Streets Ahead Metas Threads and Instagram Video Quality Street Fight

Streets Ahead: Meta’s Threads and Instagram Video Quality

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In this week’s Streets Ahead update, SOCi discusses the continued growth of the Meta’s Threads platform and  the Instagram move to adjust video quality based on popularity Threads Rapid Rise: 275M Users and Counting The News Meta’s Threads app, emerging as a competitor to X (formerly Twitter), has rapidly grown, now boasting 275 million monthly […]

Unlocking the Potential of Social Media Advertising

Unlocking the Potential of Social Media Advertising

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Platforms like Instagram and TikTok weren’t built for traditional click-to-buy conversions – at launch, both were “unclickable” channels. That’s been a challenge for many of our clients and partners. How do you prove the true value of your social media advertising campaigns – and with it, secure the resources and funding needed to keep growing […]

As Instagram Moves Away from Live Shopping, Emerging Platforms Gain Market Share

As Instagram Moves Away from Live Shopping, Emerging Platforms Gain Market Share

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The death of Instagram’s Live Shopping feature is creating new opportunities for other platforms to grab market share in interactive live shopping, even as the technology continues to evolve.

Instagram Becomes a Product Discovery Engine

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Instagram has somehow conditioned its users to see it as a product discovery engine. Its feed is filled with fashion and food products … and users lap it up.

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Location-Based Marketing Association: Instagram Experiments with QR Codes

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In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Doritos letting you turn any triangle into chips on Snapchat, Sonic Boom Records launching a vinyl record vending machine in Toronto, Instagram letting you share reels, posts, and your location through QR codes, and Ecom Express partnering with What3Words for last-mile delivery in India.

5 Gen Z and Millennial Social Shopping Trends for the Holidays

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Marketers gearing up for the holiday shopping season will no doubt be looking to court Gen Z and millennials, and much of that courting will take place on social apps. To instruct brands on where and how to speak to their fellow kids, here are five Gen Z and millennial preferences captured by a survey of more than 500 consumers by StitcherAds.

GoDaddy Launches Instagram Integration for SMB Users

GoDaddy Launches Instagram Integration for SMB Users

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In a move that’s indicative of the small business community’s increasing reliance on social media for organic growth and digital marketing, GoDaddy is launching a new Instagram product for its website builder designed to help its users attract and engage with customers across digital platforms.

How to Use Instagram to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

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On its face, Instagram is not all that link-friendly, especially compared to other sites like Facebook or Pinterest, which are practically driven by linked-to content. Even though you can’t make an Instagram post link to a URL, there are ways to maximize the linking features Instagram does have.

Yes, Brands Can Boycott Facebook — and Still Work with Influencers

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While you want to be safe, pausing your Influencer campaign altogether right now might not be the right move. Yes, even if you are boycotting Facebook, you can still work with Influencers. 

In fact, brands need to work with influencers in order to maintain a social and online presence and remain top of mind for consumers. This is especially critical now as mobile and social media consumption is up and online shopping is increasing, while budgets are up in the air and the election year crowds the marketplace.

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Location Weekly: Walmart’s Grocery Partnership with Yahoo Mail

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In this episode of Location Weekly, the Location-Based Marketing Association covers Walmart partnering to let people buy groceries through Yahoo Mail, Iceland’s Airport using sensors and AI to streamline passenger flow, a project between Trident and Instagram that can get you to the Grammy’s, and MUJI taking their products to the mountains.

Social Distancing and Gen-Z

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Social distancing and self-quarantining have changed the world in a matter of weeks. How is Gen-Z responding? They are flocking to apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat to pass time and interact with family and friends. Facebook and WhatsApp have lost their reign over the competition during lockdown.  

To get a better understanding of Gen-Zers’ habits, routine, and lives during the pandemic, Brainly, the world’s largest peer-to-peer learning community, surveyed over 1,700 of them. 

How Will Influencer Marketing Survive the Covid-19 Crisis?

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It is against the backdrop of an unprecedented economic downturn that marketing tech makes its pitches to clients this year. On the one hand, it is fair to say cutting-edge marketing may be as important to businesses as ever. With storefronts closed across dozens of states to promote social distancing, businesses need ways to connect with customers, and they need novel, often tech-driven tactics, like curbside pickup, to sell their goods safely. E-commerce, including mobile and social commerce, are also well-positioned to thrive at a time when customers are often left with hardly any other option. On the other hand, with revenue dramatically down for most retailers and consumers averse to in-store spending, digital tools risk being cut from squeezed budgets.

