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By Alex Heath,

For the first time, “Sponsored Snap” ads will appear in the main Chat tab of Snapchat.

Snapchat will soon start “experimenting” with placing sponsored messages next to chat threads from friends, according to CEO Evan Spiegel.

These “Sponsored Snaps” from brands will appear as unread messages in Snapchat’s main Chat tab, implying that they’ll sit above messages from a person’s contacts until they’re acted on. This is the first time Snap will show ads in the most used part of its app.

In an employee memo also posted on the company’s website, Spiegel says that Sponsored Snaps will appear “without a push notification, and opening the message is optional.” It’s unclear how easy it will be to get rid of a Sponsored Snap without opening it, or if doing so will even be possible. (Snap declined to comment beyond Spiegel’s memo.)

“Sponsored Snaps empower advertisers to communicate visually with the Snapchat community, making the core functionality of Snapchat accessible to advertisers,” writes Spiegel, who goes on to note that, “As always, your conversations with friends are private and are not used for advertising purposes.”

To understand why Snap is doing this now, look no further than its stock price, which is hovering near an all-time low. Despite now reaching over 850 million monthly users globally, Snap’s ads business is still tiny compared to its biggest competitors, including Meta. Snap also still isn’t profitable.

“The growth of our digital advertising business is one of the most important inputs to our long term revenue potential, and investors are concerned that we aren’t growing faster,” writes Spiegel in his memo, which is timed to the company’s 13-year anniversary. He writes that Snap will also start letting advertisers pay to promote places in its Map tab, where Snapchat users can see the whereabouts of their friends.

Feature Image Credit: Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

By Alex Heath,

Deputy editor and author of the Command Line newsletter. He has over a decade of experience covering the tech industry.

Sourced from The Verge

By Allison McDaniel

Reported by Axios, Snapchat is releasing a new feature that lets news publishers upload their content in real time. Beginning today, more than 40 news publishers globally will use this new feature called Dynamic Stories to publish to Snapchat using RSS feeds.

Some of the US publishers include CNN, ESPN, Axios, The Wall Street Journal, TMZ, and others. International publishers include The Independent, The Mirror, Marie Claire, GQ India, and more.

The new feature is an automated process of converting stories from the web to Snapchat. Most web publishing systems already have RSS feeds, so content easily goes to Snapchat in a vertical format. The Axios article also states that Dynamic Stories won’t include videos for now but may in the future.

Once a story is published to Snapchat, it’ll be added to users’ Discover platform which updates in real time. Users can also find Dynamic Stories in their subscription feeds. Snapchat will highlight the articles in the “Happening Now” section.

The social media giant is also selling vertical video ads to post within Dynamic Stories and plans to share some of the revenue with publishers.

Sources from Snap’s partners, who have been in testing for months, say so far the partnership hasn’t driven significant income, but it offers publishers an opportunity to reach the ever-distracted Gen Z audience.

This isn’t the first time Snap has brought breaking news onto its platform. In 2018, Snapchat launched the NowThis news channel, featured in Snapchat Discover. Other major publishers have since created their own news channels.

Only verified publishers will be part of this platform. More news partners will join Dynamic Stories in the coming months.

By Allison McDaniel

Allison is a News Writer at 9to5Mac covering Apple news and rumours.      You can email her directly at [email protected] or catch her on Twitter at @aamcdani

Sourced from 9to5 Mac

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Chinese-owned video platform is set to overtake the advertising scale of Twitter and Snapchat combined

TikTok is on track to overtake the global advertising scale of Twitter and Snapchat combined this year, and to match mighty YouTube within two years, as trendsetting teens and young adults make it the hottest social app of the moment – and Facebook is worried.

The Chinese-owned video-sharing platform is forecast to catch up with YouTube by 2024 when both are predicted to take $23.6bn (£18.2bn) in ad revenue, despite TikTok being launched globally 12 years after its Google-owned rival.

