One of the most popular and downloaded video app TikTok is now planning to boost its ad revenues. Until now the video app had focused on getting users rather than focusing on ad monetization plans. Now TikTok is planning to monetize its app in Indonesia. TikTok’s head of public policy, Donny Eryastha, stated that they are planning to monetize the platform advertising and native apps. The video app company previously stated that they were working on a native audience network so that brands and users could reach their unique audience more easily. TikTok allows users to shoot and upload 15 to 60-second videos. Even though TikTok’s main demographic consists of 15 to 34 years, the app also wants to attract a greater number of Baby Boomers. According to the company, Indonesian users spend an average of 29 minutes per day to watch TikTok videos. This includes food, travel, and comedy content. A recent report from TikTok said that more than $9 million is spent in in-app purchases and the app has passed over one billion downloads.

WhatsApp has always been a favorite among people for daily chats and communications. Even though the number of messaging app users worldwide is set to grow 12.1% to 2.52 billion people, but growth is slowing in 2020 to 7.3%. The popular free messaging app WhatsApp retains its largest number of users in India where it has 340 million users. With 99 million Brazil follows in second place and the US with 68.1 million in third. Over 90% of smartphone users in Brazil, Argentina and India are using WhatsApp in 2019. India a country that has always been open-minded to new and rising technology is now a testing ground for new WhatsApp capabilities, including a payment process. The wide user base is due to many reasons, partly feature phones like JioPhones. While users in the US also use Facebook Messenger and iMessage it's no surprise they are in the 3rd position. Facebook Messenger users are also expected to increase in the country to 117.6 million.

While most know Instagram as the “social media ”’ for image and video sharing, Instagram is also an incredible social media marketing tool. It is an effective platform to sell your services and products to your targeted audience. A recent survey by VidMob found that around 60% of users have followed a new brand on Instagram after they saw an ad across its feed. 1,000 Instagram users were surveyed on their shopping preferences across the platform. This means that a third of users have purchased from seeing an ad. Even though rate of millennials using instagram is higher compared to Gen Z , it was found that Gen Z was the generation with the highest tendency to buy through an ad, at the same time women between 35 to 45 had the lowest tendency to do so. These results show that Instagram is rather performing well as a platform for product discovery and marketing. While a four out of 10 people search a product after spotting it on Instagram, 60% search them on other apps. More women (81%) had shopped on Instagram from an unknown brand. Even though Instagram is a popular social media platform, it’s also a good place for product discovery considering their rapid growth over the last few years.

Multinational tech giant Samsung recently launched its redesigned Galaxy Fold smartphone. But the main questions were raised over the kind of apps that would be usable on the completely foldable phone. Even though Samsung faced criticism when it first launched the phone in April 2019, the redesigned version of the Fold is pretty cool, with its 7.3-inch display. The relaunch also allowed developers to redesign the user interface and provide support for apps. Now, Samsung revealed that hundreds of apps have been redesigned for the Fold, including major apps like Amazon Prime Video, Facebook, iHeartMedia, Microsoft, Spotify, and Twitter. Samsung claimed that it worked with major partners to design and deliver a brand-new mobile experience and foster an ecosystem that gives users access to the best applications and services. Samsung also changed Android 10 for better resizable activity, multi-resume functionality and support for multi-display switching.
Samsung team and the Android developer community worked together to ensure the users of the Galaxy Fold have the best experiences with their favorite apps and services

We are living in a digital age where we are constantly checking up on the number of likes and comments under our social media posts. But this causes unwanted peer pressure and competitiveness among today’s generation. Facebook has decided to test hiding Like counts across the News Feed to discourage competitiveness among users. According to Facebook, this action would be used to stop users from destructively comparing themselves and misusing their posts to attract Likes and negative publicity. This also leads to users deleting posts if they don’t get enough attraction. Instagram has also been testing the same method across seven countries already. Since everything seems fine on Instagram, Facebook might also go ahead with the plan. While engagement across Facebook is declining, removing Like counts could be easing some of the pressure for users allowing them to share daily again.

A recent survey showed that 80% of consumers would abandon brand website over extreme content. This survey of over 1,000 respondents by the Trustworthy Accountability Group(TAG) and Brand Safety Institute(BSI), Eighty percent of consumers said they would leave shopping websites or brands if they advertised near extreme content. This includes ad-related piracy and malware as well as inappropriate adverts.Even though reputational harm can be difficult to measure, consumers said that they would leave brand sites if they fail to take the necessary steps to avoid and control showcasing of hate speech, malware, and piracy. Seventy-three percent of consumers believe that advertisers should not run ads near hate speech, pornographic content (73%), violent content (70%) or drug-related content (69%). Over half of respondents would also prefer advertisers to omit ads from running on stolen or pirated movies (53%) or hacked websites (73%).

The popular social networking website Facebook recently announced plans to make changes to its mobile News Feed ad format.The company said it would “match the look and feel of the new Facebook design introduced earlier this year.”This also means that mobile News Feed ads will include fewer text, limited to just fewer lines. Now only 3 lines of primary text will show on Facebook mobile News Feed, after which people will be prompted to click to view additional text. Maximum media height for photos and videos will reduce to 4:5 on mobile News Feed. The tallest supported aspect ratio for images without links and for videos is now vertical (4:5). Media taller than 4:5 will be masked on Facebook mobile News Feed.
Before it was 2:3 aspect ratio with 7 lines of primary text. This shows the company’s attempt to make the feed format simpler. It hopes that this should improve ad effectiveness and make it easier to reuse assets across the Facebook News Feed and Instagram feed. Earlier this year the company also made design changes to its Ads Manager. Although 80% of social marketers are utilising Facebook for their campaigns, average social media time on Facebook declined in 2018.

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The millennial app Snapchat seems to be always one step ahead of its competitors. Instead of the ‘shop’ button, Snapchat is launching shopping destinations in its app. While some of the publishers and influencers have already featured like swipe-up to promote their brands, this new feature will allow selected accounts to have their own shop inside Snapchat. Users can access this by going to a particular account, but this feature is only available to the US users at the moment. Only 6 official accounts have shops currently, while Snap is planning to release more shops in the coming weeks.
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For all those ad buyers who are planning to shift from platforms like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn will soon offer features in advertising marketing. LinkedIn will provide options such as lookalike audience, target marketing which would help advertisers target their potential customers. While digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter give more reach and awareness, LinkedIn will be sure to give qualified leads. Read more
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The team of the viral trivia app HQ Trivia is now expanding its horizons and is teaming up with Google assistant to launch the voice first trivia called HQ University. Instead of getting cash this app is intended to help people at playing HQ Trivia. HQ University is part of the Google-HQ sponsorship deal that began last year. With an Apple TV app already in the market, HQ is widening their product portfolio with spinoff games such as HQ Sports and HQ Words.

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One of the highly popular social media platforms Pinterest just updated their catalog and shopping ads. Known for its wide range of image collections and inspirational ideas, these updates of Pinterest will help brands to connect with their audiences. Pinterest already had the shopping ads which made it easier to connect products to Pins. The new updates includes “Shop a brand” feature which helps users to explore the brands further. Users can also look for products that matches their Pins in “more ideas” section. The new updations also help in moving from check out to inspirational easily.
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The social media giant is planning something new and exciting and has officially started the experiments. Twitter started testing on a new app with a selected group of people so that only the company could test out the features in their own platform. Known as ‘Dubbed Twttr’, this experimental app focuses on improving the usage and the platform for their audience. The Twitter support team are giving their dedicated users chance to share their opinion about the new features Twitter need to make in order to improve their platform.
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