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September 27, 2016

The Rundown: September Edition

rundownIt’s almost the end of September, so you know what that means – another recap of the biggest updates and trends in social media. Without further ado, here’s the latest edition of The Rundown:

Facebook Under Fire (Again? Again.)

In the latest of Facebook’s “discrepancies,” the company announced that it had overstated the viewing metrics for video content on the site. While the error did not allegedly affect billing (according to Facebook), Adweek points out how “the stat in question may have influenced how much some brands have been spending on Facebook, which made $6.24 billion in ad revenue in Q2.” Although the mistake has been owned up to at this point, the incident adds fuel to the fire for the numerous marketers and agencies already in favor of third-party verification and measurement.

Snapchat Rebrands Corporate Name, Announces Spectacles

Chief Strategy Officer Imran Khan elaborated on the news at Advertising Week by declaring, “We rebranded our company to Snap Inc. because we are bigger than just one app.” The company’s new Spectacles product, a pair of video-capturing sunglasses designed to sync with the Snapchat app, will shoot video in a new 115-degree circular format. Whether or not this new format drastically impacts any kind of behaviors in video viewing or consumption, it appears to be a sincere effort in disrupting the ‘vertical vs. horizontal’ orientation argument.

Thanks, Twitter…

Photos, videos and GIFs no longer count towards your character limit. ‘Nuff said (other than, ABOUT TIME).

Instagram Optimizes Link Ads

In June, Instagram debuted an updated action button on its ads, which consisted of extending the lower bar across the entirety of the ad. The company revealed that through testing, they had determined “the presence of [the] call to action button was not well-known.” Since release, Instagram also says that this enhancement “has been successful, with performance increasing more than 45%.” They don’t plan to stop there – in a recent blog post, Instagram explained how the company is in the process of rolling out 4 new enhancements to link ads:

  • Highlighting a call to action button when people show interest about an ad—such as lingering on the ad for four seconds or visiting the profile name.
  • When Instagrammers visit an advertiser’s profile through an ad, a button with a call to action currently appears at the bottom of the profile. Now, the button can also be found in the comments section.
  • When additional details from an ad are detected (such as price, destination URL or app store rating), they will automatically be added to the call to action button.
  • For video link ads, when users unmute a video, they’ll be taken to the destination URL as the video continues playing at the top of the screen. This means that people can now explore, browse and act on a landing page, and still continue watching the video.