Facebook

26
Oct
2017

Facebook is testing moving News + Brand Pages to a separate feed

A Facebook update that is currently being tested in 6 countries will make the default Newsfeed just for friends (and ads), and a separate feed for news and brand pages that you follow. The knock-on effect for brands and publishers could be devastating as pages in test countries have seen a dramatic drop in traffic since the test began as highlighted by Slovakian journalist Filip Struharik. Organic reach for brands on Facebook fell off a cliff back in 2014, but a shake-up like this could make it even tougher for Pages to get noticed – unless they are willing to pay of course.

 

Posted by Rob in Facebook, Media
28
May
2017

Facebook & Snapchat are battling it out to change the way we visualize the world around us

Originally featured in the May 28th 2017 issue of Campaign Middle East

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. And that’s probably never been truer than it is today. It’s no surprise that people are communicating less and less through text these days – and more and more through visual means on mobile messaging apps and social media platforms in particular.

Instagram may have kick-started this trend a few years ago on social media, but Snapchat dragged it into the personal messaging space and other platforms have followed suit, so much so that now, rather than using digital imagery as a way of simply documenting and presenting our lives, we actively use visuals to communicate in the place of text. Snapchat has been the poster child of this movement over the last 3 years or so, tripling its daily active users to over 160 Million. Not content at being left behind, Facebook has copied pretty much every visual messaging feature that Snapchat has popularized on each of its four platforms – Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook itself.

While facial lenses and basic image editing have become a bit of a commodity on social messaging channels though, both platforms are trying to branch out from this to a more ‘augmented reality’-style future where users can actively overlay digital elements onto whatever they are looking at in real-time. Think Pokemon Go, although much more interactive and responsive to your actual surroundings. Snapchat describes it as “painting the world with 3D experiences”.

Snapchat may have been the catalyst for this trend, but it seems that Facebook are innovating at faster speed. At the company’s recent F8 event Mark Zuckerberg launched a host of new 3D camera effects, highlighting a renewed focus on creating a ‘camera platform’, an onus on the camera not simply being a tool used just to capture images, but to communicate too. He even went as far as to say that the camera needs to be more central than the text box in all of their apps.

This is a way for Facebook to fully insert itself into the real world, to become the link between your smartphone and everything you see around you. Speaking to BuzzFeed News, Zuckerberg expanded on this approach, “Facebook is so much about marrying the physical world with online. When you can make it so that you can intermix digital and physical parts of the world, that’s going to make a lot of our experiences better and our lives richer”.

Demoing these new 3D camera effects, one Facebook engineer pointed his phone at a table and a 3D propeller plane appeared on the screen, flying around a water bottle on the table top. Another used his phone’s camera to turn the room into a planetarium, with planets and stars spread out across the ceiling. Another took a normal photo of a face, then manipulated the expressions into a smile and then a frown.

Facebook also showed off various 3D scenes created entirely from a handful of 2D photos. The scenes had real depth to them, allowing viewers to tilt their head to see behind a bed in a room, or peer around a tree in a forest. Users could dim the lights in the image of a room, flood it with water, or even leave a digital object in the room that would still be there for someone else to discover at a later time.

The ultimate idea here is to turn the real world into an extension of Facebook itself. While Zuckerberg highlights examples like using Facebook’s camera to view pieces of digital art affixed to a wall, or to play a digital game overlaid on a table-top, you can see the long game here – dragging elements that would normally appear in your feed, for example, into the real world. But as well as pieces of content from your friends and family, surely this means ads too. As the traditional Facebook Newsfeed takes a back seat to messaging apps, this could be one way of keeping this type of content relevant going into the future, as well as expanding their ad inventory in the process.

But what will this mean for brands when consumers are living in an augmented world, constantly interacting with and visually manipulating their surroundings? And what happens when we are all wearing AR glasses or contact lenses 24/7? Visions of a Minority Report-esque world where ads bombard us at every turn spring to mind, but surely there must be another way. I guess we’ll have to just wait and see.

Posted by Rob in Augmented Reality, Campaign Magazine, Facebook, Snapchat
19
Mar
2017

Chatbot 101 – Serviceplan Middle East talk

I gave this talk a few weeks back at the Serviceplan Middle East office on the rise of Chatbots in 2017 but am only getting around to putting it up here now because I’m super lazy.

With mobile messaging app usage overtaking regular social media usage as far back as 2015, coupled with the fact that people have basically stopped downloading standalone branded apps, the opportunity for Chatbots to provide an alternative communication channel has never been more obvious.

Since Facebook opened the floodgates to developers on it’s Messenger app platform last April, tens of thousands of Chatbots have been launched. Some haven’t lived up to expectations, but the future potential of Chatbots when paired with more concrete mobile functions like location-based services, push notifications and payments mean that our definition of what a Chatbot actually is could change drastically over the coming years.