Helped by unparalleled moments of cool at the height of the pandemic – Idaho labourer Nathan Apodaca skateboarding along to Dreams put Fleetwood Mac’s album Rumours back in the top 10 more than four decades after its release – TikTok’s surging growth belies the metronomic pace of its name.

Last year, it overtook the global ad take of Snapchat, previously the digital hangout of choice for teens and twentysomethings, and by the end of this year it will have surpassed that of Twitter. This year it is predicted to triple worldwide ad revenues, to $11.6bn, more than the $10.44bn for Snapchat and Twitter combined.

“TikTok’s user base has exploded in the past couple of years, and the amount of time users spend on the app is extraordinary,” says Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, which compiled the ad spend forecast. “It has moved well beyond its roots as a lip-syncing and dancing app. It creates trends and fosters deep connections with creators that keep users engaged, video after video.”

TikTok landed its billionth user in 2021, four years after global launch, half the time it took Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, and three years faster than WhatsApp. Earlier this week, analysts at data.ai revised a prediction that TikTok would hit 1.5 billion monthly active users this year, after its analysis revealed it had surpassed that milestone by 100 million users within the first three months.

The company is winning the battle for the “sweet spot” of social media users, those in the 18- to 25-year-old demographic where Facebook is seeing its biggest declines, with parent company Meta trying to stem the exodus by attracting them to stablemate Instagram.

TikTok is also becoming increasingly addictive. Despite the platform supposedly being restricted to those aged 13 and over, about 16% of three- and four-year-olds view TikTok content, according to research commissioned by media regulator Ofcom. This rose to 29% of all children in the five- to seven-year-old age group.

Last year the typical TikTok user spent 19.6 hours on average per month on the app, according to data.ai – equalling Facebook, the global leader in time spent by users on social media. For TikTok, this represents an almost fivefold increase in just four years, up from 4.2 hours in 2018.

“Facebook has always been the biggest competitor in this space for dominating users,” says Sam O’Brien, the chief marketing officer at performance marketing company Affise. “But it seems it can’t quite tap into convincing TikTok’s loyal users to revert back to its platform. TikTok has figured out its own way to give the platform an addictive quality.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta still dominates the market – Facebook has 2.9 billion monthly active users, and Instagram another 2 billion, with Insider Intelligence putting their 2024 ad revenues at $85bn and $82bn respectively. Even so, it emerged last month that fear of TikTok had led it to hire a lobbying firm to paint the company as the “real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app”.

“Meta clearly sees itself in a battle against TikTok for the hearts, minds and attention spans of millennials, a significant chunk of the social media market,” says O’Brien. “TikTok has experienced a staggering growth of users since the onset of the global pandemic, taking over a huge chunk of its competitor’s audience.”

Meta’s tactics aim to exploit the suspicion promoted under the Trump administration that Chinese companies, from telecoms giant Huawei to TikTok’s parent ByteDance, pose a national security threat as potential conduits of personal data to Beijing.

Two years ago, India, one of the world’s biggest markets for social media usage, banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok. However, Trump’s plans to force ByteDance to sell its international operations to a US firm, such as Microsoft or Oracle, petered out after he lost the US presidential election.

Nevertheless, suspicions remain among many users including those in the UK, which has banned Huawei equipment from being used in mobile phone networks. Last year, research found that almost a third of all Britons were concerned that TikTok might share their personal data with the Chinese government. Among those aged 18 to 34, a third believed it would hand over their data on request from China.

ByteDance has also come under pressure at home as Beijing has looked to rein in the power of the country’s tech titans. Billionaire co-founder Zhang Yiming unexpectedly announced in May that he would step down as chief executive, and in November relinquished the role of chairman, as ByteDance underwent a major restructure breaking it into six business units.

