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Instagram unveils two new advertising channels
Instagram unveiled two new advertising channels this week. One, which it calls Reminder Ads, is available now, and the other, ads in search results, is expected to launch in the coming months. Dig deeper: How Haleon built social media intelligence in-house What are they. Reminder Ads is designed to “help advertisers build awareness, anticipation, and consideration for upcoming moments.” Consumers who opt in will get three reminders about a marketing event: One day before, 15 minutes before and at the time it happens. The Meta-owned company says this comes after a successful test run in partnership with the cable network Starz. Reminder Ads image via Instagram Now in search. Instagram is currently testing putting ads in search results “to reach people actively searching for businesses, products and content.” It is likely these ads will be highlighted in a way that differentiates them from the marketing content which currently appears in search results. Why we care. Meta is floundering fiscally, but more ads on Instagram may be counterproductive. The company is facing a weak ad market and pressure from TikTok. On the plus side, Instagram is still providing marketers with the best ROI – more than twice that of TikTok. However, TikTok’s average revenue per user was $46.86 last year, seven times more than Instagram. Also, TikTok’s users spend an average of 89 minutes a day on the site, three times that of Instagram users. Finally, there is the very real risk of oversaturation. Remember MySpace? It was doing great until News Corp. bought it in 2006 and put ads everywhere. Instagram already has ads on the Explore page, Explore feeds, Reels, Stories, user profiles and plenty more when you open its app. Let’s hope more ad inventory doesn’t mean less ad viewers.
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LinkedIn releases new Pages features for B2B marketers
Today, LinkedIn rolled out new features to help B2B marketers post content and host live events on the platform. Scheduled posts. Marketers can now schedule the specific date and time for posts to run on their organization’s LinkedIn page. This is a new capability, allowing users to schedule content within the LinkedIn platform, instead of depending on a third-party marketing or publishing tool. Posts can be scheduled up to three months in advance, and all scheduled posts can be viewed and managed within the platform. Live audio-only conversations. LinkedIn Audio Events, another new feature, allows users to host live conversations without video. The host announces the event and LinkedIn users can RSVP ahead of time, all in-platform. Audio Events are structured informally, with a speaker on the “stage.” Other virtual attendees can raise their hand and be invited to join the stage and speak, if they choose. LinkedIn already has a LinkedIn Live product for video events, but users need a third-party broadcasting tool to use it. There are no charges for events products, but LinkedIn requires creators and orgs to have 150 or more followers to their Page in order to host an event. Dig deeper: How to personalize your brand on LinkedIn Posting new jobs automatically. LinkedIn has also introduced an opt-in to post new job posts automatically on Pages. If this option is chosen, LinkedIn will share one new job per day as a pre-scheduled post on the organization’s Page. Following for Pages. Pages used by organizations can now follow other pages, in the way that individual LinkedIn users can follow others. Why we care. Social media scheduling tools have long been a part of the digital marketer’s stack at larger and more mature organizations. LinkedIn is making it easier to schedule content and post jobs in-platform with a smaller budget and content staff. The new Audio Events give B2B marketers an added opportunity to share industry views and exchange ideas in a more casual way, hitting a middle ground between a written article and a professional video talk.
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Habu releases new data clean room enhancements
This week, enterprise data collaboration company Habu announced enhancements to its platform and key partnerships with the likes of Snowflake and Amazon that support the platform’s interoperability. “Our goal is to empower organizations across the ecosystem to execute data collaboration at scale, without the need for ongoing technical resources or the need to move the data,” said Matt Kilmartin, Habu co-founder and CEO, in a company release. Why we care. Marketers are looking to data clean rooms as a way to enrich their data and boost ad campaign performance in an increasingly regulated digital ecosystem where data is precious. Interoperability increases the opportunities marketers have to build clean rooms with publishers and other digital media partners. “Data clean rooms come in very handy to help us broaden the ways we use data beyond just a one-to-one kind of transaction,” said Roku’s head of ad platforms, Youssef Ben-Youseff, in the release. Dig deeper: Why we care about data clean rooms Data and intelligence tools. Habu’s improved platform allows clean room owners to work more effectively with business intelligence derived from the data clean room. Reports and analytics dashboard environments generated from the clean room can now be templatized and packaged. Also, an improved Question Builder in the new version of Habu now makes it easier to author new clean room use cases and templates. New integrations. Enhancements to the platform include a new simplified integration with Facebook. Marketers can now add Habu to their Facebook Ads/Advanced Analytics account. Additionally, enhancements to integrations with TikTok and Twitter reduce rate-limit disruptions and other errors, taking away the need for ongoing manual support on those social platforms. Amazon Marketing Cloud. Last fall, Habu became a certified Amazon Marketing Cloud partner. This opened up the Habu platform to marketers using Amazon Ads who want to expand their campaign through the marketing cloud and use Habu’s intelligence tools. Using a library of plain English queries and visualizations, the no-code and low-code Habu tools allow marketers to enrich data and gain intelligence with little to no experience in data science. Dig deeper: Amazon announces AWS Clean Rooms
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Digimind’s new product combines two AI engines to monitor and analyze social media
Digimind, the social listening and marketing intelligence platform, today unveiled a new social listening program which it says is the first to use two AI engines to monitor and analyze online conversations. What it does. The new product combines Digimind’s AI Sense with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. AI Sense monitors social media, blogs, reviews, podcasts and more, to detect key events about any brand or topic. It then determines important metrics, such as reach, brand impact and key mentions. This is sent to ChatGPT, which will analyze and summarize it in plain English in real time. Dig deeper: How Haleon built social media intelligence in-house “It is as if each user gets full access to two dedicated analysts: one data scientist, and one business analyst 24/24, 7/7,” Paul Vivant, Digimind CEO, said in a statement. “This saves hours of analysis and allows our clients to react much faster by having an instant brief on the situation.” Why we care. You don’t have to look any further than the Twitter-fueled run on Silicon Valley Savings Bank to see how a social media wave can swamp a business. The toughest part of monitoring online conversations is separating wheat and chaff. How do you know what matters and what’s just someone blowing off steam. And how long can you afford to wait for an accessible summary of what’s going on? If this solution does what it promises, it will be a big step forward on this.
