Chinese social media giant partners with Hamilton Island to promote Australia

by Marketing ON 9 May 2013

Tencent, China’s largest online community with more than 780 million active users has partnered with Hamilton Island to broadcast the Great Barrier Reef Island to the flourishing Chinese market.

It’s the first time the social network has shifted outside of China and the third largest internet company in the world after Google and Amazon. Tencent’s QQ.com is the ninth most visited website in the world so traction for Australian is immense.

Targeting China’s affluent travellers of the future, Hamilton Island’s first Chinese ambassador Chao Xian Yang will work with Hamilton Island playmakers to build a robust Tencent Weibo community and fan base for the trendy Whitsundays’ island.

Chinese supermodel Li Ya Hong, Hamilton Island ambassador Chao Xian Yang, Tencent Weibo executive Xia Yue and a competition winner will visit Hamilton Island in May to promote Hamilton Island on Tencent Weibo.

Branded the ‘Twitter of the East’, Sophie Baker, Hamilton Island’s senior communications manager, explains the strength of the social media superpower: “China probably has more social media users than Facebook has worldwide. With China’s social media market nearly at one billion users, mostly on mobile, we are honoured to be partnering with Tencent Weibo.”

Capitalising on the high-end travel market, it’s a huge win for Hamilton Island in a monetary sense as Tencent Weibo executive Ai Fang admits. “When it comes to luxury goods, unique and high-end experiences, Tencent Weibo’s hundreds of millions of users are highly engaged consumers with high spending power,” he says.

Using Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest and YouTube boomed back to the Tencent Weibo juggernaut, Hamilton Island’s social reach should increase dramatically.

Honda’s low-budget social media innovation

by Mark Cameron ON 15 April 2013

As major brands expand their social media budgets their marketers’ sights are moving to the new and innovative uses which are offered by less well known social media platforms. The rapid growth of Pinterest has attracted many of these marketers attention. There have been many interesting cases of Pinterest being used effectively but few stand out like Honda’s recent approach.

Pinterest was the breakaway social media platform of 2012. It is essentially an image scrapbook online. Pinterest users ‘pin’ images they find online, then categorise and share them. Like all social media platforms, Pinterest offers brands an effective communication medium – provided they think through how it will be used. Honda understood that many people are spending large amounts of time on Pinterest, to the point of developing a ‘pinning habit’, and that formed the insight needed to launch their campaign.

Honda’s new CR-V has a ‘get out and live life’ brand personality. The target audience for the CR-V comprise young people on the verge of reaching one of life’s big milestones such as getting married and having children. This group have grown up with social media and are now planning all of their big adventures online. Many of them are using Pinterest.

Honda began their campaign by simply identifying Pinterest users with high follower counts and connecting with them. They then offered these users a challenge – take a 24 hour break from Pinterest and Honda would give them $500 each to spend on making one of their pinned images come to life. Honda called it taking a #Pintermission.

Honda set up individual boards within its profile and uploaded personalised images. Honda allowed the users they had contacted permission to add image content to these walls so they could upload their photos once their ‘Pintermission’ challenge was complete. Honda also asked the same targeted users to create their own Pintermission titled boards and make Honda a collaborator. This tactic gave Honda exposure to many more followers and a much broader reach.

Honda also created promotional posters that were easily sharable through Pinterest.

This may appear a complicated approach but they clearly got the formula right. Over 4.6 million individuals were exposed to the #Pintermission boards. The campaign gathered more than 5000 repins and almost 2000 likes. By usual metrics this is not a lot of direct interactions. But more than 16 million media impressions were garnered from the campaign. And the buzz extended well beyond the boards of Pinterest as conversations moved organically to Twitter and Facebook.

This kind of platform and content experimentation, together with audience engagement testing, will be something we see much more of over the next few months. There are a multitude of social media platforms on which companies’ audiences are sharing and communicating.

