Facebook Announces ‘Your Business Story’ and Advertising Milestone

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Facebook announced a new video offering for small businesses called Your Business Story, which would allow Pages to easily create and share montage-videos incorporating still images and music. At the same time, the company let slip that it now has over three million advertisers.

Your Business Story is a simple tool similar to the previously announced SlideShow offering. The company didn’t say anything about ads being included in the platform, but the note about their recent advertising milestone suggests the new offering will eventually work its way into Facebook Ads.

In the announcement, Facebook said:

To celebrate the businesses that use Facebook to grow, we created Your Business Story — a tool that makes it easy to create a video that shows what your business brings to the world. Because we believe the best way to tell the story of three million businesses is to empower each one to share their own.

Three million advertisers is a significant milestone for the social media platform. In September, the company announced it had reached 2.5 million. Before that, it claimed two million advertisers in February 2015. That means Facebook has been bringing in about half a million advertisers every six months for about the past year.

The announcement also said the majority of the businesses that use Facebook’s ad services are small businesses, also saying “50 million small businesses now use Pages on Facebok.”

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Accelerated Mobile Pages Are Rolling Out Across Google

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Google Mobile

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) have been rumored to rollout in late February for some time, and it appears they are finally starting to appear. The AMP listings are being spotted in mobile search results, but it seems they are not available for all searchers.

Accelerated Mobile Pages are pages designed to be super lightweight and allow for incredibly fast load times. It does this by using a unique, streamlined version of HTML that is able to be heavily caches to provide the fastest loading experience possible.

To see if you have access to the new AMP search results, just perform a search on Google.com for any query that would typically trigger a news box. If you can’t think of anything, you can try ‘Trump’, ‘Google’, or ‘Obama’.

Barry Schwartz shared a few screencaps of what you can expect to see as the listings become more widely available. You can see them below:

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This screencap shows AMP listings appearing in the news listings, rather than the carousel:

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Google Has The Slowest Loading Mobile Home Page In Its Market

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Google has been vocal lately about encouraging webmasters to improve the loading speed of their websites, especially on mobile devices. It has made loading speed one of its many ranking signals and is rolling out Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve mobile website speed.

With all this effort to make mobile loading speed an important issue for webmaster, you might think Google would be ahead of the curve when it comes to making sure their pages load quickly on mobile devices. Not so, according to a recent test shared on Hacker News.

The test was conducted using Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool and several others have replicated the results on their own. The findings seem clear; Google is the slowest loading home page on mobile in its market.

You can see the results of some of the speed tests below:

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Google’s loading speed

DuckDuckGo's loading speed

DuckDuckGo’s loading speed

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Bing’s loading speed

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Yahoo’s loading speed

Somewhat surprising, Yahoo came out ahead of the pack with a loading speed significantly faster than anyone else in the market. That may be part of the reason Yahoo has seen faster growth on mobile than Bing or other alternatives to Google. However, Yahoo’s market share of mobile search still sits at just over 3.5% compared to Google’s 94%.

Several elements are slowing down Google’s mobile home page, including render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content. Once AMP is rolled out, this could change. If Accelerated Mobile Pages are as effective as Google claims, it should have one of the fasted loading home pages on mobile once the new system is released. But, it is interesting that Google is currently lagging behind the field.

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Facebook Brings New Look, Important New Stats To Video Metrics

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Facebook is overhauling its Video Metrics section of Page Insights with several new improvements and features to improve how it allows users to track video engagement. To start with, the company is completely redesigning the entire interface to the Video Metrics section. But, it is also launching a few highly requested metrics to better gauge how users are watching videos on the platform.

Since Facebook has launched the video portion of its platform, it has allowed Page owners to track total view counts on videos. However, it did not provide any information on how long people watched for or if they clicked away at some point in the video.

Now, Facebook will display the total minutes viewed watching a video, so Page Owners can tell if they are losing viewers mid-watch and get a better perspective on the effectiveness of their videos. The company says it was the number one most requested feature.

In addition to this, Page owners are also now able to track views more closely with the new 10-Second Views metric, which shows how many viewers watched for at least 10 seconds. This is big for two reasons. On one hand, Facebook has received criticism for counting any view over three seconds in their video counts, compared to YouTube’s harsher 30 second standard for view counts.

