Facebook offering more audience development strategies; Snapchat effectiveness in question; Twitter broadens live video scope
We’re seeing more publishers partnering with Facebook for distributing content as part of an audience development strategy. Part of this content strategy is focusing on Instant Articles and how more advertisements can be placed within Instant Articles. MediaPost reports, “Unveiled in a Facebook blog post from the social network’s Journalism Project, beginning this week, the new rules governing ad placements will allow publishers to place ads after every 250 words of editorial content in Instant Articles. That compares to the previous proportion of one ad for every 350 words.”
“In addition to allowing more ads, the blog post also hinted that new ad formats and placements are on their way, although these are still in the works. This could be a boon for publishers that have complained standardization for Instant Articles limited the custom ad experiences they can offer advertisers.”
[text_ad]
The article continues with a look at where the product is heading in the future. “According to previous posts, Facebook’s Journalism Project is also working on story packages that allow publishers to entice readers with more than one article at a time and a subscription service integrating Facebook’s payment system, among other new features.”
Next, we move to Snapchat as another tool for audience development. However, this audience development tool isn’t faring as well with marketers, according to AdAge. “It might be early days, but marketers are seeing little return when advertising on Snapchat. They also seem more interested in spending ad dollars on the company’s newfound rival: Instagram.”
“That’s according to a series of studies published by RBC Capital Markets in partnership with Ad Age, where some 1,600 marketers were surveyed in an attempt to gauge the pulse of the digital advertising industry. The sobering news underscores the uphill battle Snapchat faces as other platforms like Facebook-owned Instagram and Messenger mimic its features. It also shows Snapchat is a far cry from being in similar company to Google or Facebook, which both received significantly higher marks from marketers.”
How does Snapchat compare against other social networks? Here’s a look from the article. “Between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, AOL and YouTube, Snapchat only outperformed AOL in terms of ROI, scoring a 3.43 out of a possible 8 points, according to the survey (AOL scored a 2.88). Google (6.98) and Facebook (6.72) led the pack, performing nearly twice as better than Snapchat, RBC said.”
Now we move to Twitter, which is increasing its live video content to compete with Facebook and others. AdWeek reports, “Twitter is making a bigger bet on video. The microblogging site and its live video app Periscope announced an application program interface, or API, today that makes it easier to to stream video from cameras and other equipment.”
“[Periscope] is plugging streaming technology into hardware, software and cameras that let users start a video broadcast without connecting to either the Twitter or Periscope apps.”
We’ll continue to share relevant news with you as audience development strategies morph and change.
