Twitter trialling chronological timeline view
Following an announcement made by the company that it wants to give more control to their end users, Twitter has started testing a feature allowing users to view their timeline chronologically rather than by relevance.
This should help to curb the ‘echo chamber effect’ often associated with traditional algorithms that choose what you should see based on relevance rather than chronology.
While the feature hasn’t yet been confirmed or rolled out across the whole platform, stay tuned for the latest updates.
Instagram to promote Stories
Instagram is releasing a new ad type called ‘Promote’ exclusively for Stories. Advertisers will have targeting options such as location or creating lookalike audiences from existing followers.
Instagram Story ads have often been more challenging for new advertisers, due to formatting and other requirements, but this new option will allow advertisers to easily turn their existing stories into ads.
As part of this new drive, a new Instagram analytics tool is accompanying the Promote option, offering deeper insights than before, making it more akin to Facebook’s attribution system.
Instagram to allow sharing of IGTV content in Stories
Instagram has announced that users will be able to share IGTV clips in their own Instagram Story. This is following a drive to push Stories, seen as the future for social media, across the whole Facebook ecosystem.
This will allow advertisers the potential to get their content in the top bar of the platform and open more doors with influencer marketing.
Some, however, have concerns about the long-term viability of IGTV, with critics viewing it as an awkward alternative between long-form video content on Facebook Watch and YouTube and short clips on Instagram Stories.
Carousel ads in Pinterest
Pinterest has announced a new carousel ad format containing five images in a single ad, with the aim of ‘telling great stories on Pinterest’.
The style will be mostly in keeping with normal ‘Pins’, but each image can be edited with different descriptions and even landing pages, providing new options for advertisers.
The move seems to be consistent with the general trend amongst the big social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, which have all seen great success with the carousel format.
Improving pixel transparency
Following continued privacy concerns across the whole sphere of social media and data breaches within the company itself, Facebook is making business owners disclose ad partners and define the relationships with which the businesses share data.
The process will start to be rolled out from November 2018, and by mid-2019, businesses that previously set up pixels and shared data must also complete the new requirements.
Advertisers that don’t disclose their relationships won’t be allowed to use the service or share data through Facebook.
