The 4% | Edition 009

What a weird month in social media advertising.

It's hard to not consider the impact that Musk buying Twitter will have on the entire digital eco-system; how does it increase regulation? change user behaviour and expectations of responses from the platforms? what happens when ad revenue isn't the primary reason?

Appears the news is already causing random behaviour, with TikTok and Snapchat confirming they are in fact not social media platforms.

While Snap is doing their best to prove their claim as a Camera company; TikTok's claim is viable based on the Q1 Earnings call presentation focusses from Meta & Google.

TikTok First & Third Party updates

Well this is going to be fun job for attribution over the coming months as TikTok Ad Spend increases, claiming a larger share of conversion data, this could begin putting a lot of pressure on Facebook ad spend investment that continues to struggle in a post-iOS world.

TikTok Adds Third-Party Cookies To Its Pixel – And Tries To Eat Facebook’s Lunch | AdExchanger

TikTok has become accustomed to Facebook and Instagram stealing its cool new features and video formats. So, it’s a refreshing change to see TikTok pilfer one of Meta’s innovations. Starting Thursday, TikTok launched the ability to add first-party cookies to its site conversion pixel, which allow ad…

AdExchangerJames Hercher

It's not all over...

Facebook, sorry Meta claimed some user growth in Q1. Difficult to believe any user numbers though. And it does appear majority of these is coming from developing markets

More interesting in the update was the Video numbers at 50% and growth of Reels to be at 20% of time. This in itself is showing the massive change that TikTok is bringing to the way users want to use social media platforms.

Meta says Reels now makes up over 20% of the time users spend on Instagram – TechCrunch

Meta announced during its Q1 2022 earnings call that Reels, its short-form video feature and TikTok rival, now makes up more than 20% of the time that people spend on Instagram. The company also noted that video, overall, makes up 50% of the time that users spend on Facebook. Although Meta didn&#82…

TechCrunchAisha Malik

Does YouTube have a bigger problem?

While the majority focus when discussing TikTok's growth is the decline of Instagram, from TikTok's own assessment they view themselves closer to a video platform (ala YouTube)

“The audiences that love and build and create and connect with TikTok, they say they check Facebook, and they check Instagram and they check Twitter and they check Snap and they check things. But they don’t check TikTok. They tell us they watch TikTok.”

Taken from the Fast Company link in the intro, they also explain some other key stats:

• Average view time of 11 minutes
• Majority of users (70%) do not post videos (very similar to YouTube)
• Only 15% use it to communicate peer-to-peer

YouTube Shorts Growth (and here comes the ads)

Which brings us to Google's announcements on YouTube Shorts growing with 30 Billion daily views claimed on the platform.

Their earnings call also claimed the launch of beta testing ads in this format too.

The rest of this year is going to be fascinating for the movement of social ad budgets.