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British Airways has utilised a number of social media platforms to unveil its London 2012 Olympics advert, according to an article published by Marketing Week.
Entitled ‘The Race’, the 60-second advert debuted on the airline’s Facebook page yesterday; it was then made available on Google+ – a platform expected to become hugely popular amongst social media marketing professionals – shortly after.
The light-hearted advert features British Airways staff and follows a young girl as she eagerly awaits her British bag, as it races against luggage from rival nations to make it first to the baggage collection hall.
Other parts of British Airways London 2012 Olympics campaign include a print advert, emphasising the fact that the airline’s cabin crew will serve passengers with enough tea to fill three Olympic-sized swimming pools this year alone, while another ad will feature a gold medal with the tags “To Fly. To Serve” and “2012. We’re Ready.”
‘The Race’ is set to make its TV debut tonight (February 10) during Coronation Street on ITV.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
Microsoft has unveiled a number of new improvements to its adCenter platform, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.
Changes have been made to campaign budget overview, mobile ad targeting and the character limit in ad descriptions.
The character description length has been increased by one – from 70 characters to 71 – to match the limit featured on AdWords; the expansion of the word limit is expected to make running PPC marketing campaigns on multiple platforms much easier.
Microsoft have also added a budget overview gadget to adCenter’s dashboard. This provides a simple overview of the campaign’s budget without the need to install extra plug-ins or programs.
Mobile targeting has also been improved; adCenter now has the ability to tailor campaigns to target specific mobile devices.
Campaigns can also be designed to target different types of phone, such as Windows Phones or iPhones, and tablets utilising operating systems such as iOS or Android.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Are you selling products online? Then you should check out Pinterest…. It gives you an opportunity to showcase all of your products, with photos, and Pinterest is fast becoming a buzzword in the social media world. It is driving more traffic to corporate websites than Youtube, Google+ and Linkedin together, so ignore it at your peril.
Why should businesses be interested? Pinterest offers a great chance to link your product photos back to your website, offering another traffic driver to your site. However, it is also social media and – the clue is in the name – the ability to comment on photos and share offers an additional opportunity to engage with users.
By pinning other people’s images on your boards, as well as your own, you can open up the doors for pins (rather like Facebook posts) to be repinned, shared or sent to other users, and also to go viral if an image is particularly good. The images you pin do not necessarily need to be directly related to your brand or products, as you can create multiple boards for different topics. In fact, Pinterest, unlike many other social media sites, puts subjects and topics before people in its search capabilities so you could create an artistic images board, photos of landscapes, funny shop names or anything that will encourage users to find you when searching on a specific topic.
As with all things social media, this is not a static site and requires engagement to reap maximum benefit. This means finding and following users or subjects that are of interest and interacting with those people. Pinterest is very much not about ’sell, sell, sell’ and anyone pursuing a purely promotional strategy on Pinterest will quickly lose ground. Social media users want engagement, they want conversations, they want dialogue not monologue, they want to be treated as people rather than as a potential customer.
This change in tack for marketing and PR teams has exercised many, who have been slow to realise what social media is and what it most definitely is not. There are few social media tools that work purely as a broadcast channel; yet many companies are still only using their Twitter, Facebook etc accounts simply to put out marketing messages. This works until one person complains on your wall, posts on Twitter that you don’t respond and then others will come out of the woodwork quickly to add their negative comments, whether or not they have any experience of the company, products, brand etc.
Agile responses are required and many social media crises can be avoided by monitoring your socmed accounts and responding promptly to any input, positive or negative. Pinterest gives a gentler arena, particularly whilst it remains new and novel, and is an ideal opportunity for you to use any images you have (don’t forget to also put them on your Flickr account and on your Facebook page) whilst also giving your company the chance to develop a personality through the boards you set up. Allowing your staff to contribute funny pics, or examples of great design, or quirky photos, will help you to attract more followers who will then share your pins on their boards and lead more traffic back to you.
As ever, content is king so choose your images and boards carefully to give the appropriate image of your company. You can optimise your descriptions of your photos with keywords so pick from your keyword list wisely and this should also help the Google and other image search results. Don’t forget to include your brand or product names in the description, and actively follow people so that you can easily engage with a wider audience.
Happy Pinning!
Although celebrated by many in the Silicon Valley, it has been suggested that the monthly and daily users figures released by Facebook might not be entirely accurate, according to an article published by ZDNet Asia News.
The social media site – popular for social media marketing campaigns – claimed in the filing of its IPO (initial public offering) that it had around 845 million active users per month and 483 million active users per day.
However, New York Times columnist, Andrew Ross Sorkin, has argued that Facebook failed to mention that a good section of those users might not actually be visiting Facebook.com.
In its S-1 filing papers, Facebook state: “We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website that is integrated with Facebook, on a given day.”
Others such as Barry Ritholtz, director of equity research at Fusion IQ, have said that the number of users visiting Facebook on a daily basis is actually much lower than the figure of 483 million presented by Facebook.
Speaking from a business perspective, Ritholtz went on to add that those not visiting the site “cannot be marketed to, they do not see any advertising, they cannot be sold any goods or services.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO, has previously stated that the site’s measurement of success has shifted away from the amount of users on the site to how engaged they are.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
Research carried out by an automotive digital marketing firm has suggested that businesses aren’t harnessing the full potential offered by social media sites, according to an article published by Car Dealer Magazine.
Razsor’s survey found that while car dealers were active in their use of Facebook and Twitter for social media marketing campaigns, they were overlooking other sites, such as YouTube and LinkedIn.
Group director of digital marketing at Trader Media Group, Craig Stevens, commented on the findings of the survey.
He said: “There’s widespread agreement that in an increasingly competitive market, customer services is a key differentiator that can offer dealers the opportunity to stand out from the crowd.
