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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!)
There’s no doubt 2021 has been a wild one but as we got used to WFH, Friday Fun, back to the office, socials, new client wins, award wins, and continuing to go above and beyond for our existing clients, we also made 6 new hires this year!
So whilst our senior leadership team might have been with Fusion for 83 years combined (!) our newest recruits are only just getting started on their journey with us. Want to find out what it’s like to work at Leeds’ best-kept secret? Let Tom, Charlie, Emily, George, Jonny and Elise tell you more…
You joined the Fusion team earlier this year, how would you summarise your time here so far?
Tom: It’s been great! Everyone has been very welcoming, it’s a great team to work in and I feel like I’ve learned a lot since I started. Working across different clients has been something new for me as I worked in-house previously, but it’s been very enjoyable and it’s helped me grow.
Emily: This is my first full-time role post-university so when I think about my knowledge of the field when I joined the team compared to now, I have learned soo much. It’s been quite the journey starting from working remotely, which is why it’s now great having the option to go into the office & see everyone at socials face-to-face rather than through a screen.
Charlie: My time at Fusion so far has been incredibly fulfilling and a rewarding experience. In terms of development I’ve had continual support from the team as a whole, positively challenged with opportunities to grow, whilst also being introduced to and welcomed across all teams.
Jonny: In one word; welcoming! The whole team has been incredibly warm and friendly since the day I joined, and has made it an absolute breeze to settle in. Every agency likes to talk about collaboration and teamwork, but with Fusion you can really feel it. The team is always ready and willing to support on any issue or challenge.
George: It’s been great, very fast-paced and no day is the same. I’ve loved the variety of sites that we get to work on and take great satisfaction from seeing recommended technical actions implemented with a positive impact.
What’s been the biggest surprise about working at Fusion?
Tom: Not a surprise as such, but everyone works to a very high standard and is very professional in what they do, and I haven’t worked in an environment like that before where the standards are so high, so it’s great to be within it.
Emily: I had no preconceptions of what it would be like working for Fusion, so it has been a pleasant surprise to find it’s a fun and welcoming environment to work in. There has always been someone to turn to if I have a question so that has been really helpful for my own personal development.
Charlie: I think when you start a new job it can be a nervous time, but across the interview process to starting my first day, a sense of welcoming and warmth came across in abundance – the extent to which this has continued goes far beyond what I could have hoped for. Feeling like you belong in a workplace is so essential and I feel I’ve really found that here.
Jonny: How adaptable the team is. I joined Fusion during lockdown and it was a genuine surprise to see how well Fusion had adapted to working from home. I never felt like I skipped a beat switching between the office and home. That being said Charlie’s barista skills make trips to the office somewhat essential; the man has travelled the world in order to perfect the art of coffee for the whole team’s benefit – definitely not one to be missed.
George: I’d say the biggest surprise would be how efficient and adjusted everyone has become to WFH, whilst maintaining communication and remaining collaborative.
Top skill or tip you’ve learned this year in your specialism?
Tom: Attention to detail is the top tip I’ve learned, whether that be a change in metrics or a market trend, constantly looking at the small details has been massive for me.
Emily: I’d say for anyone starting in the field, try to make clear comprehensive notes while you’re learning anything new. It is helpful to have a written explanation of what was done and why so that you can go back to it when you come across the task again. It is especially valuable to have these notes written in a step-by-step format so that they are organised in the order you will complete the task.
Charlie: Be curious, read across varying industries and always look to discover and anticipate the next development.
Jonny: Perhaps a bit cliché but…I’ve learned the value in thinking outside of the box. Recognising that the solutions to some challenges involve brand new processes, and true collaboration with other departments/people has been of great value and has given me a fresh perspective on client strategy.
George: You could say I have become relatively accustomed to ScreamingFrog, the capabilities of that tool are endless for a technical SEO.
What are your predictions for digital marketing trends in 2022?
Tom: Automation will continue to be more prominent for platforms.
Emily: I have found it interesting how much can change within the industry in such a small amount of time, for example, what is considered best practice can adapt relatively quickly. From this, I think there will be an even greater focus on automation as technology evolves and changes the way we work.
Charlie: Customer-wise, ‘experience’ across the digital journey path is increasingly becoming a social currency. Elsewhere, privacy challenges will continue to affect the wider industry, but present an opportunity to develop more meaningful connections between all parties.
Jonny: I think we’ll continue to see rich media play a bigger role in Paid Search. Image and video assets provide a fantastic opportunity for clients to communicate their brand values, whether that be within a SERP or attached to content. Text ads are limited by characters, but a picture paints a thousand words!
George: On the SEO side of things, I expect plenty more Google algorithm updates – including Page Experience finally coming to desktop (although that’s not much of a prediction).
Anything else you’d like to share?
Tom: Fusion is a great agency to work for and I’m constantly learning from a lot of good people. I feel very grateful to be a part of the team and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in 2022!
Jonny: It’s clear to see from day one Fusion’s friendly and welcoming atmosphere, but it’s also especially great to see that same culture shared with clients. There is a real sense of collaboration with all my clients and I’ve been fortunate enough to build fantastic relationships with people from a variety of industries.
George: Just that how happy I am to be a part of team Fusion, it’s a happy and supportive place to work.
Like what you hear? Join Team Fusion! We have exciting opportunities on our careers page.
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.
I understand that, and thanks for reaching out, but from what I see market behaviour in ads is quite different in the EU and US. So just testing the US doesn't seem like it's helpful for a solution intended to be global?
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…
If anyone thought this year would be any different in the world of social media, three words quickly teamed up to prove otherwise. We’ll give you a hint. The first is ‘vegan’. And the third is ‘rolls’.
Read on for baked goods and more in our brand new round-up of the most buzzworthy social activations of the last month.
Huddersfield Town announces surprising new manager
Back in December, Huddersfield Town football club parted ways with their manager, David Wagner.
The club had been linked heavily with German coach Jan Siewert, when a keenly-eyed Sky Sports news team thought they spotted him in the crowd when Huddersfield played Manchester City. Unfortunately for the reporter, he quickly discovered that it wasn’t Jan Siewert; it was City fan ‘Martin from Wakefield’ instead!
A lot was made of the encounter on social media, which cameras caught in full. And Huddersfield got in on the act when announcing Siewert’s appointment, involving Wakefield’s finest in the content creation and beginning their video with Martin sat at Siewert’s desk in the manager’s office.
The Huddersfield Town coat labelled ‘MFW’ – Martin from Wakefield – is a nice touch too!
Greggs’ reputation for social media antics doesn’t need much introduction.
They made headlines in 2017 with their controversial nativity scene, exchanging the baby Jesus for Gregg’s sausage roll. But that furore pales in comparison to their latest media frenzy – which, ironically, results from something far less controversial.
At first, all Greggs did was announce the launch of their very own vegan sausage roll, coinciding with the start of Veganuary.
Like a finely-grilled panini, things really heated up once the Internet began engaging. And Greggs handled the naysayers masterfully, despatching a barrage of fiery tweets that caused a good chuckle from the social crowd:
The campaign marked a masterclass in social media marketing, from the standards of creative, to community management.
Netflix brings Bandersnatch to social
January was a superb month for streaming giants Netflix, with a range of titles receiving massive pop culture interest and acclaim, from Roma, to FYRE, to Sex Education.
Another title that captured the Internet’s imagination was Bandersnatch, the interactive choose-your-own-adventure style film from the creators of Black Mirror.
Not just content with enormous success on-screen, the Netflix digital team also brought the Bandersnatch concept to life on Twitter via Twitter Polls, giving their online audience the chance for an adventure of their own.
OK! I got jealous of all the Bandersnatch memes, so I wrote my own campy horror story (it’s already a cult classic in 3 small countries) where YOU control what the main character does using twitter polls. You’ll also help crack the case at the end.
Let’s set the scene. Alex is on his way back to Seven Oaks Drama Camp, this time not as a camper but as a counselor after a failed acting career and getting kicked out of his parents' house. While at camp, an “incident” occurs that will leave one person dead and several suspects.
First up, help us with casting. Alex is our protagonist. He’s 28, still doesn’t have his shit together, the type of guy who never fulfills your Venmo request but has a good heart. Should he be played by…
And it continues! Head to Twitter to see how the whole story unfolded. It’s a neat way of bringing your fans an engaging experience – and utilising Twitter’s functionality in an unconventional yet stimulating way.
Last year, MoonPie didn’t run any ads in the Super Bowl per se. Instead, they posted images on social media containing scripts that would have been in their ads. And these were all about as usual and conformist as you’d expect:
I wanted to run commercials but we've been too busy making MoonPies so I will be posting several scripts during breaks tonight that I have written for very good and important MoonPie spots that you can enjoy right here on Twitter instead #TheBigThing
This year, MoonPie took their subversive Super Bowl ads approach a step further, by turning their scripts of the year before into full one-minute video ads. You can enjoy them below:
This received acclaim from leading industry press, including a spot in AdWeek, and enormous engagements from avid Twitter users from across the galaxy.
Come back next month for more social media stories and highlights!
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.
Though Instagram’s starred in marketing news repeatedly in recent weeks, with a host of updates that we covered in our last blog post, there have also been significant changes on many of the Internet’s other leading social media channels.
Read on as we round up several of the biggest social platform updates in recent weeks, with analysis of its impact on the industry.
Facebook cracks down on sensationalist headlines – and you won’t BELIEVE the reasons why!
Well, actually, the reasons why probably won’t shock you. In fact, this is exactly the type of rhetorical grandiosity that Facebook’s looking to crack down on with its new ad policy, which is set to penalise click-bait ads which sensationalise their content or omit meaningful details in order to manipulatively improve click-through-rate, Marketing Land reports.
Facebook’s stance follows a new policy announcement in May 2017, that they would be implementing steps to minimise the impact – and reach – of disruptive, malicious or sensationalist posts.
As an indication of the new policy in action, Facebook has already removed more than eight-hundred pages in recent weeks that consistently misled users with overly-dramatic and disingenuous headlines.
While the vast majority of these pages were political in kind, the policy change will have ramifications for digital marketers, who’ll need to ensure that their posts aren’t withholding key information purely to bait site sessions out of users. And though we certainly won’t be posting this to social with the promise that it’ll change your understanding of the industry FOREVER, we hope you’ll get something out of it, anyway.
Pinterest revamps Ads Manager for the first time since 2016
In recent years, Pinterest has slowly but surely picked up the pace as a content curation channel of choice for aesthetically-minded users the world over.
To kick things off, Pinterest has given its Ads Manager a considerable overhaul. A campaign set-up wizard is now available to help users create and optimise campaigns – which will be particularly beneficial to first-time marketers exploring the channel’s merits to their brands. Optimisation options include setting campaign goals, choosing specific audience targeting, and determining the exact Pins that are to be promoted within the feed or search results.
