Social Media Training for Marketers

45% of B2C marketers have a dedicated content marketing group in their organization. 69% are creating more content now than they did one year ago. The use of blogs dropped from 72% last year to 67% this year; the biggest increase in tactic usage has been for branded content tools (from 37% to 47%). B2C marketers are using, on average, 7 social media platforms this year, compared with 6 last year. 71% of B2C marketers use print or other offline promotion, making it the paid method they use most frequently to promote/distribute content; yet only 46% of them say it’s effective. The method they find most effective is search engine marketing (57%).

more strategic thought around how to deploy mobile in a shopping arena—not necessarily the new technologies or the new checkout system because that’s going to happen no matter what.”

s you start to see third parties map indoor spaces [and] you start to see retailers put beacons on the shelves, I think there is going to be some massively interesting creative unlocked [in 2015].” 

adoption of mobile payments and loyalty programs by both retailers and consumers. We’ve finally reached a long-awaited tipping point with beacons and NFC, and these technologies are poised to supercharge in-store sales and turn the tables on showrooming.” 

The single-most engaging, and simple, content marketing strategy is to create a reason and method for your audience members to supply content. Whether you ask them to submit photos using your product or you’re posting an engaging question of the week and aggregating answers for a roundup blog post, you’re building in the emotional trigger: they are the content. When someone sees their own photo, their name and contribution, they share like a proud parent. It’s like your own “easy button” for creating engaging content.

Facebook is reintroducing Atlas, the underused platform it bought from Microsoft last year.

it will allow them to buy ads on non-Facebook websites and apps, using Facebook targeting data

these ads aren’t “Facebook ads.” But it is also playing up the notion that the ads marketers buy via Atlas will be more effective than other big ad platforms, because they use Facebook’s data.

mobile platforms combined to account for 60% of total digital media time spent, up from 50% a year ago. And mobile apps accounted for more than half of all digital media time spent in May at 51%.

mobile sharing is dramatically outpacing desktop sharing: in Q2, sharing from smartphones and tablets grew more than 30%, while sharing from the desktop declined 5%.

Pinterest and Twitter have done the best job harnessing mobile users. While half of all shares on Facebook are mobile, that number jumps to 75% of shares on Pinterest and Twitter.

Twitter generates 8% more Arts & Entertainment sharing activity than average, with Facebook about average and Pinterest under-indexing in this category by a significant margin;

Pinterest generates a whopping 226% more Shopping content sharing activity than average, with Facebook (-17%) and Twitter (-43%) both under-indexing in this category.

43% of social sharing activity on tablets was driven by users aged 55 and older, whose sharing on tablets grew by 88% quarter-over-quarter.

around half of respondents said their marketing data and technology are either managed separately (10%) or that only some tools are integrated (41%). Just 4% reported having a completely integrated stack.

respondents averaged 36 different data-gathering systems and vendors for marketing efforts, with some using hundreds.

CTR by itself is a poor indicator of ad performance and may be “completely unrelated, or even negatively correlated, to the other measures capturing metrics such as calls, directions and store visits” As mobile display campaigns are optimized for CTR, it negatively impacts secondary actions such as calls and directions Lower CTRs were often associated with the highest offline in-store visitation rates

if marketers and brands are relying exclusively on CTR they’re not getting an accurate picture of which ads actually deliver true engagement and are “working.” In addition the risk of inadvertent clicks (the “fat finger” problem) is relatively high, casting further doubt on CTR.

40% of Internet users across the world don’t see any point in “friending” a brand online. In the U.S. and the U.K., that figure rises to 55% and 63%, respectively. In emerging markets, consumers were more open to it.

there’s evidence that they want to engage with a brand online so long as they get something out of it. For example, the majority of shoppers in the study said they are open to receiving an ad or promotion from a brand on their mobile device that’s tied to their location.

half of respondents in the study said they are interested in brands sharing other users’ brand or product experiences with them and 42% said they want brands to help them make better product choices.

the need for “an algorithm that delivers the depth and breadth of the content we have on a specific topic and then eventually as it relates to people,” he added.

This is related to Twitter’s larger aim to better organize its content—to separate the interesting and timely tweets from the noise. Twitter has already begun tweaking the timeline where tweets appear—most notably (and controversially), by introducing tweets from accounts users haven’t chosen to follow.

Costolo said that the favorited tweets by other users show up when the user pulls to refresh their timelines twice and Twitter has no new content to show both times.