Customer Experience

By Liam Dowd - September 16th, 2014

Instagram on the catwalk, Facebook video marketing and tweet locations.

Adobe Social joins Bitly Certified Partner Program

Adobe Social has become the latest big name brand to join the Bitly Partner Program. Bitly has fast become the short code of choice, but can do much more than simply shorten URLs. The system is also a powerhouse of tracking metrics many of which can be used to gain insights into consumer activity on their social media networks.

Bitly explain: “The Bitly Certified Partner Program is designed to help marketers identify the best platform partners that integrate seamlessly with Bitly to ensure a consistent and secure experience. The addition of our data to Adobe Social allows businesses to control, measure and optimize the performance of their links.

“The ability to better understand how social interactions increase site-side conversion is an ongoing challenge for social marketers,” said Craig Stoe, director of product management for Adobe Social. “As a Bitly Certified Partner, we can provide Adobe Social customers with a deeper understanding of how their Bitly links are contributing to impressions, traffic, and conversion on digital properties so they can optimize their social content campaigns.”

“Platform partners like Adobe Social help Bitly customers create hundreds of millions of links every month,” said Jennifer Hanser, our senior director of strategy and partnerships here at Bitly. “Bitly and Adobe Social together can empower marketers to more fully understand the impact of their content across marketing channels.”

For brands this level of tracking is a vital component of their marketing activity. Big Data has delivered masses of information especially about social media behaviour. Bitly offers even more granular insights all corporations can leverage.

Instagram powers social catwalk

TopShop have continued to innovate and expand what is possible with social media and how this activity can be linked to the tactile world of e-commerce. The company’s latest link with London Fashion week illustrates what can be achieved. Using their Facebook and Instagram pages as a hook into the event in London, Social Catwalk also took a step further this year and offers consumers the ability to instantly buy the fashion they are seeing on the catwalk.

This level of integration with social media platforms is fostering a highly personal link between TopShop and its customers. Positive sentiment and high levels of brand advocacy are a clear result from this initiative. Corporations in other spaces can follow this lead and develop socially anchored commercial initiatives that make buying the goods being showcases no more complex than simply taping a button on a screen.

Tweet locations

Where a corporation’s customers are based is essential information if your business is to ensure its marketing messages across social media in particular are relevant and timely. A new infographic from Mention looks closely at the geographical dispersement of tweets and discovered that: The U.S. collected 41.5% of all mentions, which is bigger than any one country. What this means for all corporations is the vast majority of the chatter about their business isn’t from within their own national boundaries. The UK came in second place, with almost 10% of mentions, followed by France at 5.4%, Canada at 4.3% and India at 3.9% Mention also revealed the languages in use with tweets and also when each country posted the most messages.

Improving video ad revenue

Every corporate marketers knows that video has continued on its meteoric rise to dominance across the social media space. New statistics from eMarketer reveal that Facebook is also coveting this lucrative area of social media exchanges. According to their research YouTube now accounts for nearly 20% of the US video ad market making this space worth an estimated $1.13 billion.

One of the major issues with ads placed on YouTube is their inconsistent delivery. Corporate marketers need to show ROI and a consistent revenue stream, which is often disrupted by ads, which are not shown regularly to build consumer awareness. In addition, Facebook is rumoured to be ramping up its marketing initiatives to gain more corporate video ads. Indeed, Facebook has stated that between May and July they saw a 50% uptick in video content views. Perhaps Facebook could become the new home for your corporation’s video content?

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.