Social Networking

The Instagram Ikea Catalog.

here is an interesting use of Instagram in terms of advertising without feeling quite so much like an ad or an online catalog.

Ikea Russia created an “Instagram Catalog Website” for a 34 piece designer collection of products. The Instagram account used the tagging feature to promote items and encouraged followers to share images and videos of their own Ikea PS 2014 products using the same hash tags. The campaign snagged over 15,000 followers in less than a week. With the “Instagram Catalog Website” functioning much like a microsite, the cross linking feature allowed each product to build out it’s own Instagram microsite for each product. The social sharing users generate with their own photos tagged with the product’s Instagram name allowed the campaign to go viral.

Oh and the cost was marginal for Ikea Russia.

The Social Media Life Cycle.

The image below from the Social Media Center provides an insight into the process of converting content and conversations – via transactions – into recommendations. The graphic shows that the real power is found in earned media. With 92 percent of trust recommendations coming from friends and relatives. In addition to that 92 percent, another 70 percent of social media content viewers trust online reviews by other consumers according to Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising Report 2012. If you do anything with social media in the world of marketing and advertising, the image below is worth taking a look at.

Vertasium Explains the Facebook “Like” Fraud.

Anyone that knows me, knows that my personal engagement with Facebook has wained over the last few years as the social media giant has grown into a giant ad revenue giant. The video below from Veritasium has drawn almost a million views in the last two days. Why? because it punches a gaping hole in Facebook’s pay for “Likes” system and the way Facebook’s pay to play promotions work. If you are a marketer, advertiser, or anyone that uses Facebook as a platform to engage with your target audience, you should watch this. What Veritasium points out is hard to deny, and the point they make about audience engagement effects you more than you know.