I think most are getting used to the idea of advertising online. Many digital marketers are seeing great results with Facebook ads and promoted Tweets.
However, just when we get used to everything, BOOM. Something changes.
There have been a lot of social advertising updates and announcements lately, so I thought it only appropriate to catch everyone up on what is happening in the world of social advertising. Here we go:
1. Instagram is expanding its advertising.
According to a post on the Instagram blog,
As with our initial roll-out, we are committed to learning as much as we can while building Instagram as a sustainable business. Later this year, we’ll start by introducing ads on Instagram in three countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In the future we’ll also look to introduce ads on Instagram to additional countries across the world.
With this and future expansions of our advertising platform, we remain dedicated to building Instagram into the best possible experience for our entire global community. Thanks for continuing to inspire us each and every day.
Even though Instagram ads are not available to small businesses (or really anyone outside of their selected brands), they are realizing that they will have to expand this to continue to be successful. So far the ads that have run had results above the industry average per the same blog post.
2. Pinterest to launch “Do-it-Yourself-Promoted-Pins”.
Pinterest is slowly rolling out its advertising (see my previous article on it HERE). Following that announcement came this one,
We’re continuing our paid tests of Promoted Pins in search and category feeds. Now, we’ve added a do-it-yourself Promoted Pins tool so businesses of any size can promote their Pins to reach more people and get visits back to their website. These Promoted Pins will be available on a cost-per-click basis through ads.pinterest.com.
You can sign up at ads.pinterest.com to get on the wait-list for the DIY option.
3. Facebook is changing its ad terminology…again.
This time “page post” is being removed from ads types. According to AllFacebook,
Facebook’s efforts to simplify its advertising offerings appear to have been extended to terminology, as sources told sister blog Inside Facebook that the term “page post” is being removed from the names of its ad units, although the units themselves are not changing.
According to Inside Facebook:
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Page post photo ads will be known as photo ads.
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Page post video ads will become video ads.
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Page post link ads will be referred to as link ads or multiproduct ads.
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Page post text ads and page post status ads will become simple text ads.
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Page post-offer ads will be known as offer ads.
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Domain ads will become link ads.”
This will not affect anyone, but we need to be aware of the terms so we know what we are looking at and what our options are.
4. Facebook is adding videos to their advertising options.
According to Facebook,
For advertisers who specifically want to drive video views, “video views” will be a new objective to choose from when they create a campaign in our ads create tool, Power Editor and the API. Facebook will automatically optimize these ads to be shown to the people most likely to view videos on Facebook, across devices and across target audiences.
Advertisers will also be able to encourage people who have viewed their videos to view additional content with two new solutions.
It’s bad enough that auto-play videos were eating up my data on my iPhone, now I have to worry about sponsored videos showing up? Like all things Facebook, they will be rolling this out the only way they know how, very slowly and randomly.
I commend the platforms for providing business owners with more options, even though we are playing the waiting game. I know I can’t wait to try the Promoted Pins. How about? When you gain access to any of the above, will you try out?
