Mediaboss Marketing

The FDA gets more than a fair share of jabs on social media, but lately its Twitter account has been showing its own spunk.

Last week, the FDATwitter account posted,You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it. The post linked to anarticlediscouraging use of ivermectin, commonly used to treat parasites in animals, to treat COVID-19.

Spurred by serious reports of people hospitalized after self-medicating with the veterinarydrug, the cheeky tweet containeda serious message.

And thats the point, says the FDA.

Historically, weve used our social media platforms to communicate about a lot of important public health issues in fairly straightforward ways, but as the platforms have evolved, weve embarked on an effort to find creative ways to deliver our messages, Brad Kimberly, director of social media in the FDAs Office of External Affairs, said in an email.

These posts are designed to get peoples attention and, most importantly, combat dangerous viral misinformation," he said.

RELATED:FDA reputation takes another hit after scathing aducanumab advisory panel meeting

He added that so far the efforts are very effective, and Im glad people are recognizing this shift.

Effective may be an understatement. The not-a-horse post garnered more than 104,000 likes and 46,500 retweets. For comparison purposes, an FDA Twitter post the week before about the approval of a generic form of amoxicillin for dogs and cats got 70 likes and 28 retweetsand people really love their pets.

The ivermectin tweet in fact rivaled the FDA's Monday announcement that Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine, Comirnaty, had been approved. The FDA breaking news post got 90.000 likes and 55,000 retweets.

Some naysayers didnt appreciate the agency's attempts at witone responder calledthe tone of voice inappropriate and saidit's better suited to Wendys than FDA.

Many others approved, thoughone commenterpromised to stopreferring to the organization as the"Fun Destroying Agency"and those in favor included some marketing experts.

Its actually quite appropriate, Eileen OBrien, Real Chemistrys social media practice leader, said in an email.

FDA social media channels can remain an important voice of authority while also having a personality. Its essential to speak in a way that engages the general public, she said.

Wendy Blackburn, executive VP at Intouch Solutions, called the FDAs new tone uncharacteristic, but she also approves.

Recently we have seen the FDA Twitter handle speak more in social medias native language. Theyre using emojis. They retweeted Ellen DeGeneres. Theyre showing their humanity with a dose of authenticity, and its a welcome change, she said.

RELATED:Pharma's reputation drops again. Could it foreshadow a return to the bottom?

Blackburn added, Its an effective and welcome trend in the way that FDA is battling misinformationas long as they also continue to balance their tone with one of authority and a focus on the science.

The FDA concurs on her science point.

As Kimberly said, We hope that people will come for a little bit of snark, stay for the serious, and in the process learn something new about the FDA and an issue that could save their lives.

See original here:
Show me the funny: FDA social media account gets spunky, adding wit and wordplay to combat misinformation - FiercePharma

As TikTok continues to expand, and become a bigger consideration for marketing teams, the platform is also growing its Marketing Partner Program, which provides access to local expertise and guidance to help brands maximize their in-app presence.

The latest additions on this front come in the South-East Asian region, where TikTok is adding nine new agency partners to provide assistance with TikTok campaigns.

As explained by TikTok:

"We're excited to announce that were expanding the TikTok Marketing Partner network to onboard nine more leading agencies and technology service providers from Southeast Asia (SEA) and Australia. Along with the expansion, we are also badging a set of regional partners that have excelled this part year and showcased exceptional creativity and zest in helping our clients scale new heights with their campaigns."

TikTok's marketing partners can provide professional advice and insights to help businesses optimize their TikTok ad campaigns. This new expansion will facilitate more opportunity for SEA businesses, with a specific focus on Singapore, where TikTok usage is on the rise.

In addition to this, TikTok is also adding a new Agency Services sub-category within its Marketing Partner platform, which will help to connect brands with partners that can optimize their campaigns creative and performance needs.

"In practice, this means advertisers can now select the local market in the main Partner Search dashboard and see corresponding listings. By adding Campaign Management to Media Buying Technologies, we want to give brands more ways to access a complete spectrum expertise for TikTok campaigns."

