#SubjectToChange is your weekly roundup of all the social media news & updates you need to know from the past week. Get it straight in your inbox, here.
Opting-out is all the rage this month, with brands calling it quits Don Draper-style this holiday season (true fact: here’s the original campaign by American Tobacco Company). First REI dropped out of Black Friday, and now Nordstrom is putting the ho-ho-hold on holiday decorations until after Thanksgiving. Speaking of trends, if you opt-ed out of this year’s #WOMMAsummit, you can get our full presentation and case study with Tom’s of Maine, here.
Hitting your feeds this week: Snapchat’s pulling in 6bn views per day, Pinterest’s new visual search tool, and YouTube’s bet on virtual reality.
That Hotline BN
Snapchat is reporting 6 billion views per day, up 3X since May 2015. For context, Facebook is generating 8 billion video views daily – which includes desktop and mobile users.
Definition of ‘views’ aside, the increase indicates the number of changes made to the app (emphasis on live events, launch of Stories) have only expanded engagement among its core 13 – 34 year-old user base. It’s also playing well with publishers – 21% of BuzzFeed’s video traffic is referred from Snapchat. Investor Fidelity isn’t so sure, and dropped down the stake of its valuation 25%.
Pin-ception
Now you can discover pins in other pins, no text required. Pinterest launched its new visual search tool, which enables users to pinpoint and search for items in pinned images, and with that a potential new revenue stream in the form of promoted search Pins (and product placement possibilities abound). Ad spend is already up 8X since January.
How it works: Spot an item of interest in a Pinned photo, click the search icon in the upper right hand corner and highlight that item to discover more items like it, or filter the results to find an exact match.
Virtual Insanity
YouTube announced that users can now watch virtual reality videos via its Android app, with the help of the wallet-friendly Google Cardboard viewer.
In fact, you can now use Google Cardboard to watch all existing YouTube content, essentially giving users the ability to watch videos virtually anywhere, anytime, and a significant leap on Facebook and Samsung in the race make virtual reality mainstream.
Hey, What’s Up, Hello!
Facebook discovered that sending photos in Messenger was a thing, and so used its facial recognition tech (which powers the photo tag suggestions) to ID friends and the option to send the pic to them.
The ‘Book also introduced Music Stories, a new post format that allows users to listen and share track previews from Spotify or Apple Music.
