This International Women’s Day we spoke to Laura (LT), Amelia (AF) and Emily (EF) to hear more about their experiences and what IWD means for them. So without any further ado…
What does IWD mean for you?
LT: Empowerment to live the life I want, to do it all
AF: Celebrating all the strong, successful women in my life who have been pivotal role models for me. Also, acknowledging that we still have some work to do in the pursuit of equality – important days like this helps drive the conversation about gender equality and how we move forward together.
EF: IWD to me is a day to acknowledge and celebrate all women for what they have achieved, especially women from marginalised groups who still experience racism, stereotyping, ableism etc. every day.
Which powerful women do you admire the most?
LT: My wonderful daughter, mum, grandma and nana aside – who could not admire the Queen, such a strong lady in every aspect of her life, and also the other Queen – Dolly Parton, what a life she carved from humble beginnings. Dolly has such a work ethic whilst being kind, caring and an all round superstar!
AF: Jacinda Ardern. The way she handled the pandemic was admirable. She acted swiftly, strictly and with compassion to protect the people of New Zealand. A true role model.
EF: I admire all the trans women who still experience discrimination and violence in society just for living authentically as themselves. I admire Michaela Jaé Rodriguez who shows us that with talent and determination you can achieve anything, as she became the first trans actor to win a Golden Globe in 2022. I admire my friend Summer who has experienced harassment in Leeds for not looking ‘womanly’ enough but is brave and powerful in expressing her femininity.
What barriers/challenges have you faced as a woman in digital?
LT: My own lack of confidence and belief in myself, which is a work in progress every day!
AF: I would say one of my barriers has been the fear of failure. Sometimes, I have a dreadful feeling of “what if I fail”. Collectively as women, I believe it is important support each other in the pathway to success.
What advice would you give for women looking to start their careers in digital?
LT: Listen, learn and absorb from others whilst on the job – never stop growing your knowledge and pushing forward.
AF: Be confident in yourself and show your strengths. If you want to make a difference, start with believing that you can.
EF: When applying for roles, it could be a good idea to look at the current staff members to see the ratio of women. It can be evident from looking at a company’s colleagues whether women have been given the opportunity to progress and that could impact your decision of whether you would want to work there.
We’re thrilled to have Shreya on board as our newest Account Executive. A Computer Engineering undergrad from Essex university and a MSc Business with Marketing from Warwick Uni – we can’t wait to see Shreya blow us away!
Let’s get to know her a little more…
Welcome to the team! We’re all delighted to have you here. What are you most looking forward to about the role?
Thank you! I am glad to be a part of the team! I would say the thing I am most looking forward to is learning as much as I can from everyone at Fusion and putting my degree to good use!
So tell me, why marketing?
Marketing was a rather impromptu choice for me but the one thing I have come to love about it is that Marketing combines both creativity and analytics. That being said, I have always been fascinated with the social media algorithm and curious to learn more about it.
What attracted you to Fusion in the first place?
The opportunity to work with a small team and learn from a variety of experts on the team was what mainly attracted me to the role. I have always preferred working and learning with smaller teams and I am glad to have been accepted into the Fusion family.
Right, let’s get to know the real you…
Favourite marketing campaign?
It has to be “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty”. It is an impactful campaign which aims to highlight women’s unique differences thus empowering them. Absolutely love the message behind it!
App you couldn’t live without?
Instagram!
What are you reading/podcast are you into currently?
Death Message (by Mark Billingham) … (I really love crime novels)
Dream Client?
Any online fashion retailer really…
What are you binge watching right now?
Suits! Absolutely love that show! (…and also FRIENDS for about the 100th time!)
The second installment in our homewares sector series, we’ve peeked behind the curtain at some of the biggest brands dominating the SERPs in the curtain and blinds industry.
Using our proprietary tool, Natural Edge, we’ve taken a 6-month look back at how SOV for core keyword categories has changed over time, developing a league table with some (very surprising) increases and decreases.
Get in touch here to find out how the experts here at Fusion can help you drive your business forwards.
Discover what dreams are really made of in the first of our homewares sector report, this time for beds and mattresses. Our report delves into organic visibility and performance for big brands and rising stars in the beds and mattresses market using our proprietary Share of Voice tool, Natural Edge.
What will you uncover?
Brand table – top 50 brands with highest share of voice
Share of voice at a product category level
Keyword opportunities – where has seen the biggest growth areas over the last 12 months?
Keyword losers – where has seen the biggest decline this last 12 months?
Whilst it may come as no surprise that large scale retailers Argos, Dunelm and Dreams are often at the head of the bed, there are plenty of examples of smaller brands who, maybe without the lofty budgets, are dreaming big and rising up the ranks for their niche.
The bed category has seen a lot of fluctuation over the last year and what’s interesting is when we drill down to a product category level we see how quickly the lay of the land can change. Employing a highly targeted keyword mapping, research and tailored content strategy is key to success here.
Craig Broadbent – Organic Search Director
What next?
Our technical and content experts are a match made in heaven for helping you gain the visibility you deserve. If you’re interested in finding out more about how we can help you gain visibility in the SERPs within the beds and mattresses category get in touch here.
Whilst marketers have been aware of this development since August 2019, this new chapter of advertising is here knocking at our door.
But before we delve into practicalities let’s look at why this is all happening in the first place (and why it’s important). Fear not, there is not a single reference to the daftly named ‘cookiepocalypse’ in this article…
What are cookies and why are they important?
Let’s start off with the basics:
First Party Cookies
Stored by a website you visit, these cookies provide useful information for that website and shape how a user interacts with it. It’s everything from which pages they visit, how long for, how often and, what they do. Don’t worry – these aren’t going anywhere and will actually become more important as we find out in this article.
Third-Party Cookies
These are tracking cookies that are stored under a different domain than you are currently visiting. They are mainly of use for advertisers as it enables them to track users between websites and display more relevant ads between websites.
How is this relevant to online privacy?
As third-party cookies enable advertisers to track the digital movements of users, there has been a growing demand for transparency and gaining back control of data. Whilst all users do have the option to opt-out of third-party cookies, it’s not always straightforward to do so.
Google’s figures show that searches for “online privacy” have increased by 50% globally year on year. A demand for anonymity from a digital presence in the era of information is no passing trend, however. You only have to look at the 1.2 million members of reddit’s Privacy community or the creation of Tor back in 2006 to see that users are seeking solutions to digital anonymity.
This demand in knowledge, or privacy as it were, has also led to an increase in content being published surrounding ‘online privacy’ over the past five years.
Ahrefs Data
How has Google Chrome responded to the removal of third party cookies?
With Google Chrome having a whopping 63.5% of browser market share – as a market leader the internet giant needed to make its stance on cookies clear, especially as browser competitors were doing so.
