The changing face of social content
Content in social media has evolved over the years from the traditional, ‘image+copy+hashtag’ type posts in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to mini websites and rich media. Smart marketers are using data in their social and ad platforms and also from social analytics tools like Brandwatch to inform creative and messaging.
Benjamin Allison, VP, Global Media at VaynerMedia, highlights the fact that content insights and content generation for social often happens in near real time: “Content has gotten smarter, faster, and increased in volume,” Allison says. “The days of extensive focus groups, weeks of brooding over one asset or the other are starting to look archaic, with real-time signals of intent providing feedback that marketers can act upon.”
The major changes to social content explored in this briefing include:
- Stories
- Augmented reality
- Stickers and gifs
- Long-form video
- The growth of ‘live’
Stories
In October 2018, UK-based communications agency Battenhall ran a study among the top 100 brands in Instagram, finding that these brands collectively posted a total of 10,079 Stories vs. 8,949 newsfeed posts. Ephemeral Stories had overtaken ‘classic’ posts in the feed on this platform.
Facebook has added stories to personal accounts, pages, Messenger and groups. Facebook’s WhatsApp allows users to display a Stories-like status. LinkedIn is slowly rolling stories out to members and LinkedIn Page owners in Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands and the UAE, and plans to release the feature more widely. Twitter is also testing a Stories-like feature called ‘fleets’, and will test the user controls that determine whether these posts will be as public as tweets or can be restricted to specific audiences.
Instagram Stories has the most functionality, from basic features and video modifier effects such as Superzoom and Rewind, through to basic emojis, tags, stickers and gifs.
Over time, Instagram has added polls, quiz and music stickers and other ‘conversion’ Stories layers such as Donations Stickers, which allow users and charities to collect donations with a click, and Shoppable Tags, which link to buyable products from the Story. These have added new levels of creativity to brand storytelling and made traditional posts in social platforms feel flat and dull by comparison.
There is no sign of the popularity of Stories waning as the format gets ever more interactive. With a hugely creative army of individuals creating filters and games, brands can either choose to work with them or learn from the best to create branded augmentation in a users’ Stories feed.
The New York Public Library’s reimagining of classic novels as Instagram Stories is an enduring best-in-class example of the format. Helen Wood, Head of Content and Publishing at H+K Strategies UK, explains why: “We are a nostalgic generation – both seduced by technology and unable to let go of the scratchy sound of a record player or the smell of a new book.
“This work from the New York Public Library is such a beautiful example of taking tradition and making it work for modern life. The team at Mother took iconic novels and converted them into Instagram Stories – demonstrating a commitment to giving their audiences access to information and literature.”
Facebook users have been slower to adopt Stories, despite its adoption of many techniques to get users to try the format. At one point, it forced users to share their Memories from the feed as Stories or to wish friends happy birthday via Stories. By encouraging these user behaviours and creating new content formats, it has also created more ad inventory space on the platform.
Augmented reality (AR)
With the opening of Facebook’s Spark AR Studio to the public in August 2019, suddenly highly engaging features, such as AR face filters, were accessible to millions of developers.
This has led to a raft of entertaining AR filters and games in Instagram that have enabled users to entertain themselves with special AR effects. Examples include an Adidas filter that lets users add brand logo tattoos to their faces, and games such as the popular ‘Gibberish Challenge’ and ‘Random Questions while Distancing’.
Given that Snapchat was the first social platform to introduce AR lenses, the app looks like it is slightly ahead in the competition to connect AR with social commerce, or ‘Shoppable AR’, as it calls it. Together with partners, Snapchat has innovated ‘try-on’ features for clothing and shoes where users can see what the sized-for-the-user products look like when ‘worn’ by them, and click out of the app to buy the product.
The AR technology detects and maps the user to be digitally dressed, for example, before offering shoes and makeup to be ‘tried on’ via the app. Brands can also create ‘virtual installations’, where, for example, a Louis Vuitton AR filter could show the user what their iconic luggage might look like in their home. The AR lens could be triggered by the Louis Vuitton logo or voice activation.
Online shoppers have the constant challenge of not being able to try on online items, either on the body or in the home, so Shoppable AR could go a long way to mimic in-store experiences and shopping in real life.
Given that social distancing measures may be in place around the world for some time, it is easy to see how Shoppable AR can help fashion and homeware retailers increase conversions and potentially reduce product returns. Purchases will have been ‘tried’ or ‘placed’ on the person or in the home and garden. Instagram has also partnered with brands to trial AR for makeup and sunglasses, while Pinterest added AR makeup in January 2020, and it is almost a certainty that TikTok will be close on Snapchat’s heels.
Stickers and gifs
Smart marketers are leveraging their brand assets for Stories users, TikTok creators and those who just want to share on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and WhatsApp (and even email). They are considering which ‘layers’ can provide value and encourage use among people who like to use elements such as stickers or gifs on their Stories and posts.
