How To Run A Successful Multi-Platform Hashtag Campaign

Now that pretty much every social media platform supports hashtags, more and more companies are running campaigns either centred around a hashtag, or featuring one. Brands feature hashtags at the end of adverts, TV shows feature hashtags during the credits and celebrities use hashtags to advertise their appearances. In every instance, hashtags are used to drive conversation about a particular topic, but they can be used for a plethora of other reasons.

Hashtags can be used to advertise new products and campaigns, to run competitions and contests, to ask fans for their input about a company development, and to associate a brand with a popular news item. The best thing about hashtag campaigns, however, is they can be completely free. Of course, the more you (strategically) spend on a campaign, the more you will reap its rewards. Here are a few pieces of advice to follow when planning your hashtag campaigns.

Promote It:

• If you’re about to run a hashtag campaign then make sure the public know about it. Feature your hashtag in print and media advertising, or run a larger campaign with a featured hashtag. By promoting your hashtag as widely as possible, you can make sure that people will start talking about it.

• Make sure that you promote your hashtag campaigns across all the hashtag-compatible social media sites. Even if you’re running a hashtag competition on Instagram, you can still drive conversation about it on Facebook and Twitter, even if people cannot enter the competition from those sites.

• Of course, in the case of hashtags, Twitter started it all. If you’re planning on running a large hashtag campaign on Twitter, it’s a good idea to take advantage of some of the site’s advertising features to ensure a wide audience.

Make It Interactive:

• Use a hashtag that will encourage debate – a phrase that invites the public to give their opinion or make a joke. For example, Edge Shave Gel ran a campaign on Twitter asking users to say what irritated them using the hashtag #soirritating. The hashtag trended on Twitter as hundreds of users wrote quips and comments.

• You don’t even need to get involved in the conversation: Matalan advertised the hashtag #MatalanSummerTips on Twitter recently so that fans could exchange tips and hints on the site.

• You could run a picture or video campaign across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Vine, asking fans to post content around a specific hashtagged theme. Ben & Jerry’s ran the #CaptureEuphoria campaign on Instagram, inviting fans to post pictures of themselves enjoying ice cream. All the pictures were posted on a devoted microsite so that fans could view them.

• You can even engage with tweeps in innovative ways, gaining a wider audience in the process. A few weeks ago, Honda responded to a number of tweets containing the hashtag #WantNewCar with Vine videos. the campaign was very popular, catching the attention of a number of social media influencers in the process.

Be Topical:

• Create a hashtag campaign that is themed around a big event or news story. During Wimbledon, for example, sports brand adidas introduced two hashtags into the Twittersphere: #AllinforMurray and #Hitthewinner, the latter of which was also used by entrants for an online competition. #AllinforMurray was tweeted over 20,000 times during the weekend.

• People tweeted the #Hitthewinner hashtag in order to enter a competition: Murray’s fans could use the hashtag to play a real-time game during the match. To play, they had to first select an area of the court where they thought Andy would hit a winner, then tweet their guess before each set. Millions of people watched the tennis match, so, by providing fans with a way to interact during the game on Twitter, adidas ensured a large userbase. 

Give Them An Incentive:

• Create a competition where the applicants have to use a specific hashtag to enter, or one of a number of hashtags. Vodafone Netherlands recently launched #HashtagHolidays, rewarding followers with one of eight different holidays, each one based on a trending hashtag.

• Nissan recently ran a campaign which was interactive and gave competitors an incentive. Nissan asked fans to create micro-videos using the hashtag #VersaVid. They then featured some of the videos in a TV commercial, rewarding the makers of these videos with a $1000 Amazon Gift Card.

• You don’t always have to offer a big prize; instead, you can reward the best content by featuring it in a larger campaign. The best #CaptureEuphoria photos, for example, were featured on billboards and in magazines. Wendy’s is running a promotional Twitter campaign at the moment. The restaurant is creating videos featuring singer Nick Lachey and posting them online. Fans of the restaurant brand are being asked to tweet the hashtag #PretzelLoveSongs and Lachey is then incorporating these tweets into love songs about the new pretzel bacon cheeseburger. 

