Why is this important? Twitter has established itself as the go-to place for real-time updates and conversation around everything from hard hitting news and sports coverage, to snarky comments about “Fat Betty” on Mad Men.  Keyword targeting on Twitter is unlike any other social ad offering out there, in that it allows brands to capitalize on timely events and conversations the moment in which they are happening. Delivering ad opportunities around the cultural zeitgeist is something that Twitter is uniquely able to deliver in an era when being timely and relevant has never been more imperative for capturing consumer attention.

To take advantage of this new feature, marketers should keep the following things in mind:

1. Increased relevance could drive higher engagement from current followers
   For marketers who are already using Twitter to amplify content and connect with their current community, keyword targeting will allow them a higher degree of relevancy and the ability to better customize their messaging strategy based on the nature of the conversation. For instance, a fashion brand could promote real-time content to followers who are tweeting from or about the music and arts festival, Coachella. A TV network could likewise tailor its messaging based on a TV character that one of its followers happens to be tweeting about.
2. New approach to campaign set-up
   With additional targeting options comes the opportunity to fine tune campaign set-up and reporting. Creating more granular targeting segments will be critical for test and learn. Twitter recommends approaching campaign set-up with a paid search mindset – focusing on brand and product terms first, as well as high performers from other channels, such as paid search. There is also the option to target exact match and unordered match, which will allow marketers to take advantage of the conversational element of Twitter. We also advise marketers and their agencies to think through what they are hoping to achieve with keyword targeting as it relates to their existing Twitter strategy, and to then setup their campaigns accordingly.
3. Marketers can reach consumers further down the funnel, but not the lower funnel (yet!)
   While keyword level targeting is more ‘precise’ than other targeting options, marketers should consider the role it will play in their overall media and/or Twitter strategy. Twitter is a platform focused on conversation and self-expression. Unlike search, consumers are not using Twitter to express a specific need that they would like met, and Twitter, to date, has not been set-up to capture that demand. Marketers should view keyword level targeting as a way to increase consideration and awareness at a specific moment when people are expressing something they care about. As the platform evolves, consumer behavior could change – at which point, marketers could start using Twitter for lower funnel initiatives.

As with any new advertising product, marketers should approach usage with a test and learn mentality. This new addition, however, signifies Twitter’s commitment to building out their ad products to allow marketers to scale at the same rate as their platform.

Cover photo via Twitter

For marketers, the Sponsored Results product enables greater reach against non-fans, as well as visibility in one of the most widely used features of the platform. Brands can use this new offering to drive users to specific tabs or apps, or to send them directly to a page’s timeline.

Sponsored Results appear at the top or near top of a user’s search results on desktop searches only. Copy is limited to 70 characters, with the image and title pulled from the app or page being sponsored.

Brands can use Facebook targeting criteria to serve results to Facebook users based on demo, geography or connections, as well as appear alongside searches for their own brand, similar brand pages, places or apps or by users who have subscriptions enabled. Unlike the search experience one would have with the engines, Facebook’s Sponsored Results do not target keywords or keyword strings in the search box.

Brands can buy Sponsored Results directly through Power Editor or the Facebook API. Targeting and pricing work the same as they do for other marketplace ads. At this time, brands cannot use Sponsored Results to drive to destinations outside the Facebook environment.

Facebook Search: An Imperfect, Yet Evolving, Feature

Currently, the Facebook search experience for the user is haphazard. Results are ranked based on popularity (for pages and apps), as well as the volume of connections (for people). Beyond these basic rules, the algorithm is a bit of a black box.

A search for “Kraft” could bring up Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, as well as five people I am connected to with the last name Kraft. Move on to “Kraft Recipes” and Kraft’s corporate page comes up, along with a number of apps and two of my friends who have worked at Kraft Foods.

When I search for “credit cards,” the first result is from KRUNGSRI Credit Card Fanclub, as well as a variety of Credit Card related pages, none with a sizable fan base. The search results don’t seem to take into account the fact that I am a fan of Capital One on Facebook.

Fitting Sponsored Results into Your Facebook Ad Strategy

Challenges aside, it will be interesting to see how Sponsored Results affect the overall search experience on Facebook. If brands get on board en masse, targeted results could make the search experience more relevant or surface pages, events or apps for users. To do so, however, marketers will want to consider who they are targeting and whether or not their brand will be relevant to that user’s search.

