Six months after its now-famous acquisition, Vine is the #1 free app in Apple’s App Store. The app, acquired in mid-october before its initial launch, has had its share of controversy, having been pulled over adult content and thereafter relaunched. But for all the hiccups the app has not failed to generate mountains of visual content, viral media (with its new trending hashtag section), and has been used in unique ways by brands and celebrities alike. Vine’s closest competition in the social sphere thus far is Snapchat, but it’s important to note that Vine is only iOS compatible at the time of writing, which means that even more growth into the Android field should be expected.
Tag: Online Communities
Facebook To Advertise Based On Offline Habits
Starting today, Facebook will be able to target some of its advertising based on offline habits as a result of new partnerships announced today with Datalogix, Acxiom and Epsilon that will apply their records about purchase histories to Facebook’s Custom Audience’s product. Custom Audience allows advertisers identify Facebook users by their Facebook ID, phone number, or email, and now advertisers can match that information with data from these firms, gathered from customer loyalty programs. Businesses, Facebooks says, can now target categories like soda drinkers or auto intenders. However, as with any Facebook ad, the user can opt out at any chosen time.
Facebook Expands Graph Search
Facebook, at an event today, expanded graph search from its original 100,000 beta testers to “hundreds of thousands” of users, and is trying to convince even more users to get on an early access waiting list. It’s accomplishing the latter via the former: when new people get access to the service, Facebook automatically generates a news feed story, and by clicking on the words “Graph Search” in this story, you can sign up for early access as well.
Facebook is clearly making a big push to rollout the new product that overlaps with many discovery services like Google Search and Yelp. Time will tell if users will actually embrace the new functionality that would make Facebook a powerful tool for finding merchants, content and more.
Twitter Adds Beefed Up E-mail Security
Following a series of high profile security breaches that brought Twitter’s security woes to the fore once again, Twitter has announced that it adopted the DMARC e-mail security protocol earlier this month. The protocol works by comparing e-mails supposedly from a known sender to a record of known information about that sender, and routing the verified messages. Twitter is doing this in hopes of cutting down the number of spoofed e-mails Twitter users receive in attempts to breach accounts, but has still made no comment on more advanced measures like two-step authentication, already in use by Google, Dropbox, and others.
Pew: Pinterest Catches Twitter; Digital Divide Shrinks
Pew research released new statistics today on Americans addictions to social networks as of December 2012, with surprising revelations. 15% of Adult U.S. Internet users now use Pinterest – which is practically identical to the 16% who use Twitter – which has experienced massive growth among white, female users, who use the network in large part for fashion-based research. So although Twitter grabs more headlines for its communicatory potential, in the U.S. the usage data is nearly the same. As well, there is no longer a minority gap in social media use, as almost twice as many African Americans use Twitter as Caucasians. But most importantly, not using social media has become a financially elite phenomenon, as well-educated wealthy Americans who find privacy policies troublesome or think that Facebook is too mainstream are turning away from the social network. In other words, not using social media is, now, a product of more education rather than a lack of access. Ultimately, 2/3 of all American Adults utilize social networks on the whole, with the vast majority on Facebook.
Twitter To Rank Tweets
Twitter will, beginning late this month, assign rankings to tweets across the interface. To start with, the social media service will assign designations of “none,” “low,” and “medium” to the metadata of tweets in an attempt to help developers more selectively curate the sea of status updates. A “High” rating should roll out a few weeks after the initial rankings testing, and will ideally correspond to the “Top Tweets” results that you would find by searching a hashtag, which in its current form indicates a very high level of engagement with the tweet. The ultimate goal is to make Twitter’s streaming more customizable and targeted for developers looking to tweak applications for brands and companies, allowing a higher level of analysis and interaction with the platform.
Twitter Charges $200,000 For Promoted Tweets
Promoted Trends on Twitter continue to charge more and more money, and according to a Report by AllThingsD they now charge $200,000 a day. Clocking in at more than twice the original price of $80,000 a day in 2010, Twitter clearly understands that it has a market for the Trends, which were used by both Obama and Romney in the past election, as well as Coke, Disney, and Hyundai in the past year. Purchased hashtags are placed at the top of the trending topics list, and users who click the hashtag see a tweet from the company who purchased it. Other options beyond the Promoted Trend include promoted Tweets and Accounts, which have also proven effective as marketing strategies, but according to Twitter’s data Promoted Trends have a much higher degree of engagement than any other form of advertisement on the site. If, and it’s a big if given the hefty pricetag, Twitter can sell this advertising slot every day, they could generate up to $70 million in revenue just through this method alone. It hasn’t happened yet, but it could in the very near future as social media marketing continues to thrive.
Vine Steps Out At Fashion Week
Vine is making a big impact at New York Fashion Week. Reporters, attendees, and socialites are all taking to the app and exploring new ways to share and report back on their experiences at the events. Though Instagram was universally embraced last year, Vine is currently far and away the in-vogue app of choice this season. The functionality of the app makes it very well suited to reporting on the proceedings: several media editors have been using the app to take and edit videos of multiple looks over the looped segment, giving viewers a unique perspective on the clothes in moving, living color. It provides viewers with a better conception of the clothes than Instagram, which obviously doesn’t capture movement. At the same time, using Instagram would require more time to edit multiple photographs of different models and looks, as opposed to Vine which can point and shoot a loop of many models simultaneously.
Beyond reporters, designers and retailers are utilizing the app to provide viewers with privileged views into the backstage. Some examples include designers showing video of modeling auditions to allow viewers to help pick the models, or showing the stages and rehearsals in progress. In all, it will be interesting to see how the fallout from this new-found use of the app shapes its future as a journalistic and social medium.
Pew Study Finds One In Five U.S. Internet Users Has Ditched Facebook, While 27% Of Current Users Plan To Reduce Time In 2013
Facebook currently has a stranglehold on the social networking habits of America: two thirds of those online in the US are on Facebook, as compared to only 20% on LinkedIn and 16% on Twitter. But today, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report titled Coming and going on Facebook that highlights a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction spreading through Facebook users.
Based on telephone surveys of 1,006 American adults, Pew found that one in five online adult Americans who do not currently use Facebook said that they have used it in the past, suggesting that they’ve given up on the service. They also found that two-thirds of current Facebook users said that in some time in the past they have taken a voluntary break from the site for several weeks or longer.
The (relative) bad news is that a relatively large proportion of users is evidently finding Facebook time-draining, boring or annoying enough to have given it up for weeks at a time — still, despite a sense of dissatisfaction, these people ended up going back for more. But the most worrying statistic is that 27% of current Facebook users say that, in the future, they plan to spend less time on the site, and just 3% said they want to spend more time there. This is all part
of the population struggling to come to terms with an increasingly social landscape, but these trends will be important to watch for advertisers and tech startups alike.