• You don’t always have to come up with your own hashtag either (though I suggest that you do). JELL-O recently ran a campaign using the popular hashtag #FML. The company gave small prizes to selected people who used the hashtag on Twitter. It is, however, difficult to tell how much JELL-O’s campaign permeated into the Twitter consciousness: with such a commonly used hashtag, it’s unlikely people would have associate JELL-O with #FML. 

Conclusion:
Every month, companies are thinking of new, innovative ways of using hashtags to promote their brands on social media. If you haven’t used hashtags yet, then I advise you start: introduce a hashtag to a campaign you are running currently, or incorporate a hashtag into a campaign you’re planning at the moment. If you’re new to hashtag campaigns, make sure that you experiment a little first by trying out hashtags on various platforms. A number of campaigns have gone awry because people didn’t check their hashtags, the most famous being, of course, Susan Boyle’s #susanalbumparty. The most important thing to remember, however, when you’re running a hashtag campaign, is to use the right hashtag: one that is relevant, catchy, unique and not too long.

How do you use hashtags to promote your brand on social media?

Pinterest Introduces Tracking To Make Site ‘A Bit More Personal’

On Friday, Pinterest announced that it was tracking its users' browser activity in order to provide them with a more personal experience on the site. 

A new ‘Edit Home Feed’ button has appeared on the home page, across all devices. There are two tabs on the ‘Edit Home Feed’ page: ‘Follow Boards’, where users can view boards based on what they have pinned themselves; and ‘Unfollow Boards’, where users can stop following boards they don’t have any interest in any more.

Pinterest will also suggest boards based on the sites users have visited recently, as long as they have a ‘Pin It’ button. Software Engineer Ke Chen gives an example in the updates announcement of when this feature might be useful:

So if you’re planning a party and have gone to lots of party sites recently, we’ll try to suggest boards to make your event a hit. You can learn more about personalized pins and boards in our Help Center or updated privacy policy.

Pinterest now supports Do Not Track, so users who don’t want their activity tracked by the site can adjust their account settings at any time.

What do you think of Pinterest’s update?

Ten Great Free Apps For Social Media Managers

Earlier this month, Facebook released its 2013 Q2 earnings report. In the last three months, Facebook earned $1.8 billion, an increase of 53% from last quarter. This boost in revenue is largely thanks to an increase in mobile advertising, which has raised 41% of Facebook’s ad revenue in Q2.

Mobile is becoming an increasingly important platform for social media managers. Every social media network has a number of apps to make managing social media profiles easier. Facebook, for example, has several, including Pages manager and Messenger.

Apart from all the apps owned by the big social media firms, there are dozens of apps that can help a social media manager to organise their day and create content for their pages. Here are ten great apps you might not have heard of and how they can help you manage your social media pages.

1. Drop Box

Drop Box is a secure cloud platform where you can save images, documents, spread sheets and videos, and then access them from any device.
If you take a photo on your phone that you want to edit on your computer, save it to Drop Box so that you can access it later.

The alternatives: Google Docs

2. Pho.to Lab

Pho.to Lab is a great app for social media managers looking for an image editing tool with capabilities beyond those of Instagram. With more than 500 different effects, Pho.to Lab lets you create photo montages, virtual postcards, personalised contact icons and animated photos. If you want to create an eye-catching, unique image to post on your company’s social media pages, Pho.to lab is the one for you.

The alternatives: Aviary, BeFunky

3. Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts is the brilliant video calling service from search giants Google. Unlike Skype, video conferencing on the service comes at no extra cost. Because Hangouts is a Google product, there are also a number of great add-ons to help improve your communication, such as YouTube video sharing. Using Hangouts you can call clients, hold meetings and conduct interviews. You can even store and post the videos on your other social media sites.

The alternatives: ooVoo Video, Skype

4. SoundCloud

SoundCloud is a fantastic site where you can upload all your podcasts and audio files, follow other users and share content – essentially, it’s a social media site for audio. You can even embed SoundCloud files on other websites. With the SoundCloud app, you can manage your audio files easily, just as you would on your desktop device.

The alternatives: there aren’t any, really

5. Feedly

Feedly is a great news aggregator app, with many calling it the natural successor to the recently demised Google Reader. Feedly is available across all platforms, so you can stay abreast of updates relevant to you and your company no matter where you are. If Feedly doesn’t suit your needs, the alternatives below also provide great services.

