Tag: social media marketing

Instagram Continues Global Roll-Out Of Business Profiles

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Instagram officially launched Business Profiles at the beginning of June after weeks of private testing, and now the company is ramping up the global roll-out of its latest brand-friendly features. The social network says it is fully rolling out Business Profiles, along with the two brand-oriented tools, Insights and Promote, in the US, Australia, and New Zealand in the coming months and will finish the global roll-out by the end of the year.

Why Brands Should Care
Instagram has been modeling its business-oriented products after its parent company Facebook, including Business Profiles (similar to Facebook Pages), Insights (Facebook Pages come with an analytics product of the same name), and the direct-response ads launched last year. Although new reports suggest that Instagram’s direct-response ads haven’t totally clicked with brand advertisers yet, the global roll-out of the business-facing tools shows Instagram’s determination in making its platform more brand-friendly. As Instagram continues to vie for the massive amount of ad dollars shifting from traditional channels, brands, especially those with an international presence, would be smart to take full advantage of these new business tools to engage with its 500 million monthly users.

 

Source: Wired

 

Marketing budgets must open to social

Posted on by Lab Team

Social media's percent of marketing budgets (iStock) To remain successful, marketers MUST market in the social web. According to a May 2009 Anderson Analytics’ survey, 52% of social network users had become a fan or follower of a company or brand, while 46% had said something good about a brand or company on a social network. No matter the marketing goal, from customer service, branding, and lead generation to direct marketing and e-commerce, there is a place for social media in the marketing plan.

Although companies have begun to realize the importance of social media marketing in the near term, budgets have been slow to open up. While traditional media channels attract the largest percentage, online channels represent a growing portion of all marketing spend. But although social network interest, momentum and overall ad budgets are increasing, social network spending will remain a small percentage of total US online spending, remaining at 4.7% to 4.8% over the next few years (eMarketer). Still it’s important to recognize that resources directed to the social media space include time and effort and can be less concrete, and the key advantage of social media marketing is that you can get a lot of value for little investment. Continue reading “Marketing budgets must open to social”

Facebook marketing boot camp

Posted on by Lab Team

Facebook marketing camp This month the Lab attended a kind of Facebook marketing boot camp, where members of the Facebook team guided us on best practices for integrating Facebook within brand marketing plans. The opportunity is much larger then capturing a portion of the 250 million Facebook users as customers; it’s also a prospect for new ways to be innovative in our marketing.

Most of the conversation of the day centered around two ways you can use Facebook to market your brand: engagement ads and Facebook pages. But the team did talk a bit about what’s new on the popular site. For instance, they are starting to put demographic and geographic targeting into action: Targeting keywords from status updates and users birthdays are new features.

Continue reading “Facebook marketing boot camp”