Nevertheless, the company remains in rude health and last December was named the world’s largest unicorn with a valuation of $353bn – up from $80bn a year earlier – with the markets hopeful of a blockbuster initial public offering in the future. ByteDance saw its total revenues, including its Chinese operation and substantial in-app and ecommerce business, grow by 70% last year to about $58bn, up from $34.3bn in 2020.

While Meta remains a much larger business and revenues rose 37% last year, to $118bn, Zuckerberg has felt the need to launch a commercial counterattack to shore up and diversify his advertising-based business model.

Always quick to ape the successful innovations of rivals, Meta is exploring launching virtual coins, nicknamed “Zuck bucks” by staff, for users of Facebook and Instagram to buy and use, in a very similar strategy to that already employed highly successfully by TikTok.

Earlier this week it emerged that TikTok is now the most lucrative app in the world for in-app purchases. TikTok users spent $840m on its virtual “coins” currency, which can be used to “tip” creators and promote videos, in the first quarter – up 40% year on year.

“It’s the biggest quarter for any app or game ever,” says Lexi Sydow, head of insights at data.ai, which published the report. “It’s the first app ever to beat a game in consumer spend in a given quarter.”

Zuckerberg’s revenue diversification plans follow an ill-fated launch of direct TikTok copycat Lasso in 2018, which shut after just 18 months. Meta is persevering with rival short-form video product Reels, which launched on Instagram in 2020 and Facebook last year, but despite its efforts TikTok’s momentum shows no signs of slowing down.

“Some young people have switched off Facebook entirely,” says Jamie MacEwan, senior media analyst at Enders. “In the UK, 18-to-24s spend as much on TikTok as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp combined. There is rampant competition for time. TikTok is the one growing fastest right now, and has scale, it’s the one to watch.”

Feature Image Credit: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

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Sourced from The Guardian

By Nicolas Vega

Snapchat parent Snap Inc. on Tuesday reported revenue that demolished Wall Street’s expectations as millions of hunkered-down users stared at its app amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The social network famous for its disappearing photos and messages said that it saw usage jump toward the end of March as people turned to it to communicate with friends and family. Snap also said that it saw increased engagement with its in-app games and original content.

Snap reported daily active user numbers grow 20 percent year-over-year to 229 million, beating analyst forecasts of 224.7 million. Revenue clocked in at $462.5 million, a 44 percent year-over-year increase that outpaced Wall Street’s predicted $428.8 million and showed few ill effects from the pandemic.

Shares of Snap opened trading up more than 23 percent, at $15.33.

“These high growth rates in the beginning of the quarter reflect our investments in our audience, ad products, and optimization, and give us confidence in our ability to grow revenue over the long term,” Snap’s 29-year-old chief executive Evan Spiegel said.

The company said higher revenue in January and February helped offset slower growth in March as advertisers began to tighten marketing budgets due to the coronavirus.

Small and medium-sized businesses have been hard-hit during the pandemic, but represent a smaller portion of Snap’s direct response ad business, which has helped protect revenue, Snap’s chief business officer Jeremy Gorman explained on the earnings call.

Moving forward, Snap said it will have its sales team focus on serving advertisers in industries like gaming, home entertainment and consumer packaged goods, which are expected to see higher demand from people stuck at home.

For example, Snap could help movie studios pivot to digital or streaming releases, Spiegel said.

Snap said it would not provide its usual guidance for the next quarter, given the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus.

By Nicolas Vega

Sourced from New York Post

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  • Pinterest surpassed Snapchat as the third-largest social media network in the US, according to a report from eMarketer.
  • EMarketer predicted that Pinterest will “continue to stay ahead of Snapchat in the coming years.”
  • The report said that despite Snap’s 2019 comeback and popularity with younger users, Pinterest’s “universal appeal” helped it pull ahead this year.
  • Shares of Pinterest surged as much as 12% on Tuesday morning after the report was released.

Pinterest has surpassed Snapchat to become the third-largest social media network in the US, according to a new report from eMarketer.

