The new cover photo, a horizontal banner across the frame, allows for visual design to be predominant in the page. Not only will the cover photo be the first thing a user sees when landing in a page, but that image will be the main conveyor of message and identity. For example, some of the m0st popular brands are now using the cover photo to showcase its beginnings. Along these lines, Burberry cover photo is a black and white picture taken in 1856 of its first store in Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK. - Facebook has now banned all sorts of call-to-action from being displayed.
- This means that the era of landing pages with messages such as: ‘Like us to enter’, ‘Become a fan’, etc. has arrived to an end. From now on, pages will not allow administrators to set a default landing tab that acts as a fan gate.
- Does this mean that we will need to be more creative in engaging our audience? Yes. And I see relaying on visuals and providing the fans with more entertaining branded content as the first step to do so.
- The second step is mastering the new advertising guidelines and formats that Facebook launched a few weeks ago -probably to complement this change-.
The first thing that social media marketers consider when trying to promote their business on social media is to come up with a concept. The concept can be a word, a theme, or a new idea that the company is adapting. Based on the concept, marketers would then start working on the campaign plan and strategy. Even if the concept looks like it’s going to work it might not, not because of the idea itself but maybe because of something else such as your brand or product.
Many would think that a good social media idea would fail because the idea was not supported with a good strategy or maybe there was no enough funding to back up the campaign. That can be true but the most important thing is how relevant the idea is to the brand itself.
- The disease
Comparison is a disease. When marketers of startup brands treat their pages like a “Coke” page or “RedBull” they put themselves in risk of failure. Those pages are built on a strong user generated content base, because their brands are already out there in consumers head. Those brands don’t even need to generate awareness and follow a specific strategy to get fans on board because fans will organically come even if there is no specific campaign running on the page, so after all a good Facebook page is not measured by number of fans.
- Copy cat
Some might think that if you’d want to get as many fans as “Coke” has on Facebook, just follow the same campaign idea they had on their page. Big No, why? Because first of all you will not even get half of the fans they have on their page. Secondly, your brand has a different perception in consumers head and you will not get a similar response, and last but not least, did you even consider copyrights?
Just be realistic, you don’t have to lose hope, you will still get thousands and maybe millions of fans by time. All you have to do is to up realistic goals when it comes to social media based on your brand positioning and overall marketing strategy.
- Magic world
Nothing is magic, success in social media depends on several things, It might be your brand name, your product, or your recent application on Facebook that is driving fans to your page, and if you can’t have any of that, then you should be creating an extremely viral content on your wall that is generating word of mouth and getting your fan count up. My recommendation would be start from the roots, understand your brand, define your competitors in the real world, and then see how you can position your brand in the digital world so that your goals and expectations stay realistic.
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Is anything in the world truly free?
Reading this on a blog for an agency that lives and breathes social media, I imagine a lot of eyebrows going up. But no, really, I ask you, is anything in this world truly free, especially if it is a piece of your creation, a brainchild of yours, that you as the avid user may have posted on one of many social media channels?
Word on the digital street is that the web 2.0 may have been the new kid on the block a little while back, but now has been wholly joined the ranks of marketers who have pushed boundaries to drive the presence of brands online. This was avidly followed up with direct content marketing where brands would have been involved in the creation and dissemination of content that sought to engage and retain current as well as potential consumer basis. This, with the advent of social media networks has propelled individuals to the forefront of creative processes, where each user has the creative space to be content authors, and disseminate content within community of their choice, amongst a large audience, with the potential to create an impact on other users. Which brings us to the next big kid on the block: User Generated Content.
It’s all in the word of mouth, quite literally in fact. User Generated Content (UGC), briefly defined is digital content that is created and published by a social media user on a social media platform. UGC can be wholly original in creation, such as a Youtube video, adaptive, such as a rendition of a Youtube video, or a transformative, such as a Facebook update that is derived from the rendition of the Youtube video. Well, now that the big words have been explained, we now ask the question: Why am I reading this?
As a digitally savvy marketer you would know that, UGC, especially leveraged through social media channels can greatly increase the awareness and assimilation of a brand’s presence in several ways. Firstly, generating content that is rich with customer experience and testimony actually increases the legitimacy of the brand. Secondly, UGC ups a brand’s visibility through optimization of page rankings in search engines. It does not end there. UGC can also help transform a brand into a trustworthy entity, where consumers can connect with the brand through the experiences of other consumers and users. This serves to increase engagement with a brand as consumers keep coming back to interact on a platform that doesn’t require them to physically meet, turning that platform into an online community.
So here’s the long, or rather the short of it: Who owns the content that is generated by social media users, for a social media channel, but for a brand that has a presence on a social media channel? In other words, if a user, for example posts a video talking about their experience of a brand, on a brand’s online community, such as a Facebook page or Youtube channel, does any entity besides the user him/herself have the right of ownership of that piece of content. This may not be significant perhaps for the giant social media network, but this is significant for the user who created the content, and brand for which the user has created the content.
My objective behind this rather long-drawn piece about UGC is not to give answers about the rights and responsibilities around content ownership, but to raise crucial questions that can affect the way a brand is marketed on social media channels where a community contributes to that brand’s identity, as well as how users come to see social media. So here are a few questions:
- If ownership of content created for a brand is attributed to the user that created the content, does that make social media a profitable platform where content will be bought and sold between a brand and its consumer if a brand sees an advantage in doing so, thus denying the fact that social media is truly free?
- Conversely, if ownership of content created for a brand is attributed to the brand and not the user, does that mean that the user then loses their freedom to express their loyalty to any brand, or entity lest they lose authorship of their content?
- Or maybe, lets say, that according to various TOCs by several social media platforms, any content created on that platform whether by the brand or a consumer can be attributed to the platform. Would that come to undermine the freedom of interaction between a brand and a consumer in an online community?
So this, in conclusion, brings me back to my original question: Is anything in the (social media) world truly free?
Disclaimer: Graphic designers don’t necessarily make great bloggers. They are visual junkies who view alphabets as elements of design. Visualize every bit of text you read below for a better blog impact.
You’re in the social media business and chances are that in 1 out of 3 of your meetings, you’ve been faced with the usual ‘Social Media ROI’ question by clients/executives who are still very skeptical about the impact of social media on the bottom line. The account manager does a great job at explaining how social media can impact the client’s business in a positive way but that’s not enough. Can the graphics you create; sell the impact the account managers have just painted in the client’s imagination?
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