Struggling to keep up with the latest social media updates? Here’s a quick summary of the most important ones that were released last week (April 8), to ensure you’re staying ahead of the competition.
TikTok
TikTok had a few large updates, including Search Insights, which we’ve written a full guide on. In short, it’s a bit like Google’s Trends, or a keyword research tool for TikTok video titles.
It also released Brand Safety Controls, as well as a more streamlined process for managing your ads within TikTok Ads Manager.
TikTok is adding ‘Category Exclusion’ and ‘Vertical Sensitivity’ controls, which, like Meta’s ad manager, will allow you to exclude your ads from appearing in certain categories of ads, to help remove any association with any video that sits in those categories.
‘Category Exclusion‘ will allow you control if your ads appear next to:
- Gambling and Lotteries
- Violent Video Games
- Combat Sports
- Youth Content
TikTok said: “By controlling association with these categories of content, brands can maintain consistency in messaging. Take, for example, a major technology company promoting its gaming brand to adults. Likely, the company would feel comfortable having these ads appear adjacent to Violent Video Games content. On the other hand, when promoting their suite of productivity tools, they may want protection against this category”
‘Vertical Sensitivity‘ will enable advertisers to exclude their ads from appearing next to content that may not align with their brand.
The categories you can exclude are Beauty, Pet, Food, Fashion and Retail, Travel, Financial Services, Technology, Automotive, Gaming, Professional Services and Entertainment.
As TikTok explains: “A travel brand that generally prefers content about nature, may not want to appear close to content about volcanos or floods. Or a financial brand could avoid content depicting potentially novice financial advice or strategies from a beginner sharing their opinion.
Meta
Meta has launched ‘Info Hub‘, which helps developers stay within the rules when using its API to ensure any apps developed are compliant and safe.
It has also announced HD Photos, Shared Albums as well as larger photos of up to 100MB on Messenger. While this is not a complete game changer, for anyone running Messenger ads on Meta, you may find this beneficial.
Additionally, we received new data on how Instagram’s ad revenue, which, spoiler alert, is performing very well. In 2021 alone, IG earned more than $32 billion in revenue.
Snapchat
As a struggling ad platform, Snapchat has continually tried to enhance its offering this year, and last week it announced more partnerships with third party ad analytic tools.
From here, you can use the search function to find relevant search trends. It’s better to keep your searches shorter, and broader, instead of using long tail keyword phrases like questions, to get the best results.
LinkedIn has highlighted the benefits and potential of video ads for B2B brands.
While this information will not exactly be new for most advertisers, it serves as an important reminder to use a variety of ad types; especially video. You can see the full stats below.
