Tag: social media

How MTV Used Vine To Capture The Viral Moments Of VMAs

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
During this Sunday’s VMAs broadcast, MTV’s official Vine account outshone the channel’s performance on other social networks, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. While much of the conversation surrounding the annual award show happened on Twitter, it was Vine that had the most interactions among all social media, with the top vine video amassing nearly 11 million plays.

What Brands Should Do
Vine’s endlessly looping, six-second-long format made it a perfect platform to disseminate and consume the viral moments of media events in bite-sized portions in real time, something that most brands should leverage into their social media efforts. Essentially gifs with sound, Vine offers the perfect format for brands to create short-form viral content to engage their fans with. Plus, its deep integration with Twitter no doubt helps to expand its reach as well, as Vine videos are natively embedded in tweets.

 

Source: Digiday

Header image taken from MTV’s Vine Account Page

How Brands Are Using “Snapcodes” To Attract Followers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Several digital publishers including The Huffington Post and The Daily Dot have replaced their usual Twitter profile pictures with “Snapcodes,” an account-specific icon generated by Snapchat that doubles as a scannable QR code for easier following. Snapchat users usually find people to follow through phone numbers in their address books, so this offers a good alternative for brand accounts that aren’t typically tied to a phone number. Previously, users would have to know the username and manually search for the brands’ Snapchat accounts in order to follow them.

What Brands Should Do
For brands looking to connect with today’s young audience, utilizing Snapcode on other social media channels to build a following on Snapchat would be a good place to start. More importantly, brands should learn to leverage their social media presence into building a fanbase on new emerging platforms, such as Snapchat and other messaging apps, where today’s consumers are spending more and more time in.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Header image courtesy of Huffington Post’s Twitter Page

Social Overtakes Search As Main Traffic Source For News

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
A recent report from web traffic analytics firm Parse.ly says its data shows Facebook now accounts for more of the traffic to news sites than Google. Traditionally, organic search dominated as the top traffic referrer online, but social media has been quickly catching up in recent years and has now seemingly overtaken search as the leading traffic referrer source for good. As of July 2015. social media, of which Facebook is the largest, accounted for 43% of the traffic to news sites tracked by Parse.ly, whereas Google Search only accounted for just 38%.

What Brands Can Do
As consumers increasingly switch from desktop access to mobile devices, time spent in apps is starting to eclipse time spent on the mobile web, which could explain why more people are getting their news and content from social media instead of web search. This means brands need to make a conscious effort in translating their web content onto social media platforms, if they wish to keep up with the changing user behaviors.

One bonus effect of this shift is that content that does well on social media can get exponentially more attention than something that does well in search. Studies have shown that consumers are more likely to buy a product if it is recommended by someone they know.

 

Source: Fortune

Why Instagram’s API Is A Big Deal For Brands

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Last week, Instagram officially switched on its API for ads, making it possible for just about anyone to easily purchase ads on the photo-sharing social network. Advertisers can now buy through tools that plug directly into the network, such as Salesforce, Brand Networks, and Ampush. Previously, Instagram has been quite cautious in rolling out its ad products, selecting only a handful of brands to advertise on its platform.

What Brands Should Do
Instagram has quickly grown popular among marketers and brands for its visual-first nature and high user engagement. Its mobile ad revenue is estimated to reach $2.8 billion in 2017, potentially surpassing other digital ad giants like Twitter and Google in the U.S. market. For brands, especially those in visual-dependent verticals like fashion and cosmetics, or those seeking to reach a younger audience, that wanted to advertise on Instagram but got discouraged by its long, complicated buying process before, now is the time.

 

Source: Re/code

How Old Spice Is Winning With Native Ads On Imgur

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Old Spice has launched a native ad campaign on Imgur, an image-sharing community of 150 million – mostly millennial male – users, which makes it a good fit for the men’s deodorant brand. The brand’s sponsored post utilizes popular memes of the platform, and also engages Imgur users with self-aware language and challenging users to “gif wars,” a popular form of voting contest unique to the platform. The campaign has received very positive responses so far, racking up over 750 comments under its launch post.

What Brands Should Do
With the increasing usage of ad-blockers (for more on this, read our newest Fast Forward feature), more and more brands are turning to native ads to combat the viewability issue. Old Spice worked with Imgur’s in-house creative team to create branded content that fits the platform, and their familiarity with its community shined through. For brands that are considering native ads for content marketing, this example is further proof that tailoring your ad content and format to the platform of choice gives the best chance of success.

