The Weekly Digest #17 : The Best of Social Media

The Olympics are in full swing since last August 5th which may be the reason why the social media announcements are a little lighter than usual. No worries we still have a few news for you. Today we’ll tell you more about stories from Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Snapchat partners with the NBC to include short video series

Snapchat announced they were extending their partnership with NBC Universal. They will provide 5 episodes of a special The Voice on Snapchat series starting August 22nd. Fans of the music TV show were able to submit their performance on voicesnaps.com to have the opportunity to feature on the Snapchat series. The Voice coaches will then select a few videos that will appear on the broadcast premiere of the next season. Other famous shows from the NBC like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live will also display content on the social network later.

Twitter opens Moments to more creators

Moments are a way to sum up an event in a few tweets along with different media attached like images, GIF or videos. Until now they were created by Twitter’s curation team as well as a few of their publishing partners including Vogue, The New York Times, BuzzFeed and more. Twitter have now opened this feature to more influencers, partners and brands and will eventually make it available to any user in the next months. As part of the new creators you can find the magazine Allure, the beer brand Budweiser and DeRay Mckesson who is part of the Black Lives Matters movement in the United States. You can see another example of a story here.

Facebook adds metrics to help you understand traffic on your videos

Facebook added new video metrics tools in Page Insights and Video Library to enable publishers to understand who engages with their videos and how. This will help them to adapt their content in order to enhance engagement and create videos that will reach a more diversified audience. They will first have access to Audience demographics to compare how old viewers are, what their gender is or what the top locations are. Publishers will also have more insights on engagement on live broadcasts. They will be able to know how many reactions there were, as well as the number of comments and shares at any moment during the live video, to understand which moments interested viewers the most. Lastly, as “48% of video watch time on Facebook comes from shares”, they will be able to know how many times the videos were watched from the Owned page or after being shared.

Instagram is testing a Save Draft button

Today, Instagram is only letting users publish posts in one go — which can lead to loose everything if something else pops up on your screen. This problem could be resolved as they confirmed that they are testing a new feature that would allow users to save their videos or pictures as drafts. You might not see it yet but some users can now edit their pictures in advance, enter a location and a legend and everything will be saved for later. When users click on the cancel button they have the choice to select the “Save Draft” button or see their image discarded. For the moment this is only tested on iOS and there are no more information about Android or if the feature will be officially launched.

Pinterest announces a new way to buy CPM

Pinterest announced a new way for businesses to buy CPM in auction, in order to reach more people with their ads. Jenny Chiu added :

You can bid on a CPM basis and we’ll optimize how we deliver your ads to reach more people. You can also specify the maximum number of times someone sees your campaign. By using this new solution, you’ll get more impressions for your campaigns at more efficient rates and drive higher results.

This new possibility is available in the UK, US and Canada for the moment through Ads Manager and to most of Pinterest’s Marketing Developer Partners.

Facebook improves Ad controls and blocks Ad blocking softwares

Facebook took in consideration the fact that users were annoyed by irrelevant ads a while ago, and took some measures to make their experience on the social network more pleasant. Today, they are improving ad controls by making the ad preferences section easier to use. Users can select their interests in order to only see ads about subjects they are interested in. Moreover, Facebook know some users pay Ad blocking softwares not to be disturbed by ads on their timeline. Well, they found a way around and want to keep displaying ads to users who are blocking them. You can imagine the news have not been welcomed from most of these blocking softwares that accuse the social network of being “anti-user”. To be continued…

If you’d like to read last week’s Digest just click here.