Mediaboss Marketing

AR is set to become a much bigger focus in the coming years, with the big tech companies investing big in AR tools, and new devices like AR wearablesset to hit the consumer market in the near future.

That will open up whole new possibilities in regards to marketing, communications, discovery, etc.

And Snapchat is also looking to be a key player in this next shift - as Snap notes:

"Now is the moment for Augmented Reality. Consumers are excited about it, and brands have a unique chance to boost engagement, elevate consumer experiences and increase revenues. Today, there are more than 100 million consumers shopping with AR online and in stores."

To get a better understanding of the potential for AR,Snapchat recently teamed with Deloitte Digital to interview over 15,000 consumers across 15 nations, in order to measure the top consumer AR trends, and what they might mean for the future of gaming, shopping, communication,media and entertainment, and more.

And there are some important insights of note - you can read Snapchat's full 'Consumer AR Global Report 2021'here, but in this post, we'll take a look at some of the key highlights.

First off, Snapchat notes that AR usage, based on current adoption trends, is set to become hugely influential over the next few years.

As per Snapchat:

"AR adoption is tracking with the mobile usage boom we saw in the mid 2000s: By 2025, nearly 75% of the global population and almost all smartphone users will be frequent AR users."

That underlines the significance of AR development. While it still feels like a way off, and it may not seem like the technology that we primarily use, right now, to add digital masks and dog's ears to our faces in video clips will eventually become a major influence over how we interact, in a huge range of ways, the data shows that it is indeed moving in that direction.

AR will eventually play a key role in how we do almost everything, in a connectivity sense. And that will be the next major shift for marketing.

In more specific terms, Snapchat's research shows that AR is already influencing people's shopping process, with more than 100 million people currently shopping through the use of AR-enabled processes.

The expanded potential of these tools, including virtual try-on options and digital product placement (like 3D visualizations for furniture) in the home, will build on this, making AR an even bigger consideration for more businesses over time.

That becomes even more significant when you also consider the rise of eCommerce, which has seen a significant boost as a result of the pandemic. Indeed, Snap's research also shows that more consumers are now finding value in AR as an assurance and demonstration tool.

Which adds another wrinkle to the growing use of AR for digital product promotions and display, again pointing to broadening utility, for many, many brands.

In essence, based on these trends, it's not hard to see AR becoming the essential add-on component for online shopping, which will then help to form habitual behaviors that leads to increased AR adoption in even more applications and processes.

As Snap notes:

"Consumers continuously expect more personalized and engaging experiences that enable them to interact with the world. The companies that embrace change can become dominant industry players those that dont, fall behind competitors and sink."

And if you can't see the potential rising as yet, you soon will. Snapchat has also shared this timeline for the growth in AR adoption - going from 'Tech' to 'Toy' and eventually 'Totality', in regards to its expanded usage.

There is a heap of potential here, and Snapchat's AR report outlines it in an easy-to-follow way, with the added insight of consumer usage and interest rates to underline each point.

Again, it may not seem like AR will become an all encompassing tool, but the trend notes do point to this next stage, and when fully-functional AR glasses become available to consumers, that next shift will happen fast.

Best to get ahead of the game now, and ensure you're prepared.

You can read Snapchat's full, 74-page 'Consumer AR Global Report 2021'here.

Excerpt from:
Snapchat Publishes New Report on Rising AR Adoption Trends, and What They'll Mean for Marketers - Social Media Today

Jackson, Mississippi April 30, 2021 The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on April 29, announced $31 million in funding to advance restoration work and improve water quality in the Gulf Coast states impacted by theDeepwater Horizonoil spill. The funds will support three priority programs and related project work approved by theGulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration (RESTORE) Councilas part of a multi-year process of collaborative planning and public engagement throughout the Gulf.

USDAs Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), along with state forestry agencies in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi will leverage the funds to restore forest health, improve coastal ecosystems and provide technical and financial assistance to private landowners.

For more than a decade, the Forest Service and NRCS have worked side-by-side with private landowners and state agencies to support Gulf recovery efforts through an all-lands approach, said Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen. Our continued support in these collaborative projects will help to generate lasting ecosystem improvements and ensure clean water for millions of Americans downstream.

Most of the land in the Gulf Coast is privately owned, so working lands are pivotal to restoring habitat and improving water quality, said Mississippi State Conservationist Kurt Readus. Working side-by-side with farmers, ranchers and forest landowners to improve their operations enables us to take better care of our natural resources, including our coastal ecosystems.

Healthy forests improve water quality and quantity by refilling groundwater aquifers and filtering rainfall and flowing water, said Joe Fox President of the National Association of State Foresters and Arkansas State Forester. Nationwide, and in the Gulf states, forested land is primarily owned by private landowners who are most likely to manage their forests with technical and financial assistance provided by state forestry agencies. To enhance the health of the Gulf watershed, the Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi forestry agencies will use proven social marketing techniques to double their outreach to private landowners, who will in turn, implement best management practices that sustain healthy forests for decades to come.

