14 Mar Meerkat Makes Exit from Livestreaming | Social You Should Know
Meerkat makes an exit from livestreaming, Snapchat continues to endure growing pains and Facebook introduces point-of-sale data. That and more in this week’s Social You Should Know.
Meerkat Makes Exit from Livestreaming
Twitter and Facebook proved to be too fierce a rival for Meerkat, one of the first movers in the livestreaming space. It is getting out of the livestreaming space to focus on a full, video-based social network, where ‘everybody is always live’. It will likely be similar to Google hangouts with the format being based around group video chat with people you already know, instead of broadcasting to everyone. When it comes to livestreaming, Facebook is keeping the pedal to the metal on growing its Facebook Live product. Data shows that people watch real-time broadcasts 3x longer than saved ones, so Facebook made the wise decision to put live broadcasts higher in the newsfeed than older, saved streams. There’s no sign that this will apply to livestreams from brand Pages yet. We also learned this week that the platform is bidding to live stream NFL games. Should this come to fruition, the potential for integration by brands on Facebook is thrilling.
Snapchat Endures Growing Pains
Snapchat appears to have caught up to Facebook in terms of daily video views, as the platform is getting 8 billion video views per day. More than half of the new users signing up to Snapchat these days are over the age of 25, and its 100+ million daily users spend an average of 30 minutes on the app every day. And these users are a passionate bunch; when Snapchat rolled out an update this week that included a complete change to the font used in contact lists and Stories page, many users had a meltdown. Keep calm and snap on, users. Design changes like this one are quite common, and can be a good thing. Just ask Twitter – since replacing the favorite star with the like heart, the network has a 27% jump in activity.
Facebook isn’t idly sitting by, however. It announced this week the acquisition of Msqrd, a fairly new app (it just launched in the US in January) that allows you to snap a selfie (or video) and change the way it looks through filters and special effects, then share to Instagram and Facebook. This is a pretty clear play by Facebook to compete with Snapchat’s popular filters.
Facebook Introduces Point-Of-Sale Data & Promoted Pins Diversify
Facebook added two new data offerings this week to help marketers track offline sales. Facebook Atlas campaigns, which includes ads on numerous publishers and websites, will offer point-of-sale data called ‘Offline Actions’ which allows marketers to upload a list containing data about the transactions conducted in its stores that will be matched against Facebook’s own list of people who saw the ad. Facebook also introduced a “Path to Conversion” metric, which is said to help marketers track ads to digital purchase by giving insight into touchpoints on multiple devices. Lastly, Pinterest, a channel ripe for catching consumers in the shopping mindset, continues to evolve its Promoted Pin offering byexpanding its targeting options from 30 to 420 interest categories, and finally opens the tool to all small and midsize brands in the U.S. Which brings me to this helpful guide on social media buying – as the ad products evolve and change rapidly, these best practices are worth bookmarking.
