Starting last month, Mercedes-Benz has been seeding their ad content to various recruited “Instagram influencers” to market the car on their respective feeds. This effort is part of the #GLApacked campaign for its GLA sports utility vehicle scheduled to launch later this fall. In addition, a GLA cross-country excursion is also being documented on Instagram as native ad content. Since visual storytelling is a really powerful tool for the younger consumer, Instagram seems to be a great fit for this campaign. As brands continue to explore the new and exciting territory of social media marketing, the luxury car company’s move to tap into these influencers’ following is no doubt instrumental. How many impressions would actually turn into purchase though, would a lot harder to measure, and that’s what we marketers need to figure out.
Tag: social media
Can Brands Get Better Engagement On Messaging Apps Than Facebook?
Messaging apps are the “The New Face of Social Media,” but how do they compare to the old guard when it comes to organic reach and engagement?
Last week Tango, a messaging app with 200M+ users globally and close to 70M in the US, launched brand Channels– and initial results give a glimpse into the looming battle between messaging apps and Facebook / Twitter. The numbers (assuming they’re accurate) are surprisingly impressive for an opening week, with companies like Spotify racking up 119,000+ followers, bands like OK Go gaining 124,000+ fans, and a curated Feedly “World Cup News” channel netting 233,000+ subscribers.
Brands on Tango often get better engagement on posts than they do on Facebook, even with infinitely smaller fanbases. Spotify’s Father’s Day post, for example, asked users on Facebook and Tango to fill in the same blank “Tell us: I listen to _________ because of my Dad,” and yielded 7,625 likes and 1,114 comments on Tango vs. 1,749 likes and 2,369 comments on Facebook. With 4.5M more Spotify fans on Facebook than Tango, the neck-and-neck results may speak to decreased organic reach on Facebook and high engagement on Tango.
A closer look at fan comments, however, reveals that quality of engaged users on Spotify’s Facebook page is much higher. While Facebook fans thoughtfully answered the question by naming artists, Tango comments include a fairly high concentration of random emojis, troll-like statements like “BITCH WHO DO YOU LOVE?,” and other off-topic ramblings.
What Tango does best is organize channels by topic to facilitates discovery. They even tally total followers by category, making it easy to glean what appeals most to the user base: Music (286,000+ followers), Sports (276,000+ followers), Tango Updates (134,000+ followers), Funny & Cute (118,000+ followers), Entertainment (58,000+ followers), and lastly News (36,000+ followers).
In our messaging app white paper we cautioned against replicating Facebook and Twitter content on messaging apps. But in Tango’s case, they’ve appropriated the classic social media news feed, so understandably brands aren’t getting creative like they might on open platforms like Kik. Tango’s initial focus is also on content creators, with no traditional brands like Coke or Pepsi entering the fray yet. Given the success off the World Cup News channel, brands should consider exhibiting creativity by curating a channel tied to music or sports instead of (or in addition to) a standard brand page.
As the summer progresses, expect more brands join Tango to access its 200M users, which means more competition for eyeballs. We may also witness the first few brands with 7-figure follower counts, inevitably turning heads in the broader marketing community. For now, Tango Channels is off to a promising start.
Social Native Ads To Overtake Traditional Display Ads
Social native ads – that is, ads that appear in users’ streams like organic content – are poised to overtake traditional social display ads in terms of industry spend. According to a recent report published through Business Insider, as publishers, media outlets, and social networks themselves reorganize and redesign their platforms around the prospect of driving revenue through native ads, native will come to represent over 40% of the total $10 billion in social media ad spend by 2017. On networks like Facebook and Pinterest, in-stream native advertisements will come to work seamlessly across devices and platforms, making mobile campaigns nearly indistinguishable from others. Breaking the data down to specific social networks, the Business Insider report claims that Facebook ads in news feeds achieve a click through rate 49 times that of traditional placements on the right side of users’ pages. The big takeaway, though, comes with respect to photo sharing: 43% of global internet users have shared a photo in the past month, and Business Insider seems to think that native photo advertisements on platforms like Vine and Snapchat will go a long way in the near future.