Sponsored Results are a new way for marketers to engage users who are looking for their brand by highlighting their page or a complimentary app or event. Brands can also use it for competitive, as well as demographic targeting.

As we have seen with traditional paid search, more relevant results will drive higher interaction and lower pricing. Brands can buy broad in an effort to reach more people with an impression, but the likelihood that someone will click on the result is low.

Of important note is that appearing within the search results differs from appearing on a user’s right rail or News Feed. One can assume that users who are searching on Facebook are looking for something relatively specific, and will be more likely to respond to results that directly align with their needs.

Marketers already buying paid media on Facebook should consider testing Sponsored Results as another way to increase visibility for and traffic to their page, app or event. Similar to paid versus natural search within the engines, Sponsored Results allow advertisers to control the experience searchers have with their brand as Facebook continues to work on its own natural search algorithm.

At this point, Sponsored Results is not the best place to promote specific content — and it’s not a replacement for the Sponsored Story product — but the offering could evolve to achieve those objectives someday. In the meantime, Facebook is continuing to work on its search product to enhance the experience for users and better connect them with what they’re looking for.

Twitter rolled out Promoted Tweets for mobile earlier this year, but at the time advertisers couldn’t target mobile users alone, nor were they able to target to users within specific geographic areas.

More than 60 percent of active Twitter users access the platform via a mobile device and there is an inherent connection between mobile and local. This enhancement is in line with the way consumers are using Twitter and provides brands with more options to increase relevancy. Brands can now reach mobile and PC users separately, as well as develop specific campaigns focused on reaching a mobile consumer or spurring a local action.

More than anything, Targeted Tweets enable marketers to increase the relevancy of their advertising to ensure their messages are reaching the right people. As of now, brands cannot target tweets to specific audiences. Using Promoted Tweets with geo or device-specific targeting can ensure that brands reach an audience that’s more likely to engage.

There are many opportunities for marketers to leverage Targeted Tweets in their paid social campaigns. The new offering could work well for retailers with market-specific promotions or brands that want to connect with users during or around a live event like a music festival or fashion show.

For USA Network’s new show, Political Animals, 360i bought Promoted Tweets for July 4 and Independence Day trends. Knowing that the show’s target audience would most likely be out celebrating the holiday – and thus away from their PCs – we targeted the tweets to mobile devices only. While this campaign did not employ geo targeting, there are ways for brands to take advantage of more targeted messaging for geo-specific promotions or products.

Targeted Tweets is certainly a step in right direction when it comes to Twitter’s ad platform, but currently its targeting capabilities are not at the same level as those of Facebook, which is able to serve ads based on interests, employers and other criteria. That said, brands will be happy to hear that the update provides a new opportunity to deliver more relevant messaging based on where a person is, or what they are doing (sitting at a desktop vs. out and about).

Joel Lunenfeld, VP, Global Brand Strategy, opened the day by asking the audience to recall a time not so long ago that when people were looking at their phones, it meant they weren’t paying attention. Today, it means that they are paying attention, but doing so in a different way.

With over 55 percent of users accessing Twitter via a mobile device, Lunenfeld’s observation is probably true. Twitter is a place where people talk about what they’re seeing, experiencing and thinking. And they’re doing it a lot. There are more than 1 billion tweets every three days. Twitter is also a place where people listen. Sixty percent of Twitter’s users proactively converse or respond; the other 40 percent listen. With over 140 million active users, these are big numbers – and they continue to grow.

As a media person, I was hoping for an announcement of a new ad product – one that, like their current suite of products, continues to help drive engagement with marketer’s owned and earned media. That didn’t happen. What did happen was an informative and interesting series of conversations around how brands can continue to use the Twitter platform to create meaningful connections with their consumers.

1. Redefining the creative canvas. ‘Conversation is the Canvas’ was a big theme at the event. In media, we often talk about the creative canvas and how much space we’re going to have to communicate our brand’s message. Bigger is usually better and, we hope, with this larger real estate will come increased brand awareness, consideration or response rates. With Twitter, however, the canvas is the conversation that a brand can have with its consumers around events and topics that are relevant to them.

Twitter shared an example of @Tide and how they capitalized on a conversation started by NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski. @Keselowski tweeted a picture from his vantage point after a crash at the Daytona 500.

