Instagram isn’t considered one of the best marketing tools, but that is because the larger companies have a hard time breaking its formula with raw capital alone. They have to pay massive amounts to influencers on Instagram to receive far less value for money than if they paid Facebook or Twitter influencers. As a result, smaller businesses are able to sneak into the public view and make some gains on a brand-by-brand level. Here are a few Instagram features that favour smaller businesses.
Create a Wall of Branding Messages
Put simply, you can turn your Instagram account into a big repository of your branding and marketing messages. All you have to do is put your evergreen stuff in there, and it will still be interesting to the people who visit. Added to which, it helps spread your brand message on social media.
You Can Buy Attention Three Ways
These days, you can pay for Instagram promotion through their marketing systems and tools. This is expensive and fairly inefficient. You can pay influencers and celebrities to promote your brand, but that is even more expensive. Or, you can go online and buy Instagram accounts from a company like Fameswap, and then exploit the accounts of other people who have already built up their audience.
Test Your Ads Through Instagram Stories
This is a trick as old as time. You can run all your most shaky ads through Instagram to see how people react. Oddly, if people do not react at all, it probably means your advertisement is okay for mainstream use but may need improvement. Nevertheless, taking a few chances and running a few risky ads through Instagram is rarely a bad thing, even if you don’t gather much data.
You Can Ask Your Customers For Input
As with all social media, you can ask your followers and potential customers for input on your services, your products, your brands, your offers and your social media posts. As a smaller business, you can be more interactive and authentic with your customers.
Watch and Maybe Even Copy Your Competitors
You can copy your competitors posts, ideas and sales. You can check out what works for them, and then make your own version. The great thing is that there is nothing they can do about it. Plus, you don’t have to try their methods right away, you copy their stuff, make your own, make it better, and then release it when the time is right.
Try Instagram Live For Certain Promotions
There are certain companies that are able to make the most of Instagram live. Haunted houses are pretty popular at the moment, and there are times of the year when fireworks are popular too. If you are running events that are live themselves, like live standup comedy, then you can do very well with the Instagram Live features. There are even people making unboxing videos of their own products, so you could try that too. They seem to be oddly popular for unknown reasons.
You Can Upload Videos of 60 Minutes
If you run a business account that is verified, you can run videos of up to 60 minutes. If you have the sort of content or even the types of services that warrant a 60 minute run-time, then you have an advantage over all the accounts that cannot post 60 minute videos.
Get Yourself Listed on Google
If you have a fully fleshed out Instagram profile and a well maintained Instagram account, then you will appear on Google when people are searching for your business. It doesn’t have a big impact, but it is one more Google result in your favour, possibly ranking above the Instagram profile of your competitors.
The CEO of Meta Platforms announces a new day in tech: conventional normality.
The party’s over.
In tech, this amounts to saying that the cool and Zen culture marked by an office transformed into a cosy lounge is over. Used to be we came, we entered and we were at home. The fridge was full; everyone helped themselves. The buffet was permanent.
The employee was in the centre. Work-life balance was the principle. The well-being of the employee came first. Companies were required to do everything to put their employees at ease to get the best out of them.
No more.
It’s all a distant memory now, says Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms (META) – Get Free Report. Welcome to the real world, he proclaimed on March 14.
The social media emperor just announced the elimination of 10,000 additional jobs, after 11,000 jobs were cut last November. In all, the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has cut 21,000 jobs in four months.
‘Year of Efficiency’
It’s not just the cuts themselves that’s striking here. It’s the tone with which Zuckerberg announced the new wave of austerity measures. He adopted the vernacular of the boss of an old-economy company. He was a cost-killer. He was cold. It’s isn’t personal; it’s just business. He was a normal boss.
“In our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on cancelling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organization as lean as possible,” Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post.
He continued: “As part of the Year of Efficiency, we’re focusing on returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles. It’s important for all groups to get leaner and more efficient to enable our technology groups to get as lean and efficient as possible.”
He used the word “efficiency” fully a dozen times, including three times in the first two paragraphs. These two paragraphs are a catch-all of classic corporate lingo that says everything and nothing: “improve our financial performance,” “difficult environment,” “execute,” “optimize,” “workstreams,” “processes,” “changes,” “uncertainty,” and “focus.”
He sounds like the CEO of a traditional company. His post is a manual, a guide that other tech CEOs will use as well.
The tone is cold. And it changed. In November, when Zuckerberg announced the elimination of 11,000 jobs, he played the sensitive chord. He apologized.
“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” the CEO said at the time. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.”
This time, there is none of that. He is not sentimental, as if to put a wall between him and those for whom the music just stopped and who were asked to go home while the evening was in full swing. He just killed the fun.
