#insidesocial

[inside-social]

Facebook: video ads get a revamp and… is News Feed shopping actually happening?

Posted by: Jamie O’Brien, Social Editor

New capabilities for Facebook’s video ads Facebook wants to be a branding platform on a par with TV and its video ads are a big part of this. Launched in March, its Premium Video Ads are bought and measured in the same way as traditional TV ads, making it as easy as possible for brands to move some of their TV budget over to Facebook.

Once these brands try the placement, Facebook is aiming to woo them with advanced targeting and measurement capabilities that TV and print can’t possibly match. Not all brands can afford the premium video placement though, so Facebook has also rolled out new branding friendly capabilities for its standard video ads: Video views objective This allows advertisers to designate video views as the objective of their campaigns. Ads will be automatically optimised for views by showing them to Facebook users who are most likely to view them. Remarketing to video viewers This allows you to target people who have already viewed a previous video. It can be used to tell a story in segments or follow up an initial video with something more sales-led, such as a product video or another Facebook ad unit. Call-to-action option for video ads This is an optional action for brands that want to drive traffic off Facebook after viewing a video.

These new features began rolling out on the 15th of July. A new way to discover and buy products on Facebook Facebook is testing a ‘Buy’ call-to-action button that allows users to purchase products directly from businesses without leaving Facebook. Up until now, businesses that want to sell a user something have to direct them off Facebook and complete the purchase elsewhere.

Only a few weeks ago Tweets were spotted with ‘Buy now’ buttons, proving that Twitter was testing in-Tweet purchases. Facebook’s own tests can be seen as a reaction to this.

So although Facebook and Twitter are chasing the big-budget TV advertisers, they haven’t forgotten about direct response and s-commerce. In the coming months, we expect to see more social shopping releases from the social giants. If you’d like to know more about Facebook video ads or the launch of shopping on Facebook and Twitter, talk to TBG.

Jamie O’Brien Social Editor, TBG To stay up-to-date on all things social, follow TBG on Twitter.

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Facebook is expanding the features of website custom audiences

Posted by: Jamie O’Brien, Social Editor

Facebook has announced enhancements to its Custom Audiences from your Website product that will make it easier to retarget people who have visited your website.

What is Custom Audiences from your Website? Custom Audiences from your Website is Facebook’s version of cookie-based retargeting offered by Facebook PMDs like Mediamath and Turn. With cookie retargeting, users who visit your website can be retargeted with ads when they visit Facebook. The ads can then be tailored to the content they viewed on your site. The same can be achieved with Facebook’s Custom Audiences from your Website. Custom audiences created in this way can then be referenced in Facebook ad targeting in the same way as standard custom audiences. Why has Facebook launched these new Features? Custom audiences work. They make advertising on Facebook more efficient, reducing wastage and improving the overall relevancy of ads on Facebook. These new features make it easier and quicker for brands and agencies to create custom audiences; they also cut out the middlemen. Previously, to manage a custom audience it was necessary to use one of the third party PMDs. By building its own custom audiences product, Facebook gets to keep the chunk of an advertiser's budget that would otherwise go to the PMDs. The original Facebook Custom Audiences from your Website product didn’t have all the features that were available to the PMDs through the API. With this update the Facebook product now has those, plus additional features that Facebook is not releasing for the PMDs. This not only makes Facebook’s offering better but also easier for brands and agencies to set up, as it can be done automatically through Power Editor/Ads Manager. Facebook has already followed this path with mobile retargeting (targeting someone who has visited your website on their mobile phone). It’s exclusively available through Facebook’s Custom Audiences from Websites—and therefore not available via PMDs cookie-based products.

What are the new features?

Updating the audience rule builder: You will soon see a new interface for the audience rule builder in Power Editor and Ads Manager. The new rule builder makes it easier to get started with simple use cases and includes some advanced features previously only available in the API. You can also now use the audience builder to create custom audiences for users that have performed a certain action on your website, such as searching for a particular term or viewing a specific product. Launching audience pre-fill: With this new capability, you will be able to automatically build audiences based on past activity history on your website. Increasing the audience limit: Facebook has increased the audience limit to enable you to build more granular segments. For example, you can now build an audience for almost every product in your catalogue.

Facebook expects these features to be available for all advertisers in the next several weeks. What does this mean for PMDs? This isn’t good news for PMDs. After initially working with them on this, it seems as though Facebook is now cutting them out of the deal. Obviously this is just a part of their business and Facebook will continue to work with them, but it’s a warning that Facebook can take things away if there’s revenue to be siphoned off. It’s also another nail in the coffin for cookies—along with the general transition to mobile and the emergence of new behavioural tracking outfits such as Medialets and Drawbridge that do not rely on actual tracking (they use spatial and temporal cues to match a user across devices and platforms with a degree of certainty). If you’d like to know more about custom audiences, talk to TBG.

Jamie O’Brien Social Editor, TBG To stay up-to-date on all things social, follow TBG on Facebook.

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It’s finally here: buy ads by reach and frequency on Facebook

Posted by: Jamie O’Brien, Social Editor

All managed Facebook clients can now buy ads on Facebook by reach and Frequency. This is important news for many of our clients who have been requesting this capability for a long time.

Reach and frequency explained Reach is the number of individuals that see your campaign. Frequency is the number of times an individual sees your campaign—this is an average number and referred to as average frequency. For example, a campaign with one million exposures and a reach of 500,000 users will have an average frequency of two: on average each person saw the ad twice.

Why are they so important? The ability to optimise campaigns for reach and frequency is important because for each brand and campaign there is an optimum frequency that will trigger a conversion. Showing a million people a single ad may achieve very little, they might not see the ad or take it all in. Conversely, showing 1,000 people the same ad 200 times is overkill. Somewhere between two and twenty exposures your chances of influencing them will be reduced to nothing. Any exposures beyond this magic number are just wasted budget and may even be detrimental. This graph shows that sweet spot of ‘effective reach’:

Here, the range is between four and ten, but you may find that more exposures are necessary. Every campaign is different and testing is essential to determine the optimum frequency. Campaigns are optimised to frequency by counting the number of exposures it takes for each user to convert. By setting a maximum number of exposures, this budget can be saved and used to expand reach to new targets. A new way to buy Facebook ads Of course, optimising by reach isn’t new to Facebook, this update is concerned with the ability to buy Facebook ads by reach and frequency. Previously, there were only two basic ways to buy ads on Facebook, CPC (clicks) or CPM (exposures). There wasn’t a way to buy a set audience size based on your time frame, budget and required frequency—the way that brands are used to buying ads for TV, print and other online media. This is part of Facebook’s transition from an old style online media company—selling standard gif ad placements based on clicks to direct response advertisers—to a branding platform that offers levels of scale and targeting that appeal to the biggest brands. To make it as easy as possible to sell ads to these brands Facebook needed to offer them advertising that can be bought in the same way as TV or print—guaranteeing a reach and frequency level for a certain spend.

Reliable frequency This is where Facebook can move beyond other forms of media and give brands more reliably predictable reach and frequency. TV and print frequency predictions are not really trackable and cookie-based online tracking isn’t accurate. Facebook consists of specific individual users that log in across multiple devices so it can more accurately predict, control and track reach and frequency. The ability to buy Facebook ads by reach and frequency was announced last month and became available in Power Editor for all managed clients on the 9th of July. If you’d like to know more about buying ads on Facebook by reach and frequency, talk to TBG. Jamie O’Brien Social Editor, TBG

To stay up-to-date on all things social, follow TBG on Facebook.

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Instagram: How do brands use it? Why is it so engaging? How do ads work?

