According to a new report by Vision Critical, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter drive as much in-store purchasing as online purchasing, but affect purchasing behavior in different ways. The research gathered 5,900 responses to online surveys to determine how social media influences a consumer’s path to purchase. Facebook was best for motivating customers to make purchases offline and online, while those who purchased after viewing on Pinterest hadn’t thought of making that purchase until viewing the item on the network. Ultimately, technology items – after being recommended to users – are most frequently purchased directly as a result of a recommendation from a friend or social network.
Tag: Social Networking
Twitter Adds Embed Tracking To Tweets
In an effort to be a more engaging service, Twitter has been working to make Tweets more interactive. Among hundreds of small changes to the service is the addition of links indicating where any given Tweet is embedded on the web. The advantages of this addition are several, providing context for a Tweet’s viral trajectory, and giving sponsors another opportunity to appear with popular content.
Twitter Lists Where Tweets Have Been Embedded
In conjunction with its broader initiative to experiment with different ways of making Tweets interactive, Twitter today announced another new development: Twitter will display a list of sites linking to where a Tweet has been embedded. Listing where a Tweet has been used is another sign of how Twitter hopes to continue to make its platform more interactive and cross-platform across the Internet. This means that Twitter can sell itself better as a broadcasting platform that makes advertisers hungry for promoted spots – rather than taking a best guess about where the Tweet goes after it’s sent.
Twitter Continues Ad Expansion
Twitter today inked a deal with WpP to expand its data-driven marketing. The deal will focus on tapping and interpreting Twitter’s massive data collection, and the deal will span several WPP unites including GroupM, Kantar, and Wunderman. This will likely mean more effective ad campaigns for marketers across the platform, and it will help expand Twitters footprint to regions like Japan, Turkey, Mexico and Brazil. This comes on the heels of Twitter’s Starcom MediaVest deal in April, which granted millions of dollars to preferred ad slots for clients like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Procter & Gamble.
Pipe App Brings File Transfer To Facebook
File transfer on Facebook is finally a reality, thanks to an app called Pipe that launched this week. Pipe, based in Berlin, allows people to drag and drop music, documents, video, and pictures into a virtual green tube that connects Facebook friends in real time. Friends can receive the documents even if they don’t have the Pipe app or aren’t online. As well, Pipe supports files that are up to 1GB, which is a significant increase over the 100MB email limit.
Twitter Debuts Amplify
Twitter today took to the stage to announce that a new advertising and marketing service called Amplify will be launching. Amplify allows media brands to promote television clips on Twitter; examples include a key play in a basketball game, a short weather forecast, or a short spot for a car. Twitter debuted this product for ESPN and the NBA, which partnered with Turner Broadcasting to make the product effective. Additional media partners now include A&E, BBC America, Conde Nast, Discovery, Fox, Major League Baseball, and WWE. Twitter also announced plans to start working on a TV ad targeting dashboard, which will help advertisers target Promoted Tweets to people who have seen their ads on TV.
Twitter Unveils Lead Generation Cards
Twitter today announced the Lead Generation Card, which is a new, expandable tweet format that allows users to show their interest in a particular discount or offer that’s being promoted by their favorite brand. When users expand the tweet, they’ll see a description of the offer and a button to send their name, Twitter handle, and email to the brand. All this is sent as soon as the card button is clicked. Twitter has been testing the cards with Full Sail and Priceline, and the iea is to give businesses more opportunities to discover new customers, while simultaneously reducing the amount of time spent between spotting an offer on Twitter and actually paying for the product online. It remains to be seen whether this is exclusively for promoted Tweets, but if it’s used broadly it could mean a very different Twitter for marketers, brands, and companies.
Yahoo Partners With Twitter For News Feed Integration
In an effort to update its offerings, Yahoo has partnered with Twitter to integrate tweets from a number of major news sources into its homepage news feed. This comes on the heels of a major brand overhaul by CEO Marissa Mayer, focused on maximizing personalization of the brand’s products. There has been little chatter about how this upgrade actually applies to Yahoo’s personalization goals, but with their many startup purchases and branding overhaul in progress, big things appear to be on the horizon for Yahoo.
Video Ads Coming To Facebook
According to the Financial Times, Facebook users might find video advertisements in their newsfeeds as soon as July, with Facebook hoping to grab some advertising revenue away from TV and open up a new revenue stream to appease shareholders. Facebook’s client council include brands like Coca-Cola, Ford, and Unilever, all of whom expect to take part in trials. The worry, however, is that users will find the experience so disruptive that they will move on to other websites and social networks. Indeed, just last week it was reported that Facebook’s user numbers are on the decline despite Facebook Home and other attempts to keep users engaged. Facebook will present the videos silently, with the user choosing whether or not to activate the sound. At what price will this video advertising come? That remains to be seen, but raises another question: how long until Facebook offers an ad-free newsfeed, for a price?
Facebook Ups Target Ads Ante
Facebook announced that it’s now allowing developers and marketers to push targeted ads based on users’ app preferences and purchases with a new targeting system. Speaking at Mobile DevCon 2013 in London, Facebook developers showcased a new targeting field in the latest SDK for a feature called Custom Audiences, which will result in more relevant, targeted ads being displayed on both websites and native apps that pull from individual user preferences and purchase data. This means that a retail app could reach out to Facebook users with additional products that they might be interested in based on purchase history tied to a name. The Custom Audiences feature works by helping marketers find new customers among Facebook’s existing users via email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs or app user IDs to make a match. Thus developers can use information about offline audiences to target the online population.
