Social Media Archives | Page 7 of 11

Cancel

Leading digital marketing agencies like Bluetext work in social media everyday for both our clients, and we see firsthand the social media trends that impact the market. The reality is that social media evolves more quickly than any brand could realistically keep pace with.

It wasn’t that long ago that Twitter, for example, was the hottest property in the market and enjoyed the fruits of a successful IPO. Two years later, its share price has plummeted because marketers haven’t been able to figure out how to use it to drive brand awareness, loyalty and revenue. As it has become the pulpit of choice for politicians, sports figures and entertainers, brands have struggled with the character and video limitations and are moving on to other platforms to build engagement with their target audiences.

This is a long way of showing that understanding social media trends is important to an effective and successful social media program. Here, then, are five trends to watch in 2017 to keep your social media campaign on track:

Fads can make for great content, but you need to move fast. Remember Planking? Hard to believe that was nearly three years ago. More recently, the current fad was the Mannequin Challenge. The shelf live of both of these was a matter of two or three months. If you think a fad will provide good social media fodder for your brand, by all means go for it. Just do it asap, because the it won’t be popular for long.
The value of Social Media to marketers is continuing to expand, if done right. It’s no longer just about building a brand, but is now being used not only for customer engagement, but for brand recognition, customer service, and driving sales. We leverage tools like boosted posts and retargeting as a key element in lead generation.
Social Platforms are getting sophisticated – and expensive. Social media companies have seen the green from marketers, and are building in some very sophisticated tools to take advantage of their growing audiences and the insights and information they have on them. At the same time, it’s now harder to have content go viral and to get an organic boost, due to the competition for attention and the algorithms that platforms are deploying. As a result, boosted and paid campaigns are becoming the norm.
Video’s influence will become even stronger. Video content as a driver of social media engagement is only getting more entrenched. Don’t fight this trend. Use video as much as you can, as long as it’s content that is interesting, relevant and delivers value. If it’s clever or fun, even better.
“Immersive” will continue to be the goal. Bringing your target audiences along for the ride is more effective than ever as a marketing and sales tool. SnapChat and Instagram are going to town on this trend with their “Stories” capabilities. Digital Briefing Centers and virtual reality will continue to be popular. Don’t just tell them, take them on the journey.

Want to learn more about how your brand can employ these 2017 social media trends to drive your marketing goals? Bluetext would be more than happy to help.

The world has changed dramatically with social media. Businesses are following suit. Salesforce found that 70 percent of brands are increasing their social media spend this coming year.

Social media isn’t just an alternative to traditional media—it’s turning the traditional model on its head. Since the beginning of the modern era, consumers made purchasing decisions based on the advertisements that they saw or heard. Today, it’s easier to connect with other consumers via social media and make better purchasing decisions by learning about their experiences with a product or service.

People expect brands to talk with them rather than at them. They no longer want brands that merely sell to them, but rather they prefer brands to entertain and inform them. In this new paradigm, influencers are a force to be reckoned with. Brands can strategically partner with the right personalities to spark organic conversations and seduce their followers.

Simply having even one influencer share your content across their social platforms can result in a huge surge in social reach and engagement. But how can we get an influencer to share our content to their large and loyal following?

In this Bluetext ebook, we frame out 6 ways to get influencers to share your content to their large and juicy audiences.

It’s been an exciting summer here at Bluetext, and to top it all off, our Chief Creative Officer Jason Siegel is speaking at BizBash’s Elevate DC 2016 on August 3rd about his ideas and insights on the many cool things happening in our office and the industry in general. Jason will head to the Reagan Center here in Washington on August 3rd to participate in this one-day conference for meeting and event professionals. Filled with engaging speakers from a variety of industries, Elevate DC promises to be a great time, and Bluetext is honored to participate.

Jason will speak about “The New Rules of Social Media and Event Marketing”, sharing the way that social media engagement and other innovative marketing strategies can help businesses drive interest and registration for events. Following up on Bluetext’s recent virtual reality campaign for Varonis, Jason will discuss how to seamlessly integrate VR into an event marketing strategy. He will also be exploring how to use a three-part, campaign-style approach to maximizing event reach and creating urgency to register.

To see Jason’s presentation and the many other great speakers coming to Elevate DC this year, you can register here. And to learn more about how Bluetext is on the cutting of VR, reach out today:

Our Chief Creative Officer, Jason Siegel, was featured in DC Inno this week talking about the exciting new ways that Bluetext is helping our clients achieve their marketing goals with virtual reality (VR). Highlighting our recent case study with Varonis, the article shows how VR is disrupting the marketing space and leading technology companies into this unexplored territory. Here is an excerpt.

Jason Siegel and his team at marketing and design firm Bluetext have their own vision for how the technology can be used. It’s the next stage for the Washington D.C.-based company, which has built digital marketing systems for all kinds of tech companies, ranging in size from local startups like Canvas all the way up to Google. Now, the rising interest in virtual and augmented reality offers new opportunities of which Siegel, Bluetext’s founder and chief creative officer, was eager to take advantage.

