Where digital meets travel + lifestyle … A collection of can’t-miss news from this week. Sign up to get the TURNER Weekly Download in your inbox every Friday.
Facebook recently announced it had reached 1.79 billion monthly active users – but that’s not the big news. The social media platform also revealed that 1 billion of those users are “mobile only” users. Accordingly, the majority of Facebook’s ad revenue now comes from mobile ads as well. It’s all part of a mobile-first strategy that has paid off in a big way for Facebook, bringing in a huge number of new users and in the process making a lot of money.
Did you know 84 percent of smartphone users in the US browse, research or compare products via a web browser or mobile app? Instagram took note of this factoid and ran with it, in the process changing the online shopping game. Starting next week, the photo-sharing platform will be testing out a way for users to tap to view an item’s price and a link to where they can buy the product featured. Kate Spade, JackThreads and Warby Parker are among the first US-based brands to be using this new feature.
Twitter is now offering brands their very own customer service chatbots which will respond to any direct message that the brand receives. Although automated messaging isn’t totally new for this platform, Twitter is really focusing on having all brands use this feature. While Twitter has served as a customer-service tool for businesses since long before the platform started offering ads, the company hasn’t added any features focused specifically on customer service. Until now, that is. Let us know how you feel about Twitter bots @turnerpr – we swear we’re real!
Google’s not the only game in town. Expedia is ready to slip away from the tech giant and work at building a bigger presence on Facebook and other social platforms. Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi plans to increase spend and efforts on Facebook to “Google-like levels.” The brand’s marketing spend has jumped from 27.7 percent to $1.2 billion in the third quarter, a great deal of which goes into Google advertising. But Expedia’s ready to diversify its marketing and advertising spend. And they’re not the only ones ready to rock on Facebook – Priceline is too!