The week in social media news curated by your friends at Fandom Marketing. Pinterest launches Gifts, a feed just for shopping. How viral video “Between Two Ferns” drove website visits in less than a day. Twitter’s upcoming profile design. Mark Zuckerberg calls the President, and more.
Twitter Testing Major Profile Redesign That Looks a Lot Like Facebook
February 11, 2014
(Not this week but notable, we are preparing client’s Twitter redesigns in preparation and so should you!)
The revamped tweet stream is also a departure from its signature look. There is a greater focus on photos and content cards. It moves away from a strictly vertical timeline too.
Full story on Mashable
A feed just for shopping
March 12, 2014
We know people love to use Pinterest for shopping ideas, which is why we’ve created a new Gifts feed of all the different things you could buy. The work-in-progress feed lives with our regular categories but it’s special because it only shows Product Pins. Product Pins show extra details like pricing, availability and where to buy right on the Pin so Pinners can decide which products are right for them.
Full story on Pinterest Business
Between Two Ferns’ Helps Drive 40% More Visits to Healthcare.gov
March 12, 2014
Unless you’ve been hiding between two rocks, you’d have seen Between Two Ferns make its way around the Web this week. Why is it important to marketers? It’s a real example of viral marketing.
Traffic to Healthcare.gov was 40% higher on Tuesday than the day prior, after President Obama made a surprise appearance on web series Between Two Ferns with comedian Zach Galifianakis to promote the federal online insurance marketplace. The traffic boost was announced on Twitter by Tara McGuinness, senior communications advisor for the White House.
Full story on Mashable
Facebook Introduces Video Ads, Promises They Won’t Be Spammy
March 13, 2014
Ads that look and feel like TV commercials but are targeted like display ads: For Facebook, that’s long been the holy grail — the chief hurdle being how to introduce them without annoying the bejesus out of its users. After many months of tinkering, Facebook executives finally think they’ve got it right. Today the company officially introduced what it calls Premium Video Ads.
Full story on Forbes
Zuck called President Obama
March 13, 2014
The social-network founder called President Obama and wrote what some would call a scathing post on Facebook expressing his frustration over the National Security Agency’s covert surveillance practices.
“This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.”
Full story on Facebook
The Power of Case Studies in Technology Marketing
In a survey we conducted last year around influential marketing activities, (See “Tech Go-to-Market: Align Marketing Activities to Tech Buying Cycle Streams“- subscription required) we didn’t ask directly about case studies vs. other content types. But we found that customer references were near the top of the list in terms of their level of influence, significantly higher than brochures, collateral and white papers. In the earlier stages of the buying cycle, when a prospect is trying to understand if a solution exists for their problem and then determining which providers they want to further engage, they will be consuming case studies from your Web site or other places and this is likely to have a much greater influence on them than other types of content. But there is also an expectation the case studies will be compelling since they are ostensibly coming from your best and happiest customers.
Full story on Gartner
What We’re Watching
This university’s social media center helps students learn to use social listening data to analyze things like discussions in correlation with stock prices. Dell shows off a similar command center. This video wall is every social media person’s dream!
~ Melonie
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