Earlier this year, Pinterest partnered with digital advertising and technology solutions specialist, Kenshoo, to bring you ‘Search Ads for Pinterest’.

With search ads on Pinterest, our clients can promote visually engaging ads as consumers search for relevant products. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Pinterest to provide search marketers with an innovative new way to engage earlier in the buying journey, when their customers are most open to new ideas – Will Martin-Gill, Chief Strategy and Development Officer, Kenshoo

And it seems after initial trials with Barilla, eBay, Garnier, Walgreens and The Home Depot, these search solutions are available to every business through the Pinterest Ads Manager.

So what exactly are we working with here?

We’ve talked about it before – Pinterest is investing a LOAD of money into monetising the platform.

With 97% of their 2 billion searched pins unbranded, the platform is an oasis for advertisers who are struggling to compete on other crowded social platforms.

So what can advertisers expect from the platform?

• Broad, Phrase & Exact Match Keywords: offering advertisers precise control over where their pins pop up in searches
• Exclusion of Negative Keywords: so your add for “loafers” won’t show up when someone is searching for that perfectly baked, gluten free, low carb loaf of bread – saving you $$ in wasted advertising dollars
• Search Term Reports: to help you optimise your search term strategy

What’s new with Taste Graph?

Pinterest’s ‘Taste Graph’ compiles data from over 100 billion pins, to profile users based on what they like, how those interests change over time, and basically directs them down specific pin paths most relevant to them.

This technology allows Pinterest to target users with more specificity, resulting in an increased likelihood that users engage with the brands shown to them = better spent advertising $$.

Pinterest announced that they would be testing auto-targeting, backed by Taste Graph, “as a way to extend your keyword campaigns into more searches” – simplifying search.

To get started, head to the ‘Ads’ section at the top left-hand corner of your Pinterest feed. Remember, you’ll need to have a Pinterest Business account and it would be a good idea to install the Pinterest Tag on your website. If you’re just starting out, check MeetFox’s guide on why you need to have a good website.

The post Search Ads for Pinterest – Offering Targeted Advertising for Businesses appeared first on Social Status.

Since then, a lot has changed.

You asked and we listened – our social media analytics platform has gone multi-channel!

Our multi-channel platform allows users to pull in data from both their own, and their competitor’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram pages.

Read more: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter – Now Live on Social Status

Our automated custom reports have gotten much more sophisticated as well.

We deliver the following level of insight into our customers mailboxes either weekly, monthly, quarterly or per campaign;

• Page and Profile Insights from Reach to Conversion
• Social Ad Performance and Ad Metrics for each Campaign Objective
• Competitor Analysis and Industry Benchmarking
• Influencer Performance for the Influencer’s you work with or anyone that uses your Brand Hashtags
• Insights and Recommendations

Originally posted on siftery.com

Automate your Social Media Reporting with Social Status

Social Status is a social media analytics platform used by thousands of marketers, businesses and agencies that enables marketers to quantify the impact of their social media marketing. Save countless hours by automating your social media reporting and benchmark against your competitors. Provides actionable insights to improve performance by finding optimal days, times, frequencies and media types to post.

Social Status also helps you measure the effectiveness of your content strategy.

Kevin William David interviewed Tim Hill, CEO at Social Status to know more.

Hi Tim, so tell us about Social Status?

Social Status is a social media analytics platform that automates social reporting for over 2,800 brands and agencies all around the world. We’ve just launched Custom Reports — a new feature which enables any brand or agency to order beautiful PowerPoint reports covering all their social pages & profiles, competitors, paid performance and influencer performance.

Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve?

There’s a general perception that there are many social media analytics tools out there but if you speak to any digital marketer or social media marketer, the majority of their social media reporting is actually manual. Most marketers still spend countless hours in Excel wrangling data for their reports and manually creating charts and graphs. There still isn’t an effective social analytics platform built for the mass market which effectively automates social reporting. That’s the problem we’re solving.

Interesting. So what’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use Social Status?

