This Week in Social and Digital (Week of October 21)
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.
Facebook Ramps Up Security Ahead of U.S. Elections
Facebook announced a slew of steps it’s taking ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election to keep the platform from being used to manipulate results. Mark Zuckerberg announced that 35,000 people are now working on platform security with a budget in the billions of dollars.
One of the updates is Facebook Protect, a feature for officials, candidates and staff to further protect their accounts thanks to both two-factor authentication as well as ongoing monitoring of any suspicious activity.
A new tab is being added to pages called “Organizations That Manage This Page,” which will feature everything from the confirmed page owner, legal names, verified cities, phone numbers and websites for those involved in managing the page. Pages with large U.S. audiences that are verified businesses along with pages authorized to run political and social issue ads will be part of this effort. Pages found to be concealing ownership will be required to complete a verification process.
Media outlets that are at least partially controlled by their governments will be tagged and labeled as such. Facebook and Instagram will be adding more prominent labels on content rated as false or partially false by third-party fact-checkers. These labels will appear above photos and videos as well as on Stories with links to fact checkers. Users who share debunked content will be shown a pop up letting them know the content has been debunked before sharing it. Even when it is shared, any content that has been shown to be false will have reduced distribution. Beyond that, any content that is detected to be suppressing voters will be more proactively detected and removed.
Finally, Facebook is updating its Ad Library API to better allow journalists, researchers and officials to download all ads from a page. Those ads will be accompanied with scripts to make identifying the content in ads easier.
The announcement of these updates was accompanied with the announcement that Facebook just removed accounts spreading misinformation on behalf of Iranian and Russian governments.
This is a pretty impressive list of updates and actions being taken by Facebook. The actions are encouraging, but results will be what speaks volumes. Facebook’s very much been part of the problem when it comes to these issues in the United States and abroad, so these steps are really Facebook minimizing the problems it causes. The actions are an overall good, but Facebook has been an unreliable protagonist here. We should be pleased with the steps being taken but committed to ongoing accountability.
Snap Earnings Offer Mixed Picture with Future Upside
This week, Snap Inc. shared its Q3 earnings report, and everyone was wondering if the service going into the report with shares up more than 150% over last year could maintain its momentum.
Snap revenue beat forecasts with $446 million. It was also able to beat global daily active user numbers, ending the quarter with 210 million. It even exceeded average revenue per user forecasts with $2.12 per user.
Where it fell short was in its revenue forecast for Q4. It’s not expected to exceed expectations in Q4, which raised some doubts that it could continue the momentum it’s seen in 2019. Snap attributed the conservative forecast to the one less week between Black Friday and the end of the holiday shopping season, which is Snap’s peak demand time period.
The forecast made investors nervous, but Snap showed it continues to excel where it needs to—user numbers. Snapchat’s revamped Android app continues to bring in new users, especially from outside the U.S. That growth in users plus Snapchat’s ability to monetize those users through higher engagement in Discover, for example, put Snap in the best position it’s been for awhile.
Snapchat Launches Dynamic Ads
Dynamic Ads are officially coming to Snapchat. The ads let advertisers automatically generate ads using their product catalogs. It then serves those ads up to users it deems will find them most relevant.
According to Snapchat, “Dynamic Ads now brings automated personalization to the platform, opening new ways to scale and drive impact very easily.”
The ads will take product images and build them into built-in templates, leading to different variations depending on where the ads are displayed on Snapchat.
Advertisers have found dynamic ads can be some of the best performing ads they run on other platforms like Facebook, so in order to be competitive, they’re necessary for Snapchat to offer. Of course, dynamic ads come with tradeoffs in that they sacrifice creativity and originality for speed and scale. It’s important for advertisers embracing dynamic ads to balance them with ads designed to drive attention.
That being said, dynamic ads are attractive. They’re tied directly to a business’ product catalogs, they update automatically and they’re served up to what Snapchat says is the right audience.
Twitter Earnings Disappoint
Twitter’s Q3 earnings did not impress Wall Street this week, and honestly, it sounded a little disappointed in itself. While it reported revenue up 9% over last year, reaching $824 million, it missed expectations and admitted that its ad business was hampered by an error with its mobile application promotion product.
This error made it unable to target ads as well as share data with measurement and ads partners. That’s not good when your entire revenue model is based on advertising. Twitter attributed its disappointing quarter to that as well as seasonality swings that were more significant than it anticipated.
Twitter’s had some impressive quarters as of late, so as a company, they’re eventually going to miss revenue expectations after having showing impressive growth previous quarters. But the problems with its ad product are a bit more concerning, given that’s their business model. It goes without saying that Q4 is a big deal, so hopefully for Twitter and advertisers, those issues have been dealt with.
Facebook News Debuts
The anticipated Facebook News has launched. The news hub will host news from publishers, drive users to publishers’ websites and pay, some of them at least, for their content. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, CNN, Bloomberg News and others are signed up to participate in the initiative.
Facebook News is the latest of a long record of news initiatives from Facebook that have included things like Instant Articles and Watch, but publishers, understandably, cooled on Facebook when it became clear Facebook was profiting off of their content while they earned very little.
News aims to do things differently (a bit at least). First of all, it plans to surface content from credible news organizations (Note: Breitbart is listed as a partner, however. There are exceptions to “credible” in this set of partners.) with vetted content. This is meant to address past lapses in which misinformation spread on Facebook from illegitimate news sources. Second, many of the 200 media publishers on Facebook News will be paid directly, meaning they’re not merely hoping providing free content will lead to revenue. Others, unfortunately, will be participating on the hope that Facebook News leads to site traffic they can monetize. Third, a team of journalists will be selecting articles manually to be featured in the service’s “Today’s Stories” section. Facebook’s taking a break from algorithms to make Facebook News a more responsible curator of news.
Time will tell if this time is different for news on Facebook, but practice makes perfect.
News Quick Hits
Messaging app Kik was supposed to be shut down, but now it appears to be “here to stay.” The app has been acquired by the holding company MediaLab. In order to make the acquisition work, MediaLab, which owns a range of apps, including Whisper, will be bringing ads to the service, while also committing to making it faster and more reliable. Kik was going to be shut down, so founder Ted Livingston could focus on cryptocurrency as well as alleviate pressure from the SEC.
Facebook’s making further tweaks to organic content shared by pages. Now, organic content will be filtered like paid ads in that Facebook will filter out repeat organic impressions occurring within a specific time frame. This means users will be less likely to see a post multiple times, leading to organic impression declines.
Google announced that it developed a quantum computer capable of completing a mathematical calculation that today’s supercomputers couldn’t complete in 10,000 years in 3 minutes 20 seconds. Google submitted a paper on the achievement to the science journal Nature. There’s no telling what this means for the future of computing, but Scientists have likened it to the Wright brothers plane. It wasn’t all that useful, but it showed what’s possible.
Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress this week to defend Facebook’s proposed digital currency, Libra. Zuckerberg warned that if the U.S. doesn’t act, other countries will. He even opted to make the Libra even more dollar-centric than it already is, but Libra wasn’t the only thing on representatives' minds. Facebooks sins were on full display as Zuckerberg was grilled for foreign interference in U.S. elections, misinformation on the platform, race and gender disparities, privacy practices and political advertising policies.