When Facebook and Business Collide

n the last few year Facebook has gone from a platform where people can communicate with their friends to a viable marketing tool. Nearly every business big and small is on facebook and uses it as a medium to communicate with customers and inform them deals, offers and events. There have been many success stories.

It's Pimm's o Clock

Pimm’s used Facebook’s flexibility to launch a “thermally activated” campaign in the summer of 2012. When the weather was good or there were special events to celebrate, such as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the brand responded with timely posts of product images and serving suggestions. The brand, working with Carat, boosted the reach of posts with paid media when it knew fans most wanted to engage with Pimm's. Page post ads appeared on both the right-hand side of the Facebook homepage and in fans’ News Feeds on desktop and mobile. To reach all females on the homepage on Jubilee weekend, Pimm’s also ran a female-only targeted reach block, encouraging British women to celebrate this momentous occasion with a Pimm’s. By leveraging Facebook ad products in this innovative way, Pimm’s was able to reach a far broader audience at times that insights indicated sales impact would be the highest.

As a result Pimms received

• 5X sales return on ad spend
• 15,000 new Pimm’s customers
• 14% more spent on Pimm’s by people who saw the ad
• 20% of the online UK adult population reached

Secret Escapes

Secret Escapes started running Page post link ads that took users to its own website to sign up. These Page post ads also displayed in News Feed that targeted people according to demographics, location and likes and interests that were suggested interests in Secret Escapes’ offerings. By working with Preferred Marketing Developer, AdParlor, Secret Escapes was also able to drive better results by optimizing their ads to reach potential customers who were most likely to convert. AdParlor utilised custom audiences to reach Secret Escapes’ existing customers as well as lookalike audiences to find and reach people with similar characteristics to their customers on Facebook.

As a result 

• 2X+ increase in clicks in May 2013 vs. April 2013
• 2X increase in sign-ups

Pepsi

Pepsi Max created a viral video for the web in which UK magician Dynamo takes a tour of London while levitating next to a bus. This video was launched on Facebook, which Pepsi Max was confident could be a vehicle for mass reach.

This was a break from past behaviour, when the brand would have looked at more traditional channels like a YouTube masthead, promoted video or pre-roll. But that kind of broad targeting wasn't guaranteed to work in the summer, when desktop internet audiences shrink. With Facebook’s consistent reach on mobile, Pepsi Max decided to use a news feed and mobile reach block to hit 18m people, and released the video through the native Facebook player as opposed to embedding via YouTube. It also worked with the Instagram community to amplify the real life moments captured on the video.

As a result Pepsi

• 18.7m unique people reached
• 2.4m paid media video plays
• 600k viral video plays
• 23% engagement rate
• £0.04 cost per view
• +100k shares/likes

Social Media and The Superbowl

Last Week the biggest sporting event in the american calender took place as the Superbowl took place with The Seattle Seahawks playing the Denver Broncos and winning against them in a massive defeat. When it comes to the Superbowl there is no better place for companies to advertise their products. The Ad's shown during the Superbowl are almost as anticipated as the game.  Companies know however, that the buzz you get on social media about your ad's is key

Hashtags were used in 57 percent of nationally-run Super Bowl ads, up from 50% in 2013 and setting a new record. Facebook was the social network most mentioned, though barely. It had only five mentions and just edged past Twitter with four.

The numbers are from our third annual #Hashtag Bowl count of social media mentions during the Super Bowl. We only counted ads shown nationally, and only ads from after the kick-off until the game was over. Promos for Fox, the network that carried the Super Bowl, were not included. Nor was the Pepsi lead-in to the half-time show.

In change from last year, a hashtag also no longer counted the same as a Twitter mention. All the major social networks now support hashtags, including Facebook. However, it still seems likely that hashtag use was especially designed to drive real-time discussion on Twitter. 

The Superbowl ad's are know for being some of the most pricey airtime of the year, millions are spent on a 30 second ad spot. However online, where brands and advertising teams pounced on meme-worthy moments and reacted to each other in real-time, things were lively — and occasionally, heated.

According to Twitter, which has become the real-time advertising hub-of-choice for brands looking to cash in on huge audiences, nearly 60% of commercials included a hashtag to drive the conversation online. It worked. Of the roughly 24.9 million game-related tweets that were sent during the telecast (up from last year’s 24.1 million), a hefty portion of the conversation was by brands or about brands, causing the hashtag #BrandBowl to trend for most of the night.

Some companies took a practical joke approach to social media. When J.C. Penney sent out two jumbled tweets with misspelled words and faulty punctuation, most assumed whoever was in charge of tweeting on the retailer’s behalf was drunk. The messages were retweeted around 20,000 times each. Perhaps sensing a window of opportunity, other brands jumped in: Snickers encouraged the tweeter to eat candy with the company’s tagline, “you’re not you when you’re hungry,” and Coors Light chimed in, “We know football goes great with Coors Light, but please tweet responsibly.” J.C Penny would not be heavily associate with sports and sports fan but the fact that they got people talking even though they are not associate with sports shows how active companies can be during the event and how much of a buzz they can create.  

Coca Cola ad caused a storm online as they had a ad of people singing America is Beautiful in different languages to show Americas diversity but there were racist comments by some users who tried to brand the company Anti American. This was global news and was all over social media and the ad was seen all over the world rather than just in the US.  You can find the ad Here 

Social Media Apps

There are so many social media websites and apps out there that here is a small recap on some of the biggest in the world.