Our main competitors are Socialbakers and Simply Measured. The main difference with us is the power of our reports. Users receive our automated reports in PowerPoint format covering all their social performance metrics from channel insights to paid performance, competitor analysis, influencer analysis, customer service performance and more. No other platform can produce such high quality, boardroom-ready reports like Social Status. We’re also half the price, which helps 😉

Pretty useful for any marketer to automate social media reporting!

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Social Status?

We have a very diverse user base from small businesses all the way up to global corporations. Although our user segments are very different, their fundamental needs are exactly the same. They all need to quantify the value of social media to their business, understand what is insightful from all of the data and report to management or their clients. Typically, the roles of our customers are marketing managers, digital marketing managers or social media marketing managers for brands. We also have many agencies using Social Status and these roles are typically Digital Strategists, Planners, Account Directors or Community Managers.

One of our earliest customers was Anytime Fitness, one of the largest fitness brands in the world. We also have customers spread across many industries including Retail, Government, Travel, Finance, CPG, Automotive, Insurance, Sport, Media, Education and Non-profit.

How are your customers using Social Status? Could you share a few use cases?

The biggest use case is social media reporting. It takes the average marketer 8 hours per week to compile their social reports manually. We think this is insane. It should be easier and pain free, that’s why we built Social Status.

Benchmarking against competitors is another use case which is popular. For many marketers looking at their social performance stats, it is difficult to know if a 2.48% Engagement Rate is good or bad. With Social Status, they can compare performance against competitors and against industry averages and know exactly how they’re performing.

Have their been unique use cases for Social Status that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Tracking brand performance is a popular use case but one of the more unique use cases we’ve seen is in Retail, with the official social accounts of shopping malls. Rather than tracking competitor malls, they instead tracked performance of the retailers in their building to identify which retailers they should partner with on social media who get high levels of engagement. Similarly, we’ve seen event brands and publishers track performance of sponsors to assist in partnership negotiations.

Interesting use case!

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Product Hunt was an early driver of our success. This one listing drove thousands of users to our site in a matter of days and still drives traffic to this day. I remember the listing went live in the middle of the night too — I didn’t get much sleep that night 🙂

In the early days we also spent time at trade shows and spoke at industry events. We worked hard to get Social Status on the minds of marketers and advertisers. These days we publish industry reports like ourFacebook Retail Industry Report.

We find the best growth opportunities come when you provide value up front.

That’s a great tip!

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

We didn’t iterate fast enough in the early days and we’re only now really finding our rhythm with the platform and our reports offering in market. Building a social analytics product is in many ways like building a business on quicksand. The social landscape is in constant flux and continually evolving making it especially difficult for the incumbents to keep up. We continually optimize for where the greatest user demand exists and what needs marketers have for analysis of social performance and reporting.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

We’ve integrated with a semantic analysis partner which has enabled us to extract entities from social content such as people, places and organizations as well as themes and topics. Originally we planned to only integrate sentiment analysis (positive, neutral, negative) but there has been great feedback from users across full semantic analysis of post data.

Before we end, what are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

• Slack is our internal communications hub. We are a distributed team so being able to split conversations out to channels and have bots notify us of any significant activity is vital to maintaining a high level of internal communication.
• Intercom is our user-facing communications hub. It’s great because we can deliver messages to users in-app and by email based on events and behavior.
• Zapier automates all the things. We have over 30 different zaps firing events into Slack and other apps. I love the power of Zapier and the endless possibilities to connect all our tools together.
• Trello is our team collaboration tool. We plan, run workflow and manage delivery through Trello. It’s simple, intuitive yet powerful.
• Mouseflow gives us qualitative user feedback. It’s perhaps our most insightful tool for really understanding what users do in-app. Everytime I use Mouseflow I feel like I’m getting closer to our users. But not in a weird way ;).
• Statbot gives us user stats and vitals. They were the 1st to market with Intercom reporting.
• Stripe handles our payments. Stripe removed the hassle of dealing with banks, we were up and running in no time.
• Xero handles our cashmoney. I really don’t know how we managed our finances before Xero.
• Google Analytics reports our website performance. I like GA’s dashboards and the way they’ve continually innovated such a huge powerful piece of software.
• Social Status reports our social performance (dog fooding all the way). A little bit biased here but there’s no better way to view our social media ROI.

