Pinterest Expands Promoted Pins To All Users

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Pinterest started 2015 with a bang by expanding Promoted Pins to all users yesterday morning. Promoted Pins were first introduced early last year when a beta roll out was given to a select number of advertisers. The social platform announced the expansion Monday, while also providing some pretty astounding statistics about Promoted Pin performance.

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Here are some of the benefits Pinterest claims Promoted Pins can provide:

  • Promoted Pins perform as well or better than organic Pins.
  • Brand advertisers achieved about a 30% bump in earned media from people who saw a Promoted Pin and saved it to their own boards
  • Promoted Pins are repinned 11 times more than organic Pins on average.
  • Promoted Pins draw engagement from users well after a campaign has ended.
  • Businesses typically outside of Pinterest’s core categories and interests were also successful with Promoted Pins.

While these findings sound nice, it is important to remember that Pinterest’s beta launch of Promoted Pins was given to a select number of well-established brands. While the new promoted posting system may carry some weight, the data is based on a test of high-quality targeted ads. Your mileage may vary.

To help businesses get introduced to promoting themselves on Pinterest, the company is establishing the “Pinstitute” – a new interactive program to educate businesses on how to connect with users and improve their return on investment.

The “Pinstitute” helps you learn about what kind of Pins perform the best, what users are interested in, and what products will be coming from Pinterest in the future. The program will also invite select groups of brands and agencies to quarterly workshops. The Pinstitute will have provide webinars and other online education tools tailored for the needs of local and smaller businesses.

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Instagram Purges Fake Accounts, But Large Brands Are Largely Undisturbed

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Instagram LogoMany celebrities and popular internet figures were shocked last week when they lost thousands upon thousands of followers in the Instagram Rapture. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise, as Instagram gave warning they would be deleting fake and spammy accounts, but the purge of useless accounts still caused an uproar across the social network.

Celebrities were the hardest hit, as Justin Bieber lost over 5 million followers, or 15% of his total followers. Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million, but rapper Mase received the most embarrassing lost as his 1.6 million followers dropped to only 100,000 in under 20-minutes. His account was deleted quickly after.

Instagram was clear the purge would be coming in their announcement they had hit 300 million active followers. They noted spammy accounts had already been deactivated for violation of community and were not included in the count.

“When we remove accounts from Instagram that don’t follow our Community Guidelines, you may see a decrease in your follower count,” the company wrote in its blog post. “This shouldn’t affect engagement from authentic accounts that like and comment on your posts.”

Celebrities may still be reeling from their large drops in followers, but most marketers are celebrating and larger brands haven’t seen much of a change. For marketers, the deletion of spam accounts means better analysis of how many people are being reached with each post.

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Instagram Beats Twitter in Major Brand Engagement

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Source: Wired

Source: Wired

Instagram made big news recently by speeding past Twitter in active users, reaching 300 million to Twitter’s 284 million. Perhaps surprisingly, Twitter’s board members didn’t seem concerned by the numbers. Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and board member didn’t mince words when he reportedly told Fortune “I frankly don’t give a s*** if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.”

Well, if the last report wasn’t enough to give Twitter’s board pause, maybe a new study on brand engagement will make them less flippant.

Social analytics firm Socialbakers compared the top 25 brands in Instagram engagement with the top 25 on Twitter and found Instagram received up to 50 times more engagement rates per post.

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By comparing three months of data ending December 9, Socialbakers found the average Instagram post for a major brand has a per fan engagement rate of 3.31% (counting likes and comments), whereas top brands on Twitter only receive an average rate of 0.07% per tweet including retweets, replies, and favorites.

Throughout the three month period of the study, brands included averaged 38 times more total interactions on Instagram (6.5 million a month) compared to Twitter (167,000). Socialbakers didn’t release a full list of included brands, but they did divulge five brands appearing on the lists for both Twitter and Instagram: Victoria’s Secret, Starbucks, GoPro, Forever21, and Aeropostale.

Socialbaker’s report isn’t much of a shocker in light of past reports. A previous Forrester Research study released last May found Instagram’s per follower engagement rate for major brands to be an astounding 120 times higher than Twitter.

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Facebook and Twitter Release Their 2014 “Year In Review” Lists

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As the year comes to a close, countless companies are releasing their 2014 recaps and best-of-lists, including Facebook and Twitter who have both recently released their year in review which highlights the top trends, topics, locations, and content across social media his year.

