In both cases, the focus is purely on the ads that drive users to a Facebook Page, without detailing what the user was ideally supposed to do once they had arrived there. In the case of GM, to assume that a user would click an advert with an inciting offer, then be lead to the GM Facebook Page or a generic landing page and from there somehow consider purchasing a car seems ridiculous. Without a strategy or a thought-out user journey to bring the user to the point of purchase or a even to a consideration point, say a data capture mechanism, it’s clear that the advertising campaign will not deliver any meaningful results.
It’s becoming clear that a PPC spend on a social network like Facebook needs to be aligned with the social media strategy and a process that will lead the person (who has taken the time to click your advert) to a place where they are rewarded for that action, feel it is worthwhile and led to a place where they can carry out a transaction of some kind. For this process to work well, a careful balance needs to consider the target demographic, the ad messaging and creative, the destination and possible creative build (e.g. Facebook Landing tab) and the final action (the end of the journey) e.g. sign up, click through, purchase.
If the quality of the profiles are low, the demographics need to be changed, or ‘friends of fans’ can be targeted, if sign up is low the landing page might need to be tested or the copy or promotion may not be inciting enough.
Last week, Twitter introduced search autocomplete and ‘People you follow’ search results to the profiles on twitter.com. In addition to recent improvements like related ‘query suggestions’, ‘spelling corrections’ and more relevant search results, these updates make it easier for Twitter users to source real time information.
Some of the changes to Twitter’s search engine are detailed below:
After you enter your search, you’ll find the most relevant Tweets, articles, accounts, images and videos for your query. Twitter have also made other improvements to make your search experience better.
- Spelling corrections
- Related suggestions: If you search for a topic for which people use multiple terms
- Results with real names and usernames: When you search for a name like ‘Pete Tong’ you’ll see results mentioning that person’s real name and their Twitter account username
- Results from people you follow: In addition to seeing ‘All’ or ‘Top’ Tweets for your search, you can also now see Tweets about a given topic from only the people you follow when you select the ‘People you follow’ view.
These updates introduce a new layer of search to Twitter, changing the dynamic of “social search”, and related search suggestions
The change was noticed when co founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes married his partner Sean Eldridge and made the change. Mark Zuckerburg, plus 1800 other Facebook, users all ‘liked’ the Facebook timeline update.
Facebook is continually showing their support for same sex couples, back in the beginning of 2011 introducing additional relationship options for those in the gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender community. Facebook has also hooked up with GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) in an attempt to prevent anti-gay bullying within the social network.
Introducing these features will of course face objection and criticism from some, but most hope Facebook will be the first of many to recognise same sex couples.
LinkedIn and Twitter have worked together since 2009 to enable you to share your professional conversations on both platforms. Twitter recently evolved its strategy and this will result in a change to the way Tweets appear in third-party applications. Tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn know that sharing updates from LinkedIn to Twitter is a valuable service for its members. You will still be able to share updates with your Twitter audience by posting them on LinkedIn.
How can I continue to share updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter?
Simply start your conversation on LinkedIn. Compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as before.
What changes can I expect to see on LinkedIn? Any conversation you start on Twitter will no longer be automatically shared with your LinkedIn network, even if you synced your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. As the two part company, the way in which you share content across multiple networks is clearly starting to change.
The cookie brand Oreo’s posted a picture to their Facebook Page on the 25th of June in support of Gay Pride celebrations in America by inserting a rainbow into the normally cream-coloured center of their biscuit under the caption “proudly support love!”
The response was immediate and sparked a huge debate on their Facebook Page, with customers advocating both for and against its support of Gay Pride. As of writing, the post received over 200,000 likes, 60,000 shares and over 30,000 comments which is huge increase in engagement from their usual posts.
Whatever you think of the creative or the coverage of the campaign, Oreo definitely hit the sweet spot. They (or rather their agency) understood exactly what talking points people engage with (based around the event) on social networks, tying up the concept very neatly in a clever piece of creative that light-heartedly gives support to a worthy cause.
The huge boost in engagement is only part of the return this campaign delivered, by getting off the fence and siding with Gay Pride, Oreo as a brand will have shown a loyalty that will resonate with their consumers on and offline, despite the fact that at the end of the day, it is just a chocolate cookie.
Brands often pick the “safe route” celebrations of Valentine’s Day or Christmas as a way to drive their messaging on their social media channels, avoiding controversy and often using generic copy that doesn’t inspire and lacks that creative idea to kick start engagement.
Hats off to Oreo for facing the controversy and showing their true colours, regardless of the potential for a backlash from some of their community instead trusting the broader majority of right thinking users to step in and self-moderate the comments on the Page. The conversation they started has moved off their Facebook page and into blogs, forums and reddit showing a broad reach and wide exposure that has the brand at the heart of the discussion.
The Internet is a really big place. Really big and it’s sometimes difficult to determine just how big it is. Sifting through all the content that gets submitted online every minute of every hour is an increasingly difficult prospect, becoming nigh on impossible to determine the good from the bad, the misleading from the accurate and the funny from the dull. In this respect, the much popularised content aggregation site reddit.com has hit the sweet spot. The site has a clever voting system allows signed-up user’s one vote per piece of content posted to the site, either upvote or downvote giving or taking “karma” away from the user who originally submitted the post. The result has led reddit to quickly own the moniker “the front page of the Internet”, a place where new pictures, videos, memes, infographics, commercials, articles and stories quickly gain popularity or are buried as irrelevant, based purely on their own merit.
Around the sites democratic system sits a loyal and heavily Internet-addicted community who spend an in-exhaustive amount of time reviewing every new piece of content, voting, commenting and discussing their way through the constant stream of new posts that get posted to “sub-reddits”, categories of interest.
One of the most impressive sub-Reddits is the community at r/suicidewatch. The idea being to talk to those who feel they have nothing left to live for. The community is definitely responsible for having saved lives, with nearly 9,000 subscribers, this sub-reddit is arguably one of the largest groups in the world dedicated to suicide prevention, it is most certainly the largest 100% unfunded, 100% volunteer suicide prevention group.
The efforts of reddit’s users have caught the eye of news sites, political pundits, celebrities and the wider online community who now visit the site to see what content has made it to the front page – namely the most “upvoted” content of the day, that often end up in news stories, advertising campaigns and even political speeches.
The payoff for reddit’s users is simple, they get the most cutting edge pieces of content about a range of topics that interest them before anyone else, and with that comes tonnes of good karma and even possible fame beyond reddit’s walls.
Content aggregation has become important in a number of areas; brands are now taking note, particularly when distributing content online to ensure it reaches the right demographics. Celebrities and famous figures now respond to requests for question and answer sessions on the site, called “AMA” (ask me anything), charitable causes have received tens of thousands of dollars in donations and large institutions are being held to account for misdeeds by reddit’s rapidly growing community.
The site itself recently topped one billion page views in a month and since the decline of its rival Digg.com, its growth has become exponential, attracting an increasingly international audience.
Click here for 19 reasons why Reddit could be one of the most influential websites in the world
One of the key aspects for brands to consider is that Google has prevented competitors from being able to occupy this space with advertising, giving emphasis to brands with a connected Google+ Page instead (see a natural search for “Expedia” using Google.com below):
