Social Media Marketing

Category: Social Media Marketing

Facebook intends to change its social media marketing metrics

Julie Campbell | March 23, 2015

This move will have a direct impact on app developers all around the world.

Facebook is preparing its announcement of a new measurement tool for social media marketing firms that may help the network to be able to offer better competition for Google and to allow the company to taken on a greater share of the smartphone based ad marketplace.

The announcement is expected to be made at the Facebook annual F8 developers conference on March 25.

The new measuring service will give brands using Facebook social media marketing a better ability to know whether or not an app was actually downloaded as a result of having been exposed to an ad on the social network. This, according to a recent report that was made by The Information. This tool will not be limited to measuring the performance of ads purchased through Facebook. It will also help to better understand the performance of ads that have been served on other mobile apps, as well.

Should Facebook encourage enough use of this social media marketing environment, the outcome could be massive.

Strong partnerships of this nature could end up presenting some initial challenges to rivals such as Twitter, iAd at Apple, and Google, which are direct competition within the mobile advertising space and that are highly unlikely to want to give up any of their market share to Facebook. Overall, if this plays out the way that The Information has suggested, it could mean that Facebook could become a much more important advertising resource for brands, particularly when it comes to desktop and mobile ads.

This would also help to provide further explanation for the launch of Facebook Audience Network, in 2014, when it gave mobile marketing firms the ability to broaden their Facebook campaigns to reach other mobile apps by way of its targeting data.

This also helps to show why Facebook is adding support to its Atlas ad server, which provides social media marketing advertisers with the ability to use consumer data from Facebook in order to target them over non-Facebook ads and websites. It also underscores the importance of the “Topic Data” data analysis tool that it recently launched.

Google+ is splitting up into streaming and photos

Julie Campbell | March 6, 2015

Social media marketing will be shifting into a new direction if it is to continue on that network.

The Google+ has been struggling to become relevant ever since it was first created, and now, several years later, the product vice president at Google, Bradley Horowitz, has announced that he will be taking over the social network and will be dismantling it so that it will function in a new way.

Horowitz will be taking over for David Bresbis, who had held the lead role at the social network for under a year.

While the leadership at Google+ may be interesting news, what is truly attracting attention – particularly from users and social media marketing firms, will be the new direction that is going to be taken. Horowitz now refers to the brand as being “Google’s Photos and Streams”, instead of the actual title of the network. Indeed, that social network does still exist, and from the point of view of the user, nothing seems to be different, so far. However, internally – and potentially from the user side, going forward – some considerable shifts are taking place.

The change from Google+ to Photos and Streams has now been confirmed by way of a post on the social network.

Horowitz posted on the Google Photos and Streams account (which is still officially known by the + name for all intents and purposes, on the user side) that he “Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products!” He also went on to add that “It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

While requests were made for further details about this change, responses from Google were not made immediately available and had not arrived by the time that this article was written. That said, at the Mobile World Congress, the senior vice president of products at Google, Sundar Pichai, discussed the decision quite briefly. He explained that Google Plus had always been intended to be able to provide two primary features. The first was to build a stream and the second was “what you call a social layer”. It was the sharing component that exists among the various Google products and services. “The second one is, in some ways, is an even more important role for us.”

Therefore, the intention is to organize Google+ internally to be able to support the streaming but, to a much greater extent, to support photos and communications “and you will see us evolve,” said Pichai.