, is designed to simplify Stories.

nstagram hopes that allowing people to complete their purchases inside the app will inspire them to shop more — and to create a big new business for parent company Facebook, which has recently signaled that it expects commerce and payments to represent the future of the company. For now, payment information stored with Facebook will only be used on Instagram. But it’s easy to imagine Facebook letting you use your credentials elsewhere in its family of apps.

In the meantime, Facebook says it won’t share your payment information with other users or with retailers.

Instagram believes shopping represents a massive new business opportunity. The Verge reported last year that the company is building a standalone shopping app. It also said Monday that 130 million people a month tap on product tags in shopping posts.

With Facebook's new Open Graph applications, you're not just limited to other people's apps -- you can also create your own apps that support your very own marketing initiatives! The new and improved Open Graph allows third-party developers to create 'frictionless' apps that, after a user provides permission once, automatically share users' engagement with the app on Facebook.

Use Facebook at the speed of light with Facebook keyword shortcuts for Google Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer. Access Facebook's keyword shortcuts here.

From every ad, users can also steer themselves to an "ads preferences" settings page, where they can tell Facebook not to show them ads based on their inferred affinity for certain categories. Conversely, they can also select categories they are interested in.

Now users who click or tap on the drop-down menu on a Facebook ad and select "Why am I seeing this ad?" will be taken to a brief explanation for why that ad was shown to them. For instance, a user could be told they saw an ad because they're interested in televisions, and that Facebook's inference was based on pages they've liked and ads they've clicked on.

the new targeting is intended to help direct-response advertisers, in particular, to make their Facebook ads more relevant to their selected audience.

Facebook is reintroducing Atlas, the underused platform it bought from Microsoft last year.

it will allow them to buy ads on non-Facebook websites and apps, using Facebook targeting data

these ads aren’t “Facebook ads.” But it is also playing up the notion that the ads marketers buy via Atlas will be more effective than other big ad platforms, because they use Facebook’s data.

The company is relaunching Groups by rolling it into its main app by the end of the month after quietly pulling the standalone app earlier this year, and it will be streamlining the service by cutting out several features, including an ability for Group administrators to pre-moderate comments; and a way to email send Group posts as emails to the whole group, while also adding in new features like threaded replies and the ability to post video and other media.

Almost exactly a year ago, Facebook announced that it too was killing off its Groups app so that it could integrate the feature closer with the core app experience. In both the case of LinkedIn and Facebook, the idea is somewhat the same: while we have our wider networks of friends and Pages that we follow on both platforms, sometimes there is value in communities that are focused around more specific interests, and ultimately, that might turn out to be the lever that brings more people in and out of using the main service.

conversations taking place in Groups will now appear in-stream on the LinkedIn feed, rather than in a separate tab. When group members are replying to posts, there will now be threaded replies, which will let people respond directly to comments within the thread.

the new social model is simply to harvest social signals and sell personalized ads, however and wherever possible.

The purpose of Facebook’s upcoming mobile ad network is to sell ads outside of Facebook.com and its mobile app. This “multiple app” strategy often accompanies a network’s own app offerings — in Facebook’s case, Messenger, Facebook Camera and Paper. According to Elgan: If Facebook’s direction or strategy isn’t clear, let me spell it out: Harvest personal data from multiple apps, then sell personalized advertising in multiple locations.   Here’s an oversimplified example: An ad for a Starbucks promotion presented to you in a mobile game (sold through Facebook’s upcoming ad network) might be based on knowledge that you spend a ton of time at Starbucks — information harvested from the Moves app.   As you can see, there’s no Facebook — no social network — involved in this series of events. But Facebook gets paid anyway.

It’s passive zombie-feed scrolling, not active communication with friends, that hurts our health, according to studies Facebook has been pointing to for the last seven months. Yet it’s treating all our social networking the same with today’s launch of its digital well-being screen-time management dashboards for Facebook and Instagram in the U.S. before rolling them out to everyone in the coming weeks.

Unfortunately, you’ll only see info about your usage on the mobile app on that device. It won’t include your minutes spent on desktop, where these features don’t appear, what you do on your tablet or info about your usage across the Facebook family of apps. There are no benchmarks about how long other people your age or in your country spend in the apps. All of these would make nice improvements to the dashboards.

Zuckerberg says “People share more photos, videos, and links on WhatsApp and Messenger than they do on social networks.” 