Complementing this, they’ve also brought in more comprehensive reporting elements with a snazzy new reporting dashboard, making ROI easier to monitor – and, thus, deliver – and allowing advertisers to vary campaigns in a more flexible and intuitive way.
Pinterest has also redesigned its Shoppable Pins, introducing reactive stock controls and dynamic pricing, and allowed greater numbers of pins to use the shopping bag feature, which lets users click-through directly from the Pinterest Shoppable ad to the checkout on the native site. For e-commerce brands in particular, this is something to be sure to look into.
We’re always interested to see new channels taking strides to allow users to more easily see and purchase the products they love. In coming months, we’re keen to see how the channel develops!
New research finds ways of using social media to proactively monitor mental health
Healthy social media usage has been frequently in the news in recent months, with several channels taking steps to increase and safeguard its users’ well-being, such as Instagram’s introduction of an anti-bully filter to its ‘You’re all caught up’ indicator, encouraging users to be mindful of listlessly scrolling through photos they’ve already seen.
In a new and intriguing development, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania – and the World Well-Being Project – have created an algorithm that’s able to trawl through users’ Facebook posts and, from their choice of language and manner of expression, identify whether they could be at risk of any mental health problems.
Johannes Eichstaedt, WWBP founder, explained in interview that ‘Social media data contain markers akin to the genome.
With surprisingly similar methods to those used in genomics, we can comb social media data to find these markers.
Depression appears to be something quite detectable in this way; it really changes people’s use of social media in a way that something like skin disease or diabetes doesn’t.
The hope is that one day, these screening systems can be integrated into systems of care’.
If social could unobtrusively keep an eye out for its users’ mental well-being, then this is just another way that channels could take strides to look after the health of users online.
Twitter takes steps to make its rules’ enforcement clearer
Currently, when you report a tweet, what happens next is a little unclear. You aren’t notified if the tweet – or the tweeter – is penalised, and the tweets remain visible in your feed, despite the fact you’ve shown you think it shouldn’t be there.
Twitter’s acknowledged the issue and, in response, is introducing new measures that will make it much more apparent when they’re taking action, and why they’re doing so.
Moving forward, when Twitter deletes a reported tweet, they’ll indicate it on the user’s timeline by showing a warning in place of the now-removed message. This will include a link through to the Twitter rules, explaining how the removed content violated terms of service:
Additionally, any tweet you report – regardless of whether Twitter takes action or not – will also be hidden from your timeline and replaced with a placeholder:
It’s interesting to see Twitter taking greater strides to improve its transparency, and we wonder whether this will roll out onto other channels in the future.
That’s all for this month, folks! We’ll be back next month with a round-up of all the most significant changes on social.
Fusion Unlimited is delighted to announce its appointment by Scotts & Co, the owners of the nationwide multi-channel retail businesses Scotts of Stow, Bloom and SkimGuard.
Scotts & Co has been a market leader in mail order trading for many years. The group sought to match its offline success with its online performance and work with a specialist agency to develop a comprehensive multi-channel strategy and best-in-class CRM program.
Scotts invited Fusion to pitch, where our paid performance team quickly demonstrated its expertise in the field. We were appointed to begin our work soon after.
‘After meeting with many providers, Fusion Unlimited were quickly identified as the partner to develop our PPC channels’, said Scotts’ Digital Marketing Manager Barry Kirley.
‘They were quick to understand our requirements and need to maintain a suitable return on advertising spend while expanding and nurturing our existing campaigns’.
Mark Curtis, Fusion’s Managing Director, said: ‘Scotts & Co is a national leader in mail order retail, and we are delighted to be working with them to grow their online marketing channels’.
‘The Fusion team pride ourselves on our meticulous approach to meeting performance targets, and our proven track record of working with many of the UK’s best-known brands. Scotts is a great match for our team’s reputation as experts in multi-channel retail’.
Fusion Unlimited is a specialist digital agency, with over twenty years’ experience of working with many of the UK’s biggest household names.
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:
Listen I know it’s kinda late or whatever but there’s still time to tear open a MoonPie and just tell it all about your day everything’s gonna be ok
Parents, talk to your teens about MoonPie Ask them why they are sending me DMs asking me to prom Is this something you are comfortable with Please ask them
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
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.
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?
— Netflix "Mariah Carey's Merriest Christmas" US (@netflix) December 11, 2017
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:
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.
Make a cuppa and take five minutes of your day to find out all about last month’s most notable developments in social media, courtesy of Fusion’s social team!
Facebook
Facebook’s main changes last month involved the introduction of several new features to its group functionality.
New additions include:
Automated welcome posts that admins can use to personally welcome new members to communities.
Badges that make admins’ and different members’ roles easily identifiable.
Group member profiles, outlining users’ interests, upcoming events and past contributions. For many users, groups form a major part of their Facebook experience. It’s great to see Facebook’s commitment to improving the service and making groups more inclusive than ever.
Simultaneously, the service announced new measures for tackling the proliferation of suspect political ads, which posed a major problem during the 2016 US election.
Firstly, Facebook will soon require all political advertisers to verify their identities before allowing them to post, which will minimise the influence of anonymous users. Simultaneously, they will ask advertisers to disclose political ads’ affiliations within the ad copy, making political posts easier to spot. Any posts in breach of these standards will be detected automatically through Facebook’s machine learning technology.
To complement this from a user’s perspective, Facebook will also introduce a ‘View Ads’ button which will enable users to see every ad that a page is running. It’s another way of increasing pages’ accountability for their campaigns.
All these changes will be rolled out in Canada next year, and introduced in the US in time for the 2018 midterm elections.
Twitter
Twitter faced similar criticism for its failure to moderate a high volume of low-quality ads. Like Facebook, they too have refined their services to improve ad standards and transparency.
To tackle the issue of political ads, Twitter has created a new template specifically for electioneering posts. These will look different to typical display ads. As on Facebook, they’ll need to clearly state their political affiliation.
Twitter’s vision of how the new electioneering ads will appear. (Credit: Twitter)
As a larger scale commitment, Twitter has also launched what it’s called its Transparency Centre. This will enable users to see:
All ads that are running on the service
How long ads have been running
All ad creative associated with campaigns that you are being targeted by
And personal information on which ads you are eligible to be serve
It’s interesting to see both channels’ responses to what’s been a crisis for the industry. We’re keen to find out how they continue developing these aspects of their service in the future.
Instagram
Last month, Instagram added two new features to help users create particularly quirky content.
For Halloween, the channel introduced a range of hair-raising stickers and frightening face-changing filters. Users were able to shapeshift into many of the season’s spookiest staples, such as bats, ghouls, zombies and more:
They also added a comical camera effect called Super Zoom. When pressed, the camera suddenly zooms in, as an appropriately dramatic soundtrack plays in the background to set the scene:
Instagram has also kept up the pressure on rival mobile app Snapchat by introducing a new live-streaming feature called ‘Go Live With’. This allows live-streaming users to invite others to feature within their stream. For influencers and their fans this will create new opportunities for engagement and live content creation. We’re intrigued to see how the channel’s biggest stars respond!
Post-Halloween greetings from Fusion Content. It’s been the season to be scary. The world’s biggest brands and content creators headed outside to trick and treat, as campaign activity took a frightening turn towards the paranormal.
Now that the pumpkin lanterns are well and truly out, read on for the best examples of Halloween marketing this year.
Stranger Things turns the internet Upside Down (spoiler free!)
The Internet loves talking about what it’s been watching. In recent months, few series have received more hype than the newest Stranger Things. Netflix released the show’s second season on October the 27th.
As a goldmine of pop culture throwbacks and retro references, the series presented super partnership opportunities to a range of brands:
SPOTIFY
Spotify allowed users to find out which Stranger Things characters share their musical tastes. Firstly, they tailored playlists to the season’s main characters’ preferences. Then, they compared them with users’ listening histories. Options ranged from the Demogorgon’s Upside Downers to Eleven’s Breakfast Jams!
TOPSHOP
Topshop converted their flagship Oxford Street branch into a Stranger Things shrine. They recreated a range of the show’s most iconic locations, such as Hawkins Lab, the games arcade and the Byers’ heavily graffitied living room:
These are the snack of choice of one of Stranger Things’ most iconic characters. Since series two arrived, the Eggo Twitter has practically become a Stranger Things fan account (with a few outrageously bad puns thrown into the mix):
All of these are instances of brands imaginatively tapping into mainstream pop culture events to create relevant and timely marketing. Kellogg’s activity is an especially excellent example. By capitalising on Eggo’s sudden uplift of pop culture relevance, and crafting a social strategy around it, they’ve been able to grow their brand in a new direction for a widened and younger audience.
Svedka Vodka uses display ads to haunt the internet
Svedka Vodka took an unconventional but eerily brilliant approach to its Halloween-themed marketing, which combined creative activity and remarketing to possess users’ social feeds with spooky Svedka Vodka content.
The campaign began by serving clickbait Halloween-themed cocktail recipes on users’ feeds. However, all wasn’t as it seemed. If a user clicked they link, they’d instead be spirited away to a video proclaiming that the curse had been laid:
From then on, they would be shown a cocktail of creepy banner ads. Geotargeting and retargeting methods made the curses uncannily unique: users in New York would be served New York specific ads, for instance.
And the user could only lift the curse by sharing one of the clickbait articles from Svedka Vodka’s Halloween hub. The curse would pass on to their friends and the cycle would begin again!
The brand’s multi-channel strategy created a memorable, outside-of-the-box campaign. Whilst we wouldn’t normally advocate shaping a digital strategy around hexing your audience, it certainly paid dividends on this occasion!
Burger King clowns around with McDonald’s and IT
Like Kellogg’s Eggos, Burger King’s Halloween content tied into pop culture happenings. Yet, rather than using pop culture to promote their own product, Burger King used it instead to take a swipe at a rival. The target? Historic arch-nemesis, Ronald McDonald.
This Halloween, BK invited the world to dress-up as scary clowns and, in many of its biggest locations (such as Leicester Square), offered free burgers as a reward. The campaign’s motto summarised the endeavour succinctly: ‘Never trust a clown’.
This isn’t the first time that Burger King has trolled its competitors in its Halloween content. Last year, one outlet dressed up as McDonalds’ ghost:
Credit: AdWeek
Nevertheless, it’s an inventive approach that capitalised on a seasonal opportunity to create conversations and serve up buzz around the brand at a competitor’s expense (which is risky, but fits within Burger King’s wider brand identity).
Come back next month, where we’ll be chatting all things Christmas!
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.