Trying out what works for each audience group is a necessary step in of the process of finding where your market is connecting online. That is perhaps the most important lesson from the Honda campaign.

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Feb social media stats: Facebook, Pinterest and smaller networks drop users

by Marketing ON 4 March 2013

Facebook, Pinterest and the extended family of smaller social networks have begun to drop users over time, potentially as digital media fans start to rethink their bloated social networking diets.

Pinterest, one of the strongest performers in the social media pack over the past year, dropped 30,000 unique Australian visitors (UAVs) month on month in February. Facebook also fell heavily, down 106,870 users, prompting editor of Social Media News David Cowling to ask if users are starting to rebel against Facebook addiction and delete their accounts.

Another reason behind Facebook’s decline could be its active culling of fake and duplicate accounts, a practice it embarked upon in December last year. If this is the sole reason for the drop, a much larger cull was made this month than last when only 24,000 accounts disappeared.

Many of the smaller networks are getting forgotten over time, Cowling believes. Reddit dropped 10,000 UAVs in February, down to 160,000, StumbleUpon fell by 10,000 UAVs to 90,000 monthly visitors, and Foursquare shed a further 3000.

Instagram however is still fresh in Australia and experiencing steady growth, cracking the one million mark according to Cowling’s calculations.

Sites ranked by active monthly members where possible (by UAVs where not)

Facebook – 11,677,680 Australian accounts (down approx 106,780)
YouTube – 11,000,000 UAVs (steady)
Blogspot – 3,200,000 UAVs (down 200,000)
Tumblr – 2,800,000 UAVs (down 100,000)
WordPress.com – 2,650,000 UAVs (up 50,000)
LinkedIn – 2,400,000 UAVs (steady)
Twitter – 2,200,000 approx Australian accounts* (steady)
Instagram – 1,101,667 approx Australian accounts*
Flickr – 850,000 UAVs (up 20,000)
Pinterest – 630,000 UAVs (down 30,000)
Google Plus – approx 340,000 Australian accounts
MySpace – 310,000 UAVs (down 10,000)
Yelp – 220,000 UAVs (steady)
Reddit – 160,000 UAVs (up 10,000)
StumbleUpon – 90,000 UAVs (down 10,000)
Foursquare – 53,000 UAVs (down 3000)
Digg – 36,000 UAVs (down 5,000)
Delicious – 31,000 UAVs (up 1000)

*Social Media News estimates Twitter and Instagram user numbers by taking the percentage of Facebook’s global user base that is Australian (1.1%), and assuming the same proportion of each network’s global user base is Australian. In January, Twitter had 200 million global users and Instagram had 90 million.

Sources: Quantcast, Comscore, Google Ad Planner tool, Facebook Self-Serve advertising tool, Vivid Social Research Division.

Compiled by SocialMediaNews.com.au (CC BY-ND 3.0).

Pinterest to test new look for greater ecommerce referrals

by Marketing ON 31 January 2013

Pinterest is to test a new look in a bid to boost ecommerce referrals and increase engagement on the social scrapbooking site via aided discovery.

The almost-three-year-old social network announced it will soon test an update with a small number of users that features changes to navigation, increased image sizes and more information below each pin.

The update follows the launch of accounts designed for marketers last November, as the site begins to pave the way for brand pages.

Changes have been made to the navigation and search panel of the site, in an effort to make getting around more intuitive. The changes will enhance the image based nature of its search tool, to make searching more visual for users, a feature that Google and Facebook are likely to watch closely as they move to enhance their own social search offerings.

Pins will now be larger and contain more details, including related pins, copy and links to aid discovery and deepen engagement on the site. In December last year, 1.2 million unique Australian visitors accessed the site, spending an average of three minutes and thirty-six seconds per visit, according to figures from Nielsen.

The changes will mean businesses on the social network will need to optimise copy and links attached to pins, adopt a greater focus on platform management and ensure high quality, larger sized images are available, Matt Owen from Econsultancy writes.

