Tag Archives: social media marketing
content, Digital Marketing, Twitter
Twitter Advertising allows advertisers to share their message and content with the 200+ million active users on Twitter at any given time. Twitter's advertising revenue was $45 million when it began to offer the service in 2010 and has then since grown to earn $582.8 million in global ad revenue in 2013. By 2015, it is estimated to approach over $1 billion in total worldwide revenue.
More than ever, businesses are able to target ad campaigns to the users they want to reach with a variety of determining factors. The following improvements to the Twitter Advertising Dashboard make it easier than ever to set up an effective campaign with sponsored tweets or accounts.
1. Progress Bar
The new progress bar is visualization of how far along your campaign is, making it even easier to understand. This visual guide tracks your steps from start to finish, letting you know what's left to be done and what is ready to go.
2. Save Drafts
This new feature allows you to take a break mid-campaign and come back and pick up where you left off. You no longer need to worry about rushing through a campaign and missing out on all the effective targeting tools Twitter ads offer. Advertisers can use keywords in the timeline, interests, location, gender, device and similarity of existing followers to target and attract new followers with their promoted tweets.
3. Maximize Results
It's more important than ever for digital advertisers to connect and engage with the consumer and understanding how people use Twitter helps. Over 60% of Twitter users are on their mobile devices, so content needs to be catered to a shorter, on-the-go mentality. Advertisers should mix up pictures, videos, links and even new products in order to ensure relevance in the consumer's mind. Keep things interesting, and more users will be inclined to interact with your promoted tweets.
3 Changes to the Twitter Ad Dashboard
Tagged promoted tweets, social media marketing, targeting, Twitter Advertising
Analytics, Facebook, Social Media
Facebook Opens Up Emoticons for Small Updates
Facebook is now testing a new feature that allows users to include emoticons in status updates. Lately Facebook has been prompting users to input their favorite color as well as favorite ice cream flavor and other trivial issues. Now users can update what they are reading or other quick update and then attach an emoticon to it for a quick nonverbal appraisal of the item.
One advantage of this service is to help stave off some competitors that are touting their quick visual survey of items. Instead of reading why someone likes a certain book, the user can see quickly how it evaluates the item in question. The better gain for the social media agency is more data for evaluation. The emoticons will help normalize data as well. Now a book will be linked to certain data points (enjoyed, liked, hated, etc) instead of needing to use semantic assessments to determine if a status is an endorsement or not.
Above all this change will help make the Open Graph more powerful so the advertiser can better target users based upon their data. This will help accelerate the mobile boom and make advertising more appropriate to the each individual user.
Facebook Tries Letting You Share Emoticons Of Exactly What You're Feeling, Reading Or Eating
Photo by: ntr23
Tagged online advertising, open graph, Search Graph, social media marketing
Facebook, Google, Social Media
Google+ Cracks 100 Million Unique Monthly Visitors
New data from comScore shows improvement for Google+, as it now joins Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin as having over 100 million unique monthly visitors. October 2012 saw it break into the club with 105 million visitors. The previous October the fledgling social network only had 65.3 million unique visitors, so it is seeing extraordinary growth. Google+ still pales when compared to Facebook, but its stand-alone numbers are still impressive.
Digital marketing agency's that offer search engine optimization services need to make sure Google+ remains in its field of vision. Even though it does not boast the usage of even a crippled Facebook it is still important. Its raw numbers is large and that largeness is often lost in the eclipse of Facebook. Google+ presence also ties into other services like an improved awareness by Google places and Google maps which are services that Google does have domination within. The rule of thumb to remember is that a Google+ presence translates most directly into access to a user's mobile device. They may not be using the service to share content, but they are using the service to access other features which are much more difficult to track.
Report: Google+ Has 105 Million Unique Monthly Visitors
Tagged google+, online advertising, social media marketing
Facebook, Online Advertising, Social Network
Facebook's Sponsored Stories Has Suspicious Likes
New research about Facebook's Sponsored Stories, the ads that say X likes Y, has found some disturbing news. The investigation began when deceased people were appearing in newsfeeds as endorsing certain Pages. That problem was the result of users not being memorialized on the social network. But further research has found that some people are being presented as endorsers of brands they have not endorsed. When asked for comment Facebook is able to identify the exact moment the like was made, which leads to a further issue: mistaken likes. The problem seems particularly acute on mobile devices with small screens and where accidental touches are more likely.
The problem for the digital marketing agency is about credibility. Fortunately, the brands with mistaken likes that are most likely to be covered are large and carry some polarizing image with them, for example Wal-Mart. A mistaken like for a smaller firm is less likely to be noticed and even then less likely to become an issue. However, it remains something important the digital marketing agency ought to remain aware of and try to keep from happening. An easy way to prevent it is to post often enough that someone who mistakenly liked a Page would receive status updates and could then take action to unlike the Page.
Facebook Sponsored Stories Can Harbor Suspicious Likes
Tagged advertising, digital marketing, Facebook, social media marketing
Brands, Digital Marketing, Facebook, Online Advertising
Facebook Makes Tracking Conversions Easier
The bane of the social media agency's existence is convincing the skeptical client that social media can create conversions. FaceBook is now offering some advertisers an option that will make it easier to track conversions. This system will help demonstrate the value of social media as well as help the A/B testing to determine which ads are working better than others.
