1. Updates From Snapchat’s Partner Summit ( 1:06) – Snapchat has shared that they reached 280M daily users and over 500M monthly active users globally. Other features they have announced include Creator Marketplace, where businesses will be able to find and partner with Snap creators, and Public Profiles, which will help users get discovered organically, engage with customers, build a following, sell products, and manage their profile – all in one place.
2. Facebook Explains “What’s Allowed” & Community Standards Enforcement Report (CSER) (7:15) – People often wonder what content is allowed on Facebook’s platforms. Well, it all starts with their Community Standards, which outline what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook and Instagram. Community Standards cover over 20 distinct topic areas that span everything from violence and criminal behavior to safety, integrity, and authenticity to objectionable content. To enforce these policies, they use a combination of content reviewers and artificial intelligence. When they find harmful posts on Facebook and Instagram, they take a zero-tolerance approach and remove them. But zero tolerance doesn’t mean zero occurrences.
And they published their Community Standards Enforcement Report for the first quarter of 2021. In the report, Facebook shares that they have seen a decrease in the prevalence of bad content; improvement in the amount of hate speech on the platform. They have also introduced their new Transparency Center which will provide many resources of integrity and transparency efforts to its users. Guy Rosen, the vice president of integrity at the tech giant, shared that they are working towards having a secure platform and they have implemented 12 policies for Facebook and 10 for Instagram, to let everyone know they are enforcing policies.
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-content-policies-commitment-to-safety#
3. How Does Facebook’s Ad System Work? (8:24) – A new overview has been published with additional context that can help you understand any errors or missteps that you may have experienced. They require advertisers to follow their Advertising Policies in addition to their Community Standards. Their Community Standards guide what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook and apply to all types of content, including ads.
Their Advertising Policies place additional requirements on advertisers to help further protect people from poor experiences — especially because ads may be delivered to people in their News Feed from Pages or accounts they don’t follow. For example, they don’t want ads that use profanity, show excessive nudity, or include misinformation.
The system reviews all ads before they are released. It relies primarily on automated technology to apply the Advertising Policies to the millions of ads that run across the apps. They also rely on their teams to build and train these systems and manually review ads.
However, the platform has admitted that its enforcement isn’t perfect, and both machines and people make mistakes sometimes.
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/facebook-ad-policy-process-and-review#
4. Say Hello To “Live Shopping Friday” By Facebook (10:04) – The session has just been introduced now and it will run until July 16. It is a way for shoppers to discover the best products for them, and for brands to build relationships with customers. These streams will be available via the brand’s Facebook page or the social network’s Shop page. Viewers could also complete the checkout process without leaving the app, by tapping on the features products.
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/05/introducing-your-new-favorite-way-to-shop-live-shopping-fridays/
5. Instagram Has Planned Their First Creator Week (11:36) –
“The first-ever Instagram Creator Week will run June 8-10, with a series of virtual streaming sessions. Those will be accessible by invitation only, with about 5,000 creators from the U.S. expected to attend. The three-day event will include sessions like ‘How to Supercharge Your Community’, ‘Media Training 101’, ‘How to Break Into Entertainment’, ‘How to Start a Podcast’, ‘How to Get Discovered on Instagram’, and ‘Fund My Merch Line’, in which creators will be able to pitch their dream product idea to a panel of judges – and the winners will get their ideas funded. Sessions will also address burnout and algorithm myth-busting. In addition to all of this, there will also be surprise special guest appearances and product news announced during the week.”
While Creator Week is invite-only, Instagram will make a portion of the content from the sessions available publicly on the instagram.com/creators account (4.5 million followers), including in a daily recap series called “The Rundown.”
6. Pinterest Launches Idea Pins & Shares How It Handles 5B+ Searches Per Month (13:01) – After testing their Idea Pins for the past 8 months, Pinterest has finally launched the feature. It will allow creators to capture and edit innovative videos of up to 20 sections of content, utilizing resources like voiceover recording, sound effects, animations, and other creative features, very much like their own TikTok mashup of Stories.
“There are now more than 5 billion searches on Pinterest every month. As people prepare for a post-pandemic life, searches for outfits, vacations, and home renovations are at all-time highs, and searches for weddings have presumed pre-pandemic levels.”
That’s a lot of search activity – for context, Pinterest last, officially reported its total search volume in 2016, when it was facilitating 2 billion searches every month. That means Pinterest has increased its search volume by 150% over the last five years – which, given the pandemic, and the subsequent boost for eCommerce and online product discovery, is not overly surprising. But it does provide some additional context on Pinterest’s user traffic, with the majority of these searches (if not all) for products that people are looking to buy.
7. Twitter Adds Scheduling for Spaces And Relaunches Verification (14:48) – Bringing back the blue badge features is a great way to help people distinguish the authenticity of high public interest accounts. Twitter’s research, that has shown to lead to healthier, more informed conversations between people. Moreover, broadcasters on Twitter will now be able to plan out, and build hype around their upcoming events, with the addition of Spaces scheduling on the platform.
8. Google Expands The Way Customers Can Shop: Shopify Integration And Shopping Graph (15:53) – First off, Google has announced that it’s expanding its partnership with Shopify, which will provide new, simplified processes to enable Shopify’s 1.7 million merchants to get their products featured across Google “in just a few clicks”.
“This new collaboration with Shopify will enable merchants to become discoverable to high-intent consumers across Google Search, Shopping, YouTube, Google Images and more.”
Google says that it’s seen a 70% increase in the size of its product catalog, and an 80% increase in merchants on its platform, over the past year. That was most notably boosted by Google, eliminating all charges for Google Shopping product listings, last April, to assist retailers looking to shift their focus amid the pandemic.
And now, Google’s looking to push that further with the evolution of what it calls its ‘Shopping Graph’.
“The Shopping Graph is a dynamic, AI-enhanced model that understands a constantly changing set of products, sellers, brands, reviews, and most importantly, the product information and inventory data we receive from brands and retailers directly – as well as how those attributes relate to one another. With people shopping across Google more than a billion times a day, the Shopping Graph makes those sessions more helpful by connecting people with over 24 billion listings from millions of merchants across the web. It works in real-time so people can discover and shop for products that are available right now.”
9. 4 New Features In Google Ads (18:12) – Top signals for target ROAS and maximize conversion value; seasonality adjustments that can be made at the manager account level; recommendations for max conversions, and Target Impression Share simulators for performance predictions.
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10715180
