Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Big brands usually take their ad campaigns very seriously. But sometimes they don’t. In their latest attempt to win over the coveted Generation Z, companies from Uber to Netflix are laughing at themselves in sponsored memes, or funny vignettes, on Instagram. 

Meme accounts are a way for brands to reach a powerful audience that doesn’t consume media in the same way their parents and grandparents did. Gen Z, roughly between the ages of 7 and 22,  is the biggest consumer cohort globally, with spending power to the tune of more than $143 billion in the U.S. alone. And while Instagram remains the most popular social platform among teenagers, Dino said meme accounts are one of the fastest growing parts of Instagram.

Not even the promise of lower CPMs as a result of less competition was enough to tempt large swaths of advertisers to change their view of the platform last year. But it wasn’t for lack of effort. Snapchat execs pushed the self serve auction model in the U.K. for much of 2018.

Snapchat’s impressions are now the cheapest of its peers, according to the ad buyers interviewed for this article.

ll told, the ephemeral mobile messaging app had a good year in 2018 thanks in part to the arrival of the Snap Pixel. When it launched last summer, the pixel gave its ad business more clout as agencies could go to advertisers with more accurate data based on how Snapchat’s ads drive direct response clicks to websites. Deeper data on what actions Snapchat’s ads drove meant ad buyers could move away from last click attribution models.

Instagram's working on a new ad type that it's calling "Branded content ads", which will let brands sponsor posts created by celebrities and publishers, and then promote them as they would their other ad efforts.

"Until now, brands could hire popular Instagram users to work on ad campaigns and promote products with branded content, but the posts would only reach the followers of the influencer. Branded content ads let the advertisers promote these Instagram posts just like they would any other ad."

The offering will essentially be an extension of Instagram's existing branded content tagging system - now, along with the 'Paid Partnership' tags (as shown below), brands will also be able to extend their promotions of the same.

Before now brands and publishers have participated in Groups through the personal accounts of people in their companies.

In the past year, as Facebook has tried to fix the platform, it prioritized Groups as a constructive activity on the social network, connecting people on the service in positive ways. Facebook shows more messages from Groups in the News Feed, too, so they have a better chance at reaching people.

We are now going further in our efforts to limit low-quality ads on our platforms by disapproving more of them and reducing distribution for more ads in our auction."

1. Engagement bait These are your typical 'like and share' posts, re-purposed as ads. Facebook has specific rules against using such methods in contests, but they also don't like them in promotions.

2. Withholding information Facebook also dislikes ads which lure clicks by alluding to the full detail of the post without being clear on what that detail actually is.

News publishers’ “pivot to video” was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real for news video too — even if people within those publishers doubted the trend based on their own experiences, and even as research conducted by outside organizations continued to suggest that the video trend was overblown and that news readers preferred text. (Heidi N. Moore put many of these trends together in 2017, and her accounting is only strengthened by the new information that we’re seeing this week.)

The court case was unsealed this week, following efforts by organizations like the online publishers’ trade organization Digital Content Next to make previously redacted parts available to the public. I read the filing and pulled out some of the most interesting and relevant parts for news publishers below. I wanted to try to see whether Facebook’s active promotion of its video offerings might have influenced news publishers’ allocations of resources, and whether it is reasonable to allege that Facebook knew, as publisher after publisher laid off editorial staff and pushed into video, that that was misguided. I wanted to know whether people working in news organizations were fired based on faulty data provided by a giant platform that publishers believed they could trust.

One of the many ways that ads get in front of your eyeballs on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant lets an advertiser upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses it has on file; it will then put an ad in front of accounts associated with that contact information. A clothing retailer can put an ad for a dress in the Instagram feeds of women who have purchased from them before, a politician can place Facebook ads in front of anyone on his mailing list, or a casino can offer deals to the email addresses of people suspected of having a gambling addiction. Facebook calls this a “custom audience.”

You might assume that you could go to your Facebook profile and look at your “contact and basic info” page to see what email addresses and phone numbers are associated with your account, and thus what advertisers can use to target you. But as is so often the case with this highly efficient data-miner posing as a way to keep in contact with your friends, it’s going about it in a less transparent and more invasive way.

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.”

In 2016, BuzzSumo analyzed more than 800 million Facebook posts. Based on their findings, posts with less than 50 characters “were more engaging than long posts.” According to another, more precise study by Jeff Bullas, posts with 80 characters or less receive 66 percent higher engagement:

Paid posts: 5 to 18 words Every Facebook ad needs three types of content: a Headline, Main Text, and a Description. After analyzing 37,259 Facebook ads, AdEspresso found that ads did best when the copy in each element was clear and concise. According to the data, the ideal length for a: Headline, the first text people read, is 5 words. Main Text, the snippet above your image or video, is 14 words. Description, the text that lives directly below your headline, is 18 words.

