In the ever-changing world of social media, The Social Sparq Plug is your one-stop-shop for all things digital marketing. Each week, our online marketing team meets to discuss the latest trends and updates happening on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Pinterest and beyond.
We’ve aggregated the best creative and noteworthy news and campaigns from the past week. Here’s the hot take from the minds of our online marketers!
Social Media Updates You Need to Know This Week
After spending many months in development, it looks like advertisers will be able to promote branded content from users. The feature applies to stories and in-feed posts and includes ‘Paid Partnership’ on ads they run in Instagram’s feed, along with the brand’s name.
Instagram calls their new feature, “an important piece for our continued investment in ads transparency.”
In more Instagram related news, they launched their latest attack on Tik-Tok with their new karaoke lyrics option in stories. This new feature is currently available everywhere Instagram Music has launched (including the U.S., France, and Germany). In past years, Instagram has become infamous for taking successful features from other social platforms and making it wildly successful on their own, thus siphoning their competitors’ audience. But Tik-Tok is not going down without a fight. On June 6th they enabled users to add overlaid text to videos, too. In the past, their users have had to turn to other platforms to easily add text to their videos before pulling it back into Tik-Tok. This new feature was launched in order to make it easier for their users to STAY with them.
Our final piece of news comes from YouTube. The platform has been under scrutiny for years about their relaxed stance towards statements of hate, harassment, and discrimination made on their site. YouTube has since announced plans to remove thousands of videos and channels that spue hate. But with 400 hours of content being uploaded to YouTube every minute, it will be interesting to see how effective their algorithm changes are and what other innocent creators are caught in the crossfire.
Creative “Sparqs” To Get Your Imagination Flowing
Looking at Burger King’s latest campaign has become a guilty pleasure for our social team – so much so that it almost made us forget about IHOP’s burgergate of 2018. In their series of promotional videos, we see the breakfast powerhouse poke fun at the ‘scandal’ in efforts to continue to promote their dinner menu item. It is a really interesting and creative way to handle the backlash they received so long after it occurred.
A PSA-style video was launched by Joan Creative for CPR Awareness Week titled Womanikin. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the U.S., but women are 27% less likely than men to receive CPR when they go into cardiac arrest in public. Which begs the question, why is CPR only practiced on male mannequins? In this era of political correctness and the #MeToo movement, men are more cautious of what’s right or appropriate when performing CPR. The Womanikin is a real product that will help educate the public on how it’s virtually the same process to perform CPR on a woman as it is a man and help remove the stigma.
Our final creative ‘sparq’ this week comes out of Germany with Volkswagen’s response to their fuel emissions scandal a few years back. The brand has created an electric version of their famous microbus from the ’70s with the slogan, “In the darkness, we found the light. Introducing a new era of electric driving.” Their video for the campaign is an absolute must-watch and addresses the issue while seamlessly transitioning into their new vehicle launch. We had a great discussion internally about how they addressed the issue- they took responsibility but didn’t really apologize. They can’t go back and undo their mistakes, but the new vehicle is an effort for their brand to make things right with their consumer.
Our Marketing Term of the Week
Abandonment rate is the percentage of social customer service issues that customers abandon before they are resolved. It is especially important for our social team to reflect on this word and how it affects the way we monitor our client’s social channels. When attempting to resolve an issue, it’s always a possibility that the unhappy customer leaves the conversation before you’re able to settle it.
Join us on Mondays to hear what brands are ‘sparqing’ our creativity, how algorithms have changed, and the bullet points on what you need to change in your marketing strategy to get your clients the best return on their investment.