Unsurprisingly, media brands such as Disney (which owns Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel, among others) and brands with established characters, such as KFC with its Colonel Sanders, have created verified brand accounts on Giphy and designed instantly recognisable stickers and gifs that users can simply add to their Stories, TikToks or share via WhatsApp.
KFC’s Colonel Sanders character performs Fortnite-inspired dance moves such as the ‘Floss’ and the ‘Dab’. On the Australian KFC account, he wears a KFC bucket on his head (users can pick their favourite colour) and plays air guitar with a cricket bat to celebrate the Cricket World Cup.
Publisher Penguin Books UK use stickers and gifs to support book launches, drawing from key themes in its books, quotes as well as cover art, such as that of Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments.
In a bid to appeal to late 20-somethings feeling nostalgic for their childhood books and reach younger Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp users, the publisher has also introduced hand-drawn stickers of Jacqueline Wilson’s character Tracy Beaker. There are a number of generic word-based gifs for book lovers – including ‘Love Books’, ‘Bookworm’ and ‘Am Reading’ – as well as animations of the famous Penguin and Puffin logos.
This is an almost zero-cost way of extending brand symbols in playful ways, giving people tools to use brand assets within their personal social platforms. However, for those who have discovered the ease with which gifs and stickers can be created and shared organically, placing the brand in front of millions of eyeballs with no money changing hands, the party may not go on for much longer.
In May 2020, Facebook acquired Giphy.com for $400m. It is easy to understand why. At the moment, gifs can be created and uploaded to Giphy then shared on all Facebook Inc. platforms as well as on competitor platforms. With 700 million users accessing more than 10 billion gifs per day as of May 2020 and Giphy providing Facebook Inc. with a source of gifs for layering on to Stories, it is likely that Facebook will want to monetise and promote premium sponsored brand gifs, stickers and microgames through the Giphy integration.
Given how popular gifs and stickers are, it is clear that Facebook has acquired yet another platform with the potential for collecting data, allowing it to broker premium brand partnerships. It can also consider whether it turns off the gif tap to competitor platforms such as TikTok and Twitter.
However, this acquisition is subject of an antitrust investigation by the UK Competition and Markets Authority, which at the time of writing, is seeking to determine whether this deal will lessen competition in Facebook and Instagram’s UK markets. Pending the outcome of the investigation, it remains to be seen whether this potential new revenue stream for Facebook Inc. materialises.
Long-form video
IGTV, Facebook Watch and Snap Originals are big moves into the competitive world of long-form video content and platform and creator-produced TV quality episodic content.
Instagram launched IGTV as a standalone video app in June 2018 in direct competition to YouTube. Its integration with Instagram has been a more interesting story.
IGTV videos are designed to be longer than Instagram Stories, at longer than one minute and up to 15 minutes when uploaded via mobile, or up to 60 minutes when uploaded from the web.
Many brands, with the exception of broadcasters and publishers including Refinery29, BuzzFeed and Vice, were slow to adopt IGTV. When compared to YouTube, it had comparatively poor content discovery and search functions, but it has gone a long way to improve this. In 2019, content creators could finally share one-minute previews of IGTV ads in their Instagram feeds that increased discoverability and views within the app.
UK-based public service broadcaster the BBC was an early IGTV adopter, creating successful previews for longer form IGTV content for its main Instagram channels, including BBC News and BBC Sounds.
As YouTube and TikTok found, one of the key elements of user retention and platform stickiness is to support creators and to help them monetise their presence on the platform. To that end, Instagram is working with creators, initially in the US, to gradually roll out ads that appear when users click through to the creator’s IGTV video from the feed. It will give a projected ad revenue share of 55% to the creator. Whether users like these interruptive ads or not will be tested in the slow roll-out.
Another mooted creator feature is ‘badges’, which viewers can purchase for between $0.99 and $4.99 to show their support for the creator. Badge owners will be featured in the comments and given a shout out during a livestream by the creator. This is a monetisable fan feature that is commonplace in Twitch.
It is worth noting here that Facebook has not yet achieved the predicted user views or success with its investment in its video-on-demand platform, which features original scripted and no-scripted episodic TV content, despite working with huge broadcast, musical, sports and movie stars.
However, Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Red Table Talk, a talk show format featuring her mother and daughter, is one of the stand-out successes. Follow its success, Facebook has ordered a similar show by singer songwriter, Gloria Estefan and her family. These developments suggest that Facebook Watch is positioning itself as a TV platform for older female audiences.
Facebook’s shifting priorities and acquisitions, as well as the legal challenges it faced in 2019, may have diverted its focus from Watch. As Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp’s core features and functionality merge and as social commerce becomes slicker on the platforms, perhaps IGTV and Facebook Watch will move their focus away from original programming and become more like a televised home shopping channel, blending creator-led content and the ability to shop in the video stream.
Snapchat’s Snap Originals’ has placed Snapchat firmly in the original episodic content space. Snapchat has held firm with a young audience, despite the rise of TikTok and predicted exodus to Instagram. Research by Qustodio found that US and UK kids spent 65 and 43 minutes respectively on the platform a day during the Covid-19 lockdown, compared with 60 and 54 minutes per day on Instagram.
