Tag Archive for: AR

What kind of content engages LinkedIn users (Infographic)

It is no news anymore that all social networks are turning more and more into content platforms, and are challenging the good old publishing world. Brands and managers, especially thought-leaders, are showcasing their business expertise to their peers and the industry they are addressing on platforms like LinkedIn rather than starting their own blogs.

LinkedIn gets over 100,000 posts on a weekly basis published via their Pulse platform. Getting the attention of the users on LinkedIn however is rather difficult if your post is not found and pushed by the LinkedIn’s Pulse editorial team and positioned as a special content piece in one of their content channels. Only then, it reaches people that are not only in your own network and your connections area.

In order to give more transparency what really attracts users in terms of content, LinkedIn has published some interesting facts in an infographic to make clear what more than 9,000 LinkedIn users see as engaging content to them. Furthermore, they make some differences obvious between Millennials and Gen Z, but also what really drives engagement amoung users of their professional networks.

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Source title picture: https://pixabay.com/de/statistik-wordpress-web-daten-1820320/

Instagram rocks influencer marketing (report)

In the last weeks, influencer marketing has become the rising star among marketing tactics. This is not surprising as ad blocking makes the life for marketeers and their brand campaigns more and more difficult. The team at Hashoff, a micro-influencer platform, just recently published their latest annual report on influencer marketing which gives some interesting insights in an evolving marketing discipline (by channel like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and Vine).

From the 300 influencers that Hashoff interviewed, 99% stated that Instagram was their place to go to in order to connect with communities and brands. Furthermore, 56% of a very much engaged community spends more than four hours per day on social media. Over 20% spend almost an entire working day with seven hours on social sites.

There are already 12% of influencers that indicated that influencer marketing is their business profession. The rest of the influencers have a proper full- or part-time job next to their influencer “business”, with over a quarter of the influencers being students. Surviving as an influencer seems to be a hard business and the report suggests the impression that all influencer business is short-term and (spontaneous) campaign-based marketing activities.

It is interesting to see how much time influencers put in the quality of their content. Over one-quarter of the influencers of the report invest up to three hours for their content from idea to production, and some even up to five hours per piece (10.5%). Half of the respondents spend 10 to 60 minutes on their content pieces.

2017: Top Social Networks Data (Infographic)

All marketers want to know in our seminars, where to find their audience for their next social media campaigns. Obviously, all decisions and spends will be depending on if you are focussing on B2B or B2C customers. Still, some general (social network) data might be helpful in organizing and planning your next campaign audiences.

The guys at Trackx have recently published a new infographic. This infographic gives us the latest essential data and key insights on the major social networks. Interesting that almost every third (28%) has only one social network presence. Generation X is almost a full working day on Facebook available. Youtube generates 2 Mio. video views in a minute on their platform. And for marketers might be interesting that more than every second user on Instagram follows a brand (53%).

But find the data that might be relevant for your knowledge here in this infographic.

The Responsive Car: Peugeot Instinct Concept

Not futuristic in terms of the design. Not too special compared to Tesla (big tablet in the middle, holographic head-up display, plug-in hybrid engine, and so on). Still, it is a smart car with a very much clean and intuitive layout. Peugeot unveiled their latest car study at Mobile World Congress last week, called Instinct concept.

That the trend of all car manufacturers is heading towards smart connected cars is no secret any longer. However, the Peugeot approach seems like a vision probably many people cannot envision yet. Autonomous, intelligent, self-driving cars that talk to all of your other devices and can even detect in which state of fitness you are sounds like a far too futuristic project these days.

“In the future, maybe you will have cars that can be only autonomous, and it will be forbidden to drive anymore. But this transition will be very long, and what we wanted to illustrate here is part of this transition, because this will take time.” Matthias Hossann, Head of Concept Car and Advanced Design, Peugeot

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Peugeot foresees a future where the drivers can choose how much control they want to give to the car. The concept offers two self-driving modes and two active modes. The car shall even be able to adjust its driving based on data analysis that it gets from connected devices like smartphones or tablets. The car technology will be based on the Samsung Artik IoT platform. As an example, the car manufacturers mentioned that if someone has been on a hard workout, the smartphone tells the car automatically to shift into an “autonomous soft” mode to let the driver relax. Sounds like a responsive car, right?

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“This is a bridge, and it’s something that we would like to push for the future. That’s why we didn’t create something that looks like a UFO”, states Hossann.

The official debut shall be at the Geneva Motor Show next month. However, even Peugeot sees that the technology of the car won’t be available until 2025 at the earliest.

BMW connected window. The glass for the future?

bmw-connected-windowYears ago, I have written about various options of companies envisioning the future of mirrors and screens. Whether it was Samsung or Toyota or any other company out there. Many brands think about the future way of living with new world of screens evolving. The rising mobility trend drives companies to work on the glass of the future.

