Social media 2018 put the spotlight on data, video, Stories

After sus­pend­ing Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca from its plat­form in March, Facebook’s data man­age­ment issues remained the lead social media news sto­ry through­out 2018. The company’s con­stant stream of user pri­va­cy chal­lenges left lit­tle space for oth­er social plat­forms to make waves — but, some still man­aged. Twit­ter put its focus on elec­tion integri­ty and per­formed a mas­sive purge of bad user accounts. While Face­book and Twit­ter focused on clean­ing up time­lines, Snapchat, Pin­ter­est and LinkedIn con­tin­ued to build out their ad offerings.

Near­ly all plat­forms released new polit­i­cal adver­tis­ing poli­cies, and you couldn’t open an app with­out bump­ing into a Sto­ry. (In fact, now that Snapchat’s orig­i­nal con­cept has made its way to Insta­gram, Face­book and YouTube, the real ques­tion is why doesn’t Pin­ter­est have them?) In its spare time, Face­book did its best to recruit more video cre­ators, YouTube gave its cre­ator base more mon­e­ti­za­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties, and Insta­gram launched a video plat­form. Not to be left out of the mix, Red­dit wrapped up its first major redesign in over a decade.

User data handling backlash

This year was not the first year Face­book has been scru­ti­nized for its mis­han­dling of user data, but it was the first time the com­pa­ny was forced to take seri­ous action against the com­pa­nies that had been giv­en entry into its sys­tems. With the March 18 announce­ment that Face­book had sus­pend­ed Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, the com­pa­ny set in motion what would become a year-long cam­paign to prove it was seri­ous about data secu­ri­ty and user safety.

Face­book has tak­en the brunt of hits this year for fail­ing to safe­guard its users, but Twit­ter had work to do as well. Twit­ter CEO Jack Dorsey took part in a 45-minute livestream in March, answer­ing ques­tions about the spread of mis­in­for­ma­tion and abuse on the plat­form. At the time, the CEO said Twitter’s pri­ma­ry focus was deter­min­ing how it could mea­sure the health of the plat­form in a way that was pub­lic and account­able. Four months lat­er, the com­pa­ny was still focused on plat­form health — putting oth­er work ini­tia­tives on hold to con­cen­trate on elec­tion integri­ty efforts. Google, whose data col­lec­tion net cov­ers near­ly every cor­ner of the inter­net, went large­ly unscathed.

Face­book sus­pend­ed apps, lim­it­ing API access to user infor­ma­tion and remov­ing third-par­ty data bro­kers, Twit­ter purged thou­sands of accounts, changed the way con­ver­sa­tions hap­pen on the plat­form and, in an attempt to curb spam, made it more dif­fi­cult for brands to Tweet iden­ti­cal con­tent simul­ta­ne­ous across mul­ti­ple accounts. Twit­ter also restrict­ed access to its API.

Mar­keters were forced to con­sid­er pri­va­cy issues with the launch of the EU’s GDPR in May.

Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn steadily built out ad features

Snapchat, Pin­ter­est and LinkedIn focused on build­ing out their ad busi­ness in 2018. Snapchat’s user num­bers dropped, but its adver­tis­ing rev­enue grew this year. The com­pa­ny start­ed the year by open­ing its ad API to all adver­tis­ers. By Q3, Snapchat achieved record rev­enue growth after mul­ti­ple new ad prod­uct launch­es, includ­ing an ad mar­ket­place for Dis­cov­er part­ners, e‑commerce ad options, Com­mer­cials and AR Lens­es in Ads Man­ag­er, Spon­sored Snap­pables and loca­tion-based ad tar­get­ing tools.

This year, Pin­ter­est hired its first ever CMO. Giv­ing the mar­ket­ing team a C‑suite lead rein­forced the company’s com­mit­ment to expand­ing its ad busi­ness. In 2018, Pin­ter­est launched a num­ber of new ad offer­ings — from Pro­mot­ed carousel ads and an updat­ed ads man­ag­er to wide for­mat video ads and new Pin­ter­est Mar­ket­ing Part­ner cat­e­gories. It also grew its audi­ence to 250 mil­lion active month­ly users.

LinkedIn total­ly revamped its Cam­paign Man­ag­er, rebuild­ing it to bet­ter serve adver­tis­ers man­ag­ing high-vol­ume accounts. The social network’s ad man­age­ment tool was rebuilt to be objec­tive-based, with new per­son­al­iza­tion options, one-click cam­paign break­downs for report­ing and new search capa­bil­i­ties for adver­tis­ers. LinkedIn also added Dynam­ic Ads to its Cam­paign Man­ag­er ad offerings.

