Public Relations & Social Media Insight

The next shiny new thing in social media isn't necessarily a slam dunk.... Looking at Vine, there are some trends indicating that the Twitter-owned product has established itself as a worthwhile endeavor for communicators.

 

Unruly recently conducted a study using 10 million Vine submissions as its data set and determined the following:

- An average of 5 Tweets per second contain a Vine link.

- 4% of the top 100 tracked Vines is branded content.

- Weekends are the most popular time to share Vines.

- According to Unruly co-founder, Matt Cook, vines that evoke emotional response are shared most frequently.

 

On the flip side, Facebook has demonstrated how a new social-media product can land with a veritable thud. The company’s Home app has been described as a “flop,” and many are describing the smartphone home screen app as “too intrusive” and “pushy.”... 

At first tweet, Twitter can look like a jumble of irrelevant thoughts and an overwhelming flood of industry news. Businesses usually start using it by joining the crowd. They share content that can drive some traffic to their sites, but rarely maximize the potential of the micro-blogging platform.

 

A lot of companies tweet in something of a vacuum: they scramble to get an interesting link or promote a new blog post, share it on Twitter and call it a day. Sure, that’s tweeting. But it’s also really, really boring. To actually build a strong, active following on Twitter, you need to establish a unique voice among your industry peers, prospects and customers. In short – stop being boring. Here are five ways to do that...

Twitter is pretty cool for a 7-year old Twitter is cool and it does so many things so very well. In a crisis it's an important source for news, updates and tips. When you're researching, it can be a vital source of information for PR and marketing.

 

...I thought it would be fun to highlight a few of the unusual aspects of Twitter. After all, it is the weekend and inquiring minds need to know.  It’s also a belated celebration of Twitter’s seventh anniversary (March 6, 2006).

Twitter is working hard to become a place for local businesses and customers to connect – so now’s the time to develop your local strategy.

 

We’ve compiled 5 tips for local businesses to maximize their impact on Twitter, helping you use your 140 characters to reach the customers that care about your product most. These tips are hot on the heels of yesterday’s news that Twitter is quietly working on a local tweet discovery tool. Although details are still sketchy, it looks like the tool will surface tweets sent by local tweeters using geolocation.

 

This is a pretty big deal, since this is only a hop, skip and jump away from Twitter offering local businesses the opportunity to target ads based on how close someone physically is to their store. If you’re looking to get a head start on all this exciting local tweeting, here are 5 tips to get the most out of Twitter....

A recent study called "Tweets in Action: Retail" by Compete, a media data analyzing company, discovered that Twitter users who see a retailer's tweet are more likely to visit their retail websites and make online purchases.

 

This article made me consider the impact of a tweet on online retailers. I feel very strongly about online retailers using various social media outlets to build awareness around their business and boost sales. Without using this readily available tool, retailers online and off are missing out on a key audience that are constantly consuming information. This is the first in a series where I will examine social media tools and how they can work for online retailers....

Small business on a tight budget looking to promote their business in 2013 might want to consider making this the year they start tweeting. Twitter can be a great way to drive traffic to your website. Twitter is free to use and if done properly, tweeting can be a powerful tool in helping your site get found while raising your rankings on search engine results pages. One of the quickest and easiest viral campaigns you can start right away that can increase your SEO rankings is to start a Twitter petition....

Twitter’s latest ad product provides a call to action right inside a tweet — showing the company is finally creating marketing tools closer to the “bottom of the funnel.” Even as Twitter has grown into a media and marketing giant, not everyone is persuaded that the social media site is useful for selling things. As one marketer recently lamented to me, the platform’s effectiveness is hard to measure — and justify to clients — because “no one’s going to buy a car off Twitter.”

 

[Update: Twitter says "au contraire" and sent this research] The perception, then, is that Twitter is useful for what the ad types call “top of the funnel” marketing — building brand awareness and so on — but that it has yet to deliver paying customers in the way that GoogleAdwords can.

 

Today, though, it appears Twitter has responded with a new ad product that will make it easier for brands to assess what they get for their marketing bucks. The product, called a “Lead Generation Card,” lets marketers post expanded tweets that invite users to sign up for stuff right inside Twitter. The company showed what this might look in a blog post describing the product...

As I look at where I am now, more than 18 months into my business, I am amazed. I have awesome clients, I just experienced my busiest month yet in April 2013, I have had the opportunity to inspire thousands of people through speaking engagements, including the 140 Conference in Montreal, which was another opportunity that arose through Twitter. I am producing our third Toronto Impact99 HR Summit, bringing 99 more business leaders together to ignite change in the workplace. I know I couldn’t have done any of it without social media. I also know I’m not alone. I believe that if organizations don’t find ways to engage their talent more successfully, offering purpose, autonomy and impact, they will lose top talent to entrepreneurialism. Twitter is only 140 characters away and there are stories like mine everywhere....

Twitter has finally crossed the rubicon and will allow advertisers to target ads to you based on the words that you tweet. specifically, the feature is called ‘keyword targeting in timelines‘, and its available today in 15 languages and all markets. Twitter previously used the content of tweets to fill out its interest graph for advertisers, but this update brings laser targeting based on the topics that you tweet about to the product.

Twitter uses the example of a person who tweets about enjoying an album from a band. A local venue could use a combination of Twitter’s location-based targets along with a keyword tuned to that band to pop an ad with a link to buy tickets to that band into the user’s timeline as a Promoted Tweet. Twitter stresses that they’re not showing more ads in anyone’s timeline, they’re just going to be showing better targeted ones. And users will still be able to voice their disinterest by dismissing un-relevant Promoted Tweets.

The ad targeting is also “based on the keywords in their recent Tweets and the Tweets with which users recently engaged.” That engagement could come in the form of retweets, favorites and other actions....