A New Normal
Tech and Silicon Valley now enter the normal corporate world. In this world, what matters is to please the markets. And markets like cost cuts. The employee is secondary. If you make big profits with the least possible cost, the markets applaud.
Interestingly, Zuckerberg’s announcements come at the same time as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, a major player in the startup ecosystem and in Silicon Valley.
The two events cannot be separated. Their symbolism is strong. It is the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, or rather the meeting of the old economy and the new one.
In case anyone still has any doubts, Zuckerberg also appears to be ending remote work at Meta. Tech companies previously backed off from from forcing employees back to the office.
“Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” he said.
“This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week.”
“I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work with your colleagues in person.”
The party is over. It’s time to grow up, Zuckerberg seems to be saying.
One last tip to reflect on, while you’re on your way home: “I encourage each of you to focus on what you can control. That is, do great work and support your teammates.”
Tech workers: Welcome to a normal boss and a normal company.
is opening up new avenues for advertising on Instagram and Messenger as the company seeks to reverse a downward trend in revenue that recently pushed the stock price to its lowest since early 2019.
In an event for advertisers on Monday, Meta introduced a new way for advertisers to display ads on Instagram’s explore page, which shows content to users based on their preferences and routines, and on the profile pages of all public, non-teen Instagram users. As part of a new test of the ad format, select influencers will be able to allow ads to appear on their feeds as a potential source of revenue.
On the Messenger messaging service, Facebook is launching a tool that uses machine learning software to show ads intended to “reach people who are most likely to make a purchase,” said Maz Sharafi, Meta’s vice president of marketing and growth for business messaging. Sharafi noted that “the important thing here is that we do not use message content for ads,” implying that the company will not analyse Messenger messages to determine which ads get placed.
The announcements come just three weeks before Meta is scheduled to release its third-quarter earnings report, which is expected to show a second straight period of declining revenue. The company gets substantially all of its sales from mobile ads, a business that’s been hammered this year because of Apple’s
privacy updates to its operating system as well as a sputtering economy and rising competition from TikTok. Meta’s stock has lost close to 60% of its value this year.
As Meta looks to the future, the company is banking on the emergence of virtual reality and the metaverse to drive growth. It’s now starting to experiment with how advertisers will exist in that world.
Meta said it’s testing augmented reality ads within Instagram’s main feed and stories feature, said Nicola Mendelsohn, Meta’s vice president of the global business group, at the ad event. Most consumers experience AR today when they interact with the digital filters that decorate the photos and videos they see on social media services like Facebook and Snapchat.
“Through the AR experience, brands can encourage people to actually try out and try on that product or interact with effects from their surroundings,” Mendelsohn said.
Another new option for businesses on Instagram is an ad product called multiadvertiser ads that will show users a carousel of related promotions to accompany the original ad. Meta didn’t providing pricing details on any of its new offerings.
One of Facebook’s primary challenges this year has been its hefty investments in its TikTok competitor called Reels, because there isn’t yet an established ad format for short-form, viral videos.
To try to take advantage of the growing popularity of Reels, Meta is debuting what it calls post-loop ads, a new ad format for creators and companies. A creator can run these short video ads of their partners in between their Reels. That feature is only available on the core Facebook app.
Additionally, businesses have the option of embedding a carousel of ads onto the bottom of a creator’s Reels if approved by the creator.
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify that ads will be rolled out to all Instagram users.
If you thought there’s no corner on Instagram without ads, you’re wrong, my good friend. Meta can always make room for more, and that’s exactly what it’s about to do.
As the company is struggling with a major financial loss, it needs a way to generate more revenue. So, Instagram is about to get even more ads, and they’re going to be everywhere.
There are already ads on your Feed, in Reels, in Stories… So is there even a place where there can be more of them? Meta found the way, so they will now be on in your Explore feed, and a feed of posts you see when you click on someone’s profile. Brands can already post ads to the Explore feed, and the profile feed ads are still in the testing phase. “As a part of this test, we will experiment with a monetization opportunity that will allow eligible creators to earn extra income from ads displayed in their profile feeds, beginning with select U.S. creators,” Meta writes.
But wait, there’s more. Instagram now also has AI-powered multi-advertiser ads. In other words, Instagram’s algorithm will pay attention when you engage with an ad. And then, it will deliver ads underneath that it thinks may interest you.
In the announcement, Meta writes that new ad placements and formats are there “to help businesses tell their story and reach new customers.” So kind of them, right? As a mere Instagram user and creator, I feel like both my work and the work of the people I follow are drowning in ads and branded content. I think it’s only a matter of time before we find an alternative for showcasing and selling our artwork.
