Digital Media News

With over one billion people using social media channels across the globe, it has become a powerful communication and marketing channel that we cannot afford to ignore.Social networking sites allow for viral marketing and word-of-mouth promotion to be very effective because of the high levels of consumer engagement.

But with so many businesses making use of social media, it’s not enough just to set up an account and post generic items once or twice a week. Social media advertising offers far more potential than that.

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.

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.