Channel Roundup : April 2014

Channel roundup – essential intelligence on the latest developments from the world’s leading digital networks and channels

Facebook ads get a makeover…
Facebook’s right rail ads, known for their lower click-through rates and a boxy, text-heavy format, are being updated in an attempt to make them a more lucrative option for marketers. The new ads will be slightly bigger than twice the size of the current ad space and sized in the same proportion as news feed ads, so that marketers can use the same images in both, an option which was previously unavailable to them. Global rollout of the new design should be complete by the end of the summer.

…And Twitter gets a new look, too
In the US, Twitter is rolling out a revamped image (which some users are saying looks very similar to Facebook) and introducing more videos and bigger photos into user feeds. Reports say that the service is also experimenting with simpler language, designed for novice users. ‘The redesign advances part of Twitter’s game plan to relate more widely beyond its 240 million monthly users to try to catch Facebook and its more than 1.2 billion base,’ writes Garett Sloane of Adweek.

YouTube top of the class for highest user engagement
According to a recent report by Shareaholic, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn have the highest levels of social engagement. YouTube is the top performer, with low bounce rates, high visit duration and pages per visit. Google+ and LinkedIn don’t get as many social referrals, but they have high engagement rates when users are on the sites. Facebook and Twitter have roughly comparable levels of engagement.

iOS 7 adoption reaches 87%
Apple has released new figures for iOS version adoption, with iOS 7 accounting for 87% of all iOS devices and iOS 6 making up just up 11% (2% of devices are running pre-iOS 6 versions). It’s interesting to compare this almost wholesale adoption of the latest versions to Android’s statistics, which show an overwhelming number of device owners who are still on a version of Jelly Bean (34.4%) and a large chunk on Gingerbread (17.8%) and Ice Cream Sandwich (14.3%), with only around 5.3% on the latest version (KitKat 4.4 or higher).