17 May Facebook’s Big Move into Media Publishing, What Does It Mean for Brands | Social You Should Know
The Surrender at Menlo Park
That headline, from this article, nicely sums up how many feel about Facebook’s deal to display articles from a few publishers natively, within the feed, rather than a simple link off to the publisher website, as we’ve been used to. The experience, which only works on iOS for now, is fairly impressive, and adds features not available to normal posts (from brands or people). Like the ability to like a photo within the article. Or the ability to share the article not just to Facebook but to Twitter or Pinterest right from Facebook. The article graphics also autoplay. All of this gives these publishers more exposure than we as brand and content marketers get. But beyond that, imagine if Google did the same thing? Instead of sending you to the website, they just showed the content within Google? The whole web would be transformed.
Emojis as Revenue Generators?
Two pieces of news were released this week in which emojis are being used as generators of very real cash. In the first, Domino’s is launching the ability for someone to order a pizza simply by sending an @message with the pizza slice emoji to the brand’s Twitter handle. Of course, you need to set this up first by telling them your default pizza and payment method, but being able to order a pizza by sending an emoji tweet is either the smartest thing I’ve heard all week, or a very real sign that our level of laziness knows no bounds. You decide. Separately, the World Wildlife Fund launched a new campaign in which you can tweet using any of 17 endangered animals emojis, and each time you use them, you’re committing to donate 0.10 euros (about 11 cents). Emojis as money. Who’da thunk it?
Many Never See Your Video Ad
Remember last year when Google research showed that 56% of online display ads were never seen? Today, they noted that 47% of video ads on desktop are never seen. Mobile does better (only 17% never seen). Google does point out that 91% of YouTube ads are seen. Google owns YouTube, of course. Speaking of video “views,” by the way, another article this week pointed out that Facebook and Instagram count a “view” if someone watches 3 seconds. YouTube counts a view only after “around” 30 seconds. Big difference. Also, while YouTube has said since 2008 that autoplay video views do NOT count, Facebook and Instagram DO count autoplay views. In other words, 10,000 views on Facebook is very different than 10,000 views on YouTube.
On a final note, here’s an infographic showing that users come back to Facebook more often than any other network, with 54% of users visiting more than once per day.