The likes of Safari and Firefox placed limitations on tracking years ago with the latter using the following disclaimer in its February 2021 release:
At Mozilla, we believe you have a right to privacy. You shouldn’t be tracked online. Whether you are checking your bank balance, looking for the best doctor, or shopping for shoes, unscrupulous tracking companies should not be able to track you as you browse the Web. For that reason, we are continuously working to harden Firefox against online tracking of our users.
Google first stated its intention back in August 2019 when it sought to “develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. We’re calling this Privacy Sandbox”. Fast forward to January 2020 and further rollout details became apparent with the announcement of a 2-year timeframe of cookies being phased out from Google Chrome. By October 2020 Google was prepared to share more detailed insights on the steps they were taking in relation to mitigating “deceptive and intrusive tracking techniques, such as fingerprinting” which saw it throw its weight behind supporting Secure DNS.
However, the largest development so far in this whistle-stop tour of Google’s announcements has been the introduction of FLoC.
What is FLoC?
In January 2021, Google Chrome announced the creation of FLoC with a view of testing amongst advertisers to be rolled out as early as Q2 2021.
FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) proposes a new way for businesses to reach people with relevant content and ads by clustering large groups of people with similar interests. This approach effectively hides individuals “in the crowd” and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser.”
Before raising hell amongst advertisers who feared the future collapse of targeting as we know it, Google set the record straight earlier this month. “Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.”
What that’s to say is that Google would not be providing the ability to use third-party cookies to target individuals, thereby protecting a user’s right to anonymity, but would provide advertisers with the opportunity to target a cohort of similarly behaved groups. These interest-based groups could indeed be in their thousands so there’s no denying that the precise nature of targeting will be lost in stark comparison but Google has assured advertisers that we can expect “at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising.” From here on in, only the performance of ads under the new targeting options will tell.
Some naysayers aren’t convinced, with talk of FLoC undoing a decade’s worth of work and even calling into question whether FLoC is even that private as there are seemingly ways around extracting user IDs from a cohort.
In Europe there are big question marks over whether FLoC is GDPR-compliant, prompting Marshall Vale to clarify that testing in Europe would be rolled out at a later date.
We are starting this FLoC origin trial for users in the US and select other countries, and we expect to make FLoC available for testing worldwide at a later date.
By 2022 Google Chrome confirms the use of third-party cookies will cease to exist entirely.
How can we be prepared for the change?
As a performance marketing agency, our Head of Paid Media, Jen Mottram, and Account Director, Kyle Brogan, share their thoughts on how the absence of cookies will shape the future of paid media as we know it, and why it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
What were your initial thoughts on the announcement of FLoC?
Jen: I’m very glad that a solution to the loss of 3rd party cookies is nearly ready, and we will have familiar targeting options. However, there are still a lot of questions; what about the 45% who do not use Chrome? can the privacy issues raised by some be rectified? Ultimately something is better than nothing, but I’m watching updates closely!
Kyle: It’s reassuring that there is a recommended option available to allow advertisers to continue to target customers in a privacy-first manner. I’m keen to see how this develops over the next few months, and how robust it will be across networks beyond that of just Google.
How will we be preparing for a cookie-less future?
Jen: From a technical perspective, 1st party data will be a focus, luckily for us a lot of our clients have already heavily invested in this or are making all the right steps towards the necessary infrastructure.
Additionally, utilisation of AI, like smart bidding and responsive/dynamic ads, will be even more important to ensure campaigns are reactive to all other signals. We have built these into our clients’ strategies and the tech behind is ever-evolving and robust”.
Kyle: Conversations with clients, as solutions are developing, is key in ensuring all parties are prepared for a cookie-less future.
We’re in the process of establishing what the potential risks are as well as what can be done now to ensure their 1st party data is in the best condition possible.
Keep an eye on our blog, LinkedIn and Instagram channels for information!
It will come as no surprise that when Google updated its 14 year nofollow link attribute value on 10th September it caused quite the stir in the world of SEO.
This update sees an extension to the well-recognised nofollow tag, broken down by Google as follows:
rel=”sponsored”: Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.
rel=”ugc”: UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
rel=”nofollow”: Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.
Historically, the nofollow tag was initially introduced by Google to help prevent comment spam, latterly this update is regarded as a way for website owners to tell Google to ignore the link. In other words, the link wouldn’t be crawled and it wouldn’t be used as an indication to help improve rankings. It therefore became a common way for websites to still acknowledge guest blog posts, partnered or sponsored content without losing any of their site equity.
What’s changed and why does this matter?
However in the new update this view of ‘nofollow’ tags and the introduction of two new tags ‘sponsored’ and ‘ugc’ Google seems to have changed its mind stating:
“All the link attributes — sponsored, UGC and nofollow — are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search. We’ll use these hints — along with other signals — as a way to better understand how to appropriately analyze and use links within our systems.”
The idea that it could be a ‘hint’ is great news for websites looking to earn links and increase their backlink portfolio, what was once a redundant link is now being used as a ‘hint’ for ranking.
Google has made it clear that websites don’t need to update old nofollow tags to follow the new structure but instead this can be introduced by websites who want to be more granular in their link tags.
You took time to ask a client if they would adopt something no one said you needed to do? Again, this is a voluntary outside of sponsored links. If people *want* to use more granular identification, those who *do want* can do so. If you don’t, don’t. https://t.co/rMmSrUHaSQpic.twitter.com/hbNMgPaxtd
Furthermore, as of March 2020 Google has also suggested they may begin using this collection of nofollow, sponsored and ugc link attributes for crawling and indexing.
Moz have produced a simple analysis of this change which helps demonstrate before, now and how this will change again from March 2020.
If you have any questions about the impact of linkbuilding our door is always open…
We’re delighted to announce that Fusion Unlimited have been nominated for 2 awards in Prolific North’s Northern Digital Awards 2019.
The fantastic news has seen us secure nominations for the “Best Digital Tool or Software Category” and for “Search Agency of the Year”.
Our team are proud to be recognised for our approach to delivering innovative search marketing campaigns with performance at the forefront of mind. We’re constantly seeking news ways to achieve market standout for our clients, be it through our own proprietary software, Natural Edge, or through rigorous testing programmes.
Join Fusion’s content team as they take to the stars for an in-depth look at one of social media’s most surreal but successful brands: American marshmallow-cookie makers, MoonPie.
As in our analysis of Spotify’s 2017 Wrapped, we’ll explore how the MoonPie cookie crumbles and highlights the lessons that other brands can use to inform their own approach to social media success.
How does MoonPie work?