If you're looking to get into TikTok ads, and you have the resources to utilize a partner agency, TikTok's Marketing Partner Program is a good way to get in touch with approved, trained experts in various aspects of the process.

And as TikTok continues to add more users, and become a real rival for the bigger players, it certainly is becoming a much bigger consideration for a great many brands. The expansion of its partner program will help TikTok capitalize on that potential, and become a bigger player within the digital ads space.

Read more:
TikTok Expands Marketing Partner Program in Southeast Asia - Social Media Today

Social media is a great tool for keeping brands connected to their customers, but it can also be a powerful driver of direct sales activity.

Do you use social media to attract customers and increase sales?

If so, have you made sure that your social media profiles are contributing to your sales funnel, instead of each being a standalone element?

Heres how you can ensure your social media efforts are tied back to driving sales for your business.

When launching your brand, keep in mind that your website is going to be just one of many marketing channels. You're going to need a range of online assets to maximize your visibility, and each of those assets will form another part of your sales funnel.

Given this, consistency is key, and you should look for a brand name that's ideally available across all the major social media platforms as part of this approach.

This way you ensure that:

Namify is a brand name generator tool which checks name availability across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest:

It's a quick way to see how your name is being used, or not, which can help guide your initial branding approach.

Aside from your brand name, your brands visual identity (logo and colors) is another powerful way to build brand recognition, and increase your presence more broadly.

Human beings are extremely visual, and we recall and recognize things through visual associations. This is due to 'pictorial superiority effect'which relates to the brain's ability to retain visual information much easier than text:

Given this, your brands visual identity should be consistent across all your social media profiles, tying into that cognitive response.

Consider visual consistency across:

Visme has a handy feature which stores your brand identity elements, and aenables your team to then apply these visual cues and motifs to every asset that they create. This will save you time by enabling you and your team to apply your branded visual elements to all your creatives with just a few clicks.

Social media marketing is interruptive. People generally come to social platforms to see the latest updates from their friends and family,and your product links and promotions interrupt their activity.

This is where a strong and consistent brand identity can help people more comfortable and confident when finding themselves on your page.

Think about every click that your social media update or ad is going to drive to your site. Why would this social media user want to continue interacting with your page, instead of clicking off to continue browsing their social media feed?

For example, in this Instagram ad, UPRIGHT uses the same visual elements in both the ad creative and the linked landing page:

By maintaining consistency, you're not only reinforcing your branding, but you're also providing more assurance to users that they've clicked through on what exactly they were after, while it also ensures a less disruptive experience.

Content repurposing is one of the most effective ways to create cross-channel brand recognizability, but instead of just re-using the same content across as many channels as you can, consider a more creative approach.

Each platform is different, and the ways in which people engage on each also varies, which means that you need to align with each app's best practices to maximize your content appeal.

For example, you might:

The more assets you create, the more unique updates you'll be able to put together, with each driving more awareness for your brand, and more traffic to your site. And because you've used your original article as the foundation, people clicking your social media links will likely feel more comfortable interacting with your site.

There are multiple tools that can help you build an effective content repackaging strategy, including Canva, Visme and Haikudeck.

If you need help coming up with ideas on how to expand and repurpose your content, you can also run a quick search in Text Optimizer. The tool uses semantic analysis to suggest unique angles for you to use in your content repurposing strategy:

Marketing personalization means providing different user experiences based on each person's previous interactions with your brand.

There are various ways to use personalization for your social media sales funnel. One of the most obvious methods is using the Facebook Pixel, which captures data on people who visit and interact with your website, then enabling you to reach out to them with more personalized promotions based on their specific actions.

Finteza is another marketing personalization tool, which enables you to adjust your calls-to-action based on the traffic source, location, and previous interaction of your users.

Social media platforms can drive brand recognizability, and direct sales -and social media marketing is at full strength when used for both concurrently. Think of each social media function and update in terms of your brands identity: How will it contribute to my overall brand image and how will it help grow my brand awareness?

Considering the bigger picture can have a big impact in boosting your branding and sales efforts.