The post Siftery Talks Automating Your Social Media Reporting with Social Status appeared first on Social Status.

Twitter announced last week that it would be giving a small group of users the ability to tweet in 280 characters – double the standard 140 characters that we have grown used to.

Why the change?

The 280 character tweet limit is currently in testing in every language except Japanese, Chinese and Korean. The thought behind this is that these languages are able to effectively communicate/express more in fewer characters.

Example: The same Tweet in different languages – Image Courtesy: Twitter

The change comes as new data shows that only a small percentage of tweets sent in Japanese (0.4%) actually use the whole 140 characters, compared to 9% of all tweets sent in English.

Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese. Also, in all markets, when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting – which is awesome! – Aliza Rosen, Product Manager @ Twitter

Twitter’s monthly active users have remained stagnant for 2 consecutive quarters at 328 million, and there lies the problem.

Twitter’s ability to secure advertising dollars depends on the platform’s ability to continuously grow, hence the addition of 140 extra characters – Twitter’s growth strategy.

And much like previous product updates, Twitter users have taken to the platform to voice their dislike/concerns over the potential character change.

Flash poll: What do you think of Twitter’s plan to experiment with a 280 character limit? https://t.co/j7xAFXaC7Z

— WIRED (@WIRED) September 26, 2017

What does this all mean for marketers?

Now, it’s easy as marketers to jump at the opportunity to use 280 characters. I get it… sometimes it is really hard to write clear brand messaging in 140 characters.

But I warn you – approach with care.

There is a reason that the Twitter community instantly voiced their dislike over the character changes. Let’s discuss;

Twitter is about brevity. It’s the core of the platform – it highlights only the most important things, forcing people people to get to the point of what it is they’re trying to say.

140 characters vs. 280 characters – Image Courtesy: Twitter

Doubling the character limit seems to go against that core philosophy. Twitter users have become comfortable with the 140 character limit over 11 years since it was introduced – it’s what they expect. When they look and see a long post, they’ll automatically assume its 1) someone on a rant or 2) an ad, and ultimately ignore it.

The main objective for Twitter with this move is to increase the amount of platform users globally, and the number of tweets per user.

This is a double-edged sword for marketers.

On one hand, more users means a larger audience base = potential customers. However, more users (who don’t have the 140 character discipline that Twitter alumni do) means more long-format style tweets = flooding.

I just saw a 20-tweet thread where each tweet used 280 characters. pic.twitter.com/RBGUuqqw0x

— D.B.Anderson ???? (@DBAnderson1) October 5, 2017

The 280-character tweets will likely dilute Twitter as a receptive marketing platform for consumers engaging with brands. Some of the most successful brands on Twitter, including Wendy’s, JetBlue and DiGiorno Pizza, have gotten to the peaks of brand engagement because of the discipline and rigor it takes to fit a message into 140 characters” – Rachel Spiegelman, CEO of Pitch

A polluted newsfeed will result in lower brand retention, ad recall, engagement and ultimately force long-time users off the platform.

On the plus side, Customer Service Managers rejoice! Hannah Redmond, Group Director of Strategy and Innovation at The Marketing Arm says the 280 characters will allow companies to better service their customers on Twitter.

This allows brands to better solve a problem or provide more information in response to customer inquiries or customer service complaints right there in the native platform, rather than directing them to a phone number or microsite

The post Why Marketer’s Should Be Cautious of Twitter’s New 280 Characters Limit appeared first on Social Status.

And it’s not the first time the social platform has seen such growth, doubling from 500,000 advertisers to 1 million advertisers in the space of 6 months almost a year ago (a result of the integration between Facebook and Instagram advertising).

With a total community size of 800 million (500 million of them using the platform every day), it is no wonder advertisers have flocked to spend their dollars on the highly popular platform.

And it seems Instagram is catching up with its parent company, Facebook, who claim to have 5 million advertisers spending their money on the platform as of April this year.

