Archive for the ‘Social Marketing’ Category

These factors have the biggest impact on influencer marketing effectiveness – University of Washington

Research | UW News blog

October 19, 2022

New research from the University of Washington examines how factors related to social media influencers, their posts and their followers impact marketing success.

About 70% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 use Instagram, and its hard to spend much time scrolling without encountering a sponsored post from an influencer. The same holds true for just about any other social media platform.

New research from the University of Washington examines how factors related to influencers, their posts and their followers impact marketing success. Social media influencers are typically digital creators who have built a large following due to their knowledge on specific topics, such as beauty products, food or pets.

Recently published online and forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, the study is one of the first to include cost data in its examinations of influencer marketing. Researchers found that if firms spent 1% more on influencer marketing, they would see a nearly 0.5% increase in engagement. They also concluded that reallocating spending based on the studys insights could result in a 16.6% increase in engagement.

Engagement is the way people react to online content, such as such as liking, commenting or reposting. For this study, researchers prioritized the number of reposts because it represents a deep form of engagement where followers are choosing to share content with their own networks.

Robert Palmatier, co-author and professor of marketing in the UW Foster School of Business, said influencer marketing is currently producing higher return on investment, or ROI, than most other kinds of marketing.

I predict that in the future, a lot of marketing is going to be crowdsourced, Palmatier said. As a marketing manager, youre going to manage a portfolio of influencers, just like Nike manages a portfolio celebrities.

For this study, researchers tested data obtained from Weibo, a microblogging website that is one of the largest social media platforms in China. The data consisted of 5,835 posts written by 2,412 influencers related to 1,256 campaigns for 861 brands in October 2018. The brand sponsors spanned 29 categories, including beauty products, e-commerce platforms and food and beverages.

Researchers found that influencer originality, follower size and sponsor salience the prominence of the brand in a post enhance the effectiveness of a message, while posts that announce new products diminish it. Followers are less likely to repost product launches due to the heightened risk of vouching for something unknown to their networks.

The influencers activity rate, level of post positivity and follower brand-fit, or the degree to which the interests of an influencers followers match the sponsor, all produce inverted U-shaped effects. It hurts engagement if influencers post too much, for example, but engagement also suffers if they post too little. This suggests that a balanced approach is most effective.

If you dont post, Im going to forget who you even are, Palmatier said. But if youre doing too much, it kind of cheapens you. Its what we call an inverted-U shaped effect, which means there is an optimal point of activity where something performs the best.

When it comes to brand-fit, researchers found that firms should search for influencers with followers that overlap but arent an exact match.

If youre only talking to people who are most likely to buy your product, those people already know about it, Palmatier said. Now if you go to people who are a terrible brand match, theyre never going to buy it because its just a poor fit. You want people that have some interest, but probably dont know about this product.

Palmatier used Tiffany & Co. as an example of a brand that has successfully utilized influencer marketing. There was a time when the company had trouble acquiring younger customers, he said, because it was mostly popular with longtime consumers.

If you think about Tiffanys marketing department, it was probably a group of people that knew their historic targets, Palmatier said. What they did was spend a very small part of their budget to bring in some influencers, and those influencers got multiple times higher returns than their own product managers.

Influencers compete in the free market to increase their followers and engagement, Palmatier said, which is a major factor in their success.

They had to be clever, he said. They had to find a niche. In other words, influencers win their following by understanding their audience very well. When I go to an influencer with my product, theyre going to create posts that resonate with their followers. Tiffany never understood how to position its product for that group, but influencers were able to connect.

Another advantage of influencer marketing is microtargeting, Palmatier said. Customers can self-segment on social media by following specific topics that interest them. For example, a person might follow hashtags related to Paris before a vacation.

This is crowdsource positioning, Palmatier said. You give influencers a product and they go position it. People also see influencers as being more authentic because mentally, you feel like youre actually friends with the people you follow on social media even though youve never met them so they appear more authentic when theyre positioning the product.

Other co-authors were Fine F. Leung and Flora F. Gu of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Yiwei Liof Lingnan University; and Jonathan Z. Zhang of Colorado State University.

The research was supported by Lingnan Universitys Direct Grant and Faculty Research Grant.

For more information, contact Palmatier at palmatrw@uw.edu.

Here is the original post:
These factors have the biggest impact on influencer marketing effectiveness - University of Washington

Here is how much TikTok, Meta and other social platforms are paying creators – Digiday

Nowadays, social platforms are defined more by their entertainment value than what they originally set out to be: social networks. The rise of the creator economy is proof of that.