See the original post:
5 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Branding and Sales Efforts - Social Media Today

For the last few years, Facebook and Instagram have dominated advertisers media mix. But recently, media buyers say ad spend on social medias biggest platforms has started to deteriorate.

Its more of a slow leak than a mass exodus, with client ad spend dedicated to Facebook and Instagram recently declining by 5-10% over the last year, according to Hallie Wyckoff, group director of social media at Wunderman Thompson Commerce.

Its happening now because of the pandemic, in all honesty, Wyckoff said. There were so many changes in marketing budgets last year where a lot of brands pulled back for a bit or had to be more lean with what they were willing to spend.

For Wunderman Thompson, with clients including major marketers like Unilever and Coca-Cola, ad dollars that may have gone to Facebook and Instagram have recently shifted to alternative platforms like TikTok or to efforts to improve or build out social commerce opportunities, as well as working with influencers, Wyckoff said.

Given Facebook and Instagrams scale, targeting capabilities and range in ad unit offerings, advertisers and media buyers predict it wont lose its crown any time soon. In fact, the platforms ad business is holding up for now, per previous Digiday reporting. However, the platforms flaws like waning interest from younger audiences, rising cost per impression and mounting data privacy issues are giving way to challengers like TikTok, Snap and even Pinterest.The flaws have gotten worse because the pandemic has made for an uncertain future and constant shifts in peoples shopping habits, which has advertisers looking for alternatives.

When asked for comment, a Facebook spokesperson pointed to the platforms Q2 2021 earnings call, in which Facebook reported strong business growth and noting that total revenue for Q2 was $29.1 billion, which is a 56% year-over-year increase. According to chief financial officer David Wehner, speaking during Facebooks most recent earnings call on July 28, the growth was predominately driven by verticals that performed well over the course of the pandemic, like online commerce and consumer packaged goods.

At least one marketing agency, Tinuiti, which Facebook pointed to as an example of increasing investment on its platforms, hiked its year-over-year spending on Facebook and Instagram alongside increased ad spend for platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest.

Weve seen this increase 37% YoY on Facebook and 75% YoY on IG (24% growth in Q1 and 53% growth in Q1, respectively). And were on pace to spend 61% more on Facebook and Instagram than we did in all of 2019, said Avi Ben-Zvi, vp of paid social at Tinuiti.

But according to Pew Research, Facebook and other major social media platforms growth stalled over the past five years. Facebooks brand reputation suffered last year after advertisers boycotted the platform with the Stop Hate for Profit campaign. And new research from analytics and insight company Skai, shows that social media CPMs have been steadily increasing, up about 12% from 2019. According to Skai, CPMs hovered around $5.71 this time in 2019 and are now at $6.37.

Also buffeting the social giant is the fact that it is facing a serious challenge in Apples data privacy changes, noted Katya Constantine, CEO of performance marketing shop DigiShop Media via email.

The biggest cause has certainly been because iOS14 removed some of the most powerful targeting options, she said. Also, I imagine that some of the usage has also slipped as the world came out of the pandemic and that removed some inventory and drove up CPMs.

Elijah Schneider, CEO of social marketing agency Modifly, backs up Constantines claims.

Advertisers are starting to lose trust that consumers lost a long time ago, Schneider said.

And challenger brands have seen the writing on the wall. Modifly, with a client list that includes startups and direct to consumer brands like Super Coffee drink brand and Beam wellness brand, has seen clients press for serious ad dollar diversification since late last year, said Schneider who added that in 2019 and 2020 at least 80% of Modifly client spend was in Facebook products. At present, that ad spend now sits at 55% on Facebook and 45% on alternative social platforms, like TikTok and Snapchat.(Schneider didnt share what these breakdowns looked like in actual dollar figures.)

For brands that are really focused on Gen Z, Facebook is part of the mix. But theyre not necessarily the dominant part of the mix, said Noah Mallin, chief strategy officer at IMGN Media, where client ad spend on Facebook and Instagram has decreased from 95% of budget in prior years to 75% at present. Theyre much more evenly matched for established big brands where Gen Z is a segment among many, he added.