 

Source: Digiday

Header image taken from Old Spice’s Launch Post on Imgur

Twitter To Reinvent Itself With “Project Lightning”

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: TechCrunch

Twitter has been undergoing some major changes recently, including a leadership change, eliminating character limit in direct messages, and officially rolling out its autoplaying video ads. And now, reports claim that Twitter has been working on a new project codenamed “Project Lightning” that could help twitter reinvent how people see and search for tweets.

This new project will bring a curated news platform to Twitter, shifting its content focus from user’s timeline to breaking news and events as they happen in real time. A group of editors at Twitter will be handpicking and sorting relevant tweets into various event-based channels, enhancing Twitter’s appeal as a go-to site for real time news and events. Although still a few months away from launching, we could already foresee brands getting on board with timely tweets to get a piece of the amplified attention.

 

Correction: An earlier version of the post misspelled “Project Lighting” as “Lightening”.

Pinterest To Become More Brand Friendly With New Ads API

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Ad Week

Pinterest has been readying its ad sales programs since a year ago, consciously making its platform more brand-friendly. And earlier today, the company unveiled its first ads API for tech partners to help make posting more efficient and provide better measurement.

Moreover, the social scrapbook site is also launching a marketing program to help brands increase the amount of unpaid posts. Paid advertisers will be able to automate the buying of Promoted Pins in a new programmatic system, whose automation and sophistication will undoubtedly help Pinterest to woo brands and advertisers.

Global Watch: How Xiaomi Broke Its Own Flash Sale Record

Posted on by Lab Team

Just in time for the company’s fifth anniversary, rising Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi reported yesterday that it broke its own flash-sale record, selling more than two million phones within 12 hours, reportedly generating around $335 million in revenue. The secret to its success besides hunger marketing? A loyal fan base built from smart marketing.

The flash sale, as part of Xiaomi’s “Mi Fan Festival”, is a tried-and-true tactic for the company to leverage its zealous fan base. Besides flash sales, the company also builds up loyalty by routinely hosting exclusive parties and sponsoring festivals for fans across the country, and systematically rewarding fans that volunteer to answer questions on online community forums.

Moreover, savvy social media marketing has also played a big role in Xiaomi’s outreach and community-building efforts. Xiaomi’s page on the Chinese microblog Weibo currently has over 10.7 million followers, and the company typically announces its flash sales and other updates on its social media platforms as well as on popular messaging app WeChat.

Still, Xiaomi’s ambitious expansion into certain international markets so far has been met with lackluster responses, and a major reason behind such underwhelming performance is that its marketing doesn’t translate well across nations. Without a fan base to hype up its products, Xiaomi suffers from low brand recognition and loyalty in oversea markets. It’ll be interesting to see if the company sticks with its usual marketing tactics, or try something more localized instead.

 

 

YouTube’s March Towards Sophistication

Posted on by Lab Team

With over 1 billion users, YouTube has held onto the top spot for video sharing on the Internet since its founding a decade ago. Since then, YouTube has steadily grown and matured, slowly but surely transitioning from a pure video-sharing website into a sophisticated video platform with diversified content and a corresponding monetization system.

Music has long been one of the most popular content categories on YouTube, and in fact, a mid-2012 Nielsen study reported that two-thirds of U.S. teens used YouTube as their primary choice for streaming music. Not surprisingly, YouTube has been building out its music business, beginning last February when it started promoting curated playlists in search results and culminating in YouTube Music Key, its own Spotify-like subscription-based music service in late November.

However, this newfound focus on music hasn’t stopped YouTube from diversifying its content. In fact, earlier this week, the company released a brand new family-friendly mobile app showcasing its kid-friendly content and easy parental controls. The movie rental feature it introduced back in 2011 has also been gaining traction lately, thanks to the online release of controversial movie The Interview. Moreover, it has been credited with revolutionizing modern journalism by reducing entry barriers and the video game industry by enabling streaming commentary.

YouTube is also developing a correspondingly sophisticated monetization system. Besides offering advertisers guarantees on views and chances to purchase Nielsen ratings, its unique Content ID system helps content creators and media owners monetize all videos containing copyrighted material, which accounts for over a third of the monetized views on YouTube. Recently, the company has been criticized for aggressively pushing its monetization system on users and allegedly strong-arming indie musicians into strict contracts, adding to the many growing pains for YouTube on its road to online video domination.

How Medium Is Becoming More Like Tumblr

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: TechCrunch

Popular industry blog platform Medium is introducing a series of changes that encourages its users to share stories of shorter length. The platform is also replacing its front-page “channels” with “tags” for content discovery, furthering its resemblance with Tumblr, for better or worse.

While it makes sense that Medium would want to make itself more accessible to casual bloggers in order to reach a broader mainstream user base, some worry that such changes could cost Medium its core asset— the staple “Medium Post”, —thereby losing its differentiating point.