Which makes recent shifts in ad revenue share deals from YouTube and Twitch even that more notable. Moves like this always say a lot about how much the platforms value creators (or dont). It also puts even more eyes on where ad dollars are going as the year winds down to an increasingly unsteady economy.

Creators are watching the space very closely, because these changes directly impact their livelihoods at a very precarious time. [Influencers] have to think about how they connect to the different audiences, whether they need to create different content it creates more work, said Jenny Tsai, CEO of Wearisma, an influencer marketing platform.

With this in mind, wechecked in on what the main platforms arepaying creators.

Short-form video master TikTok splits ad revenue 50/50 with approved creators (those with 100K followers or more) through its TikTok Pulse program, which launched in May.

Since short-form video has taken off (thanks TikTok), YouTube recently announced it will share its ad revenue on Shorts beginning January 2023. While long-form video creators will still be compensated with a 50/50 split, Shorts creators will be entitled to a 45% share while YouTube will take 55%.

Instagram previously let creators make money through in-stream video ads, earning a 55% share of the revenue. However, it stopped supporting this venture in February 2022, when owner Meta shifted its focus to Reels. As such, only Facebook still provides that 55% share to creators by way of in-stream ads and ads on Facebook Reels.

While Snapchat doesnt disclose percentage shares of ad revenue, creators can earn money by adding mid-roll ads into their Snap Star Public Stories. While its unclear how much exactly creators can earn, Variety reported that the app paid out more than $250 million to more than 12,000 creators through its Snapchat Spotlight program in 2021 alone.

Twitch, however, was in hot water last month after announcing its plans to change its revenue share split for subscriptions, for its star creators. Beginning June 1, 2023, Twitchs top performers will continue to earn a 70/30 premium rate, but only on the first $100,000. Everything after this point is reduced to its standard 50/50 split. Unsurprisingly, creators were angry at the split, as Digiday reported last week. Creators felt this was essentially a pay cut from Twitch, while the platform was seen to be spending huge amounts of cash elsewhere on its celebrity lineup for TwitchCon.

Not that creators ever had much stability where revenue share deals are concerned: rates change quite frequently, depending on the wider macro economic environment at play. For example, Instagram began sharing revenue with creators through ads in IGTV as the world shifted online in the pandemic. Around the same time, Snapchat introduced mid-roll ads during its Stories format for its biggest creators. Now with a downturn sliding into a recession, its no different with these latest moves.

Theres less advertising dollars to go round, explained Tsai. These are ad-funded businesses. People wanted to boost their audience sizes and therefore their ad revenue share.

But the business model for platforms doesnt necessarily allow creators to monetize the communities they built.

Creators, in a sense, have always been able to count on change where revenue shares are concerned. But these changes often come without clarity, which has led to frustration among the creator community.

A lot of the platforms struggle with what is next and what is the roadmap.

Crystal Duncan, head of influencer marketing, Tinuiti

This rings true with TikToks creator fund, which received backlash from some TikTok stars including Hank Green, because its more like a pool of funding divided between all creators, yet the money in the pool doesnt change while the number of creators continues to rise.

More clarity on platforms ad revenue shares could be a starting point. Theres been some criticism about how the deals are calculated, said Tsai, later adding, These rev share changes affect their income, its a matter of whether they can pay their rent or not.

It affects long-term financial planning.

A lot of the platforms struggle with what is next and what is the roadmap, said Crystal Duncan, head of influencer marketing at Tinuiti. Theyre trying to figure out what excites creators, what is going to encourage them to join their platforms, stay there and make money.

This uncertainty has driven creators to diversify their revenue, including in affiliate marketing and brand partnership contracts alongside their ad revenue pots. Take Vine, a short-form video app launched in 2012, which enabled users to share six-second-long looping video clips. In October 2016, parent company Twitter announced it was shutting down Vine because was unable to support content creators, due to increased competition levels, lack of monetization and advertising options.

So many people put their entire careers into Vine, then the platform disappeared and creators had to completely start over. No one wants to do that again, Duncan said. Creators are trying to figure out how they can continue to grow their brand and business, so theyre not putting todays couple of dollars against tomorrows longevity and future.

https://digiday.com/?p=471266

See original here:
Here is how much TikTok, Meta and other social platforms are paying creators - Digiday

Three-Quarters of In-House Creative Teams Have Restructured, Survey Finds – Social Media Today

RALEIGH, N.C.

Creative and Marketing Leaders Cite Stakeholder, Employee and Customer Experience as the Driving Forces and Used Data to Sketch out Restructuring Plans in their March to Evolve In-House Creative Teams into Strategic In-House Agencies

Nearly three in four (74%) of in-house creative and brand teams have restructured in the last 12 months or are currently being restructured. Another 16% say their organization is planning to reorganize sometime over the next year. Thats according to the results of a new survey by Lytho which polls creatives and marketers for its quarterly Creative Operations Report.

