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Twitterati shows mixed feelings towards Meta Verified

Diverse perspectives among Twitter influencers around Meta’s user verification initiative surged dramatically in the third week of February.

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has launched a paid subscription bundle “Meta Verified” starting at $11.99 a month that includes account verification with impersonation protections and access to increased visibility and support.

And according to GlobalData’s Social Media Analytics Platform there has been a mixed response among Twitter Influencers following the announcement.

Smitarani Tripathy, Social Media Analyst at GlobalData, said: “Some influencers opine that the service is needed to filter fake accounts, as Meta is actually verifying and not just charging for the badge. They prefer the steps taken by Meta to verify over Twitter and slams the SMS verification of Twitter.

“Meanwhile, some influencers say this new change may also give rise to verified scammers. Influencers have also found it expensive for users as the company wants to monetize its new features.  At the same time, some influencers expect the remaining social media platforms to launch verification subscriptions.”

Below are a few of the most popular influencer opinions captured by the GlobalData’s Social Media Analytics Platform:

  1. Ross Gerber, CEO at Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management:

“Meta is offering customer service with their subscription service along with verification. This is well needed on instagram as it’s filled with fraud and fake accounts… and so many ‘influencers’ who can now be verified. Nor are they charging the people already verified. $META”

  1. Ari Paul, Founder of BlockTower Capital:

“Worth noting how unrelated this is to twitter’s program.  Meta is actually doing verification, not just charging for a badge.  And comes with service.”

  1. Mark Gruman, Chief Correspondent at Bloomberg LP:

“Twitter, Facebook etc should charge all they want for verification, extra features, fewer ads, new icons, better customer support etc. Completely reasonable. But charging for things like SMS authentication and for preventing platform problems like bot impersonators isn’t right.”

  1. Rachel Tobac, CEO at SocialProof Security:

“If we’re going to do paid verification at all, I’m glad Meta has required 2FA for it.

This ensures that an additional step is required upon sign in and reduces account takeover. Would love to see additional education on likely scams to steal pw/MFA for these types of accounts.”

  1. Sumit Gupta, Co-Founder CoinDCX:

“After Twitter Blue, #MarkZuckerberg launches Meta Verified badges! Wondering if this is actually thought out for adding real value to the audience or more for generating revenues. Also worried that this strategy may give rise to verified scammers!  Will have to wait and watch”

  1. Ben Parr, Co-Founder at Octane AI:

“Meta is rolling out the ability to pay for verification on Instagram. It will change the entire ecosystem around verification as a status symbol. Will the idea of verified accounts as being important symbols fade away? Check marks mean nothing anymore.”

  1. Ken Yeung, Co-Host and Producer at The Created Economy:

“Will #YouTube, #TikTok and #LinkedIn soon follow suit and launch a verification subscription offering like Twitter and Meta?”

IDPC GDPR fines ‘only adding to Meta’s woes’

The ‘unexpectedly harsh’ penalty served out to Facebook owner Meta by Ireland’s data privacy regulator has wide-ranging consequences for the tech-giant, showing how national rulings can impact business on a global scale.

To recap, Meta has been fined EUR265 million ($275 million) by the Irish Data Protection Commission (IDPC), bringing its total data privacy fines in Europe to EUR1 billion ($1 billion);

Emma Taylor, Analyst at GlobalData, said: “Against the backdrop of mass layoffs and a rapidly sinking share price, the news of an additional fine represents another blow for Meta. Although the company claimed to have changed its policies since the data leak, the IDPC has been understandably harsh with its penalty.

“Ireland’s position in regulating Big Tech has increased, as Meta, Google, TikTok, and Twitter all now have offices there. Looking at its track record, Meta being hit with yet another fine is unsurprising. It would only be surprising if it were the last.”

