This Week in Social (Weeks of October 20)
This Week in Social is a weekly digest of some of the biggest stories in social media marketing news. These stories are the show notes for the Brave Ad World Podcast. Each story is discussed at a deeper level on the podcast.
Snapchat Debuts its First Ad (Read more at AdWeek)
Snapchat advertising is here. Less than a week after the ephemeral messaging service announced that advertising would be coming, Snapchat followed up with its first ad, which promotes Universal Pictures' Ouija. The ad ran last weekend as an animated GIF under the 'Recent Updates' tab with a 'Sponsored' label. Users needed to click the ad and hold their fingers on their phone screens for the duration of the ad. The was a twenty-second movie trailer with a stitched-together feel, similar to Snapchat's snaps.
Snapchat's greatest strength is its audience, and for products looking for mass audiences, skewing on the younger side, Snapchat offers a viable solution. However, knowing how fickle teens and younger social media users can be, moving from platform to platform, that probably won't be a sustainable offering over the long-term.
It will have to evolve to compete with other paid social platforms in terms of analytics, targeting and native solutions.
This is Snapchat's first foray into advertising, so it will likely evolve over time. But one thing Snapchat has going for it is users opting in to watch the ad by holding their fingers on their screens for the duration of the ads.
This solution is currently a limited one, offering one way for brands looking to reach a mass audience. That probably won't be enough to make Snapchat ads an attractive solution over the long-term.
Foursquare Unveils First Ad Campaign (Read more at AdWeek)
Foursquare has unveiled its first ad campaign, which will run as OOH in New York subways and Chicago bike share kiosks. The ads show two different people with different taste and use cases on Foursquare. They are purely focused on discovering the food and activities that you uniquely will want to do. There is no mention of mayorships or check-ins, which where folded into Foursquare's sister app, Swarm, in August.
Foursquare is purely focused on local discovery. To accompany the campaign, Foursquare announced that it now has 55 million registered users who have generated 50 million tips.
The campaign is scheduled to continue for six weeks.
Foursquare needed to reintroduce itself to users who may have heard of it as a check-in service years ago. If it's going to be successful with its pivot, reintroducing itself to people who had written it off makes sense. Although, the pivot appears to have already been successful in tis own right. Since then Foursquare has seen a 54% lift in users compared to last year. Today, one-third of its users use Swarm only, one-third Foursquare only and one-third use both every 30 days.
However, its growth appears to be slowing down. Download rate rankings for Foursquare apps are falling as are unique visitors. Advertising may be a final attempt for Foursquare to turn the tide.
Tumblr Ad Performance Revealed in Yahoo Earnings Report (Read more at The New York Times)
Yahoo shared its third-quarter results this week, and one of the most anticipated results focused on Tumblr.
Tumblr will bring in $100 million in ad sales in 2015. While that's still a far cry from the $1 billion CEO Marissa Mayer spent to acquire the platform, Tumblr remains a long-term platform. As Yahoo continues to shift to mobile, Tumblr will play a valuable role in contributing to mobile, which Mayer predicts will be a $250 million business.
In addition to reporting some of Tumblr's numbers, Yahoo noted that display ads were down 5% this year over last to $447 million, but overall revenue increased by 1% after it took the step of adding 24% more ads. Price-per-click was up 17% and brought in a 4% increase in revenue.
Popular opinion was that Tumblr wasn't performing, which was why Yahoo refrained from sharing any numbers. However, it looks like it may be more of the opposite.
The audience on Tumblr grew 40% to 420 million users, and the number of blogs came close to doubling, hitting 206 million. In addition, the amount of time people spend on Tumblr increased from 22 to 28 minutes.
It's taken time, but Tumblr appears to be starting to carry its own weight. And with display declining and mobile becoming more of a focus, it's likely Yahoo will continue to look to Tumblr to bring in a greater and greater share of revenue over time.
Twitter Pitches Fabric to Developers (Read more at CNET)
Twitter is working to develop closer relationships with developers to make Twitter a more central part of mobile apps, not just a social network. This week Twitter shared a suite of tools to help developers build mobile apps it calls Fabric.
One of the features Twitter shared is called Digits. Digits allows users to log onto apps using phone numbers instead of usernames with passwords or social authentication, and McDonald's will be the first to put Digits to use in all of its apps.