Facebook

acebook is an online social networking website^] Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.^[6] The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before it opened to high-school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. Facebook now allows anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.

Facebook is now the second biggest website in the world, only behind Google in the rankings on the US and in the whole world according to Alexa. In  January 2014 its market capitalization had risen to over $134 billion. At the end of January 2014, 1.23 billion users were active on the website every month, while on December 31, 2013, 945 million of this total were identified by the company as mobile users.

Most of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising. Facebook generally has a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) for advertisements than most major Web sites. According to BusinessWeek.com, banner advertisements on Facebook have generally received one-fifth the number of clicks compared to those on the Web as a whole.

On February 14, 2014, Facebook added a feature that allows users to choose up to 10 different gender definitions from more than 50 options, including “cisgender,” and "intersex," as a progression from the previous format that only permitted "male" and "female" to be selected as a gender description. An announcement of the addition was made on the "Facebook Diversity" Facebook page alongside a photograph of rainbow-colored pieces of material hanging over a footbridge.  Facebook's official statement read: "People can already opt out of showing their sex on their profile. We’re constantly innovating on our products and features and we welcome input from everyone as we explore ways to improve the Facebook experience.

Facebook went Public in May 2012 and was one of the biggest in technology, and the biggest in Internet history, with a peak market capitalization of over $104 billion.

Twitter

Twitter is the micro blogging site that has taken over the social media world in a few short years. Everybody from politicians, celebrities and ordinary folk have profiles on the site and you can air your thoughts and opinions, all under 140 characters. 

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass and by July 2006, the site was launched. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 500 million registered users in 2012, who posted 340 million tweets per day. The service also handled 1.6 billion search queries per day. 

It is the 11th most viewed site in the world and is said to be the SMS of Social Media.The country with the most traffic going to twitter is the US where it is 9th most viewed site in the country

Twitter went public in November 2013 and has shown strong growth ever since, and unlike it's rival facebook there are no signs of the site slowing down.It's stock price is 58.07 and growing. Nearly every public figure has a twitter page. The most followed people on the site are 

1. Katy Perry 50 Million followers
2. Justin Bieber 49.5 Million followers
3. Barack Obama 41.3 Million followers
4. Lady Gaga 41 Million followers
5. Youtube 39 Million followers
6. Taylor Swift 38 Million followers
7. Britney Spears 35 Million followers
8. Rihanna 34 Million Followers
9. Instagram 30.7 Million followers
10. Justin Timberlake 30.5 Million followers

Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows members of the public to publish their own blogs. It was developed by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. A user can have up to 100 blogs per account. It was founded by Evan Williams and his company Pyra Labs in 1999. It has a global ranking of 54 and the country that it gets most of its traffic is America where it it the 68th most visited site in the country. Most of it's users are female it is mostly accessed in schools according to Alexa.com. 

Tumblr, stylized in its logo as tumblr., is a microblogging platform and social networking website founded by David Karp and owned by Yahoo! Inc. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs, as well as make their blogs private. Much of the website's features are accessed from the "dashboard" , where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear.

As of February 7, 2014, Tumblr hosts over 170.2 million blogs. The company's headquarters is in New York City.

Yahoo! announced its intention to acquire Tumblr on May 20, 2013, for approximately $1.1 billion and  The deal closed on June 20, 2013. However there was some outcry from tumblrs teenage users on twitter who felt Yahoo was to old and out of touch to control Tumblr. They thought that they would try and censor the site and not let them post freely, although this does not seemed to have come to fruition. 

It has a global ranking of 32 according to alexa and the site revives most of it's traffic from the US where it is the 17th most visited site in the country. 

According to Forbes, Tumblr has been valued at $800 million and it's founder and CEO David Kerp's fortune had been estimated to be $200 million.

The Most Popular Blogs on Tumblr are

1. Mcupdate.tumblr.com (1.9 million unique monthly visitors): A blog dedicated to news about Minecraft, a game about blocks.  
2. comoeumesintoquando.tumblr.com (1.2 million unique monthly visitors): A collection of hilarious GIFs.
3. dedalvs.tumblr.com (1.1 million unique monthly visitors): The personal blog of David J. Peterson, the guy who created the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for HBO's Game of Thrones. 
4. onenable.tumblr.com (715.6 thousand unique monthly visitors): A site dedicated to Korean comics.  
5. theworstroom.tumblr.com (707 thousand unique monthly visitors): A blog about the trials and tribulations of finding housing in New York City. 
6. publicshaming.tumblr.com (645.7 thousand unique monthly visitors): Created by producer Matt Binder, Public Shaming will call you out if you start tweeting hypocritical content. 
7. siriuslymeg.tumblr.com (606.3 thousand unique monthly visitors): A blog all about movie quotes and inside jokes. 
8. howdoiputthisgently.tumblr.com (525.3 thousand unique monthly visitors): A graduate student documents her life through GIFs.
9. comedycentral.tumblr.com (490.7 thousand unique monthly visitors): Comedy Central's official blog. 
10. reasonsmysoniscrying.tumblr.com (449.7 thousand unique monthly visitors): A blog that documents all the reasons why children cry.

you can find more on these sites and others from my piece on google drive 

Introduction

My name is Eimear. I am a business student and this is my blog to comment on trends in Social Media. I started this blog and I started a tumblr aswell however I do not like the site. I also have a instagram, facebook and twitter page. I will be writing about htese social media sites in this blog.