The news is a significant shake-up in the social media pecking order, and could signal that Snapchat has begun to lose its luster among the millennial users who for years have given the social media app a distinct cachet.

Pinterest’s number of monthly users grew to 82.4 million in 2019, up 9.1% from the previous year, beating out Snapchat’s 80.2 million, a 5.9% increase, according to the report’s estimates. Pinterest claimed the third spot behind No.2-ranked Instagram, and Facebook, which reigned as the most popular social network in the US last year.

The report caused Pinterest’s stock to jump as much as 12% on Tuesday morning after the report’s release.

“While Snapchat has a young core audience that it caters to, Pinterest has a more universal appeal, and it’s made significant gains in a wide range of age groups,”  said Nazmul Islam, an analyst at eMarketer, which is owned by Business Insider’s parent company, Insider Inc.

But the report does not include user numbers for China’s TikTok, which has enjoyed explosive growth among teens and young adults over the past year. In December, CNBC cited an estimate from App Annie that TikTok had 625 million monthly users on a global basis, but it’s not clear how many users the app has in the US.

In its report, eMarketer predicted that Pinterest would remain ahead of Snap for the coming years. But if the TikTok surge continues, both Pinterest and Snapchat could be soon be overtaken by the Chinese app.

Shares of Snap remained flat following the report’s release.

Following a 2018 redesign that initially caused backlash among users, Snapchat seemed to be making a comeback in 2019 thanks to popular augmented reality “lenses” like its gender-swap filter, earning it praise from investors.

But Pinterest’s efforts to convince investors that its platform is a “visual discovery tool” more akin to Google than Snapchat seem to be paying off. The eMarketer report shows that the strong user growth Pinterest saw ahead of its public offering last April has continued on an upward trajectory.

emarketer pinterest snap age
Pinterest’s wide appeal across ages helped it surpass Snapchat as the third-largest social media network in the US in 2019.
eMarketer

Get the latest Snap stock price here.

Feature Image Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid

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Sourced from Business Insider

By Tim Peterson

YouTube has largely reversed the changes to its verification program that were announced Sept. 19. However, the initial announcement to revoke some creators’ verified status served as a reminder that no other platform has yet emerged as a viable viewership- and revenue-generating alternative to Google’s video platform in the minds of creators. But YouTube stars continue to look for low-stakes opportunities to syndicate their YouTube videos to other platforms in hopes that they could become competition for YouTube.

Digital media company Jellysmack has begun working with YouTube creators to edit their YouTube videos for Facebook as well as Snapchat and establish the platforms as relatively passive income streams. Over the past two to three years, the publisher had developed its own tools to optimize the videos that Jellysmack posts to its own Facebook pages, such as Beauty Studio, which generated 269 million views on Facebook in August 2019, according to data from Tubular Labs. In the first quarter of 2019, it created a program to open up these tools to YouTube stars, who may be interested in expanding to Facebook in order to diversify their businesses but struggle to find the time to do so while continuing to manage their YouTube channels; in August Jellysmack began to add Snapchat to the program’s mix. In addition to assisting creators with tailoring their YouTube videos to run on the creator’s own Facebook page, Jellysmack helps them to find an audience on the social network by investing its own money to promote creators’ videos as ads on Facebook.

Jellysmack and the creators share the revenue from the ads that Facebook sells against creators’ videos, according to Jellysmack CEO Michael Philippe; Jellysmack does not currently have the ability to sell ads against its videos on Facebook. Philippe declined to say how specifically the revenue is split between Jellysmack and creators but said that some creators in the program are making “six figures per month on Facebook.” Additionally, the processing of creators’ videos will help Jellysmack’s optimization tools understand different types of content than the types of videos it posts to its own Facebook pages, and Philippe hopes the program will help it to establish relationships with creators who may eventually star in Jellysmack’s original shows.

