RAAK

Asking (begging?) for Facebook Likes generally falls in a less attractive, more desperate category of Social Marketing. Unless you do it like this! [procrastination aid alert]

The Presidential effect

Reddit’s been our favourite hangout on the ‘Net for quite a while now. Kind of like that dingy bar where you stumble into lengthy philosphical discourses on the social drive behind the Arab Spring, before getting your beer spilled into your lap by two fistfighting patrons. Only, the other day when we got there, Barack Obama was there too! He did an AMA (Ask Me Anything), which is Reddit shorthand for a rogue interview, where anything goes. The number of page views for the day jumped from 1.3 million to 4.4 million! While this means a lot for Reddit, it is just a sign of exactly how big Reddit’s influence in the mainstream social sphere has become. This post explains it quite well, from a journalist’s point-of-view.

Twitter, Twitter, wherefore art though Twitter?

We’ve written before about Twitter’s aggressive steps against consumers of their API, specifically Instagram and LinkedIn. These steps, and the roadmap ahead, was clarified by Twitter last month, when announcing the new version of their API, causing an outcry from its developer community. It was clear – Twitter’s tightening the noose on its developer community. This was followed by the announcement of Certified Products, confirming Twitter’s plan to distinguish between “good” and “bad” API consumers. The main changes are smaller rate limits (the amount of times you can call the API per hour), and – the most discussed one – a maximum user cap of 100 000. This week, however, saw the release of the dreaded API version 1.1, together with a clarification that the 100 000 user limit will only apply to apps that replicate Twitter’s own client behaviour. Phew!

Target by Twitter tribes

We’re still on the topic of Twitter making money. Up until now, if you bought a Promoted Tweet, it was targeted at Twitter users similar to the ones that follow your Twitter account. Now Twitter has added two new targeting opportunities. You can now target users by interest (you supply a list of topics, and your tweet will be shown to people interested in those topics), or by similar users (you supply a list of users, and your tweet will be shown to users with similar interests to those users). Peerindex has been creating topic interests from Tweets for quite some time, with mixed success. We think that targeting by people is a better bet. That means, however, that you need to know your users rather well to get the best out of them. Ad buyers can no longer afford not to be on the platform they are buying for.

Measuring the ROI of your (obviously brilliant) social strategies

With all these Social Media Marketing offerings popping up, most companies now consider social media an integral part of their marketing and business strategies. A new report by Econsultancy shows that social is especially used for brand awareness while many are making it part of their content marketing and customer service handling as well. But as always, the struggle persists with accounting for the ROI of those social efforts. Defining objectives, KPIs, measuring and reporting on your success? Adobe has a new tool for that. The social ROI checker part of a newly launched Adobe Social suite, lets marketers track how much revenue is generated from their social media campaigns. We like the promise but are looking forward to see how it holds up against the social wilderness of clicks, mentions, likes, pins, plusses and retweets.

Dream on!

Now here’s something new! Zappos customers are 13 times likelier to share an item they bought with friends on Pinterest than on Twitter, and 8 times more so than on Facebook. When posting on Twitter, however, the post generated way more revenue – $33.66 per order – than a post on Facebook, at $2.08 an order, or Pinterest, at 75 cents an order. This chimes nicely with a study by sociologist Alice Marwick that Pinterest, more than other social media like fashion blogs, is about fantasy, rather than reality.

Creative of the Week – Chris McDowall

There’s no two ways about it: the ego is an intrinsic part of Twitter. That’s why we like Chris McDowall’s project Uncertain Rainbow so much. He’s developed an app that removes all account names and profile pictures from your Twitter feed and replaces them with beautiful colours. Smart, cute and above all, interesting.