A New Era in Social- Less Photos, More Videos (At Least on Facebook)

A New Era in Social: Less Photos, More Videos (At Least on Facebook)

Last week, the raging topic of social media discussions was a dress. No one seemed to agree on its colors (white and gold or black and blue?). No matter what we see in the photo, brands did not waste time trying to highjack the hashtag on Twitter and elsewhere.

Bad idea or creative genius? I will let you be the judge.

We live in a world where things change fast. Today’s trends may be gone tomorrow — just like what has been happening with Facebook’s organic reach.

In today’s roundup, we also take a quick look at Twitter’s new tools for small business owners and users, Google Search, and more. I hope you will enjoy it!

It’s All About Videos on Facebook Now

Photos are officially the old black on Facebook. They now get the lowest reach (3.7%) of all post formats for pages.

The biggest winner? Videos, according to Socialbakers. Their average organic reach is at 8.7%. Text and link updates score 5.8 and 5.3% respectively.

Images and links get the short end of the stick when it comes to organic reach for brands’ fans as well (2.3 and 3.8%). Videos and text posts still dominate (5.7 and 4.8%).

So, does it mean that companies and marketers should change their strategies to solely focus on video content? Not at all. Socialbakers’ Phillip Ross states that,

“you still need to ensure that your content is high-quality. A great photo post that gets good engagement will likely see continued News Feed reach, while a poor-quality video post is going to get buried. That’s just the nature of the Facebook News Feed, where Fan love dictates what gets to stick around.”

Ready for a new Facebook ad format? The company bets you will love cinemagraphs, those still photographs with subtle motion you may have seen around the web.

Speaking of ads, the company launched two new products: the Ads Manager App and product ads. The latter is “designed to help businesses promote multiple products or their entire product catalog, across all the devices their customers use.”

 Ads manager app

(Source: Facebook for Business)

New stat: There are now 2 million active advertisers on Facebook. And the company will only charge them for viewed impressions from now on.

In other news, Facebook has also started offering more suicide prevention resources and support for U.S.-based users. According to a Facebook Safety post, a trained team will review reported posts with suicidal content and contact posters privately with relevant information (if need be). However, it will first connect the flaggers to share tips and advice with them.

Twitter Wants to Help Small Businesses

If you still find Twitter hard to figure out, check out #TwitterAcademy. This new “on-demand education hub” features videos on a variety of topics, including Twitter Cards, audience building, social customer care, and Twitter Analytics.

There is now a simple way to grant people access to the same Twitter account without sharing any password. It’s called TweetDeck Teams. All you have to do is log in to TweetDeck with your Twitter credentials.

Team members can be administrators or contributors. The only difference is that the latter cannot view, add or remove members. However, both must be on TweetDeck to access the account.

“If you prefer not to receive invitations to others’ teams, you can opt out completely on twitter.com/settings/security, or just allow invitations from users who you follow,” says Product Manager Amy Zima on the TweetDeck Blog.

Last week also saw the release of Twitter’s first official WordPress plugin. The plugin offers features liked embedded Tweet customization, Tweet/Follow buttons, Twitter Cards, Analytics, and ads conversion tracking.

There are a few more cool WordPress plugins that can help with that.

Finally, anyone can now report impersonators and accounts that leak private information. There are also new enforcement actions in place to curb abuse, especially from repeat offenders. According to The Washington Post, banned users may have to give Twitter their phone numbers to be able to use the platform again.

Google Has Tweaked Search

Anyone familiar with Google knows that the company keeps improving its search engine. For example, last week, it launched Google Flights and started testing a live chat button in results. 

But that’s not all. Mobile-friendly usability also officially became a ranking signal for all languages. Further, apps indexed through App Indexing will now rank better in mobile search.

 Google Analytics users will be alerted whenever their websites have been hacked.

LinkedIn Expands Its Marketing Solutions Portfolio

There is a new ad platform in town. With LinkedIn Network Display, brands and marketers can buy ads from Linkedin that will appear on third-party sites, including CNN and Weather.com.  They can target a very small group of people (as few as 1,000).

LinkedIn is also launching another tool. According to Re/code, Lead Accelerator determines “where a particular LinkedIn user is in the buying process; it will then automatically surface the appropriate ad to that user in hopes of pushing them further along that timeline.”

And the Most Popular Social Company in the World Is…

Infegy released its latest World’s 50 Most Popular Brands list. It looked at 800 “contestants” and ranked each based on volume of mentions, sentiment, gender representation, and purchase intent.

Once again, Google reached the top spot with 718.5 million (mainly positive) mentions and a high purchase-intent rate (22%). It is followed by Twitter (576.7 million mentions), Facebook (373.2 million mentions), Tumblr (452.4 million mentions), and Apple (355.2 million mentions).

With 86% and 83% of positive mentions, Disney and Nordstrom beat all other brands in the sentiment area. FitBit and Amazon.com win the contest for most desirable companies (36 and 23% in purchase intent).

Gender-wise, Buzzfeed, Disney, Walmart, and Amazon have the most balanced audiences.

Interested in knowing the male-female ratios for some major social platforms? Here they are:

  • Twitter: 52% – 48%
  • Facebook: 53% – 47%
  • Tumblr: 58% – 42%
  • YouTube: 65% – 35%
  • Google: 65% – 35%
  • Soundcloud: 69% – 31%

In Other News

BitTorrent is partnering with Rapid Eye Studio to launch its own original series. BitTorrent Originals “will include a focus on stories appealing to a young, creative, and influential group of 14-25 year-olds that make up the BitTorrent audience of 170 million monthly active users.” the first project, Children of the Machine, will premiere at the end of the year.

Some of China’s top social networks ( QQ, WeChat, Sina Weibo) deleted 60,000 accounts following the implementation of new real-name registration rules.

Digg launched Digg TV, a “full-screen, autoplaying video experience, organized by channel or your own collection of saved Digg videos.”

Blogging platform Medium is changing….

Pinterest is testing a “multi-pin carousel” that would allow brands to include several images in a promoted Pin. The company is also winning its fight against spam. According to a recent announcement, the number of users who click on spam has been halved in the last few months.

Yahoo released its Mobile Developer Suite, a platform built on “five products to help developers, measure, advertise, monetize and enhance their apps.”

YouTube has a free app for children. YouTube Kids only shows family-friendly content, does not allow comments, and has parental controls / voice-activated search.

See you next Monday for a new roundup of must-read social media studies!

Cendrine Marrouat
Paper.li Blog Staff Writer, Cendrine Marrouat is a French-born social media coach, curator, and author. She is the founder of Social Media Slant and the #smslantchat Twitter chat. Her latest e-book release, "The Little Big eBook on Social Media Audiences: Build Yours, Keep It and Win", is a comprehensive guide focusing on the four pillars of audience building. Follow her on Google+.

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