Keep an eye out for WhatsApp inevitably getting in on the action at some stage over the next 12 months too.

Posted by Rob in Apps, Facebook, Mobile, WhatsApp
03
Aug
2016

Instagram add a very Snapchat-esque new feature

Instagram have just launched a new feature called ‘stories’ in a pretty brazen move trying to emulate one of Snapchat’s main functions. So, while Snapchat has recently added features that make it more like Instagram (i.e. Snapchat ‘Memories’), Instagram have done the opposite and added a feature that makes it more like Snapchat.

All of this echoes some of the developments that other tech and digital media companies have made over that last couple of years that move away from what made them unique in the first place. Today, everyone seems to be scrambling around video, live streaming and ‘stories’. The boundaries of these platforms are continuing to blur.

At the end of the day, whoever can leverage the most revenue from their users wins. Any platform can add any new feature that they want. Whether they were the ones to take it to market first or not doesn’t really matter. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.

FYI, while Snapchat is growing at a tremendous rate, Instagram still has DOUBLE the amount of daily active users (300m vs. 150m respectively).

Introducing Instagram Stories from Instagram on Vimeo.

Posted by Rob in Facebook, Snapchat, Social Media
04
Feb
2016

Mobile messaging, and what it means for brands

For the last 6 or 7 years, the growth of social media has been a phenomenon that’s affected everything from the way we communicate with one another to the way we consume media and entertainment. But as Social Networks make the move to being de-facto media distribution channels, users have overwhelmingly started migrating to messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, LINE etc. to engage in more meaningful communication with friends and family.

It may come as a surprise, but in 2015, the Big Four mobile messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Viber) overtook the Big Four Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn) in monthly active user numbers. So it’s official; mobile messaging is where it’s at.

messaging

From a publisher’s point of view, some media outlets are already using messaging apps to connect with their audience in interesting ways. The Huffington Post are using Viber’s Public Chats to publicly share real-time conversations between their journalists. BBC News are using WhatsApp for user-generated content, gathering reader photos, videos, and first-hand accounts that it later repurposes on its live news blog, and The Washington Post are using Kik’s Promoted Chats to attract readers through quizzes and game-like experiences.

Either way, it’s clear that where users go, ultimately, brands want to go too, thus providing the incentive to technology platforms to facilitate this connection.

Much has been made of Facebook’s desire to turn it’s Messenger app into a much broader platform, enabling users to do more than just communicate with each other. Plans include everything from facilitating customer service, to ordering an Uber directly within a conversation, and even allowing P2P micro payments, all within the context of messaging. This is much like the most popular Asian apps such as WeChat and LINE already offer. In a way, the messaging aspect is a commodity service used to build a broad user base to offer a wider range of add-ons to.

WhatsApp is looking to get in on the action too. At last month’s DLD conference in Munich, founder Jan Koum spoke about the plan to remove the annual subscription fee to use the service and eventually cater to businesses (he gave American Airlines and Bank of America as examples), offering them ways to deal with customer servicing directly through the messaging app.

How might brands utilise messaging apps?

But all of this just poses the question of how exactly brands might use messaging apps to connect with consumers. Perhaps it’s not too crazy to think of WhatsApp customer call centres springing up in the developing world in the not-too-distant future, but surely there are possibilities far more interesting than this. AI responses to customer queries have been touted, but aside from a responding to customer complaints, how else might brands utilize messaging platforms to enhance customer relationships?

Perhaps ‘conversations’ with brands can be used to maintain customer loyalty and rewards programs, a friction free way of opting-in and continuing to use them.  Mobile loyalty apps have been sold as the answer to the problem of having to constantly carry around rewards cards and the like, but in reality, downloading a standalone app and registering your details to keep track of this seems to be as much of a turn-off as carrying around a physical card in the first place. Brands could also use messaging channels to offer personalised deals or suggest new products that their users might like. Something akin to the “If you like this, you’ll love these” style prompts that work so well on Amazon etc. Either way, it sounds like a smoother way to interact with customers and prompt them into action.

But at what point might this become a nuisance, and are most consumers really open to engaging with brands on channels that they also communicate with their friends and family on? Well it would appear that they are. Recent consumer research in the area is encouraging. According to a 2015 MEC survey, 79% are not opposed to engaging with brands on chat apps. That sounds like enough of a mandate to me. Even if actual user behaviour turns out to be a little less enthusiastic about this once it becomes the norm.

I’m sure we’ll slowly start seeing some examples of these concepts over the next 6 months or so as Facebook and friends turn on the tap and unleash some of the functionality that third-party developers have been working away on since F8 last March. In the meantime, we’ll just have to put our thinking caps on and come up with some interesting ways to utilise messaging channels to connect with customers.

Posted by Rob in Facebook, Mobile, Retail, Social Media, WhatsApp