Posted by: Jamie O’Brien, Social Editor

If you aren’t an Instagram user, you'll know that it’s a photo sharing app but do you know exactly how it works? Or, do you know how brands are using it? Here’s our guide including a quick overview of the basics, details on how brands use Instagram and how to prepare for advertising on the platform.

What is Instagram? Instagram is for sharing photos: selfies, landscapes, holiday snaps, food you’re about to eat, outfits or just for showing off. Instagram is not for sharing any old snap—it’s as much about the beauty of the image itself as the subject. Editing tools and retro filters make it very easy for amateur photographers to produce stunning images in a few taps. Real photographers may scoff at Instagram, but it gives easy access to the arty side of photography, without the need for expensive kit or the effort of processing the images. Instagram still has its share of bad photos, memes and jokes, but generally, the quality of images is higher than other major platforms, especially those from brands. The vast majority of posts are still photographs rather than videos.

The most liked post ever was this shot from Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s wedding:

West says that he spent days editing the image himself to get it just right (but then he neglected to crop it for Instagram’s square image ratio). Many serious Instagrammers take their photos with a camera and edit them using professional editing software or apps before uploading.

Like other social networks, users can follow their friends, celebrities and brands, as well as strangers whose content they like. It’s slightly more open than Facebook—users can search for content by hashtag and follow strangers based on the images that they post.

Arguably, Instagram is the second largest social network; certainly in terms of users and time spent on the platform. Here's our analysis on the true size of the app: Is Instagram actually the second biggest social network?

To see how Instagram compares with Vine, Snapchat, and other sharing apps read our definitive guide to video and image apps.

How does it work? Take an image or 15-second video (either pre-existing from your phone or take a new one from within the app), then add filters, crop or edit and upload—with or without a short text description or a location. Posts can also be manually or automatically shared to Facebook, Twitter or other accounts, depending on your settings.

The camera within Instagram and the home feed showing a post from Nike

Your followers will then see your post on their home page feed. All the posts by users you follow are shown in chronological order (no algorithms here). Your followers can then like or comment on your posts. Videos will auto play without audio as you scroll them into view. 

Why do people use it? Instagram is Facebook’s hipster little brother. Ninety percent of it’s users are under thirty-five. They use it both to keep track of what friends are up to and, to a lesser extent, enjoy good photography.

Instagram sits somewhere between Facebook and more private platforms like Snapchat or WhatsApp. Images are shared with friends and are viewable by the general public by default, but there’s minimal danger of parents or colleagues seeing what you are up to. Generally, users don’t use their real names. 

Why do brands use Instagram? Instagram is for brand campaigns. Click through links cannot be added to posts, as with Facebook or Twitter. It’s closer to TV, print or outdoor advertising, in that the objectives are visibility and recognition rather than direct conversions.

Nike’s Instagram account While videos are only around five percent of all post on Instagram, brands often use video on Instagram to share high quality video content.

Instagram sees far higher engagement rates than other platforms—58 times higher than Twitter and 120 times higher than Facebook. Users are more inclined to like and comment because a user’s every move isn’t broadcasted. Instagram doesn’t tell everyone you know when you like or comment, just the person who posted the image. These sky-high engagement levels are why seventy-one percent of the world top brands are now using Instagram. Promoted posts Brands can convert a standard Instagram post into a sponsored post. The only difference is that the post has a ‘Sponsored’ flag at the top, and it can be targeted to certain users, rather than a brand’s usual followers. Users can also hide any sponsored posts from their feed and submit feedback.

Promoted posts from Ralph Lauren and Ben & Jerry’s

Ads are targeted based on a user’s activity on Instagram (the people they follow and the posts they like) and if a user’s account is linked to Facebook, their Facebook interests and other basic profile information are used. Measurement focuses on reach, ad recall and awareness.

Instagram has been testing ads for around eight months in the US with a handful of big-budget advertisers. Promoted posts aren’t available to all yet, but if you want to be prepared for the full launch, read our guide for brands to being ready for Instagram ads. This includes a full review of brands currently using promoted posts. 

