I’ve been fascinated by all things having to do with the brain and psychology for many years, so I enjoyed writing these two posts for EveryoneSocial, a social-media content-management platform.
This Is Your Brain on Social Media
The Psychology of Social Selling
PHOTO: Neil Conway
Instagram advertising saw 400 percent growth from August through December, according to Brand Networks. Consumer packaged goods, fashion and retail are among the top spenders. It feels a little bit like coming full-circle back to the days of glossy magazine ads. What’s different is that, instead of hoping people will buy the magazine, you can not only target who you want to reach on Instagram, you can also encourage them to distribute your luscious product shots to their friends.
Adding an adorable baby never hurts, either.
Twitter Moments recently went live for me, providing a curated selection of top tweets. And very soon, Twitter will test “promoted moments,” that is, brand content, according to Venture Beat. With Facebook providing APIs to let publishers including the New York Times publish directly via Instant Articles, it seems media companies are anxious to harness the power of social medial. But what about their business model of showing ads against content?
My editor liked this idea because it contained not one but two ad-world buzzwords. Programmatic content is also a concept that scares us journalists and content creators to death, stinking as it does of robots and the bad old days of content farms.
However, programmatic native advertising has been with us since, arguably, the earliest days of AdWords. This article for Campaign US explores in depth where programmatic makes sense for native advertising, how it’s already being used and whether premium publishers will be able to keep raking in premium rates for native articles on their sites.
Last week, Facebook reported Q3 earnings. Revenue exceeds analysts expectations, stock falls, blah blah blah. What was interesting about the call was how much like Google Facebook is sounding, not least of which is its ambition to catalog, well, not all the world’s knowledge, but all the world’s Facebook content — which is coming close to equaling the size of Google’s index.
How music and entertainment brands harness social media not only to amplify content but also to create new business models.