Future Trends in Social Media Marketing

The Rise of Augmented Reality

Augmented reality has been creeping into our lives over the last few years; through apps like Snapchat and Instagram. It is no secret that Apple is one of the main industry leaders when it comes to anything to do with mobile technology. Following the recent reveal of the iPhone X, augmented reality has gained a massive boost. The new iPhone X features a new chip which allows the phones to provide users with an augmented reality experience that previous to this millennium would have been inconceivable. This video demonstrates it:

While this new feature will likely be initially used for gaming and utilities, such as measuring tapes. It is inevitable that it will find its way onto social media platforms. In my opinion, Snapchat and Instagram stories will have the biggest use for this feature, as they will soon support filters and geotags that take advantage of this new technology. Similarly, brands could soon project their products into the homes of social media users through special filters.

 

The Change of Twitter

Twitter has failed to significantly grow its followers in 2017. To give an idea of their failure in 2017, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram all now have more followers then Twitter. In 2017, Twitter also lost access to the rights to stream NFL games to Amazon; this is a huge blow to Twitter in America. In 2018, it is very likely that we will see twitter make an attempt to rethink how the platform operates. Possible outcomes of this could be some time of a subscription element, or possible redoing their advertising options, which have fallen behind the competitors.

 

Facebook Spaces

Facebook owns Oculus, which is currently the leading company in Virtual Reality. Facebook has also been working on a project called Spaces.

Spaces is a platform which is designed to allow friends to connect through VR. Facebook is predicted to invest more into Spaces in 2018, and when they do, it is likely to be the first successful VR social media platform.

Ref: Oculus.com

Embracing Stronger Governance Policies

Following a series on controversial decisions in 2016 presidential election in America, social media platforms have been forced to carry out a more hands on approach when governing their platforms. For example, Facebook recently demolished thousands of ads that had seemed to be connected to Russian meddling, and have also invested in new forms of artificial intelligence that can monitor meddling. 

Taking into account the heat that Facebook and Twitter received during the 2017 election, these platforms are likely to introduce new codes of conduct and governance policies that will protect entities from future criticism.

 

The Growth of Instagram Stories

Approximately 200 million people use Instagram stories each month, which is over 50 million more then on Snapchat. Keep in mind Snapchat was the birthplace of Stories and Instagram stories is only 1 year old. If the growth continues at this rate then nearly half of all Instagram users will be using stories by the end of 2018. This is means brands must focus more on Instagram stories then ever before.

3 Irish Brands on Pintrest

What is Pinterest?

 Pinterest is a unique social media platform that allows its users to share, categorize, and save images to what they call “Boards”; which can then be seen by your followers. It is very similar to Instagram but the idea of a caption is not as important and it is more about the image itself.

 

Cadburys is an Irish confectionery brand that specialize in milk chocolate bars, that they call Dairy Milks. They are by one of the largest brands in Ireland and according to Joe.ie they are the second best Irish brand. The way that Cadburys uses Pinterest is very clever. The use Pinterest as a sort of recipe book, with recipes that involve chocolate or other product that they sell. Their account is called Cadbury’s Recipes, and they have the images to the left as their logo.

I think that this is a very good use of Pinterest as it is very engaging to the consumers. 

Ref: Cadbury’s Pinterest

Kerrygold

Kerrygold has been a very popular household name in Ireland for as long as I can remember. They produce a variety of products that are staple items in the Irish diet. They are not as engaging as Cadburys, as they rarely post recipes, but post images that require butter or other dairy products to inspire its followers. Kerrygold has a very active Pinterest account. They have a very good Pinterest account that I could not find many flaws in, the only recommendation I would make is to be slightly more engaging with its followers, by possibly posting pictures of their follower’s creations.

 Ref: Kerrygold’s Pinterest

Paddy Power

Paddy Power is an Irish bookmakers which was founded in Dublin in 1988. They conduct business through a chain of better shops and also by operating Ireland’s largest telephone betting service. They have grown a massive Twitter following of  638 thousand on their main account, due to their humerus and topically tweets and sports, pop-culture, and politics. This most certainly works, as I am someone who is into sports but not into betting, and the Paddy Power Twitter pages is one of my favorite pages to look at during a match. On Pinterest, Paddy Power has adapted a blog style, where they have individual boards of different events or seasons. They post relevant content to do with each event. This is a great use of Pinterest and the content they post, similar to their Twitter, is top quality.

 

The only suggestion I would make, is an obvious one upon inspection. They seem to have stopped posting content since 2015. I feel if the audience was there, it would be beneficial to revisit Pinterest, seeing how this is a company based so firmly around social media. If they attempted to grow their Pinterest following by promoting it on Twitter I also think this would be very beneficial.

Ref: PaddyPower’s Pinterest

 

Video Marketing

Video Marketing in recent years has seen a massive shift from television to online. Far less people are watching television and as a result, services such as Netflix and YouTube have exploded in terms of their audience.

https://twitter.com/pndessus/status/708573883922849792

This graph shows the change in hours spent watching traditional television. As a result of this, companies have been forced to provide higher quality ads that work more effectively, and also to provide ads that can be used in the YouTube ad format.

This graph shows the spending on advertising as a percentage of the GDP in the U.S. There is a very clear decline in recent years and this will only continue to plummet in the coming decades.