If you’d like to know more about Instagram, get in touch with TBG. 

Jamie O’Brien Social Editor, TBG

To stay up-to-date on our nights out, awards, parties, cakes, ping pong tournaments and selfies, follow TBG on Instagram.

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How are brands using apps to reach festival audiences?

Posted by: Bianca Ohannessian, Senior Content Manager

Music festivals have become seriously techie. As some of our TBG’ers are gearing up for Glastonbury this week, the mother of all British festivals, we’re taking a look at the handy apps brands are producing for festival season. There are iPhone and Android apps available covering all the different corners of the festival experience. The only thing you have left to worry about is making sure your phone’s charged up.

Festival essentials Wellies? Check. Sunscreen? Check. Torch? Oh wait, there’s an app for that. The Torch and Flashlight apps are free and will make sure you can find your way back to your tent in the dark. If you think you’ll have trouble finding it in the daylight too, try Festival Buddy or TentFinder which use GPS to help you navigate through the confusing sea of mud-splattered tents.

Now, if only your phone could turn into a multi-functional Swiss Army Knife... Sorry, it can’t. But Victorinox, the makers of the indispensable camping gadget, have released an app called Festival Ready. Not quite the same as their knife, but still pretty useful, it gives you camping tips, 3D navigation around the site and live weather updates. And if you think you’re likely to forget some necessary item, never fear! It offers a check list to help you pack for the festival.

Safety first Whether you’re drinking alcohol or water, it’s easy to lose track of what you’re sipping in all the excitement. Change4Life Drinks Tracker will help you monitor how many ciders you’ve had, while Water Your Body and WaterIn will make sure you’re getting enough water to keep you hydrated. The perfect balance.

Here for the music Get hyped before the festival and discover new artists to check out with Rithm, a social network built around music. You can recommend songs to friends accompanied with personalised videos and emojis. It’s a bit like Snapchat but with a soundtrack. There is also a song of the day feature. Then at the festival, if you happen to discover your new favourite band, join SongKick to be first in line for their next gig.

Shazam has come a long way from its early days. Now, not only can you listen to any song and find out the track name and artist, but you can share it on Facebook and Twitter, add it to an interactive map and instantly download it on iTunes. Also, if everyone at the gig seems to know the lyrics and you don’t, Shazam has got your back. You can sing it loud and proud with the LyricPlay function. And if you get really carried away, put your virtual Zippo Lighter in the air and start swaying.

In the festival fields With so many festival-goers on the loose, it’s easy to lose track of friends in the crowd. Try Find My Friends to locate them with GPS and see how far away they are from you. Or choose a meeting point and send them a ‘Yo’ with the app of the moment, Yo (yes, it’s as simple as that) to let them know you’re waiting for them at the tent, to the left of the Pyramid stage or wherever you have arranged to meet.

Glastonbury also has its own app by EE. To be honest, it’s a bit ‘buggy’ and the buttons are not very responsive but it does have some fun features. You can create your own line-up and set alerts before your favourites go on stage, use interactive maps to get around and receive festival updates. The only thing that’s missing is an alert to let you know which porter-loos have the shortest queues. Now that would be useful. Maybe next year, hey Glastonbury?

Connect with cows As well as running out of cash for the bar, dodgy internet connections are often a problem at festivals, or any event where lots of smartphone users gather together in a field. Glastonbury has a solution for both. They’ve added contactless card payments to 25 of their main bars and they’ve also brought in Wi-Fi hotspots disguised as colourful cows. If Glastonbury can keep 120,000 internet users happy, hopefully other major festivals will follow their lead and start introducing more Wi-Fi hotspots.

And to make sure consumers don’t miss out on all these apps, measures have been taken to banish dead battery disasters. You can get yourself a portable phone charger, or use the new EE charger exchange service, and use an app like Battery HD+ to preserve your battery life for as long as possible.