“In theory this should deepen the site’s already impressive engagement figures, but for business accounts it means something more important: cross and up-sell opportunities,” Owen says. “By highlighting other content and even users related to an original pin, there’s an increased chance that your account will be found through a users’ organic connections, and a chance to showcase more of your products, services, and even those all-important influencers who already engage with your product.”

When rolled out universally, the changes look set to deepen engagement and boost ecommerce referrals, making the site an even stronger social commerce tool.

Beautiful real-life social infographic project for Turkish paint brand

by Marketing ON 23 January 2013

In what is presumably a world first, Turkish decorative paint brand Jotun has beautifully represented the colour-selection data of its market through a clever use of design, social media and data.

Multi-layered in intent, Jotun’s real-life data visualisation project, titled ‘Colour and Space’, researched interior design posts on Pinterest to identify trends in colours that Turkish households had embraced.

Danish designers Mie Frey Damgaaard and Peter Ørntoft devised the intuitive way to simultaneously showcase the paint brand, provide a service, and use social media to extract ideas and information to help realise the idea, and ultimately share it.

Extracting statistics such as this from rapidly-developing Pinterest boards allowed Jotun to see colour choice trends unfolding in real time, allowing it to create an intelligent, modern-day visual colour chart.

“We think it works as inspiration for at least the Turkish consumers,” says Ørntoft. “We can see the colour choices of other consumers so it works as a colour map.”

The project now features on the brand’s Facebook and Pinterest profiles

Check out the making-of video, below.

Pinterest paves way for brand pages, launches features for marketers

by Marketing ON 22 November 2012

Pinterest has started paving the way for brand pages by launching accounts designed for marketers.

The social scrapbooking site launched accounts that allow marketers to sign up using business names (rather than requiring a first and last name) and verify websites last week.

While the pages themselves are no different to the current page layout, the move signals the social network is ready to work more closely with brands and includes the launch of ‘pin it’, ‘follow’ and featured content widget options for third-party sites as part of the sign up process.

A business microsite displaying case studies from brands like Etsy and Jetsetter, as well as best practices and guidelines for brands, has also been launched. Its terms of service have also been updated to include businesses.

Product manager at Pinterest, Cat Lee, played down the launch of the business features, telling Mashable they have nothing to do with monetisation or [Pinterest's] business model. “We know that when we do introduce a business model, we definitely want to design it in a way that makes the user experience better, but this announcement is just about taking that first step,” she said.

Companies that already have a personal account on Pinterest will be able to convert it to a business account free of charge.

The company raised $100 million in funding and was valued at $1.5 billion valuation in May, according to Mashable. Its hired several ex-Facebook staffers, including head of operations Don Faul and head of product management and partnerships Tim Kendall, who once directed Facebook’s monetisation strategy.

Window shopping Pinterest users seek out retailers

by Marketing ON 24 October 2012

Around two-thirds of Pinterest users sign up to the social scrapbooking network specifically to identify potential purchases or engage with brands, a study found.

BizRate Insights’ ‘Online Consumer Pulse’ compared the shopping and brand engagement behaviour of Pinterest and Facebook users, finding that in addition to generating a huge amount of referral traffic, Pinterest users are far more likely to ‘window shop’ than their Facebook counterparts.

The website monitoring company surveyed 1248 Pinterest users and 4738 Facebook users in North Amercia, revealing 69% of Pinterest users buy or plan to buy an item they found on the social network, compared to 40% of Facebook users.

In addition, 70% of Pinterest users cite ‘to get inspiration on what to buy’ as a main reason for using the social network, while only 17% of Facebook users reported the same motivation.

While Pinterest’s member base cannot compare to Facebook’s billion-plus users, it continues to grow. According to Australian statistics compiled by Social Media News, Pinterest was the eleventh-most visited social network in September, commanding 640,000 active monthly users. Engagement with the site ranked higher than its user base though – fifth among social media sites with an average of 13 minutes spent per visit.