He continued to tweet as NASCAR cleaned up the mess and brought out massive amounts of Tide to do so. Tide capitalized on this conversation to find a relevant way to connect with the audience. This is only one example, but it shows the ways that brands can leverage live events and join conversations that are already happening on Twitter in an unobtrusive and authentic way.

2. Extending the shelf life of your campaign. Audi was the first advertiser to include a hashtag in its 2011 Superbowl commercial. By 2012, 1 in 5 superbowl commercials had hashtags.

One of these was H&M, which debuted it’s David Beckham underwear line with the hashtag #beckhamforhm. An estimated 111 million people tuned into the Superbowl this year. But not all of them saw the ad. H&M responded to users tweeting after the fact and continued to utilize #beckhamforhm through Valentine’s Day – a key retail period.

3. Providing utility. Not to be mistaken for a platform only focused on driving brand metrics, Twitter also featured a number of marketers who are partnering with them to drive utility for their core customers. Virgin America promoted a 24-hour sale to its Twitter followers and had one if it’s best retail days to date. Bonobos, an online men’s retailer, unlocked a discount based on the number of retweets one of their tweets received.

The featured marketer was American Express, which recently unveiled its Sync.Tweet.Save platform, which allows American Express card members to sync their American Express Card with their twitter handle, tweet specific offers and automatically save with those merchants on their next purchase. Leslie Berland, American Express’s SVP, Digital Partnerships and Development spoke about the program and why it was a ‘win, win, win’ for their merchants and cardmembers. She focused on the fact that it brings incredible utility in the form of savings for consumers and customers for merchants.

More importantly, however, she emphasized how important it was to keep the program simple and tied to the natural user behavior on twitter. The only action users had to take was the tweet – something they were already doing on Twitter. American Express could then reply to users who tweeted out offers to remind them to redeem. In the same way that marketers have used email reminders in the past, this can now be done on Twitter.

***

For marketers continuing to invest or thinking about investing on Twitter, it’s important to stay authentic to the platform. Think about ways to join or spark relevant conversations that make sense for your brand to be a part of. For those wondering if it can drive product sales – the answer is yes. It’s important to remember, however, to do this in a way that takes advantage of the platform and provides utility for your customers.

Image via CNET

Tumblr’s new ad products will live in the Radar and Spotlight sections of the platform – both are areas where Tumblr users already go to find new content. Radar rotates a brand’s content through Tumblr’s curation engine, which surfaces interesting content to members. Spotlight Sponsors will receive a prime spot above other spotlighted members.

The key to Tumblr’s announcement is not that marketers can finally buy advertising or that the ads are integrated into areas previously reserved for earned media. The thing that stands out is that Tumblr is not offering these placements to everyone. Brands must be approved by Tumblr in order to buy. While the specifics of the approval criteria are not yet clear, Tumblr has indicated that brands who buy will have to have shown that they understand the purpose of the platform and are already engaging with their followers in an authentic way. Tumblr has always been protective of their user base and doing business with brands who won’t disturb this experience is Tumblr’s compromise between revenue and control.

For marketers who are already investing in Tumblr, consider the goals for your community and how you can (or should) utilize these paid placements to drive towards those goals. For Radar, identify content with high engagement rates to feature. For Spotlight, determine why someone should follow your brand and how you can pay that off through your creative and what’s featured on your Tumblr.

Tumblr’s announcement reiterates and supports the story of the integration of paid and earned media. Paid media on social platforms should be used to build an audience or amplify content that is resonating with the audience. It should work hand in hand with earned efforts to engage a core audience and extend the reach of the brand through this audience. Brands who embrace this and align their KPIs with the success metrics of that platform (in Tumblr’s case – followers, likes and reblogs), will see success across both channels and on the platform as a whole.

Integrating Sponsored Stories into the news ticker marks another move by Facebook to blur the lines between paid and earned media. These types of ad placements have proven successful for advertisers like 360i client USA Network, which has seen Sponsored Stories drive higher response rates at a lower CPC than other advertising efforts focused on engaging fans.  These results are not surprising, as adding the ‘personal’ element of a friend’s activity into an ad increases the likelihood of response.

How will consumers receive this update? Brands and Facebook braced for a consumer backlash when Sponsored Stories were first announced earlier this year, though negative consumer sentiment has been minimal. We don’t anticipate this change will stir up a lot of negative buzz; however, Facebook has long been the target of privacy concerns and users are sometimes prickly about their information being used to fuel advertising efforts.  