A new team will be tasked with building paid experiences across Meta’s apps
Meta is setting up a product organization to identify and build “possible paid features” for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, according to an internal memo sent to employees last week that was obtained by The Verge.
The new division is Meta’s first serious foray into building paid features across its main social apps, all three of which boast billions of users. It’s being set up after Meta’s ads business was severely hurt by Apple’s ad tracking changes on iOS and a broader pullback in digital ad spending. The group, called New Monetization Experiences, will be led by Pratiti Raychoudhury, who was previously Meta’s head of research.
In an interview with The Verge, Meta’s VP of monetization overseeing the group, John Hegeman, said the company is still committed to growing its ads business, and that it had no plans to let people pay to turn off ads in its apps. “I think we do see opportunities to build new types of products, features, and experiences that people would be willing to pay for and be excited to pay for,” he said. He declined to elaborate on paid features that are being considered.
Meta’s revenue almost entirely comes from ads, and while it has several paid features already across its apps, the social media giant hasn’t made charging users a priority until now. Hegeman downplayed paid features becoming a meaningful part of the business in the near term, but said that “on the flip side, I think if there are opportunities to both create new value and meaningful revenue lines and also provide some diversification, that’s obviously going to be something that will be appealing.”
Longer term, Meta sees paid features becoming a more meaningful part of its business, he said. “On a five-year time horizon I do think it can really move the needle and make a pretty significant difference.”
Facebook group administrators can already charge for access to exclusive content, and virtual “stars” can be purchased to send to creators. WhatsApp charges certain businesses for the ability to message their customers, and Instagram recently announced that creators could also begin charging a subscription for access to exclusive content. In June, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company wouldn’t take a cut of transactions from paid features and subscriptions until 2024.
Meta isn’t alone in pushing toward more paid features. Social media apps have been increasingly turning to charging over the past couple of years. TikTok started testing paid subscriptions for creators earlier this year, Twitter has paid Super Follows, and Discord makes its money entirely from its Nitro subscription. In addition, this year both Telegram and Snapchat added paid tiers that unlock additional features. Snapchat’s paid tier has proven to be an early hit.
“We’re obviously paying attention to what’s going on in the industry,” said Hegeman. “And I think there are multiple companies that have done interesting things in this space that I think hopefully we can learn from and emulate over time.”
Instagram, like all social media platforms, is investing heavily in its e-commerce capabilities. But while its ambitions are forward-facing, it is also looking backward at an underappreciated marketing tool to supercharge those ambitions – the QR code.
The QR code is having a renaissance. Once mostly seen in out-of-home (OOH) grassroots campaigns, the value of the code has skyrocketed as marketers grew to understand its wider implications for attribution and analytics purposes.
Instagram, finding itself on the back foot for e-commerce compared to platforms such as TikTok and Snapchat, is now quietly rolling out a new QR-based feature for all users. Following a limited trial of the tool, as noted by Alessandro Paluzzi, the platform is allowing its wider user base to share links to Reels and posts through the generation of a QR code.
A Meta representative told Techcrunch: “To make it easier for people and businesses to share specific content, we recently launched the ability to create QR codes for profiles, tags, locations, reels and more.”
It is another lease of life for the QR code. In 2015, Snapchat experimented with launching QR-based Snapcodes, allowing users to easily follow their friends. TikTok similarly launched its own visually-distinct QR code to allow users to share their own profiles.
The tool has also previously seen use in marketing in print titles. South Africa’s Associated Media – which publishes the regional editions of Cosmopolitan among others – saw positive results from printing QR codes next to products in its print magazines. That allowed its brand partners to track the purchase funnel from an analogue product to a digital one with much greater specificity than would otherwise have been possible.
At the time, Associated Media’s chief exec Julia Raphaely said: “We started with a QR code because, in South Africa, that is the payment gateway that’s very well recognized. We partnered with a QR code technology that was powered by a bank, and we started testing it.”
In the rest of the world, however, the QR code was seen mostly as a tool that had never lived up to its potential. Now, though, audiences have greater familiarity with codes for information-sharing and linking out. In its most recent Marvel series, for instance, Disney has included QR codes within TV shows that take users to bonus content.
A social strategy
Now, however, the QR code has come roaring back to the fore as a viable marketing tool. On social platforms, as in print, the codes are being used to open the purchase funnel for consumers – and to deliver greater measurement options for advertisers.
Jordan Lukeš, communications director at Emplifi, explains: “QR codes offer a wealth of opportunity for brands in terms of social-forward marketing. We know that influencer marketing is a huge hit with younger consumers especially. Just imagine how this could enhance the shopping experience – you could have QR codes connecting product info to posts where an influencer is wearing the item, or even include QR codes on physical clothing racks in stores.
