Tag: social media

Twitter To Roll Out Promoted Moments This Weekend

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Wasting no time to monetize its newest feature, Twitter is set to roll out branded Moments this weekend. Instead of inserting promoted tweets into existing Moments channels, Twitter will grant advertisers a dedicated Moments channel for 24 hours, allowing them to incorporate more photos, videos, and tweets to build a rich narrative and draw in the audience with branded content. The first-ever Promoted Moments will be for the upcoming sports drama flick Creed, produced by MGM and distributed by Warner Bros.

What Brands Need To Do
As we noted when Twitter first launched Moments earlier this month, this new feature makes content discovery on Twitter easier and quicker, especially for casual users. Now with the  launch of branded Moments, Twitter is opening the door for brands and marketers to capture the attention of Twitter users. For brands that are interested in trying out this new ad product, the key would be creating a collection of fun, engaging tweets that people will willingly watch and share.

 

Source: Bloomberg Business

Facebook Ramps Up Mobile Commerce With New Shopping Feed

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following its partnership with Shopify to add “Shop” sections to companies’ Pages last month, Facebook continues to dive deeper into mobile commerce with the debut of a new shopping feed and a wide roll-out of its new “Canvas” ad format. Now Facebook users can find a “Shopping” tab in their feed menu, which provides a feed of various products that businesses choose to highlight and is customized to match individual user’s connections, Likes, and interests. Moreover, Facebook is also rolling out its immersive full-page ad format, now called “Canvas,” to more businesses to showcase different products in a fast-loading, full-screen experience in the news feed on mobile.

What Brands Need To Do
According to a recent study, Facebook ranks as the No.1 app that consumers spend time in, taking up 13% of all time spent on mobile. Therefore, it is important for retailers to reach customers where they already are and start utilizing these mobile commerce features to build a presence on Facebook. Besides, Facebook also provides some data-driven personalization options, which retail and CPG brands would be wise to make use of.

 

Source: TechCrunch
Header image credit: Promotional Image from Facebook

Facebook To Expand Like Button With Six New “Reactions”

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Thursday Facebook unveiled “Reactions,” a set of emojis designed to convey empathic feelings other than a simple “like.” The six new reaction emojis are laughter, love, cheer, shock, sadness, and anger, and they will be treated the same as “Likes.” They will also influence Facebook’s news feed algorithms. The company will test these new reaction buttons in Ireland and Spain before rolling them out globally.

What Brands Need To Do
For brands, this expansion of the Like button presents a new way to accurately gauge customers’ reactions and more accurately measure their sentiment. Previously, brands would usually turn to sentiment analysis services with semantic analysis of comments provided by third-party analytic firms to get an idea of how people are reacting to their content on social media. Now, brands will be able to see reaction counts within Facebook’s page insights tool, something that any brand with a Facebook presence should definitely look into.

 

Source: AdAge

Header image courtesy of Facebook

How Brands Can Make Use Of Twitter’s New “Moments” Feature

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Twitter officially launched Moments, a brand new way for users to discover top tweets and for brands to reach a wider audience. Previously known as Projected Lightning, this new Moments feature presents editorially curated collections of best tweets in regard to various news items and live media events. With this new feature, users can now easily find the top tweets of the moment in a separate tab across Twitter’s mobile apps and desktop sites, therefore shifting its content focus from a user’s timeline to breaking news and events in real time. Major publishers like BuzzFeed, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have signed up to try out this new product. Twitter also reportedly has deals in place with a number of unnamed brands to run ads within the collections in coming weeks.

What Brands Need To Do
This new feature makes content discovery on Twitter easier and quicker, especially for casual users. Therefore it enhances Twitter’s appeal as a go-to site for real time news and events, which in turn brings a bigger audience for brands. Moreover, it also provides brands specific channels to reach different audience segments based on their interests, such as a sportswear brand reaching sports lovers by live-tweeting a major sports event. Although Twitter’s selections seem to be fairly news-centric at the moment, we can already foresee brands of all types getting on board during live media events with high-quality, timely tweets to get a piece of the amplified attention.

 

Source: The Verge

Promotional image courtesy of Twitter 

Brands Engaging Fans On Twitter With Native Polls

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Last week Twitter quietly unveiled a new feature that allows simple, two-answer polls to be natively embedded into Tweets. Only select accounts have been granted access to this new feature, according to Twitter, but many major brands, especially those in sports, are already using the new tool to engage with their followers with simple, fun questions. The polls are visible on the desktop and mobile apps for 24 hours by default, with voting results only revealed after the polls expire.

What Brands Need To Do
This feature offers brands a new, low-barrier way to engage with their fans on Twitter, while also giving brands a chance to receive direct feedback. Besides, brands can also use this new tool to organize simple Twitter contests. For instance, last Friday, Tesco unveiled a pick-your-favorite cookie poll that also promised winners digital coupons. As social commerce continues to gain momentum, this new poll feature could play an important supporting role in engaging online shoppers, and brands of all types would be wise to start experiment with it.

