04 Oct Twitter to Go Beyond 140? New Social Ad Options | Social You Should Know
Twitter’s plans to go beyond 140 characters got a lot of press this week, although what they’re likely to do is only an incremental, wise step. New research on millennials and social behavior has some nuggets for social media marketers and YouTube and Facebook have new ad options, in this week’s Social You Should Know.
Twitter to Go Beyond 140 Characters, But Not By Much
Tech website Re/code broke a story on Tuesday that Twitter was likely to go beyond 140-characters which caused some consternation among active users. Some have said they simply must change this, and I agree, if they do it in the way being discussed (not counting links, images and user handles in the 140-character limit). This can keep the Twitter experience while providing a bit more wiggle room. What’s been underplayed however is the assertion in that article that Twitter would release a separate, new “long form” product. That will be interesting to watch.
New Research on Millennials
First the expected: The average social network user now spends 1.77 hours a day on social media, with 16-24 year olds spending 3.5x more than 55-64 year olds. Tumblr, Vine and Instagram have the youngest audiences and Snapchat and WhatsApp grew the most. However, did you know that 59% of women age 20 to 35 do NOT have a Snapchat account? 56% of men in that age group do not have a Pinterest account. And finally, Facebook says that millennials actually consume and absorb ads 2.5x faster than older people, as they grew up trained in digesting content rapidly. Hmm…
Facebook, YouTube Launch New Ad Features
Facebook is up to 2.5 million active advertisers (up from 2M just seven months ago). They’ve added four new ad features: 1) Total Rating Point Buying; 2) Brand Awareness Optimization; 3) Mobile Polling; and 4) Video in Carousel Format. More details here. YouTube is not going to let the Buy Button phenomenon pass it by. New shopping ads will begin showing up in videos this week and will be rolled out more widely in early 2016. The ads will be in a native form and can appear on any video. Google will serve the ads and decide which videos to pair with. The ads will be in a small box in the top right corner of the video. If users click, they will be shown a drop down menu of products to view as the video plays.
I enjoyed Social Fresh in Tampa last week and shared some thoughts on what I learned here. Separately, I’m doing a webinar on October 15th for Staples and SCORE called “5 Simple and Affordable Social Media Tactics For Your Small Business.” Sign up free today.