People are spending more time than ever on the platform producing and exploring content, especially mobile video – Instagram

While the integration between Facebook and Instagram advertising has certainly played a part in Instagram’s advertiser growth, video has played the biggest role. Instagram reports that people are spending 80% more time watching videos on Instagram than they were a year ago.

250 million people are watching and creating stories every day, and businesses are no different, with more than 50% of them creating at least one story in the last month.

Instagram plans to ride this growth wave, introducing a number of features and Facebook integrations for their stories, “giving advertisers more flexibility”.

Facebook’s Canvas Integration

Instagram allows advertisers to take advantage of Facebook’s full screen Canvas format inside of Instagram Stories.

The intention is to allow advertisers to capture their audiences attention with a short, video or jingle, and lead them somewhere where they can learn more about the product or service on offer.

Store Existing Creative Content Permanently in Power Editor and Ads Manager

Instagram is extending its creative tool suite by implementing a new uploading feature.

This feature will allow advertisers to re-purpose existing creative content, by storing it permanently within the Power Editor and Ads Manager for future use.

This feature is intended to increase the amount of organic content created within Instagram and have advertisers take full advantage of Instagram’s camera features; face filters, boomerangs, and drawing tools.

Placement Optimisation

The Facebook Marketing Science Team have been researching cross-platform campaigns and spend, trying to establish a way for cost effective campaign success.

Placement optimisation leverages off Facebook’s ad delivery system to dynamically seek out the lowest cost per outcome at any given point in time wherever it’s available, whether it be on Facebook or Instagram. As a result, running ads across multiple placements should provide lower cost per outcome than advertising on a single platform or even trying to manually allocate budgets across platforms

In the coming weeks, Instagram will be rolling out the ability for advertisers to automatically add Instagram Stories to Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network campaigns through placement optimisation.

With its continued Advertiser growth, Instagram is expected to generate $1.5 billion in mobile advertising sales this year and $5 billion in 2018 [Omni Core Agency]

The post Instagram Announce More Flexibility for the 2M Advertisers Using the Platform Every Month appeared first on Social Status.

Pinterest had previously only displayed 400 interests to advertisers looking to use their paid ad targeting – clearly amping up their monetisation efforts and investing heavily into making the platform a solid choice for companies looking to spend their advertising dollars.

We built the Pinterest Taste Graph on the world’s largest collection of human-curated links – over 100 billion Pins – and the trillions of interactions people have with them every week. Whenever someone searches with us or saves a Pin, we refine our understanding of what they’re into

The introduction of new visual search functionalities such as ‘Interesting Ideas’, ‘Shop The Look’ and ‘Lens’ has attributed to an increase in 40% more mobile text searches and 60% more visual searches on the platform since last year.

Pinterest is sitting on a gold mine of people’s tastes, preferences and interests, and have finally started to curate it in a way that enables marketers to better reach their customers in very specific ways.

By understanding people’s evolving tastes, preferences and interests, the Pinterest Taste Graph connects millions of people on Pinterest to hundreds of billions of fresh ideas that are just right for them

Some examples of these new categories include: underwater photography, sustainable architecture and vegetarian barbecue.

It has been a busy year for Pinterest, with a host of feature rollouts in their attempts to directly compete with the bigger social platforms and differentiate themselves from the others.

And it’s a great tactic for them, signing up a host of retailers whose products can be bought directly inside of Pinterest, a way to better monetise the platform and incentivise advertisers.

The main differentiator for advertisers wanting to use the Taste Graph, is that the content shown to users will not be overly dependant on the amount of money spent on the advertising, rather the quality of the match with the end users interests and preferences.

This means;

• ads will be better-targeted resulting in a better user experience as opposed to the inconvenience of being bombarded with ads irrelevant to your personal interests/tastes
• smaller companies will have a better chance at quality ad targeting, especially going up against big budget advertisers, due to the sophistication of targeting

The post Pinterest Introduce Taste Graph & Enhanced Targeting for Marketers appeared first on Social Status.

According to Influencer Marketing Hub, the Influencer industry is expected to be worth nearly $10B in 2020. That’s a lot of shout outs and collabs!

