It’s been known for a little while that Mr Zuckerberg is incredibly excited about live video on Facebook and the newest update “Facebook Live” is a clear indication of this.
Importance: [rating=3] (If you use or manage Social Media Accounts)
Recommended source: Social Media Management Checklist
He sees it as the next step in social media and clearly isn’t the only one, Twitter have also dabbled by developing their own Standalone streaming service, whilst Snapchat have recently updated their software to include a live chat function.
Zuckerberg began pooling a lot of his internal resources to help build this new feature and has clearly put a lot of effort behind this. So what will stop this feature becoming an overhyped, semi-flop, much like Meerkat and Periscope?
And what does it mean for us marketers?
What is Facebook Live?
It's likely you've already seen a Facebook live broadcast,…
Measure your brand's growth rate on social against the industry average
That social networks are still growing rapidly should come as no surprise. In 2014 a quarter of the world's population was active on social media, but by 2018 it is predicted a third of the world will be active. That is a massive increase of almost a billion new people in just 4 years.
The term 'fastest growing' can be defined in a number of ways. If you calculate it in percentage terms, then it will be the newer, smaller social networks that come out on top. For example, if the new social network 'Peach' went from having 10,000 to 100,000 followers in a year then it would have grown at 900%. By this measure, it would be faster growing than a more established network which had growth of 10 million users in a year, even though it had…
Involve Your Pets - A Strategy For Successful Content And Social Media Fundraising
Clever fundraising ideas for charity giving are a must these days, when people are rather jaded from years of the same old coffee mornings and bake sales. If you’re after inspiration for something a little different, that might attract new fundraisers to your event, why not lead with the new trend – pet participation.
Content is key for any campaign and fundraising event, and a strong marketing strategy should contain priority content areas to promote. Cancer Research UK’s fundraising Best Paw Forward campaign in 2013 is a great example of this and could give you the inspiration you need to run a pet-focused fundraiser of your own and help charities with donations.
Why is having a key content marketing strategy important to fundraising events? It makes sure you socially target the right…
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March 16, 2016
Overcoming objections to use of social media in not-for-profit organisations
Social media can be beguiling, stimulating, addictive, confusing and at times downright frustrating. In my experience, Not for Profits, like commercial organisations, are still grappling with how much valuable staff time and resource should be deployed to this burgeoning and proliferating media.
In order to fully embrace and capitalise on social media often objections, real or perceived, need to be overcome to win over internal stakeholders. Common concerns include:
Suppose people post negative comments about us?
How can we control it?
Do we need 24/7 resourcing?
How can we prove that it works?
Isn’t this distracting us from the important work we’re doing?
Do we have enough content to be able to have a credible presence?
Although charities face the same challenges of many other professional organisations, they do have some distinct advantages:
Source of truth and integrity: Trust as we all know is very important online and, like all…
Taking you through setting up Facebook's new Canvas ads
The Facebook advertising juggernaut moves on with yet another huge product roll out. This time it's Canvas Ads. As with Instant Articles for mobile, the idea is to provide an "immersive" experience with a rich media combination of images, videos, gifs, text, products, carousels and more for mobile users. As usual the idea is to keep users on Facebook, scrolling through this "canvas"of fun rather than bumping them off onto other website (and likely experiencing poor load time as part of the process). Think of Canvas as very deep web pages on mobile with the added benefit of interaction such as panning and enlarging.
With all those variables it sounds complicated right?
Well actually not so much. I actually had a lot of fun experimenting with the new tool albeit that creating a Canvas is time consuming and once you've hit the "Finish" button there's no way…
Start targeting even more precisely with new Facebook ad-option
Top of my wishlist from Facebook for the last nine years (yes that's how long I've been advertising on Facebook) has been the ability to use the magic "AND" word rather than "OR" when it comes to selecting Interest targeting. I've called this "Boolean Targeting" or "Overlap Targeting" and it became the holy grail for me as a Facebook advertiser. This level of targeting would mean targeting those people in the Venn Diagram overlap - the people that liked ALL the things I was listing in interests rather than just some of them.
OR vs AND, Boolean targeting, Overlap targeting, Detailed targeting: Confused already?
Let me explain. When you select interests (for instance you are looking to target people that like social media marketing so you'd probably have selected some of…
Facebook rolls out instant articles to everyone on April 12th
Importance: [rating=5] (For Publishers)
Recommended source: Facebook Media
Facebook’s Instant Articles is only nine months old. But, given its great success over that gestation period, Facebook has now deemed it developed enough to be unleashed on publishers of all stripes.
What is Instant Articles?
If you not all that familiar with Instant articles, it’s probably because it works so seamlessly you haven’t really noticed it. When you click on an article from a news publisher that uses Instant articles whilst on a mobile device (most of the bigger publishers do now), then instead of being taken to the publishers site and waiting for the whole thing to load, which can often take a fair while on a mobile device and consume a considerable amount of data, you are taken to an Instant articles page hosted by Facebook. This massively improves load times and keeps…
Twitter tweaks timeline to show most engaging Tweets top
Importance: [rating=3] (For Marketers using Twitter)
Recommended source: Twitter's blog
Twitter has been grappling with a series of problems of late. Falling share price, stagnating user growth and some high profile exits from some of the top brass. It's looking to re-invigorate itself, and has decided to do so by introducing a sprinkling of the magic that has made Facebook's newsfeed one of the most powerful forces in the world of digital marketing. I say magic, I mean algorithms.
This doesn't mean that Twitter is doing away with the chronological ordering of Tweets, that would be a big mistake given that it is what sets Twitter apart from other social networks such as Facebook. Instead it will use an algorithm to decide which Tweets you are most likely to care about (based on past interaction with the account there from). Then when you log into Twitter…
Facebook reactions to roll-out worldwide after testing
Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Bloomberg article announcing roll-out and explaining the approval process
What's the change??
You may remember that this change was first mooted back in the early Autumn - Marie Page covered the new alternative Facebook Reactions in her Smart Insights post where she showed how Facebook were testing these different Emojis to supplement Likes. Facebook had tested a 'dislike' button but it was thought that this would generate too much negativity.
So, after testing, Facebook Reactions has now been fixed as a Like button alternative that comes in the form of six emoji with the following sentiments: Angry, Sad, Wow, Haha, Yay and Love.
This change will have a HUGE impact in terms of the number of online consumer interactions each day, and it will affect Facebook…
A social media policy is crucial if you want to be in full control of your social media interactions
One social media gaffe can ruin the reputation of even the strongest brands out there. No marketer wants to face a host of outraged consumers. Social media might be the best thing that ever happened to branding, but one wrong move and you can be sure that a PR disaster will drag behind you for years. The internet never forgets. How to avoid that risk? By building a social media policy to set up standards for social media usage at your enterprise. Here are some practical tips for developing a social media policy.
1. Set out the basic rules
Developing a social media policy requires a clear understanding of your main goals on social channels. Here are a few questions to help you:
What is…
