All the news that’s fit to blog, starting with Storyful, which brings a newsroom approach to verifying social and UGC content for use by brands, as well as validating breaking news for news outlets. Just announced, the addition of Snap to a battery of sources which already includes Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube. The Snap API will feed video content, along with time-stamp and geolocation data, into Storyful’s Newswire feed, enhancing clients’ ability to track and verify breaking news and social intelligence.
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Speaking of social intelligence, Twitter has been doing something smart this week by cracking down on “digital pollution” by cleansing accounts of fake followers; a move which won the approval of Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed: “Pleased to see @twitter taking a big stand against the fake followers polluting the digital ecosystem. Great step forward which strengthens the industry…”
As a general rule, the more followers an account had to start off with, the bigger the hit it took. Katy Perry, Barack Obama, Justin Bieber, and Taylor Swift were among the superstars who lost upwards of two million; always remembering, of course, that by the very nature of the accounts being eradicated, they lost nothing at all.
Taking a marketing perspective, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO of Socialbakers, said: “This is a step in the right direction as Twitter shows its commitment to delivering an authentic, “digital-pollution” free environment for both marketers and users. Improved transparency from the platforms as a whole will help marketers looking to discover authentic influencers, better measure their impact and focus their marketing activities on audiences that are open to engaging with them.”
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In case you were wondering, video is officially confirmed as dominating Facebook’s advertising eco-system. The Q2 “Facebook Benchmark Report,” released by Nanigans this week, showed video dominating global ad spend on the platform “for the first time.” Video’s share of total ad spend scrambled to 51 percent (up from 46 percent in Q1), while there was a 55 percent increase quarter-over-quarter in ad spend just for eCommerce.
Investment in Facebook dynamic ads, which automatically serve relevant messages to users who have shown interest in a product, “skyrocketed” — a 243 percent growth YOY in the online retail space.
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And where are we today? Well our new editor and reporter Nick Ciccone will be researching all things smart at the ai,now workshop at One World Trade Center, hearing about AI use cases from brands like P&G, Visa, and Colgate Palmolive.