From a LADbible campaign asking the UN to recognise a country made from trash, to Cristiano Ronaldo showing he’s as good at marketing football as playing it, Fusion Content round up five of September’s best campaigns.
Unicef drives empty school busses through New York streets to highlight children’s education in war zones
Unicef estimates that around 27 million children aged 6-15 are unable to access an education due to the immanent threats of war and conflict. In the run-up to last month’s UN General Assembly, they combined with non-profit ad agency KBS in a creative campaign that poignantly illustrated the statistic by driving twenty-seven empty school busses through the streets of New York, bearing banners like ‘Books not bombs’ and ‘Avoiding land mines shouldn’t be an extracurricular activity’ and carrying just one passenger, Muzoon Almellehan, a Syrian refugee whose family fled the country’s civil war in 2013.
The busses brought the statistic to life with an appropriate urgency. Their convoy almost resembled a blockade as they drove sombrely towards the UN building, slowing down traffic and creating physical space in which the issue was able to become present and enter public consciousness.
One of the company’s most recent successes showed succinctly how a creative strategy shouldn’t just be targeting big wins, as they turned a cease and desist letter into a brilliant basis for content:
The letter addressed to a Stranger Things based pop-up bar lacking the studio’s authorisation encapsulated the show’s kooky and charming tone to a T. The writer begins by confessing that their ‘walkie talke is busted so I had to write this note instead’, before saying soon after:
Look, I don’t want you to think I’m a total wastoid […] but unless I’m living in the Upside Down, I don’t think we did a deal with you for this pop-up. You’re obviously creative types, so I’m sure you can appreciate that it’s important to us to have a say in how our fans encounter the worlds we build.
This was a deft and elegant way of handling a potentially difficult situation, illustrating how brands can still – when appropriate – keep negative engagements with consumers engaging. ‘We love our fans more than anything,’ it ends, ‘but you should know that the demorgorgon is not always as forgiving. So please don’t make us call your mom’.
LADbible dives in at the deep end in Plastic Oceans campaign
Each year, eight million tonnes of plastic are deposited into the world’s oceans, devastating marine wildlife. The figures are so great that by 2050, scientists anticipate the plastic in the ocean will outweigh the fish. To confront the issue head on, LADbible teamed up with activist group Plastic Oceans and a star-studded line-up of influential names, like Mo Farah, Judi Dench and Ross Kemp, in an outside-of-the-box campaign that sought to make the UN acknowledge the country status of a giant patch of trash in the Pacific Ocean, which they’ve Christened ‘The Trash Isles’.
To be recognised as a country, a region must meet several criteria, and LADbible has ensured that the Trash Isles ticks the boxes: it has a defined region, a newly-formed government, an increasing number of registered residents (vis-à-vis a Change.org petition), is in dialogue with other states, and even has a beautifully designed currency that’s humorously called Debris.
The UN Charter dictates: ‘All members shall co-operate in a spirit of global partnership to conserve, protect and restore the health and integrity of the Earth’s ecosystem’. In other words: because UN member states are responsible for ensuring that member countries are ecologically responsible, gaining membership for the Trash Isles would oblige the UN globally to assist in a clean-up of the ocean.
This is an excellent campaign, supported by influencer campaigns, social media activity and onsite content, by a ground-breaking brand, whose 3.2bn generated views in March this year made them rank as the month’s most popular video creator in the world.
Lyft heads to the Wild West for new prospects as Uber’s stock continues to fall
After becoming embroiled in various scandals and controversies often of its own causing, the last few years for Uber have been a fairly bumpy ride. Their misfortunes have presented a rare opportunity for rival rideshare apps to increase their foothold in the market. To increase their brand’s prominence in relevant conversations, competitor company Lyft has begun honing its brand identity, in a series of humorous ads starring actor Jeff Bridges that tie into the American history of journeying with surreal references to the trends of today.
The ads show actor Jeff Bridges in various Western settings with nods to 21st century pop culture: one sees Bridge’s character sat in the passenger seat declare ‘Shame they haven’t invented the football yet. Sure would be good to have something to talk about’, whilst another sees a passenger texting ‘lol’ through a typewriter.
Capturing a sense of history with tongue-in-cheek flair, the ads demonstrate the worth of taking time to work on fleshing out your brand’s identity itself, rather than solely promoting your products/services. Doing the first can massively help with the latter.
FIFA brings Ronaldo off the bench for ad campaign
Few dates in the video games calendar are more hyped than the release of each year’s new edition of FIFA. This year, the game’s publishers EA Sports brought their marketing strategy literally to life by involving Cristiano Ronaldo, asking him to create his own footballing skill that would be included in the game.
It’s a brilliant example of using an influencer’s input to promote your own material. Fans keep returning to the video game because it enables gamers to embody their favourite football players. Personally involving Ronaldo’s creative input, FIFA has made that connection stronger than ever.
Come back next month, and we’ll see what October had in store!
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.
As the Internet catches its breath after last season’s Game of Thrones, and ‘winter is coming’ becomes more and more of a reality, the greatest minds in digital marketing continue to produce buzzing campaigns and pique the attention of the Internet.
A tea giant ran a giveaway in their cricket whites, the National Gallery introduced Van Gogh to Facebook, and an airline produced its own take on John Cage’s 4″33. Read on for five digital media happenings that caught the attention of Fusion’s content team last month!
1) Yorkshire Tea hits the content for six
In the build-up to last month’s match between England and the West Indies at our very own Headingley Stadium, an inspired Yorkshire Tea competition asked entrants to film themselves bowling their teabag into their cuppa as spectacularly as possible.
The prizes didn’t stray far from the wickets. The lucky winners received VIP tickets to the game, a signed cricket bat, and the opportunity to chat with legendary English cricketer Michael Vaughan.
The competition benefited the brand in several ways: it enabled them to highlight their Yorkshire roots and tap into pop culture interests, whilst encouraging the creation of unique user generated content that created animated conversations on social media.
2) Vincent Van Gogh gets social with the National Gallery and Facebook
Recently, Vincent Van Gogh has enjoyed an unlikely pre-eminence in digital media. In February, Airbnb partnered with the Art Institute of Chicago to build a real life version of his iconic painting ‘The Bedroom’, making it available for art-minded guests to stay in. Now, he’s starred at the heart of a foray into VR by the UK’s National Gallery, who used Facebook Live to host a virtual exhibition that united his legendary ‘Sunflowers’ paintings – displayed in galleries all over the world – for the first time in their history.
The exhibition functioned as a relay between five galleries. Each had fifteen minutes to present their own portrait to the audience, before passing the impressionist baton on to the next.
‘We launched our first Facebook Live a year ago’, said Dr Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the Gallery. ‘They’ve been growing in popularity ever since, so we are delighted to be teaming up with galleries all over the world and Facebook for the first ever live relay focusing on Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’. This collaboration is a key step in the National Gallery’s Digital Strategy, which will see us fully explore the potential of immersive media to create new ways of experiencing art’.
The joint effort provides a wonderful example of a brand capitalising on the new opportunities that new channels present to create unique, ground-breaking content. We’re excited to see how marketers will pick up on Facebook’s Live availability in the future!
3) easyJet gets ambient with charity album
Musically, August delivered a fairly happening month for the airwaves: Leeds and Reading Festival came and went, as thousands of starry-eyed festival-goers discovered the invention of the beer bong and depleted the country’s Frosty Jack’s, whilst Taylor Swift deleted her social media channels, before springing back with a new single which remained very Taylor Swift. However, what piqued our interest the most was the astonishing arrival of an ambient album from easyJet, with the release of their two-song EP titled ‘Jet Sounds’.
This wasn’t the sign of a change of heart for the airline brand, but a clever example of a zany, high quality campaign. It followed the UK Sleep Council’s recent findings that 22% of the population get a poor quality of sleep, and their recommendation that one way to remedy this is by listening to white noise before we go to bed – a monotonous and droning sound that soothes our minds and eases out distractions. As the low humming of an aircraft’s engines meets these criteria exactly, the airline decided to record two tracks of it on a plane flying from Gatwick to Nice!
All of the release’s proceeds go to The Children’s Sleep Charity. If you’re feeling a little tired yourself, or just fancying some Boeing 737 beats to liven up your weekend predrinks, check out the album on iTunes here.
4) Airbnb criticised over email marketing campaign
After the devastation of flooding in Houston by Hurricane Harvey, Airbnb waived rental fees across the city, enabling hosts to let out their properties for free and provide shelter to the tens of thousands of people left homeless. However, the company simultaneously received criticism for the poor timing of a concurrent email campaign which promoted an opportunity for holidaymakers to stay in a ‘floating world’, spending a trip in a home on the sea ‘without touching dry land’.
Striking too much of a chord with the events unfolding in Texas, the brand received an overwhelmingly negative backlash on social media:
Considering the major meteorological disaster atm, not sure @Airbnb's email promoting floating cottages was particularly well thought-out.
An Airbnb spokesperson said: ‘The timing of this email marketing campaign was insensitive and we apologise for that. We continue to keep everyone affected by Harvey and all the first responders and their families in our thoughts’.
Whilst Airbnb has thorough disaster response measures, it’s essential for all brands to ensure that their content schedule remains suitably responsive to current events.
5) The North Face challenges Trump’s wall in campaign championing social mobility
Since Trump’s election as President of the USA, talk of the border wall with Mexico continues to dominate the headlines. Leading outerwear brand The North Face alluded to it heavily in their latest campaign, cleverly titled ‘Walls Are Meant for Climbing’.
Integral to the brand’s campaign are themes of unity and community-building, opposing the barriers that divide us. ‘Some people build walls. Other people climb them’, says the print copy. Whilst there’s no direct mentioning of White House policy, the reference’s political elements are readily apparent.
On a less metaphorical and more practical level, the campaign centres on the brand’s objective of making climbing more universally available. They’ve invested fairly heavily to do this: they donated $1,000,000 to the USA’s Trust for Public Land, for them to build climbing walls and facilities in public spaces across the country, and partnered with gyms across the world to establish August the 19th as a global day of climbing, allowing people to climb, for a day, for free.
The North Face’s campaign placed the brand within an important, relevant and politicised conversation, which – as shown by Pepsi earlier this year – can be a risky line for brands to tread. When doing this, it’s essential for the brand to support marketing efforts with practical and impactful activity. Here, however, the North Face accomplishes this impeccably.
July proved to be a busy month on the football pitch: the England women’s team demonstrated superb quality throughout the European Cup, defeating France for the first time in forty-three years to reach the quarter finals, before losing 3-0 to a clinical Netherlands side in the semis, whilst various high profile moves have consistently dominated the headlines.
Lest we get too carried away, last month was busy for content, too: some campaigns gloriously hit the back of the net, whilst others variably missed the mark. Join us for post-match highlights of last month’s campaign activity and trends!