“It’s like an infinite canvas,” Siegel told DC Inno in an interview. “There’s so much potential in virtual reality and augmented reality.”

Bluetext picked New York-based cybersecurity firm Varonis as the first client to use its VR ideas. Using the Unity platform to ensure cross-publishing potential, Bluetext wrote and filmed a 360 video. The video then went into mobile apps for iOS and Android based on Google Cardboard as well as a two-dimensional version for regular computers. That was necessary to expand the potential audience as Facebook 360 videos are starting to pop up on people’s newsfeeds even while most people don’t own VR headsets.

“The logistics (of VR and AR) are different, but the replay value matters,” Siegel said. “You can watch it more than once, try new things. It’s interactive [in a way that] standard video isn’t.”

Read the full piece on DC Inno here. And to learn about how Bluetext creates VR experiences, reach out today:

As most anybody reading this post already knows, the marketing challenges faced by B2B organizations in an increasingly content driven social landscape, require vastly different social marketing strategies and technologies than B2C companies. The more B2B marketers invest time, money and resources in the creation and distribution of premium content, the more they are under pressure to deliver social media ROI. And as most social platforms continue to change the rules of engagement, I thought it might be helpful to share a few insights on what B2B marketers can control to improve the effectiveness of their social presence to drive greater levels of awareness, engagement and demand.

Employee Activation

Because marketing departments in mid-market and enterprise level organizations are often outnumbered by their sales department brethren by at least 10 to 1 — they are looking for new and innovative ways to motivate sales organizations and employees alike to start being active social advocates in their own brand’s social ecosystem.

The good news is that new social marketing technologies enable corporate marketing to push messages down to individual reps who can then share the social content, become thought leaders and help build brand awareness in places like LinkedIn where they can now expose their entire network to new and relevant content to grow pipeline – their pipeline – and once they see that start to work for them they will become your biggest advocates.

Social Advertising

As social networks continue to manipulate their hidden algorithms to downgrade organic promotional posts at the same time they upgrade sponsored content – paid social promotion is becoming a growing and necessary channel for brands who want to stay visible and maintain their social reach.

Paid social media offers a wide range of valuable targeting options, allowing B2B marketers to hyper target an audience with rich and contextually relevant content across a wide range of emerging social platforms. However, many of these platforms have self-service interfaces available to launch paid social ads that might appear easy to use, but are often not leveraged or used properly by the brand owner.

For this reason, we recommend investing considerable time testing and analyzing social ad performance to stay in control of ROI. And while we recommend to our clients that they continue to maintain their paid search budget, we are seeing more and more of that being directed towards the increasing demand for content development that’s necessary to feed the social marketing beast – paid or otherwise.

Social Mobilization

Most B2B marketers use a multichannel social content distribution strategy, and therefore spend more than half their annual marketing budget on the development and production of content. The problem we are seeing is that all of that rich, premium content is increasingly being consumed on mobile devices – yet not being fully optimized for the mobile user.

B2B social engagement is now almost entirely mobile – with more than 75% of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn users accessing the social network via mobile – brands have the opportunity to leverage social channels quickly get their messages out to their customers and prospects.

The key to leveraging mobile for B2B social marketing isn’t just in it being presentable in a mobile accessible format – in needs to be easily sharable with share buttons and direct links that connect users to your website and other online properties to drive engagement, demand and measurable ROI.

PR is not a sinking ship. It’s still an essential element in your marketing mix, especially in the crowded real estate market. But is your PR program delivering the results you need to meet your revenue goals?

Let Bluetext do a free PR assessment to see if:

Your outreach is delivering the results you need
You are gaining ground in the market
You’re getting the coverage that will drive your growth

Our Share of Voice assessment can let you know if you are hitting on all cylinders, or if your program needs a shot of high-test to get it in gear.

Sometimes it seems as if marketers are speaking their own language when you try to engage them in a Virtual Reality project to support your marketing, branding, or communications goals. From HMD to FOV to Judder, Virtual Reality jargon can be confusing. Whether a Google Cardboard project for your campaign or a high-end Oculus Rift project for a special event, it requires a solid collection of new terminology specific to VR technology. To help demystify some of the most commonly used Virtual Reality terminology so you can have a savvy discussion with your in-house engineers, agency folks or freelance consultants, we’ve put together this VR glossary.

Are you feeling out of touch with the latest cybersecurity marketing jargon and worried that your boss might catch on? In the digital age, cybersecurity marketers, companies and thought leaders are constantly introducing new ideas, solutions and technologies that can be impossible to keep up with. From the top down, companies need to be familiar with critical concepts like Sandboxing, Phishing, Patching and Malware, not only so they can keep up with the evolving conversation, but so they can adapt to protect themselves and their customers from cyber threats and breaches. To ensure you’re up to speed with latest and greatest in the world of cybersecurity marketing, we’ve put together a comprehensive Cybersecurity Lingo glossary. Don’t get left out of the conversation.