Stories, Stories and more Stories

In June, Insta­gram report­ed 400 mil­lion peo­ple were using Sto­ries on its plat­form dai­ly, more than dou­ble Snapchat’s total user base — the com­pa­ny that first orig­i­nat­ed the Sto­ry con­cept. Face­book, which launched Sto­ries on its plat­form in 2017, saw an uptick in usage as well. In May, Face­book began test­ing ads in Sto­ries and made the ad prod­uct avail­able to all adver­tis­ers in Sep­tem­ber. YouTube launched its own ver­sion of Sto­ries in Novem­ber, giv­ing the fea­ture to chan­nels with 10,000 or more subscribers.

Facebook’s plans to challenge YouTube

As part of its efforts to build big­ger audi­ences on its Watch, Face­book gave cre­ators mon­e­ti­za­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties and an expand­ed set of video tools.

In June, the com­pa­ny launched IGTV — both with­in Insta­gram and as a stand­alone app — giv­ing users the abil­i­ty to upload up 60-minute long videos. Adop­tion of the plat­form has been slow­ly, and there are still no ad offer­ings. In fact, the biggest news to come out of Insta­gram this year may be the company’s CEO Kevin Sys­trom and CTO Mike Krieger announce­ment they were leav­ing the com­pa­ny in September.

For its part, YouTube rolled out a “Go Live” fea­ture for cre­ators to stream live from their desk­tops. It also dropped the num­ber of sub­scribers a chan­nel must have to be part of its Chan­nel Mem­ber­ship pro­gram — a rev­enue dri­ver for many cre­ators — from 100,000 to 50,000. In June, YouTube said cre­ators earn­ing five-fig­ures on the plat­form was up 35 per­cent, and six-fig­ure earn­ers were up 40 percent.

Political ad policies get a rewrite

After Face­book, Twit­ter and Google con­firmed Russ­ian inter­fer­ence on their plat­forms dur­ing the 2016 U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cycle in the form of mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns dis­trib­uted as ads, a major­i­ty of social and search net­works made sweep­ing changes to their polit­i­cal ad poli­cies. Months out from the 2018 midterm elec­tions, Face­book insti­tut­ed new rules enforc­ing all polit­i­cal adver­tis­ers be ver­i­fied on the plat­form and Twit­ter added labels to polit­i­cal can­di­date accounts to eas­i­ly iden­ti­fy any­one run­ning for office.

Both Face­book and Twit­ter launched ad archives for more trans­paren­cy around adver­tis­ing on the plat­forms. Facebook’s archive was focused on polit­i­cal ads, while Twitter’s archive logs all ads that ran on the plat­form dur­ing the past sev­en days.

Google rolled out new ID require­ments for polit­i­cal adver­tis­ers in the U.S., requir­ing polit­i­cal adver­tis­ers to pro­vide a gov­ern­ment-issued ID before they could pur­chase ads across all Google plat­forms. Google also required all polit­i­cal ads across its plat­forms clear­ly dis­close who bought the ad.

LinkedIn removed itself from polit­i­cal adver­tis­ing con­tro­ver­sies alto­geth­er by pro­hibit­ing polit­i­cal ads in June.

Reddit got a redesign

For the first time since its launch in 2005, Red­dit rolled out a major over­haul to its web­site. The net­work redesigned its plat­form from the ground up, aim­ing to get away from what its CEO called a “dystopi­an Craiglist” inter­face. Reddit’s VP of brand part­ner­ships told Mar­ket­ing Land the web­site was see­ing three to sev­en times bet­ter user engage­ment rates since the redesign, increas­es that trans­lat­ed to more ad engage­ment as well.

Adver­tis­ers are still slow to open their adver­tis­ing bud­gets to Red­dit, but that could change as more brands real­ize the traf­fic Red­dit is attract­ing. Cur­rent­ly, Red­dit is ranked as the fifth most traf­ficked web­site in the U.S. by Alexa, with the aver­age dai­ly time spent on the site at 11:36 — longer than the top four web­sites it fol­lows by as much as four-minutes.

Advertisers kept spending on social media platforms

2018 was a year of many tran­si­tions and much upheaval, and no where was this bet­ter reflect­ed than on our social plat­forms. We’ve seen tech giants once held up as busi­ness heroes forced to face hard ques­tions about how social net­works are influ­enc­ing and shap­ing our culture.

The scan­dals have not led adver­tis­ers to shy away from the plat­forms, and with few excep­tions, they don’t expect that to change in the year ahead — unless there is a user engage­ment exo­dus or tar­get­ing options become crit­i­cal­ly limited.

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