Last week saw the release of Econsultancy’s State of Digital Marketing in Australia report, where the current environment is closely analysed to understand what’s happening, where focus is being placed and how this is affecting marketing activity.
In line with this, ExactTarget’s Inspired Marketing Predictions recently compiled various opinions from industry experts, of which many echo the research findings.
Facebook’s success hasn’t only netted its founders, early employees and investors billions of dollars, the world’s largest social network has built an ecosystem that has served as the foundation for other businesses collectively worth billions.
From large social gaming companies like Zynga all the way to individual developers building Facebook apps out of their bedrooms, Facebook’s launch of a development platform in 2006 proved to be a game-changer for online entrepreneurs.
Strides in social commerce have been made with Facebook and Pinterest but, until today, brands and ecommerce specialists haven’t been able to crack the code when it came to Twitter.
American Express and Twitter have announced they are joining forces by allowing members to sync their Amex cards with their Twitter accounts and then tweet special hashtags to make purchases.
This is not the first foray into connecting American Express member cards with social networks. They have focused on the interconnection with commerce and social since it launched its Link Like Love program with Facebook in 2011 and they have been promoting Twitter deals since last year.
But is this Twitter partnership just another gimmick or something more?
In recent weeks I’ve begun looking at the different ways in which some of the world’s biggest brands use social media.
Having already run the rule over ASOS, Walmart and Tesco, the next retailer under the spotlight is John Lewis.
John Lewis has had an excellent start to the year, announcing a 44% increase in online sales over Christmas. You can read more about it in our Q&A with the company’s head of online delivery and customer experience Sean O’Connor.
Unlike Walmart and Tesco, John Lewis doesn’t publish its own social media guidelines online, however in a previous interview its social community manager said that content is key, “with a tailored approach for each social media channel.”
So here’s a quick look at how it uses four of the main social networks…
The arrival of Google Product Listing Ads (PLA) in the UK is a mixed blessing for the advertising world.
While retailers will no longer benefit from the free traffic they were receiving from Google product search, it gives advertisers more granular control over product listings, bids and traffic, allowing them to work out what’s going where and when, and distribute budget as necessary.
Mobile is changing our behaviour. And the message from a recent mobile marketing event, hosted by ORM London was, adapt to this change or be left behind.
The headline figures: who owns a smartphone (currently 54% of the UK), tablet (21% of the UK) and what they do on these devices (28% surf the net) changes from week to week. The latest in this rapid stream of stats is that more smartphone devices are being activated everyday worldwide than babies being born.
Mobile usage is big and it’s set to be even bigger. Twitter’s latest report highlights how smartphone and tablet users are the most engaged consumers. Mobile users are 96% more likely to follow 11 or more brands and 58% more likely to recall seeing an ad on Twitter.
Google even predicts in three years mobile will overtake desktop as the most common way to go online – making mobile marketing more important.
Mobile devices achieve higher click-through rates than desktops when it comes to UK paid search ads, according to a report from Marin Software.
The data looks at how different devices performed during 2012, with smartphones achieving the highest CTR at 5.87%, compared to 3.93% on tablet and 2.29% on desktop.
And though the same is true of the Eurozone, the difference is less pronounced – smartphones achieved a CTR of 4.78%, compared to 4.48% on tablet and 3.1% on desktop.
The findings come from Marin’s new report that looks at how smartphones and tablets are changing paid search.
Social media, as a channel, is hard to hate, and despite the fact that companies are still grappling with ROI, brands continue to pour larger and larger sums into social media initiatives and industry observers continue to show the same interest in highlighting and analyzing them as they did when social media first started to go mainstream.
But don’t let any of this fool you. Investment and attention don’t mean that social media initiatives are effective, or serve a useful purpose. In fact, many of them are arguably downright pointless.
Social media attribution is BIG news.
Marketers are struggling to attribute revenue to social channels, and lack of definable ROI is one of the major reasons that businesses cut back on social investment.
I spend a lot of time looking at our own social attribution, but it strikes me that in many cases, the closer I look, the less clear a picture I have.
This isn’t because the figures I have to work with aren’t clear.
It’s because, in a lot of cases, they might not be true…
Social media as a whole has become an incredibly valuable channel for brands and consumers, one that allows communication that simply was never possible before.
Facebook (with over 1bn monthly active users) allows different levels of engagement and so provides opportunities for marketers that other social networks potentially don’t and can’t.
It’s important that brands recognise the different levels of social interaction they can have with their customers, as this will impact on the benefits that they’re able to take away.
Last year, David Moth reviewed Asda’s mobile site, and was critical of a few aspects of the site.
It has since been updated so, in the interests of fairness, I decided to revisit the site to see how well Asda is adapting to the enormous opportunities that mobile provides…
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