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How Haleon built social media intelligence in-house
Social media platforms are an important arena for consumers to talk about brands that affect their lives. That’s why Haleon assembled an in-house team to own social media for their many over-the-counter products. Haleon was created last year out of a joint venture between GSK’s and Pfizer’s consumer products, which include Advil, Excedrin, Robitussin, Tums and other household brands. The company assembled an in-house team to use social media intelligence, or “social intelligence” — tools and strategies to understand what customers are saying about brands and how to leverage that intelligence to boost marketing efforts. Dig deeper: Social media marketing guide for brands First, Haleon had to define social media intelligence. It can mean different things in different organizations, so it’s important for each business to establish goals and benefits derived from social intelligence operations. “Social intelligence is folding in all these different data sources and really trying to figure out what this data is actually going to do and what [it] tell us,” said Danny Gardner, analytics manager U.S. and North America social intelligence lead for Haleon, at The MarTech Conference. Gardner and his team consider social intelligence as a more sophisticated version of social media monitoring and listening. Instead of just tracking different topics that consumers are talking about on social platforms, social intelligence draws insights from this data and ties the insights to marketing actions. “Why does the business want to have social intelligence?” Gardner asked. “At its core, it’s insights. We’re able to act on this data and get to insights faster than any other team in the company.” Brands that gather social intelligence have access to consumer opinions about their own products and also the competition. They also gain feedback about marketing campaigns and can learn more about their target audience. Another benefit of social media intelligence is finding out where consumers say they are purchasing products. For Haleon, knowing if customers are talking about buying Advil at a Costco or through an online retailer helps the company develop an ecommerce strategy. If consumers are speaking negatively about a brand on social, knowing this can help the brand execute a crisis management strategy, said Gardner. Four social media intelligence categories Social media is a vast space, and listening to it intelligently means having clear categories or “buckets” for the data. Image: Haleon. Gardner and his team established four main buckets of data they wanted to gather through social channels. They wanted to analyze and gain insights from social conversions that related to their own portfolio of brands, competitor brands, broader topics related to using these products, and “macro and cultural” trends. “There are a lot of trends that go on and things that happen in society that we’ve realized our consumers care a lot more about than our brands, and rightfully so,” said Gardner. “And so we took it upon ourselves years ago to build this into our remit.” Building and scaling social media Although Haleon only went live as an organization in 2022, their marketing strategy, including their approach to social intelligence, has been years in the making. Here’s a timeline of the steps they took to implementing social intelligence tools and strategies. Image: Haleon. “There was this large discovery phase around what data is available, how can we get to it, what does data mining look like, what vendors exist and what are their capabilities,” Gardner explained. “It was actually a couple years before I was hired that they started building the case that, hey, we actually think we might be able to do this in-house.” Haleon also debated the pros and cons of building versus buying their solution, and eventually wound up settling on a suite of social intelligence tools developed by Meltwater. Piloting social media intelligence during the pandemic Just as Haleon was ready to test pilot some of their social media intelligence capabilities, the world changed. During the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, many consumers upped their use of digital channels to purchase products and self-educate. “We came out of our 12 month pilot, and at the end of the tunnel was COVID-19,” said Gardner. “And so this definitely accelerated the demand and interest for what social listening was and really catapulted us into the limelight…Social media was kind of the go-to for questions [consumers] didn’t have answers to.” He added, “So at the time this is actually what inspired this macro trend tracking capability and we now know we can do this pretty well around our brands.” As a result, Haleon has a better understanding of how consumers feel about their roster of brands. And they can join the conversation on larger issues in a way that’s relevant to their customers. Register for The MarTech Conference here.
