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Poshmark saw a 37% increase in app installs, along with a 28% reduction in ad costs. Target launched a campaign to drive installs of their mobile Cartwheel app, resulting in an uptick of downloads and 43% savings per install on new users.

Instagram users do not want to know that they are being advertised to. Instead, be subtle and charming with your ads, fitting in with the context your users expect. 

Instagram also outlined its coming Creator Profiles, which code hacker Jane Manchun Wong previewed recently (below), while it also shared some usage stats, including that 69% of users say they come to Instagram to interact with celebrities, and over 80% of accounts proactively follow a business on the platform.

Instagram also noted that it will continue to ramp up its push to remove inauthentic activity, including purchased followers and likes, in order to clean-up its platform and improve the integrity of its metrics

when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to disclose shadow contact information to users for almost a year now. But it has even refused to disclose these shadow details to users in Europe, where privacy law is stronger and explicitly requires companies to tell users what data it has on them.

To test the shadow information finding, the researchers tried a real-world test. They uploaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people who work for Northeastern are unlikely to have added to their accounts, though it’s very likely that the numbers would be in the address books of people who know them and who might have uploaded them to Facebook in order to “find friends.” The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted with ads, and when they ran an ad campaign, the ad turned up in the Facebook news feed of Mislove, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed this with my own test targeting his landline number.

“I think that many users don’t fully understand how ad targeting works today: that advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc,” said Mislove. “In describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this, and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer related services. Thus, we think there is a significant need to educate users about how exactly targeted advertising on such platforms works today.”

There are certainly creepier practices happening in the advertising industry, but it’s troubling this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about letting you control your ad experience. It’s disturbing that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for that purpose to data-mine them for ads.

When I asked the company last year about whether it used shadow contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information, and it hadn’t made the practice clear in its extensive messaging to users about ads

Those surveyed said they were most interested in advertising on Instagram (64%), followed by Amazon (43%) and then Spotify (40%). About 37% of marketers said they are interested in advertising in Snapchat, which is about the same (35%) as what they said in 2015, according to RBC.

Snapchat's focus on "sound-on" video ads has been appealing to its entertainment clients.

The behavior on the app is very different as you want to focus more on shorter content, whereas on Instagram, people tend to watch longer videos."

Snapchat says its vertical video ads are "as good as television" — and in some ways better — because users can choose to skip ads, swipe up to interact with them, and advertisers can use more granular targeting than TV. But with AdAge reporting in November that the average Snapchat video ad lasts less than three seconds and Snapchat counting a video "view" as soon as the video opens, it remains to be seen whether its ads are more effective than those on TV

a lack of measurement data, disinterest among social media celebrities, confusion about the platform, and general indifference towards advertising agencies — are leading more of their clients to abandon it.

Trend Pie's Ricci said. Out of 100,000 "views," he estimated only 1 percent actually saw the ad.

"Instagram is built for finding what you don't follow easily, Snapchat isn't. If Snapchat can figure that out, that will help, because why make content people can't find?"

When Snap went public, he noticed a rush of influencers asking them to include their Snap accounts as available for advertisers. Since then, many have abandoned their accounts to focus on more lucrative platforms

Those are known within the agency as educational letters, whereas the recent ones are known as warning letters. For repeat offenders, the FTC could seek to impose fines.

Since the video tests (vertical vs. square) were identical in content, theme, length, headline, caption, and more, it came as quite the surprise that vertical video outperformed square by such a significant margin (as much as 68 percent less expensive in cost per view). It’s also interesting to note that not only did vertical video outperform square in the Facebook News Feed, but Facebook outperformed Instagram in overall cost per click (CPC) within the feed

which format drives more engagement within the Instagram Feed? Turns out it’s vertical video!

In all of our tests, we found that Facebook consistently generated a lower CPC than its Instagram counterpart.

ith our research, we wanted to know if spending more time, resources, and money on producing polished videos actually resulted in greater results than organic DIY videos. We found that there was no statistically significant difference in the results.

Admissions officers are desperate to make the most of social media as a recruiting tool. “One of the things we constantly talk about in our marketing department is, How do we utilize these tools where students spend so much of their time in the admission process?”

Some want to reach new students; others want to change a narrative about their school, Freeman says, using microinfluencers on campus to promote academics, say, rather than the partying scene. Others, like UC Berkeley, harness alumni influencers to help raise money.

The most successful college-aged influencers seem underwhelmed by universities’ offerings—educational and financial both. Markian is a college dropout. “I took a marketing class in 2017 and it didn’t touch anything even related to social media,” he says. “There’s no question that college is unnecessary. I dropped out because it was hindering my business.”