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What’s new in the realms of paid search and social media? This month, Laura Kubiesa, Basis’ VP of Social Media Investment, and Lindsay Martin, Group VP of Search Media Investment, compiled all the latest news, trends, and resources for easy access.
Earlier this month, Meta released Threads, its Twitter competitor where users can share text, photo, or video posts, as well as like, comment, share, and repost others’ content. One of the platform's biggest assets is its connection to Instagram: Registration has been called “incredibly easy,” and users can automatically follow influencers, content creators, and friends they're already connected with on Instagram. Thanks to a slick signup process and an almost-instantly relevant content feed, Threads was able to capture more than 30 million users within just 24 hours of launch. (Note: the platform is without advertising opportunities...for now.)
You’re saying they have even more users?
In just five days, Threads reached 100 million users. Whoa. Conversely, user traffic on Twitter slowed upon its launch—according to Similarweb, traffic to Twitter was down 5% for the first two full days Threads was available, compared with the previous week (and was down 11% year-over-year). To add to the drama, Elon Musk and Twitter are already accusing Meta of stealing trade secrets to build this new platform.
ByteDance has launched its own publishing company, 8th Note Press, to capitalize on the success of BookTok, a highly engaged community on TikTok where users discuss and share books. Many authors have found overnight success from BookTok, and some are now concerned that the social media company’s promotion of its own books will compromise the ability of authors unaffiliated with 8th Note Press to achieve virality.
Pretty sure Gaston isn’t the target audience here.
Next year, there will be nearly the same number of social media users in the US as there are TV viewers, which eMarketer calls an “historic audience shift.” While it’s estimated that Meta and Twitter will see slight declines, other major social platforms will see increases in users, led by Reddit, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Advertisers who have leveraged Meta heavily for paid social initiatives should look to expand and diversify their social strategies and dollar allocation to tap into the growing user bases of other social platforms.
Google recently launched a new feature to improve where advertisements appear—and where they don’t. Brand Exclusions allow marketers to add a layer of control so Performance Max will not serve for branded queries that advertisers want to avoid across Google search and shopping inventory. Advertisers who require brand exclusions, or advertisers who require specific budget parameters associated with branded traffic, can monitor how this may impact reach, performance, and conversions.
Lizzo knows what to do.
Two new AI-powered Google campaign types aim to boost consumer interest through the path to purchase. Demand Gen integrates top-performing video and image assets across a variety of other Google ad formats such as YouTube and Discovery, while Video View campaigns are intended to complement Demand Gen efforts to maximize views. Initial testing showed Video View campaigns achieved an average of 40% more views than in-stream skippable cost-per-view campaigns.
Marketers can now tap into data from audio, long-form, and YouTube Shorts to identify songs that are trending with the Gen Z audience. Google’s algorithm will package such songs into the Gen Z Music Lineup, allowing advertisers to place ads near media that uses the music this audience is listening to. Read more from the official release here.
Great googly moogly, that’s a lot of Google updates!
An eMarketer report projects YouTube to earn over $15 billion in ad revenue in 2023, while holding an 8.3% share of US video ad spend and anticipating double-digit growth for YouTube’s CTV offering this year. How does the platform compare to its competition? YouTube is, of course, part of Alphabet, which ranks highest in the world for net digital ad revenues; YouTube on its own would be number six on that list, behind Meta, Amazon, Alibaba, and ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company). Meanwhile, TikTok’s share of US video ad spending continues to climb and is right on YouTube’s tail. For CTV specifically, only Hulu beats YouTube in US ad revenue, whereas YouTube leads in share of streaming time across its 236 million viewers.
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