This Week in Social Media Marketing
POSTED BY Stacy DeBroff AT 10:50 AM
This week's trends in Social Media Marketing: Visual micro-sharing, content marketing
and highly-filtered ad targeting.
How do you, as a social media marketer, best develop actionable narratives about your brand and provide shareable nuggets of engaging content that will inspire your consumers to share, post, participate, recommend and take action:
Forget Stories. Your Brand Needs a Narrative – PR Newswire
John Hagel, author of “The Power of Pull,” believes that stories fall short for a brand. Hagel argues that stories do not promote participation. Stories also eventually end. Narratives do not end and urge listeners to come participate. “In a business context, if you can harness the power of narrative, you can derive competitive advantage,” said Hagel. Narratives work because they don’t simply motivate employees, they can galvanize a broad swath of people, and inspire them to action.”
Scoring Brands By Searching Social In Real-Time – MediaPost
SinoTech group has announced the launch of a new search engine called Buzz Equity. This search engine will specifically search out all the mentions of your brand across multiple social media platforms for free. After searching your brand across social media, Buzz Equity will score your brands online social value. “The score is determined by a combination of mention concentration, frequency, "passion" (i.e. - virality), reach, and sentiment.”
Visual Micro-Sharing Platforms: The Next Big Thing in Social Media Marketing? – SocialMediaToday
Vine and Snapchat are quickly becoming huge factors in social media. But how can these platforms be utilized properly and what can you share with your clientele? You can showcase new products or offer flash deals. Visual Micro-Sharing is bound to enter into companies marketing plans at some point. It is important to familiarize yourself with it now. “their passionate user base means that companies need to utilize them for community building and exclusive sharing of products and services. Instead of believing users will stick around to watch 6-seconds of a company's logo, businesses should be dedicated to staying relevant and interesting in this instant new way of communication.”
Now You Can Buy and Sell Items Directly in Your Twitter Feed With Ribbon – Mashable
Ribbon announced a new Twitter feature that will allow merchants to sell products directly through Twitter without having customers leave their twitter stream. This could prove much higher conversion rates for Twitter. “With Ribbon, sellers can create a customized link for free to list their product on Twitter and embed a checkout page within the tweet. Beneath the text and link in the tweet, customers will see a picture and description of the product and can then proceed to click through and enter their personal information and credit card details to make a purchase.”
How to get your CEO Tweeting – SocialMediaToday
Tweeting takes more time than one thinks. It can especially be tough to tweet about your business. You have to be careful with what you post. You can’t offend your readers but you want to be witty and fun. This is why many CEO's don’t tweet. They just don’t have the time in their schedule. Here are a few reasons why it is important to tweet as the CEO. Most importantly, it gives your company a face. “For a CEO, this is the time to get on our Twitter level and give a corporation (the bigger, the better) a face and name behind the brand. And most importantly, a story. A look at what life behind the scenes at the company is like as told through Instagram photos.”
Should “Likes” be the focus of your Facebook Strategy? – SmartBlogs
Although Likes may be a useful tool, they do not tell you how effective your message is at getting your fans to take action supporting the brand. “Still, as long as Facebook interactions remains a step on the path to your brand’s ultimate goal, it won’t make sense to focus your Facebook strategy on any internal Facebook actions. Instead, you need to use Facebook to cultivate a following that you can then redirect to another platform where you goal action is easy to accomplish.”
Facebook Home Puts Facebook First and Everyone Else Second – Mashable
Facebook has recently announced the launch of Facebook “Home” for Android phones. Facebook home is essentially a cover feed. Instead having a plan lock screen on your phone, it will now be replaced by Facebook. This could prove to amplify the importance of Facebook in terms of reach. Other social media platforms, like Twitter, could soon follow. “What Facebook Home accomplishes, with its Cover Feed, Facebook-only notifications and Chat Heads is an always-on, wholly immersive Facebook experience that, except for when you access the app launcher, pretty much eschews everything outside of the Facebook universe.”
Ensuring Facebook Users Find You When They Need You – SocialMediaToday
Organic vs Paid. Those are the two methods are driving people to your company’s website. Paid is probably a fast method but why pay when you don’t have to. What can you do to bring people to your company website? Make sure you have loads of content. You can distribute this content in two ways. Either you push it out yourself or let visitors do the work for you. Leverage your content with advertising. “The point with this post is to discuss how Facebook can be a sustainable, always on, source of visitors. Basing your marketing on content creation have great long-term effects that are not achievable by buying traffic with regular display advertising.”
Facebook Opens Up Ad Targeting to Minivan-Driving, Baby Food-Buying Homemakers
Adds third-party audience segments from Acxiom, Datalogix, Epsilon from AdWeek
Advertising on Facebook is getting very specific thanks to the data of their new partners like Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon. Is targeting this way advantageous? Or will this new hierarchy eliminate people who really do fall into the brands demographic?
Facebook today rolled out the segments as Partner Categories available through its self-serve Power Editor ad creation tool and through its ad API partners. This allows U.S. advertisers to layer in the 500-plus new segments in addition to the standard Facebook ad targeting criteria.
Now advertisers can create ad-targeting parameters such as "home owners who are retired, own a Ford pick-up truck, buy over-the-counter allergy relief medication and take cruises." They can also target "dentists who live alone, own a BMW and buy big-and-tall clothes and diet foods." Or “people who live in a million-dollar home housing four people including a military veteran.” Or “mortgage borrowing homemakers who own a minivan and buy baby food.”
A caveat: creating a highly filtered Venn diagram such as the ones mentioned above would likely work against an advertiser because they'd be too specific and counterintuitive for brands attracted to Facebook because of its billion-user scale.
And finally...
#nowthatchersdead: Fans Think Cher Died After Thatcher Hashtag Trends – Mashable
Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, passed away last week. An anti Margaret Thatcher website called “Is Thatcher Dead Yet?” wanted its readers to use the hashtag #nowthatchersdead to tell spread over twitter what they were doing now that Margaret Thatcher had passed. The hashtag trended but many people confused the hashtag by reading it as “Now That Chers Dead.” Twitter quickly turned into an arena of mourning for Cher. A lesson to all social media users, Capital letters in a hashtag make or break the message.
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