When asked Why? their team has restructured or is restructuring, the top reasons centered on the experience of their stakeholders, employees and customers. These included better internal collaboration (45%), ensuring a sustainable workload (39%) and improving customer experience (36%).

The report contains interviews that illustrate how some organizations restructured creative teams. For example, headcount pressure during the pandemic forced one creative team to modify its processes and approach to technology. In many ways, it shifted, out of necessity, from a highly structured and siloed project management style model to a more collaborative and centralized work environment thats become a hallmark of in-house agencies.

As the pandemic wound down and the creative team staffed up again, the company envisioned going back to its old operating model. However, the leadership team saw an opportunity to have the marketing leads function more like account managers in an agency. They found centralizing work, particularly at project intake, enabled the team to work more efficiently and ensured better brand and message consistency across channels and tactics.

Creative and marketing leaders have been on a journey to transform their creative and brand teams into high-performing in-house agencies that make a strategic contribution to the business, said Lytho CMO Russ Somers. We believe this research outlines a blueprint for creative leaders: have a clear vision for restructuring, focus on improving the experience of employees and customers, and finally, use data and technology to guide decision-making and support process improvement.

Some of the additional findings and detail from the report include the following:

The full study Creative Operations Report Q3 2022: Why In-House Brand and Creative Teams are Restructuring is freely available online without registration.

# # #

About the Creative Operations Report

The Creative Operations Report is a quarterly survey of the brand and creative market fielded by Lytho. In Q3 2022, the company polled 123 US-based in-house creatives and marketers for this report. Most respondents are leaders in their organization 64% say they hold management roles. Respondents also tend to come from the creative side of the house: 56% hold creative positions; 29% hold marketing jobs and 15% are operations or project managers. Respondents come from a broad variety of markets including technology (25%), retail (14%), manufacturing (12%), and CPG (8%). Many respondents work for large employers and on sizable creative teams 78% work for companies with 500 employees or more and 80% are on a team with 11 or more people on staff.

###

Lytho, a creative operations platform, is uniquely focused to address the needs of brand and creative teams. The platform combines the benefits of many disparate tools such as creative workflow and digital asset management (DAM) into a single software solution. Creatives no longer need to be limited by tools that are neither fully interoperable nor suited to their specific needs. Todays brand and creative teams need a solution that will help them fight the complexity that comes from managing the growing volume of requests, stakeholders, digital assets and brands. More than 600 enterprise customers worldwide use Lythos software.

Media Contact:Frank Strongfor Lytho202-352-5920[emailprotected]

See the rest here:
Three-Quarters of In-House Creative Teams Have Restructured, Survey Finds - Social Media Today

YouTube’s Providing More Creators with Access to Shoppable Links – Social Media Today

Will live-stream commerce ever become a thing in western markets?

It already has in China, and in some other Asian regions, while theres also evidence that Middle East-based users are becoming more open to live-stream buying.

But western audiences, not so much.

Yet, with so much potential (the Chinese live-stream commerce sector is now worth $180 billion), the big tech giants are not giving up on it yet, with Insider reporting today that YouTubes now looking to open up access to its live-stream commerce tools to a much wider pool of creators.

As per Insider:

By year's end, members of YouTubes Partner Program in the US, UK, Brazil, and India with at least 20,000 subscribers will be able to tag their videos, Shorts, and live streams with shoppable links.

That could see a lot more direct shopping options appearing in many places within the app, while YouTubes also running a live shopping broadcast on November 10th, which will feature products and presentations from Ulta Beauty, Tula Skincare, and many more.

YouTubes been looking to tap into live-stream shopping for some time, and the expansion of its presentation tools and options could be a big step up in this respect.

If, of course, western consumers warm to in-stream buying.

And there are some indicators that they are TalkShopLive, for example, which is focused on live shopping streams, reported last year that its broadcasts were increasing at a rate of around 85% month-over-month, largely led by celebrity influencers.

That got TikToks attention, with the platform now partnering with TalkShopLive to re-broadcast and re-share its live shopping offerings, while TikToks also working with various influencer agencies to get more top creators sharing shopping streams.

Live shopping is of even more value to TikTok than it is to YouTube, with TikTok seeing huge success with shopping streams in China. But its efforts in western regions, thus far, havent taken off.

TikToks initial live shopping push in Europe was eventually scaled back due to various teething problems. But itll be hoping that its new approach in the US, through TalkShopLive and top creators, will spark new enthusiasm for the option, and will eventually make it a more habitual, engaging element for its billion-plus users.

