“Thanks, TikTok…
…for all the features and ideas for our app, Reels” – probably some Instagram executive somewhere.
Yes, a few more updates hit Reels yesterday, all of which have to do with audio. Here’s what you can now see (and hear) on Reels:
- You can now save sounds and then repurpose them for your own videos later on. Using other users’ audio and sounds has recently become a trend on TikTok, so it’s no surprise that the TikTok clone – Reels – has made this possible.
- Share Reels that have audio in common. This is a pretty cool one: if you want to share multiple Reels that use a certain piece of audio, you can now do that easily over DMs.
- Browse for audio. Instagram now lets you navigate the Reels search features by audio, which ties in very nicely with the other two updates.
The full announcement from Instagram’s Adam Mosseri can be found here. It’s no secret that Reels is a blatant clone of TikTok, and the new audio features might help the platform keep up with TikTok’s fast-growing user base.
If you do any marketing or promotions on Reels, this new audio update should make it easier to connect to users when audio-based clips go viral.
Let’s (try to) make your ads great again…
… with this list of tips we found scraping the web.
Two of them are from Ads Alchemist that makes a comeback in our newsletter:
- When launching a campaign, make sure to watch your spend allocation early on. Most of the time, it can happen that an ad gets approved very quickly and eats up all the budget. To avoid this, either turn off the campaign until all the ads are approved or watch the spend closely.
- Your ad accounts might be lost forever after a ban, but the data doesn’t have to follow the same fate: With these six steps, Ads Alchemist shows you how to never be locked out of your account. Note: It has to be done before the ban, talk about prevention…
Alright, that was useful stuff, but here’s a little tip by David Herrmann that might get you some big improvements. And it makes sense especially if you are advertising in the USA in this period:
- Exclude political audiences from your ads. In this way, you won’t compete for ad slots that political organizations are targeting.
Aaaand, regarding the CBO vs ABO dilemma, here’s what Mark William has to say:
- The ad set budget optimization (ABO) works better for smaller budgets (around $100 per day). The campaign budget optimization (CBO) works better for big budgets (around $500 per day). Do you agree?
In addition, last week we told you about Shopify’s new Facebook Conversion API. The purpose is to improve the overall data that is being sent from your Shopify store to Facebook.
Why should you care? It can be extremely useful to work around ad blockers or browsers that limit the amount of data that is passed to Facebook.
If you want to implement it, this post from Foxwell Digital shows you the step by step procedure. Have fun!
And to round up this list (and get one more “Aha!” moment from you), remember that Facebook isn’t getting rid of the 28-day click-through attribution window, at least until 2021… Here’s one more confirmation.
YOUTUBE
Is this new platform worth your time?
Let’s talk about YouTube Shorts.
They’re YouTube’s answer to TikTok: short-form catchy videos shot with phones – usually of people dancing or doing weird things or following a trend that would, out of context, look extremely strange.
For the moment, Shorts have been rolled out in India. But, marketers are already wondering if Shorts will be worth their effort when they roll out worldwide.
How come? Well, TikTok has 700M monthly active users.
Instagram has 1B monthly active users.
YouTube? More than TikTok and Instagram combined: We’re talking about 2B active users every month. At the very least, Shorts is a channel to keep an eye on.
Matt Southern tackles this topic here. Well, to be more accurate, he tackles it by answering five questions: Who, what, when, where, and how?
After this, you’ll probably know if Shorts is worth your time or not.
Shall we?
YouTube Shorts: Who, what, when, where, and how?
Who are the target audiences? There are actually three target audiences for YouTube Shorts:
- Creators and artists.
- Viewers and subscribers.
- Advertisers and brands.
What kind of content are they seeking? According to a Insight Strategy Group’s research commissioned by Google, viewers – especially Gen Z (ages 13-22) and Millennials (ages 23-38) – are seeking “short, catchy videos”, “highly replayable short videos,” or “user-generated short videos.”
Thus, Shorts meets this trend perfectly.
Why do users like this kind of content? The research named before also asked people why they crave this kind of content, and some of the answers received were:
- Helps me relax and unwind.
- Teaches me something new.
- Allows me to dig deeper into my interests.
- Makes me forget about the world around me.
- Keeps me in-the-know.
- Helps me be efficient.
Outside of just YouTube Shorts, these are good principles to keep in mind when you’re creating content for any platform.
Where and when will users find short catchy videos? With so much content to choose from, users won’t need to stick to one platform. The emphasis will be on content, not on the platform itself.
How can you measure results? YouTube gives you access to different metrics right now to measure the effort put in Shorts:
- Ad recall.
- Brand awareness.
- Consideration.
- Impressions.
- Views.
- Engagements.
As TikTok clones continue to flood the market, keep YouTube Shorts in mind – it might be a big one.
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
INSTAGRAM: A new study from Socialinsider and Wave.video has revealed a few of the best ways to engage with your customers using Instagram Stories.
GOOGLE: Want to see what Google’s been up to this year? This article from Search Engine Journal is a useful compilation of all of Google’s notable patents in the first half of 2020.
SEO: In a new blog post from Google, Danny Sullivan explains how autocorrect predictions are generated. If you’re wondering how Google always knows what you’re about to search, this is a great read.
BRAIN TEASER
We’ve got a marketing-related trivia question for you today: TikTok has dominated app downloads every single month of 2020, except during April. Which app was able to unseat TikTok in April?
You can find the solution here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
The team that made The Mandalorian is training the Space Force (basically)
Season 2 of the Mandalorian is launching later this month, so there’d hardly be a better time for the news to break: Part of the VFX studio behind The Mandalorian is building an immersive space training tool for the Space Force.
The VR space simulator is being designed to use real-world physics and visuals as part of a training program for potential future astronauts.
With the team behind The Mandalorian in charge, the only thing we’d change is to make this simulator available for the general public, because who doesn’t want to train for future space travel?
If you want to check out what made The Mandalorian so revolutionary in the first place, watch this video about how the team used Unreal Engine – and a giant screen – to shoot most of the scenes.