 Facebook

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Here are the top updates, trends and locations on Facebook in 2014:

Top Global Topics

  1. World Cup
  2. Ebola virus outbreak
  3. Elections in Brazil
  4. Robin Williams
  5. Ice Bucket Challenge
  6. Conflict in Gaza
  7. Malaysia Airlines
  8. Super Bowl
  9. Michael Brown/Ferguson
  10. Sochi Winter Olympics

Most Talked About US Topics

  1. Ebola virus outbreak
  2. Ice Bucket Challenge
  3. Robin Williams
  4. Super Bowl
  5. Michael Brown/Ferguson
  6. World Cup
  7. Conflict in Gaza
  8. US midterm elections
  9. Malaysia Airlines
  10. ISIS

Most Checked-Into US Locations

  1. Disney properties
  2. Universal Studios Hollywood
  3. Times Square
  4. Yosemite National Park
  5. Grand Canyon National Park
  6. Yellowstone National Park
  7. Yankee Stadium
  8. Las Vegas Strip
  9. Hollywood Walk of Fame
  10. Madison Square Garden

Twitter

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Using the site 2014.twitter.com, Twitter has released their top moments and perspectives of 2014 that can be juxtaposed with previous years. Here are some highlights:

The Golden Tweet (Most Retweeted)

Most Talked About Global Moments

  • World Cup
  • #BringBackOurGirls (Nigeria kidnapping hashtag)
  • #IndyRef (Scottish referendum on UK Independence hashtag)
  • Hong Kong Protests
  • #BlackLivesMatter (Social support against Ferguson decision hashtag)

Most Noteworthy Tweets of 2014

Twitter also shared a collection of the most noteworthy Tweets of 2014. That featured the following content from brands/organizations:

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Facebook Gives Business Pages New Call-to-Action Button

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Facebook CTA

Facebook has been rolling out tons of new features aimed at improving business pages lately, but the most recent feature could be the most important of them all. Yesterday, the social media site announced it would be launching call-to-action buttons visible on business pages.

As the announcement explains:

“Pages are an important destination for people on Facebook, and we’re building new ways for people to interact with businesses through them. Today, we’re announcing a new call-to-action feature that will help Pages drive business objectives.”

This new feature allows users to more quickly make the action they are most likely to be looking for, and you can more efficiently direct visitors on your page to your most valuable destination. Whether you want users to sign up for your mailing list, browse your e-commerce store, or book a reservation, there’s a button to fit your needs.

Matt Southern broke down the 7 call-to-action button options announced so far, along with briefly explaining what each is likely to be used for. Facebook’s announcement did not go into details beyond the names of the buttons, but you can get an idea what to expect below:

  • Book Now: To direct visitors to book a table at your restaurant or, a room in a hotel, or a similar kind of reservation.
  • Contact Us: You can likely use this to direct visitors to a contact form, or if you’re brave perhaps it could be a button to email you directly.
  • Use App: If your company has its own app this could be a button to open the app on your mobile device.
  • Play Game: If you’re a mobile app development company this could be a link to play your latest game.
  • Shop Now: Direct visitors to your e-commerce store.
  • Sign Up: Direct visitors to your mailing list sign up page, or a webinar sign up page, or something like that.
  • Watch Video: Pretty self-explanatory, direct visitors to watch a video of your choice.

For an example of how these buttons will work, you can see the business page for Dollar Shave Club, who has had access to these call-to-action buttons already. Apparently it is working well for them:

“Over the course of a three-week test, the Sign Up call-to-action button delivered a 2.5x higher conversion rate versus other comparable social placements aimed to drive new user acquisition.”

These buttons will roll out in the US over the next few weeks and worldwide next year.

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Instagram Surpasses Twitter With 300 Million Monthly Users

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Instagram LogoInstagram is quickly becoming one of the most popular social media platforms around. With new estimates saying Instagram pulls in 300 million monthly users, the photo- and video-sharing app has bypassed Twitter’s official user count of 284 million. The new numbers mark a 100 million user increase since March.

The company announced the milestone yesterday, along with the announcing that Instagram would begin verifying accounts similar to Twitter’s method of certify celebrity or high-profile accounts.

The verified badges for public figures and brands will be coming within the week according to Instagram, who says the badges “will make it easier for people to identify and follow the authentic brands they care about.” The blue badges will appear next to names on their profile pages, as well as in search.

The increase in users leaves only a few social media sites ahead of Instagram, including Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram’s companion company Facebook. The site is extraordinarily popular among youth and brands, and predictions see it continuing its fast growth.

In the announcement, Instagram also said it would be purging fake accounts from the site, so brands can expect to see a relatively small follow count decline.