The alternatives: Pulse, Flipboard, Google Currents

6. Blogger

Maintaining an active blog is simple with the Blogger app. It isn’t very easy to write articles on the go, but if you need to edit a mistake or respond to a comment, the app can be extremely useful.

Of course, the alternative WordPress also has an app, so if you do most of your blogging on WordPress then download it instead.

The alternative: WordPress

7. Yelp

Yelp is the best online business directory out there, with information about hundreds of businesses accessible from any device. Create your own Yelp profile so that people can find your business.

If you need to contact a potential client or find their offices while on the go, I advise that you download Yelp onto your mobile device.

The alternative: Google Places

8. Evernote

Easy to use and absolutely free, Evernote is the best note taking app out there. Like Drop Box, Evernote saves all you work onto a cloud platform so you can access it from any device. If you don’t have a pen and paper handy, then Evernote is the perfect application to note down important information. Evernote can also help you stay abreast of all your tasks and appointments with to-do lists and notifications.

The alternatives: EasilyDo, Weave

9. Dragon Dictation

If you don’t have time to type, then Dragon Dictation is the app for you.

Dragon Dictation is the best of the new generation of speech recognition apps, allowing you to record your speech quickly and accurately.

The alternative: Listnote Speech

10. Vine

Alright, Vine might be a little bit obvious but it’s a great app nonetheless. Personally, I use it instead of Instagram Video, but it really is a matter of preference. With Vine, you can create fun and interesting videos to post onto Twitter, catching the attention of your Twitter audience. The best Vine videos often go viral, so it’s worth experimenting with.

The alternative: Instagram

What apps do you use to manage your social media pages?   

Royal Birth Trends On Twitter

At 4:24 p.m. yesterday evening, Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a baby boy.

The birth was officially announced later in the evening: a signed document recording the birth was placed on an easel just inside the gates of Buckingham Palace for the hundreds of excited onlookers and news reporters to see – or, rather, squint at.

A short time after, a more legible announcement of the news was posted on Twitter by the Clarence House Twitter account, the official London residence of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

The news of the royal issue spread quickly through Twitter and a number of hashtags were adopted by the adoring public. The hashtag #royalbaby has been tweeted around 1 million times, while overall mentions peaked at around 25,000 tweets per minute.

Twitter was also at the heart of conversation when The Duchess of Cambridge went into labour: there were just under 500,000 tweets mentioning the royal pregnancy in the hours after.

The official Instagram account of The British Monarchy did its part spreading the news of the baby’s birth, posting two images of the signed document: one as it was erected on an easel and one of the document itself.

How did you find out about the royal birth? What do you think he’ll be called?    

Why Social Media Is A Must For Your Business

For a long time, social media sites were only perceived as places where young people could stay in contact with one another: somewhere they could share their thoughts, photos and videos with their friends. Sites like Myspace and Bebo helped users connect with new people and keep in touch with their friends online, while also giving them a platform to express themselves.

After a few years at the top, however, Myspace and Bebo were replaced by new kid on the block Facebook. Facebook, a site designed so that Ivy League college students could create a profile and exchange messages, has become something far greater than its humble origins. Companies and brands quickly realised that they could set up their own profiles, just like the college students, allowing them to connect with Facebook’s millions of users. In 2007, only a year after Facebook went public, there were over 100,000 business pages on the site.

Now, Facebook has over 1 billion users and millions of company and brand pages. The site’s huge membership figures give companies a present and active audience, one they can reach and engage with promotions, and even interact with easily. Companies can use Facebook to keep fans and customers up-to-date with new products, or even to run competitions and contests.

There are a number of other social media sites that provide businesses with fantastic marketing opportunities. Twitter, for example, is where the conversation happens. Twitter’s 200 million users access the site to talk about what they are doing and current topics of interest. Businesses can use Twitter to see what people are talking about and even what people are saying about their brand.

Picture sharing sites like Pinterest and Flickr give businesses a place to showcase their work with eye-catching images, while video sharing sites like YouTube help companies reach the public with viral video adverts. Google+, Google’s answer to Facebook, provides a very similar service to Facebook, but with a focus on building interest-based communities.

Over the last two years, social media has moved onto mobile devices. With apps like Instagram, Vine and Facebook Mobile, people can stay constantly connected to their social media profiles. Meanwhile, with geotargeting social media networks like Foursquare, and similar services on Google and Facebook, local businesses can even find customers nearby and target them with advertising.