MoonPie’s Twitter – as comic as it is cosmic – is truly a channel of the third kind, a meteor shower of eclectic jokes, sassy asides and graphics cooked up in an MS Paint rush. It’s not every day you see a brand complimenting another brand’s looks, literally talking about being a brand, or repeatedly sending semi-ridiculous questions to @NASA:
Meanwhile, whenever a user sends in something strange, the account’s more than happy to get even stranger back (and regularly does so late into the night). The brand’s commitment to its zany sense of humour and meme-based jokes, which are incredibly popular with today’s social media users, is absolutely unwavering, and departs substantially from how we might ordinarily expect a brand on social to be.
However, hundreds of thousands of likes, retweets and followers later, it’s clear that today’s digital audience has embraced MoonPie’s quirkiness like no other. One particular tweet coinciding with last year’s solar eclipse gained over 500,000 likes and almost 200,000 retweets:
It’s more than apparent, too, that social success has seen sales soar astronomically. Maseena Ziegler for Forbes wrote that, following August 2017’s viral tweet, US ‘demand for the product […] exceeded production capacity for the first time in decades’. Soon after, in September 2017, MoonPie’s sales hit the highest on record in the company’s one-hundred-year history.
When scrolling through MoonPie’s Twitter feed, it’d be easy to perceive all this success as being purely aleatory, as if they piloted their account bravely into the void – leaving strategy and ground control in the dust – only to emerge from a black hole with a winning formula completely by chance. And yet this would also be considerably short-sighted, for although MoonPie’s creators have said in interview that they’ve certainly required more creative freedom than usual to deliver their creative vision in full, the channel’s success is a consequence of exceptional strategic thinking which takes many cues from traditional advertising best practice.
David Ogilvy, one of advertising’s all-time greats, famously said that ‘if you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think’. If you apply this filter to MoonPie, it becomes apparent that their decisions surrounding tone of voice, engagement and creative quality signify a masterful use of the ‘language in which [its target audience] thinks’. By getting weird on social, following in the footsteps of its target audience (young social media users), and posting high quality creative that’s as fun as anything anyone will find elsewhere on their feed, all sense of the MoonPie Twitter belonging to a brand vanishes, becoming eclipsed by the sheer emotional response that the brand elicits – namely, laughter and joy. Ultimately, the channel leaves its visitors forgetting that they were ever looking at a branded channel in the first place, that the channel’s goal is to promote MoonPie and its products. I don’t think we could put it much better than MoonPie do themselves:
Evolving from heritage to challenger through social
MoonPie’s weirdness is a bold new outlook for a brand that’s been around for over a hundred years. Its appeal was its heritage – think Wagon Wheels in the UK – and its target audience a relatively older purchasing demographic. Needless to say, MoonPie certainly hasn’t always felt at home firing strange clapbacks at strangers across the Internet.
From our point of view, what’s so remarkable about the way the brand has revitalised itself in recent years is that its new-found success was so heavily reliant on its social media strategy. Twitter let MoonPie come to life, express a personality that resonated with a new audience, and flourish. The MoonPie Twitter, in this way, is a real testament to the transformative opportunities that social offers, that, when utilised well, can truly bring brands to life.
Thoughts to take away
• Use social to its full potential, to make your brand a personality.
• Think about what your target-audience values and shape your content to their perspective. This doesn’t mean you need to become as surreal as MoonPie; to the contrary, there are many ways this might be achieved.
• Embrace change – as MoonPie has shown, thinking outside the box for your strategy can be incredibly rewarding.
• And once you start something, commit to it – users value consistency and they’ll be more likely to follow an account when they’re confident about what they’re going to be served!
Just over a month ago now, Facebook announced that they’d be removing their third-party partner categories feature from Business Manager. The decision follows recent concerns surrounding Facebook’s handling of user data, and allows the company to demonstrate its commitment to increasing the transparency of their data-related activity.
The timeline
Facebook rolled out the changes over a fourteen day period:
From May 11th, marketers in the UK were unable to select partner categories’ data in their campaign creation
From May 25th, Facebook no longer delivered partner categories built on audiences from the UK, Germany and France, and disallowed campaigns from serving third party data to UK audiences
Remaining targeting options
We imagine marketers will be beginning to place much more emphasis on first party data and custom audiences will play a much greater role in social targeting strategies, from re-targeting website visitors to uploading CRM.
Creating lookalike audiences from campaigns that are already using third party data remains an option for marketers to consider. This gives companies a chance to identify audiences with similar behaviours and interests to the third party data audiences whose data they’re using currently. The benefit of this is that audiences will be classed as first party and will be available for use in future campaigns.
Of course, there is still the opportunity for marketers to use Facebook’s range of detailed targeting options such as demographic, interest and behaviour targeting.
Overall
Though the shutdown of third-party partner categories marks a significant restructuring of the social media marketing landscape, we see it primarily as a positive; it ensures far greater protection of online data, and the remaining targeting options are more than sufficient for generating successful marketing campaigns.
We’re keen to see how marketers continue evolving to these changes as they happen and will be sure to cover any future updates of this kind on the Fusion blog!
Throughout the last month, the world has keenly followed all the action taking place at the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.
Media outlets and journalists from all across the globe have flocked to the tournament, broadcasting around the clock coverage of all the biggest highs and lows. So too have many of the world’s biggest brands, turning the biggest talking points into social media spectacles, building buzz on the ice and keeping at the fore of the moment’s most compelling conversations.
We’ve rounded up our four favourite instances of brands mixing content with skis and showcasing digital talent on the slopes!
Red Stripe’s new sled for the Jamaican bobsleigh team is on the house
Ever since its debut at the 1988 Games, the Jamaican bobsleigh team has been an iconic fan favourite.
The men’s team failed to qualify for this year’s tournament, but all wasn’t lost for Jamaica, as the female bobsleigh team qualified instead, marking their competitive debut on the international stage.
However, the bobsledders’ time in PyeongChang has been all but plain sleighing. The campaign was beset by off-the-slope disunity and a frosty team spirit, which resulted in the mid-tournament resignation of coach Sanda Kiriasis. To make matters even worse, Kiriasis owned the team’s only sled; her departure made their future prospects look incredibly slim.
When it all seemed to be going downhill at near-terminal velocity, Jamaican beer brand Red Stripe stepped in to save the day. The brand reached out to the team via a Twitter @ mention with the generous proposal of gifting them a brand new sled of their own with no strings attached, which was a sizable financial commitment at around £40,000. An amusing Twitter exchange between the brand and team ensued:
The advent of social media changed the relationship between sports and its fans forever. Today, 24/7 coverage and content creation from teams and journalists alike means there’s never been less of a delay between a newsworthy event happening and fans knowing about it.
To this end, sports media giant Eurosport saw the 2018 Winter Olympics as a chance to deliver the first ever completely digitalised Olympic Games.
