This Week’s Social News — March 10

Welcome back to Café Social’s regular weekly social news updates. We’ll keep up to date with all things digital and social so you don’t have to.

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Crosspost Reels to the News Feed

It’s no secret that Reels are a pretty straightforward attempt at slicing into TikTok’s quagmire but what might come as a surprise is that Facebook is keen to get in on the action themselves. Facebook owns Instagram, that’s true, but we’re talking about a new push in India to crosspost Reels straight to Facebook. India is the testing ground for all things Reels as TikTok was banned in the country last year amidst a slew of other Chinese apps following a scuffle at the border.

Conversation Settings for Twitter Ads

As part of Twitter’s push to more effectively commercialise, they’re exploring new options for advertisers to own the conversations they’re paying to create. In this case, that means expanding conversation settings to the ad creation flow. Twitter is the most famously ‘block on sight’ platform for advertisers and some users do enjoy griefing advertisers in replies just to stretch their marketing budgets even further so this is a welcome step for those with a clear message and no desire to elaborate. We’re pretty big fans of hiding, deleting, and blocking bad comments on Facebook ads where appropriate so consider this an extension of that approach.

Save Your Twitter Spaces Chats

Related, Twitter continues to push to usurp Clubhouse’s dominance within the social graph they’ve already spent ten years building. On a podcast with The Verge, Twitter’s head of consumer product, Kayvon Beykpour, says the company is looking to build a way to save conversations down to replay after the fact if you’d like. Clubhouse is developing a ‘black market’ of this with some users recording conversations through their phones and posting to YouTube for later consumption but this Twitter version would likely include better attribution and ownership of ‘your own’ contribution to the chat.

Instagram Tests Automated Captions for IG Stories

Instagram’s added a new Captions sticker to IG Stories for generating closed captions. A great step forward for accessibility in the Stories, which has been notoriously bad, and reinforces Instagram’s apparent commitment to fostering inclusion on the platform — for a change, some might say. They’re ‘for Internal Testing’ right now but keep your eyes peeled for their rollout.

Snapchat Responds to iOS14

We mentioned last week that Facebook seems to be the only social ad platform who’s displaying any concern at all about iOS14, but Snapchat’s now launched an iOS14 Resource Hub to help advertisers prepare for what’s changing. They’re also hosting a webinar on March 11, 11am PT to run them through as well. A recording will be available afterwards if you’re asleep.

Slightly related, Snapchat’s also partnered with media company Gannett to sell small to medium businesses on Snapchat ads’ potential to reach younger audiences. The business is looking to aggressively scale its revenue, posting a 62% increase in Q4 as the CEO recently predicted “multiple years of at least 50% growth” so keep an eye on the yellow AR company if you’re not already.

Google Throws Out the Cookie Jar

Meanwhile, Google presses on in its quest to do away with third-party cookies altogether — like the Facebook pixel — to track users for advertising. They’ve been researching implementation for a while through their Privacy Sandbox and they suggest that “advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers.”

There’s not really a lot here to report on other than the fact that “They’re working on it FYI” but Search ads are so obscenely profitable that they’ll only make the switch from targeted to anonymised ads once there’s a use case. At that time, expect Internet advertising to change all at once — again.

Twitter Working On Undo Timer

If you put a feature on your app, @wongmjane will find it. In this case, she’s found Twitter testing a feature that lets you unsend tweets during a brief countdown after posting. It’s not quite an edit button, which has all sorts of ramifications on virality, but it does at least let you fix typos that you spot only as you tweet — which is where you find them all, let’s be honest.

Jack’s First Tweet For Sale

@jack, Twitter’s co-founder, has listed his first tweet for sale as a non-fungible token, or NFT for short. NFTs like NBA’s Top Shot are an interesting new intersection between art, crypto, and consumerism that has potential courtesy of the immutable nature of the blockchain but how exactly they evolve from here is anyone’s guess. The current asking price for the tweet is USD$2.5 million in case you were concerned that there wasn’t enough money floating around.

Stay tuned next week for more.

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Originally published on our website.