This Week in Social (Week of January 12)
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.
Twitter Developing Advertising Approach to Reach Non-Users (Read more at The Wall Street Journal)
Twitter is planning a new approach to its advertising by selling ads embedded within tweets on others’ websites and apps. The new ad network would involve Twitter splitting revenue with site and app owners.
One of Twitter’s biggest challenges is growing its user base. It’s difficult to scale without more users, but one thing Twitter does have is ubiquity. It’s everywhere from TV to websites.
This approach would allow Twitter to place ads in front of even non-users. The challenge Twitter may face is how these ads will be targeted. It will be interesting to see how Twitter works to get the right message in front of the right audience.
Facebook at Work Becomes Available to Some Users (Read more at The Wall Street Journal)
Facebook at Work is now available for some select businesses. The service allows businesses to have a self-contained social network for employees to collaborate and communicate, similar to services like Slack and Yammer. Facebook at Work will be accessible through the website as well as from iOS and Android apps.
Users will be given the option to create separate logins for Work and their personal profiles. However, if they do choose to connect Facebook at Work to their personal profiles, actions performed on their personal profiles will not be shared with their Work profiles and vise versa.
There will be no ads on Facebook at Work, but it is likely some kind of subscription model for businesses will be rolled out.
Facebook offers something that other internal social network providers cannot, and that is familiarity. Users will know what to do and how it works, which will likely encourage adoption.
The challenge Facebook has will be trust in data and privacy for employees. Facebook has stated that it will not gather data on corporate users, but that’s something Facebook will have to prove.
That’s likely why it is rolling out slowly. This is not an area Facebook has experimented with before, so the slow rollout is likely designed to help Facebook understand all aspects of entering businesses before diving in.
LinkedIn Rolling Out Two New Features (Read more at Mashable)
LinkedIn is in the process of introducing two new tools for its users.
The first will allow users to send InMail (LinkedIn’s version of email) to coworkers even if they aren’t already connected. Users will also be able to share their contact information and make it accessible to all coworkers.
The other product allows company administrators to send information to select groups of employees, such as employees working in a specific department. This tool will go into testing later in this quarter.
This seems to be a big week for social networks trying to get into the enterprise between LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn appears to have a slightly different focus than Facebook. LinkedIn wants to better connect coworkers and build a digital rolodex of sorts, while Facebook is more focused on collaboration and competing more directly with services like Yammer.
News Quick Hits
- Mark Zuckerberg announced that users in Colombia, Kenya, and Tanzania can download the Internet.org app. The app will allow users of wireless carrier Tigo to access services like Facebook, Wikipedia, AccuWeather and UNICEF free of charge. (Read more at SocialTimes)
- Facebook is starting to give users warning messages when they are about to view videos or photos that contain violence. This is intended to keep such videos from auto-playing on the website. Users will instead need to click to play such content. (Read more at The Guardian)
- AMBER Alerts are now going to display on Facebook with photographs of missing children, names and descriptions of suspected abductors and license plate numbers. The number of users who see such a notice will be determined by the range of the target area for the alert, but the number of alerts users will see will be no more than a few each year. (Read more at The Huffington Post)
- Google is now displaying brands’ social media profiles in the Knowledge Graph card in search results. It makes it much easier for users to connect with brands’ various channels without looking through search results. (Read more at WebProNews)