Social Marketing

There’s no shortage of people tweeting about live TV these days—it’s a digital phenomenon and picking up speed. In 2013 alone, 36 million people sent 990 Million Tweets about TV, according to Nielsen SocialGuide. Until now, however, we haven’t known how many people tweet about TV and brands—critical information for advertisers who want to leverage the momentum of Twitter TV activity to amplify brand messages.

On Dec. 5, 2013, Mark Bradbury wrote Still Relevant: Top 5 Predictions For 2014 in this space. His points were well made. However, you won’t find the driver of improved sales to Baby Boomers (born before 1964) in a company’s planning department, or marketing/advertisement departments.

Some 73% of online adults now use a social networking site of some kind. Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in the number of users, but a striking number of users are now diversifying onto other platforms. Some 42% of online adults now use multiple social networking sites. In addition, Instagram users are nearly as likely as Facebook users to check in to the site on a daily basis.

When you really deconstruct true viral video, you see that it’s not really a marketers’ game. Fundamentally, most truly viral videos aren’t trying to sell a product, which can be a deterrent for the audience. Most went viral unexpectedly. Most had few, if any, media dollars pumped into them for seeding. It’s difficult to plan viral. It’s difficult to formulate it. And it’s sure as heck difficult to sell a product alongside it.

As 2013 draws to a close, and the Social Media Insider unleashes below the first in a two-part series of predictions, what strikes me about social media is how established it is. It certainly doesn’t feel new anymore. Maybe a better word for how it feels is — embedded.

In her recent article (Medical Marketing & Media, Nov. 3, 2013) Zoe Dunn posed the question “should Pharma abandon social media?” Her premise was that, in a world where brand marketers change every 18 months, can there ever be enough commitment for long-term tactics such as social? And she is right, to a point. The trouble is that today, at least in the Pharma space, social media is still widely considered a tactical “nice to have.”

In an always-on world, mobile devices are always at-hand as consumers move from screen to screen, according to a new eMarketer report, “Key Digital Trends for 2014.”

Quality beats quantity when it comes to measuring social media effectiveness, according to an August 2013 study by ExactTarget. The survey found that 38% of US Facebook and 43% of Twitter marketers were more concerned with the quality of audience members added via social efforts than with the number of followers gained.

We started working with mom bloggers nearly eight  years ago, at a time when hardly anyone knew who or what they were and persuading brands to trust this new and mysterious form of media was a lengthy, painful and, for a long time, unsuccessful experience.

Latin America will add nearly 100 million people to its social network user audience between now and the end of 2017, according to eMarketer’s latest estimates.

Valassis announced new findings revealing the heightened digital and social engagement of the growing Hispanic population when it comes to savings.

Univision Communications has offered an interesting infographic regarding the importance of the US Hispanic Social Power.

Brand strategy on social media has expanded drastically in the past year. While many monitoring conversation during the most-talked-about televised events has been a commonality, brands have taken their social media efforts to a new level: predictive and real-time/responsive content marketing.  By Bill Mrazek, Social Media Strategist, BodenPR

I spent the greater part of last week in Silicon Valley and surrounding areas with about 50 brand managers. We visited with a selection of startups, accelerators, incubators and the usual suspects of social media movers and shakers.

Call 2014 the year of “social acceptance.” More marketers are committing budget to paid social media advertising. And social media companies are providing advertisers better targeting than ever, and more ways to see the return on investment, according to a new eMarketer report, “Social Media Advertising: Seven Trends for 2014.”

Although social media users’ top methods of discovering, researching and keeping in touch with brands vary, they rely heavily on social networks throughout the entire customer life process, according to a September 2013 study by Wildfire.

Social media’s value to companies can be difficult to measure, and the efforts required for successful outreach can seem daunting. But, execs seem to think it is helping them improve customer relations. Some even consider it “transformational.”

Alexandre Hohagen, Vice President Facebook Latin America, has moved to Miami to assume the additional responsibility for U.S. Hispanic. Christian Martinez, previously Vice President of Network and Interactive Sales at Univision has joined the team to help run ad sales for the U.S. Hispanic market and will also be based in Miami.

We need to rethink the question of calculating ROI on digital and instead see digital as one of the components of a larger brand voice.

Nearly one-in-ten U.S. adults (8%) get news through Twitter, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center, in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Compared with the 30% of Americans who get news on Facebook, Twitter news consumers stand out as younger, more mobile and more educated.