Tech: Facebook photo albums go multimedia (FB)

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Facebook's photo albums have been revamped with new features, TechCrunch reports, including the ability to add videos, text posts, and check-ins to albums; exhibit "featured" albums on your profile; easily add friends as contributors to albums; and follow friends' albums to be notified when they're updated.

These features are now available in Facebook’s Android app and will roll out to iOS soon.

The substantial update to Facebook photo albums serves several strategic objectives:

• Stimulate usage with Facebook albums. Original sharing has dropped on Facebook in recent years, and engagement also seems to have declined. Users generated 29% fewer posts in 2016 than 2015, according to a study by Mavrck. Facebook will hope to invigorate photo uploads on its platform by plugging photo albums with new features. Making albums compatible with videos and text posts opens up new opportunities around storytelling that could benefit brands, public figures, and publishers.
• Ward off competition, like Google Photos. The new Facebook features are also likely a response to the recently refreshed Google Photos app, which now has 500 million users worldwide. Google Photos is now infused several social features that take aim at Facebook, like Suggested Sharing to send photos to friends and family, Shared libraries to automatically share either full or parts of albums with others, and the app also integrated with the Google Lens visual AI software, to give more context to photos.
• Keep pace with Snapchat feature updates. In late May, Snapchat unveiled Custom Stories, letting groups of people contribute to a single story, much like Facebook’s new enhancement to make photo albums on its platform more collaborative. Once more, augmenting the social aspects of Facebook photo albums could increase usage with the features, as well as engagement. Friends are now able to add and view photos within a single album, rather than have to venture through multiple people’s profiles.

This update may also yield benefits relating to Facebook’s original video efforts. The company’s original video rollout is delayed, supposedly because it hasn’t figured out the user experience, and how to house this content, on its platform. One of the photo album updates here could serve up a solution — the feature for following friends’ albums, to be notified when they’re updated, would also work perfectly for keeping track of video programming, to know new a new episode in a show is uploaded.

Mobile-app makers and content creators are vying for consumer attention in a crowded and noisy market.

Even if an app can stand out enough to prompt a consumer to download it from among a list of millions, it then faces the challenge of enticing him or her to use it enough times to recuperate development, maintenance, and marketing costs. To make matters worse, those marketing costs have hit record-high levels over the past year as discoverability has become more challenging.

And while consumers are spending more time in apps, most of that time is spent in a few favorites. Consumers spend almost three-quarters of their total smartphone app time in just their three favorite apps, according to comScore.

But it's not all doom and gloom: There are numerous tools at a publisher's disposal to engage and re-engage consumers, and there are new products and solutions coming to market that can help alleviate some of the issues around this app engagement crisis.

Jessica Smith, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on app engagement that explores the current state of the app market, the issues around engaging consumers, and the tools at a publisher's disposal. It also identifies best practices for the implementation of some app engagement tools, and presents the pitfalls that some publishers fall into in this pursuit.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• The app market today is challenging and volatile. It's difficult to stand out, and most apps have to be offered for free in order to entice consumers who have too much supply to choose from. This puts greater emphasis on engaging consumers after they've downloaded an app in order to recoup costs.
• Consumers are more difficult to engage today, as most have dozens of apps installed on their devices yet spend most of their time in just a select handful of favorites.
• There are numerous solutions at hand for mobile app publishers and content creators seeking to engage consumers. Push notifications, in-app messaging, and app message centers with badges are three tools publishers can use to engage consumers.
• While many publishers mistakenly rely solely on push notifications for app engagements, this is a poor practice because many consumers don't allow push notifications and those that do can easily be overwhelmed when they receive too many.
• The best solution often includes leveraging two or three of these tools to engage consumers with the right message at the right time. The technology in this market has grown increasingly sophisticated, and publishers that don't diversify their approach run the risk of annoying their consumers to the point of abandonment.
• There are emerging engagement technologies that will change the current app engagement norms and present new ways for app publishers to communicate with users. The mobile ecosystem is changing quickly as technology improves and consumers become more comfortable conducting more activities on mobile devices.

In full, the report:

• Identifies the major challenges in today's app market and explains why employing good app engagement practices is more important than ever before.
• Presents the major app engagement tools currently available.
• Examines the pros and cons of each app engagement tool while outlining some pitfalls that publishers encounter in implementing them.
• Prescribes best practices for adopting various app engagement tools or strategies.
• Assesses how the market will likely change over the next five years as emerging technologies change both consumer behavior with mobile devices and introduce new tools with which to engage consumers.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and more than 250 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. » Learn More Now
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