The investment in these priority projects is part of theFunded Priorities List (FPL) #3bannounced Thursday by the RESTORE Council.

The USDA funded activities through FPL #3b include:

Read this article:
USDA, RESTORE Council to Invest $31 Million for Priority Restoration Work in Gulf States Impacted by The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill - Picayune Item -...

This is slightly unexpected.

According to a new report from Axios,TikTok is currently testing a new tool that would enable brands to recruit employees on the platform, and promote their internal workplace culture to potential candidates via TikTok clips.

As explained by Axios:

"The pilot program is designed to help people find jobs on TikTok and connect with companies looking to find candidates. It's also meant to help brands use TikTok as a recruitment channel."

Axios says that the new recruitment platform, as it currently stands, is not integrated within TikTok itself, but is accessible via a separate web page, which can then be linked back to the TikTok app. Through this process, brands are able to post jobs that can be shared through their TikTok clips, while users are able to share a TikTok video resume to apply, rather than a traditional document.

The company is currently testing the tool with a beta group of companies.

It's an interesting development, a sort of new take on LinkedIn for younger users, which provides direct connection via the medium that they're increasingly comfortable with.

And it actually aligns with broader usage trends, because as reported by The Washington Post back in March, TikTok is already becoming an active space for career guidance and advice.

As noted by The Washington Post:

"TikTok, widely known for 15-second videos of cranberry juice-drinking skateboarders andgroup dance challenges,is fast emerging as a force in the job search ecosystem at a time when unemployment remains high, a new generation looks for their first jobs and pandemic isolation leads to hours of mindless scrolling."

Which seems unlikely, but also somewhat logical at the same time, particularly for those organizations that are seeking candidates with social media skills. Which, given the rise of eCommerce over the past 12 months, is a lot.

Indeed, according to a recent survey SkyNova,TikTok is the social platform that business owners currently want to crack the most, with the rising app still leading the download charts, and on track to become the next billion-user app. With that in mind, it makes sense that businesses would consider utilizing TikTok for recruiting for such roles - yet even beyond that, users are increasingly engaging with career development-related posts within the app.

According to TikTok, videos using the hashtag #careeradvice generate more than 80 million video views a day per day, while career advisers like Tessa White are making use of the short, engaging clips to provide actionable tips.

Really, it's just speaking the evolving language of modern web users. Digital consumption trends clearly show an ever-increasing adoption of video content, and short video content, in particular, is on the rise, be it via Snapchat Discover's episodic, vertically-aligned presentation, and now, TikTok clips, which enable creators of all types to condense a lot of info down into easily digestible, engaging posts.

But what's particularly interesting here is the expanding use case for the app. When TikTok first began, it was all goofy dance clips and Vine-like visual gags, or responses to internet memes that served little value outside of shallow entertainment. Which may well be enough within itself to sustain the app over time, but newer usage trends like this show that TikTok's user demographic is changing, and that people are finding increased value, and opportunity, via the app's quick, creative clips.

TikTok's own data underlines the same, with older users engaging with hashtags like #parenting (4b views) for example, and #momlife (20b), facilitating new use cases, and new, potential marketing value, for the app.

The adoption of career advice clips further highlights this expansion, which likely points to there being a lot more to TikTok than you might think, while the platform's highly attuned, highly personalized algorithms are also helping to fuel these new shifts, again broadening your TikTok horizons.

In essence, you can't take TikTok at face value, and if you think you know what it's all about, it may be time to reassess.

Spending some time in the app, searching by hashtags relevant to your business, and your niche, could uncover a whole other subculture of short clips that you never knew existed.

And soon, it might just help you find your next best job candidates.

See the rest here:
TikTok is Exploring New Job Listing and Recruitment Tools - Social Media Today

Sprout Social has published its latest listing of the best times to post to each of the major social media platforms, which is based on the company's 20,000+ customer base, who use the platform to schedule and post online.

By analyzing this data, Sprout has determined the best times to post based on when this content is seeing the highest engagement rates -which is slightly different to the information you'll get from on-platform insights, as those reports are generally based on when users are active in-app.

That could make Sprout's report a more accurate indicator of the best times to post for optimal engagement - but it is always worth noting with these 'best times'reports that the information being presented is generic, and based on a broad data set. The best times for you to post will be relative to your unique audience and their habits, but even so, data overviews like this can help to guide your posting strategy, and help you tap into your best posting cadence quicker to improve your results.

Here's what Sprout found in analyzing the data from last year - and one other key proviso: all the times listed refer to Central Time Zone (CST).

These trends would likely hold in other regions as well, but it is worth clarifying this note ahead of time.

As you can see in this chart, Sprout Social says that the best times to post to Facebook are on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, between 9am and 1pm. Monday between 9am and 12pm also looks pretty good, so there's a range of good engagement times to experiment with.

Sprout says that the weekends are the worst time to post -which makes some sense, in terms of users looking to spend their time doing other things. But then again, you would also expect that people would have more free time, and be more responsive on weekend days.