While the world is facing uncertain times, there’s still huge growth in influencer marketing. For its comparatively low cost, it remains a key strategy for marketers at global brands all the way down to small businesses. The trend continues:

What is an Influencer?

Word-of-mouth recommendations still play a crucial role in a consumer’s purchasing decision and its been shown to improve marketing effectiveness by up to 54% [MarketShare].

Millennials ranked word-of-mouth as the #1 influencer in their purchasing decisions about clothes, packaged goods, big-ticket items (travel and electronics), and financial products [Radius Global].

This trust in the recommendations of people has launched the careers of actively engaged individuals on social media, thus the creation of ‘the influencer’.

An individual can be identified as an influencer if they;

• have an established sense of authority/credibility in a certain industry (lifestyle, fashion, food, travel, fitness etc.)
• have a large reach to an engaged fan base (visibility)
• are authentic and have an ability to sway opinions/perceptions

Influencers have become somewhat of an unofficial friend, and we trust their recommendations more than branded content delivered directly from the brands they connect us with.

What is Influencer Marketing?

When a brand compensates an influencer for a promotional post – that is influencer marketing in its simplest form.

Why do Brands need Influencers?

The decline in outbound or “push” marketing effectiveness has led to more brands reaching out to influencers.

When a brand partners with an influencer, they get access to a number of things including;

• their personal aesthetic and authenticity
• the eyes and ears of a large, loyal and engaged fan base (the influencer’s following and their audience network)
• the production of branded content (User Generated Content)
• their ability to influence and illicit action for your brand
• their brand advocacy as they frequently engage with fan’s in two-way conversations

Industries benefitting from Influencer Marketing

Although influencers seem to be present in almost every industry these days, there are three industries that have arguably benefitted the most:

1. Fashion & Beauty

85% of beauty consumers say they would trust a cosmetic review by a YouTuber over any other method.

As 89.3% of all videos watched by females on YouTube are makeup/cosmetic related and consumers watch anywhere between 6-30 hours of these videos every week, it’s not hard to see why this market has flourished from engaging with Influencers.

2. Lifestyle & Travel

Unlike typical brand content, travel and lifestyle influencer marketing involves a more casual and subtle promotion using UGC.

This has led to brands focusing their attention on the millennial market. With the help of influencers, travel companies are transforming themselves into lifestyle brands, with influencers creating perceptions of exclusivity, authenticity and a fear of missing out.

3. Health and Fitness

“Fitness, wellness and nutrition content and influencers have taken off because they are able to share a much more authentic journey, experience and struggle with something everyone has a connection to,” says Vanessa Flaherty, partner and senior vice president of Digital Brand Architects.

“It’s no longer a celebrity or physician-driven topic, instead it’s everyday people showing off what works and doesn’t work for them.”

How to find Social Media Influencers

With 6,000 tweets per second, 95 million posts on Instagram every day and 4 million Facebook likes per minute – it’s pretty easy to get lost down the rabbit hole searching for the best influencers for your brand.

Something important to note: influencers should be carefully chosen based on their image and how well it aligns to your brand, not just an individual with a large follower count.

The influencers you partner with should be your biggest brand champions as they’ll be interacting with their audience about your products/services and you want this exchange to be authentic.

Here are 4 ways you can find the perfect influencers for your next campaign:

1. Use an influencer database tool: Scrunch

Scrunch is a huge influencer database that enables you to filter based on criteria like industry, location, age, gender, hashtag and a number of other criteria. Best of all Scrunch is user friendly and powerful whilst being quite cost-effective. Most marketers use Scrunch to find influencers for campaigns or longer-term brand relationships.

Setting up your account is easy. Just click “I’m a Brand” and fill out the form! Once you’re in, you can start filtering influencers based on 23 categories:

2. Use an influencer marketplace: TRIBE

TRIBE is a marketplace of micro-influencers who have signed up to the platform to receive “influencer briefs” from brands. Micro-influencers need to have a minimum of 3,000 fans to join the platform.

3. Use an influencer agency: Vamp

Vamp is an agency that represents hand-picked influencers. Brands brief Vamp on the campaign, the objectives, target audience and budget – then Vamp searches their books to suggest the best fit influencers for the campaign.