The new 10-Second Views metric is also important because Facebook announced last summer that advertisers will only be charged for ad views if their video was watched for more than 10 seconds.

Alongside these view-length metrics, Facebook also rolled out an interesting new metric that gives Page owners a better idea of exactly how users are watching their videos.

Within the Insights view of individual videos, Page owners can see the amount of people that viewed a video with the sound on vs with the sound off. This lets Page owners get an idea of their audience and how their videos are being interacted with.

For example, if the majority of views are coming from users with the sound off, there is a good chance your audience is primarily watching videos at work, school, or in another public space where sound shouldn’t be turned on. You can take this into account with your future ads by being sure to optimize sub-titles and perhaps take a more visual approach with your content.

These changes allow Page owners and advertisers to gain a much deeper insight into how their ads and videos are performing, and that means allowing them to make even better ads and videos for their audience. If you want to make sure your ads are really successful, you should consider giving these new video metrics a look.

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Instagram Rolls Out View Counts For Video

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Instagram Banner

It has been almost three years since Instagram stretched its legs and expanded to video, but in all this time it has been missing a crucial feature – view counts. While the other giants in social video like YouTube, Facebook, and Vine have let users see how many times a video has been played, Instagram has been slow to add any view count feature to their platform. Until now.

Instagram has announced it will soon be adding a counter that includes everyone who has watched at least three seconds of a video.

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The company says the feature will be rolling out over the “coming weeks” and will show alongside the existing like and comment counts.

The feature could be beneficial for advertisers on two fronts. On one hand, it will be greatly useful to simply be able to see what their most popular content is in a more direct way than with like and comment counts. While those show engagement levels, a view count will be a much better indicator if video reach.

Secondly, as Twitter has recently seen, when users see that others are watching and interacting with content, they are more likely to view, engage, and share that content. By letting other users see that your videos are popular with other users, you also see a chance at increasing your total view counts overall.

For more information on how Instagram will roll out view counts in the next few weeks, check out the official announcement from Instagram.

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Twitter Announces New “Improved Timeline”

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Source: Shawn Campbell

Source: Shawn Campbell

Twitter is calling its latest new feature an improvement to their timeline, but many users disagree. The new Improved is an algorithm-based feature which uses data collected from a user’s previous activity on Twitter to show them the tweets that are of most interest to them at the top of their timeline.

The goal, according to Twitter, is to make sure users see all the most “important” tweets for them as soon as they log in. Directly below this section of most important tweets, users will find the traditional reverse-chronological timeline they’ve come to know and love.

While Twitter is hailing the new feature as a move forward, the social media site has been in open rebellion since rumors of the feature started swirling over the weekend. The site saw #RIPTwitter trending as many said the site was losing what made it special in order to be more like Facebook.

The furor over the changes has quieted down somewhat as the company shared more details about the new feature, including its opt-in nature and somewhat non-intrusive design.

This isn’t the first controversial rumored feature from Twitter in recent weeks. The platform faced similar freak-outs when word got out that it was testing significantly longer tweets than the traditional 140-character limit.

That feature has yet to be put into effect, but Twitter is trying hard to walk a very thin tight-rope. The purpose of these new features is to attract new users to the stagnating service. However, losing Twitter’s existing audience in the process may set the company back even further.

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Google Is Urging Business Owners To Update Their Knowledge Graph Listings

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Have your checked your business’s Knowledge Graph information lately? If you haven’t, you may be hearing from Google the next time you perform a search.

Recently, Dan Leveille discovered that Google is proactively reaching out to searchers and urging them to keep their business listing up-to-date. If you haven’t checked on your listings recently, you may see a similar alert to the one below next time you sign in with a Google account associated with a Google My Business page.

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Leveille notes:

“Other than asking developers to include social profile data, this seems like the first time Google is proactively asking business owners to directly suggest edits to their Knowledge Graph info.”

Leveille also uncovered a newly updated help document from Google detailing the criteria for being considered an “official representative of an entity in the Knowledge Graph.”