Not so, according to the data, which is largely in line with what Sprout also found in its report on the same last year.

I mean, that does also run counter to a report published by Blog2Social earlier this year, so you can take it or leave it -but again, this is based on engagement stats among Sprout's 20k users. It could help provide some guidance for your approach.

Sprout says that Tuesdays between 11 am and 2 pm, and Monday through Friday from 11 am to 12pm are the best times to post to IG.

Like Facebook, the engagement on weekends looks a lot worse - but it would be also interesting to note whether the data here is skewed by business users of Sprout Social who don't post as much on weekends. If they're not posting, they won't be seeing engagement, and that could seemingly influence the results, which may make weekends look less engaging than they actually are.

Sprout says that Wednesdays between 9 am and 3 pm are the best days to post your tweets, while Tuesday to Thursday between 9am and 11 am is also a high engagement time.

Twitter's stream moves faster, so you'll likely be posting multiple times a day, and it'd be interesting to match this data up to your own to see how that impacts your approach. If you see more engagement at specific periods, should you post more in those few hours, rather than spreading your tweets out over the course of the day?

Really, Twitter strategy comes down to experimentation - but again, these notes may provide some insight.

And again, weekends look bad for posting on Twitter.

Sprout says that Tuesday through to Thursday between 9am and 12pm are the best times to post to LinkedIn, while again, the weekends are no good.

Which is interesting, because LinkedIn itself recently reported that Monday is the best day of the week to send an InMail, which is not the same as general feed engagement, of course, but you would expect to see some crossover there.

Still, these are times that Sprout Social users are seeing engagement, which points to when people are likely more active, and ready to engage with social posts.

Again, this may be highly relevant, or it may be nothing, as it does come down to your individual brand audience, and their specific usage behaviors. But if you are looking to map out a more effective strategy, these notes could provide a good starting point to begin your experiments. You can then optimize your approach relative to your own data findings and insights.

Sprout Social's full report also includes industry breakdowns and other trend notes which may help in your planning. You can read the full report here.

See the original post:
New Report Looks at Best Times to Post to Each Platform, Based on Insights from 20k Users - Social Media Today

Its been quite a year, hasnt it? While some companies have flourished, others have fallen by the wayside, unable to compete in quickly changing (and unexpected) market conditions. So we wondered, what are companies doing to survive and thrive online in these difficult times?

Our research and experience with customers shows us that companies that benchmark their social advertising efforts against the competition are able to pivot quickly to address shifts in consumer behavior, customer demand, and competitive campaigns. But its not always easy.

Recent research published by BrandTotal gives us some indication of that. For example, in a recent survey of 500 U.S.-based CMOs conducted by Pollfish on behalf of BrandTotal in April 2021, 87% of respondents said that while they had a tool to measure the impact of their creative performance, only 37% of respondents actually benchmarked their creatives against rival brands advertising creative with a creative intelligence tool.

So, how can you know how your company is performing in social advertising, especially when it comes to brand metrics such as share of voice, consumer sentiment, consumer engagement, share of topic, and other data? Lets take a closer look at this important strategy, starting with key challenges.

Why Is So Hard to Optimize Media and Creative when Advertising on Social Media?

There are several reasons that make strategic social advertising so difficult:

How to Benchmark Against Rival Brands to Improve Your Social Advertising

We here at BrandTotal believe that to optimize your social advertising strategy, you must be able to directly address the key challenges listed above, and one way to do that is with competitive social advertising intelligence, which enables you to:

Tools like BrandTotal can act as the one stop for all competitive social ads paired with real (and real-time) consumer response on that ad or campaign. With unparalleled campaign granularity and 100% visibility into paid social dark advertising, you get third-party validation of your social performance benchmarked against the competition. Shorten the time to ad optimization from an average of 14 days to 24 hours. And no more relying on dubious stats from social channels that dont correlate to anything else. Moreover, such a tool helps you identify better creative so you can produce optimized content, faster and shorten time to creative by 50%.

Doesnt that sound like a smarter way to manage your brands social advertising? To see the power of BrandTotal, the company has recently released dozens of industry research reports based on the data we collect. In BrandTotals new monthly Social Competitive Intelligence Snapshots, we reveal key trends and benchmarks to help you outsmart the competition while optimizing your brand ROI. Get an in-depth review of the competitive marketing in your industry to understand whos winning at paid social across channels and which channels are most successful at driving SOV and engagement.

A Crystal Ball Looking Into the Future

While its been a rocky year, to say the least, we are heartened by the fact that many businesses have pivoted to a strategic approach to social advertising to help them stand up and stand out against their rival brands and better connect with their consumer audiences. As the world returns to a new, new normal, advertisers will continue to move toward social commerce and direct-to-consumer marketing to engage their potential customers and create loyal fans. And when they do, BrandTotal will be there to help those brands understand their competitions strategy and uncover whitespace opportunities to win. Heres to the future!

Link:
BrandTotal on the Importance of a Strategic Approach to Social Advertising - OCNJ Daily