This Week in Social and Digital (Week of July 31)
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.
Snap Shares Fall as Stock Lockup Lifts
This week marked the first time inside holders of Snap, Inc. stock, which include executives and investors from when it was a startup, could sell shares. They were restricted from selling an estimated 400 million shares a certain number of days after Snap’s IPO. Once those days were up sell they did, sending shares down 23% below Snap, Inc.’s $17 IPO price.
This comes at a time when Snap stock was already under pressure as Facebook has continued to use its size and resources to copy one Snapchat feature after the next.
Snap, Inc. is looking dangerously like Twitter. While it has an incredibly passionate and loyal user base, it hasn’t shown an ability to scale it, despite tweaking the app’s user interface to make it more approachable.
That’s the challenge in being the app that thrives on being the exclusive platform for a singular audience, which was teens and young Millennials in Snapchat’s case. Once you need to scale that user base, it becomes a large ship to turn.
What Snapchat’s been able to do in rolling out new features, including World Lenses has been impressive, and those efforts will certainly keep its core engaged. What they haven’t figured out is what will bring a user from Facebook over to Snapchat, even for a bit. That will be the story that will be unfolding as Snap, Inc. continues to push forward as a public company.
Search Takes Front and Center on Pinterest
Pinterest is not a social platform. It’s a search platform, and it made another step in that evolution this week when it added a new search bar to the top of users’ home feeds as well as its visual discovery tool Lens.
Beyond that, it’s updated its algorithms and recommendations to ensure users never see duplicate pins. All of this comes at a time when users are turning to it more and more for search. Text searches on mobile are up 40% over last year, and visual searches are up 60% after the introduction of Lens.
Pinterest is playing where no one else is. It’s made its stake in being the source for visual search and discovery, and with the introduction of its Lens tool in combination with its trove of image data, it’s created a value proposition no other platform can touch.
Marketers would be wise to look at Pinterest as a search platform first. It’s not a place to be curating content from other sources any more. It’s place to highlight what your brand has to offer through compelling visuals optimized for both text-based and image-based search queries.
Site Speed Emphasized by Facebook
Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is in a constant state of getting new updates, but this latest one is big. Facebook is now going to be emphasizing stories and content from websites that load quickly on mobile, a move made by Google in its search algorithm months back.
According to Facebook, “as many as 40% of website visitors abandon a site after three seconds of delay.” If Facebook finds that a webpage will load quickly, a link to that webpage “might appear higher in your feed.”
Facebook’s proven to be a significant traffic driver, especially for publishers. This move understates the fact that being strong in one area doesn’t make up for being weak elsewhere. The entire digital ecosystem needs to come through for the user, and Facebook and Google are doing what they can to ensure that’s true for the users of their platforms.
Instagram Stories are a Runaway Success
When Instagram blatantly copied Snapchat with the introduction of Instagram Stories, there was more than a little skepticism. Now, that Stories is a year old, Instagram released some new stats on its usage. Now, users under 25 spend 32 minutes per day on the app, up from 21 minutes a year ago. Beyond that, 15 million businesses are on Instagram and have produced a Story in the last month.
It’s easy to compare Instagram’s success to Snapchat’s struggles, especially because Facebook has taken the approach of using its size and scale to out-Snapchat Snapchat. Instagram Stories is an unabashed success and is clearly keeping users, especially younger ones, more engaged with the platform. That’s exactly what Facebook was hoping to do with the feature.
News Quick Hits
- Facebook is allowing Facebook Stories to be shared publicly to followers. The feature is available through the Story Settings. While the feature may go unnoticed by the majority of Facebook’s users, the move is aimed at giving celebrities, influencers and other public figures a reason to use Facebook Stories, which launched in March. Facebook hasn’t shared any numbers on the feature’s usage, even though it's been touting the success of Instagram Stories. This may be an effort to shine more light on Facebook’s version of Stories to curb low pickup by users.
- Google is giving its Chrome mobile browser a built-in setting that that would allow users to block ads that Google has categorized as intrusive, which includes pop-ups, interstitials and autoplay video. The feature is currently being tested, and it follows announcements from Google earlier this year that it aims to help users block ads that Google doesn’t believe provide users a positive experience.
- Spotify revealed that it now sits at 60 million subscribers, which is 10 million more than it had in March. The announcement of these new numbers comes at a time in which a Spotify IPO looks more likely than not.
- Snapchat’s added new features to its self-serve ad platform. Now, advertisers can do “bulk creation,” which means more seamlessly setting up multiple campaigns at once. It also has an ad targeting library that will store audience data and a brand’s creative assets for use multiple times. The move comes at a time in which Snapchat is working to attract advertising dollars. Ad tech infrastructure has been one of Snapchat’s biggest issues.
- Snapchat’s launched a new measurement program that will make it easier for brands to implement market mix modeling in their Snapchat campaigns. The ultimate goal of the initiative is to bring big brands onto the platform thanks to the third-party verification available to advertisers.