P3
A)
Advertising
Advertising is a big part of nearly every social media platform, this is
mainly due to the fact that basically all forms of social media are free and
therefore need to find another alternative to make revenue. One of the main
ways in which this is done is through advertising.
Instagram
The main form of advertising on Instagram is ‘sponsered’ advertisements.
This is when uploads from accounts that users do not follow appear on their
news feed; usually advertising some form of product/service. This happens
because the owners of that account of paid Instagram to advertise some of their
uploads on user’s news feeds so that more people will be aware of the
product/service they are trying to sell.
Furthermore, Instagram also has other forms of advertising
such as ‘marquee ads’, which allows companies to pay Instagram to display their
content at the top of user’s news feeds. User’s can expect to see extra content
at the top of their news feeds up to three times a day.
Another form of advertising Instagram uses is video ads,
this is often refered to as the ‘future of marketing’ and is done very easily
through Instagram due to Instagrams short video feature which allows users and
advertises to upload short video clips for other Instagram user’s to see.
Again, companies can pay Instagram to show their video advertisements on
people’s newsfeeds via sponsered posts.
Facebook
Facebook is much more simplistic when
it comes to its advertising techniques and generally sticks to just keeping the
advertisements on the side of people’s news feeds instead of them being actual
posts themselves. Shown on the right is
two examples of this, with one being an advertisement from Knoor advertsing
food, and the other being an advertisemnet from Jumia which is advertising a
blazer.
Statistics
have shown that the percentage of pages of that feature advertisements is only
6% which shows that Facebook does try and keep its advertisements limited to
give users a more seemless and smooth experience on the platform. However, on
the contuary, research has also shown that the number of advertisements on
Facebook has seen a 50% increase between 2015-2016.
Twitter
Twitter is generally a little bit more technical when it comes to
advertising compared to Instagram and Facebook. Twitter will actually use people’s
cookies and location to determine what advertisements users are going to be
interested in as well as what advertisements are advertising companies that
operate close to their area. This means that the advertisements shown are most
likely going to be relevant to the user and catch their attention.
Twitter also gives users suggestions
on which users/companies to follow. This is usually because this user/company
has paid Twitter to advertise their accounts to users who may be interested in
them based on their internet cookies. This helps them garner a larger following
on Twitter which ultimately means a larger consumer base.
B) Viral Marketing
The term ‘viral marketing’ refers to a marketing technique which aims to
make a particular advertisement viral. In order for this to happen, the
advertisement would need to be extremely entertaining and above all else unique
to all other adds that are currently in rotation at that point in time. Having
an ad go viral is very beneficial for the company behind the advert as their
brand will be featured somewhere throughout the ad, this means it will create a
lot of exposure for the company’s brand as everyone will be watching the advert
and see the brand name pop up within it.
Instagram
A good example of a viral campaign
that took place on Instagram came from energy drink powerhouse Red Bull. They
launched a campaign revolving around their three new Red Bull flavours; Red
Bull Red Edition, Red Bull Silver Edition and Red Bull Blue Edition, in which
Instagram users were told to guess what inspired each of the three Red Bull
Edition energy drink flavours along with the hashtag of what flavour of drink
they would like to win (i.e. #rededitionplease). Many users jumped on board
with this campaign as they wanted the opportunity to potentially win one of the
new flavours and have it sent to them by Red Bull themselves.
The advert also allowed users to get creative as there was thousands of
possible answers to choose from which encouraged people to think outside of the
box. At the end of the campaign, a huge collage was made of all the posts that
Red Bull was sent regarding the campaign to showcase the Instagram community’s creativeness.
Facebook
An example of a video that went viral on Facebook was when life insurance
company TVC; uploaded an advert on their Facebook page. In the advert is a man
who goes about his daily business, however, he decides to help people in
whichever way he can along the way. The message is that he never actually gets
a reward, instead, the reward he gets is seeing the smiles on people’s faces
once they have been helped. This advert went viral as it is a very emotional
advert that tugged at people’s heart strings, which therefore led to them
wanting to share it with their friends on Facebook.
Twitter
A prime example of a viral campaign
that took off on Twitter would be the ‘What bean are you?’ quiz from Heinz.
This was a quiz that would come up as a sponsored post on people’s news feeds
and would require them to answer a series of questions to determine what type
of bean they were.
This was a very successful campaign for Heinz as the quiz managed to
garner around 10,000 retweets and boost Heinz’s Twitter following by an
estimated 22,000 followers. This was all achieved in a two-week period which
just goes to show how rapidly successful this viral campaign really was.
No comments:
Post a Comment