In a rush to diversify ad spend, advertisers have divided their digital dollars up amongst everything from alternative social media platforms to digital tools to support a brick-and-mortar presence. Theres no clear kingpin coming to dethrone Facebook and Instagram, although many marketers see promise in TikTok given the platforms scale and massive audience.

If nothing else, the decline continues to push along the industry-wide conversation around theneed to diversify media spend, making for healthy competition among the platforms and more viable options for media buyers, Mallin said.

I dont necessarily see [Facebook and Instagram] diminishing to nothing, Mallin said. But if you want to have a smart mix and youve got the budget for it, youd want to have Twitch in there and you want to have TikTok in there too.

Thats not to say Facebook couldnt make a few changes to delay its decline and this could just be the latest interaction of changes in the social media landscape, marketers say. When it comes to digital and social media, that landscape is always changing, meaning advertisers will always need to adapt. This pandemic made flexibility a priority, said Wunderman Thompsons Wyckoff.

If we start to see CPMs or CPCs go down, you might see an influx back to Facebook and Instagram, she said. Its an ever-evolving world and marketers are going to continue to pay attention and see whats best.

‘Advertisers are starting to lose trust’: Why media buyers say Facebook is losing its grip on social ad spend

Excerpt from:
Advertisers are starting to lose trust: Why media buyers say Facebook is losing its grip on social ad spend - Digiday

Theres a lot of advice out there on how to grab peoples attention, but theres one aspect of marketing that Robert Katai thinks isnt talked about as often: maintaining their attention. The solution, he says, is a combination of content strategy and positioning.

Based in Romania, Katai is known for his podcasts and speeches covering the gamut of content marketing. A product manager at online graphic design platform Creatopy, he also works with clients as a freelance content strategist, and it is in this capacity that he was recommended to TechCrunch via our growth marketer survey. (If you have growth marketers to recommend, please fill out the survey!)

Katai was recommended by multiple Romanian clients and contacts who vouched for his content strategy prowess, so we were curious to know more. Who is he? And is his advice applicable beyond borders?

The short answer is yes. In a freewheeling interview, Katai spoke about how content marketing should integrate with users daily lives, and how content can be repurposed across multiple formats. He also shared some insights on the booming Romanian startup ecosystem.

Editors note: The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

TC: How do you help your clients as a freelancer?

Robert Katai: One of the two things Im doing is that Im helping clients with creating their content strategy based on their objective. You can get web traffic, but you can also create a message and build the brand. You dont have to start at the beginning; You can rebuild the brand later.

For instance, Im working with a Romanian outsourcing company that pioneered this industry in our city of Cluj-Napoca. But lately, they started to realize that they should be more attractive from a sales as well as from an employee perspective. So I worked with them to perform an internal audit to see why employees love the company, why they leave, why they stay and what they want from the company.

Image Credits: Robert Katai.

From there, I got to the idea that they needed to reshape their brand to not just have people notice them but to also maintain their attention. And here comes the content: I started an ambassador program, because there are people outside of the company who love it.

I also recommended they create an internal print magazine. Its a very well-designed magazine that their 200 to 300 employees can take home and read. Its not just about the job; its also about their hobbies, things to do in the city and some thought leadership articles that can inspire them to have a better life.

Whats the second way you are helping clients?

Apart from content strategy, Im working with clients on their positioning for their audience, community and market, but also sometimes in terms of employer branding. Content can be a bridge between the two ways I am helping clients, because Im using a lot of content marketing here and not focusing only on performance or growth marketing hacks. Im helping them understand that if they want to establish a memorable, long-lasting brand in the market, they have to make content marketing part of their life.

If they want to reposition themselves in the industry, they need to say: Okay, these are the kinds of content we have to create for our goals; who will amplify the content, who will connect with us, and who will consume the content. Today, content creation is free everybody can do it. The hard part is how you distribute and amplify that. And heres how I can help the startups: Make a big piece of content and repurpose it in several small pieces; get it in front of people so that the brand is on their minds.

