Bringing "How To" Videos to Vine and Instagram

After an extremely successful Black Friday Vine program, Lowes continues to evolve the campaign using consumer behavior and insights to drive creative, and effective, work. 

In the new campaign, Lowes:

• Evolves the “Fix in Six” campaign from small hacks to larger projects
• Showcases seemingly hard-to-do tasks in easy, digestable, 6-15 second videos
• Leverages existing user experience and platform functionality with a “Tap thru” engagement
• Breaks projects into steps that viewers can pause turning the quick video into a tutorial
• Educates audiences on how to use the feature and videos

Now, with the influx of the use of the mobile app and utility of the Vines, there is an opportunity to take this in-store and purchase the items needed for this DIY project. 

To learn more about the new campaign, see Lowes on Instagram, Vine and within this article.

Key Moments in Social Media

After a great Social Media Week panel with the likes of Social Code, Livestream and BuzzFeed, we heard a lot of the same stuff: 

Social TV is not going away. Users are engaging with live TV events (like Super Bowl, award shows, sports, etc) while on social within their mobile devices.

• We should be selective for the events in which we engage on live events
• For Example:  Pepsi only held a live event war room for the Grammy’s and Super Bowl as they have a larger presence for these events. It gives them more of a reason, and more content to work with, when engaging on these programs.

Listen to, and think like, Customers:

• Become more “Data Driven” but with the right data points based on campaign KPIs
• Continue to join existing conversations, rather than creating your own so we can become a part of the community
• Evaluate if you would share your branded content as a user first - if the answer is no, don't publish it!

But, some information is nice to hear again as a reminder for brands: 

Think moneyball strategy for content strategy with 3 types of content:

• Evergreen strategy: maintain the “always on” organic posts that support the brand and marketing goals (long tail)
• Seasonal strategy: Layer in relevant content to join the existing conversations
• Real-time integrations: Plan around a tent-pole moment and react to real time moments (like Sponsorship opportunities)

Content has a shelf-life. Revisit it and repurpose it when we can:

• Think about the platform shelf-life:
• Twitter = 2-3 days
• Facebook = 5-7 days
• Instagram = 5-7 days
• Pinterest = 60-90 days
• Some evergreen content can be repurposed – evaluate how to optimize and bring back to the platforms especially if the content worked well the first time

Follow me at @CourtRache for some more live moments for the last day of SMW!

Creating Custom Content for Each Social Platform

In order to have a high performance, multi-platform social media campaign, Brands must do their best to understand each social platform and how its audience consumes media in order to provide rich, engaging content.

While there is no fool proof formula, this infographic developed by My Clever Agency provides tips on how to make the most effective social posts.
A few highlights include:

• Facebook: Use simple imagery posts that can be easily seen on mobile devises as 70% of fans view posts on their phones 
• Twitter: Retweet relevant content for your audience and be sure to leave 20 characters so people can add content
• Pinterest: Images that do not have a human face are shared 23% more while images with red or orange get double the repins
• Google+: Use full sized images to make posts stand out on the page compared to thumbnails
• Although not mentioned, using “Auto-Awesome” (a tool from Google that enhances images) on photos also helps increase engagement
• Instagram: Reply to people who have liked/commented to drive two way conversations
• Vine: Use popular hashtags such as #loop and #howto to gain the most engagement
• Tumblr: Like and reblog posts to interact and ensure visibility throughout the site

Instagram Announces Ads

Instagram finally announced plans to roll-out advertising to US users over the next few months.

The Ads Will:

• Focus on delivering a small number of beautiful, high-quality photos and videos from a handful of brands that are already great members of the Instagram community
• Appear in users’ feeds that do not currently follow that brand on the platform
• Give users will have the option to hide the post as well (similar to Facebook)
• As a user, you will still own your photos and videos (only brands' content can leverage paid promotions)
•  Create the need for brands to develop even more beautiful, compelling custom content that feels consumer-centric

Ads here present a big opportunity for real-time marketing for brands.  It will be interesting to see how the analytics tracking, and user behavior will evolve around this new initiative as well.  Stay tuned!

For More Info

Business Insider Article

Instagram's Official Announcement

Digital Video Ads Help Hit Marketers' Goals

Nearly 75% of marketers plan to increase their budgets on branded video content or video ads in the next year.  This digital video trend is expected to be a major component in driving engagement with consumers.

According to the study:

• More consumers reported having a positive attitude toward ads in original streaming content (25%) than in TV programming (22%)
• 58% of marketers thought digital video ads performed better than TV ads in achieving engagement goals
• 47% of marketers thought digital video ads were better at driving awareness than TV ads
• 87% of marketers said targeting was an important factor when planning a branded digital video campaign

There are opportunities for brands to further leverage video ads by:

• Leveraging existing TV spots as pre-roll and video banners
• Create new advertising especially for digital video (perhaps shorter than the 15s spots), to distribute during related programing on popular streaming sites and major networks sites
• Monitor the user of Instagram Video and Vine in this space

For full results of the study, please see the article link:

For Driving Engagement, Digital Video Ads Beat TV by a Wide Margin

How to Create the Perfect Hashtag

Hashtags have not only become synonymous with Twitter, but across the social web.  So how do you come up with the best hashtag for your brand or marketing campaign?

Twitter launched an infographic that helps establish the path for creating a new hashtag, using an existing hashtag, or why a hashtag should actually be avoided.  

In short:

• Make your hashtag memorable
•  Hashtags should be easy to remember
• Integrate the hashtag with other forms of marketing materials, not just on Twitter

• Don’t be afraid to piggyback on a popular term
• For example, Foot Locker began using the popular “#Kickstagram” hashtag. The hashtag was often used by sneaker-heads, but the brand began using it, added media and incorporated it to other messaging.  Now, the sneaker-heads think of Foot Locker when using #Kickstagram.