Eurosport partnered with global ad agency Wasserman, and subdivision Cycle Media, to conceptualise and execute a compelling ‘always on’ digital strategy for the brand’s social portfolio, creating highly responsive content for fans’ entertainment and driving huge volumes of reach and engagement for the Eurosport social channels.
Jonathan Davies, managing director of advertiser partnerships at Eurosport, said that ‘this partnership brings together Eurosport’s outstanding Olympic Games content and audiences with Cycle’s cutting-edge creativity in the social space – giving brands the opportunity to produce bespoke content that engages with younger audiences in new and innovative ways’.
See a few examples of the content they produced below!
It's been described as the biggest upset in the history of the Winter Olympic Games. Listen to the reaction of Eurosport commentators from across Europe to Ester Ledecka's sensational win in the women's Super-G yesterday.#PyeongChang2018#Olympics#Ledeckapic.twitter.com/OvgOHuPAV0
— Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Europe (@WBDsports) February 18, 2018
She is the American superstar who has 41 World Cup wins to her name at the age of 22.
The women's slalom starts from 0215 CET tomorrow morning.
— Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Europe (@WBDsports) February 13, 2018
NBC calls for an Uber (and sends a Snap)
Eurosports have led the way in European coverage of the Games, and NBC have been putting in a similar shift for their North American viewers, reporting on the action around the clock and creating digital content for users to interact with.
To place their content in front of as wide an audience as possible, the broadcast organisation partnered with global transport company Uber, in a digital campaign that enabled Uber passengers to access exclusive NBC highlights and interviews from the Uber app while in transit.
‘We’re excited to partner with Uber to reach Olympic fans on the go’, said Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics. ‘Through great partner platforms such as Uber, NBC is able to fuel the Olympic excitement by surrounding the American audience with the great moments and stories unfolding in Pyeongchang.’
To complement this, NBC have also become the world’s first company to directly stream Olympic action through Snapchat.
‘We do believe that the best place to watch a live game and a live awards show is on television’, Ben Schwerin, vice president of partnerships at Snap, told The Wall Street Journal. ‘But if we can show the one moment that matters most on Snapchat, we think we can create a complementary experience’.
It’s interesting to see how the world’s biggest digital channels take to the phenomenon of streaming live events and matches; we’re sure this is something that will only grow more and more prevalent in the build-up to this summer’s World Cup.
P&G pushes back against prejudice with emotional TV spot
However, the brand – an Olympic Games official partner – recently demonstrated how on-point their advertising strategy so often is with an incredibly moving TV ad celebrating the diversity of the tournament’s myriad competitors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSWyrR4gXkw
It’s a brilliant piece of creative, which masterfully gets right the precarious equilibrium of channeling emotion and becoming overly sentimental whilst championing a powerful and relevant message.
Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next month with more.
Throughout the month, join Fusion’s SEO, social and content teams as they explore how 2018 will shape up for digital marketing.
To start, we’ve identified the challenges of the year ahead and how the content we’re creating will change in response to developments both inside and outside our field.
Closing the book on machines
For a large part of SEO’s history, keywords have been an essential part of Google’s ranking equation.
Initially (and in the most basic of terms), if a site contained myriad mentions of the word ‘cat’, Google’s crawlers—its machine readers which continuously scan the web for new pages and changes in sites’ infrastructure—would determine it to be a useful source of cat-related content and raise its ranking position for cat relevant search queries accordingly.
Because of this, many SEOs would create content that tactically targeted keywords with an extremely close focus, which was often at the cost of scansion and readability. In essence, content was being created to be legible not for humans but Google’s bookworm machines.
Over the years, Google’s algorithm has been continuously refined, to the extent where ranking determination has become the responsibility of an incredibly sophisticated artificial intelligence, which is capable of judging content quality with a critical eye that’s very similar to human thought.
As entertaining as it might have been for Google’s hivemind to tirelessly wade through gigabyte upon gigabyte of keyword-dense articles, Google has now decided to minimise the bearing of keyword presence on ranking position. If a site’s content is unsuitable for human comprehension, Google will now deem its value to be much lower and ranking will be lowered in kind.
This marks a major (and much-needed) change to the field. Ranking will now be much harder to game through content that focuses solely on uncompetitive keywords and high-volume search queries. Instead, in order to have the desired SEO effect and be high quality, content must provide genuine insight that’s intelligible for human readers.
Following this, we expect all content writers to turn towards longer form pieces, covering articles comprehensively rather than merely flooding pages with now inert keywords. As a consequence, the web should become much richer with higher quality content, which will be great for both brands and users alike.
Lights, cameras, content
In line with the changes to Google’s algorithmic thinking, it’s evident today that legibility and content delivery are more crucial considerations in shaping quality content than ever before.
Traditionally, blogposts have been the most common way of providing web users with information. While we don’t expect them to vanish from the net, we anticipate another format to soon enter the ascendancy across both desktop and mobile browsers: video.
Chiefly, this is because video has one unique advantage over prose: the capacity for delivering information to your audience with greater flair and creativity. This is particularly apparent if your content features the involvement of influential figures – be they social media influencers or star names.
An excellent example of high standards of branded video is the digital offering of current Premier League leaders Manchester City, whose creative form is almost on par with their footballing ability.
City recently became the first team in the UK to accrue one million followers on YouTube, with an account that regularly posts varied and engaging content featuring a range of their star players and staff, such as tunnel footage before and after matches, unique interviews with players and humorous (and slightly off-kilter) seasonal content, like a Christmas singalong with Kolarov.
The channel combines ‘the creativity of De Bruyne, the execution of Aguero and the intelligence of Guardiola‘, said Tomos Grace, YouTube’s head of sport.
In addition, it’s arguable that no form of content has showcased a greater potential for reach than video has in recent years. These could come through social shares to users’ news feeds and timelines or native views on platforms such as YouTube; with over one billion users, the site’s visited by a third of web users worldwide.
The transition from still life to moving pictures might not be one that brands need to do straight away. Nevertheless, we anticipate that video in coming years will become more and more of a feature of brands’ creative output and content budgets.
ASA demands greater diversity – and brands need to listen
While Google has started to pay more attention to human reading, many of the world’s biggest brands and watchdogs have begun to think more critically about the messages that ads and content are presenting.
After undertaking a review of the effect of harmful stereotypes on viewers, the ASA has found that ‘harmful stereotypes can restrict the choices, aspirations and opportunities of children, young people and adults’.
‘These stereotypes can be reinforced by some advertising, which therefore plays a part in unequal gender outcomes, with costs for individuals, the economy and society’.
These ads are not just negatively impactful – they’re also negatively received. A survey undertaken last September by global ad agency Havas Creative found that 47.8% of UK television viewers ‘resented’ ads presenting negative stereotypes, with women agreeing more strongly than men (at 50% and 45.2% respectively).