Converse goes back to school
Amidst the new trailers for the second season of Stranger Things, Millie Bobby Brown, one of the show’s star actresses, has been making headlines all of her own, teaming up with Converse for a quirky back to school campaign titled ‘First Day Feels’:
Big Spaceship, the agency behind the campaign, converted the video into a range of GIFs, to be shared by leading relevant publications such as Buzzfeed and Teen Vogue.
It’s a neat example of a brand creating compelling content by combining with a key influencer who bears enormous appeal to target audience.
Simultaneously, with her performance as Eleven fresh in our memories, Bobby Brown creates a great link between the brand and the Stranger Things series – a show that perfectly hits the retro notes that Converse are looking to replicate.
Whilst Tourism Ireland heads to Westeros
For years, vast parts of HBO’s iconic series Game of Thrones have been shot in Ireland. To commemorate the launch of season seven, Tourism Ireland immortalised the exploits of the series’ characters in a gigantic artwork based on the Bayeux Tapestry. At a colossal seventy-seven metres long, it’s actually seven metres longer than the original!
The artwork is available online in all its glory. The physical original is on show in Belfast’s Ulster Museum.
Football gets creative with transfer announcements
As cheques matching the GDP of small countries continue changing hands, the world’s leading football teams have decided to replicate their investment on the pitch with their creative endeavours off of it, producing imaginative, weird and wonderful videos to announce their new signings’ arrivals.
In particularly dramatically notes, Sevilla announced the return of their former captain Jesus Navas:
Whilst last month, Chelsea humorously revealed the signing of AS Roma’s Antonio Rüdiger:
Of all teams contesting for creative premiership, however, AS Roma look set to clinch the metaphorical title, passing deftly to absurdity in their surreal announcements of Başakşehir midfielder Cengiz Ünder and Manchester City full-back Viktor Kolarov.
For Ünder, Roma’s fancy announcement video parodies the concept of YouTube highlights reels:
Airbnb and Audi link up for Bayern Munich giveaway
As one of the world’s leading companies, it makes sense that Airbnb’s campaigns should rank amongst the best. Recently, we covered Airbnb’s partnership with a Chicago gallery that enabled guests to sleep in a real life envisioning of a Van Gogh painting.
Last month, Airbnb partnered with Audi to promote the Audi Cup, a football tournament based in Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena, lacing up their imagination and offering one lucky family the chance to sleep for a night on the stadium’s pitch, as the guest of FC Bayern defender, Jerome Boateng.
The prize was a holistic Audi and Bayern experience: a driverless Audi A7 collected the winners from the airport and drove them to the stadium, where they were introduced to the Bayern Munich players and given VIP seats for Bayern’s match against Liverpool. After the match, they were able to catch up with Bayern player Jérôme Boateng, one of the world’s best footballers, before getting a good night’s sleep on the green!
Like Converse and Bobby Brown, Audi and Airbnb’s partnership benefitted both brands considerably, especially with football thrown (or rather, kicked) into the mix: both Audi and Airbnb capitalised on promotional opportunities, where their combined contributions strengthened the overall campaign’s effect all the more.
With that, it’s auf Wiedersehn from us! Come back next month for all of August’s content news!
June’s been another busy month in the social media universe, one where Facebook celebrated Pride Month with a new reaction; Twitter had a makeover and a “pointless” social media app rose to prominence. As ever, we’ve rounded up the biggest news below…
Twitter
The most obvious change of this month has been Twitter’s design overhaul. A number of visual changes have occurred, most notably the new emphasis on curved icons which has caused a headache for a number of brands…
Alongside a host of surface level changes, a new feature updating tweet activity and stats in real time has also been launched, with the aim of emphasising Twitter’s fast paced nature. However, the most important consequence for businesses will be keeping their profiles suitable for the new layout, and ensuring that it meets expectations from their audience’s perspective.
Twitter has also been rolling out action buttons in DM conversations with bots. This new feature allows bots to provide a number of CTA options whilst messaging, in order to facilitate actions taken outside of the conversation. For example, these buttons could open an exterior website link or compose a template tweet related to the conversation that has taken place in DMs. With the focus on bots clearly increasing across multiple social networks, businesses need to think about the ways they could use them as part of their strategy. For instance, thanks to this new update, bots could be used to start a conversation with a specialised customer service account, or to build trust in the brand by linking to relevant, helpful content.
You may have noticed a new rainbow reaction on Facebook this month – for those wondering what it’s all about, this is a temporary feature added by Facebook to celebrate Pride Month. This reaction was only available after liking a specific page on Facebook, which implies a high level of malleability with regard to Facebook’s reaction options. As such, there is a chance that this may result in the possibility of branded reactions going forwards, in the same vein Twitter’s branded hashtag emojis, which could represent a particularly strong opportunity for brands looking to build awareness.
Another feature spotted this month (although only in testing), is that users are being encouraged to watch Facebook Live videos on TV screens. This is a clear statement from Facebook, who, given their recent focus on live video, are looking to expand to the TV market and are testing ways to make their content easily accessible on larger screens. It’s worth keeping an eye on future developments in this area, as this will likely become one of Facebook’s next big directions.
Facebook is pushing people to watch live videos on the big screen (spotted in comments thread of a live video) pic.twitter.com/1tpODS2HKK
Finally, Facebook has expanded its Creative Hub tool, a feature which allows users to mock up adverts to see how they would look on its different advertising platforms. This new update gives the possibility of getting “actionable insights” on creative before an ad goes live. Although it’s not specified exactly how this would be gathered in practice, the ability to get feedback before putting an advert live is a particularly handy tool for new advertisers, and one worth keeping an eye on for the possibility of optimising creative before an ad has even gone live.
Instagram
Instagram have backed away from the ephemeral feeling to their live stream feature, now giving users the ability to share the streams as a Story for the following 24 hours too. This could be the tipping point for more users and brands to use the live stream feature, as the work that they put in could now reach some of Instagram’s 250 million daily users of the Stories feature as well, rather than just disappearing at the end of the stream.
Catch your friends up on what they missed! Share a replay of your live video to Instagram Stories. pic.twitter.com/UradhWGPbU
Finally, with a lot of talk about the metal health issues of social media returning to prominence recently, it’s notable that a new app has risen up based on its, well, pointlessness. Positioned as the antithesis of social media, Binky – which started out as a joke – provides a random feed of posts (or Binks) to interact with, with the ability to like, comment and re-Bink them… all of which does absolutely nothing.
Literally nothing happens on this app. But you might feel great after you use it. pic.twitter.com/6FxNbDcROP
As it’s meant primarily as a satire of social media’s influence, it’s unlikely any business possibilities will come from this, but it’s important to note that this app arises from a general feeling of malaise towards social media and its effects, which may come to influence the industry’s future.
To a mix of excitement and surprise, Google have launched their new Google Posts feature, allowing all Google My Business customers to microblog directly onto the search results stream, enabling brands to reach their audience with unprecedented ease.
The Google Posts interface was first trialled in January 2016, in the build-up to the US election: Google gave electoral candidates the chance to summarise their responses to pressing political concerns in posts of up to 14,400 characters, and then made those responses visible on relevant search queries. Searching for issue X, for instance, would show you the stances of politicians Y and Z towards it.
A year and a half later, Google has completely reimagined the tool and expanded its availability, now enabling all businesses to post content directly to the search feed.
Brands’ posts will be visible for up to seven days before they disappear, exhibited in a scrollable carousel that rotates up to ten posts at a time, in a move that encourages businesses to keep their content fresh and vibrant.
Like Facebook and Twitter, posts can be brought to life with images and photography, although the interface doesn’t currently support GIFs or video. There’s a 300 words limit; only the first 100 characters will appear immediately in the Knowledge Panel, encouraging brands to balance creativity and concision when delivering their message.
There’re various ways that posts can be made more actionable: they can be created as ‘events’, causing the content to display for the event’s duration as defined by the user, or they can be rounded off with a call to action, be it a link for users to follow for more information, or an ‘add to cart’ functionality for quick and easy purchasing.
The whole of the interface is superbly tailored for mobile use; it’s clear that mobile search lies at the heart of Google’s bold philosophy and plans for the future.
It ties in beautifully to the company’s ever-expanding focus on local search, empowering small businesses by giving them an even greater opportunity to spread the word of their services through curated content.
Google Posts equally presents a brilliant opportunity to larger multi-location brands, allowing for the publication of bespoke content relating to each store locality.
If there’s going to be an exciting event or a brilliant promotion running in your Leeds’ store, for example, you’ll be able to use Google Posts to advertise it specifically on the Leeds store’s GMB page.
It’s very new, and there’s certainly scope for several of the interface’s features to be improved, such as widening the list of available calls to action and broadening the reach of the Insights module, providing greater information for analysis.
Needless to say, Google Posts is an exciting direction for Google to be heading in, opening another channel for the creation and promotion of content, and one that brands would be wise to think about, too!
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.
June began with the Champions League final, seeing a scintillating Juventus side square up to a fiery Real Madrid.
The match’s twists and turns made a fitting end for May, which proved to be a high-octane month across the spheres of social media, digital campaigns and content.
We watched a burger brand bravely contest the monarchy of Belgium, a Playstation ad play games with the laws of physics, a shark dramatically steal a 90s popstar’s thunder, and a crisp brand unknowingly create a content piece fusing Gary Lineker with Rebecca Black (a little less conventional than salt and vinegar!).
Read on for post-match highlights, analysis and more of five of the last month’s most noteworthy campaigns!
Walkers wave “the Walkers Wave” goodbye
Walkers’ “Walkers Wave” was an innovative approach to the competition format, but an unfortunate tactical oversight caused the campaign to be abandoned in less than twenty four hours.
The competition, presenting entrants with the opportunity to win tickets for Cardiff’s Champions League final, revolved around user generated content: they asked people to send in a selfie, converted the selfie into a video of the person’s picture being held up by Gary Lineker and then automatically tweeted the video back to the user from Walkers’ verified Twitter account.
The process of posting tweets to Walkers’ feed was automated. Herein lies the fatal flaw, for many of the selfies that were submitted were not actually selfies at all.
The campaign, quickly peaking into virality, witnessed Lineker welcoming into the Wave people that ranged from Joe Biden to Rebecca Black, alongside more unpleasant images such as mugshots of criminals.
A high profile, high cost campaign, Walkers supported online activity with media elements such as supersized displays of the social stream in Cardiff city centre, which unfortunately added all the more publicity to the brand’s own goal.
User generated content catalyses campaign’s momentum, increasing interest and visibility on social, but it’s vital to only integrate moderated content into your brand.