In fact, thanks to the reams and reams of personal information users put on social media accounts, businesses can target their ideal customers with adverts.

Social media has become one of the most powerful tools in a business’ arsenal, providing them with a low-cost platform for advertising and marketing, an enormous and targeted audience, a place where they can keep up-to-date with all the headlines and breaking news, a stage on which to release and promote new products, and a forum to speak to customers and monitor the conversation.

How do you use social media to help your business?

How To Optimise Your Business’ Page For Facebook Mobile

Browsing Facebook on iOS and Android devices is one of the public’s most popular pastimes: the average smartphone owner spends 18% of the time on their device accessing Facebook, while in the UK alone mobile usage has increased by 22% in the last year.

As more and more people purchase tablet and smartphone devices, using them to access social media networks like Facebook, it becomes increasingly important for businesses, both big and small, to optimise their Facebook business pages for mobile devices.

If you are a business owner, don’t worry: optimizing your Facebook page for mobile devices is very easy. Just follow the three simple steps I have outlined below.

1. Make the most of the space

When optimising your Facebook page for mobile devices, the biggest concern is space. A severely truncated version of your business’ page for desktop devices appears on smartphones, missing the majority of the timeline, the iframes, the comments box and even some of the text from longer posts.

If you are trying to promote your business on mobile, try to use simple, eye-catching pictures and snappy, concise text. Of course, you need to make sure that the stuff you are posting on your page with mobile devices in mind won’t look terrible on desktop devices.

If you want a post to stand out you can pin it to the top of your page. Pinned posts appear beneath a page’s profile picture, cover photo and calls to action, so they are on a user’s screen as soon as they visit the page. Pinning posts is an easy and effective way to ensure that the content you want to get seen is seen.

2. Make the most of the features

It is extremely important that all the information on your page is correct, especially the address information because, using Facebook’s Local Search feature, potential customers and clients are able to find and visit your business.

All Facebook business pages feature call to action buttons, visibly displayed beneath the cover photo. On mobile devices, local business pages with a fixed address (as opposed to the pages of larger corporations and brands) feature a ‘Like’, a ‘Check In’ and a ‘Call’ button. Try to encourage customers and clients to check in or like your business when they visit by displaying clear signage which gives them information and specific instructions on how to find your page. The more people like and check in on your business’ page, the more people will discover your business – also, it will improve the interaction stats on your page.

Beneath the interaction stats are photos. In the case of local businesses, there are two photo tabs: one for photos taken in the location and one for photos posted by the page administrators. Post photos of you and your colleagues enjoying themselves in your business and encourage customers and clients to do the same – people are more likely to visit businesses where people have fun.
3. Use the Page Manager app

You should not only be optimising your page for Facebook Mobile, you should also be optimising your page on Facebook Mobile.

The Facebook Page Manager app is a great tool for page administrators who cannot always access Facebook from a desktop device. On the app, you can post updates and photos, respond to comments, access and send messages, set up notifications and view your Page Insights.

The newest version of the app even allows admins to apply Instagram filters to their photos before posting them and add stickers to messages.

How do you encourage people to like and check in on your business’ page?   

Unruly Reveals The Science Behind Viral Video Sharing

Last week, online video technology consultants Unruly released “The Science of Sharing”, a white paper describing the best practices companies should observe when creating sharable viral videos. The white paper was released a couple of days after YouTube announced that they were making channel management easier.

To research and write the white paper, Unruly analysed statistical data gathered using Unruly ShareRank™, the company’s patented online video ranking software, based on views, shares and engagement. According to the white paper, which you can apply to have emailed to your inbox:

[ShareRank] is powered by a proprietary algorithm containing 100+ variables, trained from a data set of over 329 billion video views and 10,000+ consumer responses to predict the social impact of video content. 

Unruly measured the impact of 12 different commercials which were televised during Super Bowl XLVII and released online. To work out why each video was or was not successful, Unruly rated each on its content and the emotional response it evoked in the audience. The success of each advert was dependent on how often it was shared on social media networks.

