A bi-weekly summary of the most exciting recent news in marketing technology and trends. If you’re trying to keep up, consider this your one-stop shop.
- Facebook says 3 million advertisers are now using its new Stories format on the Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp platforms. Some 500 million post Stories daily and the format won the largest portion of year-over-year ad impressions growth during the first quarter of this year, according to Facebook’s Q1 results as reported by CNBC.
- Brands may have a significant opportunity to increase their reach to consumers on social media when users unlock their cell phones, according to a new study by Verto Analytics. The study found that messaging and social media apps trigger more than 100 unlocks per user per month. The study also found that approximately 16% of Facebook usage on cell phones happens when the social media app is relaunched when the mobile phone is unlocked.
- Facebook’s user base continues to grow in spite of the social media platform’s legal and privacy problems with regulators. The Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms have 2.7 billion monthly users worldwide and 2.1 billion open one of the apps everyday, according to reporting by Tech Crunch. Facebook grew its user base in Europe by 4 million during Q1 of this year.
- More than 40% marketers surveyed by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Winterberry Group said predictive modeling and segmentation will be their main focus this year. AI is increasingly being used by brands to arrive at more lucrative market segmentation from data gathering. More than half of those surveyed also expressed concern about the impact increased regulation may have on their data gathering and analysis capabilities, as reported by Emarketer.
- Officials in Great Britain are recommending increased regulation of internet content that could result in individual liability for executives of large internet platforms like Google and Facebook, according to reporting by The New York Times. Prime Minister Teresa May was quoted by the Times as saying “for too long these companies have not done enough to protect users, especially children and young people, from harmful content.”
- More images may mean higher SEO rankings by Google, according to research by seoClarity as reported by Media Post. The research found images were appearing more frequently in the top search results. Researchers said SEO optimization strategies need to take account of search engine users’ preference for images over text, as keywords used used in searches contain images more than one third of the time.
- The online shopping application Dote has attracted $12 million in new funding and will offer online shopping parties to users that seek to replace the experience of going to the mall with friends. The application allows shoppers to make purchases on the Dote app from a range of retailers and includes recommendations from social media influencers, according to reporting by Tech Crunch.
Mark A. Browne
Mark A. Browne is Portada’s Marketing Innovation Editor. He is a bilingual (English-Spanish) writer, media relations manager, and content creation professional with an established record providing journalism, copywriting and analytical content services to major publishers, PR agencies and businesses in the United States, Latin America and Europe. His award-winning career as a reporter and editor includes daily and weekly newspaper experience and free-lance writing for major print and online publications.