For YouTube stars and their talent managers, Jellysmack’s program is appealing for obvious reasons. “It’s found money,” said Adam Wescott, partner at talent management firm Select Media Management. “But it’s still a bit unproven. When it comes to Facebook, the CPMs don’t match YouTube.”

While Facebook has cultivated a crop of homegrown creators, the social network has struggled to win over YouTube stars for two main reasons. YouTube-centric creators are unsure whether Facebook can consistently deliver a large, intentional audience a la YouTube, as opposed to passive views from people scrolling through their news feeds. And even if the audience is there on Facebook, the money may not be, at least not enough to justify the effort required to either produce original videos for Facebook or edit their YouTube videos for the social network. Conceivably, creators could cross-post identical versions of their YouTube videos to Facebook, which is nice in theory but unproven in practice. “While it seems easy, there’s not really that payoff when you talk about monetization,” said Christina Jones, vp of talent at talent management firm Digital Brand Architects.

YouTube-centric creators like Lizzy Capri face a dilemma when looking to expand to Facebook. Since 2017, Capri, who is not involved in Jellysmack’s program, has worked to develop and hone a content strategy that has amassed her 3.9 million subscribers on YouTube. She would like to replicate that success on Facebook but recognizes that that would require replicating the time and effort she had to put into her YouTube channel because Facebook is “a whole different beast to learn,” she said. For example, she would have to edit her YouTube videos, which are usually more than 10 minutes long, for Facebook, where three- to five-minute videos perform best, she said. Additionally, she would have to determine how the profile of her audience on Facebook might compare to her YouTube audience and take that into account when tailoring videos for the platform. Because she knows the effort required to establish a successful channel on Facebook, she also knows that she doesn’t have “the bandwidth to do that right now,” she said.

Caylus Cunninghman, a creator who goes by the name “Infinite,” could probably make the time to grow his channel on Facebook, he said. But he doesn’t have to. As one of the creators in Jellysmack’s program, Cunningham has been able to “just leave it in [Jellysmack’s] hands because, at the end of the day, they know how to run a Facebook page, and I don’t really. I know YouTube,” he said.

Cunnigham had tried to get to know Facebook. In early 2018, he began uploading some gaming-related videos to Facebook to try out the platform but only attracted roughly 20,000 followers. That pales in comparison to the more than 12 million subscribers he has on accrued on YouTube since he started taking YouTube seriously in 2016. Then around April of this year, Cunningham began working with Jellysmack to edit his YouTube videos for a new Facebook page that has amassed 2 million followers to date.

Cunningham can customize whatever edits that Jellysmack makes to his videos, including their titles and thumbnail images. But he usually just leaves whatever optimizations are made by Jellysmack’s tools. Typically Jellysmack removes the intro and outro from his YouTube videos and adjusts the aspect ratio of his videos — which are produced horizontally for YouTube — so they can be more easily viewed when people are holding their phone’s vertically, he said.

While Cunningham has established a large following on Facebook, YouTube continues to generate more views and revenue. He estimated that his YouTube videos typically receive two to three times as many views and ad dollars as his Facebook videos. However, considering that Jellysmack is handling the heavy lifting in adapting his YouTube videos for Facebook, whatever views and revenue he can reap from Facebook is pretty much all profit. While Jellysmack has effectively made Facebook a passive income stream for Cunningham, the platform is beginning to take a more active role in his content strategy. “Sometimes when I’m making my YouTube videos, I do think of Facebook now,” said Cunningham.

By Tim Peterson

Sourced from DIGIDAY

Sourced from MEN STYLE FASHION

The digital platform has led to the immense growth of social media. This has led to growth in a lot of areas on the internet including trade, advertisement and marketing. There are so many sites where you can advertise your brand, but which is the right one? It can get very confusing and overwhelming to make such a decision. Although some sites may not need too much investment financially, they can really take up your time.  One effective way to get to know the perfect site is to understand your audience, commodity or services and markets.