“Not only does this create a phygital experience for the shopper, but it offers a new way for brands to drive and monitor their engagement in a way that can be traced all the way down to the bottom line.”
The codes would also aid with one of Instagram’s perennial issues – that of discovery. While more consumers are using platforms such as TikTok and Pinterest to seek out and discover recommendations, thus opening the purchase funnel for brand partners, Instagram has struggled to match their capabilities. This integration of QR code allows its creators to share their posts off-platform, which could help ameliorate that problem.
Beyond that, the key benefit for Instagram is one of attribution. The QR code allows for more direct and demonstrable measures of efficacy when it comes to linking through to advertising partners’ products.
Media Bounty’s Max Harris and Ali Moloney explain: “For advertisers, this trend has provided the added benefit of gathering audience data for future marketing purposes. For example, QR codes can store digital information such as when, where and how often you scan a code, which typically leads to an app or a website that then tracks your personal information. Therefore, the rise of the QR code follows the agreement between platforms and users as we exchange our data for access and convenience.”
The QR code was a victim of Amara’s Law, and its early use cases were arguably too early to take advantage of the rise of the smartphone camera and social media. With Instagram and the other major social platforms making huge strides toward developing their e-commerce operations, however, the QR code has again found its place in the marketer’s arsenal.
Apple’s quietly begun hiring for roles aimed at poaching the Facebook and Instagram advertisers that felt the biggest brunt from the company’s privacy updates
In terms of Silicon Valley feuds, you’d be hard pressed to find one that’s spicier than the years-long battle between Meta and Apple. Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg started steering his company toward virtual-reality tech, and now Apple CEO Tim Cook has made it clear he’s gunning for the same. Meta’s Facebook recently started testing out encrypted chats, a domain that Apple has dominated for years.
Facebook is a company that historically hasn’t shied away from sharing user data with countless third parties. Meanwhile Apple AAPL, 0.16%, as its own glitzy ad campaigns constantly remind us, is the one tech company that doesn’t spray your data across the web.
And, of course, there’s Apple’s recent privacy changes to its operating system that wiped out an estimated $10 billion of revenue for Meta META, -0.83%. At the same time, the advertisers that relied on the long-established tools on Facebook and Instagram were left without the data they long relied on for their businesses.
In the year since Apple CEO Tim Cook denounced ad-based business models as a source of real-world violence, Apple has ramped up plans to pop more ads into people’s iPhones and beef up the tech used to target those ads. And now it looks like Apple’s looking to poach the small businesses that have relied almost entirely on Facebook’s ad platform for more than a decade.
MarketWatch found two recent job postings by Apple that suggest the company is looking to build out its burgeoning ad-tech team with folks who specialize in working with small businesses. Specifically, the company says it’s looking for two product managers who are “inspired to make a difference in how digital advertising will work in a privacy-centric world” and who want to “design and build consumer advertising experiences.” An ideal candidate, Apple said, won’t only be savvy in advertising and mobile tech, and advertising on mobile tech, but will also have experience with “performance marketing, local ads or enabling small businesses.”
The listings also state that Apple’s looking for a manager who can “drive multi-year strategy and execution,” which suggests that Apple isn’t just tailing local advertisers but will likely be tailing those advertisers for a while. And considering how some of those small brands are already looking to jump ship from Facebook following Apple’s privacy changes, luring them off the platform might be enough to hamper Meta’s entire business structure for good, ad-tech analysts said.
“If you talk to any small business, they’ll tell you, ‘Yeah, right now is a disaster,” said Eric Seufert, one analyst who’s been following the battle between Apple and Facebook evolve for years. “It’s just a meltdown. There’s been a complete, devastating change to the environment.”
Is Apple’s Tim Cook stealing a page from Facebook’s playbook? Getty Images
‘What goes around comes around’
Zuckerberg has said (over and over again) that Apple’s move to cut off the company’s precious user data would hamper “millions” of small businesses, and, indeed, in the iPhone update’s aftermath, some marketers said they were left “scrambling” to identify whom their ads were reaching — and typically paying sky-high prices for the privilege to do so.
From an iPhone owner’s point of view, it can be tough to understand exactly how a privacy feature could singlehandedly bring countless mom-and-pops to their knees. Especially when that feature, App Tracking Transparency (ATT) — which Apple rolled out in April of last year — does something as upstanding as mandating that app developers give users the freedom to choose whether they want to be tracked across their device.
Most users, by all accounts, would end up saying no. And once they did, those apps lost access to a crucial mechanism in mobile advertising: that person’s unique “identifier for advertisers,” or IDFA for short.