Each video was marked on the strength of the psychological response it elicited in the viewer, as well as the strength of its social motivation: why people would want to share the video and how likely this was to happen. The two scorecards below, both from the white paper, show the exact categories considered and the scale to which videos could be considered sharable:



The two adverts which scored the highest, Budweiser’s “Brotherhood” and Ram’s “Farmer”, evoked strong emotional responses of warmth and happiness in the audience, who were motivated into sharing the video to spread this emotional experience and to get a reaction.

”Brotherhood” was the most successful ad overall, achieving an Unruly ShareRank
score of 7.9 and an impressive share rate of 18.6%. “Farmer” came second, with a ShareRank score of 7.3.

In the white paper’s conclusion, Unruly draws attention to the fact that neither of the top ranked videos used humour to elicit a response, setting them apart from the majority of the Super Bowl commercials. Citing the data gathered during the study, Unruly advises companies to avoid humour as an emotional response, if possible, in order to “stand out”:

Hilarity is a fickle trigger – brands need to be exceptionally funny, or their content falls flat. We recommend brands move away from humor for future media events in order to be remembered and shared.

Viewers, Unruly says, need to feel an extremely strong, positive emotional response from a video if they are then going to share it with their friends. Videos which evoke emotions on the stronger end of the scale are three times more likely to be shared than videos that evoke weaker responses.

In other viral video news, YouTube has made channel management much easier, making it possible for users managing multiple channels using a Google+ account to create new ones from the same account.

In an announcement last week, Staff Software Engineer Brett Hobbs encouraged channel managers to take advantage of the new, useful feature. Of course, the feature won’t only benefit users: YouTube channel managers who haven’t got a Google+ account will create one, increasing the social networks membership figures.

Do you agree with the findings of Unruly’s white paper? What do you think makes videos more sharable?       

Google+ Updates Follow Button, Photos And Badges

To celebrate its second birthday, Google+ has released a new Follow button for websites, updated Google+ Photos and redesigned Badges for Profiles and Pages. Google+ has also released a new Communities Badge, allowing Community managers to advertise their Google+ Communities on their websites.

On Friday, Google’s Vic Gundotra, posted a celebratory message on Google+:

Two years ago we started the Google+ project. We're still young, with lots of growing left to do, but today we wanted to stop (for just a second) and say thanks. It's your support, your feedback, and your enthusiasm that make Google+ so awesome. So let's keep building something to love. Together.

That same day, Google announced changes to various Google+ Plugins, as well as to Google+ Photos.

The Google+ Follow button is a plugin that users can integrate into their websites, which allows visitors to follow them on Google+. Visitors can even add the website owners to a specific Google+ Circle. The Follow widget is compact and, when clicked, confirms the ‘follow’ action. The total number of Google+ followers the user has is displayed beside the button. According to the announcement post on the Google+ Developers Blog, the Follow button is easy to integrate:

The Follow button is simple to add to your website. In fact, if you've already installed the +1 button, no new JavaScript is required. Just configure the plugin, add the markup to your page, and you’re all set.

Google+ has redesigned Profile and Page Badges, giving users more customisation options. Google+ users have been invited to update their Badges now, but the old Badges will be around for another 87 days (it was 90 days on Friday). Users can decide between a dark or a light badge colour scheme, toggle the cover photo on and off, and make their badge landscape or portrait. At the very least, Badges must consist of a profile picture, a name and a Follow button.

According to Google+, Community managers have been requesting Community Badges for some time. Like the Profile and Page Badges, the new Community Badges are fully customisable, but instead of featuring a Follow button, Community Badges contain a Preview button, allowing visitors to a Community manager’s website the opportunity to preview their Google+ Community page in a new tab, without leaving the original webpage.

From there they can view recent posts (subject to your community's privacy settings), as well as join. Returning to your site is as simple as closing the new tab.

Google’s Jon Emerson posted about further changes being made to Google+. Google+ Photos has been improved, “Making it easier to move, download, and upload your Google+ photos”:

• A new “Move” option makes it easy to move photos between albums. Just pick a few photos in an album (or click the new “Select” link to select all of them) and choose where they go. 
• Easier photo downloads. Once you’ve selected photos, use the new “Download” option to save them to your computer. 
• Faster uploading for large sets of photos. We’ve made a few small changes that make adding photos from your desktop an even smoother process.

Emerson goes onto say that Google+ will continue to improve Photos based on user feedback.

What do you think of Google+’s recent updates?