Mindshare NA Social

Great news! Pinterest is experimenting with "promoted pins" from a select group of businesses. According to the company's blog post, promoted pins will be:

Tasteful: no banners or pop-up ads

Transparent: Pinterest will let you know which content is promoted

Relevant: pins will tie into the consumers' interests

Improved based on feedback: Pinterest will honor feedback from consumers

For the first test, Pinterest will promote a few pins in search results & category feeds.

HUGE NEWS from FACEBOOK:

On Tuesday, Facebook made it much easier for Pages to administer promotions. Promotions are now allowed to be administered directly on page timelines! Before this change, promotions were only allowed to be administered through apps (tabs), which are costly to create and administer. 

Pages can now:

Collect entries by having users post on the Page or like/comment a Page post

Collect entries by having users message the Page

As before, clients cannot administer a promotion on a personal timeline - Sharing a page post is still not an acceptable form of entry

Facebook also updated page terms to prohibit pages from tagging or encouraging people to tag themselves in content that they are not actually depicted in.

With that being said, promotions should still:

Tie into business objectives

Be compelling: promotions offering significant upside to people who enter are more likely to encourage engagement and generate buzz 

Include creative Facebook best practices 

here's a link to Facebook's Promotion Guidelines

Yesterday, Instagram announced that users now have the ability to upload videos that were already taken, directly from the phone's media library. Once a user has selected the video, he or she can edit the video before posting. The option to square crop the video is also available, to keep the action front and center.

Instagram also developed a new technology to straighten photos instantly before posting. 

This is a huge game changer for brands. Before Instagram announced this ability, many brands found it difficult to use Instagram video. They had to take a video, send it to the client for approval, and then try to recreate the experience in order to upload it to the brand's account. This new ability definitely puts Instagram above Vine in terms of the ability for brands to play and market themselves on the platform. 

Facebook announced today that they will start publishing blog updates on the changes in their News Feed algorithm- similar to how Google does. Facebook's first post will be about "Story Bumping", which pushes stories that haven't been seen yet above those which have.

With Story Bumping, Facebook looks not only at which stories have been published since a user last looked at the feed, but also at recent stories the user hasn't seen: not just "new", but "new for you". This way, users can see more relevant stories, even if they are a little bit older.

Users are now reading reading a larger amount of their stories due to Story Bumping.

Facebook also announced two more algorithm changes:

Last Actor: looks at the 50 people a user has most recently interacted with, and shows more stories about them in the feed

Chronological by Actor: Facebook's attempt to make real-time content more comprehensible. If a person is posting real-time updates about an event, users will see the updates in chronological order, rather than in ranked order

To read the full article click here: http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/06/facebook-story-bumping/

A recent survey from SimplyMeasured found that so far, hashtags have been popular with the top brands on Facebook.

From Facebook's hashtag launch on June 12th until June 24th, 56% of the top 100 brands included a hashtag in one of their posts, and nearly 40% of these brands have included hashtags in multiple posts. 

Top brands have also ramped up their use of Facebook hashtags since the June 12th launch. Of the top brands, only 8% of posts contained hashtags on the day after launch. On June 20th of the following week, however, 26% of brands' posts included them. 

It will be interesting to see how big brands continue to use hashtags in their strategies, and to see how they integrate content on other hashtag-optimized platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.

Last week, Facebook announced that it was adding hashtag support to its mobile version, and launching related hashtags. Clicking on a hashtag now will pull up other hashtags that are often posted at the same time. For example, searching for #equality will also bring up #lgbt and #pride.

When Facebook originally launched hashtags, there was no mobile support for the feature. But Facebook is now adding the feature to mobile devices.

Related hashtags, which are also available on Twitter, enable consumers to get caught up with parallel conversations. Facebook analyzes which hashtags are frequently posted together to discover various associations. After viewing the results for one hashtag, consumers can click down the row of related hashtags to get a better idea of what is being talked about. 

Will Facebook become the new Twitter?

In light of Instagram's new video feature, Vine rolled out a big update to their platform as well. Here are the new features:

New Camera Tools: redesigned camera which includes a new grid, focus, and ghost tools to make shooting easier

Channels: users can now submit their videos to 15 different channels, including Art & Experimental, Nature, and Family

On the Rise: the ability to discover Viners that are capturing the attention and interest of the Vine community. This can also be useful for brands who want to find influential Viners

Revining: the ability share other users' (or brands?!) Vines

Protected Posts: protect video posts (similar to privacy settings on Facebook or Twitter)

Will these updates push Vine back into the running with Instagram?! Only time will tell

Facebook announced this week that it is updating its Insights tool to make it "more actionable" for page admins. According to Facebook's announcement,  "it should be clearer to businesses how to use this information to drive the results they care about."

The upgrade covers a number of key components. Here are the three main changes:

1. Post-Specific Score Cards: with the current version of insights, admins are able to gather information about how a specific post performed, but it isn't easy. This new version aggregates all this into a single place for each post, creating what Facebook calls a "score card" where admins can evaluate how popular an individual post was. Information about negative interactions with the post is also available, such as how many people hid the post, marked it as spam, or unliked the page while viewing it, giving  a much clearer and bigger picture of the post's overall impact.

2. Enhanced Demographics: currently, Insights provides admins with demographic details for the page's fans. Now Insights will show the same demographics, side by side, for those Facebook users whom the page has engaged—through liking, commenting, clicking on, or sharing  Posts or Page.