You can think of it as something like the iPhone’s answer to a web cookie. An advertiser can use your IDFA to track, say, whether you saw its ad on Instagram and then bought its product on Etsy ETSY, -0.66%, or followed its account on Pinterest PINS, 3.62%. IDFA was the key that let mobile advertisers know whether their ads actually worked.
So when Apple’s change hit, it wasn’t just Facebook’s advertisers that were flying blind — small shops that were running ads on Google’s GOOG, 0.63%GOOGL, 0.41% YouTube, Snap’s SNAP, 0.84% Snapchat, Pinterest or any other platform where ads are sold experiences some sort of hurt. And the more your platform’s business relied on user data, the bigger sting you felt.
“You can have an ideological take on all of this and say, ‘Well, these ad tools shouldn’t have gotten so efficient, since that was dependent on violating people’s privacy,’ ” Seufert said. “And that’s a fair argument.”
But, as he also pointed out, you can’t ignore economics. Apple certainly hasn’t.
“I guess what goes around comes around,” said Zach Goldner, a forecasting analyst at Insider Intelligence who specializes in digital ads. “I mean, it’s not like Facebook hasn’t copied other platforms before.”
Aside from its myriad privacy scandals, the other core concept that the Meta brand is synonymous with is copying competitors. As Goldner put it, it was only a matter of time before someone tried made a run at the company that’s spent more than a decade weaving its brand into small businesses.
“Using Facebook ads for small businesses is voluntary in the same way that using email for a job search is voluntary,” said Jeromy Sonne, a longtime digital marketer who has since abandoned the platform to start his own ad-serving network.
“No, you’re not ‘locked in,’ and they aren’t forcing you to spend money. There’s no contract here,” he went on. “But because of the lack of options and the number of businesses that built their entire revenue off the back of the platform, it’s virtually impossible to walk away.”
Mark Zuckerberg made Facebook indispensable for the nation’s small businesses. Will that stranglehold endure? Associated Press
How Facebook became ‘virtually impossible’ for small business to escape
Before rivals like Snapchat and TikTok would hit the social-media sphere, Facebook had been running ads for years.
Some of the last holdouts in the switch to digital were smaller businesses — and reports at the time showed that there wasn’t a lack of companies trying to swoop in on the opportunity to work with local mom-and-pops. Ultimately, a good chunk of them would end up migrating to Facebook; the platform’s ad service was easier and cheaper to run than its competitors, and it offered more data than they did, too.
“You could just run anything in it, and it was so cheap it didn’t matter,” said Sonne. Facebook was offering something that was “100% self-serve” and didn’t have the price floors that other platforms — like, say, DoubleClick — were demanding at the time. And it was far easier to navigate than those competitors to boot.
Then the early aughts happened. In an effort to make its platform more user-friendly in 2014, Facebook started throttling the cheap promotional page posts that brands had become accustomed to, forcing the bulk of them to pay up for ad space in people’s feeds or lose the audience they’d spent nearly a decade cultivating.
When small businesses cried foul, Jonathan Czaja, Facebook’s then–director of small business for North America, said bluntly that the platform was simply “evolving,” and advertisers had no choice but to evolve alongside it.
So they did. A month after Czaja’s statement, the company boasted in a blog post about a new record number of small businesses operating on the platform: 40 million. At the same time, Zuckerberg noted that the company, though it was pivoting to fewer ads in people’s feeds, would be going even harder on microtargeting — a strategy that even he admitted was “pretty controversial” inside the company. Around the same time, employees reportedly began raising red flags about a then-obscure ad firm named Cambridge Analytica, which improperly harvested data from countless Americans in the run-up to the 2016 election.
‘Using Facebook ads for small businesses is voluntary in the same way that using email for a job search is voluntary.’
— Jeromy Sonne, digital marketer
By 2017, the combination of Facebook’s ever-growing cache of user data and increasing scale had left advertisers more or less stuck. When Facebook admitted to marketers no less than a dozen times that it might have flubbed the figures it provided, advertisers shrugged off the miscalculations every time. “Even with the wrong math — it is really small compared to fraud rates on other platforms,” one ad executive told Business Insider at the time. “In digital advertising, you just learn to live with a certain amount of ambiguity.”
Another executive put it more bluntly: “I wouldn’t say they are foolproof, but they are fairly impervious to almost anything.”
Revelations that the company knowingly lied to advertisers for years about how far their campaigns were reaching didn’t send advertisers packing, and neither did the slowly rising prices that many advertisers were paying. It’s typical for ad prices on any platform to fluctuate from month to month, but Facebook’s spikes were unusually extreme. Between January 2017 and January 2018, for example, one analysis found that the prices advertisers were paying for their Facebook ads were spiking as much as 122%.
