Social media is not the “free way to reach your fans and customers” any longer. The time has arrived when brands need to spend money to break through the clutter and give new and old users compelling reasons to listen to your messages. Social advertising can seem scary, but in reality it’s built in a way that allows you to dip your toes in the water and experiment. When planning your next campaign, consider adding a social media advertising line in the budget to help maximize your effectiveness.
Foursquare
TechCrunch: With An Eye To More Revenue, Foursquare Opens Its Ads Platform To All Small Businesses
It’s been interesting to watch Foursquare move from check-in platform, to review platform, to local content platform over the last few years. Now, the mobile service is looking to take another step forward with the opening of its advertising system to all businesses. Foursquare is trying to set itself apart from competitors by allowing advertisers to only pay for those that respond to the ad instead of just paying for impressions. If you are a business with multiple retail locations, it would be wise to look into the new platform.
The Wall Street Journal: Google’s New Ad Star: You
We’re sure you’ve seen social endorsements on Facebook (when the platform says that one of your friends likes a brand or product page that you don’t follow in your News Feed) but Google is about to up the ante in a big way. The search giant’s new terms of service allows Google to include your reviews, comments and endorsements in “social-context” ads that could have you shilling products without you even knowing it. Word of mouth sure has a different meaning than it did 10 years ago, doesn’t it?
Bloomberg: Facebook Boosts Targeting Options for Advertisers
Facebook is making an important update to the platform’s advertising options, now allowing brands and agencies to target customers on mobile devices based on their online activity outside of the social network. “A bike retailer could reach people who started designing bikes on its website but didn’t make a purchase, or, a mobile travel app can deliver ads to people who have downloaded their app but haven’t used it in a while and encourage them to book getaways within the app.”
Facebook has an impressive suite of options for reaching your customers in unique and non-traditional ways. Make sure you are taking full advantage.
The Verge: Facebook now lets teens post statuses and photos publicly
Actual numbers not withstanding, Facebook has been fighting a public perception battle about how many teens are using the platform. Reports speculate that teens are turning elsewhere because of a distaste of oversharing and too much of their information becoming public. Facebook’s move to allow teens to post statuses and photos publicly is an interesting one that may help the platform disprove some of the speculation. Regardless, more public sharing means more data for brands to access and more insights to learn about their fans.
YouTube
Mashable: 6 Biggest Mistakes Brands Make on YouTube
Yes, we’d all like all of our videos to “go viral” but we’d be a lot happier if we set achievable goals and made sure that our video content helps us reach those goals. Before setting out on your next YouTube or Vimeo brand adventure take a look at this story on some of the biggest mistakes you can make when creating social video.
Social Media
Adweek: Does Real-Time Marketing Work?
We’ve all seen the huge success stories and the glorious failures in real-time marketing over the past year or two but those are the outliers. What about the attempts that landed somewhere in the middle? This story takes a look at a sampling of campaigns and digs into how they performed… or didn’t.
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The Washington Redskins Name Debate Tackled at Halftime
