The Top 5 Paid Social Updates From January 2019

1. LinkedIn Introduces Interest Targeting

“Interest targeting lets you reach members with relevant ads that match their professional interests — based on the content they share and engage with on LinkedIn.”

This is a huge update for the LinkedIn platform, which has typically been a little slower in adopting new targeting tactics with their ad platform. LinkedIn says that there will initially be around 200 professional interest categories with more to come in the future. With 260 million monthly active users, LinkedIn is becoming more enticing as the months go by and per Digiday research, media buyers are planning on spending 42% more in 2019 vs. 2018 on LinkedIn.

2. Facebook Rolls out WhatsApp Ads

“As an advertiser on Facebook, you can add a call-to-action button to your ad that will open in WhatsApp. Audiences can engage with you on WhatsApp after clicking your ad.”

While this may not be available for everyone, we have been seeing it roll out across a number of accounts, so you should see it soon. With over 1.5 billion users and 60 billion messages sent per day, you can surmise why we are excited about this update. This rollout will allow for advertisers to add another placement to their social strategies and promote to.

3. Pinterest Gives More Campaign & Ad Group Duplication Features

“You can now copy campaigns and ad groups into new campaigns with a different objective. Previously, you could only duplicate campaigns if you wanted to use the same objective again.”

While this isn’t a huge update for the Pinterest ad platform, it takes away unneeded steps when creating new ad sets or campaigns. An example of how we use this is when there is strong performance coming from certain audiences or Pins: we duplicate the ad group associated with the audience and then test vs. a new goal (traffic, installs, etc.).

4/5. Pinterest Rolls out Timesavers in the Ad Building Process

Pinterest has introduced a number of updates to save time in their platform, including:

• Pre-populated details that automatically generate ad names, start dates, recommended bids, etc. that can all be changed if you don’t like the suggestions.
• Campaign and ad group search. Gone are the days of scrolling to finding what you are looking for; now, you can simply use their search feature and find everything faster.
• Updated bulk editor page to make it easier to use, including customizing views to see only what you want, saved templates, and an easy way to get your interests formatted correctly.