Sarah Coop, Analyst at GlobalData, added: “Meta is on a losing streak. Privacy breaches damage consumer trust, which is already dwindling for Meta. Its central social media platform, Facebook, is struggling to attract younger users due to strong competition from other platforms like TikTok. The company has also reportedly lost $9.4 billion on its metaverse business unit and has recently restructured, laying off 11,000 employees.

“GDPR fines are simply collateral damage for Big Tech. While fines can be large, at up to 4% of global turnover, most Big Tech consider it the cost of doing business. However, consumer confidence will be important for the metaverse, and cybersecurity breaches and data privacy fines further taint Meta’s already tarnished reputation.”

Facebook and Artefact team up for marketing attribution guide

Facebook and data marketing consultancy Artefact have released a practical, step-by-step guide they say will help businesses make the most of marketing attribution – the process of tracking and ranking the importance of marketing actions along the customer journey.

This first joint publication reveals that marketers who make attribution a business priority can double the marketing efficiency of their business. The partners say studies have shown that omnichannel shoppers have a 30% higher lifetime value than single channel customers, and the guide explains how to capitalise on this using the Facebook Attribution tool.

The guidebook explores how attribution is the critical next step of data-driven marketing maturity, with impact beyond digital practices. It also demonstrates how attribution is one of the most important accelerators towards a digital-first and consumer-centric business model and mindset.

The guide says better attribution pushes organisations and brands to move from discrete touchpoints planning to gluing together holistic consumer journeys. This reasoning is illustrated through three client cases showcasing best-in-class experiences with Etam, Europcar and TUI.

Other elements explored in the guidebook include:

  • How customer data collection can be enriched for attribution quality and accuracy
  • Why attribution is a critical enabler of efficient marketing (cost optimisation) and personalised experiences (message optimisation).
  • What are the key pillars of an attribution project using Facebook Attribution (measure – understand – allocate) and which stakeholders need to be engaged in the process.
  • The key steps and best practices to successfully implement Facebook Attribution and accelerate your measurement journey.

Download Facebook and Artefact’s Attribution Guidebook.

Instagram ‘attracting a larger audience than Facebook’ among brands

Instagram has a larger audience and nearly 20X more interactions than Facebook among top 50 brand profiles, according to Socialbakers’ new Q4 2019 Trends Report.

Key insights from the report include Instagram overtaking Facebook in audience size, the relative decline in engagement during the holiday season, the popularity of vertical videos, the dominance of women among fans and followers, growing ad spend, and the continuing explosion of influencer marketing. 

“The writing has been on the wall for some time, but now it’s official. When it comes to the top 50 biggest brand profiles, Instagram has a larger audience than Facebook,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak CEO, Socialbakers. “That development was not a surprise. What was unexpected in Q4 2019, however, was the relative decline in engagement during the holiday season. This is a warning sign that brands require a deeper understanding of which types of content their audiences find compelling, and an agile method to get that content in front of them.”

The key findings of the Q4 2019 Trends report include:

·         For the first time globally, Instagram surpassed Facebook in audience size – but for the top UK brand profiles, Facebook still has a marginally bigger audience, but greater engagement is found on Instagram

·         Despite efforts to attract consumers during the holiday period, post interactions for both Instagram and Facebook were lower in Q4 2019 than Q4 2018

·         Women make up the majority of fans and followers of brand pages on Instagram and Facebook, representing over half (56.4%) of the audience engaging with brands

·         Whilst 70% of videos on Facebook brand pages are shot horizontally, viewers are more likely to complete a vertical video than horizontal (29.9% vs. 22.2% respectively)

·         Ad spend on Instagram Stories increased by 40% over the last year, and by 91% over the last two years. Meanwhile, in the UK, brands are still posting more to the Instagram News Feed

·         The number of influencers using #Ad exploded by 90.5% in Q4 2019

·         The Services category (including lawyers, accounting services and IT services) found a 66.7% jump in engagement

Based on the top 50 biggest brand profiles worldwide, there was a notable change in Q4 2019. For the first time, the total audience on Instagram surpassed the total audience size on Facebook. Additionally, the total interactions on Instagram were nearly 20 times larger than those on Facebook. So, even though the top 50 brands published more posts on Facebook, the engagement on those posts didn’t reach the numbers that Instagram was able to achieve.

For the top UK brand profiles Facebook still has a marginally bigger audience. However, while brands are posting roughly the same amount of content to Facebook and Instagram, they are seeing significantly more engagement on Instagram. The lesson here is that UK brands need to focus on their Instagram strategy as by splitting their content between both platforms they are likely leaving interactions on the table. 

Engagement: A surprising drop in interactions

In the UK the industries that are seeing the most engagement across Facebook and Instagram are ecommerce, fashion and retail. The data shows that ecommerce brands are really leveraging the potential of Facebook, whilst Fashion brands are running the show on Instagram. 

Despite attempts to attract consumers during the holiday season, the relative post interactions for both Instagram and Facebook were lower in Q4 2019 than a year ago. This was true even among the most successful industries on social media. Fashion, the top industry on Instagram, decreased by 19.4%, while the top industry on Facebook, Ecommerce, decreased by 9.6% versus Q3 2019. This may indicate that brands need to get smarter about the content they post, and focus on top quality content in smaller volumes to increase engagement.

However, one interesting success story in Q4 engagement is the Services category. It achieved a 66.7% jump in engagement on Instagram compared to Q3 2019. On Facebook, Services finished fourth with 7.6% of total interactions after not making the top eight in the previous quarter. Services is a wide-ranging category that includes lawyers, accounting services, hairdressers, car repairs, IT services, conference and event organisers, and weight loss courses.

Format: Vertical videos pull viewers in

Marketers often wonder whether viewers prefer videos that were shot horizontally or those that were shot vertically. Currently, about 70% of videos on Facebook brand pages are shot horizontally. But according to Q4 data from those Facebook brand pages, vertical videos perform better than horizontal videos across the board. For videos shorter than 30 seconds (which is the most popular video length), vertical videos were completed by viewers 29.9% of the time, while horizontal videos were completed 22.2% of the time. 

Demographics: Women are dominant on social media

According to the Q4 2019 data, women make up the majority of fans and followers of brand pages on both Instagram and Facebook. On Instagram, 58% of brand page followers were female, comprising the majority of every age demographic. On Facebook, women made up 56.7% of the total audience of page fans, although there were slightly more men in the 18-24 age demographic. Women are also the largest group of people mentioning and interacting with brand pages in the prime marketing demographic of 25-34. Overall, women represented 56.4% of the audience engaging with brands in Q4 2019.

Ad spend: Instagram rises but Facebook remains the leader

As in past quarters, ad spend on Instagram Stories continues its rapid growth, although Facebook Feed remains the leader with 58.3% of total ad spend. For the first time, Instagram Stories reached 10% of ad spend in the second half of 2019. Overall, the spend on Instagram Stories increased by 40% over the last year, and by 91% over the last two years.

In the UK the data shows that brands are still posting more to the News Feed. Since Stories are proving to be a highly engaging content format globally, perhaps UK brands need to up their game on Stories. 

Other ad spend trends include the rise of Instagram Explore and Facebook Marketplace as a destination for advertising dollars. In its first five months, the percentage of ad spend on Instagram Explore grew to 1.32%. And over the last year, ad spend on Facebook Marketplace grew from 0.72% in December 2018 to 1.31% at the end of 2019, an increase of more than 80%.

Influencer marketing: No sign of slowing down

One trend that remains unchanged is the skyrocketing growth of influencer marketing. In Q4 2019, the number of influencers using #Ad or the local language version in their posts exploded by 90.5%. For the third straight quarter, the top Instagram brand profile in the world associated with influencers was Walmart, which had 854 mentions from 619 influencers in Q4 2019. Other profiles with successful influencer partnerships included Daniel Wellington, iDeal Of Sweden, and FashionNova.com.