When it comes to engaging with brands, Pinterest users do so differently than Facebook, with the latter more likely to passively participate with a brand, join a contest, or claim special offers. Pinterest users are much more active evangelists, re-pinning a brand’s posts or pinning items they find at a brand’s website, the study found.

Pinterest also appears to be the stronger vehicle for brand association. A greater percent (55%) of Pinterest users have engaged with retailers and brands via Pinterest, compared to the percent of Facebook users that engage retailers or brands on Facebook (48%). 43% of Pinterest members consciously use the network to ‘associate with retailers or brands with which I identify’, compared to just 24% of Facebook users.

The scrapbooking site is used ‘to keep up with the latest trends on things I like (e.g., fashion, home décor, other interests)’ for 67% of ‘pinners’.

BizRate’s study was conducted between August 9 and August 17, 2012.

Pinterest funeral campaign: TAC targets women with macabre road safety pins

by Marketing ON 19 October 2012

Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission (TAC) has turned to Pinterest to support its road safety campaigns with pinboards that pose as funeral planning inspiration.

The ‘How to Plan a Funeral’ campaign aims to use women as an influence on male driving behaviour by hammering home the message that speeding can put families in the situation where they need to plan a funeral.

Different boards have been loaded to the account to pose as ideas for different aspects of funerals, such as flower arrangements, coffins, hearses and even eulogy inspiration. The #slowdown message is delivered in the description of each image, in the final image of each board and in the last pinboard which is dedicated to images from the body’s ‘Pictures of You’ campaign.

The final image of each board contains the text, “I’d hate to plan your funeral. Slowing down won’t kill you,” in stark black and white lettering.

The TAC quotes statistics that reveal male drivers aged 21 to 26 years are than 50% more likely to be involved in a car crash due to speeding. Women were found to be a positive influence on male driving behaviour, directing TAC to the female-dominate social scrapbooking site to capture the attention of mums, daughters, sisters and girlfriends of speeding drivers.

“Females make up over 80% of Pinterest users and the TAC wants to spread the road safety message to this influential group online,” The TAC’s CEO, Janet Dore, says.

It is hoped that the repinning of images carrying the #slowdown hashtag will help spread the campaign’s message. The initiative will run concurrently with the ‘Pictures of You’ campaign, which features real families who have lost a loved one due to speeding.

Pinterest analytics firm launches contest app and Facebook integration

by Marketing ON 19 October 2012

Pinterest analytics firms Pinfluencer has launched a competition platform for the social scrapbooking site that provides the architecture to manage promotions and integrate with Facebook.

The platform is similar to the competition apps that social marketing software companies such as Wildfire create to help brands manage promotions on Facebook.

‘Pinterest Promotions’ launched yesterday, according to Adweek, allowing brands to set up contests and sweepstakes on Facebook or the brands’ own sites that link back to their Pinterest pages. The idea is to convert Facebook fans into Pinterest followers and stimulate sharing, or ‘re-pinning’ of the brand’s Pinterest content.

Fashion retailer Gilt has come onboard as a launch partner for the platform with a ‘Pin to Win: Gilt Wedding Style!” contest. The competition asks users to create a pinboard and repin one of five bridal gowns from Gilt’s wedding pinboard, as well as add images of other parts of their dream wedding.

Ten other companies tested the platform in beta over the past month, Adweek reports, and EBay and Sephora are set to launch their own Pinfluencer-powered campaigns next week.

CEO of Pinfluencer, Sharad Varma, said the platform will enable brands to cross-pollinate their Facebook and Pinterest fan bases, but added that its more than just an acquisition play. “Through our contest analytics dashboard, brands can easily get high-level ROI metrics,” Varma said.

Pinfluencer measures Pinterest page performance metrics like number of pins, repins, clicks and page views. It also has the ability to track revenue from purchases that stemmed from engagement on a page or from one of the Pinterest Promotion contests.

