Digital Media News

The rules of advertising have changed drastically in recent years, due tothe significant growth of social media. It has become the online advertising strategy du jour for organizations in every industry, but one area we have see the effects of this prevail more and more in recent years is politics.

The tech-savvy campaign that Barack Obama’s aides unveiled six years ago is a case in point. It was historically significant for two reasons; not only was Obama the first African American to be elected president, but he was also the first presidential candidate to effectively use social media as a major campaign strategy. Obama created an environment of transparency never before experienced in American politics.

His strategy? Personalized tweets; Facebook updates, and his very own YouTube channel.

The Obama campaign reached 5 million supporters on 15 different social Networks, and by November 2008, he had approximately 2.5 million Facebook supporters, 115,000 Twitter followers, and 50 million viewers of his YouTube channel.

As avid marketers, you’ll be familiar with the usual social media suspects - Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You will have most likely experimented with at least one of them as part of your digital marketing strategy and seen varying degrees of success.

However, there are some exciting social media kids on the block, many of which are unfamiliar to online marketers, and yet they possess great business potential.

While you obviously can’t be on all of them, here are a few thatmight fit into your social media campaigns.

Ignore the gurus - advertising is deceptively simple. It’s about creating the right messages and putting it in front of the right people. But there’s a knack to enjoying effective Facebook advertising. First, why target Facebook advertising? Well, it’s the third most popular website in the world (after Google and YouTube), which makes Facebook advertising extremely powerful for businesses.

With this social media platform, we’re talking about well over 1 billion users – that’s a lot of potential leads. But while the concept of advertising is straightforward, here are 10 top tips to make sure your digital messages cut through the clutter.

For a long time, Twitter's revenue stream has been made up almost entirely of advertising dollars, but last week, the social media company announced that it is diversifying, by taking a step into the world of e-commerce.

The social networking company is currently trialing a system that enables businesses to embed “buy now” buttons in their tweets, so customers can purchase products directlythrough the site. The button is being marketed as a fun way for users to shop and find deals on exclusive merchandise, but the new offering ultimately represents the company's latest bid to claw back revenue, following a decline in user growth.

The feature is initially being tested on a small group of brandsincluding, The Home Depot, Burberry and non-profit group (RED), but Twitter expects to roll the service out and increase the visibility of its e-commerce tweets, in the lead up to the holiday shopping season.

Most people think that LinkedIn is just a digital repository for resumes, but the site, which now boasts over 300 million members, is slowly repositioning its business around content marketing, to make the site morebusiness-friendly and relevant for social media lead generation and B2B marketing.

As part of its strategy, the company launched two new products earlier this year, in an effort to assist businesses with their content marketing efforts.

Content Marketing Score (CMS)

The Content Marketing Score is an analytics tool that provides users with insight into the impact of both their paid and organic LinkedIn activity.

Content-marketing scores are calculated by dividing the number of LinkedIn users who've engaged with a brand's content (via sponsored updates, company pages, LinkedIn Groups, employee updates and influencer posts) in the past month by the target audience of users who have been active in that monthly period. The number is then multiplied by 1 million.

The Internet is often captivated by a craze and one such craze that’s taken off in recent years is that of the ‘selfie’. Named as Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2013, many people thought that the selfie was a passing trend, but it seems to be here to stay.

Over the past two years, a growing number of companies have been leveraging the power of the selfie to benefit their marketing efforts. In January 2013, 13 brands used selfies in their Facebook campaigns and by December, that number had increased to 207. On Twitter, the number started at 252 and grew to more than 780.

Successful Selfie Campaigns

Some brands have seen great success with selfie campaigns, reporting increases in user engagement and sales.

In the digital age, consumers are increasingly flooded with information from a wide variety of media. Research has found that we create and share 1.5 billion pieces of content, 140 million tweets and 2 million videos each day. With the proliferation of information available and a demand for instant and easily palatable content from consumers, businesses are looking to visual marketing methods such as infographics to explain, share and promote content.

What are infographics?

Information graphics or ‘infographics’, are visual representations of data,that present complex information quickly and clearly.

As the majority of people are visual learners, infographics serve them well, as they’re easy to scan and easily shareable. They can therefore be a useful way to educate your audience. 

If you thought Instagram was just a photo sharing app, think again. The Facebook-owned social media network, which now boasts more than 75,000,000 daily users,has evolved into a powerful marketing tool and advertising platform. 

Instagram has rolled out the tools to its current advertising partners, including BananaRepublic, Adidas and Michael Kors, whose striking visual adsperfectly fit the aesthetic that Instagramare striving for. The response from advertisers has been positive; Michael Kors gained 33,000 new followers in the wake of theirInstagram ad campaign (16 times more than usual),but feedback has shown that companieswant more insight into how their ads are performing and how people are engaging with theircontent.

In response to feedback, Instagram haslaunched three new marketing analytics tools, which will enable marketers to monitor how their posts are performing in real time, using detailed measurements. The "Account Insights" tooltracks impressions, reach and engagement for a brand's unpaid posts.It also aggregates stats about an account's follower base, with demographic information such as the age and gender of users. It will also advise on the best times of day or week to post, based on user’s activity.

In recent months, social networking sites have been bombarded with videos of celebrities and the general publicthrowing buckets of ice water on themselvesin the name of ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) research.After an icy soaking, participants make a small online donation and nominate three people to undertake the challenge within 24 hours.

The perfect mix of social media, celebrity engagement and philanthropy – the Ice Bucket Challenge has becomea viral phenomenon. According to Facebook, between the period of June 1 and August 17, over 28 million people commented on, or liked a post about the challengeand 2.4 million videos were shared across the site.

To date, the campaign has secured donations of over $31.5 million forALS, compared to $1.9 million over the same time period last year.