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Welcome to our weekly edition of what's hot in social media news.
To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What's New This Week
Facebook Rolls Out Audience Optimization for Publishers: Facebook's new Audience Optimization is “an organic targeting tool to help publishers reach and engage their audiences on Facebook and better understand the interests of people clicking on their posts.”
Facebook Adds New Features to Lead Ads: Facebook announced “new features for lead ads that help businesses get even more out of them.” These updates include context cards to “help businesses ensure that the leads they receive are high-quality” and making lead ads available in the carousel format on desktop or mobile.
Facebook Improves Mentions App on iOS: Facebook improved “how you broadcast and save the video after you go live” on Live for Mentions. Facebook also rolled out the ability to “filter posts within your Mentions feed by source as well as by topic” and “reply to private messages sent to your Page or profile from within the Mentions app.”
Facebook Optimizes 360-Degree Video System for VR: Facebook “replaced its video processing system with [the] Streaming Video Engine (SVE) [which] splits files into several parts in order to upload and encode them separately all at once, speeding up both the encoding process and the playback by 10 times.”
Our Take on Top News This Week
In this blab from January 22, 2016, Michael Stelzner and guests discuss the top news in social media. Topics include new live-streaming platform MeVee (2:40), Facebook Sports Stadium and Nielsen’s Social Content Ratings (20:30) and updates to Facebook Live and Mentions (37:37). Subscribe to future shows here.
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More News to Note
Nielsen Introduces Social Content Ratings: “Nielsen's Social Content Ratings will be the first solution to measure aggregate-level program-related conversation on Facebook and Twitter, including posts shared with friends and family, with followers, and publicly.” There are also plans to integrate Instagram data at a later date.
Twitter Announces 2016 #HelloWorld Developer Tour: Twitter's international #HelloWorld developer tour “will focus on several aspects of the Twitter Platform, including Fabric for mobile development, Gnip for data analysis, and the public Twitter APIs.”
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WhatsApp Drops Annual Usage Fee: “WhatsApp will no longer charge subscription fees” and plans to “test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organizations that you want to hear from… without third-party ads and spam.”
Yahoo Introduces Native Ads on the BrightRoll Exchange: “Advertisers, DSPs and agency trading desks leveraging the BrightRoll Exchange for display advertising will now also have access to bid on native mobile inventory via a new API that aligns with the IAB OpenRTB 2.3 standard.”
Upcoming Social Media News Worth Following
Yik Yak Launches Public Beta of Yik Yak for the Web: “Yik Yak for the web is now moving to a public beta – which means that ALL of you are now able to yak away with your local herd on your laptop or desktop!”
Some Interesting Studies to Note:
The State of Retailing Online 2016: A recent survey from Shop.org, Forrester Research and Bizrate Insights provides metrics on online retailing from the past year and insights into digital retailers' key priorities in 2016. The report also examines the role of mobile in ecommerce and how merchants are planning their mobile presence this year. According to the report, mobile (59%), marketing (59%) and site merchandising (41%) are the top priorities of online retailers in 2016. While social is also a priority, it ranked much lower on the list (6%).
Content Marketing 2016: Staffing, Measurement and Effectiveness Across the Industry:Â Contently surveyed content marketers about their biggest issues and goals for 2016, preferred content distribution platforms, most important metrics and methods of managing workflows and compliance. The findings show that lead conversion (32%) is the most popular metric for measuring content marketing success, followed by social shares and likes (19%) and page views (15%). The report also revealed that email is considered the most effective organic distribution channel for content while Facebook is the most effective paid distribution channel.
Instagram Growth and Engagement: 2015 Year in Review: Locowise compiled and analyzed Instagram growth and engagement trends from 2015. The report shows that both follower growth (88.21%) and engagement (61.43%) on Instagram declined over 2015. Yet the platform is still much stronger than Facebook and Twitter when it comes to both follower growth and engagement.
2015 Social CEO Report: According to a new annual report from software provider Domo and CEO.com, 61% of Fortune 500 CEOs have no social presence whatsoever and not one is active on all six major social platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram and YouTube). Of the CEOs who are active on only one social network, 70% are active on LinkedIn.
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What do you think of Audience Optimization on Facebook? Are you interested in using it to organically increase engagement? Please share your comments below.
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