As epitomised by last year’s beloved Boaty McBoatface, the denizens of the Internet enjoy a near-endless supply of spanners for every possible works.
It’s best not to take risks that can have serious implications down the line.
Discovery makes a splash with Seal
A whole host of famous figures errantly ended up in Walkers’ waters. Across the pond, the Discovery Channel combined with a celebrity of their own to announce this year’s “Shark Week”.
We’re happy to give Discovery a bye over the pressing safety concerns of putting on a show by shark-infested shore, because the ad’s creative risk-taking boldly pays off.
Its bleak and ironic humour moves the nature brand into waters that are largely unexplored by its competitors, whose creative incentives are to either impress a sense of horror or awe: think of Planet Earth 2‘s photography and the commanding voice of Attenborough!
Like a strong keepie uppie, it’s good to keep the football metaphor going. Take creative inspiration from Xavi and Iniesta and look out for creative directions that your competitors aren’t occupying.
There could be a good reason why content creators haven’t followed a particular creative path – e.g. sharks. Equally, there might not be. Just because someone else isn’t doing it doesn’t mean that it’s bad; you could just be the first to spot the opportunity!
Sony enjoys eureka breakthrough with Gravity Rush 2
Strikingly executed and based on a simple yet stunning concept, a Sony advert for the new video game Gravity Rush 2 received an extraordinary response across the web.
Some things defy words, others defy gravity. This incredible creative piece by Tokyo agency Hakuhodo speaks boldly for itself:
Gravity Rush 2 revolves around the player manipulating the laws of gravity. As such, the ad’s a brilliant example of demonstrating a product: it shows, rather than tells, what you’re able to do.
The ad complements the creative flourish with gameplay footage towards the end, giving a full illustration of the product’s functionality and confidently overcoming a problem that the field of game advertising has historically struggled with, sometimes showing inaccurate video animation that doesn’t actually reflect the game at all.
This is an advert that might seem to totally flip the box upside down, rather than merely think outside of it. However, it’s based on a simple premise done exceptionally well, making small but enormous changes to the rules of physics we take for granted, showing the massive effect that can be made in subtly tweaking the everyday!
McDonald’s television ad receives backlash from charities
Social media and charities alike responded harshly to a recent McDonald’s ad, accusing the international fast food giants of manipulating childhood bereavement into a marketing strategy.
Dr Shelley Gilbert, president of Grief Encounter, said that ‘Parents [are] telling us their bereaved children have been upset by the advert, and alienated by McDonald’s as a brand that wants to emotionally manipulate its customers’.
Like last month’s ill-advised Pepsi campaign starring Kendall, it’s vital for brands to only incorporate social issues into their branding work if the product or service has direct relevance.
Without making too much in the way of comment, it seems that, in respect of the above, the Filet-o-Fish certainly doesn’t.
‘Il n’y a pas de place pour deux kings en Belgique’: Burger King lose bid for Belgian succession
We wrote about BK in last month’s round-up and they’ve featured in previous months too, because of their penchant for the absurd throughout their creative:
*Unwraps cheeseburger*
🍔: Don’t fall in love, kid.
Having just spoken about Maccies, you’d think that Burger King would regard them as their competitors. Not so, apparently, with Burger King last month launching an online campaign against, erm, the King of Belgium, instead.
The campaign, directed by French agency Buzzman, featured a poll on the website www.whoistheking.be that gave users the choice of picking between two kings: the King of Belgium or the king of Burgers.
Who deserves the country’s crown “Two Kings. One crown. Who will rule” Belgium Monarchy not impressed with Burger King promotion pic.twitter.com/mChO1a2qPJ
Any attempt to vote for the King of Belgium led to prompts in BK’s favour, such as ‘Are you sure? He won’t cook you fries’.
Perhaps they anticipated it, perhaps they didn’t, but Burger King’s campaign met a guarded response from representatives of the Belgian royal family.
Spokesman Pierre Emmanuel de Bauw said that ‘we would not have given our authorisation’ for the king’s likeness to be used in the material, landing the American brand in a sticky situation.
Moreover, Burger King actually lost the election – albeit narrowly – with 51% of its electorate preferring their current royalty to the House of Hamburger.
The combination of the above led to Burger King stopping the campaign. However, they handled it with flair and creative grace, editing the website, removing ‘King’ from their logo, and declaring in a caption: ‘There isn’t room for two kings in Belgium’.
The brand used controversy for promotional gain, which is an incredibly risky strategy that we wouldn’t necessarily advocate, but it paid off.
They may have lost the election, capturing the attention and ire of the Belgian royals in the process, but BK’s campaign was certainly a success, bringing more attention to their zany, off-kilter branding.
Thanks for dropping by and see you next month – we look forward to finding out what June has to offer!
May has seen another deluge of developments in the social media universe – but don’t worry if you didn’t keep up with everything, we’ve got the biggest news wrapped up for you here.
Snapchat
In a boost for advertisers looking for new and innovative ways to deliver their messaging, Snapchat has introduced a self-serve tool allowing all marketers to advertise on the platform. Instagram saw massive growth after implementing a similar tool, so this could provide a breath of fresh air for Snapchat after its cash flow troubles in recent months. Currently this tool is only restricted to video formats but it features a detailed range of targeting and optimisation, as well as its own version of the Ads and Business Manager (which must have been nice for Snapchat to take from Facebook for a change). Although this is still an unproven channel for mainstream use, Snapchat advertising provides a new opportunity for companies aiming at a millennial audience to reach their target demographic via an innovative method.
— Social Media Today (@socialmedia2day) May 6, 2017
Twitter
Twitter has continued to press on with their focus on live video this month, signing 12 new deals with content producers to bring a host of original programming, sports and live events to the network, including a 24-hour news network in collaboration with Bloomberg. By providing exclusive video content, Twitter is aiming to boost its number of users whilst increasing its advertising revenue. Moreover, Twitter is experimenting with introducing curated live video at the top of the feed, as well as using push notifications for relevant live events. If there ever was an indication of the importance of live video for Twitter’s future, the fact that they’re testing placing it front and centre of the feed is it.
Finally, Twitter has announced a unique new feature for advertisers – the ability to promote chatbots. This allows businesses to promote ads with up to 4 CTAs with the aim of drawing users into personalised conversations with a bot via DM. Although there seems little benefit with regard to driving direct sales from this ad format, this could help build fun experiences around brand awareness, and encourage positive sentiment.
It has been spotted this month that Facebook are testing the possibility of connecting Pages to Groups – which can involve linking to, or even posting in Groups from a Page. This could be particularly useful for brands aiming to build communities organically, as this will encourage engagement with fans inside relevant groups, alongside greater capacity for branded discussion and building trust.
Furthermore, Facebook has declared that it will be clamping down on misleading live videos such as polls or countdowns on a static background. This comes in the wake of Facebook reducing the reach of “inauthentic” posts which ask for engagement, alongside the reasoning that predictable live videos will reduce the appeal of the much-vaunted format, and so reduce future engagements. However, it remains to be seen whether this will have the desired effect for Facebook, as these videos are often some of the most engaged with content on the social network – a factor that they constantly encourage.
Finally, Facebook has announced its collaboration with delivery companies in the US to order food directly from the app. Although some will see this as Facebook’s further intrusion into every facet of life, this shows the importance of integrating businesses with Facebook when opportunities arise. Given the size of the Facebook user base and the ever more frictionless paths to product discovery and payment, businesses need to be ready to respond to new updates to get the jump on competitors when similar features get rolled out in the UK.
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.
Thank you "other beers" for advertising Responsibly. Today we want to give something back to you!Responsibly the beer all the other beers ask you to drink. #DrinkResponsibly #ResponsiblyTheBeer
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.
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.
March has seen the continuation of a number of recent trends in social media, with Twitter doubling down on live video and Facebook adding a new Stories feature. Here’s a rundown of the biggest developments of this month.
Twitter
Firstly, in big news for Twitter users, it has been announced that the character limit for @usernames will no longer apply to replies, meaning responses can be the full 140 characters. Alongside this, the ability to choose which users to reply to in a group discussion has also been introduced. The benefits of longer replies for those businesses using Twitter as a customer service platform are clear, but the removal of @handle clutter will also facilitate locating and engaging in conversations for companies looking to build a community online.
We’re changing replies so that you have all 140 characters to express yourself.
Secondly, as previously mentioned, Twitter has committed even further to live video. It has announced that it is opening its live video API, letting large media companies broadcast on the platform using professional equipment, and allowing increasingly customisable ways of streaming live. We’ve mentioned previously the importance of adapting content strategy to suit this focus on live video, but increased advertising opportunities are also arising from this. For instance, Twitter has started to introduce pre-roll ads on Periscope videos, allowing advertisers to associate their message with specific broadcasters and creators in an environment that seems more spontaneous and hi-tech.
Finally, Twitter has announced that their Moments feature will now display analytics of performance, allowing creators to track how well their content is working on Twitter, with data on opens, likes and shares amongst others. Although Moments was relegated to the Explore feature last month, this development will help creators learn from their best-performing content and help craft more engaging Moments going forwards.
Introducing Moments analytics for all Twitter users on web. Just click on the down arrow to see how your favorite Moments are performing! pic.twitter.com/9YlyeEjJ6o
Facebook has announced new developments to its Bots for Messenger feature, giving businesses the opportunity to harness the automated platform for detailed customer service responses or to encourage users into purchase decisions. An enhanced menu structure has been announced, which could help customers find products they’re looking for without leaving Facebook; or enable problem-solving conversations with bots. Although the feature didn’t really take off when first launched back in 2016, these developments could present a real opportunity for firms looking to improve customer service experience for users or drive purchase opportunities.
In other news, Facebook has rolled out split tests, allowing advertisers to split their campaigns into completely random and non-overlapping audiences, helping to determine which strategy is optimal for a campaign. With this feature, advertisers can discover which target audience, delivery method or placement is most efficient across 4 objectives:
Traffic
App installs
Lead Generation
Conversions
This is a first for Facebook, as previous A/B testing has run the risk of sharing audience members. Now, advertisers will be able to understand how different aspects of their ads affect campaign performance in a truly fair test.
Facebook has also started to roll out its tag showing disputed stories, which will appear beneath news stories that have been judged dubious by 3rd party fact-checkers. This could be a development to keep an eye on, as there is a possibility this could reduce user engagement on Facebook – visibly flagging items as disputed may reduce trust in the platform, meaning people may become less likely to share content in the future.
Facebook Stories was launched on mobile apps in March, a feature that works in the same way as the Stories features from other Facebook-owned apps (and Snapchat of course). As with Instagram Stories, this could present an opportunity for a new advertising environment if the feature shows promise… however, the continued emphasis on Story features has drawn derision and mockery from many parties and the feature has struggled to take off so far.