Have you worked with a talented individual or agency who helped you find and keep more users?

Respond to our survey and help other startups find top growth marketers they can work with!

How can brands achieve that top-of-mind status?

We all know that there are four kinds of content: Text, video, pictures and audio. These four formats never die. The platform can change, but the format will stay the same. A video can be an Instagram Reel, a documentary or something else, but its a video. The same goes for a photo. So the content strategy Im working with is how brands can use that content ecosystem.

When I work with my clients and also with Creatopy where Im a product marketer I recommend them to use content to build their brand and be visible to their users every day in their feeds. Every morning, when their customers are waking up and checking their phones, they dont open a newspaper. They will open Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, and maybe then when they get out of the bathroom and make coffee, they will open YouTube and connect with Alexa.

I really believe that brands should create content that can just be in the mind of the user. Snackable content, Reels, TikTok It doesnt matter what we call it.

You also talked about repurposing content. Can you explain that?

Lets take the interview youve done with Peep Laja. You could have recorded it as a video. And he covered several topics, so you could have several short videos 30 seconds, three minutes, whatever. You can publish them daily on your site or social media channels with a comment that says, Heres the link to the full article. But remember that on LinkedIn, that link will need to go into the comments section, not the post itself.

You can also have a longer video that you can publish on social media or on Wistia, asking people to give their email so now you also have subscribers.

Then the second type of content you can create is audio. You already have it from the recording. You dont have to publish the full 45-minute conversation, but you can have a five-minute audio clip, and again link to the articles.

Now we have video and audio, but what if you also designed quotes with his headshot and messaging? If its part of a series, you should also give it a name.

And its not just motivational; its educational, too, so you should take these quotes and create carousels for Instagram and LinkedIn. The first slide should grab attention it can be a question. The second slide can be a link to the interview so that even if people dont click it, it will be on their minds. Then you can have slides with insights.

The last slide will always be a call to action: Asking people to share, comment or save it for later its the new currency on Instagram! And once you have your Instagram carousel, you create a PDF and publish it on LinkedIn.

So now you have five formats of content from one piece of content.

Wow, how much do we owe you?! Just kidding, we actually do some of that for the Equity podcast, for instance. Now, what other advice do you have for startups?

Im a big advocate of documenting the process. Just imagine if Mark Zuckerberg had done that and you could read how he launched Facebook and so on. Noah Kagan is doing that right now. I think startup founders should do it, not just from the PR and marketing perspective, but for their audience. Even if your audience is not paying for your product right now, they are staying with you and giving your brand an essence in the industry.

Just think about what Salesforce is doing right now: They launched Salesforce+, which is like Netflix for B2B. Its to get the attention of professionals and also maintain it, and I believe this is the currency of the big companies today: Peoples attention.

Do you work with any startups in Romania? And do you have any impressions to share on the Romanian startup ecosystem?

Yes, I help a few Romanian startups with their content marketing and positioning. Sometimes other startups email me with questions, so I help them, too, but I dont charge for email advice. I work with the ones that are looking for a long-term or project-based collaboration.

Startup founders here in Romania are curious, and very courageous to experiment even if it wont necessarily work. And Romanian startups are very smart. For instance, Planable is doing a great job with content, social media and positioning. We also have social media analytics company Socialinsider, which this year launched virtual events, and TypingDNA, which wants to get rid of needing to log in with passwords and was founded by a former colleague.

I also found that the founders here work harder than their teams and dont just leave others do the work at least the ones I have met. We have several startup events in Romania: How to Web, and Techsylvania here in Transylvania.

I dont like this name, but people say that Cluj-Napoca is the Silicon Valley of Romania. Lots of startups have been launched here, but the city that is getting more and more traction is Oradea, where the bet on education is paying off.

(If you are a tech startup founder or investor in Cluj or Oradea, fill in TechCrunchs European Cities Survey 2021.)

Here is the original post:
Romanian marketing expert Robert Katai explains how to get the most out of your content - TechCrunch