Digital Connections – 360i Blog, Digital Marketing Agency

Facebook has begun rolling out a new functionality that allows for private messaging between brands and users. This feature enables people to quickly and privately reach out to Page owners with questions, comments or customer service issues. The implications of private messaging are major, as until now there was no way for consumers to contact Page administrators directly within the Facebook environment.

How does it work?

By clicking the “Message” button on a brand’s Page, fans can exchange a series of private messages with admins – much like they are able to do currently with their friends. Facebook users do not have to “Like” the Page in order to use the private messaging functionality.

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Facebook recently introduced Coupon Post Ads, a brand new ad unit designed to pique the interest of brands looking to integrate the platform into their drive-to-store media mix. Coupon Post ads live in the Premium ad placement on the Homepage or on a brand’s Facebook wall. This unit follows page posts and promo-driven premium/marketplace ad units, which empower advertisers to incorporate offers into their messaging and deliver value by providing fans with tangible discounts and promotions. As we highlighted in our Digital Coupons Playbook, digital coupons are becoming increasingly important as a new generation of shoppers turn to the web for savings.

Coupon Post Ads are similar to Facebook’s expanded post ad units, appearing alongside a user’s News Feed results or within the News Feed as a post if the user has already liked the brand (see image below). The ad displays the brand name, specifics on the offer itself and information regarding when the coupon expires. The unit also provides different ways to engage with the offer: Get the Coupon or Share the Coupon.

After clicking the Get the Coupon link, the user is sent a Facebook email that contains a printable version of the coupon. The offer can be redeemed by printing the email or showing the email in store on the mobile phone. The user can also share the coupon with friends within the ad unit.

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Twitter recently announced that a self-service advertising platform is being gradually rolled out to advertisers in what is expected to be a huge step in revenue generation for the company. Brands will simply need to store a credit card rather than working directly through a sales rep to launch campaigns. The social media giant hopes that this move will entice small and medium-sized businesses to leverage Twitter’s promoted account and promoted tweet products, an important step in growing Twitter’s global advertising revenue.

Twitter first announced that they would launch a self-service advertising platform during a conference in November. During the conference, it was revealed that Twitter had 2,400 advertisers serviced by Twitter’s sales teams, compared with 1,600 advertisers this past spring. Only eighteen months ago, the total number of advertisers was six. eMarketer estimates a 210% increase in Twitter’s ad revenue in 2011, from $45 million in 2010 to $139.5 million in 2011.

Today, the Twitter self-service feature remains available only to existing advertisers, and the experience is described in the same way that it has always been. According to Matt Graves, a Twitter spokesperson, advertisers “log into the Twitter advertiser dashboard to set up and manage campaigns. The only difference is that they now have the ability to add and store a credit card, which they can use to pay for campaigns.” The process is similar to what is currently available with Google Adwords and Facebook marketplace ads. Both companies have been able to grow their advertising businesses through the release of self-service tools, allowing small advertisers to set up campaigns on their own.

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Before waking up at 3 a.m. on Black Friday, fighting the crowds, we considered a new strategy: why not listen first? Turns out, predicting what others want for the holidays may just take a little bit of research.

Perhaps you’re not sure what to get for your co-worker, where to shop for your niece, or how to impress your father-in-law on Christmas. Here’s our advice:  if you’re looking for gift ideas for friends and family, you should probably follow them on Twitter. A little (blue) bird just may tell you what you need to hear.

We analyzed a sample of tweets to understand how consumers talk about what they want for the holidays. These 140-character wish lists provide insight into what types of gifts are hot this season and how consumers spread the word about what they hope to find under the tree.

Who is vocal about their wish list, and how do they share?

Women are more likely to share their wish list. Seventy-one percent of “what I want for the holidays” tweets are from female users, compared to 29 percent from males. Most often these are posted as status updates and are real-time statements about what gifts they would like to receive. However, consumers also strike up one-to-one conversation about holiday gifting and occasionally link to other content in their posts, such as pictures of products.

Source: 360i analysis of the social media landscape conducted December 2011 for data spanning November 24, 2011 – December 6, 2011. Sample size: 150 posts from Twitter.

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When it comes to Facebook, the number one question asked by brands is: What is the value of a fan? The answer is not so clear-cut, as there are several factors to consider when formulating a response. While a large Facebook fan count can speak to a brand’s overall influence, the act of engaging Facebook users to become influencers themselves is more important than sheer numbers alone.

Facebook’s new PTAT metric is helping marketers follow correlations between activity within the community and what’s happening on air.”

The roll out of Facebook’s new analytics tools in October (see 360i’s full report to learn more) served as a wake-up call to many brands whose inflated fan counts amassed to significantly less actual active users on their pages.  As an example, Lady Gaga’s massive 45 million fan count actually only yields anywhere between 400,000 to 600,000 users “talking about” the pop star via the “People Talking About” (PTAT) measurement (depending on how outrageous her latest video is).

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Pinterest is a ‘virtual pinboard’ full of recipes, weddings and many pretty pictures. Is it a site to be taken seriously? Take a look at the following stats: unique visitors increased from 418,000 in May to 3.3 million in October, meaning traffic increased for this site sevenfold in five months alone. Beyond its impressive growth over a year, Pinterest has also emerged as a very new type of platform when it comes to the way people engage with content in its community.

Created out of founder Ben Silbermann’s love for collecting as a child, Pinterest has become a platform for sharing ideas, making lists and curating your favorite things. And, given its passionate user base, brands are beginning to pay attention. “People are going to Pinterest to get inspiration for their most important life projects, which correlate to the most important purchasing events in their life” says Jeff Jordan, partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (also a Pinterest Board Member). In fact, 360i has built out a Pinfluencer(SM) Services practice within our influencer marketing group to better reach high profile users on the rapidly growing platform.

Why Pinterest Is Like No Other Social Network

What Google did for organizing information, Pinterest does for curating inspiration. Pinterest differs from social networks like Facebook and microblogging platforms like Twitter and Tumblr because its focus is not areal time, up-to-date stream of status updates, but rather a curated collection of content that inspires a user enough to think “must pin this.”  There is no paid advertising or media (yet), so all engagement has been purely organic.  Pinterest also ties into multiple current social trends: image sharing, tagging, mobile, curation, visual self-expression and browser plugins.  It has the same content marketing potential as Tumblr for community and ease of sharing and is similar to Google+ in terms of link aggregation. 

Beyond amplifying brand presence within search,  Pinterest can also build community among people passionate about inspiration and self-expression.  That platform provides a rich opportunity for people to share life’s most important events, and therefore gives marketers a chance to create emotional connections with people around their brands.

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Last Sunday, online buzz about Cyber Monday overtook Black Friday chatter (based on volume of conversations), reflecting a marked transition from brick-and-mortar shopping conquests to digital deal-seeking by consumers over the course of the weekend.

Source: 360i analysis of the social media landscape conducted in November 2011 for data spanning November 21-28, 2011

By all accounts, both events brought in great news for retailers, although Cyber Monday sales still represent only about 11 percent of its offline counterpart. Black Friday retail sales climbed 6.6 percent to $11.4 billion, while Cyber Monday sales rose an impressive 22 percent over last year to $1.25 billion. For a comprehensive look at how advertisers ramped up spend ahead of Black Friday, download the free Holiday Report  by IgnitionOne.

Digging a bit deeper than news of overall sales results, what did consumers say about Cyber Monday and their own experiences? We took a closer look at their reactions to see how satisfied people were with their online shopping that day.

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