Social | Page 69 of 182

Facebook Gets Topical With Marketing Data

March 11, 2015, 12:00AM

Finding consumers that are talking about a certain product can be easy at first, but when it comes to finding specific data, it can be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. To solve that problem, Facebook has introduced a new data analysis tool that makes it easier for companies and marketers alike to nail down trends in customer word-of-mouth.

The company broke down the program in a blog post today, explaining the importance of learning what matters to a specific audience. “Marketers want to understand what people think about topics related to their business, so they can make their products and marketing more relevant to their customers,” the post reads. “In the past they’ve looked at the things people share online to get an idea of what people care about, but, until now, the information available offered a limited view. To make marketing content more relevant for people and more effective for marketers, we’re introducing topic data to select Facebook partners.”

However, users won’t have to worry about their information being shared, as the website has insisted that personal data will remain private, while details on the topic data is still easy to see.

Facebook explained a number of examples of how topic data can work for some companies:

“A business selling a hair de-frizzing product can see demographics on the people talking about humidity’s effects on their hair to better understand their target audience.”

“A fashion retailer can see the clothing items its target audience is talking about to decide which products to stock.”

“A brand can see how people are talking about their brand or industry to measure brand sentiment.”

While the data can’t be used to target ads directly, they can provide additional guidance for marketers. A partnership with DataSift, a leader in the data industry, will also help so that the data can easily be read into insights.

Nick Nyhan, CEO of WPP’s Data Alliance, stated, “When marketers have a deeper understanding of people and what they are interested in, they can create more relevant experiences for their audiences. We focus on providing WPP’s clients with insights into what people say and think about their brands and products. By looking at topic data, we empower brands to make smarter marketing decisions. And we’ve worked with DataSift for some time — the way they cleverly collect and organize data continues to make it simple for WPP to ingest, connect and leverage it across the agency network.”

Although the program isn’t widely available just yet (only a few partners in DataSift’s program will have access in the U.S. and Europe), Facebook will release it “thoughtfully and deliberately, and look to expand its availability at a later date.”

Could this help marketers nail down more specific ad information on Facebook It looks likely, but until the program goes widespread, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Why Your Brand Gets Unfollowed And What You Can Do About It

BY Lauren Arevalo-Downes

March 9, 2015, 12:00AM

It takes a whole lot of work to get users to follow your brand on social media and the larger your following, the more users you are able to reach with each post. The last thing you’d want is for those users to leave in droves.

Fractl and Buzzstream surveyed 900 social media users about how frequently they weed out brands they no longer feel kinship with and why. In terms of loyalty, LinkedIn users tend to unfollow brands quite unfrequently, with almost 50 percent of users saying they have never unfollowed a brand there. Facebook sees the highest percentage of brand unfollows, with 25 percent saying they had unfollowed a brand in the past month, but Twitter followers proved fickle, too, as 12 percent unfollowed a brand in the past few days alone.

Content is super-important to users as well as how active the brand is on their channel. Twenty-one percent of users say they unfollow brands whose content is boring, 19 percent said they unfollow if the brand posts are too frequent, and less than 15 percent say they unfollow a brand if they perceive the content is irrelevant to the brand itself.

Users prefer to see images (22 percent), videos (15 percent) and customer reviews (15 percent) as content types from the brand. There are content types that social media users avoid like the plague, too. Twelve percent of respondants said they don’t like brands posting white papers, 11 percent don’t want to read your e-books, and 8 percent aren’t particularly interest in your company news.

While these are good general recommendations, the content that works best for one platform may not perform as good on another. This is why it’s very important to have particular goals in mind and a social strategy that leverages those platforms best.

If you’re posting content that is irrelevant to your brand, you can be sure users are aware of it and will put you to task.

Why Brands Need To Hop On The Snapchat Bandwagon

BY Lauren Arevalo-Downes

March 7, 2015, 12:00AM

Snapchat has clearly become the newest social media platform that possesses a young audience intrepid brands are yearning to capture.

Brands who already have a presence on Snapchat are communicating with teenagers and millennials successfully more than any other platform. This shouldn’t come as surprise considering teenagers and millennials are responsible for about half of Snapchat’s estimated 100+ million users.

Snapchat recently released (with it’s last official update) a new function called Discover.