 

A Great Irish Example

There have been many great Irish adverts throughout the years, it was very easy to find good ads but very hard to choose my favourite. Although I know this is a completely subjective decision, the best advertisements for me have always come from Guinness.

All the stand out ads from my childhood seem to be Guinness ads; so as a result of this I was natural drawn to choose a Guinness ad. After looking through a few videos of the “best Irish ads ever”, my memory was refreshed to recall an advert from around 2010, where men seemed to build a country. I remember just being captivated by the cinematography of the advert, and not being one bit surprised when the ad ended and showed the Guinness logo.

Ref: https://www.guinness.com/en-ie/

 

Cannes Lions Winner

For me, my favorite ad of all time came from the American fast food giant, Burger King. Upon the release of the smart home assistant, Google Home, Burger King released an ad that took full advantage of its smart capabilities and most certainly raised a few eyebrows. What Burger King essentially did was hack into every home in America that had a Google Home device in earshot of their TV. In the ad, a man said “OK Google”, which is the trigger for a Google Home device to turn on and start listening. After the man in the ad had gained the Google Home’s attention, he then went preceded to ask the device to define the Whopper burger. Due to the way Google Home works, the device would then pull a definition off of Wikipedia. This quickly became an internet sensation, but due to the nature of Wikipedia, people could openly change the definition of the Whopper burger; which caused the Google Home device to call out a few controversial definitions. Google soon disabled the ad.

 

This ad also received a was a winner in the prestigious Cannes Lions Grand Prix in the Direct Category.  The reason it won was because that category, according to the festival organizers, celebrates “targeted communication designed to generate a direct response between customer and company.”. Jury President Ted Lim, chief creative officer, Dentsu Brand Agencies APAC, said the Burger King Campaign “gets to you in your living room and messes with you. It was outstanding, outrageous, and we loved it to bits.” Quoting another juror, he said, “It’s the best abuse of technology.”

The ad is as follows:

Ref: http://www.whopper.ie/

5 Tips to Create a Great Facebook Page

In this blog post, I will discuss my 5 tips that I feel will help anyone to improve their presence on Facebook. It is almost essential in today’s world to have a presence on all social media platforms. Facebook simply cannot be ignored, clearly outlined in the image below.

https://www.ipsos.com/en

 

https://www.ipsos.com/en

 

1. Aesthetically pleasing

One of the most important, yet simple tip for a good Facebook page, is to make it aesthetically pleasing. If a page is unattractive and unprofessional, the viewer is likely to feel similarly about the business itself. On the contrary, if that page is all they know of the company, and the page is organized and professional; then this good first impression is likely to last.

An example of bad business Facebook page looks like this:

(BAD FACEBOOK PAGE)

There is no theme throughout the page. It has no feeling of professionalism about it. This page wasn’t created as a page, but instead as a person, which means people can’t like it. When people go onto pages they will automatically look to see how many likes a page has, having a low number or none, will make people think it is either a fake page, or not a reputable company.

An example of a page that will immediately strike you as a real, reputable, business page is The Simpsons:

https://www.facebook.com/TheSimpsons/

Straight away you know this is a real deal, it is a verified, likable page. It has an extremely high amount of likes with a lot of people talking about it, giving you the impression it is a good page to like. It also has its cover photo interacting with its profile picture, making it look aesthetically pleasing. Also, there is a skin coloured them throughout the page to contrast the yellow skin colour of the characters in the TV show.

2. Customizable URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

Another extremely easy thing that people often overlook is the URL. This may not be as important as other aspects of your page but in my opinion, it is one of the small details that really sets the good pages from the great.

By default, a URL will look like this:

https://www.facebook.com/cork.flowerstudio/

Whereas with a bit of attention to detail, you can have a simple professional URL like this:

https://www.facebook.com/CocaColaIreland/?brand_redir=40796308305

3. Correct Information

Make sure that you regularly update your information. It is important to have every field filled out. Any missing information on your Facebook page will look very unprofessional and could deter possible customers. Also, if a customer follows incorrect information such as an outdated store opening time, not only will this lose sales but it will also spread bad word of mouth publicity or negative comments. Also, correct phone numbers and addresses are essential for obvious reasons.

4. Monitor your analytics

Facebook has a very good, simple to use analytics system. You don’t need any prior training to understand it, and Facebook even provides tutorial videos in case you are stuck. It is essential to take advantage of this if you want to grow your page.

This free tool can be used to assess problems with your page; such as why a high quantity of likes isn’t converting into a high number of purchases. Maybe it is because you are only shipping items to the EU and your bricks and mortar store is in Ireland, but the bulk of your page traffic is in the US. This might be a good indication to broaden your postal service to the US or else target the content on your page more to the current consumers.

5. Engage your audience 

It is important to make your customer feel valued and that they are talking to a human and not just an automated response. In order to ensure this happens it is important to reply to comments and reply to messages. If someone makes a complaint on your Facebook page, the best way to deal with it is to respond and let everyone know who reads it, that you’re a company who cares.

This is an example of a company dealing well with a negative response:

Due to the way Facebook sorts reviews on pages, the negative responses will automatically come up first when a potential customer visits the page. Making it even more important to reply, then on a platform like Twitter, where the tweet may just be drowned out.

Bad responses mixed with bad business can lead to a very bad social media: