Hello and welcome to July!!
It’s been a week already, but the mainstream media still hasn’t let up its focus on the impending Brexit. Don’t they realise that Facebook has a new Creative Hub, YouTube has announced live streaming on mobile, Tumblr has joined the world live video, and we can now all upload longer videos to Twitter?
Sheesh – some journalists just don’t care about the important stuff, so it’s a good job that we do.
Here are the stories in detail.
Facebook Creative Hub
Advertisers on Instagram and Facebook can now make use of the brand new Facebook Creative Hub – a platform that’s been designed to help ad agencies and their clients perfect their campaigns.
It’s a pretty cool concept. Basically, it’s a hub solely for advertisers that can be used to create mock-ups of adverts. They can be tested on the platform – including viewing how the ads look on mobile using the Creative Hub app – and feedback from fellow advertising creatives can be left by anyone.
Essentially, the platform will come as a blessing to many creators, for it will mean that less time among teams will be needed to be wasted sending emails, texts, and collaborating on platforms like Slack. Indeed, an article in AdWeek by Christopher Heine is even tellingly titled – ‘With Creative Hub, Who Needs Slack?’. Hmm – perhaps Slack might need to start worrying.
At present, if you want to check it out, then you have to join the waiting list, but AdWeek has reported that Facebook hopes to fully launch the platform “by the end of the year, if not before” and “would eventually like to allow a brand’s media agency and creative shop to communicate on the platform.”
That’s the future culture of Facebook and Instagram advertising right there.
Live Video Now Available On Tumblr
If we needed any more convincing about the importance of live video streaming, then we’ve got it. Mini-blogging-come-social-network platform Tumblr has recently enabled the posting of live videos into users’ dashboards.
Here are the details from the Tumblr Staff feed:
You can post live videos:
· through YouNow (iOS, Android), Kanvas (iOS, Android), Upclose(iOS, Android) and YouTube (Android-ready right now, iOS-ready in a few days). How? Here’s how.
· They can be re-blogged like any other post. Which is wild.
· They stick around after you shoot them, and can thus be enjoyed in the future as well as the present.
· We’ll notify you when anyone you follow goes live. And we’ll pin their video to the top of your dashboard. Wouldn’t want you to miss anything, after all.
It’s a move that comes at a telling time for the company. When Yahoo acquired Tumblr (part of a larger effort to reinvent the Yahoo brand), the social network failed to hit the $100 million sales goal, according to a recent article in Mashable (which also goes into detail about further problems Tumblr has faced since the Yahoo acquisition).
Will this move into live video give Tumblr a boost in popularity and enable it to generate greater ad revenue? Well, the platform would of course have been foolish not to include live video at some point, since that is evidently en vogue on social at the moment. However, this does of course mean that the platform is simply playing catch-up, rather than offering anything unique. We’ll have to see what happens (and we will probably be able to watch it live when it does).
YouTube Live Streaming On Mobile
YouTube has launched a new capability to a select group of users at VidCon – live streaming on mobile. The update to the YouTube mobile app will be rolled out “more widely soon”, we are told, as YouTube intends to bring the power of live video to content creators everywhere.
“YouTube mobile live streaming will be baked right into the core YouTube mobile app. You won’t need to open anything else, just hit the big red capture button right there in the corner, take or select a photo to use as a thumbnail, and you can broadcast live to your fans and chat in near real time,” the YouTube official blog explains.
“Because it’s built right into the YouTube app, mobile live streaming will have all the features your regular videos have — you’ll be able to search for them, find them through recommendations and playlists and protect them from unauthorized uses. And since it uses YouTube’s peerless infrastructure, it’ll be faster and more reliable than anything else out there.”
It’s about time, to be fair. YouTube, of course, has enabled live streaming since 2011 – but it’s failure to bring it to mobile has allowed the likes of Periscope to sneak into the market gap it left. But, it’s here now, and with more than a billion users, YouTube is of course in a great position for marketers who perhaps haven’t experimented with live streaming yet – starting out on Periscope means almost inevitably building an audience from scratch, but you can pretty much guarantee that your fans will already be on YouTube.
Extended Videos On Twitter (and Vine)
It used to be 30 seconds, but go on – take a guess at how long a video tweet can last now…..
Bingo! 140 seconds. “(Select publishers will continue to be able to post videos up to 10 minutes long through our professional publisher tools.)”
The Twitter blog also stated that, “Soon, you may also begin to see longer videos on Vine. Starting with a small group, creators will be able to add a video (up to 140 seconds) to their Vine, turning the six second Vine into a trailer for a bigger story.”
As the wilier among you will be able to tell from the news today, social media is all about video at the moment, and so the message couldn’t be clearer for marketers – whether you’re a Facebook hound, a YouTube nut, A Tumblr dedicate, or a Twitter geek, YOU NEED TO BE MAKING VIDEO.
That’s what social media users want to see these days, and that’s what the various platforms are increasingly enabling and encouraging. And so, as marketers, it’s our job to give our followers what they want in the format that they want it.
That’s it for this week! See you next time.
The post Videos, Videos, Videos! Your Digital Marketing Weekly Roundup appeared first on MySocialAgency.