This time BMW came up with their latest world of a connected window. Is it a good innovation to have such a window in the bathroom (as a mirror), as a window (which takes your awareness away from e.g. the playing kids outside in the garden), or even as a car window (which might drag your attention to the wrong topic instead of focussing on the street)?

Have a look at it and tell us what you think…

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Source title picture: https://pixabay.com/de/architektur-hochhaus-glasfassaden-2256489/

How to Market to Generations on Social Media (Infographic)

All brands and companies wonder how to market to different generations on social media platforms. Marketers see great opportunities in reach and relevance in terms of the content, the data and the insights around consumers and customers. No wonder, as there are over 2.3 billion active social media users globally across various platforms. Almost 9 out of 10 Millennials (87%) are connected with brands and their families and friends via social networking.

Although the social channels are becoming more and more a paid media, the most important message to all marketers will be to listen to their customers and to engage when they are active in their social worlds. In which way a brand is then capable of personalizing and individualizing messages and content is on a different page. So, it will always stay a balance between paid and organic content that brands need to deliver to their customers.

However, the main challenge is to understand on which platform which target group wants to be addressed in which way. What kind of content do you need? How do these people engage? And why for brands Twitter or Instagram might make more sense than Facebook and Pinterest in talking to some of the generations.

Check out the infographic by Webpage FX and get some interesting insights in audiences on major platforms. BTW: It’s a shame that LinkedIn often gets forgotten in these overviews…

How to market to each generation - infographic
Source title picture: https://pixabay.com/de/handy-smartphone-tastatur-app-1917737/

Content marketing – 90% generates no engagement (Report)

When it comes to social selling, many companies and brand believe that content marketing is the secret sauce. But content marketing is not a lead engine when not controlled, qualified and distributed properly. A recent report by Beckon states that the average amount of image and video content from brands created and posted tripled since 2015. But not for the good.

The report finds that 90% of consumer engagement like Likes, shares and comments was generated by only 5% of that branded content. “In other words, 19 of 20 pieces of content pieces get little to no engagement,” it concludes. Considering all the buzz around content marketing that we could hear at digital events like dmexco, these numbers are quite interesting. And the doubtful success some companies pretend to have with it raises the question if marketers are not trying to sell too much with content marketing as Mike Templeman suggests in his latest article on Entrepreneur.

Beckon also shows that the volume of content from some brands is incredibly high. The data service company tracked 29,000 and 50,000 individual pieces of content by each one brand. It becomes clear that companies are wasting content and obviously do not know how to make most out of it. The data of the insights for the report was collected from companies like Coca-Cola Co., Gap, Microsoft, HP, Reebok, and others that Beckon is working with.

Beckon_Report

Beckon CEO Jennifer Zeszut states in an interview that some brands seem to have the primary key performance indicator (KPI) on content to generate more of it. Obviously the study proves that case with the numbers.

The reports claims that the value of paid versus owned media seems to be unbalanced which seems to be a proper explanation considering how social networks are changing today and becoming more of paid media platforms. Furthermore, the report finds that there is just a 7% increase among its clients in paid or so-called “working” media. Compared to that nonworking spending of their clients increased by 50% year over year, it shows how uncontrolled the budgets are spend in content production.

And despite the fact that programmatic is not everybody darling, the Beckon findings showcase that digital media bought programmatically by their clients generates twice the return on investment of other digital buys. However, just about half of measured digital spending was bought programmatically.

Spot On!
But the question is why this content is not triggering engagement. According to Beckon, often the lack of quality control at companies is a challenge. Many content teams simply overlook the content process by delivering guidelines and checking the produced quantity of content. However, they lack on proper content delivery and distribution. Content marketing is nice tactic but you need to know how to leverage social selling properly with the right strategic KPI set. Then content marketing gives you the right business impact.

Source title picture: https://pixabay.com/de/schüler-eingabe-tastatur-text-frau-849825/

Report on Messaging Apps: Comparison from WhatsApp to WeChat

The popularity of messaging apps is increasing. Whether it is the Facebook Messenger where all companies hope for the latest secret sauce on messenger bot technology or Line and WeChat which already offer company profiles. It becomes very clear that messengers are different in terms of functionality, technology set-up as well as the value for brands and companies. Very often in seminar that we hold these days, messengers get mixed up with social networks, and the functionality is not very much clear to marketers. Understanding the differences and the opportunities for brands has become really challenging for them. And knowing which messenger apps are used in which countries and regions will make the lives of marketers easier.