 

Source: Marketing Land

ABC Uses Custom Hashtag-Emoji Combo To Unlock Previews On Twitter

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following Coca-Cola’s debut of the first-ever branded emoji on Twitter last week, ABC is tapping into the marketing potential of emojis to promote the new season premiere of its Thursday night  lineup. Fans of the three “TGIT” shows can tweet special hashtag-emoji combinations designated by ABC (Scandal, for example, asks for a combo of #Scandal and a wine glass emoji) to unlock exclusive video content from the corresponding shows via auto-generated private messages.

What Brands Should Do
Although it remains unclear if ABC actually paid twitter for this activation, since there’s no new emoji specifically created for this promotional efforts. Nevertheless, it provides an interesting new use case of how brands can innovatively tap into emoji’s unique marketing potential on social networks. The reward of exclusive previews incentivizes fans to engage with the campaign and help spread the message, a clever tactic that all brands with social marketing efforts could emulate and put to good use.  

 

Source: Marketing Land

Why Nescafe Abandoned Their Own Site For Tumblr

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Swiss food and beverage giant Nestlé is converting its Nescafé.com into a Tumblr blog. The reasons behind this rather unorthodox move seem to be trifold. First, according to Nescafé’s marketing chief Michael Chrisment, moving all its web assets to the Tumblr platform is aimed at “building stronger relationships with younger consumers.” Second, it allows Nestlé to tap into the social sharing effect and user-generated content that Tumblr has to offer. Lastly, by switching to Tumblr’s platform, Nestlé eliminated the hefty cost of creating and maintaining the back-end of their sites.

What Brands Should Do
Of course, not all brands need to be as radical as Nestlé and start converting websites to social platforms. Nevertheless, the lesson here is that, as consumers continue to move towards mobile and social platforms and away from desktop websites, making content easily accessible and shareable is becoming increasingly important to the success of branded content. Therefore, it is time for brands, especially those seeking the attention of younger generations, to reevaluate their digital presence and reconsider their content strategies.

 

Source: The Verge

Instagram Gets More Serious About Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
After experimenting extensively with various ad products and formats, Instagram is now getting serious about courting TV and online advertisers with more standardized formats and buying options. After lifting the restriction on “non-square posts” last week, Instagram is now allowing brands to run 30-second-long video ads on its platform, extending the previous video runtime of 15 seconds. The company will also start rolling out its ad products to 30 more global markets such as Mexico and India, further expanding its reach.

Moreover, the photo-sharing network is also introducing a new banner-like ad format called Marquee, which, according to Instagram, aims to “help drive mass awareness and expanded reach in a short time-frame”. It will also start offer more customizable “call-to-action” buttons that appeals to a wide array of industries, including travel, entertainment, and retail, with direct response formats that can link outside of Instagram.

What Brands Should Do
As Instagram becomes more ad-friendly, brands should obviously start experiment with the new formats and learn to use each ad product to its advantages. The new Marquee buying option, for example, should be a good fit for for big product launches or movie releases where brands seek big opening sales. Moreover, brands should keep in mind that Instagram is still very much a mobile-first platform, which means that vertical videos are going to look better than the landscape ones.

 

Source: TechCrunch

 

IPG Media Lab + DIRECTV: Annual Survey Of The American Football Consumer

Posted on by Lab Team

Click here to download our survey report.

Live sports broadcasting is arguably the last bastion for live TV viewing. and NFL Football accounts for 1/3 of sports viewing. IPG Media Lab and DIRECTV partnered on an annual “Survey of the American Football Consumer,” which is designed to measure the following:

  • The NFL Viewing Experience
  • NFL Fans’ Passion for the Game
  • Consumption Habits of NFL Fans
  • Brand Relevance to NFL Audiences

To learn more on how to fully connect with American football fans, download and read our survey report here, or read the slides below.

 

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Instagram Adds New Share And Chat Features

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Instagram introduced Instagram Direct at the end of 2013 to allow users to send private posts to each other, but the feature’s isolated placement within the app has hindered its adoption. Now with the newest update, Instagram finally overhauled the feature to give it a more “messaging-friendly” layout and allow user to share photos, locations, and even user profiles with selected friends straight from the news feed.  Previously, users had to manually input their friend’s profile handle in comments in order to share content.

What Brands Should Do
Instagram has been growing popular among brands and advertisers, thanks to its inherently visual nature and unique aesthetics. And this new makeover of Instagram Direct, which aims to facilitate easier content discovery and sharing, could lead to a higher organic exposure for branded content, with potential to go viral. Therefore, brands that are active on Instagram would be wise to take advantage of this new feature and start encouraging content sharing.

 

Source: The Verge