To assess how the swift economic downturn caused by the coronavirus is affecting one of digital marketing’s hottest new sectors, influencer marketing, I connected with Daniel Schotland, COO of influencer marketing company Linqia.

Influencer Marketing Moves into the Mainstream

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Influencer marketing is working its way into the toolboxes of major corporations, and I’m not just talking about Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg’s meme squad. Household brands including McDonald’s, Walmart, and Anheuser-Busch have turned to Linqia to test the practice.

Garnering Love, Not Likes: Advertising on Instagram

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One of the most noteworthy benefits of today’s digital advertising landscape is the variety that comes with testing and choosing which social media platforms resonate most with your brand. If you have decided Instagram is the clear winner for social advertising, keep the many pros and cons of the mobile-friendly platform in mind. This column tackles Instagram’s demographics, measurement essentials, and global thinking.

10 Ways To Provide a Cutting-Edge Retail Customer Experience

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Delighting customers isn’t about getting one thing right; it’s about firing on all cylinders, both online and in brick-and-mortar stores, to make an authentic connection with buyers to drive satisfaction and loyalty.

What does that look and feel like? Here are 10 examples of best practices that represent the state of the art in retail CX.

How to Capture the Attention of Multiscreen Consumers

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We’ll reach for our phones because the TV alone isn’t enough to entertain us, but this constant overstimulation leaves us wanting more. The fact that we’ll often use the ad breaks to check our phones throws the effectiveness of TV advertising into doubt, but the truth is whatever outlet consumers choose, marketers can no longer take a captive audience for granted.

Here are some tips to capture attention in a multi-screen media environment.

5 Tips for Growing Affiliate Programs Through Social Channels

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According to a recent study by the Performance Marketing Association (PMA), the affiliate marketing channel is expected to grow to over $6 billion by 2020. A Mediakix study found that US influencer marketing spend on Instagram alone is expected to grow $2.3 billion by 2020. The PMA study also indicated that content, bloggers, and social media accounted for 40% of ad spend by affiliate type in 2018, and that number is surely going up. All of these numbers support the idea that influencers and social media bring an incredible monetization opportunity to affiliate marketing.

Let’s look at five ways that brands active in the partner and affiliate channels can benefit from leveraging social media, and ultimately drive more revenue. 

Will Images Drive a New Local Search Paradigm?

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Blumenthal to Mihm: Obviously AI/ML vis-à-vis image recognition is going to play a huge role going forward in terms of discovery and conversion. But I would have to add that it is also critically important to Google as a way to engage the user in “immersive search” behaviors. That is, drawing the user deeper and deeper into Google so that they never feel the need or desire to go someplace else. This will further seal off the walled garden of local discovery search. 

You can see this in the new search by photos feature where the user is led into a grid of visual business choices and ultimately served up the Local Finder via the View list link or, if they click on an image, a business profile. But to get to the phone number, the user had to totally commit to diving deeper into Google.

Inform Your Multichannel Customer Experience Strategy

Facebook Marketing Partner Summit 2019: What’s All the Hype about Messaging?

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Facebook led the Summit with this very interesting statistic: “There are now more messaging users than social users globally.” While the semantics of “messaging” vs. “social app” draw a fine distinction, on raw user count alone, WhatsApp and Messenger account for 2.9 billion users, and Facebook alone sits at 2.4 billion.

With these numbers in mind, Facebook’s contention is that conversation should be a larger part of the consumer journey when it comes to advertising, even noting that consumers are increasingly expecting to be as well, creating a virtuous cycle of sorts.

3 Ways DTC Brands Impact Legacy CPG Playbooks

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Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands have forced legacy CPG brands into a major strategy shift. The rumblings of the digital transformation signaled change was coming, and the rise of DTC brands has led CPGs to rethink consumer engagement and the marketing tactics necessary to achieve that goal. And, in today’s digital-first marketplace, CPG margins are tightening because of the competition from DTCs as well as Amazon’s white-label product lines.

The result of these challenges sees the CPG playbook evolving to meet the digital-first ecosystem through tactics including investing in acquisitions, moving advertising budgets into digital, and including emerging marketing channels such as experiential marketing to create brand awareness and make direct consumer connections.