We Are Social’s Monday Mashup #237

Mashup
nick.mulligan

Promotional posts to lose organic Facebook reach
Uh oh, organic reach on Facebook is about to drop again. The network has announced that any “overly promotional” posts will suffer – that’s those which push people to buy a product, install an app or enter a competition, among others. Our very own Robin Grant spoke to Marketing Week about the changes:

Brands are producing more content than ever, but News Feeds only have limited inventory – the obvious solution for Facebook is to sell eyeballs to the highest bidder. That doesn’t mean that producing quality content is no longer a priority, as engaging content will get the lion’s share of the little organic reach available, but more importantly drive media efficiency, maximising the effectiveness of Facebook spend.

Digiday was quick to point out that organic reach isn’t dead yet. Brands can still reach 25% of their audience per month, especially if they’re producing high quality content. The importance of that last point is highlighted in the below graph.

Deep-Focus_study

Facebook adds Yelp-like ‘Places’ feature
Facebook has added a feature called ‘Places’, which collates and showcases ratings and locations of local businesses. Now, we don’t want to start any rumours, but it’s pretty Yelp-y. Looks like there’s a new pair of rivals in town.

Facebook creating ‘enterprise social network’
If there’s one problem with Facebook, it’s too many friends and not enough colleagues. Thankfully, Facebook is working on a new network, ‘Facebook at Work’, which will allow everything from internal messaging to document collaboration. Hopefully it won’t be another outlet for your boss’s baby photos.

Twitter responds to stock price fall
What do you do when your stock price plummets? Well, if you’re Twitter, a whole host of things. First things first, the network has pointed out the value of its “logged out” audience, which it numbers at 500 million unique visitors every month.

Screen Shot 2014-11-17 at 16.12.19

CEO Dick Costolo also announced a number of updates to the way the platform works. First of all is something called ‘Instant Timeline’, which will make it easier for new users to find and follow the accounts relevant to them. There are also going to be better video capabilities in the main app, tweaks to celeb pages and users will be shown the most popular messages they missed from their network when not logged in. Finally, direct messages are going to change – you’ll be able to share tweets within them.

WeChat adds 30 million users
WeChat has reached 468 million monthly active users, which is a lot, isn’t it? However, growth is slowing – 6.8% in Q3 2014, down from 10.6% the previous quarter.

WeChat-growth-slows-right-down-as-it-reaches-468-million-monthly-active-users

YouTube plans premium music service
YouTube is launching a paid music subscription service, through which users can stream high-quality, ad-free music and music videos. It’s also adding a new way to discover full albums, with discographies listed on artist pages.

Screen Shot 2014-11-17 at 16.25.24

Pinterest plans to position itself as pre-search engine
Pinterest has a vision. It’s hoping to become a resource for people who have the faintest hint of an idea, long before they’d use a search engine. This was made clear in a presentation by head of engineering, Michael Lopp, using slides like the below.

slide2-5

Updates to Instagram
Instagram has made a couple of changes. First of all, you can now go back and edit captions on posts, particularly useful for typos/failed jokes. It’s also added a new ‘People’ tab to the Explore section, where users can see any accounts that may be of interest to them.

Screen Shot 2014-11-17 at 16.47.21

Oily bum ‘breaks the internet’
A famous woman showed people her bum and everyone wanted to get involved. Brands especially.

Banana Republic joins the We Are Social club
We Are Social has partnered with Banana Republic in the US on social media strategy, activations and community management. So far, work has included #thenewBR, a campaign to promote the autumn range through influencers and contests, as well as #ShareHappy, through which users could tweet @BananaRepublic to get cupcakes and balloons sent to someone in NYC.

Discounts for followers
OnePiece has opened a New York pop-up shop that trades social media popularity for discounts. Shoppers will receive $1 off for every 500 followers they have across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Not meaning to brag, but if I pop in, I’ll be saving myself a tidy total of $1.

Radar gets turned off
The Samaritans have pulled their ‘Radar’ app after a petition amassed over 1,000 signatures. Radar allowed users to sign up for alerts if anyone they followed on Twitter posted a message that contained a number of key words that might suggest negative/suicidal thoughts. After a number of questions about privacy, the app is now gone for good.