Jane, known as the eBay Anorak, is an eBay Specialist Consultant with a very healthy client base of different sized UK & International businesses across many categories.
Jane was at the Internet Retailing Conference last week, and always keen to keep abreast of the latest in social media, she couldn’t wait to hear what Twitter had to say and how their presentation can help you in your business:
The goldfish bowl
When it comes to advertising media, we have the attention span less than that of a goldfish according to presentation by Twitter at the Internet Retailing Conference in Hammersmith last week. It seems that the attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds and when looking at content within advertising or social media feed humans only have an attention span of 8 seconds. (I wonder how they measured that with the goldfish?)
So what has this to do with Twitter or social media advertising in general? One of the best forms of mobile ads is short video, you need to grab the attention of the recipient within those opening seconds and deliver a short sharp message in the first few seconds commanding their attention or they’ll keep scrolling onto a more interesting video to favourite and share.
We live in an age of where expectation is now, the advice given by Twitter was to take care of the three C’s:- Communication, Content and Consumption.
Communication
The most popular ‘word’ in 2014 was actually a heart emoji. The emoji can convey feeling and in the absence of expression in text can stop a misunderstanding. Communication and customer engagement is key. During London Fashion Week, Topshop ran a #livetrends campaign on Twitter where software ‘listened’ to tweets mentioning the show, this saw two way communication with 3.5m buyers and the opportunity to converse on a one to one basis giving a 75% lift in sales on featured products.
Content
Content is changing, social media spreads content far and wide. Short Form Content & Creativity works better than a normal ad, it’s known as ‘snackable’ content, short videos, those live videos on Periscope (acquired by Twitter) or Vine which are ideal for mobile. Twitter has autoplay of video in it’s stream so the first three seconds have to engage the customer before they scroll to a more attention grabbing video to watch and share.
Periscope has 25 years of live video watched around the world in every day, I find this one of the more exciting forms of social media, easily used by business for workshops and Q&A sessions. A live video stream to ‘explore the world through someone else’s eyes.’ Each video is only available to watch for 24 hours afterwards and viewers can interact live during the filming process asking questions or commenting. It can be a very useful tool for a business to engage with it’s customers.
Consumption
Many businesses and their advertisers see mobile and social media as a separate advertising channel, alongside print, TV and radio. Our mobile phones are all of these things, we watch TV, read books and magazines listen to radio/music etc so mobile stretches across all platforms of media and so should your marketing. It needs to be suitable for the audience.
The old fashioned way of marketing was on the golf course, at the business club or even in the pub, the only thing that’s changed now is the locality. The venues is now social media platforms but the rules are the same. If you met someone in one of these situations conversation is the first point, then follows what you do. Starting the conversation with ‘buy my stuff’ is just not done and will likely get you the cold shoulder. People do business with people so customer engagement is prime and business will follow.
Do you use social media marketing? Have you had success or failure?