4. Use a social media listening tool: Awario

Awario is one of the best social media listening tools on the market. You can use Awario to search for mentions of your brand, products/services, competitors or industry terms and potentially find influencers who are already actively creating content in your niche. Who knows? You might even find some customers who happen to be influencers – that is a match made in heaven!

Create a shortlist of Influencers

Once you’ve searched high and low for potential influencers, log in to Social Status and select Influencer Analytics. Here you’ll be able to see all their performance stats for their Instagram and Twitter profiles, Facebook Pages and/or YouTube channels.

You can choose influencers based on how often they post, number of Interactions, average Engagement Rate, growth and a number of other criteria.

The great thing about Influencer Analytics is that you can continue using it after you’ve engaged your influencers. Influencer Analytics can be used to track and report on the performance of your influencers down to the post level. You can export reports to PDF, PowerPoint and Google Slides. Try it free for 14 days.

The post A Brand’s Guide to Getting Started with Influencer Marketing [2020 Update] appeared first on Social Status.

Much of our recent growth comes from international markets, where word is spreading fast about Pinterest’s unique blend of utility and inspiration. For example, we’ve seen 3x year over year growth in Germany and Brazil and 2x year over year growth in France and Japan – Pinterest 

Image Courtesy Pinterest

With a steady influx of new engaged and active users to the platform coming from international markets, Pinterest has had a busy year ensuring that their product offering stays unique, pushing for visual search functionalities as its core product.

And securing $150 million in a new round of funding this year at a $12.3b valuation has ensured that their primary focus has been on just that.

Let’s take a look at some of the new bells and whistles Pinterest has rolled out over this past year.

Interesting Ideas, Shop The Look & Lens(Beta) – February 2017

Interesting Ideas

This feature saw Pinterest introduce the ‘Ideas’ circle on the bottom right hand of all images. Clicking this circle unlocks other related and interesting pins, inline, instantly reshaping your feed around things that interest you.

Shop The Look 

The ‘Shop The Look’ feature is an extension from the 2015 feature that allowed users to pinpoint different items inside of a Pin.

This feature introduced the ability for users to tap on the circles (as shown below) and track down and purchase products all inside of the Pinterest platform.

Lens (Beta)

This was the first time Pinterest had announced its “experimental technology” as a beta to users.

Rather than using text to search, this feature allowed users to use their cameras inside of Pinterest to search for things that interested them.

Just point lens at a pair of shoes, then tap to see related styles or even ideas for what else to wear them with. Or try it on a table to find similar designs, and even other furniture from the same era. You can also use Lens with food. Just point it at broccoli or a pomegranate to see what recipes come up.

Ditching the ‘Like’ Button for the ‘Save’ Button – April 2017

Pinterest finally decided to ditch the ‘Like’ button, realising that their users were confused often left asking “but what’s the difference between the Save and Like button?”

They assured their users that they wouldn’t trash all of the pins they had previously liked, moving them to a new board in their collections called ‘Your Pinterest Likes’.

Pinterest’s chief motivation for doing this was to gain insight into how they could better curate content for users based on their ‘Saved’ pins.

Recipe Filters – May 2017

Pinterest has always been a place where it’s users went to for recipe inspiration, and with this knowledge, Pinterest launched it’s ‘Food Filters’ in May.

The filters allowed users to search for specific recipes and filter them based on dietary requirements, time to cook, ingredients etc.

Lens Gets a Makeover – June 2017

Pinterest announced in June that they had doubled the amount of categories that Lens had been trained to recognise from Fashion, to Home Decor to Food.

The Beta testing showed Pinterest that users liked to wait until later in the day to Lens photos, not always wanting to do it in that very moment.

As a result, Pinterest made it possible to view your camera roll while inside the Lens camera, also adding pinch to zoom and new focus features for a better user experience.

