Coming at you, once again, with your weekly suggested serving of digital news!
Facebook:
- Facebook launched Messenger Day to compete with Snapchat Stories. The feature on Facebook’s Messenger chat app lets people share ephemeral video diaries, with a select group of contacts, that string together chronologically and auto-delete after 24 hours. Friends can watch Days from the Messenger homepage or in a chat window. Users can also see who has watched their Day.
Instagram:
- The platform is taking another page out of the Snapchat guidebook and adding geotagged stickers to Instagram Stories. As of now, only two cities have this function, with more to follow shortly. So, for those of you in New York City and Jakarta, happy stickering!
Twitter:
- Twitter’s Moments—an answer to Snapchat stories that strings together short form content in a series of tweets—got its own analytics dashboard last week. Content creators can now measure the success of their moments via stats like Completion Rate, Opens, Likes, Shares, and more.
Pinterest:
- Pinterest is expanding it’s visual search engine tool to the wider world of the interwebs by introducing the feature to its chrome browser extension. Users can now conduct a visual search for pins related to content they find anywhere on the web. Listen up, retailers—this is going to be huge for people who find a style they like at a price point they don’t.
Snapchat:
- Had your fill of Snapchat IPO news yet? Millennials haven’t. This generation of novice investors are nothing if not loyal to their brand, even if that means putting money towards a company that has yet to report a profit.
- In other news, Snap wants Discover to be more like TV. While this has been a home for daily magazine editions since 2015, the company has recently made it clear that “shows will become the prominent content in Discover.” Brb while we go nerd out over more opportunities for ad placements!
YouTube:
- YouTube announced Community Contributed Metadata: a new feature that enables creators to have viewers translate titles and descriptions, in addition to subtitles. This means videos can be indexed in search in many more languages and be discovered by many more viewers. Community contributions can be turned off at any time.
Google+:
- The Google+ project lead spoke at Google Cloud Next about how to use G+ and G Suite for businesses. New features on the pipeline include: domain-level metrics, community-level metrics, in-domain recommended communities and collections, and admin settings to control how open access is to employees (Public vs Discovery vs Walled Garden) and multi-company communities.
In Other News:
- Why email is taking center stage in marketing innovation. We’re seeing a renewed emphasis on email marketing as a driver for growth. Nearly all marketers (99 percent) reported that they will either increase or maintain their marketing budgets in 2017—and a large share of these resources will be devoted to innovative tactics and technologies. In email, these tactics will include:
- Dynamic offers – Rather than presenting static offers and messaging to an entire group of subscribers, dynamic campaigns enable marketers to tailor message content to individual users based on behavior and other criteria.
- UGC – When combined with dynamic offers and other innovations, user-generated content can amplify the trust credentials of messages and deliver important wins for the brand
- Beacons (for companies with brick-and-mortar stores) – They detect subscribers or other users in retail spaces, triggering a notification that is sent to the individual via SMS, apps, or email. Opportunistic by nature, beacons are often used to deliver on-the-spot offers or promotions to subscribers in precise physical locations.
We hope this got your marketing brain juices flowing enough to get you out of that early-week funk!