There are no guarantees though, and right now, it doesnt seem like live shopping is ever going to expand beyond a niche element.

But it might, and if it does catch on, as exemplified in China, it could become a major marketing consideration very quickly, providing big opportunities to many brands, influencers and creators in each app.

The money is simply too much to ignore for both platforms, while Meta is also still experimenting with the same on IG (though it has shelved live-stream shopping on Facebook).

Essentially, right now, live-stream shopping isnt a big deal, but it could become one very quickly, and its worth taking note of the latest live-stream commerce initiatives at each app, and tracking both how they work, and audience response to such, in order to ensure that youre tracking the potential.

Follow this link:
YouTube's Providing More Creators with Access to Shoppable Links - Social Media Today

Finance Influencers Footprint Growing: Posting 2x More on Instagram and 5x More on YouTube vs All Other Influencers – MarTech Series

After performing a deep dive into influencer growth and engagement on YouTube and Instagram, Emplifi found that finance influencers are publishing more content and gaining more traction

Emplifi, the leading customer experience platform, released social data highlighting a significant rise in growth and activity for finance influencers on Instagram and YouTube between January and August, 2022. According to Emplifis social insights, finance influencers published more than five times as many videos on YouTube and gained nearly double the number of subscribers compared to other influencers on the platform. Finance influencers on Instagram experienced similar growth, gaining more followers than all other influencers and publishing more than double the number of posts as other influencers.

The primary takeaway from our research is that finance influencers are experiencing a substantial rise in popularity. The amount of content they are producing is outpacing all other influencers, which is likely helping drive exponential audience growth, said Zarnaz Arlia, Chief Marketing Officer, Emplifi.

As part of its analysis, Emplifi looked at finance influencer subscriber growth on YouTube and follower growth on Instagram, breaking down median growth rate by the influencers account size. Emplifi also looked at the number of videos and posts published by finance influencers on YouTube and Instagram and engagement numbers so far this year, comparing finance influencer data to all other influencers on the respective platforms.

Marketing Technology News:Bomboras Intent Data Helps Inbox Insight Get Content to a Customers Hungriest Buyers

The primary takeaway from our research is that finance influencers are experiencing a substantial rise in popularity. The amount of content they are producing is outpacing all other influencers, which is likely helping drive exponential audience growth

Finance influencers take the lead on YouTube

According to Emplifis data, finance influencers on YouTube experienced nearly an 8% median growth rate between January and August, 2022 while all other influencers had less than a 4% median growth rate. When looking at median growth by channel size, finance micro-influencers (XS = under 10,000 subscribers) had triple the growth rate of other micro-influencers.

The number of videos published by finance influencers on YouTube was vastly greater than the number of videos published by other influencers. This was true across the board, regardless of account size. Finance influencers with 10,000 or less subscribers posted more than double the number of videos compared to other influencers with the same subscriber numbers. Between January and August, 2022, the median number of videos published by finance influencers with a million or more subscribers quadrupled the number of videos published by other macro-influencers. More importantly, finance influencers received significantly more median video views compared to other influencers every quarter so far this year.

Marketing Technology News:MarTech Interview with Zohar Bronfman, CEO and Co-Founder at Pecan

Instagram sees surge in posts published by finance influencers

Same as YouTube, finance influencers on Instagram are experiencing tremendous growth compared to other influencers on the platform, with median growth rates considerably higher for finance influencers compared to influencers outside of the financial space. This is true across all influencer account sizes from influencers with less than 10,000 followers to those with a million or more followers.

Instagram finance influencers are also publishing more than double the number of posts other influencers are publishing on the platform. Finance influencers with a million or more followers are publishing as much as three to four-times the number of posts as other influencers with the same number of followers.

While finance influencers are posting considerably more content than other influencers on Instagram, non-finance influencers garnered more median post interactions than finance influencers every quarter so far this year.

According to eMarketer, 75% of U.S. marketers will leverage influencers in their marketing campaigns this year, up five percentage points over 2021. And its not just influencers with a million or more followers entering brand relationships. Gartner reports marketers are paying more attention to micro and nano influencers (influencers with 10,000 or fewer followers).

For brands in the financial space, our findings underscore the impact the right influencer can have in terms of building deeper connections with consumers and growing the brands exposure, said Arlia.

Marketers are expected to spend $4.14 billion on influencer marketing this year, a small portion of the $240 billion eMarketer expects to be spent on digital advertising overall in 2022.

Marketing Technology News:Gratitude: The Secret Marketing Sauce Youre Not Using, But Should Be

See the rest here:
Finance Influencers Footprint Growing: Posting 2x More on Instagram and 5x More on YouTube vs All Other Influencers - MarTech Series