Brands can use that data to see what content performs best on Pinterest, but down the line they could use it to inform off-Pinterest advertising, Varma told Adweek.

“At some point, [brands] can also use contest pinboards and promote them on online display ad networks as a way to drive traffic to the boards,” Varma said.

New Pinterest and Facebook inspired eBay to launch locally in Nov

by Marketing ON 12 October 2012

Online marketplace eBay is getting social with the launch of a new site design that borrows from both Pinterest and Facebook.

The new site will offer users personalised homepages, so they can curate their own shopping experience, profile pages to share interests, the ability to follow sellers’ pages, a newsfeed and notifications.

Pinterest’s image-heavy layout appears to have inspired the design of the new homepage, which will display the latest product images from the sellers a user follows scattered across the screen in a similar manner to the photo-sharing site.

“We’re delivering a cleaner, contemporary look and feel; a more intuitive, convenient way to browse, decide and buy — both globally and locally; and a new personal way to curate your own shopping experience and discover items perfect for you,” eBay president Devin Wenig says.

The new design will be rolled live over the new few weeks in the US and around the world in the coming months. An eBay Australia spokesperson confirmed the new design would hit ebay.com.au in November, with additional new features coming next year.

“The future of commerce is personal, driven by data,” Wenig adds. “Search results and recommendations are no longer enough. Consumers want insight. And they want personal, curated selection that is relevant to them, controlled by them. Consumers want experiences that are not intrusive but inspiring, experiences that don’t dictate but guide and assist, in ways that feel authentic and natural. We want to make moments of inspiration instantly shoppable. This is what eBay is poised to deliver.”

Facebook to roll out ‘want’ button for products in news feed

by Marketing ON 10 October 2012

Rumours of a ‘want’ button on Facebook have been confirmed with the social network announcing it is testing a feature that will allow users to declare their intention to buy products featured in pictures.

Facebook announced that it has joined forces with seven retailers – including Pottery Barn, Victoria Secret and Neiman Marcus – to test a platform which allows users to ‘want’, ‘collect’, or ‘like’ a product, according to Mashable.

The button will be attached to images designed to be discovered in the news feed, which appear for non-followers of the brand when their friends like an image. Users will be able to click want to signify to their friends they would like to own the product and click through to buy the items via Facebook.

The feature, dubbed ‘Collections’, has a Pinterest-style look with images displaying individually or in groups. It appears that for grouped images the want button will hover over the corner of each image, while for individual images it will appear underneath.

After clicking ‘want’, users will be given the option to comment on what they like about the product.

Presumably a move to encourage more brands to invest on the network since its IPO, the initiative could see so-called ‘F-Commerce’, which is yet to gain traction, kick into gear.

The button will not extend off Facebook through the web the way social plugins, such as the ‘like’ button does, instead being an action restricted to the Facebook platform. In a statement sent to AllFacebook, the social network said:

“We’ve seen that businesses often use pages to share information about their products through photo albums. Today, we are beginning a small test in which a few select businesses will be able to share information about their products through a feature called Collections. Collections can be discovered in news feed, and people will be able to engage with these collections and share things they are interested in with their friends. People can click through and buy these items off of Facebook.”

No word on when the feature will go public has been released.

Images source: Business Insider.

Pinterest proliferation – how and what brands are pinning

by Simon van Wyk ON 24 September 2012

Last month, much was made of the international study published by Experian, the global information services company, on the meteoric growth rates enjoyed by niche social networks. Across the globe, Pinterest and Instagram massively increased their market share.

Indeed, weekly visits to Pinterest’s website from North American users hit nearly 29 million in July, up from 1.27 million a year earlier. This represents an increase of 2183%.

Of course, from day one, Pinterest was a hit with women and a natural fit for clothing brands, wedding planners, luxury goods and beauty products, giving them a fabulously designed platform to beautifully catalogue their wares.

