Ten Things You Need to Know—02/03/18

• The Adobe 2018 Dig­i­tal Trends Sur­vey: Hot off the dig­i­tal press­es is this year’s instal­ment of Adobe’s annu­al look at dig­i­tal trends with­in the mar­ket­ing indus­try, packed with insights about how the pro­fes­sion con­tin­ues to evolve and adapt to take advan­tage of the oppor­tu­ni­ties afford­ed by devel­op­ments in dig­i­tal. You can read some analy­sis of the find­ings in this post by Tri­et Huynh, or this one by John Wat­ton, or indeed, click the link at the top and down­load the full report for your­self. Con­sid­er that the report has found that organ­i­sa­tions that employ tools that allow for stream­lined work­flows between cre­ative and con­tent mar­keters and web teams are 62 per­cent more like­ly to have exceed­ed their busi­ness goals— some food for thought for those busi­ness­es yet to ful­ly embrace the poten­tial of dig­i­tal sys­tems to sup­port cre­ative mar­ket­ing outputs.
• Mak­ing FB Ad Met­rics Clear­er (Again): Anoth­er update to Facebook’s report­ing met­rics, main­ly mak­ing EVEN CLEARER the num­bers they’re report­ing to you, and get­ting rid of some met­rics that no one likes or under­stands (‘social reach,’ for example).
• Face­book Offers ‘Improved Insights’: Actu­al­ly not an improve­ment at all, sim­ply a cor­rec­tion. As of the now, organ­ic reach will be cal­cu­lat­ed in the same way as paid reach, that is, based on onscreen viewed time rather than just deliv­ery into News­feed. What this stag­ger­ing­ly tedious piece of tech­ni­cal tweak­ing means, in prac­tice, is that your organ­ic reach num­bers might look a lit­tle down from now on—don’t wor­ry, though, it’s not that you’re doing any­thing wrong, it’s sim­ply a more accu­rate reflec­tion of the fact that ORGANIC IS DEAD AND IT’S NOT COMING BACK, stop both­er­ing its grave, my pretty’s.

• New Group Fea­tures!: You will, I don’t doubt, recall that it is ALL ABOUT COMMUNITIES nowa­days. To that end, this is a suite of addi­tion­al fea­tures being rolled out to Group admins designed to make them work bet­ter. This is all very use­ful stuff, includ­ing the abil­i­ty for admins to make Group-wide announce­ments, bet­ter-organ­ised admin tools, and the abil­i­ty to give your Group its very own colour scheme! Excit­ing times, you’ll sure­ly agree.
• Twit­ter Clamps Down On Automa­tion and Mul­ti-Post­ing: This update to Twit­ter is designed to go some small way to stamp­ing out bot net­works, which ampli­fy con­tent by post­ing the same stuff from mul­ti­ple accounts. As of the now, Twitter’s API won’t let con­tent be post­ed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly to mul­ti­ple accounts owned by the same user. This is main­ly for devel­op­ers, alert­ing to stuff they will no longer be able to get their apps to do with the plat­form, but it’s worth know­ing. Not, of course, that you are doing any of this stuff. Def­i­nite­ly not.
• Insta­gram Adds Col­lec­tion Ads: These have been around on Face­book for a while. Basi­cal­ly it’s an eCom­merce offer­ing allow­ing for prod­uct brows­ing and pur­chase with­in the plat­form. That’s it! Almost cer­tain­ly not quite arrived in the UK yet, but why not make your ad sales rep’s life a small hell by ask­ing them dai­ly when they’ll be here (they prob­a­bly deserve it)?
• Rights Man­ag­er Comes To Ins­ta: This is the ser­vice enabling con­tent cre­ators to mon­i­tor for unscrupu­lous con­tent ban­dits (GREAT band name, by the way) who are rip­ping off their HIGH-QUALITY VIDEO CONTENT. You acti­vate it through Face­book, but Pages can now tag video con­tent for the plat­forms to watch out for on Insta­gram, as well as just on FB.

• Snapchat Brings Ana­lyt­ics To Sto­ries: Not to everyone’s sto­ries, just, y’know, some INFLUENCERS. Still, a use­ful-if-late addi­tion, which will enable cre­ators to see who is watch­ing their stuff. The num­bers are use­ful, but far more attrac­tive are the demo­graph­ic sig­nals, such as age and gen­der and BRAND AFFINITY, which might per­haps make doing influ­encer work on Snap ever so slight­ly less of a case of just throw­ing mon­ey at some­one and hoping.
• Sto­ries Come To The Web: And lo, it came to pass that the Sto­ries for­mat did become ubiq­ui­tous, and that the peo­ple for­got how to read or indeed con­ceive of con­cepts that couldn’t be bro­ken down into tap­pable seg­ments. This is BIG NEWS (ish)—Google announced that it’s cre­at­ed a Sto­ries (think Snapchat, think Ins­ta) for­mat for its AMP plat­form (the thing that lets web­pages load super­fast from Google). It means you real­ly have no excuse for not think­ing of every sin­gle thing you pro­duce in terms of a series of cards. There’s a real point here about how this for­mat isn’t going any­where, and how you might as well learn how to cre­ate in this style, so, you know, TRY. Oh, and while we’re doing AMP stuff, it’s being inte­grat­ed into Email too — this is prob­a­bly only real­ly of inter­est to a small sub­set of you, but if you fan­cy build­ing stuff which lets you inte­grate fan­cy func­tion­al­i­ty into your email cam­paigns then this is worth know­ing about too.
• Bad News: You might have heard about this: devel­oped by Dutch organ­i­sa­tion DROG, Bad News is a ‘game’ in which you can enjoy the illic­it and evil thrill of spread­ing FAKE NEWS and dis­in­for­ma­tion to manip­u­late peo­ple and, even­tu­al­ly, THE WORLD! It’s very light on actu­al ‘game’ elements—it’s effec­tive­ly a lin­ear nar­ra­tive that plays out with some light per­son­al­i­sa­tion options—but I like the style of it, the aesthetic’s pleas­ing­ly Teletext‑y, and it does a rea­son­able, if nec­es­sar­i­ly sim­plis­tic, job of demon­strat­ing how dis­in­for­ma­tion func­tions online.