Although there is already a lot of festival tech out there, this is a growing trend and festival apps are becoming more sophisticated and also more niche each year. However, there are still plenty of gaps to fill. Festival-goers expect apps to be readily available to them, to contribute to their overall experience, so now is a good time to think about how your brand could rock next year’s festival circuit.

Right, that’s everything covered except the Glasto weather. Looks like we’ll be needing those wellies after all…

Bianca Ohannessian @Oh_Bianca_ Senior Content Manager, TBG

To stay up-to-date on all things social, follow TBG on Twitter.

[inside-social]

This Week in Social 06/06/14

Posted by:Genna AlTai, Executive Content Manager

Let the click-bait wars begin

And may the odds forever be in your favour! Take a look at how brands can profit from the click-bait war between Facebook and other media outlets on Inside Social.

What happens when you blend fashion, social media and technology? Our Senior Content Manager dissects the internet’s reaction to Rihanna’s CFDA ‘gown’ plus more.

Get your real-time arsenal ready            

Twitter has (very kindly) assembled ten steps to marketing in the moment, just in time for the World Cup.

The password killer is coming to get you

Are you the proud owner of a Samsung Galaxy S5. Well, say goodbye to passwords and hello to finger swiping. Learn more here.  

At this year’s WWDC event, Apple had a lot of exciting news to share. For some added excitement to your day, check out these 22 important things Apple shared on The Verge.

Pinterest ads? Don’t mind if we do.

It turns out, a hefty amount of Pinterest users are moneyed ladies in charge of purchasing decisions in their households. Oh, and they’re not adverse to advertisements.  Make of that what you will, ad industry!

Don’t know the first thing about mobile app install ads? Here’s our definitive guide to mobile app install ads on Facebook, Twitter and Google, courtesy of TBG’s Social Editor.

Always-on Paid Social

Why do brands and agencies need integrated paid social? TBG CEO Simon Mansell explains on Sprinklr’s blog.

Genna AlTai @ItsGennaAlTai
 Executive Content Manager, TBG

[inside-social]

Twitter’s mute button: silence feed spammers without losing face

Posted by: Genna AlTai, Executive Content Manager

Remember when you were actually friends with your Facebook friends? Before friends list became bloated with everyone you’ve ever met, if you became friends with someone on Facebook you probably knew them well and wanted to know what they get up to—how the definition of ‘friend’ has changed.

Inevitably, users started unfriending annoying people (which was bad for Facebook) and then we arrived at the awkward point where so called ‘friends’ were sharing soul-destroying updates, but we couldn’t sever ties as it would be rude if your aunt, boss or ‘best friend’ found out. To stop users purging friends and to avoid awkward unfriending dilemmas Facebook introduced the ability to hide all post from a particular friend without them ever knowing.

Press ‘Mute’  Following in Facebook’s footsteps, Twitter has introduced the ‘mute’ button. Originally tested on a small group of users, the new mute feature allows Tweeters to silence anyone they find too irritating. That “serial baby picture poster”? Consider them gone. The “sports bro.” They’re gone too. The beauty of the mute function is that the muted user will never know that you’ve cast them into ‘frenemy purgatory.’ Another bonus: putting someone on mute won’t prevent them from favouriting, replying to, or retweeting your tweets. Is this the better alternative to unfollowing someone? It’s great for saving face, but it seems to defeat the whole purpose of Twitter.

Not-so Facebook Friends Facebook introduced ‘friends lists’ long before Twitter. Going the extra mile, Facebook added options to divide and conquer your friends into categories and subsections.

In 2012, Zuckerberg and co. brought in the ‘close friends’ function, which was meant to bring you more of your closest friends’ status updates. Overall, this was quite a positive feature because you could sift through all of your friends’ updates and go straight to the people who matter most.

Then, we have ‘acquaintances.’ Facebook describes acquaintances as “list for friends you don’t need to stay in close touch with.” As mentioned above, you can also ‘unfollow’ a Facebook friend, which is almost identical to muting someone on Twitter. Like the mute function, you’re still friends with the person, but you won’t see any of their posts or updates. As Mashable puts it, “This works well with exes, over-sharers and political hotheads.”

