Brands on social media in 2014: the good, the bad and the ugly
Brands cant achieve social media success by jumping on the Kardashian bandwagon. Photograph: Billy Farrell Agency/Rex
Here we are at the end of 2014 and it falls to me to review the good, the bad and the just plain ugly social media efforts of the year gone by. What fun.
Before we dive in its important to note how much the social media landscape has changed over the past 12 months. Organic (read: free) social media is a thing of the past. If you want to achieve genuine reach in social, you need to stump up the cash. And thats the short version.
With that in mind lets take a look back over the last year of social media marketing and wallow in the wins, losses and wastes of time that appeared in 2014.
The good news is that there was indeed a lot of good social media marketing in 2014. 2014 was the year when integrated marketing became a real thing.
Over in the US, 57% of ads during this years Superbowl wore the hashtag love bite of their social media marketing mistress loud and proud. Thats great for the US, but what about here in the UK? The closest thing we have to the Superbowl (in sheer size of viewership and ads) is probably the X-Factor. Unfortunately, only a handful of brands tend to take that kind of media buy seriously so lets compare it to the next best thing: Christmas.
From #ChristmasIsForSharing to #SpecialBecause and the excellent #WinChristmas you cant move for social media signposts on this years batch of Christmas ads which means finally, big brands are taking online conversation seriously.
As great brands become the arbiters of great content (lets be honest, as much as the Sainsburys ad is a cinematic masterpiece its hardly embodies the Live well for less brand promise) its important that they create conversation anchors to pull together online fans and advocates. The humble hashtag is that conversation anchor and in 2015, therell be more oh so much more of this all year round.
This section is brought to you under the banner of celebrities biting off more than they can chew. Id like to draw your attention to the potential pitfalls of scheduling your social media posts way too far in advance (and not checking in on them regularly). When Joan Rivers posted about her brand new iPhone 6 from six foot under quite a few fans and friends were understandably quite surprised. By all means enjoy a partnership with a popular celebrity but if said famous persons clogs decide to pop, you may want to consider cancelling that scheduled post.
Adding some light to this darkness we have Rita Ora who, after asking for a mere 100,000 RTs in exchange for an early record launch quickly dashed to claiming a hacking after only 2000 RTs appeared.
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Brands on social media in 2014: the good, the bad and the ugly