Therefore, the team at Forrester has created a report called “The Future of Messaging Apps“. The report offers a simple overview of the most important facts around messaging apps, user figures and above all summarizes the opportunities for companies as Marketingland summarizes it. And although the world and marketers get mad around Snapchat, the overview states that seven out of ten leading apps got more users than the “yellow messenger”, and also Viber, Kik and Line get more ground and challenge other platforms like Skype which was leading not so many years ago.

The evolution of messengers for brands is interesting to have a closer look at. Unsurprisingly, Asian messengers are leading. WeChat already has got some 10 Mio. company profiles, and even Line has got 2 Mio. of those already. Although Line is not familiar to many brands, they have turned around 1,1 Mrd. USD already ($ 224 Mio. via Stickers which seems to be a good monetization strategy). The messengers Kik (also offering ad opportunities for brands) and Telegram started their own Messenger Bots. On the other side, we realize that WhatsApp is starting to approach companies these days to elaborate on business requirements. So, it will be interesting to see what kind of brand solutions they are coming up with in the future.

Please find the overview in a graphic as follows…

Forrester_Messaging_Apps-Messenger_Brands_Opportunities_User_Numbers_2016

Study: Pokemon Go – a real business driver? (Infographic)

Pokemon Go is in everybody mouth these days. And many marketers are asking how to leverage the mobile app game for their business purpose – especially small and local businesses.

Just lately, the team from Slant Marketing came up with some data that shows how businesses can use Pokemon Go players for their own business – and if it is only food traffic from players that still realize the world around them.

The survey of Pokemon Go players shows that an incredible figure of 82% of those mobile players have come to visit a business when playing the game. Business that managed to “lure” players in their shops were lucky. Quite a significant number of those players stayed at that particular business longer than others.

The research data also reveals that Pokemon Go players behave like nomads. Over half surveyed (51%) answered they it was their first time that they visited the shop or business when using the app. So, Pokemon Go can become a real lead generator if used properly.

According to the data, almost three out of four Pokemon Go players (71%) replied they came in the local store as it was close to a PokeStop or Gym. Meaning that locations stored in the game attract players to come in the stores, very often these shops were small local businesses.

But the results of the Pokemon Go players also show a great opportunity of local business compared to the national chain stores. The study states that more than one in two players (56%) visited a local business when playing Pokemon Go. So, just the chance of catching some creature of the Pokemon Go game makes people come to the local stores.

Spot On!
We are sure that Pokemon Go is just one of those new game trends that mix real and virtual worlds in a mobile app or device. And that it is only a trend can be seen in the development of the app stores that have taken away the leading position of the mobile game in app stores lately as of poor monetization. Still, augmented and virtual reality opportunities for businesses have just started, and especially local stores should pay attention to mobile opportunities like Snapchat, Instagram or Pokemon Go.

The infographic of the Pokemon Go user study can be found here…

Pokemon-Go-Study_2016

Twitter Study: The value of influencers

Some weeks ago in this post, we have tried to define an undefined social media species: Influencers. The feedback was very positive and many companies are still trying to find the secret sauce how to use and leverage the value of influencers for their brands and their sales funnel.

Now, a recent study by Twitter gives further evidence of the value of influencers, and on how they help positioning brands and in which way they might might upload the sales funnel. The first part of the study was meant to figure out amoung more than 300 users how they responded toward brand influencers.

The study conducted by Annalect, a data analytics company, in corporation with Twitter shows that almost 40% of the responding people stated to have purchased an item online after seeing it used by an influencer on a social platform like Instagram, Twitter or YouTube. And another 40% stated that they are following brands on Twitter.

But influencers are not only valuable in terms of sales performance. They also make people share products they are using themselves. Almost one in five (20%) respondents claimed that they shared something they saw from an influencer. Amoung Millennials even one in three said they follow a social media influencer on Twitter or Vine.

The study comes like an extension of two former studies from Nielsen and Lithium making clear that Millennials trust different people in different ways. Interestingly enough, this study also states that influencers rival friends in trust building. Just 7% of respondents rely more on recommendations from friends (56%) than from influencers (49%).

“This is telling us is that you don’t have to be a mass media star or a household name to be influential and actually drive people to buy stuff.” Jeffrey Graham, Vice President of Market Research and Insights, Twitter

The Twitter-owned talent agency Niche revealed that the pool of influencers available to brands has grown from 6,000 to over 25,000 in a year. Honestly, we would say there os probably more depending on what you value: reach or relevance.

Twitter_Infographic_Influencer_2016

Spot On!
The smartphone has become the modern sales acceleration technology. Social influencers put trendy or interesting products on their sites or streams while walking down the street or by getting them from brands for free, and people following them would purchase those products. Have you not experienced this yourself?

The only thing we wonder is, how much would brands pay influencers to write about their product and share a picture of the product via their social media accounts? The numbers we know from influencers vary but maybe there is someone in the market who might want to share some insights.