Social Media Round-Up: From Snapchat Ads to Facebook Video Comments

Congrats, you made it to the end of a long week! Reward yourself by catching up on the social media stories that marketers are buzzing about right now.

Snapchat Expands its Advertising

Snapchat seems to be on a mission for total social media domination, and this week it announced a bold plan to expand advertising on the platform. Here are a few of the major changes to look for:

• Snapchat Partners Advertising API: Instead of having to make a deal directly with Snapchat, advertisers will be able to go through third-party companies and their software to buy large ad campaigns. Advertisers can connect with both creative agencies and ad tech partners to design and manage their campaigns.
• Snap Ads Between Stories: Snapchat users can swipe right to auto-advance Stories, and the app will start playing occasional video ads between one user’s Stories and the next person’s. There are 10 partners in the queue to test these ads, including Procter & Gamble, Universal Pictures and Verizon.
• Ad Reviews: Snapchat plans to review all ads for quality before they run in order to protect the user experience.

Instagram Rolls Out New Feed

Back in March, Instagram announced its plan to change the way photos and videos appear in your feed. Until now, the timeline has been chronological, but the new version uses an algorithm to determine which posts are most relevant or engaging for users (similar to the way Facebook orders its newsfeed).

In a March 19 blog post, the company wrote:

You may be surprised to learn that people miss on average 70 percent of their feeds. As Instagram has grown, it’s become harder to keep up with all the photos and videos people share. This means you often don’t see the posts you might care about the most.

To improve your experience, your feed will soon be ordered to show the moments we believe you will care about the most.

The plan has received its fair share of criticism; some users worry that they’ll miss posts they want to see, or that their posts won’t be shown as often to their followers. This is a particular concern among brands and influencers. But Instagram has already started to roll out the new timeline and published this blog post update:

Over the past few months, we brought this new way of ordering posts to a portion of the community, and we found that people are liking photos more, commenting more and generally engaging with the community in a more active way.

Facebook Now Allows Video Comments

Sometimes leaving a text comment on a Facebook post doesn’t quite capture what you want to say, even with all the emoji and reactions at your disposal. Facebook now has a solution for that problem; it just released a new feature that allows you to leave videos as comments.

Bob Baldwin, a Facebook developer who led the prototyping of the feature at a Hackathon earlier this year wrote:

Videos in Comments are now available worldwide! You can upload them as replies to posts by people and pages, as well as within groups and events. It’s supported on desktop web, iOS, and Android. To try it out, click the camera icon next to the comment field!

So you can record a quick video on your phone and immediately upload it to respond to a post from a person or a brand. Video is only going to keep growing in importance on social media, and this update is yet another sign that Facebook is trying to stay ahead of that trend.

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