Lifetime, Samsung test potential to streamline Twitter?s earned media opportunities
Lifetime and Samsung Canada made it easier for Twitter users to share promoted content and drive organic conversations as two of the brands involved in early testing of a new conversational ad format that was launched yesterday.
Looking to build on its strength as a driver of earned media for brands, Twitter is taking the Promoted Tweet to the next stage by integrating call-to-action buttons with customizable hashtags that encourage engagement. Lifetime and Samsung grabbed at the opportunity to drive more meaningful conversation and drive engagement with their photos and videos.
?For marketers, and specifically for social media marketers, this is a big deal,? said Thom Jordan, CEO of Ping Mobile. ?The most credible form of marketing comes straight from the people we know and trust.
?Eighty three percent of online respondents say they trust the recommendations of friends and family, according to the Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Report,? he said. ?The holy grail for marketers is to encourage consumers personally promote, recommend, or influence the reach of a brand or campaign via word-of-mouth or social media.
?How effortlessly a consumer is able to do this has always been a challenge for the marketer. A second concern for the marketer is the ability to control, or more accurately influence, the message or recommendation to consumer makes to others.?
Customized engagement
Promoted Tweets typically include compelling images or videos as well as hashtags intended to drive Retweets, likes and follows. Conversational ads build on this foundation by including call to action buttons with customizable hashtags.
When a button is tapped, a pre-populated brand message, creative and hashtag buttons appear. Consumers can personalize a message and share it. Those who do, receive a thank you message from the brand. The new Tweet appears in consumers? timelines and includes the brand?s original photo or video.
Samsung Electronics Canada was one of the beta partners testing conversational ads, jumping at the opportunity to initiate more meaningful conversations and insure its social media strategy stays ahead of the curve.
Lifetime tested the conversational video ad unit to support the premiere of Pitch Slapped on Jan. 5. The Tweet featured voting buttons encouraging fans to engage with the creative.
Extending brands? presence
Twitter is typically one of the platforms involved when videos go viral as users share their favorite content to their followers. The new conversational ad format is meant to help brands foster earned media by leveraging this viral nature.
As Twitter looks to insure its ongoing importance to brands, it must help them generate brand influence, create earned media and extend their presence across the platform.
The new ad format is also one of the ways that Twitter is focused on making it easier for consumers to engage and address complaints that it is hard to use.
Twitter is also focused on boosting the platform?s relevance as a customer service tool as it looks to enhance relationships with brands.
For example, recent research from Twitter shows users who received personal responses from airlines on the social network were more willing to recommend the company and shell out extra money for a ticket in the future, underscoring the social application?s cachet among travelers (see story).
?For brands and marketers, the new capability to leverage here is using multiple hashtags for consumers to choose from as a form of polling,? Mr. Jordan said. ?Depending on which hashtag a consumer chooses, the brand can offer a different automated tweet with different content.
?This will enable brands to leverage campaign ?branching? via each separate hashtag call-to-action, providing a different tweet and experience for the consumer and friends,? he said.
?This new format can also be used to create a sense of interactivity and participation between the consumer and brand ? not random sharing.?