Facebook has a habit of making a success out of initially unpopular apps though (see: Messenger), so we’ll need to keep an eye on this.
Clips
Finally, Apple has announced a new app, Clips, looking to take advantage of social media’s current focus on the short-form video format. It differentiates itself from other apps through its inclusion of “Live Titles” – dynamic text which creates captions based on what is said aloud during a video. Although clearly aimed at personal experiences for the moment, it’s worth watching out for any future developments to see if this will fit in with a wider content strategy.
Spring’s here and busily getting underway: the buds are opening, the birds are singing. Undoubtedly, May will alight with thunder and June will snow us in, but for now everything seems perfectly peachy, particularly because March proved to be such a superb month in content, seeing a sequence of stellar campaigns spanning myriad channels and topics, online and off.
Join us in exploring five of last month’s most vivid and stimulating campaigns. As with February’s entry, we’ve contemplated the factors that made these ads so successful, identifying the key lessons that every brand can take from them to refine and enhance their own image in the future.
With Twin Peaks set to make its long-anticipated return to television in May, the show’s promotion has taken in an idiosyncratically Twin Peaks turn.
Last month, billboards began cropping up across North America that displayed nothing but a picture of a single cherry pie. A favourite food of the Twin Peaks population, there was little doubt among the show’s die-hard fans of what they were referring to!
That the campaign only makes sense to Twin Peaks fans seems like a risk, signifying a strategy that’s fated to lose rather than gain a potential audience. However, the confidence and directness with which the ad targets the show’s most committed fans is also its greatest strength.
People return to Twin Peaks because of its quirks and the way in which the show regularly and fearlessly gestures to narratorial obliqueness. It’s a show that’s situated as far away from ‘normal’ as television tends to get; marketing it as being anything otherwise, just another show to perch at the end of a Netflix queue, would fail to connect the fans who love Twin Peaks for its weirdness while missing out on an opportunity to create vivid content to get social channels abuzz!
The campaign summarily made sweeping impressions across social media, alerting viewers to the fact of the show’s return and reminded them of the quirkiness for which they loved Twin Peaks to begin with.
There’s so much value in being mindful of the ways in which you’re using your mediums. Could you be utilising your channels to get an even bigger slice of the cherry pie? Seek ways of expressing your brand in the recognisable terms and ideas that inspire your audience to keep returning to it.
As opposed to Twin Peaks‘ quirky promotional campaign for an equally quirky show, Heinz have incorporated AMC’s series Mad Men into their latest campaign to bring a new yet vintage lease of life to their iconic tomato ketchup.
Mad Men follows the story of Don Draper, a fictional advertising exec working in the New York of the 1950s. One plot-line sees Draper actually pitching to Heinz; he proposes a thoroughly minimalist campaign that, to the puzzlement of the Heinz execs, omits the ketchup bottle entirely. Instead, Draper’s concepts simply show photos of the foods that ketchup best accompanies, alongside the caption: ‘Pass the Heinz.’
Mad Men‘s fictitious Heinz responded negatively to Draper’s proposal, but the Heinz of the real world today have made a considerable, belated U-turn and are now running Draper’s ads across the billboards of NYC!
AdWeek spoke to Nicole Kulwicki, Heinz’s head of brand, who said: ‘What we loved about the campaign is that it doesn’t require paragraphs of copy to explain it. It features mouth-watering food images, and all that’s missing is the Heinz.’
The campaign’s a perfect example of a well-known brand maximising the potential of pop culture references to expand a brand’s image, using Mad Men’s artwork to transform Heinz from a household name into a brand with a desirable vintage, emblazoning it with the retro notes that Mad Men’s stylistic flair and lush cinematography emanate.
Think about the potential of pop culture affiliation to shape your brand’s image and consider the exciting and vivid openings to which life combining with art can lead.
Nike pumps the nostalgia to the Air Max
Sunday the 26th of March marked the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Nike’s iconic Air Max 1. Like Twin Peaks shaping its promotion to reflect the aesthetic it’s famous for, Nike celebrated the birthday in quintessentially Nike fashion, evoking the contemporary flair and edge by which the global brand continues to be epitomised, in a series of “fake ads” that they, ironically, commissioned.
Nike collaborated with artists Ava Nirui and Alex Lee to refashion and customise old-school Nike Air Max ads materials, mixing their artworks with Nike’s classic branding.
Originally appearing in Dazed and now making waves across social media, Nike’s innovative collaboration with Nirui and Lee makes a vibrant, stylish example of high-quality content generating correspondingly high-quality conversations.
BT Sport channels Neymar and enjoys sublime night in the Champions League
When Barcelona met Paris Saint-German in the Champions League round of 16 at Camp Nou, it wasn’t really a matter of ‘playing’ a match; it was a rout, a masterclass in getting revenge, as Barça’s battalion of superstars combined to constellate one of the Champions League’s greatest ever performances.
BT Sport broadcasted the match on UK television and were able to get in on the action, running a dynamic a Twitter campaign that saw the brand’s average interactions increase by a whopping 1,730%. Some golazo for the BT Sport social team!
— BT Sport Football (@btsportfootball) March 8, 2017
Rather than merely posting a timeline of the match’s events, the relatively new but leading sport channel posted graphics like GIFs and delivered their content through engaging, creative copy.
We looked last month at the power of creative social posting, vis-à-vis the kooky Tweets that American restaurateurs Denny’s continue serving up, and the same applies here. It’s also a great example of keeping your content current and flowing and allowing your social channel the freedom to start conversations when opportunities for them arise!
Refuge goes viral with moving music video
Content that’s done well is content that creates conversations. After all, the web’s a pretty big animal and every piece of content’s just another drop in the ocean. But the best content gets the ocean going, and when they combined with BRIT-nominated singer Frances to produce a music video for her song ‘Grow’, Refuge, the charity, achieved exactly that.
The video shows an animated woman walking through her daily life, returning at night to a starkly-coloured home, into which the camera never ventures. Only half visible, drawn as if a ghost, the figure becomes a moving, hard-hitting metaphor for the struggle people face for their struggles to be heard.
Eventually, after encountering someone who offers her a helping hand, the woman becomes fully visible; listened to and supported, she’s able to come alive, as the video’s pallet shifts to brighter tones, reifying a final sense of fulfillment and recovery.
Though Refuge only released the video on the 19th March, it’s already reached over 150,000 YouTube views. Seeking to go viral to spread awareness of the support that the charity provides, the campaign is a moving and important example of the impact that well-made content can have!
February may have been a short month, but it delivered content in a big way: we saw Moonlight light up the Oscars with a Best Picture win after a suitably tragicomic mix-up involving La La Land, Beyoncé grace the Grammys with a phenomenal rendition of songs from Lemonade and Leicester City bid adieu to a teary Claudio Ranieri, proclaiming that his dream had “died” after a fairly toothless season from his formerly bellicose foxes.
Mirroring the pace that the world picks up, plenty’s been going on in the campaigns domain, too, from Pancake Day tweets that flipped social media norms upside down to the New York Times incurring the digital wrath of America’s overly-digital Tweeter-in-Chief.
We’ve taken a retrospective look at five of the last month’s best campaigns that got the world abuzz, online and off!
1) Coming Up: One Branded Content Record Breaker
When building a brand a persona on social media, there’s usually a degree of semblance between the channel’s tone and the company’s image. If the World Bank started tweeting in lolcats, for instance, we’d be right to be a little confused. However, February saw one company smash the performance record for branded content, with a modus operandi of doing exactly the opposite.
Denny’s describe themselves as an “America’s diner […] where guests have come for over 60 years now to sit back, relax and enjoy delicious, hearty meals”. Denny’s Twitter radically leaves behind this retro feel, operating instead in a weird, off-kilter territory that most brands would fear to tread, deftly and rapidly switching between equally hearty doses of irony and earnestness.
One of Denny’s Pancake Day tweets stunned the Internet and marketers alike, picking up over 100,000 retweets and over 150,000 likes:
Denny’s meme-heavy content shows the importance of ensuring that you’re speaking with your audience as opposed to merely speaking to them, situating your brand within the same jokes and trends to which your customers respond.
we promise if we give you pancakes they are your pancakes and we will not take them away
Denny’s’ ongoing Twitter joy shows the importance of being current, staying relevant by ensuring that your brand remains in-time with the rhythms of contemporary life.
Though they’re in an entirely different field, Cancer Research have found similar success by taking a similarly progressive approach.
For this year’s World Cancer Day, the charity led a smart campaign of installing smart benches in Lewisham and Islington; these were seating areas complemented by smartphone charging docks, free internet access and a contactless donation panel that allowed people to donate £2 at a time.
As a brand considering any type of installation, to think of simple ways in which modern technology can be integrated into the set-up is a wholly worthwhile angle to take.
3) Honda Scales New Heights with its New Civic
Honda’s advert for the newest generation of their classic Civic range arrived in the form of a breath-taking visual spectacle, presenting the remodelled vehicle through the rich metaphor of a person climbing up a mountainside. As the one minute thirty advert progresses, the camera reveals the mountain to be in the shape of a car.
Though it’s not an overly subtle image, it evokes a strong and affective sense of Honda’s timeliness as a brand, whose cars have been leaders on the road for well over fifty years. Simultaneously, the ad’s supremely high production values and sophisticated, polished camerawork balance the old with the new, evincing Honda’s long-term commitment to technological innovation.
It’s quite the far cry from Denny’s’ antics on Twitter; if their joy comes from a meticulously-crafted social channel that takes the brand out of orbit, here Honda have created an ad that matches their voice to perfection.
4) The New York Times Trumps Trump
In 2017, it’s clear that the Information Age has unfortunately spiralled into a Misinformation Age, with the biggest companies on the planet struggling to contain the rising tide of “fake news”. The New York Times have confirmed their commitment to the truth in a Droga5-led campaign titled “The Truth is Hard”, based in print media, online and in platforms such as a New York advertising board.
It’s rare for a campaign to pick up traction in the form of the attention of the President of the USA, but here it did, with President Trump remarking:
For first time the failing @nytimes will take an ad (a bad one) to help save its failing reputation. Try reporting accurately & fairly!
With the launch of the Nintendo Switch and the release of the newest addition to the Legend of Zelda saga of games, Domino’s have gone in for a slice of the action with a humorous Zelda/pizza hybrid campaign. The level of detail is relatively uncanny, right down to the pizza box shield and pizza cutter sword. It’s another great example of a brand wholly connecting with its customers’ humour and language, with the graphic picking up a highly positive response across social media channels.
February has seen so many developments in the world of social media that it’s been hard to keep up – fortunately, we’ve got the key changes rounded up here.