Adding Sponsored Stories to the news ticker gives brands another way to highlight earned activity to fans outside of the main news feed.  As Sponsored Stories are only possible when fans are engaging, producing and posting relevant and fresh content remains as critical as ever. Marketers should evaluate this new opportunity within the broader lens of their Facebook program – considering how Sponsored Stories can work alongside their content strategy given their ability to make fan engagement efforts work harder.  Though the increased exposure from this new opportunity is yet to be seen (the news ticker updates relatively quickly), it will prove to be an additional mechanism to increase engagement for brands.

YouTube launched the TrueView ad format this week.  The product, which had previously been in beta, gives users the option to skip ads after five seconds.  Currently only available to advertisers with managed YouTube accounts, TrueView is not widespread across the site.  Advertisers can choose whether to activate the option — and they only pay for the impression if the user chooses not to skip the ad.

User control during TV or video viewing is nothing new.  Nielsen reports that over a third of US homes now have a DVR (source: Nielsen Three Screen Report, Q1 2010), up 51% from two years ago.  As online viewing becomes more commonplace, providers, like YouTube, may be seeking to replicate the experience that viewers are used to in their offline viewing.  Hulu, one of YouTube’s top competitors, offers viewers the opportunity to choose their ad delivery method – e.g. watch a longer advertisement at the start of the program in exchange for no ads throughout  or to pick the ad they view from a choice of three.  In September, Vivaki made public the ASq unit, which allows viewers to choose which ad to watch before their chosen piece of video content.  YouTube, along with Hulu, AOL and Yahoo! all signed up as partners.

As online video providers continue to evolve their ad delivery methods, marketers will have to adjust to the fact that they are no longer guaranteed a captive audience.  Google reports to have data correlating skip rates to ad quality and reports 20-70% view throughs on TrueView ads. That’s a pretty wide range, but it makes sense for marketers to test it for themselves.

Similar to Google’s approach to paid search ads, relevant creative will be rewarded with higher user interaction.  Putting control in the users hands (or mouse) will push advertisers to make their video ads more entertaining, relevant or appropriate for online viewing (i.e. shorter).  Giving users control will, hopefully, make the advertising that they actually end up watching resonate more than it would have previously.

The service is built on the belief that phones are for conversations and that mobile search is no different. People want questions answered and they turn to ChaCha to get a human answer — not one generated by a search engine. When a user texts a question, they get a text answer in response. Speed varies depending on the question. For instance, my ice cream question took a couple minutes. If I text, “What time is it in Tokyo?” the answer comes back a lot faster.

ChaCha has taken the same idea and extended it to advertisers. It allows advertisers to reach a targeted audience with their message. What’s so different about that? Not much. But ChaCha takes it a step further. Advertisers can start a conversation with users actively searching for information on their program, event or product.

How does it work? Let’s use entertainment as an example. One of the studios has a summer blockbuster coming out and wants to increase attendance on opening weekend. They can loop in with ChaCha and buy against the Celebrities, Movies or even Movie Showtimes category or, if they want to be even more targeted, against questions that mention their movie and talent only.

When a user texts in a question, their answer will be accompanied with a text advertisement from the advertiser.

User: “When does Big Summer Blockbuster open?”

ChaCha: “BSB opens on July 4. Want us to remind you so you don’t miss it? Reply with ‘YES BSB.’”

User: “YES BSB.”

In this case the users would get a reminder the day before the movie opens.

How about if the movie has a star with a big fan base? That might look something like this.

User: “When does Big Summer Blockbuster open?”

ChaCha: “BSB opens on July 4^. Want to find out what Mr. Big Star eats for breakfast? Reply with ‘BRK.’”

User: “BRK.”

ChaCha: “Mr. Big Star eats oatmeal every morning. Want us to remind you so you don’t miss the movie premiere? Reply with ‘ YES BSB.’”

User: “YES BSB.”

ChaCha can also drive engagement with your brand around a certain initiative. For example, say retail brand has a large back to school campaign. They can buy the Style & Beauty or Shopping categories and target ads to users to ask questions that fall into those buckets. From there, they can offer a discount promo code that a user can use online or in store. They did this for Lids.com and generated over 1,000 online orders — a 200 percent return on ad spend.

As we become more and more dependent on our mobile devices to connect us with the world, advertisers will need effective ways to move the conversation there. Mobile advertising solutions need to deliver targeted and qualified engagement and ChaCha has come up with a pretty cool way to do it.