Here are some major social site and how they can do for your brand

Facebook

Facebook is a pretty old social media site and is among the most used among all generations. This is the safest choice when you want to market your brand. Statistics show that over 2 billion people across the whole world have active accounts on this platform. They also share videos, audio and other content types.

You can market your brand by creating your own page with your brand name and description. Getting followers on facebook is easy, you just have to send some follow requests to your audience and convince them to share them with their friends and family. Growing the page won’t be that hard also, as stated there is a numerous audience on this platform. Facebook also offers you the tools to target the audience specific to your brand and advertise to them.

facebook

Instagram

One fun fact is that Instagram is that it is owned by facebook. There close to one billion people who are active of this platform and they share posts, pictures, videos and stories. Statistics show that more than half of these people follow at least one brand. This is the best place to advertise your brand or sell your goods and services.

Instagram offers you the ability to showcase your products to your target audience while pinning the location at the same time.  You can use this visual platform to your advantage by personalising your brand and making it different from the rest.  You can also get followers who have a specific interest for your brand. There are some few methods you can use to give your brand more notice. You can choose to use the hashtag strategy, tag other followers in your posts or even pay for story advertisements.

If you’ve only created your Instagram business account, there is another way to get more followers. You can choose to engage different people through likes, comments or if you don’t have time you can get auto comment for your Instagram posts and let it do the work for you.

instagram

Twitter

Although this platform is more social than marketable, it can work as a real great advertisement.  For the most part, twitter is a platform for trending news, updates and opinions on everything.  Users on twitter follow accounts they would like updates on.  Your update is restricted to a number of updates, making it pretty short and precise.

The good thing is, you can use the hashtag to categorise your content with key words about your brand and what you have to offer.  Twitter will need you to be more engaged with your audience. You will need to tweet several times daily in order to reach a certain number of audiences, or just a target.  Most twitter users are critics and tend to be college educated, not every brand will pass in this platform.

Linked in

It is estimated that one person in every 4 or 5 social media users owns an account in linked in. It is probably not as popular as other platforms, but is a great marketing platform.  It is used equally by both genders and is a great platform for marketing any form of resume or job.  You can use this to find employees or get new jobs.

linked in

YouTube

This is one of the most popular social media platforms across the whole world.  You tube has an active user list of more than 1 billion users. It is estimated that most people who won social media account spend one third of the activities online watching videos on YouTube.  This is the widest platform when it comes to different cultures and languages. There are close to 80 different languages on this platform.

The advertisement and marketing opportunities in this social platform is outstanding.  Most people who own accounts on YouTube use it to promote themselves, and some products.  The audience is both old and young making it convenient for most types of products.

Pinterest

Like Instagram, this platform is mainly a visual platform.  One amazing fact is that Pinterest is preferred by more female compared to male. This means that if you want to use for marketing, you have to ensure your brand suits the target market.  This platform is also thought to likely to convert your marketing into a purchase compared to other social media accounts.  One amazing feature on this platform is that you can pin the purchase product on your photo and the buyer will get direct access.

Snapchat

I think we all agree that snapchat is the least expected for marketing, branding and business. At first, it was more appealing to teenagers and younger generations.  The application has very fun features and filters which draw the younger generations.  It has an outstanding 300 million users. It offers you a creative and fun way to advertise your products and services.  The filters are ever changing, making it exiting and alluring for the young.

Manage several platforms

Keep in mind that social media platforms are ever changing and require you to make changes as you go. Instead of advertising your brand in one platform, you can use the opportunity to your advantage by creating accounts with your brand in all these platforms. Ensure you have an idea of what brand will work well for the target audience before putting it out there.  If you are too busy, autolike applications or social media managers can do the work for you.

snapchat

Sourced from MEN STYLE FASHION

 

By Tim Peterson

Two years after Snapchat premiered its first original show, original programming has taken on new importance for the app, which has struggled to grow its daily audience. Snapchat is formalizing its original programming push through the formation of the Snap Originals brand.