Firstly, Facebook has had a busy month. To begin with, the social network has announced that videos in the News Feed will soon auto play with sound on when using a mobile device. This feature is likely to apply to ads as well, and from an advertising perspective, the possibility of delivering sound-on adverts to users – a more engaging format – would be a real improvement over the current situation. However, even though Facebook has claimed that this change has been positively received in tests, for many users having sound-on automatically will be viewed as invasive, and may end up negatively impacting the image of the advertiser’s brand.
Facebook has also improved its capacity for displaying vertical video, and introduced a watch and scroll feature, which also allows videos to keep playing even once the Facebook app has been exited. Facebook has mentioned that a lot of its focus moving forwards is based on video, which explains this focus on ensuring it’s as prominent as possible.
Additionally, Facebook has announced updates to its newsfeed algorithm in an attempt to “prioritise authenticity.” Pages that are seen to be “trying to game the news feed” by using posts asking for engagements, or that post content which is often hidden by users, are deemed less authentic and may be positioned further down the newsfeed. Given all these recent changes on Facebook, it’s important for businesses to assess their content strategy, so they can take advantage of this push towards video content, and move away from posts that are deemed inauthentic by this new update.
It’s been a hectic time for Snapchat too, with a number of developments ahead of its forthcoming IPO in March. In addition to a significant portion of its user base migrating away to Instagram, a survey out this month claimed that 80% of the app’s key demographic (18-24) always or often skip ads on the app – worrying for businesses aiming to advertise to this market through this platform. Although this age group has been referenced by Snapchat as a big advertising opportunity for marketers, younger users so far haven’t responded well to promotional content on the app.
However, it hasn’t all been bad news for Snapchat, with the announcement that websites will now be able to have their own QR codes. This will allow businesses to set up links to their websites within the app, reducing the number of steps between the app and the website. This should help improve the number of site sessions generated by Snapchat, as well as providing an additional reason for users to follow that business on the app. For instance, retail stores may see this as an opportunity to facilitate turning product inspiration into instant purchases with this new update.
In further video news, Twitter has confirmed that a new metric is being tested alongside likes and retweets. Users will soon see a view count next to their video content to gauge its popularity, in an attempt to help “surface the best content”, according to Twitter. Although there’s no announcement as to when this will be rolled out to all users just yet, this is yet another indication of video’s rising prominence in the eyes of social media sites.
Twitter’s increasing focus on customer service has also been highlighted this month, as it has now introduced a method for businesses to personalise their customer service responses. This feature allows customer service representatives to use a personal profile rather than the corporate one when responding to queries. Twitter has mentioned in the past the benefits of this human connection, saying that users are “22% more likely to be satisfied compared to those who had impersonal interactions with a business on Twitter”, and this addition only attempts to further this aspect.
Finally, Instagram has announced a new carousel-style feature to its app, allowing users to publish up to 10 pictures or videos as one post. This presents a whole host of opportunities for businesses to create engaging posts on Instagram that weren’t previously possible. For instance, this could be used to ask users to vote for their favourite product amongst a set; show a step-by-step process in brief stages; or for businesses to provide detailed behind the scenes content within one post.
The first month of 2017 has been as busy as ever for social media, with countless new developments springing up across multiple channels. But never fear, we’ve put together a roundup of the most important ones to keep you in the loop.
This new year has begun as the last one ended, with Instagram announcing a whole host of expansions to its service. After all of its recent improvements to Stories, Instagram boasts over 150 million daily users of this feature and are now capitalising on this by introducing ads. There’s a clear opportunity here for businesses to take advantage of on an engaging, sound-on video advertising format, which is hard to find when advertising through other platforms. These ads are soon to roll out in the UK, and although they will only be optimised for reach to begin with, Instagram has promised the expansion of this to a greater range of objectives in the coming months.
Businesses will also be pleased to know that Instagram is now showing basic insights (reach, impressions, replies and exits) to report back on Stories, helping to optimise content for what is becoming an increasingly important component of Instagram. To capitalise on this even further, Facebook has announced the trial of its identical story-based feature (the inventively named Facebook Stories), so expect even more developments moving forwards.
Furthermore, if live video wasn’t already impossible to escape, Instagram is now offering its own service… but with a twist. Following a live stream these videos won’t be archived – so once the broadcast has finished, this content is gone. This adds a more spontaneous avenue for those businesses interested in live video, and this range of channels to broadcast on allows greater refinement of live content dependent on the audience.
Elsewhere, news has emerged that Facebook has begun to test mid-roll ads – advertisements that take place during a video. Advertisers have been desperate for a way to capitalise on the captive audiences in engaging video content, but Facebook has been reluctant to introduce pre-roll ads so far. Mid-roll may be the method that suits the company best; however any disruption of videos may generate negative sentiment among users, so we’ll be eagerly watching to see how this test turns out.
Facebook has also announced its Journalism project, an attempt to improve ties between the news industry and the social network in the wake of the controversy over the prevalence of ‘fake news’ on the website. The new features arising from this range from storytelling formats (like presenting collections of stories at once) to tools that allow users to subscribe to publications directly from Facebook. Although limited to the news world at the moment, these features could give an idea of what could eventually be rolled out to more pages in future.
Finally, perhaps symbolic of the New Year, January has seen Twitter starting afresh with certain areas of its service. Firstly, Twitter is consolidating Moments, search, trending hashtags and live video into a new Explore tab – although not a huge change, this reveals the company’s diminishing focus on the Moments tab, which has not seen the success that many had hoped. Additionally, Twitter is removing the “buy” button, a feature used to drive sales in certain tweets, which puts an end to Twitter functioning as a sales channel for those ecommerce-focused brands using it. This reinforces Twitter’s increasing spotlight on customer relations offerings, leaving Facebook and Pinterest (and soon Instagram) as options for those brands who wish to use social media as a sales channel. Twitter clearly has an eye on repositioning itself, so we’ll be keeping a close eye on any further developments it decides to make…
November has been yet another intriguing month in the fast-moving social media sphere, with countless developments across multiple channels. We’re going to take a look through those which will likely have the greatest impact.
Firstly, it has emerged that Facebook has stopped insurer Admiral from using social media data to set policy prices. Admiral had planned to use data concerning the way people write statuses and the number of likes they receive as a method of perceiving which users will be safer drivers and adjusting prices accordingly. However, after a number of objections raised by prominent privacy-protection agencies, Facebook blocked Admiral’s plan at the last minute, claiming that the scheme would have contravened its privacy guidelines. As noble as this may seem, it is worth noting that if users begin to distrust Facebook with their personal data, their targeting systems for ads will become less effective, which implies that this decision could originate from a more self-serving perspective.
Furthermore, Facebook have announced a swathe of changes to their metrics, the most notable of which concerning organic reach. According to Facebook, summary figures over 7-day and 28-day periods on the ‘Page Insights’ dashboard had previously been miscalculated due to repeat visitors being treated as multiple unique users, and will now be on average 33% and 55% lower respectively. These errors have challenged faith in Facebook’s metrics once again, with many led to believe that non-paid posts had reached more people than they had. Facebook have claimed to be introducing greater third-party verification in their metrics in an attempt to dissuade the growing negative sentiment.
Over to Twitter now who have announced that they will be rolling out customer services bots into their direct messaging feature in an attempt to entice more brands to use it as a customer service platform. These automated responses can range from simple welcome messages responding to a DM, to helping with a range of common queries (for instance, allowing customers to get more information about the tracking of an order). This is encouraging news for businesses, as these features present a new range of customer service options, and may encourage users to direct complaints to a private channel, rather than airing their grievances over the public timeline. Although this is a step forward for Twitter, in reality this just playing catch-up with Facebook who launched a comparable service on their Messenger app back in April.
A series of interesting developments for businesses on Instagram have been announced this month. Firstly, Stories are getting more dynamic – the Boomerang app has now been attached to this feature, which will facilitate the creation of simple yet engaging video content, and the addition of Mentions to Instagram Stories provides the opportunity for businesses to engage with consumers in a new way. For instance, brands could tag users in their story as a more personalised way of interacting with customers in their premises or at their events, without having it remain on their feed permanently. Secondly, Instagram is introducing e-commerce features, designed to make the transition between finding inspiration and purchasing items easier. Although currently a US only trial, businesses will soon be able to tag products in their photos, provide information about them, and link through to their website with “Shop Now” buttons. This is extremely interesting news for retail businesses as it provides a key opportunity to mould an engagement channel into a sales channel. Lastly, following on from Facebook and Twitter’s further forays into live video last month, it should come as no surprise that Instagram are also planning on getting in on the act. As we mentioned in last month’s roundup, live video presents a world of opportunities for businesses, so this should be one to watch.
Finally, after last month’s mourning of Vine, it seems that its resurrection is already on the cards. According to multiple sources, Twitter has already received a number of bids from companies vying to purchase Vine. A new owner may mean new developments for the app, so we’ll be keeping an eye on how this one turns out…
We’re into a new year, with undoubtedly many social media stories to come, however there are a few stories from the end of last year which have caught our eye… Here’s a roundup of those developments which will play an important role this coming year.
The biggest news dominating social media during December has concerned Facebook’s crackdown on ‘fake news’. After an outcry that hoax stories influenced the outcome of the US presidential election, updates have been made allowing users to flag news as fake, and Facebook has partnered with independent fact checking websites to help demonstrate where sources may be disputed. Although there aren’t necessarily any direct implications for businesses from this story, it is important that Facebook reacts strongly to this in order to reinvigorate confidence in the accuracy of its service, and with misinformation sweeping the site, it has to ensure users and businesses don’t begin to mistrust the network.
We hope you’re not getting tired of live video developments, because social media definitely isn’t. Twitter has now introduced the possibility to live stream directly from the app without the need for a Periscope account, facilitating the process of live-streaming even further. To go one better, Facebook launched 360 degree live video soon after, although Twitter has just introduced its own version as well. With live video becoming increasingly prevalent on social media, yet with such a variety of ways to use it, the opportunities for businesses to go live and engage directly with users (as previously mentioned in this article) are rapidly expanding.
Finally, Instagram has launched a few more features that provide interesting opportunities for businesses. Firstly, users now have the ability to save posts in order to revisit them later. By providing engaging content like a memorable ad, or showing a product in a way that resonates with users and making them save it, businesses have the opportunity to create a long-lasting impression on users. Elsewhere, Instagram Stories has had yet another new development, with addition of stickers & text allowing these Stories to be customised even further, the value of which to businesses we looked at last month. Instagram has celebrated reaching 600 million users this month, with 100 million of those joining in the last 6 months. This, coupled with the fact that Instagram is increasingly catering for businesses, has demonstrated the rising opportunity having a strong presence on Instagram can have.