Search and Lens Move Front & Centre & Updates to the Home Feed Algorithm – July 2017

Search Bar & Lens Move to Home Feed

Thanks to our visual discovery features, monthly visual searches have increased nearly 60% over last year. And our search returns 20 percent more Pins, with nearly four billion ideas getting served up each and every day – Pinterest

Becoming an increasingly popular feature with users, Pinterest decided to move the Lens and search bar to the home feed – the search bar had previously been accessed by navigating to the ‘Explore Tab’.

Updated Home Feed Algorithm 

Due to the amount of new ‘live’ information being provided from Pinterest’s ‘Lens’ feature, Pinterest worked behind the scenes to make changes to what Pins appear on our Home Feed.

The changes meant that the Home Feed would instantly update based on Lens searches and Saved pins. Pinterest also stated that they had worked to “zap repeated Pins” saying that they had managed to eliminate almost every exact duplicate to make the Pinterest experience “easier to find what you’re looking for”.

The post A 2017 Timeline of Pinterest’s Feature Rollout – It’s Been A Busy Year! appeared first on Social Status.

A study conducted in partnership with MORI Research, indicated that college newspapers continue to reign as a top media choice among today’s co-eds and a sought-after source for campus news, entertainment and shopping information [Alloy Media & Marketing].

With 76% of all college students reading their campus publication in the past 30 days, the move to include these campus stories is a strategic push for the platform to remain relevant and dominant for younger audiences.

Snapchat launched ‘Discover’ in early 2015 as a means to achieving their goal of becoming a “destination for consuming news”.

Our ambition is very much that when something happens in the world or there’s a news event, that our audience would turn to Snapchat increasingly to get that news” – Sean Mills, Head of Original Content.

Since then, Snapchat have launched a series of Stories including some of the biggest names in publishing from The New York Times, Fox Sports, National Geographic and Harpers Bazaar.

Snapchat Discover’s facelift from 2015 to now – Image courtesy of TechCrunch

Snapchat have selected to partner with handful of colleges around the US including Berkeley, Texas A&M, Syracuse and The University of Wisconsin – Madison, to begin producing weekly Publisher Stories to be distributed on Snapchat.

The move sees Snapchat nurturing the “talent pool” stating that many of the leading journalists and editors get their starts working in school newspapers and they plan to help each school monetise and grow their newspaper through a revenue sharing agreement (although we are not quite sure what this entails).

Something (Snapchat) really stressed was to create content that made people feel like they were in on the joke or part of the campus community – University of Wisconsin – Madison, Editor in Chief – Alice Agun on her meetings with Snapchat

Snapchat still seems to have a fair share of control in the content being produced, working with students to develop the “right” kind of content, with a focus on virality and shareability.

The content will only be available to users within a close radius of the campus they are currently working with, aiming to create feelings of exclusivity and amplification of the community connectedness.

No word yet on when this will be rolled out to Australian Universities. We’ll keep you posted.

The post Snapchat Push to Remain Platform of Choice by Introducing Campus Publisher Stories appeared first on Social Status.

In this post we’ll discuss the key characteristics of each, as well as the different tools that are available to assist each function.

What is Social Media Listening?

Social listening involves the process of tracking/monitoring online conversations containing certain phrases, tag lines, or words associated with a particular brand.

Social listening is not passive. It requires the analysis and reflection of those said mentions, comments, conversations and sentiments.

Social listening is used predominantly by marketing teams for community management. Listening to these conversations allows marketers to identify customer pain points, identify engagement opportunities as well as to monitor brand perceptions.

Why is Social Media Listening Important?

Social media listening is important as it allows marketers to answer the following questions:

• Where are people having online conversations about my brand?
• What is the sentiment around these conversations? Is it positive, or negative?
• How do people perceive the brand?
• Who are our key brand influencers?

What Social Media Listening Tools are Available?

There are hundreds of tools available for social media listening – here are just a few.

What About Social Media Analytics?

The main objective of social media analytics is to gauge how effective your social media marketing content is doing based on an array of metrics.

In it’s simplest form, social media analytics identify which of your social media marketing efforts are working, and which are not!