The Discover part of Snapchat contains episodic series. One of its most well known is the reality show Bringing up Bhabie, which stars 15-year-old rapper Danielle Bregoli. The programme had 10 million viewers in 24 hours when it debuted in January 2019, making it the biggest premiere in Snapchat’s history.
In addition to lighter weight programmes, such as Big Dogz and Shake My Beauty, Snap Originals also covers hard-hitting subjects. Production partner Barcroft Studios has created Mind Yourself, a look at 10 young people and their journey in mental health, while Frontline Heroes is a 6-part series of shorts self-shot by participants to comply with Covid-19 social distancing guidelines. Each episode tells the story of workers in vital health and social services risking their lives to keep their community safe.
Creators, publisher and broadcast production partners are trialling the formats and brokering revenue share deals.
The growth of ‘live’
There has been a huge increase in live content. This was already a trend pre-pandemic, but it has been accelerated by Covid-19.
According to Stetson University psychology professor Chris Ferguson, humans are not adapted to cope well in isolation, and this could be a reason why Instagram has reported a 70% increase in US users sharing live video in March and April 2020 during lockdown. While watching a friend or family member cook their dinner or walk their dog may not be to everyone’s cup of tea, for some it has become a way of coping in a time of crisis.
Celebrities and influencers have notably been using Instagram and TikTok to keep a captive audience entertained and invite users into their homes, sharing a more authentic view of their personal lives.
In the UK, the most successful live video user is fitness expert Joe Wicks who amassed hundreds of thousands of viewers across Facebook, YouTube and Instagram daily for his live programme PE with Joe, a fitness session designed to get Britain’s schoolkids moving and motivated.
As social distancing gradually decreases, and a larger percentage of daily life is spent out of the home, it will be interesting to see whether this increased appetite for livestreamed content will remain, or if users will prefer to view short- or long-form video on demand.
The expert view on the evolution of social content
Jade Lambourne, Social Media Manager, Pai Skincare:
“Social media is ever evolving and adapting so the biggest challenge is staying on top of updates, as well as being bold and not having any fear with testing. The world is a very uncertain place in 2020, so we need to make sure our social content is mindful of that, as well as being quick to serve people with what they want during these times.”
Chris Thomas, Global Social Intelligence and Optimisation Lead, Sage:
“There is an increasing use of the B2C social marketing playbook by B2B brands. Specifically, I see greater recognition that B2B brands have underinvested in brand marketing, and that social activations with brand building objectives need to raise the game in terms of content and creativity.”
Rhian Robinson, Senior Account Director, Battenhall:
“Engagement in ephemeral content has further overtaken the newsfeed. On Instagram, Stories is where the engagement is; on the app, users scroll left to right, much more than they scroll up and down. Brands and thought leaders should strive for a balance between permanent and ephemeral content to ensure maximum engagement with their target audiences.”
Giselle Boxer, Social Media Director, Tribal Worldwide London:
“With its recent announcement of its acquisition of Giphy, [Facebook] is now able to dominate another aspect of the market, meme culture.”
Benjamin Allison, VP, Global Media, VaynerMedia:
“Savvy marketers are thinking less about ‘Facebook strategy’ as they are ‘video strategy’. This is forcing advertisers to create more content for more audience cohorts on more platforms.
“Being nimble with content creation is more important than ever, and finding a cost-effective solution to produce quality content for each video platform is paramount.
“The brands that are winning are focusing on volume of content with constant platform tests and optimisations to stay continuously relevant. Crucially, ‘more’ and ‘faster’ doesn’t mean larger spend. In fact, often the opposite, as combining data with the creative process allows businesses to be more cost-effective and only target where needed.”
Jade Lambourne, Social Media Manager, Pai Skincare:
“For me, the most exciting opportunity is IGTV and its growth. I’d always talked about the need for portrait long form video, so it’s great to finally have a space for that content to live. There are still very mixed opinions about IGTV from brands and audiences, but if the subject is interesting enough to hook your audience, they are willing to invest their time.”
Robert Haslam, Account Director, Battenhall:
“The key with Facebook Watch, IGTV and Snap Originals is to look for popular shows where you could do product placement, or to run ads that help target people who are consuming those shows.”
Helen Wood, Head of Content and Publishing, H+K Strategies:
“Live content was already a trend pre-pandemic, but it’s been accelerated by Covid. Influencers that may have been apprehensive about using Instagram live have now embraced it.”
Jai Kotecha, Head of Social and Content, Ogilvy:
“Other platforms have been successful with live videos in the last few months, with gaming platform Fortnite hosting concerts with high-profile artists such as Diplo or Marshmello, a concert that was attended by more than 10 million users. Twitch, where users can watch gamers livestream their gameplay, has also seen its viewership numbers increase dramatically.
This article is an edited version of a section in Econsultancy’s new Social Media Platforms Trends report, authored by Michelle Goodall.
The post The changing face of social content appeared first on Econsultancy.
Source: Customer Experience