The system is fairly simple. Advertisers will receive a piece of code to be placed on conversion success pages. FaceBook will then collect that data and be able to pass it along to advertisers. The code can be optimized so each ad has a different code so the social media agency can see which ads are working better than others. Retailer Fab.com was a beta tester for this service and was able to reduce costs by 39%. With the system advertisers will be able to remove ineffective ads as well as change their bidding priorities.
Tagged advertising, digital marketing, Facebook, Social Media, social media marketing
Digital Marketing, Social Media, Twitter
Prime of Life as a New Metric for Twitter Effectiveness
Seomoz has developed a new metric that is arguably a better measure for a tweet's effectiveness. The Prime of Life metric measures retweets on the assumption that retweets are the currency of the social network. While measuring clicks on tweeted links is valuable, it is measuring the viral spread of a tweet, the Prime of Life, that earns the most. The essay does acknowledge some issues with this new metric, but even if it is flawed it is still a valuable metric for the social media agency to measure.
The easy answer is that the Prime of Life for tweets is an average of 18 minutes. For half of the users sampled 18 minutes is how long it took for half of their tweets to be retweeted. An interesting result is the near uniformity of the Prime of Life regardless of follower count for the Twitter user. One thing that does make a difference is the frequency of tweets. The more a user tweets then the longer it takes to reach the Prime of Life. The social media agency already knows this lesson in the adage about saturating the communication market. It is still helpful to see data confirming the notion.
One final bit of interesting data is about the time of the tweet. Late night tweets are often lost in the feed by people the next day. But for those followers awake at the time of the tweet the engagement it spawns is very high. The metaphor is the person watching television at 3 AM is more responsive to non-infomercials than at other times of the day. These are all interesting lessons for the digital marketing firm that need to be vetted depending on the type of service being marketed.
When Is My Tweet's Prime of Life?
Tagged digital marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, twitter
Digital Marketing, Social Media, YouTube
YouTube Dropping Some Original Content
Last year YouTube launched an ambitious project of financing original content. The goal of the project was to make YouTube more like established television. In a sense it worked, because now YouTube is cancelling many of those shows. The rumor is that only 40% of the shows that originally received funding will be renewed. The cancelled shows will not be removed from the network. YouTube hopes these shows can continue to produce content just from a new funding source.
The lesson in this for the digital marketing company is about how video is consumed. The reason these shows did not succeed is that people do not browse YouTube as they do television. Most people see their video content as an embedded video and not on the YouTube ecosystem. There is no option then to immediately see other channels. The lesson is that people need to be pointed to a video. People will not seek out more video information, and if they do it is often in a search engine and not on YouTube directly. When the company's client has video content, then pointers need to be made to it.
Changing Channels: YouTube Will Pull the Plug on at Least 60 Percent of Its Programming Deals
Tagged digital marketing, social media marketing, videos, youtube
Good.is, Social Media, Social Network
New Social Network Built Around Philanthropy
Good.is is a new social network from the makers of Good magazine. The website is not new, but has recently been relaunched to offer users a platform similar to FaceBook (shareable content) centered around pushing the world forward. As a social network it is still very new and hosts very few members and even less content. Like a social network, though, it only needs a slight nudge to grow exponentially.
For the social media agency the network offers very little. It may not grow, but because of the small user base an active brand might be able to reach a large percentage of that user base. There is not (yet?) advertising available but as a platform for teaching people about a firm it might be just what some brands are looking for.
As momentum picks up for the Social Good Summit (Twitter recently announced its participation in the project) then Good.is might just become a leader in the world of philanthropists around the globe. This may not help many of the clients of the social media agency, but for those that have an interest this may present an efficient location of efforts.
Tagged Facebook, Good.is, social media marketing, twitter
Twitter Now Allows Targeted Tweets
Twitter has been actively pursuing new options for advertisers. As well as creating
new types of interest targeting Twitter has now announced another option.
Advertisers are now able to target users based on their locations. The locations can
range from country down to certain metro areas. This geo-targeting can also be
linked into other targeting options, so it is possible for an advertiser to target a user
that likes professional wrestling in a certain neighborhood of Tokyo.
Increasingly Twitter is coming online as a viable alternative to FaceBook for the
social media agency. This new step will make ads on Twitter more effective. The
ads will become more expensive as their effectiveness increases, but that value is
something each particular social media agency and its client will need to determine.
In time there will be reports about the effectiveness of these new Twitter ads relative
to other social networks, especially as numbers about FaceBook's new exchange are
just starting to come out.
A note of caution about this announcement needs to be injected. Twitter has not yet
released a list of its major metropolitan areas, so it may not yet be a major boon to
some advertisers. An example of this issue is in California where the San Francisco
crowd is very different from the LA crowd. Twitter has also not yet announced if it is
relying on profiles for location data or if there is an active tracking of geo-locations
when people tweet. Will a person from Detroit visiting New York receive NYC or
Detroit ads? More details are sure to follow.
Tagged Digital Advertising, location based services, social media marketing, twitter