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Four Reasons Brands Should Use Facebook's New Messaging Feature
PLUS: Amazon's "Lifeline"... Multiple WhatsApp accounts... And a big oops at Instagram.
Tod Maffin
October 19, 2023
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In Today’s Issue:
📢 Meta introduces 'broadcast channels' to Facebook and Messenger
📱 WhatsApp now supports multiple accounts usage
🎥 Meta faces challenges monetizing Reels advertising
🛍 Amazon launches friend feedback feature
🕊 A change to how Facebook comments work
📸 Instagram corrects Palestinian bio translation error
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Amazon’s New “Consult a Friend” Feature
In November 1999, an American tax agent named John Carpenter was on the TV game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”
He was good. He kept answering questions correctly, all the way to the final question. Answer this one right, and he’d be the show’s first-ever million dollar winner.
If you’re familiar with the show, it offers contestants what it calls lifelines — things to use if you’re stuck on an answer. One of those lifelines is called call-a-friend. The show connects you to your friend, you ask them the question, and they tell you what they think the answer is. You can go with that one, or go on your own.
On that last question, Carpenter cashed that in to call his dad.
While not quite as flashy, Amazon is launching a sort of similar thing this week — though without the million dollar prize.
It’s called “Consult-a-Friend,” and lets shoppers send a message to people whose advice they want on a product.
The message goes out from a mobile phone’s share sheet, so presumably most people will send it out as a text message.
But this is more like a poll than a request for comment. The recipient will get three icons to choose from — good, meh, or bad. They can also add some notes if they want.
Amazon says they’re adding this because people do this all the time already — ask their contacts for advice. They say shoppers pressed the share button “billions of times’ last year.
Lest you think this is a clever way to collect contact information for non-Amazon customers, the company says recipients must already have an Amazon account and be logged into it to provide any feedback.
This will roll out starting tomorrow in a small handful of countries including the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the U.K.
Broadcast Channels Coming to Facebook/Messenger
If you’ve been following the social media landscape for the last year or so, you’ll know that one of the big trends has been away from large platform sharing, like posting to your Facebook or Instagram feed, and a move toward closed circle sharing: Group DMs, Discord channels, and the likes.
One of the most popular closed circle platforms is one that marketers haven’t really availed themselves of: Whatsapp channels. These look a lot like DM threads, but only the organizer can post to it. It’s often used to distribute news, or links of interest to a small group. Users can react with an emoji, but that’s it. They can’t add a post or reply.
Meta has obviously taken note of this social trend and yesterday announced they will be adding these one-way broadcast channels to Facebook and Messenger.
They said it’ll take a few weeks to get out, but there are already some brands using it. Netflix, for instance, has one such channel where they post basically what they’d post on other social media.
There are a couple of advantages for brands using these channels:
First, not many do, so if your brand’s positioning has some “first mover” energy in it, this might be a great addition to prove your early adopter cred.
There’s no algorithm controlling what order people see their messages in — they are in order of recency. That might be great for people who only end up following a few of these channels; less helpful if consumers end up following hundreds.
Because these messages live in people’s messaging app, there’s a feeling of closer connection than just seeing content on a feed.
Notifications — again, as long as people aren’t signing up to every channel they see, you’ll be able to pop a notification up on someone’s phone when you post there. Just don’t post TOO often, or they’ll end up muting or unfollowing your account.
This is rolling out now, but it’s not clear which business categories are getting them first. Once your Page gets them, you should see a message on your brand Page.
I should note this is something that’s been available on Instagram for some time now, and has been extraordinarily popular, with some of its biggest channels having millions of members.
Has your brand ever used an Instagram or WhatApp broadcast channel? |
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Multiple Accounts Now Supported in Whatsapp
Other than broadcast channels, Whatsapp does have a pretty extensive business platform — it’s also owned by Meta, so their whole ad platform is connected.
But Whatsapp is really best used on a phone, and it only permits one account at a time. You can log out of your personal account to log into your business one, but then you have to do that all over again when you’re done with your business stuff.
Some marketers are so concerned about “crossing the streams,” as Dr. Egon Spengler once said, that they carry two phones with them.
Today, Meta announced it will finally support multiple accounts in the app.
However, there is a big catch.
Unlike the rest of its apps, Whatsapp accounts are tied to phone numbers. So, to set up a second account, you will need a second phone number and SIM card, or a phone that accepts multi-SIM or eSIM.
If you have these, you can open your WhatsApp settings, click on the arrow next to your name, and click “Add account”. You can control your privacy and notification settings on each account.
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Meta’s Battle for the Future of Shortform Video Ads
There is a fantastic think-piece at TheInformation.com today called “Inside Meta’s Struggles to Turn Reels Into an Advertising Powerhouse”.
It is a great read, and I thought I’d bring you a couple of notes from it. So, quoting from the piece:
A year after Meta began selling ads on Reels, the company is struggling to convince marketers that advertising on the TikTok rival can drive new business, ad executives say.
Marketers typically view Meta’s properties as venues to run ads designed to persuade people to do something, like buy a product or download an app, whereas quick video ads that run on Reels are better to promote a brand.
One executive at a major agency that spends hundreds of millions annually on Meta’s platforms said in an interview that his clients mostly don’t view Reels as a strong option for direct-response advertising, compared to placing ads on Instagram and Facebook’s feeds.
Roughly 45% of the firm’s clients currently advertise on Facebook Reels, which has stayed mostly flat since the beginning of the year, the executive said, indicating it is not seen as a major priority.
He said he was seeing more growth on Instagram Reels, where roughly 65% of the firm’s clients currently advertise, compared to roughly 55% at the beginning of the year.
The piece goes into a lot more depth, including how AI factors into it (spoiler alert: marketers think Meta is unnecessarily obsessed with AI) and the inside scoop on internal battles to find a vision for the product.
It’s a bit of a long-read, but well worth it. Again, You can find it at TheInformation.com — look for the piece called “Inside Meta’s Struggles to Turn Reels Into an Advertising Powerhouse”.
Facebook Comments Behaviour Changing
Meta today said it has changed the default comment settings on Facebook posts.
Normally, as you know, when you post to your personal profile, you can choose to make it public, or just your friends, or just a specific group of people, and so on. Normally, that defaults to “Public,” but now it will default to “Friends and Followers” only.
To be clear, this is for personal posts created on the site or app. This does not apply to brand pages or posting through an API.
The company says this is a temporary change brought on by the conflict in Israel and Gaza.
It’s not clear exactly which personal Facebook accounts will get this change, though Meta said it apply to “people in the region.” It wasn’t very clear on that, and we’ve asked for clarification, but I think they mean to say users in the Middle East.
They also didn’t say how long this change would last, other than to say it was temporary.
Facebook is also making it easier to bulk-delete comments and has “disabled the feature that normally displays the first one or two comments under posts in Feed.”
Meta Apologizes for Labelling Palestinians as “Terrorists”
Meta’s p.r. department was busy today, much of their day spent apologizing profusely for a deeply embarrassing translation on Instagram user bios.
Instagram had been translating bios that included the word “Palestinian” and an Arabic phrase that means “praise be to God” to say “Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”
People saw this mistranslation when tapping the “See translation” link that sometimes appears on the app.
Instagram says that bug has now been fixed.
@ytkingkhan Meta definitely needs to address this (though I couldnt find an official TikTok account for them) #palestine #arab #desi #muslim
@ytkingkhan Replying to @Khan Man Still wild this even happened #arab #desi #palestine #muslim
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See how brands like Unilever and Magic Spoon have been able to 5X revenue in 2 months and decrease ad costs using Stack Influence.
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