Discover is a series of partnerships linked with various media outlets such as Cosmopolitan, CNN, National Geographic, Vice, and others. The objective is to place content (both video and even full text articles) from those brands on Snapchat. Discover allows brands to have a permanent place on the service for the first time. The function has allowed the platform to reach Generation X’s and Babyboomers with more success and in ways brands are desperate to get involved with. It’s speculated that these newfound partnerships with formal brands will propel Snapchat forward as a growing social network.

This being said, Discover isn’t an option for most brands at the moment. What this means for other brands is, if you want to create a presence on Snapchat, you’re going to have play the game by the same rules as consumers – utilizing stories within Snapchat.

Stories enable brands to broadcast to thousands, as opposed to the one-to-one limitations that came from Snapchat’s origins, in ways familiar to that of Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. More so, brand activity on Snapchat can cause an increase in user awareness on other social media platforms as well.

“Brand awareness is hard to measure, but social monitoring conversations is easy to measure, and if brands do something good on Snapchat, people will talk about it and will talk about it on Twitter and Facebook,” Adobe Social product manager Carmen Sutter said, according to TechRepublic.

While stories is over a year old, it’s coming under renewed attention now that Discover is reawakening some brands to Snapchat. Discover is helping them realize that Snapchat can be a one-to-many channel. While virtually none of them can get into Discover right now, they can create leverage via stories instead.

Snapchat is no longer an app solely pertaining to people younger than 24-years-old. The brands that have been starting to sign up and figure out how to best manipulate Snapchat as a social media platform have begun to garner an overwhelming amount of attention and hype recently – unlike most of the other lagging brands out there.

Through use of Discover and stories, Snapchat is now reaching several difficult-to-reach demographics in ways other brands covet. Brands that intend to make a name for themselves or grow by means of broadcasting on social media platforms should hop on the Snapchat bandwagon A.S.A.P.

Facebook’s Mobile-First Future

BY Robert Workman

March 4, 2015, 12:00AM

With the Mobile World Congress happening in Barcelona this week, Facebook pushed forward on its emphasis on mobile, since millions of users utilize their phones and tablets to access the popular mobile site. Following a keynote by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, there was a push for Internet.org, the company’s side program that focuses on bringing new users to developing countries, thus attracting new customers to the site.

That’s not the only thing it’s pushing, though. VentureBeat has reported that the site also has a few ideas in mind when it comes to pushing for a mobile-concentrated future, with a series of trends that stand out. Jane Schachtel, the company’s global head of technology, explained these trends in a recent blog post.

“Mobile phones have existed in one form or another for more than 30 years now, and every day they’re becoming more entwined in people’s lives,” said the post. “But we are only in the early days of living in a mobile world. Today, a person’s mobile experience depends largely on where they live.”

Even though most people have access to more high-speed devices, not everyone else in the world does. “For many people in these countries mobile phones are also a first point of entry to the Internet,” the post indicated.

With that, Schachtel broke down the five focal points for mobile:

First up, the introduction of more low-cost smartphones “that offer better performance and better features for less money” would be a driving factor to increase the market. As a result, more people will get connected, sales will pick up, and more people will “become future long-term customers.”

Next, mobile commerce could see a big boost, even though there’s room for purchases and transactions to pick up. “More technology and telecom businesses need to adapt their business models to mobile, and I expect to see new solutions from operators that make it easier for people to buy and sell things through their phones,” Schachtel explained.

Differentiation is important, as not all devices have to look and act alike to attract customers. Making these devices stand out, or “focusing, for instance, on the emotional role they play in our lives rather than the latest technical specs”, would pick up their sales. “Device manufacturers are now introducing gadgets like watches and selfie-cams to pair with phones and tablets”, also known as “device families.”

Next up, better network capabilities would allow people to connect way easier than they were in the past. “I expect to see lots about 5G networks, as well as ways of delivering video to more people on slower networks. … It’s become essential to understand creative best practices for mobile experiences, and the changing ways in which people consume video,” said Schachtel.

Finally, connectivity with more devices – including “machine to machine connections,” would no doubt enable people to get online more and share what they’re up to. Apple’s new Watch could play a part in this as well. “With the Internet of Things, the big challenge remains showing people how connected devices can be meaningful additions to their lives, rather than just being cool pieces of tech.”

Schachtel concluded by explaining how mobile can really increase what both users and businesses can do online. “As more people come online and new technologies become more widely available,” she wrote, “we’ll continue to see more sophisticated solutions for connecting the world. And that’s good for people, and good for businesses.”

5. Fitbit