06 Feb Major Changes in Social Advertising and More on Facebook Fake News | Social You Should Know
It’s a big week in the world of social advertising with two big rollouts from Snap Inc. and Pinterest. That and more in this edition of Social You Should Know.
Snapchat Launching Self-serve Option for Advertisers
According to eMarketer, Snapchat is on its way to hit $935M in ad revenue this year (or roughly 2% of social network ad dollars). In addition, they are inching toward an IPO. In order to optimize ad sales revenue, it makes sense to expand the purchasing of ads to a wider net, just like their rival Facebook. Speaking of which, Snapchat appears to be borrowing Facebook’s model of working with the ad tech partners to help innovate the offerings. Right now the platform is only open to a handful of partners. Worth noting, GlobalWebIndex reports that it Q4 of last year 53% of 16-24 year-olds in the US actively use Snapchat compared to 6% of 55-64 year-olds.
Facebook Continues to Battle Fake News
We’ve been keeping you posted in SYSK about the tough scrutiny that Facebook has been under as well measures it has taken to combat the spread of fake news. The company announced this week that they will boost posts “that people consider genuine, and not misleading, sensational or spammy.” An article from Mashable shares that this will be done by adding more markers to each post that will signal to its algorithms whether or not a post’s information is authentic. A piece of that is determined by the page source (like whether they regularly post spam) and the other part has to do with a model Facebook has trained to look for signs of authenticity. Watch out fake news. Facebook might be onto you.
Pinterest Introduces Search Ads
In more social ad news, Pinterest is rolling out search ads, which makes sense considering users conduct 2 billion searches a month on the platform equating to half the site’s activity. Basically, it’s the Google search ad model but with images. The ads will be sold through a digital auction (common for social ad buying) and based on a cost-per-click. As it stands, ads can be bought directly through Pinterest and with a limited number of partners. The plan is to roll it out so it can be purchased through its self-serve platform. Hopefully sooner rather than later. Pinterest has been lagging in the ads innovation arena when compared to platforms like Facebook.
