This week was big for extending your capabilities on established networks: Twitter launched native video ads and opened polls to everyone (meaning it's that much easier to get the pulse on your consumers), Facebook opened GIFs to brand pages, and Giphy—with perfect timing—launched a do-it-yourself GIF creator.
Skim to keep competitors guessing!
Everything Twitter announced at its #Twitterflight developers conference
—Twitter Polls, which is rolling out across mobile and desktops and will be available to everyone!
—Native video ads, which means you can create videos that pop without disrupting the timeline or driving people off of it. Check out the example below.
—Audience Insights, which provides demographic breakdowns and key interests of your audiences.
—Unity support and a better tweet composer for native apps, which your dev team can read more about here.
Returning CEO Jack Dorsey also made a big promise to the developer community: to fulfill Twitter's mission as a tool for freedom of expression, everywhere in the world. And if anyone ever wants to help improve Twitter, they can tweet ideas using the hashtag #HelloWorld.
It's a good time to ramp up any Twitter activity you have planned, and not just to test what's listed above. Kinetic Social recently took a gander at Twitter's figures this quarter and observed that video costs are decreasing as its offering matures, putting it more in the neighborhood of Facebook costs: Cost per views average $0.10, with some as low as $0.05. Cost per engagement has also fallen 50%, to $0.23 cents per ad click versus $0.45 cents a year ago.
Our native video solution empowers any developer to monetize with native video ads just like those on Twitter https://t.co/ywy3aqYyM4
— Twitter Flight (@Flight) October 21, 2015
1. It's also easier to embed real-time Twitter content onto a site
Events folks will love this news: Twitter's new Collections API makes it simpler to add curated Twitter content to your website or app, using tools like TweetDeck or Curator. This page explains how to get the widget onto your platform; after that, picking and choosing great tweets from your live event is as simple as dragging them into the right Collections column (in the case of TweetDeck). Spredfast, DataMinr, ScribbleLive, Wayin, and Flowics are also supported.
2. Facebook Brand Pages can share GIFs now, too
When Facebook rolled out support for GIFs in May, Brand Pages were notably left out of the fun. That's changed this week—but note that in order for a GIF to work, you can't upload it natively; you can only share a link to a GIF from another site (Giphy, for example). But let's not split hairs. Let the GIF awesomeness begin!
We believe you, Marty. ??Happy #BackToTheFuture day!
Posted by The Next Web on Wednesday, October 21, 2015
3. Just in time, Giphy launches a do-it-yourself GIF creator
If you're a trailblazer, and we know you are, there's no reason to settle for the used-up GIFs of others. We give you Giphy's GIF Maker, which lets you create a GIF out of a video posted online, or a video you've uploaded yourself. Super-simple. And once it's finished, you can share your completed GIF anywhere you like.
4. Speaking of GIFs, Instagram's launched Boomerang
It's a GIF-maker in spirit: the spankin' new app lets you record one second of video, which will play, rewind, and play again in an endless loop. We can tell you're excited by this, so let's roll to video:
