The UM MENA Point of View
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A really insightful blog post from our digital, search and social marketing specialized agency Innovations_Digital. This highlights how brands can go wrong on their Facebook pages.
Advancements in digital technology, increasing demands of the consumer and the client, and changing habits of media consumption are all creating a new landscape in the ad world. What is emerging is scalable, adaptable, lean, multi-dextrous and nimble. And collaborative. Smart. The new ice age is dawning and the cold wave is technology.
posted by Debi Hickey, Associate Media Director, UM Dubai
Twitter is considering creating Facebook-style branded pages as part of its drive to increase its revenue from advertising.
Branded pages, through which advertisers could deliver tailored messages, are under consideration, along with other plans to increase the long-term revenue potential of the social network, according to sources familiar with the subject. It is understood that Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo, and Adam Bain, president of revenue, are leading the push to create fresh revenue streams. The pages would work in a similar way to Facebook Pages, providing brands with their own space to deliver content and encourage Twitter users to follow them, claim sources.
There are currently limited promotional opportunities for brands on Twitter. Apart from free branded accounts, it offers Promoted Accounts that allow brands to buy a place in recommended followers’ lists and sponsor hashtags, so they appear in relevant searches. Any launch of branded pages would roll out first in the US. Twitter launched its first ads on the platform in the US in April 2010, where its partners include Starbucks.
sourced from Haymarket
Here in the Middle East, it’s a little slower on the uptake than what’s happening in the West, but brands today – powered by YouTube, facebook, twitter and even the blogosphere are becoming independent – and relevant – media channels by themselves.
Because, combined with digital production and planning agencies, brands are now increasingly aware of the power of combining owned, earned and paid media. They’re creating content and publishing it, pushing it across channels that they are able to create. They are hiring either creative talent within their own ‘marketing’ functions or are freelancing it out. Or getting agencies in to combine content and media – creating and masterminding editorial, written, video, audio and to-be-shared social and viral content.
This is probably because there isn’t enough good content in the market out there. Brands are increasingly creating and crafting what they want to say or want said about their brands, rather than depend on bloggers and independent creators, or even existing media channels. So, a fashion brand may create their own ‘how-to’ content for a YouTube channel, rather than depend on, here in the Middle East, a Yahoo Maktoob…
Tom Roy, CIO, MCN
Facebook has released extensive updates to its Insights tool, which provides publishers who use Facebook plugins with analytics on how content is performing, according to Mashable. Now publishers can see those analytics in real time.
The update enables publishers to get real-time distribution and engagement metrics of how the content on their site is performing on Facebook, meaning they’ll be able to optimize it for Facebook. For example, publishers will be able to see if a certain post is performing exceedingly well and could adjust its prominence. The metrics, of course, are exportable through the Graph API.
The update also includes a well-rounded look into content performance on and off Facebook. Publishers now can see the impressions, referral clicks and the most popular pages on their site. The Popular Pages view was expanded to include the top 100 pages that are getting the most likes, comments or shares.
Deeper Engagement Analytics
What’s useful is that one can break down the analytics by Facebook plugin (Like button, Comments, etc.). Website owners with Like buttons, for example, will be able to see how many people saw the button, clicked on them, saw the stories that got posted through the Like button and how many of them clicked on it to come to view it on your site. It also provides metrics for the recently updated Comments plugin, enabling publishers to see the rate of comments taking place and from whom.
Users can see the granular information, such as how many “likes” included a comment from the user — only 6% on Mashable.com, I found (knowing that the comment functionality on the Like button doesn’t always work). I also was able to learn that the “likes” that included comments were more likely to get clicked on Facebook, which makes sense because it adds a personal voice from the user. What is interesting is that Insights also breaks out the shares that occur using the plugins and “organic” shares, which essentially is how many shares took places by users simply copy-and-pasting links to share or using the old Share button.
This is likely to bring some great insight to designers who implement Facebook’s “Like” buttons to see how its placement affects the click-through rates of the button.
Demographics for Interactions
Insights now breaks down interactions based on anonymized demographics, which may enable site owners to target specific audiences.
Publishers will be able to learn more about the audience that interacts with its Facebook plugins on their site. For example, site owners can see what age group, gender, language or country is most active in using these plugins on their sites. However, publishers should note that the data for demographics shows numbers per interaction, not per user. This means the numbers shouldn’t be interpreted as showing how many users are interacting with the content on the site but rather how many interactions are taking places from a specific demographic.