“Our biggest competitor by far is iMessage. In important countries like the US where the iPhone is strong, Apple bundles iMesssage as the default texting app, and it’s still ahead” Zuckerberg notes.

Mark Zuckerberg stressed that sharing is shifting to private chat, where people send 100 billion messages per day on Facebook’s family of apps, and Stories, where he says people share 1 billion of these slideshows per day (though it’s unclear if that includes third-party apps like Snapchat).

I am surprised it has taken this long for Forrester to attack the performance of Facebook. It is something we have seen developing for years. The challenge is the space has evolved making it less and less relevant for brands in the eyes of the Consumer. The shift to mobile has made Facebook pages virtually obsolete. People very infrequently drift outside of their newsfeed on mobile devices.

One recent study of sweepstakes found that only 11.8% of participants shared the Facebook app with others. In the past that number was well over 50%. You add to that the way Facebook shares content (known as the Facebook algorithm or Edgerank) only 5-15% of their friends would even have the potential to see it in their newsfeed

Facebook will round up your friends’ posts and photos from a particular place, like Manhattan’s famed Dominique Ansel Bakery, so you can see what they liked (the cronut, obviously) and what they didn’t. Place tips will also include information from the business page, like hours of operation, events, and menu details.

To determine your location, the app will use Wi-Fi, cell networks, GPS, and Bluetooth beacons placed at particular locations (a limited number in New York City so far).

But place tips will make better use of Facebook’s data, putting information front and center rather than making you comb through search results. The network’s rollout of Bluetooth beacons is a move to watch. Apple has been distributing iBeacons since the launch of iOS 7 in 2013, and we’ve seen some interesting uses of the technology, but it hasn’t yet gone mainstream. With Facebook now on board with beacons, we might see businesses adopt them at a much quicker pace. After all, few marketing moves make businesses happier than highly targeted, location-based, actionable ads.

Facebook will focus on improving visual features in Messenger. In his post, Marcus says “people will expect a super fast and intuitive camera, video, images, GIFs, and stickers with almost every conversation.”

Messenger bet big on bots in 2017. Last year the company worked with small businesses and global brands to create more than 200,000 bots for Messenger. Marcus writes, “Look for investment in rich messaging experiences not only from global brands, but small businesses who need to be creative and nimble to stay competitive.” Since many of these bots provide very rudimentary features, we would expect to see improvements in overall user experience this year. We also expect larger brands to follow the lead of brands like Apple Music and Lego in creating marketing solutions made for the Messenger platform. 

Expect to see more businesses transitioning at least some of their customer service resources to Messenger. A recent study, commissioned by Facebook found that “56 percent of people surveyed would rather message a business than call customer service, and 67 percent expect to message businesses even more over the next two years.”

Shazam execs' talk of using their proprietary data for advertising puts them in league with The Weather Company, Pandora and Amazon, which are all mining information like pollen count, song choices and product purchases to inform ad targeting. Mr. McGurn said the Shazam app ingests the live audio feed from 160 TV networks every day. That positions the app as an ally to TV networks trying to stem their share of ad spend from being siphoned online.

Shazam is also currying favor with TV networks as a way to drive viewership. For last fall's Country Music Association Awards, Shazam pushed alerts featuring the show's air date and time to the in-app news feeds of eight million users who might be interested in watching, like those who had previously tagged a Blake Shelton song. Ten million people received such a notification for The Grammys.

People who use Shazam to "tag" the game's broadcast this year will be shown a new Twitter-like timeline. The live content feed will document the game -- from tweets to photos to ads -- and is designed to keep people using Shazam for the duration. But even if people tune in and out of the app, Shazam has created a new ad-retargeting program that plugs into Facebook.

the exponential growth of sharing may not, actually, be helping Facebook. And with the explosion of dedicated mobile sharing apps, the industry may be evolving in ways that Zuckerberg never foresaw.

Facebook is now trying to cram so much "sharing" through a single service that it is overwhelming many of its core users.

Facebook knows it has a problem. It planned a major redesign that gave users more control over the News Feed. But it was scrapped when the first batch of users showed low engagement with the new design. 

the majority of teens now consider Facebook the alternate choice. 

This speaks to a shift in thinking amongst teens, in that privacy has become a concern. Users still want to be connected, but want to choose their connections more carefully, and compartmentalize their relationships. They want to share their lives, but to target where, what, and sometimes how long something is shown.

78% of our respondents counted among those who accessed their favorite social media application at least three times a day. Regardless of which app selected (and make no mistake, Facebook is included), users log on several times daily