The complete Q4 2019 Social Media Trends Report with supporting graphics is now available for free download.

Using Facebook for marketing success

By Strange

What’s the main focus of your digital marketing strategy? At one time, everyone would have said Google. These days, however, Facebook has become a credible alternative for many businesses. As an agency, we’ve developed considerable resources and capabilities to service the huge growth in clients’ use of the platform.

You may already appreciate the sophisticated features and capabilities combined with enormous reach and powerful targeting that Facebook offers. These can deliver great returns for almost any brand or organisation, whether used for acquisition, awareness or direct response, for example.

Being a Facebook Marketing Partner certainly helps us deliver better value for clients. Facebook defines Marketing Partners as “tech companies and agencies that have been vetted by Facebook and certified for their excellence in helping advertisers get the most from their campaigns.” 

New insights on the Facebook Auction 

As a Marketing Partner, we can access information and insights from Facebook that may not be widely available. In this article we’re sharing some valuable information we were recently given on the Facebook Ad Auction. We hope this helps make the auction process work better for you.

The Facebook Auction is the process by which Facebook’s algorithms spend advertising budgets in the most effective way possible. How these auctions work has, for a long time, been somewhat opaque, but Facebook has now started to release more information about how the system works.

1. Simplify your campaign structure 

A typical Facebook account structure looks something like this. It can have multiple campaigns organised into different marketing approaches, strategies or tactics. Campaigns are subdivided by highly defined, narrow audiences at ad set level.

But if your account structure could look like the one below, Facebook claims that a simplified and consolidated structure leads to what they call increased ‘auction signal’, i.e. it increases the available signals Facebook’s algorithm has to work with when it decides where and how to deploy budget. 

Combining your campaigns and ad sets into larger buckets helps because it removes constraints on the system so that it can search for the best areas of opportunity within larger groups of people, instead of being restricted to granular, pre-defined audiences.

The primary benefit of a consolidated account structure, however, is that it will help drive a faster exit from Facebook’s ‘learning phase’ because the algorithm has more information to work with.

2. Respect the learning phase

Facebook’s learning phase is when the delivery system explores the best way to deliver your ad sets after launch. This means that performance is less stable, and CPAs will actually be worse during this time because the engine is still working out the best people and places to show the ad. Anything that you can do to exit the learning phase earlier will therefore help to improve overall campaign performance. 

Fortunately there are some straightforward rules you can follow to make sure your campaigns have enough data to exit the learning phase in a timely manner. For instance, making sure that your targeting and placements aren’t too narrow will really help give the auction more signal. 

It’s also very important that you optimise for the right conversion event. If you’re optimising for a conversion event which is too far along the funnel for you to reach a sufficient number of conversions, try switching to something which will record more conversions – for example, optimising for ‘Add to Carts’ instead of ‘Purchases’. A higher number of conversion events will ultimately help you get past the learning phase threshold and improve overall optimisation.

One last critical piece of advice: do your best to avoid frequent manual edits! Whilst it may be tempting to constantly tune and tweak your campaigns, making significant changes can reset the learning phase so that the algorithm has to start all over again. Any changes to the following can cause your campaigns to re-enter the learning phase:

  • Targeting
  • Placements
  • Creative (including adding additional ads)
  • Optimisation events
  • Pausing your ad set for more than 7 days
  • Bid strategy
  • Budgets

Key takeaways

  1. Consolidate your account structure for maximum auction signal
  2. Give the Facebook system as many data points as possible so that it can exit the learning phase quickly
  3. Don’t narrow your targeting too much and optimise for the right conversion events to reach the learning phase threshold
  4. Avoid frequent manual edits so that your campaigns don’t re-enter the learning phase

Continuing to evolve

Facebook has come a long way since its Marketplace was originally launched in 2007. Back then we were helping clients use the brand new channel (we’re now celebrating our 20th anniversary as an agency) and we’ve been keeping abreast of Facebook’s evolution ever since.