Videos: 30 to 60 seconds With video, one of the primary measures of success is how long people watch, also known as your video retention rate. In 2016, Kinetic Social tracked 2 billion social ad impressions and found that 44 percent of 30- to 60-second videos on Facebook were viewed to completion. Meanwhile, videos that ran under 30 seconds or over two minutes saw completion rates of 26 and 31 percent, respectively. A more recent poll, from 2018, showed that 33 percent of Facebook users preferred to watch shorter videos, from 30 to 50 seconds long.

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.

Snapchat as “a camera, where how you feel matters more than how you look,” while painting it as an easy way to take photos of messy babies and put dog ears on grandma.

As celebrities abandon ship and convince their followers to do so as well, Snap’s demonstrated interest in a broader, older audience feels more like a survival tactic than a useful promotion of a platform that launched six years ago.

It took the company a full five years to release any instructions whatsoever on Snapchat’s convoluted and often maligned user interface; and even then, it was buried deep in its IPO filing last year

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.”

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.”

advertiser interest in Snapchat is flat to dwindling, as many opt to move toward Instagram

Issues with Snap include continued issues over measurement, difficulty in finding content, influencers moving to other platforms and lack of outreach to agencies and brands from Snap

Some brands "think Snapchat is dying, and they want their brand associated with a platform that is growing,"

Between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, AOL and YouTube, Snapchat only outperformed AOL in terms of ROI, scoring a 3.43 out of a possible 8 points, according to the survey (AOL scored a 2.88). Google (6.98) and Facebook (6.72) led the pack, performing nearly twice as better than Snapchat, RBC said.

1,600 marketers were surveyed in an attempt to gauge the pulse of the digital advertising industry. The sobering news underscores the uphill battle Snapchat faces as other platforms like Facebook-owned Instagram and Messenger mimic its features.

Marketers cited increased competition from Instagram, difficulty measuring key performance indicators, poor targeting and a decrease in both user engagement and open rates as reasons why their ROI with Snapchat decreased

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.

Snapchat is at the mercy of competitors like Facebook and Google that can simply copy its products.Advertisers say Snapchat's unique selling point is that it is cool, new, and has created its own advertising "currency."But ad-buyers also need Snapchat to do more to prove its ads actually drive sales if they are going to commit meaningful budgets to the platform.

the barrier to entry for new entrants is low, and the switching costs to another platform are also low. Moreover, the majority of our users are 18-34 years old.

Users under 25, it says, visit Snapchat more than 20 times and spend more than 30 minutes on the app each day. It may have fewer users than its rivals, but, for now at least, they are highly-engaged

ne day I spent a full 10 minutes obsessing over the perfect way to say “I’m a writer. I don’t do math” in a message to my accountant: [Girl symbol] (meaning me) + [Pen and paper] (writer) + [calculator] (math) = “?!?!?” Right, it doesn’t sound so complicated. But by finding said emoji, putting them in sequence and spacing them out, I could have typed the statement 17 times.

It wasn’t until 2008 that a uniform emoji alphabet was created (the idea was to minimize inconsistency across platforms), and Apple adopted it in 2011, adding it to its iOS5 operating system.

Problem number one: Building a relevant and engaged audience on Snapchat is difficult, compared to other social networks.

Issue number two: Snapchat has its own vibe. It may be difficult for many companies to achieve Snapchat credibility without some help from the cool kids.

the third issue is, the challenge of creating continuous, credible, snap-worthy content that disappears can be significant.

Advertisers will have the option to turn their promoted tweets into different ad formats while still using the same creative and targeting elements. For example, tweet engagement campaigns could become native ads and promoted video campaigns will transform into in-app video ads.

The move is part of the platform’s expansion of its Twitter Publisher Network (TPN), which has now been renamed to Twitter Audience Platform.

MoPub offers a comprehensive platform that monetizes ad space on mobile platforms and social media, while providing real-time bidding for prime advertising slots and times. In 2013, the company was purchased by Twitter for $350 millio

Despite the silence from Facebook on the matter, the company has made moves in the past that would indicate at least a desire to further its reach in the mobile advertising market. Last year, Facebook released Audience Network, which is meant to build out its infrastructure and enable advertisers to run Facebook ads on third-party mobile phones. Another such program is Atlas, which tracks users anonymously and provides feedback to advertisers. Facebook has also taken out a patent on a program that would enable advertisers to target only the most “influential” people on social media. Theoretically, these programs would be stitched together as part of any MoPub-like system.