Twitter put its playbook in marketers' hands, Facebook promotes public figures, and Michelob makes beer (and music) for runners.
September 13, 2019
Play-by-Play, Please
Is it possible to win a game where the rules are constantly changing? If you can get your hands on your opponent’s playbook … well, that certainly helps. Fortunately for everyone battling through the ever-evolving chess game that is social media marketing, Twitter released its Agency Playbook. The 30-page guide provides agencies, marketers, and social media managers a wealth of tips and strategies for organic and paid marketing, creative content, reporting, and analytics. Whether you’re a Twitter rookie or a legacy player, it’s worth a look. You could learn something new about the platform or gain the inspiration to refresh your brand’s Twitter game plan.
Celebrity Is as Celebrity Does
Facebook is embarking on a heroic and noble mission: helping famous-ish people reach more FB users. The platform announced a slew of tools and updates meant to boost the exposure of popular content creators and FB personalities. That includes Fan Reply stickers for Stories and News Feed recommendations prompting users to follow public figures (to name a couple). While the updates won’t do much for Pages, brands can still benefit. Whether you’re a larger business or in a niche industry, promoting members of your company’s C-suite as FB VIPs can help your brand build a following, boost awareness, and share thought leadership to create buzz in your field. So marketers, let your company’s executives channel their inner celebs and take advantage of these new tools.
Use ☝️ the ✅ Emoji 😋
We ❤️ emojis. They’re fun, full of personality, and — here’s the best part — they really can boost engagement. Social analytics platform Quintly studied more than 34,000 Instagram business profiles this year to dig up data regarding emojis, caption length, post types, hashtags, and more. Turns out, no matter the follower count, business profiles received the most interactions on posts that included at least one emoji in the caption (and even more when they had 10+ 😯). The study also found shorter captions are better (50 or fewer characters), and hashtag use should depend on the size of the business’s following. There are a lot of up-to-date Insta revelations in this study, and marketers for brands of all sizes can find valuable takeaways to shape their photo-sharing, caption-writing, and hash-tagging strategies — and get a little emoji confirmation bias as well.
SPARK OF THE WEEK
In It for the Long Run
Legs are aching, sun is beating down, one more mile to push through until your run is over — what’s the one thing you crave? A cold glass of water, a lemon-lime Gatorade … and maybe a Michelob Ultra? With Spotify Free and Michelob’s collaboration, Michelob Marathon, that’s the hope. The dynamic audio campaign uses technology to combine a runner’s pace, city, run length, and Spotify listening history into a curated, personal playlist — complete with Michelob Ultra ads specifically tailored to the listener’s location.
Beer may not be the first choice of post-exercise sipping, but Michelob Ultra promotes itself as a more health-conscious alternative to other light beers — so the collab makes sense. And as Spotify becomes even more ingrained in the world of social media (recently adding capabilities to share music and podcasts to Snapchat and Facebook Stories in addition to IG Stories and Twitter), now is the time for brands to get creative on the audio streaming platform. Creating music and/or podcasts isn’t every brand’s jam. But curating public playlists is a great way to take advantage of Spotify’s popularity — even if they aren’t as hyper-personalized as Michelob’s.