“The last few years has seen significant growth in online activity, both for dealers and customers, but many dealers are still missing out on the opportunity to further engage with online customers. Social can be much more than just a Facebook page. With the right engagement dealers can receive in-depth reviews, feedback on their website and extend marketing campaigns beyond traditional channels,” he added.
Stevens concluded by adding: “The real value of social media doesn’t necessarily come from employing someone to “do social,” but from wider training, understanding and adoption of social media as a communications channel. With a few simple tools, a dealership can offer its customers a new level of customer service, engaging with them whenever they are online.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
There are a number of mistakes commonly made in PPC marketing campaigns; despite being easily avoidable, these mistakes continue to be made on a regular basis, according to Elise Gabbert, writing for Business 2 Community.
She states that these avoidable mistakes can have a damaging effect on campaigns – affecting CTR (click-through rates) Quality Score levels and more importantly ROI (return on investment).
Gabbert has highlighted some of these mistakes; here are just a couple of them in a summarised form:
Mistake 1 – Not writing unique ad text – You’ll often see many PPC adverts that don’t have any of the words featured in a search query; Gabbert states that this is a “big no-no!” It is important not to use the same advert across multiple groups; instead the ads should be tailored towards small more specific groups.
In the example provided, a PPC advert for “Whole Brisket Online” is displayed when the query “mail order ribs” is made. Gabbert states if the company behind the ad sell ribs, the word should be included either in headline or the main ad copy; if they don’t, “ribs” should be defined as a negative keyword.
Mistake 2 – Not using extensions – Adding an extension to a PPC advert is extremely easy; extensions work very well for products – providing people with an image of what they’re searching for.
Gabbert states that a picture goes a long way towards verifying that the particular ad is related to your search query – without having to spend time reading the text that accompanies it.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Cadbury’s has announced the launch of a new social media marketing campaign to coincide with the launch of a new Wispa product, according to an article published by the Drum.
Fans of Wispa’s official Facebook page will be able to enter a Daily Lottery competition to win two bags of the new product, entitled Bitsa Wispa.
To enter the competition, which opens at 10am and closes at 4pm every weekday, fans are simply required to state who they would share their Bitsa Wispa prize with if they won.
The competition is the second launched by Wispa in as many weeks, with the previous one – lasting 24 hours – culminating with Kate Mead being crowned Wispa’s ultimate fan – receiving the first bag of Bitsa Wispa in the process.
Facebook fans have played an integral role in getting the chocolate bar back on shelves, following its discontinuation in 2003 , with a successful campaign carried out on the social networking site.
Bitsa Wispa is set to go on sale nationwide on April 2.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
It is well-known that huge amounts of effort put into SEO can bring significant rewards. However, it should also be noted that there are a number of quick tasks that you can carry out to keep your overall SEO effort ticking over.
Writing for Search Engine Watch, Josh McCoy, has highlighted a number of these tasks – which can be done in under 15 minutes.
Here are just a few of those tasks in a summarised form:
- Review your Robots.txt file; assess your Meta Robots tagging – This can be done by checking /robots.txt. In the process of doing this you may find that images, folders and pages on your site are being withheld from search engines – preventing traffic from being driven to your site.
McCoy also recommends running “a site scan with a tool such as Screaming Frog to assess if there are any pages on your site you are excluding via a meta robots tag.”
- Review your site for duplicate title elements – Checks for duplicate title elements can be carried in Google Webmaster Tools.
McCoy adds: “Checking this Google property feature can quickly show you these issues and give insight into whether you need to spend the next 15 minutes writing unique title elements, creating redirects, or thinking about which of the multiple pages should include a certain keyword term.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry, has become the latest big name to experience what happens when a social media marketing campaign on Twitter goes awry, according to an article published by ZDNet.
Having launched the BeBold campaign at the beginning of year, RIM asked users to tweet their resolutions for the New Year – using the hashtag #BeBold.
The campaign got a good response until RIM unveiled four cartoon characters designed to reflect the main themes featured in the resolutions – Achievers, Adventurers, Advocates and Authentics.
Tweeters lined-up to express their criticism of the characters, with one Tweeter writing: “The BlackBerry new #BeBold campaign is really, really cringeworthy. Dated characters and painfully bad copy. They should just die gracefully.”
RIM has responded with a post published on the BlackBerry blog.
It read: “We’ve noticed The BeBold Team has received a lot of attention over the last couple of days, and wanted to clarify – this infographic is just intended to be a bit of fun. On New Year’s Eve, we asked BlackBerry Twitter followers and their friends to submit their resolutions on how they plan to be bold in 2012.
“More than 35,000 resolutions streamed across Twitter, Facebook, and giant billboards in Times Square. As we looked at the resolutions and the data, majority patterns and categories emerged. We decided to organise the data and share it in a fun way, and the result is the infographic. This is not a new ad campaign,” the statement added.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
Popular amongst social media marketing professionals, Facebook is set to capitalise on the growth in Internet usage on mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablets) by launching mobile adverts, according to an article published by New Media Age.
Although Facebook has significantly expanded its presence on mobile devices in the past year, it has yet to take advantage of mobile adverts.
Reported in the Financial Times, it has been rumoured that mobile adverts could be unveiled and rolled-out in the next couple of weeks; Facebook are also thought to be in discussions with ad agencies to integrate Sponsored Stories into the news feeds displayed on mobile devices too.
Sponsored Stories were previously launched earlier this year with the name Featured Stories; these ads appear in a Facebook user’s news feed – displaying their friends interactions with various brands.
These latest rumours follow Facebook’s decision to file an IPO (initial public offering) last week to raise an estimated $5 billion.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