“Over time the [prices] go up, support gets stretched thin, scaling issues take hold,” he went on. But what was a struggling startup to do? Venture capital had been steadily flowing into a new generation of digital-first brands for more than a decade, which gave them new monthly goals they needed to hit.
“It became a situation where brands or agencies who had expectations of eternal growth could consistently get it from Facebook,” Sonne said, and that their funders now expected the same. But it also made them dependent on a platform that was either increasingly unreliable or downright unusable, depending on which advertiser was asked. Some small businesses reported having their ads improperly flagged by Facebook’s automated ad-review process, while other marketers expressed frustration at how buggy the back-end systems were.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Meta, meanwhile, noted that “small-business owners around the world tell us our products helped them create and grow their businesses.”
“It’s why we are consistently committed to developing and providing new programs, tools, training and personalized advertiser support for them,” the spokesperson went on.
The company doesn’t disclose how many of the 10 million–plus advertisers pouring money into a given Meta property each year qualify as a “small business.” The last time Facebook shared that data itself was in a 2019 earnings call when then–Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the top 100 advertisers represented “less than 20%” of the company’s total ad revenue. An analysis from the marketing analytics firm Pathmatics found that percentage closer to 6%, at $4.2 billion in spending altogether. The company raked in nearly $70 billion in ad revenue that year alone.
Apple’s next move
Since upending the online advertising ecosystem, third-party analysts have seen a surge of advertiser activity — and ad dollars — head Apple’s way.
Last year, for example, one of these reports found that Apple’s Search Ads — which appear at the top of your iPhone screen when you’re looking for a new app to buy in the company’s App Store — were the source of roughly 58% of all iPhone app downloads. A year prior, these same ads were only responsible for 17%. And earlier this summer, one Evercore analyst projected that Apple’s App Store ads could net the company $7.1 billion in revenue by 2025.
“I think the revenue piece [of the ad market] is less important to Apple than just breaking up Facebook’s total ownership of distribution on mobile,” Seufert said. He pointed out that, for a long time, Facebook dominated the market in driving app installs. One report earlier this year found that about three-quarters of those marketing a mobile app rely on Meta’s ad-tech tools to do so.
“Ads are a revenue opportunity, but, more importantly, they’re a discovery mechanic,” Seufert went on. “And suddenly Facebook was determining which apps got downloaded, not Apple. My sense with all this is that they care about the revenue, but I don’t think that was the primary driver. I think it was about the power.”
As far as power plays go, there’s really no better move than homing in on small businesses that have become disgruntled with Meta’s platforms. And as Goldner pointed out, with the economic crush that came with the ongoing pandemic, more advertisers — big and small — are shirking display-based advertising like Meta’s for more search-based advertising like Apple’s.
“As we’re hitting a potential recession, people are moving more towards bottom-of-the-funnel ads to squeeze the margins,” Goldner said. “Whenever a potential economic downturn exists, companies want to focus on maximizing their sales. They care less about goodwill and more about just keeping their businesses afloat.”
Apple’s impending small-business push could also explain the rumblings that the company plans to add search ads to Apple Maps in the near future. After all, one of the best ways your local hardware store or diner can advertise their wares today is via search ads in Google Maps, which have been there since 2016. As Seufert put it, “How could [Apple] justify not doing it?”
Feature Image Credit: Getty Images
By Shoshana Wodinsky
Shoshana Wodinsky is an Enterprise Reporter for MarketWatch.
Accounts with verified badges are treated like nothing less than royalty on social media. According to Instagram, a verified badge is “a tool to help people find the real accounts of public figures and brands, and it means (Instagram) verified this is a notable and authentic Instagram account.”
However, Instagram says the blue check mark shouldn’t be considered “a symbol to show importance, authority, or subject matter expertise.”
To get verified on Instagram, there are vague criteria one must meet before applying. Keep in mind that requesting a verification doesn’t guarantee one.
Open Instagram on your phone and log in to the account you’re requesting a verified badge for.
Go to your profile by tapping on your profile picture at the bottom right.
Tap the three-lined hamburger icon in the top right and tap on Settings.
Tap Account, scroll down and tap Request verification.
Enter your credentials and provide necessary documents such as proof of identification. Instagram cites a “government-issued photo ID or official business documents” as examples.
Follow the on-screen instructions and submit your request.
Before applying, there are things to keep in mind even if your account ticks all the boxes. Instagram says once your account is verified, the username for the account cannot be changed or transferred to another account.
Multiple verification requests do not guarantee a quicker verification process or a verification at all, according to Instagram. It might even lead to cancellation of your application.
How many followers do you need to get verified on Instagram?
Instagram takes various factors into account while considering a verified-badge request. Surprisingly, none of these explicitly mention a follower count. While many might assume a high number of followers will get you verified on Instagram, the photo and video-sharing platform has other criteria.
According to Instagram, in addition to following Instagram’s Community Guidelines and Terms of Use, the account must be:
Authentic: Represent a real person, registered business or entity.
Unique: Represent the unique presence of the person or business. Only one account per person or business may be verified, with exceptions for language-specific accounts. This doesn’t include “general interest accounts” such as a memes account or a fan page.
Complete: Your account must have a completed profile such as be public, have a bio, a profile photo and be active when you apply.
Notable: Your account must represent a well-known, highly searched-for person, brand or entity. Instagram takes into consideration if the person or business is featured in multiple news sources excluding paid or sponsored media content as sources for review.
As long as the Instagram account possesses all the qualities mentioned by Instagram, there might be a good chance for verification. But the criteria does say the account must represent a person or a business who’s “notable” and “well-known,” so whether a “normal” person qualifies depends on the person and the account they’re trying to get verified.
It’s important to note that if you receive a verified badge using false or misleading information during the verification process, Instagram will remove your verified badge and may take additional action to disable your account.
There is no law that says you have to use Twitter.
Almost everyone agrees that large swaths of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit are terrible, each in their own way. But these monolithic social media platforms are so ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget that you don’t have to use them. Which isn’t to say that you have to swear off of social media forever: There are less odious alternatives that will still let you participate in online life.
These smaller, scrappier social media platforms aim to either correct the most egregious mistakes their big brothers and sisters make, or to provide niche experiences that the larger social media companies can’t/won’t. Below are alternatives to five of the most popular social media platforms. None of them are perfect, but they’re at least different, and probably less terrible. Plus, if any of them really catch on, you can be first to complain about how they used to be so much better.
Ditch Facebook for MeWe: Freedom from advertising and tracking
My suggested Facebook alternative, MeWe, offers a lot of features that will be familiar to Facebook-users—groups, private chats, tagging, content permissions—and boasts a Facebook-like look and feel, but WeMe is less evil. It’s completely advertising free and doesn’t track or sell its users’ data, staying afloat by offering for-pay premium services. On the downside: There are reportedly 16 million users of WeMe, which might sound like a lot, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users.
Switch from Twitter to WT.Social: News with less misinformation and hysteria
I’ve had a Twitter account since 2010, but I can’t anymore. I just want links to interesting news stories and the occasional cute cat pic, but Twitter seems intent on serving up maddening, toxic nonsense. The site is awash in hysteria, misinformation, manipulation, and bitterness. If you’re just sick of it like I am, check out WT.Social.
Launched in 2019 by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, WT.social is completely ad-free and dedicated to combating misinformation by allowing users to flag and edit any post, like a certain famous online encyclopedia. There are no advertisers to appease, since the service is paid for through voluntary donations, and WT.social says its mission is to “foster an environment where bad actors are removed because it is right, not because it suddenly affects our bottom-line.”
Switch from Instagram to 500px: Better photos, less psychological trauma
Instagram has long been known to be devastating to the mental health of young people. The photo-sharing platform has been associated with depression, self-esteem issues, social anxiety, and other issues. It’s run by the same people who run Facebook, who seem bent on making social media experiences as addictive as possible. If you’re a photographer and you don’t want to support any of that just to show off your pics, you should switch to 500px.
The platform’s philosophy is built around quality pictures, so you can view and post pics in high resolution. The algorithm that determines which photographs are widely shared is based less on your number of followers and more on “likes” from people who don’t follow you. There are even opportunities to monetize your work.
While 500px is geared toward photographers, if you just like looking at pretty pictures, it might be the service for you too. Unlike Instagram’s mix of pictures, ads, and videos, 500px’s feeds feature only photographs, and it feeds aren’t based on Zuckerberg-style algorithms, so you’ll see only what you want to see.
Switch from TikTok to, well, something
TikTok is the nearly universal choice of young people eager to watch and share shorter videos. TikTok is so huge at the moment, it has no realistic challengers (other than old-school YouTube), and none on the horizon—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any alternatives. Here are a few video sharing apps that offer things TikTok does not.
Triller. This app makes the already easy process of posting videos online even easier. Triller uses AI to edit videos in time to pre-selected music.
Clapper. If you’re worried that your important political views are being censored by TikTok, this moderation-light platform will let you spout off whatever dumb nonsense you’d like.
Clash. Created by one of the co-founders of Vine, Clash focuses on short form videos, and isn’t designed as a challenger to TikTok as much as a sidecar: It allows creators with existing followings to interact with and monetize their audience in exciting new ways. But that also means users can interact with their faves more easily, too.
Switch from Reddit to Discourse: Less dumbness, more smartness
It’s hard to believe now, but for a couple years after Reddit launched in 2005, it was a discussion forum for smart people. Unfortunately, popularity and an aversion to curation and moderation lead to a dumbing down of content and a proliferation of hateful and boring users. For a smaller, more focused discussion-based community, try Discourse. This open-source forum platform’s stated goal is to “raise the standard of civilized discourse on the internet through seeding it with better discussion software.” In practice, that means trusted, frequent users have a say in how communities are managed; it’s easy to flag bad content; and there exists robust and user-customizable curation. Plus, fewer people use it, so it hasn’t been ruined…yet.
Feature Image Credit: Chernousov family (Shutterstock)
Meta is rolling out new ways for creators to make money on Facebook and Instagram.
Content is king on social media, and all the platforms are in a sort of gold rush to ensure the supply of new content does not run dry. Every day, it seems, one platform or the other announces some new scheme or incentive for content creators to sign up to.
Not to be left behind, Meta has announced several new ways creators can monetize their content on Instagram and Facebook. Here are the details.
Meta Announces New Ways to Make Money on Instagram and Facebook
These monetization options are always being updated. Thus, Mark Zuckerberg has posted several new monetization tools Meta is rolling out for creators on Instagram and Facebook.
In addition, Meta’s blog confirms the company will not charge subscribers a fee on Subscriptions, Badges, Paid Online Events, and Bulletin for an additional year until January 1, 2024.
Clearly, Meta is going all out to attract and hold on to its best creators.
The New Monetization Tools on Instagram and Facebook
Meta has released five new ways for creators to make money on both Instagram and Facebook.
1. Interoperable Subscriptions
Facebook will now allow creators to automatically add their fans on other platforms to subscribers-only Facebook Groups. This allows them to receive payments from their fans on the other platforms, and save time by not having to manually let individual members into their Facebook Groups.
Facebook will launch the service with a limited group of partners before expanding.
2. Facebook Stars
Facebook Stars is now open to all creators. However, they must have at least 1000 followers since the preceding 60 days, be in a country where Stars are available, and meet Meta’s Partner Monetization Policies and Content Monetization Policies. This applies to Facebook Live, videos on-demand, and will soon be available on Facebook Reels.
3. Monetizing Reels
The Reels payment program was previously only available to creators on an invite-only basis. Now Facebook is allowing US-based creators to apply to join. However, they must have created more than five Reels and have a total of 100,000 views in the previous 30 days, and they must meet Meta’s Partner Monetization Policies and Content Monetization Policies to be eligible.
Facebook is also now allowing creators to cross-post Reels on both Instagram and Facebook and earn money on both platforms.
In addition, creators will shortly be able to use the “Paid Partnerships with” label for their branded content on Facebook Reels. This will allow sponsors to convert them to Branded Content Ads.
4. Creator Marketplace
Meta is following in TikTok’s and Snapchat’s footsteps by launching a Creator’s Marketplace on Instagram intended to match creators with suitable brands.
Creators will be able to indicate the brands and topics they’re interested in making branded content for. Brands will be able to find and collaborate with creators through the Meta Business Suite.
“When they’ve found a creator they want to partner with, they’ll be able to send a project that outlines the details of the opportunity, including deliverables and payment offered,” according to Meta.
5. Digital Collectibles
Instagram started allowing NFTs to be shared on its platform in May 2022. Now Meta will allow this feature to be available to more creators in select countries, and soon on Facebook as well (starting with a small group of US creators). Users will be able to cross-post on both Instagram and Facebook.
Instagram Stories will also start hosting NFTs, in partnership with SparkAR.
Creators Have the Upper Hand
In the old days, the content we consumed was determined by a few people at the top of a production company sitting around a boardroom table. These days, social media has shifted the power to independent creators who execute and deliver content directly to us, with no oversight.
The leading social media platforms have taken notice and are scrambling to find ways to lock in the best creators on their platforms in order to lock in our eyes as well. Clearly, it’s a good time to be a creator.
Kariuki is a Nairobi based writer. His entire life has been spent trying to string together the perfect sentence. He is still trying. He has published extensively in Kenyan media and, for a hot 7 years or so, dived into the world of Public Relations where he discovered the corporate world is just like high school. He now writes again, focusing mainly on the magical internet. He also dabbles in the vibrant Kenyan start-up scene, AKA the Silicon Savannah, and occasionally advises small businesses and political actors on how to communicate better to their audiences. He runs a YouTube channel called Tipsy Writers, which attempts to get storytellers to tell their untold stories over a beer. When not working, Kariuki enjoys taking long walks, watching classic movies – especially old James Bond movies – and spotting aircraft. In an alternate universe, he would probably be a fighter pilot. More From Patrick Kariuki
