After three days of bbq’ing, basking in the fleeting bank holiday sunshine and yes, sneaking in a little work here and there, we’re back with a round-up of last week’s headlines in social. Continue Reading
All posts tagged facebook
All kinds of interesting news this week – from Tumblr’s in-feed ads to the false tweet that sent the U.S. stocks into momentary free-fall; welcome to the #TheStream Issue 32. Continue Reading
This week our regular round-up of social need-to-knows includes Twitter’s new service offerings and ideas, Facebook fan value and video ads, and a neat new in-image purchasing tool. Continue Reading
Monday mind share time – here’s our regular roundup of some of the top stories in social from the last week.
STA Travel’s Ant Stone has been talking to us about the travel brand’s approach to social. In this second post, he answers a few questions about how social media encourages people into its stores, as well as how the social team is integrating with other parts of the business. Continue Reading
Since the seventies, STA Travel has been helping students and young people travel the world. Content Marketing Manager Ant Stone talked to us recently about the brand’s approach to social. In Part One, Ant talks about what STA Travel’s been doing on various platforms and how the brand responded to Facebook introducing Edgerank. Continue Reading
Ah the start of Spring (finally), the perfect season for fresh ideas – what better time to take a quick look back at a couple of bits of interesting social news from the last couple of weeks.
So what’s blooming? Continue Reading
Facebook introduced their new look news feed last week with the simple message ‘Goodbye Clutter’. So what’s changing and what does it mean for brands looking to engage and interact with consumers via the platform?
The new look
The new look news feed – image source: Facebook
New emphasis on visuals
Larger photos and more visually engaging story and link previews. The new look feed shares similarities with other popular image led platforms including Instagram, Tumblr and Google+.
Choice of feeds
Different types of feed will enable users to easily filter what they see based on their real-time preferences – whether it’s just updates from friends; news and stories relating to specific interests such as games and music; or posts from every page and brand they are currently following.
Device agnostic design
Recognising that users are likely to access the site via a number of different devices, Facebook have taken principles and features used on the existing mobile and tablet version and brought them to the web, providing a more consistent experience.
Borrowed media – good news and cautionary notes
At Headstream, we define Facebook as a type of ‘borrowed’ media because brands have no control over what happens to the core functionality of the platform (read more on this here). While these changes to the news feed may cause frustrations, we prefer to see the positives and opportunities they will offer to brands using this borrowed platform.
The good news is:
- More image real estate means a greater opportunity to deliver striking and emotionally engaging visual advertising, particularly via mobile
- Depending on usage, segmentation of feeds helps users to easily find and interact with relevant brand content. It also potentially offers brands the opportunity to clearly differentiate themselves from competitors by going head to head with content
- Multiple feeds offer the opportunity to serve a larger number of ads in more relevant contexts
- Potential to deliver even richer content to the news feed via applications
However, it’s not known how users will respond to having more than one feed – it could certainly impact on the frequency of views and organic reach of brand pages. It’s also not entirely clear what these changes mean for the existing suite of advertising options, both in terms of price and delivery. Larger in-feed ads could well spell an increase in rates and the performance of the more cost-effective sidebar ads may suffer in the new order.
One thing’s for sure though, more than ever before brands on Facebook need to continue to move away from simply broadcasting messages and start to really think about what their communities and potential customers want from them socially.
There’s a reason we call it borrowed media.
Sources: Facebook, Mashable, VentureBeat, Techcrunch, The Next Web, The Wall Street Journal
For years the goal of advertising was drawing consumers into brand-driven stories about their unique value proposition. The thinking was, once the experience of the advertisement ended, consumers would yearn for more and move closer to purchase. The truth is, consumers crave genuine engagement and for brands that understand this, that’s what makes them truly social.
The onslaught of social media in its myriad and ever changing forms has created interesting pivots in how brands interact with consumers. Now brands hope to be “Liked,” “Followed,” “Retweeted” “Pinned” and “Shared,” all in an effort to stay in consumers consciousness, and if they’re lucky, “go viral.” But that doesn’t make a brand social.
Dr. Pepper has taken a conversational approach to engaging their audience on social media. On February 15th they posted to their Facebook page “Is there any wrong way to drink. Dr. Pepper?” To date the post has nearly 15,000 likes and 3,300 comments, demonstrating that Dr Pepper is engaging with a significant proportion of fans beyond the click of a mouse (or tap of a screen) to having a real conversation.
In a more expansive effort, last year, Dr. Pepper launched their “What Makes You One of a Kind” campaign, inviting brand advocates to engage with the brand and share what makes them truly one of a kind. They were then added to a fan mural page where they could see themselves alongside other brand advocates.
Creating genuine opportunities to engage with the brand–as well as other fans–in social spaces is essential to building and maintaining brand advocacy and it’s the core of what makes a brand social.
Today’s post was written by Reggie Wideman a Digital Strategist with Janrain, the leading provider of social identity management solutions. Dr. Pepper Snapple Group is one of their many global customers.
You can follow Reggie via his Twitter @reggiewideman
Hello and welcome to our round up of the previous weeks top news in social, tech and marketing.
2012 – That Was The Year That Was
Google, Facebook and Twitter all released their ‘year in review’ sites last week with some interesting statistics, imagery and stories to go with them. They’re all worth checking out if you have the time.
