The week in social media news hand-curated by your friends at Fandom Marketing. It’s the week of trolls with Google+’s (and YouTube’s) “any” profile name policy change and the Vine movement to call them out. Pinterest is building out its discovery tools once again to include interests like outdoors. Pinterest also becomes the number two driver of social traffic for Buzzfeed using humor. New report on how marketers are using social data. And, more.
User-Generated Content Is Dead – As Video Evolves
July 14, 2014
Media companies, Brands, Educational Institutions, and Publishers have all turned their editorial and information creation resources toward video. And video itself has moved from private enclaves and paid subscriptions toward a vast, rich, sharable sea of high quality content. It isn’t that UGC has gone away, it’s simply that it’s no longer the best choice for audiences searching for information, exploration, or entertainment. Amateurs are fun to stir things up, but video – like most other creative professions – is harder than it looks. And making video that people want to watch and share that advertisers want to support is a full time job.
Full story on Forbes
How Kevin Systrom Controls Every Ad on Instagram
July 15, 2014
Photo-sharing network Instagram still hasn’t fully rolled out its strategy for selling ads on the service. But CEO and cofounder Kevin Systrom has revealed that he has an unusual and unprecedented amount of control over photo ads before they go up on the service. “I’m looking at every ad,” Systrom told the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference at the Aspen Institute on Tuesday. “We implemented that early on.” He added that he had the power to reject or suggest changes to the content. Instagram tentatively rolled out its first 10 ad campaigns late last year. Systrom is currently limiting the service to “companies that set the bar high,” he said — companies such as Airbnb, Burberry, Ben and Jerry’s and Lexus.
Full story on Mashable
The Vine Movement to Call Out Trolls
July 17, 2014
When there’s a lot of interaction on a given social network, it’s a good sign that users are paying attention to each other’s content. But high rates of engagement can often give way to disagreement and discord. People who cross the line with vindictive comments are labeled “trolls,” meaning they stir up trouble, spark arguments and irritate others across the web. Trolls are a special breed, and they can be a pain to deal with on any social network. But victims of trolling on Vine, the hot video-sharing app, know how to strike back. And that doesn’t mean they just block or report trolls. Generally, Viners don’t tolerate hateful comments, and will go so far as to call out trolls by name in their very own six-second videos. They aren’t afraid to ask the Vine community to report users, call out thieves for stealing ideas or create humorous, troll-inspired posts.
Full story on Mashable
Nailed It: Buzzfeed Cracks The Pinterest Code
July 17, 2014
Buzzfeed is one of of the fastest growing media companies ever, with a monthly audience of 150 million and counting, thanks chiefly to its unmatched understanding of what people will read or share on Facebook. But much of its recent traffic growth has come from another, less appreciated source: Pinterest. Just two years after it started explicitly producing content intended for sharing on Pinterest, the $5 billion visual social network is already Buzzfeed’s second biggest source of social referrals, beating out runner-up Twitter.*
Full story on Forbes
Pinterest Makes It Easier to Find What Just What You’re Looking For
July 18, 2014
Pinterest is building out its discovery tools once again. The San Francisco-based virtual scrapbooking site announced on Thursday that you can now follow specific interests in addition to following other users.
Pinterest already offered a categories tabs where users could search for pins by more general groupings, but now, those categories include more specific interests that users can subscribe to. For example, you can follow interests like hiking, camping or running under the broader “outdoors” category. Following an interest means those pins will now appear in your feed, saving you the hassle of searching for them.
Full story on Mashable
How Companies Are Using Insights From Social Data
July 18, 2014
Companies from around the world are most likely to be using insights from social data to improve their customer service and understanding of market shifts, with a significant proportion leveraging social data for greater visibility into operations or communications. The study also finds that companies are monitoring and listening to social data to a greater extent than they are collecting and analyzing it.
Get chart and full info at MarketingCharts
What We’re Watching
Google has removed restrictions on profile naming, now users can now choose any name they want for their profile pages and this extends to YouTube, as well. The Internet is concerned this could lead to a resurgence in trolls.
~ Melonie
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