So while you won’t be surprised to come across boards bearing the names of famous fashion labels and beauty products – other brands in completely unrelated sectors have also spotted the potential of this platform to engage with their audience in new ways. These include Coca-Cola, upscale department store Nordstrom, General Electric, American Express and Accenture.

It’s becoming a playground too for carmakers. For example, to coincide with the launch of its 2012 CR-V, Honda encouraged some of the most active pinners with $500 to get out and live life to the fullest by going cold turkey from the site and taking a ‘Pintermission’ for 24 hours to go out and enjoy themselves. On their return they had to pin pictures from their 24-hour break on their personal Pintermission board hosted on Honda’s page.

Just recently, Volvo US launched a promotion on Pinterest inviting pinners to pin their favourite Volvo adventure for a chance to win the ultimate Volvo joyride. To be eligible to win an iTunes gift card, fuel voucher, clothing gift card, and hotel accommodation, users need create pinboards featuring their favourite roadtrip destinations, stops, outfits and music.

Interestingly, while pharmaceutical companies very rarely, if ever, make a first move in any marketing medium, they can certainly claim early adopter status on this social media platform. For instance, Novo Nordisk, the global healthcare company that specialises in medication for diabetes and haemophilia has four topical boards and 94 pins across them. The four boards: World Diabetes Foundation, Patient Stories, Sustainability and World Haemophilia Day provide a simple and accessible touch point for patients and others to find out more about living with these illnesses and connect with others with similar conditions.

Meanwhile, Bayer Corporation in the US has 85 pins across seven boards. In comparison with Novo Nordisk, their boards seem to be more conventional focussing on Bayer’s Businesses, Sustainability, Innovation, High-tech Materials, Gardening, Bayer Advertising and Science Education.

GE Healthcare has an interesting mix of pinboards while Boehringer Ingelheim has four boards that include picture competitions, a Welcome board and a History board.

Clearly, Pinterest gives healthcare brands a trustworthy and reliable platform upon which to provide patients with easily accessible information simply by pinning images from their corporate sites together with other relevant images from third-party sites. Without a huge investment in time or resources, pharmaceutical marketers can publish a board of photos, videos, charts, infographics and other relevant content to help patients living with that condition. The Patient Stories board from Novo Nordisk for example is a real standout in that it links to videos that feature narratives spoken by real patients who suffer from various forms of diabetes.

While Pinterest does offer brands a nice playground in which to engage with customers, as a marketer you surely can’t add yet other social media platform to your over stretched budget without a definite ROI.

The team from Pinterest wants you to buy into the notion that Pinterest solves the problem of discovery on the web by delivering a curated user experience. What does that mean? Well, whereas Google requires specific search queries in order to yield meaningful results, when you’re not sure what you’re looking for – such as when you want to find something special for your brother’s birthday but don’t know quite what – Google won’t be much help.

Of course you can go to any online store and browse their range, but if you’re looking for ideas, it could mean trawling through any number of pages and any number of sites before you find something that piques your interest.

Pinterest, they say, helps you cut to the chase. For marketers, opportunities abound to pay Pinterest’s uber pinners to pin an image of your product. If their personal style ties in with your brand, chances are that you can reach more than a million of their followers for a fraction of the price that you would pay a magazine to reach a fraction of that audience.

In an interesting article in Fast Company last week, Greg Fant, chief marketing officer at One Kings Lane, the highly successful US designer home décor and furnishings sale site, says that Pinterest users who find their way to One Kings Lane are three times more likely than the average shopper to make a purchase. He also mentions that referrals to One Kings Lane from Pinterest have nearly surpassed traffic from Facebook. According to research from ecommerce firm RichRelevance, the average sale resulting from a Pinterest user following an image back to its source and then buying the item is $180. This compares with $80 for Facebook users and $70 for Twitter users.

These are certainly interesting thoughts to ponder. For any brand electing to spend time on Pinterest, the most important point is to determine exactly what value you want Pinterest to deliver.