Future changes are inevitable. However the platform shapes itself in the future our focus as an agency will always be on working in partnership with Facebook to bring greater value to our clients.

Read more about Strange here

Video now accounts for 25% of US digital ad spend

Services such as Facebook Watch have driven US digital video advertising to new heights in 2018, with spend increasing by almost 30 per cent to $27.8 billion.

The latest figures from eMarketer also indicate that video will make up 25 per cent of all digital ad spend for the year, with Facebook (including Instagram) taking 24.5 per cent of video spend at $6.8 billion.

Moreover, eMarketer says Facebook takes 87 per cent of all US video ad spending on social networks, having experienced particular success with in-feed video ads.

eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson said Facebook will likely experience further success with in-stream video ads in Facebook Watch, which appear within the video player in the same way as TV commercials.

Perhaps most interestingly though, YouTube is well behind Facebook in terms of video ad spend, generating ‘just’ $3.4 billion in the US in 2018, up 17.1 percent from 2017.

Twitter is very much the poor relation, generating $633 million from video ads in 2018, while Snapchat will generate $397 million.

Lords calls for self-regulation in digital advertising

The UK’s Communications Committee has published a report ‘UK advertising in a digital age’ in which it calls for the £120 billion industry to take steps to self-regulate.

The report cites an explosion of businesses using technologies which make money from delivering advertising online, which often rely on processing personal data of consumers.

The House of Lords-based Committee says its heard evidence that even individuals within the industry do not have a comprehensive understanding of how business models such as these work, making the digital advertising industry dysfunctional and opaque.

Such views have almost certainly been exacerbated by the ongoing controversy involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

The Committee notes that the UK is a global centre for advertising that relies on an international workforce, while its ability to attract and retain international workers is key to its global success. However, it says that extending the tiered visa system, which is slow, expensive and restrictive, to EU nationals will create an unmanageable barrier to finding and hiring the talent that the advertising industry needs.

As such, the report makes the following recommendations:-

  • The Committee recommends that the industry should take greater steps to self-regulate through independent bodies such as the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards.
  • The Competition and Markets Authority should undertake a market study of the digital advertising market to ensure that it is working fairly for businesses and consumers.
  • The Government should review whether competition law is appropriate for the 21st century digital economy.
  • Individuals from all communities and backgrounds, regardless of ethnicity, gender, class and ability, should have access to employment in the advertising industry. The industry should discontinue informal working and recruitment practices, such as unpaid internships, which present a barrier to groups from lower socioeconomic groups. The Government should clarify the law on unpaid internships. This will allow the advertising industry to access a larger talent pool which better reflects the advertisers’ audiences.
  • The Government should seek to negotiate reciprocal agreements with other countries under which international workers with a job offer in the advertising industry will have the right to work in the UK. The Government should also introduce a creative industries’ freelancer visa.

Chairman of the Committee, Lord Gilbert of Panteg, said: “Advertising contributes to culture, society and fuels the economy by helping businesses to grow and compete against one another. It is therefore essential that UK advertising continues to thrive and maintain its international reputation. But the industry is facing immense changes which threaten to undermine its success.

“Digital advertising has quickly become the most significant form of advertising by spending. But the market for delivering digital advertising to consumers is notoriously ‘murky’: businesses which buy advertising services don’t know how their money is being spent, whether their advertising is being displayed next to content which is obscene or which supports terrorism, or whether their ads are being viewed by a human being at all.

“The consumer’s experience is also poor as they may be bombarded with clickbait, or their personal data may be exploited without their knowledge. To restore the public’s trust in advertising as a whole, the industry must commit to adhering to proper standards.

“The UK’s global success relies on an international workforce. These workers provide the cultural, creative, digital and languages skills which enable the UK to win advertising accounts from multi-national companies for global campaigns. As the UK leaves the EU, the Government must develop an immigration policy that works for advertising businesses.”