Teens Leaving Facebook? Not So Fast
The general consensus on social media seems to be that teens are running away from Facebook at frightening speeds. According to a new social media study of Q2 through Q4 of 2013 show that Facebook still triumphs over mobile and Instagram for teens. The key is diversity: more users are accessing more social networks across the board than ever before. The reason Facebook looked to be slipping was because of the relative increase in the other social networks, not necessarily because teens were running from their parents. Users, especially teens, are social multitaskers. The notion that teens are abandoning any one network wholesale doesn’t add up; their attention is simply divided and thus gives the impression that they might be leaving. It makes it more challenging for advertisers in particular to target them, but getting the facts straight is the first step to doing so.
Study: Instagram Is Best Business Social Media
According to a new study from marketing analytics service SumAll, Instagram is the most effective social network for driving engagement and sales figures. SumAll’s work looked at unpaid and organic Instagram traffic over an 11 month period, and concluded that US businesses that used Instagram saw revenue increases between 1.5% and 3.5% – while their UK partners experienced a 3.6% revenue boost. Nonetheless, SumAll also cautioned that businesses saw diminishing returns on platforms that they over-targetted. It’s up to each business to determine its requisite middle ground.
Facebook Still #1 Social Network Among Teens
According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, Facebook remains the post popular social network among teens, and its use increased from 93% to 94% over the last year. The second most popular social network was Twitter, used by 26% of teens. Myspace, however, saw a rapid drop from 24% to only 7%. Instagram officially became a player in the space as well, with now 11% reporting that they use the photo-sharing service, and it’s popular amongst older teens who are looking to get away from their parents and families’ prying eyes on Facebook.
Pinterest Sends Users Emails When Pinned Item’s Price Falls
Pinterest continues to prove itself as a valuable e-commerce platform, and today it took another big step forward in the pinterest-as-purchasing medium. The social network is now sending email updates when a user’s pinned item drops in price, building off of the May release that provided users with information about pricing and availability of pinned items. There are no customization options as of yet – it’s presently just an opt-in or opt-out preference setting – but expect to see the service built out in the coming months. In combination with Pinterest’s already commerce-ready platform, the world of social purchasing continues to burgeon.
Mentos Captures Facebook Activity As News Broadcast
Mentos is launching personalized news bulletins that make Facebook activity entertaining and engaging enough to be broadcast on a news network. Integrated into their “Stay Fresh” campaign, the “Fresh News” is generated through an app by the same name, and streams for 24-hours to serve up a constant stream of humorous news reports by pulling in media updates from Facebook and affiliated social media accounts. Two news anchors present satirical news highlighting a user’s recent updates, emphasizing how “fresh” the subject may – or may not – be.
Soldsie Exceeds $10M In Transactions
Soldsie, a company that processes payments on top of Facebook comments, announced that it has processed more than $10 Million in transactions, and will be expanding into several foreign markets. The service allows you to buy things in the Facebook comments section, and allow companies to grab buyer’s attention in the moment. With several companies mounting challanges to the traditional buyers model, Soldsie seems to have figured out an effective method of transitioning social media engagement into dollars.
Nordstrom Highlights Product Popularity With Pinterest
Many restaurants use Yelp or Zagat stickers as validations of their quality – displaying reviews on their windows functions as social evidence for customers looking for a dinner. Nordstrom is hoping that they can create an equivalent system for retail commerce via Pinterest. The store is tagging some of its most pinned items with the Pinterest logo in-store. It’s a way of telling customers that people want the product, as well as a way of indexing its digital popularity. The company has posted photos and instagrams of the experiment; so far its only in select stores, but it will be interesting to hear from customers in the near future whether or not they are more likely to purchase a Pinterest-tagged item.