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Google+ Now Allows You To Pin Your Most Important Posts

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Google Authorship

It can seem like the entire world hates Google+ sometimes, but in reality the social media platform has carved out a niche audience that has stayed loyal over several years, and recent changes have given the platform a strong presence in local search results.

As Google has upped the presence of “local packs” or groups of local results on searches that appear to be geographically linked and this has given businesses with Google+ profiles a big step up in visibility.

Google+ gets beat on for not having near the number of daily active users as sights such as Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, but it is not going anywhere soon simply because of how useful the site can be. Now Google+ has made it even easier to keep the most useful information in a prominent location on your page by pinning the most important posts at the top of your feed.

You can use this to keep business information such as contact numbers or location info in a highly viewable place, but this can also be extremely useful for bringing attention to sales, special promotions, or any other big events coming up for your business that you want the public to know about.

To pin posts, just click the drop down arrow at the top-right corner of your published updates and select ‘Pin post’ as in the example below.

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The feature has already rolled out on desktop and Android but, in typical Google fashion, iPhone users will have to wait until they decide to share the feature with iOS.

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Facebook Sent 10% More Traffic To Publishers This Year

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According to Parse.ly’s quarterly Authority Report, Facebook is still the best social platform for publishers looking for exposure. The site saw a 10 percent increase in referral traffic to publisher sites this August, compared to the data from a year earlier.

Parse.ly analyzed data from over 10 billion page views and more than 100,000 posts across its network to track online reading trends in an effort to determine peak reading times and referral traffic patterns. The report found that reading times peaked at 12:18 p.m., at which point desktop page views outperform mobile.

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While Google was still the lead referral traffic, Facebook continues to hold the second spot making it the top social network to send traffic to publisher websites.

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Surprisingly, the report shows very little change in traffic patterns over the past year, with Facebook being the only site in the top 10 to experience a significant increase in the amount of traffic sent to publisher sites.

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Parse.ly’s report also noted that traffic from social sites had risen seven percent over the past year, while traffic from search sites fell by four percent. You can get more insights from the downloadable report here.

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Facebook Closes The Like Gate Starting Wednesday

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like-gateTomorrow marks a rather significant change in Facebook policy as they close the so-called “like gate.” As announced in August, Facebook has decided that pages will no longer be able to require likes to enter contests or view content.

Facebook said the change was intended to guarantee people are only using likes on pages they really want to engage with, not due to “artificial incentives.” Interestingly, this is also one of the few changes Facebook has made recently to receive widespread praise.

Most social media and marketing professionals agree like gates were far from the best means of achieving the desired result, often drawing in many who have no real interest in a business. Emeric Ernoult, CEO of AgoraPulse, gave the example of pages which used giveaways of iPads or other popular consumer goods to inflate likes.

“It was too easy to make mistakes,” Ernoult told Marketing Land. “There have been too many people doing things that were actually hurting them but they didn’t realize it.”

Most importantly, the rule change doesn’t ban pages from simply asking for likes, which Ernoult agrees is an overall better policy. “You are asking now, you are proposing. You’re not forcing and that’s a big difference,” he said. “And I think it will force page owners and marketers to think about how sexy they could be and how appealing they could be. Instead of, ‘Of well, they’ll have to become fans anyway so we don’t have to explain.'”

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Instagram Launches Video Ads For a Select Few

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After Facebook’s success with video ads, it was only a matter of time before Instagram rolled out their own video ad options. According to Ad Week, you can expect that to start today as the Facebook-owned social image and video platform finally launches their own video ad platform. The only catch is the service is reserved for only five major brands: Disney, Activision, Lancome, Banana Republic, and the CW network.

Instagram’s ad platform is still relatively young, and it has been very cautious about how they go about serving ads to the public. Under the current system, CEO Kevin Systrom has said that he personally reviews every ad before it is allowed to run on the platform so that they don’t come off as aggressive or poor advertising.

The caution payed off as initial skepticism and criticism of ads on Instagram quickly died down when image ads first began appearing. It sounds like the method may also pay off for the video ad service. The Ad Week article says Instagram has reported positive brand awareness and ad recall from testing and that all launch advertisers were striving to be perceived as innovators.

“It wasn’t a hard decision for us,” Brian Chang, assistant vp of media at Lancome USA, told Ad Week. “We, as a brand, wanted to take advantage of being first to market.”

The video ads will begin appearing today and roll out more extensively in the next few weeks, and each ad will have a 15-second maximum length similar to the restrictions placed on Instagram users. Videos will also be muted unless users tap the volume control.

Banana Republic’s ad, embedded below, used Facebook’s Hyperlapse app to create the video. You can view other ads at Ad Week.

 

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