This Week in Digital Marketing - November 12, 2021

What do you need to know for marketing during the 2021 holiday season? We have some insight on that and more! ​

Pinterest Loses 10 Million More Active Users 
Pinterest reported a decline of 10 million monthly active users in Q3 this year, bringing the platform's monthly active users down to 444 million. And Q2 numbers were down by 24 million before that! 

So what's to blame for the slowdown? Quoting the company: We believe the deceleration in growth was primarily attributable to a continuation of the pandemic unwind. As lockdowns eased, people have embraced life outside their homes, a trend that caused a dramatic decline of our year-over-year growth rate of monthly active users in Q2 and Q3, as consumer preferences shifted away from our core at-home use cases.

It can be argued that Pinterest's business growth is less dependent on usage growth than other social networks. The platform has more opportunities to earn money from shopping in addition to advertising, since its focus is to encourage action with each Pin, rather than just to reach as many people as possible.

But while users were down, revenue was up. 

Quoting the company again: Revenue grew 43% year over year... We saw increased demand from large retail advertisers, as well as growth in our international business. Shopping engagement remains robust, with the number of Pinners engaging with shopping surfaces up more than 20% quarter over quarter and up 60% year over year.

Although this isn't to say that Pinterest should be completely excused for its more recent hiccups. In fact, lockdowns and other measures are driving usage higher, not lower, for the majority of social apps.

Where Is Gen Z Shopping This Holiday Season?
If your holiday campaigns are hoping to target Gen Zs, you should probably accelerate your social media work. 87% of that group say they will use social media for inspiration this season. This from a recent McKinsey survey — it also found that 58% of consumers overall say social media will directly affect their holiday shopping decisions. And 60% to 70% of respondents are shopping across channels for most holiday-related categories.

So — What platform should marketers use?

• Facebook was rated the most influential platform with 67% saying it will influence their behaviour the most.
  
• 57% answered YouTube.
  
• 52% said Instagram.
  
• Looking at Gen Z specifically: YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are their most likely sources of inspiration.
  

List of Googlebot IP Addresses Released
Knowing which bot is really Google and which is not can help you decide which rogue bots to block from your site. Google has published the full list of IP addresses it uses for crawling and accessing your website under the Googlebot user agents. Google said if you do not want to use reverse DNS types of methods for verifying Googlebot, you “can identify Googlebot by IP address by matching the crawler’s IP address to the list of Googlebot IP addresses.”

Meta Gets Creative
With the announcement of its new Creative App Platform for Facebook Stories, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, could score a few points for creativity. 

Quoting the company: We worked to understand how Sharing to Stories could further support the unique needs of our creative app partners. We found that app discovery is a key issue - in a competitive and rapidly expanding market, it is expensive and difficult for our partners to reach the people… In response, we’ve built the Creative App Platform - a new concept that allows people to discover creative apps directly in Facebook Stories...

What are they talking about here with apps? They don't mean mobile apps. They mean mini-apps — like Snapchat's implementation, which they literally call ‘Minis’, in which developers share micro-versions of their full apps within Snap. 

Facebook's variation is limited to Stories, and has attracted several developers for the first phase including VivaVideo and Vita, Camera360 and Sweet Selfie. Creative App Platform is still in beta, but it seems it is part of Meta's broader effort to regain young users.

Reels: It’s New if You Don’t Have TikTok
Speaking of Reels, Instagram is finally introducing new Voice Effects and Text-to-Speech features — bringing them up to parity with the TikTok version.

Text-to-Speech allows an auto-generated voice to read your text aloud… and the voice effect will make you sound like a chipmunk or robot, and so on. And honestly, it’s about time... that was one of the biggest gaps between the two. 

The holiday season is busy enough as it is. Let us take care of your marketing and streamline your processes for the holiday shopping season (and beyond!). Contact us for a consultation!