Social media analytics should profile your social performance, and benchmark it against both historic and competitive data, to allow marketers to answer the following questions:

• Where are the gaps in our social media marketing strategy?
• Which platforms should we be investing in?
• How are we performing based on our competitors social media marketing efforts?
• What type of content engages our audience best? When?
• Is my audience base growing at an acceptable/above average rate based on that of my industry/competitor set?

Social Status Multi-Channel Platform

Social media analytics should tabulate and visualise your social media data in a way that is digestible and can be easily communicated to other members of your team.

Why is Social Media Analytics Important?

Social media analytics is important because it provides marketers with quantitative information to be able to:

• prove the value of social within the organisation
• prove whether social media efforts were successful or not
• secure buy-in and justify budget commitments
• plan and delegate resources into tactics that are successfully delivering value and dismiss/rework those that are not

How Do We Use Social Listening & Social Analytics Collaboratively?

The answer to this is pretty simple.

Social media listening can be used in preliminary social strategy stages to audit the social environment, customer and brand perceptions as well as key influencers.

Having this information provides a solid foundation when it comes to defining your social strategy.

Once that social strategy is defined based on the insight from your social listening tools, we use social analytics to identify whether it actually worked or not!

Social Status – Social Media Analytics

The post The Difference Between Social Media Listening & Social Media Analytics: Why You Need Both appeared first on Social Status.

The social media landscape has become diverse and complex.

This has made it difficult for marketers to monitor their performance and their competitor and industry’s performance across the various social media platforms.

The task is a seemingly laborious process, with the average marketer spending around 8 hours per week manually compiling social media reports for their stakeholders and clients ($18K annually!).

We’re here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be.

What is Competitive Analysis?

There is a lot to learn from analysing your competition – leveraging off what is working within your competitive landscape to best shape your own cross-channel success.

But what exactly is it?

Entrepreneur defines competitive analysis as;

“Identifying your competitors and evaluating their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to those of your own product or service.”

In terms of competitive analysis in a social networking landscape, we would be looking at identifying;

• • who are our competitors?
  • what social media channels are they present on?
  • how active are they?
  • what sort of content are they posting on a channel by channel basis?
  • understanding which of all of the above is successful

Identifying Our Competitors 

In most instances, you’ll have a pretty good idea of who you’re competitors are.

If you’re unsure, or want to re-evaluate your market/industry, you can always search with the following:

Google Search

Google is always a great place to start. Search for keywords or phrases that best describe the goods/services you provide as well as location (if you’re centralised).

SEMRush.com

SemRush.com allows businesses to use key search terms to find paid and organic use cases online.

SEMRush tracks a large cross-section of companies from enterprise to “smaller” businesses and gives a much more realistic overview of who your competition actually is, not just the biggest sites/businesses.

Rather than compiling a list of thousands of other products or services that are similar to yours, break the list down to represent the 5 brands that compete most directly with you (this could be due to geographic location or similarity in price point).

What Social Networks are my Competitors on?  

The Social Status Multi-Channel Platform allows you to create a visual competitive landscape to assess and monitor your competitor’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube performance.

The platform allows marketers to answer the following questions;

Q: What is my competitors engagement like on a network to network basis?

Q: How often do they post? How often per platform? What is the effort vs. reward of those posts?

Q: What media types are my competitors posting? What media types facilitate the most engagement network to network?

Q: What are the top performing posts across all channels for a specific time period? 

Q: What day/time facilitates the most engagement for my competitor set? 

Q: What content themes are present/performing the best?

What is the average social network community size of my competitors? How quickly are they growing? 

Why is Competitive Analysis Important?

Competitive analysis is important to gauge where you stand in terms of your competition. More than this, there are extremely valuable lessons to be learnt in the fails and successes of your competitor’s social media efforts.

Let their fails and successes shape your cross-channel success. If you know that video content performs relatively well on a Thursday morning, you might consider making it a part of your routine social media efforts.

Competitive analysis also helps to identify which platforms you should focus your resources on. If you can see that a particular social network facilitates high levels of engagement, but is being under utilised, exploit that gap.

If you can see that competitors post a high volume of content on one particular channel, but the reward vs. effort is disparate in terms of engagement, you might consider focusing your efforts on a different network.

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