It’s clear that negative stereotyping not only puts brands in jeopardy with the UK’s advertising authorities; it builds distrust between the UK’s brands and customers.
Think about your creative content and ads. Are there areas in which your content could be more inclusive of a wider spectrum of people?
Come back next week where our social team will cover what 2018 has in store for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more!
In a Facebook post last night Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to the newsfeed to make every social media marketer internally combust.
The news that Facebook would be spending 2018 making changes to the newsfeed that would take the channel back to its roots and ‘bring people closer together and build relationships’, generated heart reactions amongst the general public but sent a strong message to pages and businesses that they were being firmly unfriended by the social giant.
So what are these changes?
Facebook will prioritise posts that ‘spark conversations’ and ‘meaningful interactions’
‘Public content’ including that of publishers and businesses will be shown less meaning Pages might see reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease
However the impact will vary from page to page dependent on Facebook’s criteria of how content is generally interacted with i.e. “Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect”.
Prioritisation of content and formats that Facebook deems to drive conversation e.g. Live Video will show higher in the newsfeed
Engagement-Bait content will be demoted
Has this come out of the blue?
Absolutely not.
A decline in organic reach for businesses and pages has been a discussion point for years. In came a dependency on social media advertising and a flurry of tactical methods from brands and publishers to engage communities through creative and relevant content in attempts to outsmart the algorithm and relive the good old days of free advertising to existing and potential customers/fans.
But the journey hasn’t been smooth; we saw consistent efforts by Facebook to create a division between users and publishers, in fact a very similar update (and the year before that) to its algorithm saw the newsfeed prioritise stories from friends and family over businesses.
These algorithm updates and initiatives to separate users and publishers, be it ‘Friends’ day, or keeping inflated and ‘engagement-bait’ content at bay has looked to reshape the news feed as we know it.
What is the impact?
Taking off our digital marketing hats the changes have been a long time coming with Facebook fighting off persistent demands for monitoring and controlling fake news, bullying and racism. The change to the algorithm is therefore an attempt to remove any external bodies from clogging up the newsfeed and creating a much more ‘organic’ feed where content is shared by users rather than inserted.
For businesses, Facebook has advised that Page posts by publishers won’t be eliminated from the newsfeed but made strong suggestions of the types of content that would and wouldn’t fall foul to the algorithm.
What are our predictions?
So whilst pages that receive an existing high level of engagement, conversation-inducing content and meaningful interactions are thought to see less impact we shall still be keeping a close eye on organic reach and subsequent engagements.
What will be interesting to see is how organic engagement rate changes – logic tells us that less reach (but a dedicated following) should see organic engagement rate increase.
Advertising is a whole other ball game – it’s a seemingly losing battle for pages with little existing engagement or local presence so a dependency on social advertising can only be the next phase for social media publishers. Again logic would suggest an increase in advertisers would lead to an increasingly expensive marketplace as brands and publishers fight for space.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on how things progress and will update with our findings as we wade through the ways businesses can react to the latest algorithm shift.
2017 has been a happening time for digital content: Wendy’s broke the retweets record; the world began reacting to the proliferation of suspect news; Twitter doubled its character count; and the world’s biggest brands continued capturing our imaginations through brilliant campaigns, as content proved that it firmly remains the king.
One of today’s greatest producers of digital content is leading music streaming service Spotify. From quirky Times Square billboards to esoteric partnerships with leading franchises like Stranger Things, its creative campaigns have continuously made headlines and captured the popular imagination.
Last month, Spotify rolled out 2017 Wrapped – its end of the year campaign – which may well be their best to date. The campaign collates each user’s top one hundred most played songs of 2017 into single playlists, and as users keenly published their enigmatic soundtracks to the year, these quickly filled the web.
Read on for our analysis of how 2017 Wrapped wrapped up Spotify’s 2017 so brilliantly.
We’re all well familiar with the age old aphorism of never judging books by their covers. Nevertheless, at a point in time when the Internet is brimming with curated content, and users’ attention spans are becoming slimmer and slimmer for engaging with the same, it’s crucial for content to lead immediately with points of interest that compel.
2017 Wrapped’s visual elements are perfect. The campaign is centered on a micro-site with a homepage that’s animated, interactive and full of colour and life, which is accompanied by compelling copy that brings a sense of immediacy and gives the tool purpose. With conviction, it states: ‘In a year that many wanted to tune out, music gave us a reason to keep listening’.
It’s great for your campaign activity to be telling a rich story or glowing with meaningful content. However, it’s key for there to be high visual quality to match, to ensure that users engage with your work in the first instance.
Find what your audience loves
Spotify’s USP is how it allows users to freely listen to the songs that they want to hear, in playlists they curate, in orders they arrange.
It’s quickly obvious that the personal preferences of its listeners lies at the heart of the service.
2017 Wrapped links into these very same sentiments, creating content that’s unique to every user, which means that they’re more inclined to engage with the content.
Think about what motivations inspire engagement with your business or service. How could your content provide for them?
Increase engagement opportunities by going one step further
As extra elements of the campaign, Spotify included self-curated playlists covering the year’s most popular hits, such as ‘UK Top Female Artists 2017’, ‘UK Top Male Artists 2017’ and ‘Top Groups of 2017 ‘, and a quiz testing your knowledge of your listening habits.
By no means were these the main drivers of user interest. However, they proved to be simple ways of increasing the campaign’s breadth, which required minimal effort to make and expanded the opportunities for engagement.
Identify unique opportunities to create unique user experiences
2017 Wrapped creates Spotify playlists using data that none of Spotify’s competitors can access.
As such, the deliverables that 2017 Wrapped returns are genuinely original – they’ve never happened before and there’s nothing like them – which is an incredibly valuable asset at a time when every brand is competing for attention and clicks.
Netflix’s recent social activity has taken a similar direction, combining its data with inventive copy to hit enormous engagement figures on social:
To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?
Whilst GDRP need to be closely adhered to, think about the data you have that could be made into meaningful content. Be sure to make the most of the opportunity!
And let users share their results
Once a user has generated their playlist, they’re able to share it to their social feeds.
Though each share has a relatively microscopic reach, on a macrocosmic level they fulfill an essential branding purpose, as each sharing user becomes a brand advocate promoting Spotify’s created content to new audiences, driving expansive visibility and facilitating new user engagement opportunities.
When you’ve made excellent content that tells a compelling story, be sure for it to be easily sharable. Beyond anything else, your excellent work deserves all the reach it can get!
We’ll be back in 2018 to cover all the wonderful content the New Year has in store. In the meantime, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year!
This November we attended Facebook Blueprint Live, an interactive training day exploring practical advice for running a successful Facebook advertising campaign, including tips for developing creative ideas that will stand out on competitive news feeds.