Facebook acquires teenage polling app tbh

Facebook has acquired a polling app which has become a viral hit with teenagers just two months after its release.

The app, called tbh, allows members to create short surveys and send positive feedback to friends. The app has already had five million downloads and one billion messages.

It is thought Facebook has paid in the region of $100 million for the app, with the four co-founders – Nikita Bier, Erik Hazard, Kyle Zaragoza and Nicolas Ducdodon – brought into Facebook’s headquarters to continue to develop the app.

In a statement, tbh said: “While the last decade of the internet has been focused on open communication, the next milestone will be around meeting people’s emotional needs… When we met with Facebook, we realised that we shared many of the same core values about connecting people through positive interactions. Most of all, we were compelled by the ways they could help us realise tbh’s vision and bring it to more people.”

UEFA Champions League to be broadcast on Facebook

A new partnership with Fox Sports will see the UEFA Champions League matches streamed live across Facebook, with over a dozen Champions League fixtures aired in the US through the Fox Sports Facebook page from September.

Fox will live-stream two live matches per day in the group stage, four rounds of 16 matches and four quarter-final matches.

“This collaboration unlocks new distribution for Fox, giving the network a national platform for matches that won’t always be televised,” said Dan Reed, head of global Sports Partnerships at Facebook. And with different matches broadcast in English and Spanish on Facebook, our community of fans will have plenty of action to cheer on and chat about once the group stage kicks off in September.”

The deal will add to Facebook’s growing list of sporting events being streamed live across the platform, with recent deals including Major League Baseball, the US’s Major League Soccer and Univision for Liga MX matches.

UK’s love for cars tops social media posts

A report by social media analytics platform, Netbase, has revealed the UK’s love of luxury car brands.

The Brand Love List report looks at the brands consumers express the most love for in social media posts, with Jaguar, Land Rover, BMW 3 Series and Porsche 911 just some of the models that consumers are crazy about, with BMW, Audi and Porsche all featuring in the report’s top 10.

This is the second year that the report has been run. In the UK, Apple held onto the top spot, but showed that Google, in second place, was narrowing the gap which last year was 400,000, now down to 130,000 along with a lot of positive sentiment for Google Classroom. The remainder of the top five was unchanged with Lego in third with an abundance of shared excitement for themed Lego such as Lego Batman, Tesco in fourth with popular campaign hashtags including #triedforless and #bagsofhelp while BMW was ranked fifth.

The European Top Five brands differed only slightly from the UK with BMW taking fourth spot and consumer goods brand Adidas coming in at fifth place. The automotive sector once again proved popular with customers expressing much love, particularly in relation to the Porsche 911. While consumer goods brands including Gucci, Adidas, Lego and Christian Dior S.A. accounted for nearly 45% of the top loved brands, they only represented 21% of the mentions. Conversely, technology which was dominated by Apple and Google but also included SAP, Siemens and Dyson, represented 10% of the conversation they also represented over 55% of mentions.

While there’s much love for consumer goods brands, they still don’t even come close to the volume of technology conversation across Europe.

The data was gathered using NetBase’s social media analytics platform to surface the strongest, most positive consumer emotions towards brands from 2.4 million English language posts of earned mentions. Earned mentions mean those posts that were not posted by the brand itself, inclusive of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and millions of other sources during the one-year period April 2016 to April 2017. It then identified the 25 UK brands that get the most love.

The European report used the same sources across the same period from 6.5 million English language posts of earned mentions in 50+ European countries and identified a list of the 50 most loved brands.

Commenting on the UK report Paige Leidig, Chief Marketing Officer, NetBase said: “What’s interesting about automotive is that brands represent 25% of the list but account for only 13% of the conversation suggesting that there is an opportunity for them to spread the love and engage more influencers in conversation.

“The dominance of technology in social conversation is no surprise but the fact that Apple and Google are so far out in front indicates that they have now become an everyday part of the English language.”

www.netbase.com

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