The Big Story
Elon Musk: SpaceX, Tesla and Now Twitter?
Elon Musk recently announced his $43 billion offer to buy out Twitter in hopes to release its potential to be “the platform for free speech around the globe.” Musk shapes this as less of a move for his own financial benefit, but as a fight for free speech stating that “creating a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely supportive to the future of civilization.”
Like many other social platforms, Twitter has struggled in recent years to figure out exactly how to regulate content and mitigate the amount of harmful content throughout its site. With Musk’s potential takeover and promises of a free speech platform, both users and advertisers worry that Twitter will turn into a harmful and toxic community. Advertisers fear that this shift could place their ads next to controversial posts. Most notably, advertisers also fear Musk’s idea of turning Twitter into an ad- free platform as Twitter is highly reliant on advertising, which made up 90% of their 2021 revenue.
Social Updates
Twitter Pilots 3 New Ad Formats
Twitter has recently released the test of three new ad formats, Interactive Text Ads, Product Explorer Ads and Collection Ads. All of these new ad formats equip advertisers with a new set of innovative tools to better reach and engage with their consumers. With Interactive ads, advertisers can highlight up to three words in the ad copy that will direct consumers to different landing pages. Product Explorer ads give consumers a 3D experience with this ad by allowing them to swipe and rotate products to view them from different angles. Lastly, Collection Ads combine a set of imagery options to drive users to different site pages. These ads display a primary hero image, like a standard static image ad, joined with a collection of up to five thumbnail visuals below that consumers can scroll through and click to different sites to learn more information or shop.
TikTok to Surpass Twitter and Snapchat Combined in Ad Revenue
According to research from Insider Intelligence, TikTok is expected to triple its ad revenue to more than $11 billion in 2022. More than half of this revenue is expected to come from the United States alone. TikTok’s 2022 ad revenue could surpass the combined revenue of social rivals Twitter and Snapchat, which are expected to generate $5.58 billion and $4.86 billion, respectively. As the platform continues to grow, so do the advertising opportunities.
Digital Updates
Google to Shift to Responsive Ads Indefinitely
On June 30th, Google will be moving away from their traditional Expanded Text Ads, which allows advertisers to write specific headlines and descriptions for their Google ads. Advertisers currently using Expanded Text Ads can continue to run them, however they will not be able to edit or create new versions after June. Instead, Google is shifting to the use of Responsive Search Ads, which allow advertisers to input a selection of headlines and descriptions to then let Google decide which ads to show based on performance. With this change, advertisers should start spending a bit more time brainstorming effective headlines and descriptions that are cohesive for Google to automatically combine.
Google’s everchanging algorithm is one SEO experts everywhere should be aware of. Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM) has been in place since last year, which was designed to better provide answers to complex queries by assessing information across multi-language text, images, video and audio. For SEO professionals and content creators, this means that there is a need to deliver high quality content that answers subsequential questions along a customer’s journey, while also incorporating appropriate multimedia formats to appease this new algorithm and strengthen your overall organic positioning.