Defining goals
There are many objectives Facebook marketing can achieve:
Brand awareness – make as many potential customers aware of your brand as possible
Reach – put your brand in front of relevant audiences who may be interested in your products or services
Traffic – generate visits to your site
Video views – encourage users to watch your video to the end
Lead generation – collect information about people who are interested in your business to follow up with later
Store visits – increase foot traffic to bricks and mortar shopping destinations
Local awareness – promote your brand to residents and visitors in the immediate area
App installs – encourage as many people as possible to install your app on their smartphone
And website conversions –stimulate your brand’s digital sales
For many clients, conversions are the main consideration (and the main way return on investment is measured). However, it’s not advisable to go straight for conversions as an initial goal. Not all users will be at the conversion (or even consideration) point of the sales funnel when your ad reaches them, so, strategically, it makes sense to begin by raising brand awareness, then retarget users who engaged with your content, and then engage this even smaller pool with sales focused content to prompt a conversion.
Using video in Facebook advertising
One of the key messages we took from Blueprint Live is that video content is the present, rather than the future, and that social agencies should be putting video firmly at the focus of current content strategies.
According to Facebook, the average advertising video is 15 seconds or shorter. So, aim for brevity and directness when creating video content. The challenge is to tell a compelling story in limited time, encourage users to watch right until the end, and create a video that ‘fits’ naturally onto your target users’ timelines.
This clever example of a snappy video ad from Taco Bell lampoons the incredibly popular ‘Tasty’ instructional cooking videos and is a good example of a familiar yet unique take on a sponsored video post:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BCyMSqxQhDU/
Think vertical
Unlike traditional TV advertising, the vast majority of mobile videos are optimised vertically, rather than horizontally, which means all photos and videos should be shot with this in mind. When creating video or creative content for Facebook, work mobile first, ensuring the experience for smartphone users is perfect, and then worry about optimising for desktop.
Hit the target
Amazing creative without clever targeting is doomed to fail. Strategic targeting of different audiences can present an opportunity to tailor creative to each demographic. For example: a jewellery brand may want to advertise its products directly to an affluent female audience, as well as targeting men with ads focused on gifting.
Delight without sound
Videos on Facebook auto play without sound, but Facebook says that 60% of brands still create videos that cannot be understood without audio.
When creating video ads, either ensure that the narrative can be understood without sound, or include clear subtitles right from the first frame.
The below video from Hotels.com is a brilliant example of knowingly acknowledging the limitations of silent videos, while encouraging viewers to watch right to the end of the clip:
Three second window
The average time to scroll a full screen on a smartphone is 2.7 seconds, giving advertisers a 3 second or lower window to catch the attention of notoriously fickle social media audiences.
Younger audiences scroll even quicker, giving advertisers just 2 seconds to stop the scroll and encourage users to engage. For video content, this means creating an opening shot that sparks curiosity immediately and avoiding drawn out introductions (or introductions in general).
GIFs and Cinemagraphs
Video may be the present (and future), but they are also extremely expensive to produce. A handy compromise to add movement to your advertising posts is using GIFs and cinemagraphs – short, repeating videos with subtle animation that doesn’t require as much time or budget as a full length video. Check out some examples of this below:
We were split into groups and given a task to create a social media advertising campaign for a randomly selected client. The task was split into several stages, culminating with a presentation about our campaign in front of the attendees and judged by a panel (incentivised with a mystery prize for the winning teams).
Each table received a brief from a fictional institution. In our case, it was from Wright Bank, a made-up financial company with a broad range of products (no frills credit cards, car insurance, retirement plans) and a fifty-year legacy within the UK.
Targeting
Targeting was our first important consideration – we created our customer personas based on the goals and products of the client. In my team’s case this was:
Young people looking to build credit with a no frills credit card
Couples looking for a great deal on a mortgage
Older consumers looking ahead to retirement plans
Creative
The creative for our campaign involved focusing on the young adult and college student audience to boost awareness and conversions, which manifested itself in a video wherein a 20-25-year-old’s head was placed on an infant’s body – an admittedly bizarre concept in the cold light of day.
The concept was intended to be surreal enough to stand out on a news feed within a few seconds, and to acknowledge the infantilising effect that financial insecurity can have for young people, presenting the credit card as a means of escaping this.
Presentation
We presented our ideas to the group (our illustrations of ‘the credit card kid’ raised a few laughs/eyebrows depending on the individual), which went down a treat. We weren’t the most polished of teams, but we definitely enjoyed ourselves in the creation of the campaign. And so…
To the (third joint) victor, the spoils. We capped the day off by winning an extremely practical prize in the form of this Facebook flask.
All in all, a useful, enlightening experience, and a chance to gain insights about Facebook’s advertising platform straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth. If you want to learn more about Facebook advertising, check out Facebook Blueprint for resources and advice for all skill levels.
Fusion Unlimited are delighted to have been appointed as the new SEO partner of Knightsbridge Furniture.
Knightsbridge are market leaders in producing high quality and bespoke B2B furniture solutions. Their specialism is furnishing hospitality and healthcare locations. They’ve been based in nearby Bradford for over eighty years.
Fusion met with Knightsbridge to discuss the performance of their digital channels. With extensive experience of B2B SEO, we outlined a clear vision for improving the company’s holistic digital approach, and succinctly presented the expertise that we can bring to the table.
Our proposal met a glowing response. ‘We loved Fusion’s expertise and commitment to detailed planning’, said Knightsbridge Furniture CEO Alan Towns. ‘Their pitch showed us that they understood exactly what our business is hoping to achieve, alongside a proven track record of success in B2B markets.
Fusion has strong experience working with big names in our target sectors and we’re confident that their in-depth strategy will achieve real results’.
Craig Broadbent, Fusion Unlimited Technical Director, said: ‘We’re really looking forward to applying our specialist B2B SEO knowledge to Knightsbridge. There are clear search marketing opportunities within the contract furniture market and we’re delighted to be partnering with Knightsbridge in the next stage of their growth’.
Working with Knightsbridge is an exciting opportunity. We look forward to helping the company grow online and enjoy all of the benefits that a best-in-class SEO strategy can bring.
Whilst the intermittent wet weather of the last two weeks seems set to bring the British summertime to a close, we’ve recently been delighted to see the wide acclaim received by our client Halfords for their exceptional performance throughout the summer, making headlines in leading publications such as Internet Retailing and The Telegraph.
Halfords’ strategy focused on the on-trend phenomenon of staycations. Growing numbers of British families are swapping ten-hour flights for fish ‘n chips and pitching their tents a little closer to home. As one of the UK’s leading suppliers of holiday-making must-haves like sleeping bags, tents, bikes and roof-racks, it was essential for Halfords’ voice to be at the heart of the conversation.