Snap Originals will encompass Snapchat’s existing original shows, like political news series “Good Luck America,” as well as a new slate of scripted and documentary series that will begin to premiere on Snapchat on Oct. 10 and mark the platform’s entry into TV-like programming.

At the same time as Snapchat has seen its daily audience shrink — losing 3 million daily users in the second quarter of 2018 — its made-for-Snapchat shows have sustained regular viewerships. Half of the audience for two of Snapchat’s existing shows — NBC’s news show “Stay Tuned” and ESPN’s “SportsCenter” — tune in at least three times a week, said Sean Mills, head of original content at Snapchat’s parent company, Snap. Now Snapchat is looking to give people more reasons to check Snapchat more often by premiering episodic series that are designed to be watched on a recurring basis.

Through Snap Originals, “serialized storytelling will be possible [on Snapchat] for the first time. So we’ll be launching a slate of scripted and docu-series shows that are serialized [and] that, building on this daily habit, will be released in a daily cadence,” said Mills.

Snapchat will debut six new original shows this month with six more in development, all branded as “Snap Originals” in the app. The initial slate includes “Endless Summer,” a docu-series following influencer Summer McKeen from “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” producer Bunim-Murray Productions; “Class of Lies,” a scripted whodunit from independent studio Makeready; and “Vivian,” a docuseries about model scout Vivian Benitez from NBCU Digital Lab, production studio The Intellectual Property Corporation and modeling agency and Benitez’s employer Wilhelmina. The Snap Originals will be exclusive to Snapchat for a period of time, and most of the shows are exclusive to Snapchat, said Mills.

To recoup the undisclosed money that Snap is spending on its original shows, the company will sell six-second-long, non-skippable video ads that will be slotted within the shows’ episodes, which will typically run between three and five minutes in length. Snap expects to insert two or three of these commercials per episode, said Mills.

Advertisers will have two options to buy ads against the shows. They can buy commercials through Snap’s self-serve ad buying tool, Snap Ads Manager, which will make the ads eligible to run across any and all of the Snap Originals series and targetable using Snap’s ad targeting tools. Or they can buy the ads directly from Snap’s sales team to advertise against a specific show. Advertisers can also get their brands featured within the shows’ episodes. While Snap is not selling brand integrations or product placements as standalone options, Snap will make these opportunities available as a part of larger ad buys when it fits a show’s narrative, said a Snap spokesperson.

Snap has a fair amount riding on original shows given its audience decline. It will run its first off-Snapchat marketing campaign that promotes specific content on Snapchat, according to Mills. The campaign will begin to roll out on Oct. 10 and span billboards as well as ads on digital platforms including YouTube and Reddit, and while it will largely focus on the Snap Originals brand, it will also tout individual shows, said Snap spokesperson.

By Tim Peterson

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

Snapchat is over. Influencers are oversaturated. And content is everything.

Those were some of the takeaways from a panel discussion about social media marketing held Tuesday at the FN Platform trade show in Las Vegas.

The participants included Rollie founder and CEO Vince Lebon, Sam Edelman marketing director Lizzi Bickford, Chinese Laundry marketing manager Alle King and Karen Bueno, Blowfish Malibu’s VP of marketing. FN’s women’s editor, Nikara Johns, moderated the conversation.

FN Platform Social Media Panel
(L-R): Karen Bueno, Alle King, Nikara Johns, Vince Lebon and Lizzi Bickford.
CREDIT: Jim K. Decker

All four executives agreed that the strongest social platforms for brand marketing right now are Facebook and Instagram — particularly Instagram, thanks to its highly visual format.

“With Instagram, we focus on brand awareness and engagement, and there we’re able to build a visual around who the brand is,” said Bueno. “With Facebook, it’s more of a VIP feel, and with those people, they give us their true feelings about [Blowfish Malibu]. That’s been helpful for us in finding out what customers like about the brand and what they don’t.”