3. General Clarity and Terminology Changes: Insights will break the vague term PTAT (People Talking About This) down into separate, clearer metrics. These new metrics will include Page Likes, People Engaged, and Page Check-Ins. The Virality metric will now include a Post's clicks in its measurement and will be renamed Engagement Rate.

These new Insights are currently being rolled out to brand pages.

According to a new study by AdRoll, news feed ads have a 21 times higher click-through rates than standard web retargeting ads. They also have 49 times the click-through rate of ads featured on the right hand side of a Facebook page.

News feed ads enable brands to target consumers who have previously visited their sites (i.e.- retargeting). They are also larger than the ads displayed on the right hand side of the Facebook screen, so they are more eye-catching to consumers.

Since they are featured in the news feed, they are more inherently "social" than ads displayed on the side of the page. Consumers can like, share, and comment on these ads. They have the ability to earn organic reach too, from consumers interacting with them. 

All-in-all, this translates to more cost effective ads: they cost 54% less than ads on the right hand side.

A week has passed since Facebook's Instagram added video recording to its popular camera app, and it’s already had a dramatic impact on its main competitor:

Vine sharing on Twitter has completely nosedived.

Vine sharing went into a free-fall on June 20th, the day of Instagram’s announcement. Topsy's data shows there were almost 2.5M Vine links shared on June 19th, then a little more than 1.5M on the 20th — a drop of almost 40% in one day.

Using Topsy’s free analytics tool to compare how many times Twitter users have shared instagram.com links versus vine.co links. 

Vine sharing on Twitter has continued to drop over the week since Instagram video rolled out. Yesterday saw less than 900K Vine links shared on Twitter — that’s about a 70% decrease from the nearly 3M links that were shared on June 15th.

Interestingly, Instagram hasn’t actually seen a huge uptick in Twitter sharing since its video launch. The number of shares has remained relatively flat over the last month. But Vine sharing is way down in the last week, back below Instagram after a short run that began when Vine shares passed Instagram back on June 8th.

Back on June 18th, a couple days before the Instagram video launch — which wasn’t much of a secret — Vine used its blog to promise “some exciting new parts of Vine” that are on the way. The post concluded with Vine stating “it’s going to be a great summer.”

It's going to be a long hot summer for Twitter & Vine unless they can turn things around fast.

Source: http://marketingland.com

According to a study from Syncapse, consumers top reasons for "liking" a brand on Facebook are based on loyalty for the brand.

Coupons and deals are still popular reasons to become Facebook fans- 42% of the people surveyed put it down as their #1 reason.

However the top reason was consumer loyalty to the brand. 49% of those surveyed said their top reason was to "support a brand I like". The only other response that was mentioned by more than 40% of respondents was "to receive regular updates from brands I like", at 41%. 

The study also found that 78% of a brand's Facebook fans are also current users of the company's products or services. 

Facebook announced this week several updates to their Ads Manager reports. This update is expected to roll out gradually, and will be available to all marketers in the next few weeks.

According to the company's post in their Facebook Studio blog, much like their recent updates to Page Insights, they are making Ads Manager easier to use and more actionable. The updates will help marketers measure the performance of their campaigns in real-time, so that they could build more effective campaigns in the future. 

The updates are as follows:

Ads reports will be easier to save, schedule, and customize

Reach and other key metrics will be measured more effectively

Performance will be broken down by demographics, country, and placement (where the ad shows on Facebook)

The ways that consumers shop and make purchasing decisions has changed dramatically with the advent of social media.

The sale of physical goods pegged through social platforms is expected to grow to $14 billion of US sales by 2105.

66.9% of consumers turn to Twitter for information on products before making purchasing decisions, and 37% of find online social sources an influential driver when making decisions. 

Facebook page admins can now create dark posts directly via Facebook's page composer.

Dark posts, or unpublished posts, do not appear on a user's News Feed or the page's Timeline. The can be promoted with Facebook ads, though, enabling brands to promote more relevant content without overloading fans' News Feeds.

In order to create these posts with the platform's page composer, the admin must click on the clock icon for scheduling posts. When choosing the year, the option to "hide from News Feed" appears. 

Last month, Facebook announced a new verified feature for pages and profiles, designed to give high-profile accounts an added level of authenticity. Just like Twitter's "verified accounts", these pages will feature a small blue check mark. The mark will appear on the page itself, as well as in the search results.

These Verified Pages are being rolled out to a small group of prominent figures and pages with large audiences.  

Watch out, Vine! The rumors are true...Instagram announced today that it has added support for recording short video clips up to 15 seconds.

Here are some of the features:

13 new filters can be applied to videos

"Cinema" feature helps stabilize shaky videos

Editing functionality: parts of the video can be erased, rather than starting the entire process over

Like photos, videos can be shared on other social platforms

This new capability is already available on iOS and Android!

The question remains: what will happen to Vine?

By 2015, mobile internet usage is supposed to surpass desktop usage.

After surveying 500 consumers, Yesmail Interactive created an infographic that displays how mobile affects shopping patterns and interaction with brands through social media.

42.9% of mobile internet users shop online at least once per month, and are 26.9% more likely to interact with a brand on social media than those who are using a desktop. 

In addition, 37% of mobile shoppers make a purchase because of a social media promotion they received on their phone.

59.7% of these users have liked a brand on Facebook, and 29.7% have commented on a brand's Facebook page.