In collaboration with Halfords’ internal teams, we implemented a cross-channel strategy to bring Halfords’ vision to life. With the objective of maintaining and increasing Halfords’ visibility for the camping category, we sought to create compelling content to drive organic visibility and secure coverage with major publications and features on high-quality lifestyle blogs. Production of an interactive camping guide whilst working alongside influencers to produce unique stories and advice helped Halfords increase SoV by 3.86% with over 50 pieces of coverage. Additionally, we supported staycation-specific products with promotional PPC ad copy to harness intent driven by the wider content strategy. Granular Shopping structure allowed dynamic support of key products during peak periods.
A snap from our work on the guide! (Halfords)
Revenue-wise, our combined activity provided the brand with a summer to remember. In comparison to the first twenty weeks of the last financial year, total sales rose by 11.2%, revenue from retail services (such as bike repairs and car -part fitting) increased by 18.3%, and overall revenue went up by 4.8%.
Another significant action by the brand was their perfecting of their in-store collection services. 85% of all digital orders are now picked up in Halfords stores, which is important for a brand who specialise in items difficult to ship. The availability enables customers to enjoy the benefits of easy online purchasing whilst minimising the hassle of delivery.
It’s always great to see our clients gain the recognition their efforts deserve, and we’re excited to how our brands’ successes will be received in the future!
Interested in how we can help your brand flourish online? Explore our range of digital services.
When we think of Cannes, we think of films. The stunning gowns and clothes of the awards ceremony, the gilded prizes, the sunshine rippling on red carpet and Hollywood’s brightest glimmering upon it.
Happening each year in May, Cannes Film Festival is one of the most acclaimed and prestigious events in the entertainment calendar. However, that’s not all the lights, cameras and action that the summer has in store for the glamorous Riviera city.
Every June, the Cannes Lions festival celebrates the greatest achievements in content creation across the globe: showbiz meets SEO, acting and Adwords, as best actor morphs into best advert and Spielberg into Google.
Across the many categories, so much of the content that’s been nominated is of an exceptionally high standard. Read on for our five favourite pieces from the Cannes Lions prize winners and nominations!
Chicago Gallery Brings Van Gogh to Life With Airbnb
The bedroom of Vincent Van Gogh’s 1890s’ home in Arles is arguably one of the most famous rooms in the history of art: it’s the subject of three paintings by the Dutch master, the first damaged by river flooding and the second and third painted as ‘repetitions’.
Last year, the Art Institute of Chicago had the unprecedented opportunity of presenting all three versions of Van Gogh’s painting in the same exhibition. In the run up to the event, the Institute partnered with agency Leo Burnett, creating a striking campaign that enabled the world to experience Van Gogh’s masterpieces more vividly than ever before:
The gallery and Leo Burnett commissioned a team of artists and designers to recreate the iconic bedroom as a real room, which they then placed on Airbnb for guests to rent out at just $10 a night, including tickets to the exhibition!
It’s a brilliant instance of an impeccable use of technology, mixed with some phenomenal thinking outside of the box and artistry. Life as art turns to art as life. We love it!
Björk Buzzes As VR Music Video Picks Up Grand Prix for Digital Craft
VR took the plaudits this year in the Digital Craft category, and no-one exhibited a better understanding or application of the increasingly-deployed technology than Björk in the sublime music video for her song ‘NOTGET’.
The jury unanimously praised Björk’s masterful and bold deployment of virtual reality, perceiving the video’s VR elements as being essential to the content’s success, profoundly facilitating the telling of its story.
Previously, brands have been criticised for excessively incorporating VR into their content for limited, novelty purposes, adding an advanced UX to material that may otherwise be completely lacklustre. This year saw content creators really adapting to VR’s opportunities; Google won second place in the category for their VR tech, the Google Tilt Brush.
Bank of Aland’s Green Cards Bloom with the Grand Prix for Cyber Tech
As part of a wider Unesco-supported education programme called ‘The Baltic Sea Project’, the Bank of Aland-who operate throughout Scandinavia-were applauded for their development of environmentally friendly payment cards and awarded the Grand Prix for Cyber in kind.
Made from biodegradable plastic, the cards provide customers with monthly insights into the impact of each transaction on their carbon footprint, advising how they can reduce it in the future.
Overall, it’s a really cool and smart campaign, executed with style and flair, and for a great and relevant cause, too.
Twitter’s Minimalist # Strategy Makes Major Impression
Known for being one of the most happening corners of the Internet, it’s no surprise to see Twitter in the Cannes Lions running. However, you may not be expecting the category in which they won their Grand Prix: Outside Advertising!
Using just the iconic Twitter #, the campaign shows a sophisticated, creative understanding of what it is we think of when we think of Twitter, masterfully and succinctly capturing and reflecting the brand’s essence.
Another entrant in the category that caught our eye, and made enormous, continuous impact on the web, was a campaign led by BTEC Paris for French alcohol awareness organisation Addict Aide, titled ‘Like My Addiction’ and based around an influencer: Louise Delage.
From her Insta content, Delage seems like your typical online socialite: a Paris-born bon vivant with over 100,000 followers, jet-setting all across the world to live her flashiest life, regularly uploading stylish content along the way.
Delage’s Instagram presents a person who loves, lives, to party: there’s a drink in literally every photograph, no matter what she’s doing. Her fans followed her revelry with every like, watching her journey through day, night and the early hours.
Here lies the twist: Louise Delage doesn’t exist; she never has. She’s a character that BTEC Paris and Addict Aide created, an online persona on a fake Insta account posting scheduled and studio-crafted content, her social media presence inflated by the use of bot followers and the participation of leading influencers for outreach.
Vividly, and with outstanding creative commitment, the campaign illustrated the difficulty of identifying addiction and reflected back to us-the viewers and users of the Internet-the casual ways in which we can enable such behaviour with every like and share.
It’s the month of pranking your friends and eating chocolate eggs for breakfast. Perhaps April’s content was always destined to be a little weird.
We watched a burger brand use ads to turn smart speakers into marketers, saw a cycling Mads Mikkelsen crash a Danish dinner party and followed one man’s mercurial mission for a year’s supply of nuggets manifest in the most viral tweet of all time.
It was the best of content, it was the worst of content. Read on with our round-up of four of the month’s most noteworthy campaigns.
Responsibly thanks you for drinking Responsibly
We’re all familiar with the advice at the end of drink ads, calling on us to drink responsibly. Ubrew played off of this familiarity to create an ingenuous piece of content that made sizable, hoppy ripples across the web. Introducing the latest beer in Ubrew’s extensive range: Responsibly.
Ubrew’s piece provides superb insight for content creators everywhere on creating fresh and relatable content: namely, that to think outside the box you don’t need to throw the box away. Instead, there’s a lot of joy to be had in making subtle yet compelling tweaks to material that we’re already familiar with!