Bickford added that gauging the effectiveness of the programs is twofold: “We measure success through engagement, and conversion is also optimal. We’re seeing a rise year over year of about 170 percent on a swipe or click-to-shop [tool]. Those features have definitely enhanced the platforms for us from a brand side.”

As for platforms that don’t work, the executives said they have all abandoned Snapchat completely and use Twitter sparingly. “The biggest result we’ve had with Twitter is if a celebrity or influencer is wearing our shoes and tweeting about it,” said King. “For me as a consumer, I only pay attention to big people and what they’re saying.”

When it comes to working with online influencers, the marketing experts recommended a careful and strategic approach. “Go in with a plan and make sure you’re aligning with the right people. Influencers are great, but the market has become really saturated,” said Bickford, who noted that she likes to meet — or at least speak with — every influencer who works with the Sam Edelman brand. “I want make sure that we vibe and they understand our messaging.”

King noted that microinfluencers have proved to be highly effective at driving online buzz for Chinese Laundry.

But Blowfish’s Bueno advised always checking the numbers before signing a partner. “Look at the engagement of their followers. They may have 2,000 likes on an Instagram photo but no comments,” she said.

For Rollie, while the label does work with social influencers, Lebon and his wife have become increasingly visible in its marketing. “When I first launched the brand, I tried to keep myself separate. But a brand is not what you say it is; it’s what they say it is,” said Lebon. “We found that people connected with our story. So now we’re putting up more photos of me and my wife, and we’re starting to document us living our bucket list. Because we want to empower our community, and the only way is by living what you say. We’ve become the face of it — not by choice, but it feels honest.”

Overall, the executives stressed that in today’s environment, it’s challenging to keep up with changing technologies and to stand out in a noisy digital landscape. But what is essential is having a strong identity.

“Make sure you have a voice, your tone is consistent, and make sure you have a story to tell,” said Bickford. “People want authenticity and content that they can learn from.”

And in the end, brands also need to be realistic about expectations, explained Lebon. “There’s no quick fix,” he said. “We would look at these big influencers and think, ‘If only we could work with them.’ And then you’d get them, and it wasn’t massive. Accept that and stop chasing. Just work on great content and add value to people’s lives. Instead of looking for that one influencer, create something where everyone you touch is inspired and they retell it and then become your brand advocators.”

FN Platform Social Media Panel
(L-R): Alle King, Karen Bueno, Nikara John, Vince Lebon and Lizzi Bickford.
CREDIT: Jim K. Decker

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Their opinion of Snapchat’s brand has taken a major hit.

Snapchat users have a much more negative view of the brand since Snap redesigned the app in January.

Its user sentiment — measured by having consumers rank their impression of a brand on a scale of 100 for “very positive” to -100 for “very negative” — among 18- to 34-year-old U.S. consumers declined 73 percent following the redesign, according to new data from YouGov BrandIndex, which tracks consumer sentiment toward brands through daily online surveys

Young people, who make up Snapchat’s core user base, said their feelings about Snapchat fell from a high score of 30 before the redesign to a low of 8 in April.

Similarly, users said that their satisfaction with Snapchat declined in that time as well, from a high score of 27 in January to a low of 12 in April.

Snap decided to redesign the app after concluding that it was difficult for people to use, preventing adoption by a wider audience. CEO Evan Spiegel also wanted to separate personal content from public content, so the redesign moved stuff from brands and celebrities to one side of the app, and left private friend posts on the other.

More than a million people signed a Change.org petition asking the company to restore the old app. Celebrities like Kylie Jenner complained on Twitter about not using Snap any longer. Most potently, Snap added fewer users and made less in ad revenue than expected, citing the redesign as a culprit.

Now Snap is redesigning its redesign to feel a little more like it was before. It’s clearly still a work in process.

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