We can expect 2017 to be as full of cutting-edge social media developments as this past year, so we’ll be continuing to watch closely as we enter the new year…
Throughout October, we have seen a range of developments in the world of social media. One of the most intriguing of these has been the addition of a series of features on Facebook which encourage the eliciting and sharing of recommendations. Now, when users ask for advice, a prominent request on the News Feed is shown, which lets friends know that users are looking for suggestions and respond accordingly.
Furthermore, Facebook is rolling out methods to book appointments, get quotes and even purchase items immediately through businesses’ pages. This feature may become vital for companies, as the buying process is streamlined and the entire purchase journey can now be made entirely through Facebook. These options are available due to partnerships with third party firms like Ticketmaster, so local businesses will need to be connected and integrated with the relevant company in order to profit from this opportunity.
As word of mouth is widely considered the most persuasive of advertising, these updates could become incredibly important for businesses. Consumers are much more likely to act on the advice of a friend, so local businesses should look into capitalising on any attention gained through these new features.
In video news, Facebook is improving its Live API service, allowing verified Pages to schedule live video events in a more engaging manner. Users are also given a reminder of these streams in advance, and can connect and interact with other viewers, helping to build a sense of community around the video provider. On a related note, Twitter is expanding its Periscope app, allowing users to stream from a greater range of devices, including professional cameras, apps and even virtual reality devices, providing the opportunity for more professional and polished content through live video.
These live video updates should reinforce the burgeoning importance of this platform for businesses, as they provide a novel way of interacting with users and customers on an increasingly personal level. Through streaming live events or providing behind the scenes access, businesses are able to give a more personal and inclusive experience. Live video could also be used for demonstrations and tutorials, allowing the promotion of products whilst providing unique and helpful information to consumers.
In Instagram news, the Stories feature is expanding to the explore tab. As mentioned in August, Instagram Stories has presented an opportunity for businesses to post more ‘authentic’ and live content, and according to Instagram over 100 million users use this tab every day to find content from creators that they are not currently following. This expansion of Stories presents an opportunity for businesses to widen the benefits of Stories to reach a whole new audience, and by providing well curated and engaging content on this platform, this could be a way to draw more users to their social media channels and hopefully through to being customers.
Finally, Vine – RIP. In the wake of a recent announcement that hundreds of layoffs were coming, Twitter has announced that it will be shutting Vine, the 6-second video app. Although it has proved an attractive platform for younger generations, Vine has struggled to keep its user base up when competing against the likes of Instagram and Snapchat, and Twitter has since shown greater interest in its integrated video and Periscope developments. For businesses, however, there will not be too much to mourn. Although Vine had some unique features, it was these very features that made it difficult to deliver engagement-driving content.
It wasn’t so long ago that Facebook announced their topic-related newsfeed update enabling users to consume more content that is relevant to their interests.
However after hearing feedback from their Facebook community, they noted that users wanted to stay as connected as possible with their friends and family.
Therefore, with this in mind, Facebook recently announced that their updated newsfeed algorithm will ensure that users don’t miss any content posted by their friends and family.
What does this mean for businesses?
Facebook has warned that this may have an effect on page reach and referral traffic. Therefore businesses who are trying to connect with their followers through their Facebook page may see a slight decrease in their overall reach.
As Facebook is one of the largest sites for referral traffic, beating even Google, this change to Facebook’s newsfeed means that businesses may have to rethink their strategy when it comes to reaching their target audiences.
Influencer campaigns are one way in which businesses could increase the reach of their page and still fit in with the recent newsfeed update.
Facebook recently announced that they will be rolling out their new topic-related newsfeed algorithm, which enables users to tailor the content that appears on their newsfeed by choosing topics that are of interest to them. These topics include – sports, TV & movies, music, politics, health and fitness and much more. This change to Facebook’s topic related newsfeed does have similarities to that of Twitter’s “moments” section, which focuses more on providing its users with real-time news content.
The new topic-related newsfeed function will stand aside from the user’s Facebook newsfeed. This allows users to have a section for their newsfeed, alongside the categories of interest to them.
This new update enables the user to consume more content that is relevant to them, therefore improving the user’s overall experience on Facebook. However this does not seem to have any chronological order; therefore Facebook will have to make changes to the timescale of their topic related content to provide users with real time news.
Instagram – Increased video length, business profiles and CTA photo advertisements
Instagram has revealed a vast amount of changes recently, from the big reveal of their new logo, to changes to videos, newsfeeds and photo ads; it’s safe to say Instagram has had a busy couple of months!
Let’s firstly start with Instagram’s change to its video length; users are now able to upload videos with a length of up to 60 seconds, as opposed to just 15. This encourages users to upload more video content through Instagram, thus increasing the amount of engagement that users’ posts will receive.
In addition to the change of length in video content, users can now also see the total amount of views their video posts receive, rather than showing the total number of likes. Users are still able to see the total number of likes their video post has by just tapping on the video, which will then show the number of likes and those who have liked the post.
This update to Instagram videos enables users to monitor the reach, engagement and interaction of their videos more effectively.For example if a video post has a high number of views, but a low number of likes, this suggests that the video has had a high reach but the content is not something that audiences are engaging with, hence the low number of interactions.
Instagram also announced the introduction of their business profiles, which are to be launched in the UK in the near future. The Instagram business profile will enable businesses to control how they would like their customers to get in contact with them. Whether this is contacting them via email, or redirecting customers to their website, or providing customers with directions to their business. This new function will enable businesses to communicate with their customers more efficiently and effectively through Instagram, improving businesses customer service management.
Businesses will now also be able to use Instagram’s new Insights tool, which will allow them to gain more of an insight into the behaviour and actions of their followers, as well as monitoring which posts performed the highest with their followers. Businesses are then able to use the posts that are performing well and turn them into ads to promote their service/products and target a wider audience.
Another recent change to Instagram is that CTA (call to action) is now embedded within photo advertisements. Once a user has tapped on the photo ad, they will then be presented with the option to click through to a website or app, thus enabling businesses to direct their audiences to their website or app, increasing CTR and potentially conversion rates.
However, the double tap CTA, does not apply to video advertisements, therefore this may be something to consider for businesses when choosing to advertise on Instagram.
We were waiting for it to happen…and it’s finally here. Twitter has now started to roll out a Facebook-style algorithm that means content will no longer appear chronologically but, instead, show you the ‘best tweets first’.
This concept of social media channels curating bespoke content is not alien. Facebook has engineered a similar algorithm over the past couple of years which serves your friends and companies content that they feel you’ll most likely want to read/watch/engage with first.
Furthermore, handpicked ‘best tweets first’ content also isn’t unknown for Twitter which has had a ‘whilst you were away…’ section pinned to the top of our screens for some time now.
When will this roll out?
At this stage such content is only shown on an ‘opt in’ basis; Twitter users have to tick a box within their settings for the channel’s well-known chronological feed to be disrupted.
However, it is anticipated that the update will be rolled out to all users in the coming weeks.
What impact will have this on social media marketing?
Like any marketing strategy, the update only spurs on the fact that marketing channels, social media included, must strive to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
We anticipate that, like Facebook’s decline in organic reach, activity must be content-led; a dependence on killer content is key to ensure content on Twitter is seen first. However, like any great content, it needs to be put in front of the right audience at the right time – a better focus on audience behaviours (income more social listening tools) and use of advertising are absolutely paramount.
If you’re in the UK, you might have logged on to the desktop site, iOS or Android Twitter app and noticed a new lightning bolt tab appear in between Home and Notifications.
Having already been launched in the US and Brazil, Twitter Moments is a collection of lists featuring live feeds on news, sport and entertainment. Bringing together images, videos and related Tweets in an easy-to-read format and curated with the help of some of Twitter’s 18 production partners, Moments aims to use this format to attract more users and help current ones keep abreast of breaking stories, live sports coverage and trending topics.
What does this mean for digital marketing?
Twitter Moments is not just for those wanting the latest news but can also serve as a useful tool for brands and marketing companies, too.
Twitter VP of Sales, Matt Derella, said the launch of Twitter Moments will “provide a canvas for brands to move people and shift their hearts and minds”.
How does Twitter Moments plan to do this?
When using Moments, users can clearly scroll through all related Tweets, even if they aren’t following a particular account, making it possible for brands to potentially reach a larger audience than they previously would. Indeed, Mad Marketer explains that “real time marketing has been extremely effective on social media. However, if you’re not following a brand you may never see their post…. Moments would amplify the viral potential of certain posts while expanding the value of Twitter to marketers”. This is potentially big news when you consider the fact that there are over 15 million active Twitter users in the UK alone.
In addition, Twitter will soon launch Promoted Moments, which will allow brands to pay for their very own Moment to appear for 24 hours.
So what can you do as a brand? We suggest you brush up on your social media skills to maximise engagement which will help ensure your brand is up-to-date and relevant and ready for its Moment in the spotlight!
During a Q&A session at Facebook’s headquarters, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook will be implementing a ‘dislike’ button. Facebook has refrained from using an upvote/downvote system, like the one used on Reddit, in an effort to avoid having posts compete for popularity and visibility.
The introduction of the presently unnamed ‘dislike’ button is not to register users’ dissatisfaction with a particular post, rather the aim is to allow users to show their empathy with a particularly sensitive post, such as news items reporting on the refugee crisis or a bereavement. Speaking of the decision to add the new feature to the site, Zuckerberg said an alternative to ‘liking’ posts of a delicate nature was needed; “what they really want is the ability to express empathy. Not every moment is a good moment,”
The feature, which has been requested by Facebook users numerous times over the years, is still in the design process and it is not known when the feature will appear on the site, although Zuckerberg states he hopes it will be “soon”.
Back in December Facebook announced a function that would enable admins to include a call to action button in Facebook cover photos. Much to the excitement of businesses all around the world, this simple addition to Facebook business pages was to be initially rolled out in the US with other countries following suit at a later date. It now appears that this function is available in the UK.
Here’s what it looks like in action:
Why is this a good thing?
Having a clear call to action at the top of the page helps businesses on Facebook to deliver their marketing messaging to their Facebook fans without being too pushy. By having an easy and clear to see call to action, it also provides flexibility for admins and businesses to test which call to action button is not only resonating with their audience but also have the opportunity to monitor the results as well as testing landing pages.
Choice at this stage is limited with call to actions geared towards businesses operating on a local scale or e-commerce businesses. Businesses therefore wanting to use the call to action to drive traffic back to the website to find out more might struggle to find an appropriate button with the options only currently including: Book Now, Contact Us, Use App, Play Game, Shop Now, Sign Up, Watch Video.
Whilst the downsides to this new function are few and far between – the only small issue is that the call to action button isn’t currently available on mobile – however, it wouldn’t be surprising if this was rolled out at a later date.
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