Burger King’s TV ad gets the AI talking
Whilst Ubrew’s resourcefulness finds the beer brand hitching a ride on their rivals’ airtime, Burger King have been taking similarly mischievous strides in an ad targeting home smart speakers such as Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_O54le4__I
The ad sees a Burger King worker confess that there’s not enough time ‘to explain all the fresh ingredients in the new Whopper sandwich’, before daringly saying: ‘Ok Google – what is the Whopper burger?’ In response, smart speakers proceed by reading out the entirety of the Whopper’s Wikipedia entry, forming the basis of a content piece lasting substantially longer than the ‘fifteen second ad’ Burger King claims it to be.
The campaign wasn’t all plain sailing: for one, Google revised their Home system so that it passed over the ad altogether, whilst various Wikipedia users impishly and inevitably edited the Whopper’s page so that its recipe included a platter of unsavoury flavours – ‘rats’ ranked high amongst the worst.
Even with its complications, Burger King’s content built buzz, attracted attention and created conversations. Arguably, the creative way that users engaged with the content complements the brand’s holistic digital strategy that veers wholeheartedly towards the stranger side of the content spectrum:
Carlsberg returns to Cophenhagen and drives home its Danish roots
Ubrew’s ironic ad departs starkly from the campaigns of many of its competitors, with drinks brands such as San Miguel, Thatchers, Peroni and Stella Artois (‘it’s cidre, not cider’) turning towards antiquity and authenticity, asserting premium from brand heritage.
Carlsberg’s latest campaign, titled ‘The Danish Way’, sees the Danish company adapting their marketing strategy to better meet the work of their competitors whilst retaining the playful notes of their previous material, in a humorous yet charming advert starring Mads Mikkelsen.
The ad follows Mikkelsen cycling through a series of enigmatically Danish scenes – along the circumference of an outdoor bath, through a quaintly decorated apartment – as he contemplates what it is that makes the Danish people ‘the happiest in the world’. Is it that they make the ‘world’s best beer’? ‘Probably’, is what the advert concludes.
Carlsberg’s piece is a perfect example of intelligently tailored content: it responsively follows the lead of its competitors whilst retaining the popular humour of Carlsberg’s previous campaigns. What’s more, the ad links nicely into hygge, demonstrating the value that’s to be had in keeping your brand’s notes aligned to the zeitgeist.
Wendy’s takes on Ellen with #nuggsforcarter
When he tweeted American fast food diner Wendy’s asking how many RTs he needed for a year’s supply of free nuggets (Wendy’s answer: a feasible ’18 million’), Carter Wilkerson (@carterjwm) could never have imagined the response he’d receive:
Huge portions of the Internet threw their support behind Carter’s fast food plight, with world leading brands sharing the tweet as a basis for their own content, major celebs getting in on the action and millions of members of the online public virtuously supporting what must at first have felt like an impossibly up-hill climb.
In the interim, Wendy’s consistently sustained the tweet’s visibility, steadily monitoring their social channels and creating engaging and responsive material.
At the time of initially writing, the tweet was just 3,000 retweets away from becoming the all time most shared tweet. As of today, however, Carter has now overtaken Ellen DeGeneres to become the esteemed holder of the accolade of having written the most retweeted tweet of all time. More importantly, Wendy’s have granted Carter his wish; he might need a bigger trophy cabinet to showcase all those nuggets!
Firstly perceiving a relatively arbitrary tweet as an opportunity for generating humorous content, and then helping that tweet become the most viral tweet ever, Wendy’s illustrate superbly the value of having a highly responsive digital strategy that facilitates the creation of dynamic and captivating content.
Whilst we don’t think anyone will be overtaking Carter any time soon, you never know – we certainly don’t! Join us again next month to see whether we have any new Twitter title contenders, and how May’s campaigns fare in comparison!
April has been yet another fascinating month for social media with Instagram Stories topping 200 million daily users, a spotlight shone on a new Twitter alternative and Facebook announcing features that could be straight out of Black Mirror… we’ve rounded up the biggest stories of the month below.
Facebook
Firstly, Facebook have announced a new mobile-exclusive ad format – Collection. These ads feature a video and a selection of products beneath it, allowing brands to tell a story then showcase relevant products for users to browse without leaving the app. This new ad format will be extremely useful for retail companies, enabling the discovery of new products alongside more brand-focused messaging within the space of a single advert.
In Messenger news, Group Payments have been rolled out to US users of the app. Although it has long been possible to send money to an individual via the app, this new feature allows users to split payments from multiple parties all within the app.
This development within the app indicates Facebook’s increasing investment in its capabilities for dealing with payments, and businesses will need to consider how they can take advantage of this focus as in-app payments surely spread to other areas of the platform.
Finally, in what some people will surely characterise as a step into social media’s dystopian future, Facebook have launched Spaces, “a new VR app where you hang out with friends as if you were in the same room.”
As odd as the description may sound, the dawn of VR heralds new possibilities for businesses, and although it’s difficult to see what form they will take at the moment, with Facebook planning to invest $3bn in VR over the next decade, this will surely be where opportunities will soon present themselves.
Twitter
In a fairly unique advertising opportunity, Twitter is now offering Custom Hearts on Periscope videos, allowing users to post campaign-specific logos and icons during broadcasts. Although this could mostly be seen as a novelty with no real effect on video effectiveness, for large campaigns this may present a new way of generating awareness, or improving sentiment towards a campaign.
Additionally, Twitter has announced the introduction of mid-roll ads, allowing companies to advertise on a new area of video content, one that could be seen as more captive than pre-roll varieties as users are already invested in the video by this point.
Video is a priority for Twitter’s future, and it claims that its “videos are 2x more memorable when compared to the same ads on ‘other premium sites’” – meaning a large focus will remain on developing new video and advertising opportunities going forwards.
Instagram
Instagram Stories has reached over 200 million daily users – surpassing Snapchat’s Stories feature – with 100 million of these coming in the last 6 months. To rub salt into the wounds, Instagram is now lifting more of Snapchat’s features like the ability to add stickers and pin text to Stories. As Instagram’s growth is showing no signs of slowing down, it is clear that it will play an increasingly important role in the content & advertising strategies of companies on social media.
Mastodon
Finally, for those looking for a new short-form platform to escape Twitter’s hold over the format, Mastodon may be the answer. This new network’s de-centralised system and 500-character limit sufficiently set it apart from other offerings, with users able to set up their own ‘instances’ of the network. Although this platform isn’t particularly friendly to businesses at the moment (no ads or tracking are currently allowed), it has been clear in the past that these guidelines can often change as networks grow in size. So, if users begin to migrate away from Twitter in large numbers, this might be another network for businesses to keep an eye on.