It also emphasized its messaging capabilities. For example, Jawbone created an app called Drop that allows users to suggest music at a party with tweets. Fabric will also allow native integration of tweets inside of apps. The Wall Street Journal will be rolling out this feature.
Social networks are becoming less about being social networks and more about connecting people from within apps. We've seen this with Facebook in a very big way, and Twitter has no plans to be left out of the fold. Google and Yahoo also offer similar products.
As social networks move forward and learn even more about what developers want, the tools are set to get smarter and more useful, while apps get more social. If Fabric is useful, Twitter will have the opportunity to put its MoPub programmatic mobile exchange to work generating ad revenue across apps leveraging Fabric.
Facebook Launches New App Called Rooms (Read more at The Telegraph)
Facebook has released another standalone app called Rooms. Rooms joins other standalone Facebook apps, including Slingshot and Messenger, as a way for Facebook to provide an all-inclusive suite of social apps.
Rooms allows users to create rooms or boards focused on a specific topic and then recruit others to join by sending them QR codes. Rooms can be focused on any topic, and users can use pseudonyms to communicate anonymously without connecting Rooms to their Facebook profiles. In fact, a different name can be used for each Room a user joins. The app is mobile only and currently is ad-free.
Rooms offers a very old-school feel in the sense that it creates what are essentially modern message boards for anonymous individuals to discuss shared passions and interests. The new app joins several other apps like Yik Yak, Snapchat, Whisper and Secret, which offer more private sharing capabilities, so Facebook is clearly tapping into a trend here. But its success with separate apps has not been stellar. Messenger is really the only notable success of an app that Facebook developed that users use beyond its core app. WhatsApp and Instagram were acquisitions.
Rooms could be different in that it isn't a direct copy of existing apps but still scratches a similar itch. It could find a niche. However, Facebook's reputation when it comes to privacy and anonymity has been scrutinized, so we'll see how open users are to trusting a private social network from Facebook.
News Quick Hits
- Flickr has launched its first iPad app. It allows users to organize photos, access them and view them in full resolution. Users can also choose to share their images to other services. (Read more at The Next Web)
- Twitter's Buy button will launch for all organizations in Q1 2015. The button went into testing last month as a way to let users make purchases or submit donations directly on Twitter. (Read more at VentureBeat)
- Foursquare wasn't the only network running an ad. Facebook released a video ad to promote its Messenger app. The ad offers little information on what differentiates Messenger from other messaging apps, but it does present it as a feel-good experience. (Read more and see the ad at The Next Web)
- Yelp has introduced a new feature to allow people to book hotel rooms from the Yelp website and mobile apps. The feature is possible through an integration with Hipmunk. (Read more at The Next Web)
- Move over Ello. There's another social startup in town. Tsu's promise to users is you will own your audience and your content. Plus, any revenue your content generates will be shared with you. Tsu is built to be the opposite of other social networks, which profit from the content shared by users. Whether or not Tsu will catch on remains to be seen. (Read more at SocialTimes)
- Groupon has launched a new section called Pages, which aggregates the phone numbers, hours and URLs for 7 million businesses. The goal is to entice businesses to offer Groupon deals for users who stumble upon their pages and to encourage users to browse its website for offers. Users can also leave "Tips" for the businesses they visit. (Read more at The Wall Street Journal)
- Google has launched Inbox for Android, iOS and the web on an invitation-only basis. Inbox allows users to sign in with their Gmail accounts and then displays emails with previews of messages in an news feed type format. Inbox is designed to pull out th emost interesting bits of information from the email, so users can quickly move through their inboxes without opening all the messages. It will also pull in contextual information. For example, a flight email confirmation will bring in information about the flight in real-time. Inbox also has a feature that allows users to create to-do lists, which Google then pulls in contextual information related to the tasks users list such as phone numbers of people they need to call. Inbox also bundles emails into categories such as Travel, Finance and Social. Emails from marketers will be bundled together as 'Promotions.' Inbox is not intended to replace Gmail, but Google does anticipate some users may opt to use it over Gmail. (Read more at The New York Times)
- Ello closed a deal for $5.5 million in VC funding. In addition to closing this deal, Ello wrote and agreed to a charter that says Ello will never sell user data, run ads or sell Ello to anyone who would encourage them to do any of those things. The charter puts Ello in the public benefit corporation (PBC) category, which means it has a legal obligation to do social good, but it can still be a for-profit organization. (Read more at BetaBeat)