Photo via audreyjm529 on Flickr
by , Tamar
The online community has been buzzing for the past 24 hours, first in anticipation-of and now digesting the ramifications-of the ‘‘. Announced just after midnight on Tuesday (UK time), Twitter have completely revamped their website to give more space to a number of new features.
If you want the headline view, I wrote a blog early this morning on the subject – but I wanted to head over here to the IAB social blog to speculate over how these changes might affect advertisers…
The main areas of change that will probably affect brands are:
The new, all-inclusive, super-sticky site will undoubtedly encourage a lot of tweeters who previously used the service through third-party apps and sites to come back to Twitter.com – which in turn will obviously increase the exposure that existing advertisers receive. Recent developments like Sponsored tweets, promoted trends and the like are already making waves, but are only visible to people visiting Twitter.com. This massive increase in page-views will surely make advertising directly with Twitter a much more attractive proposition.
The new layout also gives much greater opportunity for tweeters (and brands) to give exposure to great media content, without ever leaving the site. Partnerships with services like YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo will mean that video and image content (amongst others) will be viewable directly in your Twitter stream – as my boss and Tamar’s CEO commented this morning, with ‘New Twitter’ it’s quite likely that the Old Spice ‘guy’ would have become a sensation on Twitter, as opposed to mainly on YouTube…
Finally, the third consideration for brands and advertisers will be how this affects third-party sites that they might currently be advertising on. As this post by Mashable points out, the New Twitter is essentially a desktop app, on the web. Services like TweetDeck, Hootsuite and the like will undoubtedly feel the pinch after New Twitter rolls out, so if you advertise with them you might be in for a drop in views. Just speculation of course, but I can’t see how this WON’T affect those apps…
With the roll-out set to continue over the next couple of weeks, many of the ramifications will only start to be felt in the next month or so, but even at this early stage it’s clear to see the ‘New Twitter’ will be a much more welcome place to advertisers, brands and users alike…
By , senior PR and marketing manager, IAB
Whilst it’s important to blog about new technologies, platforms and Twitter’s ‘who to follow’ function, there are some issues within social media that are oldies but goodies, and remain deserving of our attention.
An associate kindly sent me this press release yesterday, and I must say I was jolly interested. Not because I want to buy the Club IAB page on Facebook tens of thousands of new recruits, but because I pondered for at least 3 minutes as to who else received it, and who out of those people was tempted to part with their cash. It might be a joke (particularly having read the blog) and if it is, a very funny joke it is too. The press release is below, but without the company details:
Facebook Popularity On Sale To The Highest Bidder - The ’social’ may soon be taken out of social media site Facebook as popularity on the site can now be sold to the highest bidder.
A certain ‘Social media marketing company’ has begun selling fans and friends on Facebook to businesses and organizations wanting to increase their exposure online and they’ve now announced they are selling up to 20 million fans at a time, meaning just about anyone with a “fat wallet” can be more popular than Lady Gaga, at least on Facebook. Read more…
By Amy Kean, senior PR and marketing manager, IAB. .
Sorry for the slightly inappropriate headline, but it’s based on , written in defense of the new fancy Uniqlo exercise, which appears to have received mixed reviews. Not from the general public, obviously (I doubt they care that much) but from us folks who work in digital, or more specifically social media.
In case you haven’t seen it, you enter your Twitter name into the snazzy red and white page and it provides you with a Tweet Show, displaying all your recent tweets and replies in time to a piece of rather odd music. , it’s nothing groundbreaking, but for what it’s worth having watched the show until the end I think it’s pretty and am more aware of Uniqlo and their new range of tshirts than before. I’m even thinking about buying one. What’s your view? Do you like it? Does there need to be an element of stickyness to keep you coming back? Does that even matter?
Read more…
by , new business manager at Skive
When “social media”is mentioned by brands it all too often means “do we need a twitter/facebook page?” as if the answer lies in the platform. Those with any clout realise it’s about leveraging the platforms to achieve your goals as a brand. The exciting thing about social media sites is that they can be seen as blank pages for great creative ideas to run
free. Pumping out offers on twitter/facebook may be functional but it is a drop in the ocean of what can be done if only a little creativity is applied.
On the way in to work today I noticed that they’re opening up a Yo Sushi.
In contrast to their bland product they have made great use of the construction site by putting two social media calls to action on the boards outside the restaurant.
Yo! Sushi
We are invited to follow them on twitter and tweet “London” for a chance to win a meal for 4 on the opening night. Personally I’d rather pay to eat somewhere else, you call me a huge food snob but sushi is meant to be tasty as opposed to just cold – just a thought.
I’m a big fan of cross platform marketing and it doesn’t need to be complicated/expensive. This is a simple, cheap and possibly effective use of outdoor to drive engagement online. As good as this is I think it still misses a trick or two.
1. Yo Sushi ask us to tweet “London” – and that’s it. Who is going to want “London” in their feed except people who tweet random city names for the sheer hilarity of it? They should have said “tweet why you love Yo Sushi” or “tweet Yo Sushi rules for a chance to win!”
2. There’s a similar mechanic for Facebook which falls foul of the same problem.
3. It wouldn’t have cost them much to try out other channels such a flickr. They could have printed a cool image for people to interact with and have their photos taken next to and then got them to upload it to facebook/flickr etc.
Here’s an example of this being done really well by McDonalds:
I get the feeling that Yo Sushi are dipping their toes in the water here and don’t fully understand the integration of offline and social – but it’s a good start.
By Iain MacMillan, RMM and Robin Grant, We Are Social - IAB SMC Ambassadors for Social Media and Customer Service.
Customer service is arguably one of the most intriguing elements of running a successful organisation, given that:
- It can impact on, and be impacted by, every department in the organisation
- Different customers may perceive the same level of customer service quite differently
- In today’s marketplace social technologies mean that everyone can see what you’re doing
We’ve outlined below ten traditional aspects of customer service, and how the emergence and adoption of social technologies has fundamentally changed the game in each.
Read more…
By Katie Streten, Imagination
There is a lot of discussion on blogs and in social media generally about Twitters slow and careful inching towards a revenue model. Most of the thought is that it will take the tried and tested advertising approach, and after all, it has worked well for Facebook so there is no reason Twitter wouldn’t benefit in a similar way. Twitter has a simple mechanic that allows trend and conversation tracking and the potential is that this will deliver the possibility of highly targeted advertising from brands in much the same way that Facebook does. The key difference between the two would be that Facebook’s advertising is based on the demographic and life stage data their users provide the network with and Twitter’s would focus not on demographics but on moments of interest, conversations. And in fact Twitter’s ability to model and deliver based on conversation would be far more powerful than Facebook’s model – after all, simply because I am a 45 year old mother of three doesn’t mean I am not going to be highly interested in paintballing in the New Forest, and yet this may only be the interest of a weekend, a day, an hour. Identity is more fluid than demographics allow and the ability to talk to users in real time moments of decision would be incredibly powerful for any advertiser. Read more…