This is a significant move by Google to try to clean up out-of-date Knowledge Graph information and provide accurate listings. Both local businesses and major corporations can take advantage of the Knowledge Graph, so it is always a good idea to regularly check your listings and make sure they are current.

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Mobile Wins Super Bowl 50 When It Comes To Search

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Online searchers are increasingly turning to mobile devices during the biggest trending moments, and this year’s super bowl makes that clearer than ever. According to Google, 82 percent of all TV ad-driven searches during the Super Bowl came from smartphones, a 12-point increase from last year.

Desktop continues to trail mobile searches with just 11 percent of Super Bowl searches during the game, while tablets accounted for only 7 percent.

In total, Google says the big ads during this year’s Super Bowl drove over 7.5 million incremental searches. That is a 40 percent increase compared to last year’s game.

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Perhaps due to the close game, the majority of searches driven by Super Bowl TV ads came during the first two quarters of this year’s match. Ad’s related searches dipped significantly at half-time and continued to stay relatively low through the end of the 4th quarter. This is similar to what happened during last year’s close match-up.

This pattern is quite a bit different from 2014, when the Broncos were dominated by the Seahawks. As the score widened in the second half searches increased, suggesting viewers were getting bored with the actual game and paying more attention to ads.

Google’s infographic from the big game shares many other details, like what big brands came out on top and which team won the most searches. The biggest takeaway is that brands who want to capitalize on emerging events and trending moments should prioritize mobile like their audience is.

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Is Facebook The New King of Super Bowl Ads?

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The war between YouTube and Facebook for the most popular online platform for sharing and watching videos is heating up, and Facebook may win a major victory this weekend.

With the Super Bowl upon us, everyone is gearing up for one of the greatest competitions of the year – the fight for the most watched Super Bowl ad. But, more Super Bowl ads and teaser videos are being shared online ahead of the big game, and TV ad analytics company iSpot.tv says may be the new place for watching the biggest ads of the year online.

It is a close fight, with Facebook barely pulling ahead of YouTube, but it is a big win for the company either way. YouTube dominated online Super Bowl ads last year, but Facebook has pushed their video platform heavily over the year and seen massive increases in both views and shares.

Source: Marketing Land

Source: Marketing Land

According to iSpot.tv’s data counting video views through Tuesday, February 2, approximately 75 million super bowl ads videos have been viewed on Facebook, compared to 74.9 million on YouTube. As the published report on Marketing Land shows, the numbers are neck-and-neck. But, it is a huge change from last year where YouTube received 87.6 million to Facebook’s 45.5 million.

In most cases, an argument can be made to explain the discrepancy. Facebook counts video views when a user watches for just three seconds, but YouTube doesn’t count until “around” 30 seconds in. However, iSpot.tv says it uses a three-second standard for counting views on both platforms.

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Bing Shares Key Search Insights For Valentine’s Day

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Valentine’s Day is almost upon us, and that means searches related to the holiday are already starting to spike. Thankfully, you still have time to get campaigns running before Valentine’s Day searches peak.

Bing recently released data giving insight to key trends for Valentine’s Day-related searches (including gifts, candy, flowers, restaurants and jewelry), as well as ad performance to help inform your marketing efforts this year.

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According to the data, this week is likely already seeing an increase in searches compared to last week, but next week will be the height of Valentine’s Day fever. Desktop saw an especially notable spike in the final week before the big day, jumping 77 percent. In comparison, mobile searches rose by 71 percent.

In total, mobile made up 32 percent of Valentine’s Day-related searches and 17 percent of clicks across Bing last year.

The best day for Valentine’s Day-related searches was February 11 last year, but candy and chocolate searches didn’t reach their height until February 13.

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While many get an early start on larger purchases like jewelry, it isn’t a surprise that Valentine’s Day card shopping is often done last-minute. From February 12 through Valentine’s Day, cards sales skyrocketed, showing the need to customize your budget and bidding strategies depending on what products and services you provide.

Click-through rates saw their highest point overall between the February 10 and 14, averaging 4.9 percent. On desktop, CTR reached its peak in the afternoon of February 12, while mobile didn’t top out until late on Valentine’s Day.

For more data about Valentine’s Day search and keyword trends, check out Bing’s full presentation on Slideshare.

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