A little OCD or massively helpful? It seems to be overcomplicating the whole notion of ‘social media’ and sharing. After all, isn’t the point to bring people together? Friends lists and muting functions are tools of division. My thoughts on this new Twitter function: if you don’t want to hear from them, don’t follow them. You mute TVs, not people. What does this mean for brands In addition, will these lists disrupt how information is shared and distributed? The ability to mute a brand on Twitter may be detrimental to how brands use Twitter. Follower counts may become misleading if many users have muted accounts. Overall it should make brands think twice about the content they are posting and improve quality. The fact that users now have a soft option between seeing everything and severing ties completely may mean that fewer users see your posts. It also breaks the rule of Twitter reciprocal following. Follow me and I’ll follow you back may become follow me and I’ll follow and mute you. Genna AlTai @ItsGennaAlTai
 Executive Content Manager, TBG To stay up-to-date on all things social, follow TBG on Twitter.

[inside-social]

#SoLongHashtags

Posted by: Genna AlTai, Executive Content Manager

Could you imagine a world without hashtags and @ symbols? Better question: Could you imagine Twitter without hashtags and @ symbols? #NoWay

Rumour has it, Twitter might be axing some of the features that its core users know and love. As reported by The Guardian, Twitter’s Head of News, Vivian Schiller, stated that the @-reply and the hashtag were “arcane”. She also explained, “We are working on moving the scaffolding of Twitter into the background.” So Twitter probably won’t be completely axing the functions, but it looks as if they’re ‘cleaning up’ after themselves. It seems as though the visual symbols (#, @) will disappear into the background, but the functions will remain intact and become more automated. Twitter’s motivation behind all this is to make the platform more user-friendly and appeal to the mass market. 

The Revolution will be Live-Tweeted The masses taking to Twitter to voice their opinions is nothing new. Whether it’s political, environmental or hormonal, Twitter is a fantastic way to gage how the crowd feels. A natural instinct nowadays is to take to Twitter when something’s ticked you off, right? The Arab Spring was a fantastic example of social media, and especially Twitter, rallying troupes. Would the sentiment felt by so many be as strong as it was without some help from the hashtag? That might be pushing it, but the hashtag was certainly a vehicle for public opinion. In fact, the most used hashtag in 2011 was #Egypt and many tied the eruption of the Arab spring back to social media. To boil it down, the hashtag has been used to embody whole movements in simple, easy-to-use phrases.

If Twitter does follow through, I’ll be sad to see the hashtags go. Not only do they provide a sense of togetherness in tweets, but they also add a great deal of humour to posts that would otherwise be bland. Over the past couple of years, hashtags have become so popular they’ve even managed to wiggle their way into our conversation. This ridiculous, yet kind of very true SNL skit is a fine example of how relevant hashtags have become.

#EmbraceChange We should embrace change, as without it we’d still be living in caves and using livestock as currency. If Twitter does decide to proceed with these alterations, it’ll be interesting to see how users react to the change. Of course, Twitter could be developing a way to keep the functionality of hashtags intact—the plan could just be to remove the hash visually. So hashtags could still be typed in the same way, they would just lose the hash once the Tweet is sent. An overhaul of hashtags could even improve the feature. Adding spaces and punctuation would certainly make them more user friendly, but it does take away some of the romance of the hashtag.

Twitter is already testing how to phase out @-replies in its Android alpha test group app, so this could very well become a reality. Here’s some evidence Buzzfeed provided in a post published last week:

Like every other redesign or change, users will almost certainly have a negative reaction at first, then learn to accept it and then slowly forget what the former format even was. Such is the ever changing world of social media.

Genna AlTai @ItsGennaAlTai
 Executive Content Manager, TBG

To stay up-to-date on all things social, follow TBG on Twitter.