Social

“This Week In Social” is a blog idea that has been brewing in our Social Media Department for quite some time. Nothing evolves and changes on a weekly basis, quite like the world of Social Media.

On one hand, we very much enjoys being immersed in an ever-changing, emerging industry. It’s tough to get bored when you’re constantly adapting to new changes within the platforms you advertise on. On the other hand, it can be tough to keep up with never-ending press releases and announcements made by companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram regarding new changes to their platforms.

We created this blog as a means to help inform Social Media Managers, Strategists, and Specialists  on what’s changing and how it might affect their client’s (or their own) social media efforts. Tune in weekly for the latest and greatest news in Social Media Advertising.

Twitter Stops Counting Characters

Twitter recently announced its plan to eliminate the 140 character limit on user’s tweets and instead, allow users to share tweets of up to 10,000 characters.  The good news is that this change won’t turn your timeline into a collection of long-winded monologues. Instead, users will still see 140 character tweets in their timeline with the option to expand larger tweets.

What’s it mean for marketers? Better customer service! It is rumored that a main reason Twitter is making this change is to give businesses the ability to communicate more efficiently with customers via Twitter.  At the moment, businesses are limited to solving customer’s issues in 140 characters or less, which is often far too brief to provide a true solution. Because of this we see most brands using the platform as middleman, directing customers to email or call them so they can provide a more comprehensive solution, as represented in this tweet:

Honda

The increased character count will make Twitter a more practical platform for customer service and the businesses who use as so will win. Why? Most people enjoy seeing their favorite brands provide valuable solutions to customer issues via social media. It not only shows they care, but it also gives customers the feeling that if they experienced a problem with a purchase, they could contact the company on social media for a solution as well. Businesses that adapt early and begin providing lengthy responses to common customer service problems will show their followers and customers alike, that the customer always comes first.

Facebook Advertising: The Place to Be in Q4

According to a report from campaign management platform Nanigans, Facebook ad budgets rose 11% in Q4 of 2015. Thanks to more advertising options in Facebook such as carousel ads, dynamic product ads, and video ads, advertisers now have more options than ever and according to Nanigans, they seem to be taking advantage.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. If you advertised at all on Facebook during the holiday season you most likely noticed the effects of a crowded marketplace filled with advertisers pushing their products and services. Anecdotally speaking, we saw many of our client’s Cost-per-click and Cost-per-lead rise, even if just slightly in some cases. We’re just happy holiday ecommerce season is over.

Twitter Co-Founder, Biz Stone Announces Relaunch of “Jelly”

It was almost 9 months ago that Biz Stone announced his team’s decision to focus their efforts on the opinion-sharing app, Super.  This past week Biz’s team released new information that they would be conducting an “un-pivot” on last March’s announcement, bringing their focus back to the Q and A app known as Jelly.

The goal of Jelly is to help users find answers to questions they have regarding anything from Star Wars to Rap Music. In their first launch, user’s did not have usernames which meant there was not much incentive for knowledgeable folks to sit around answering peoples questions all day. Now, when user’s have a question they will get paired with the user most likely to be able to answer it, based on past answers they’ve given. Pretty cool. Jelly wants to you to ask your question, go live your life, and come back to the right answer, as opposed to using a traditional search engine, where you have to weed through the results to find the right answer.

Jelly_001