February’s Digital Marketing Round-up

Welcome to this month’s digital marketing round-up. It’s that strange time of the year when the New Year simultaneously feels like 5 minutes ago and also like a distant memory. Marketers are also realising that those things ‘we’ll review and go through in the New Year’ are now pretty overdue and need to be gone through pretty urgently.

If you’ve spent the month stuck in this paradox, never fear, we have you covered. Here are some digital marketing stories you may have missed during the shortest month of the year.

Twitter’s bot purge

Twitter recently sought to remove bots from their network, a spokesperson summarised, “As part of our ongoing work in safety, we identify suspicious account behaviors that indicate automated activity or violations of our policies around having multiple accounts, or abuse.”

This has led to members of the alt-right and conservatives feeling victimised as they’ve seen their Twitter following dramatically reduced. A small number of real users have been caught up in the purge, however Twitter has provided a phone number to call to verify that the user is indeed human.

This change comes after bots and automated social media has been prominent in the news with Russian hackers using bots to advance their political ambitions.

Bots have been used by celebrities, influencers and marketers alike to make themselves, or their clients appear more popular and popular than they are. Many influencer platforms now vet their clients to ensure that they have human followers rather than automated ones.

This is good news for brands and agencies, bad news for unscrupulous influencers and insecure ‘political’ personalities.

Winter Olympics being watched online

The Winter Olympics began on 9th February, running until 25th February. There have been a number of memorable stories, French wardrobe malfunctions, Russian curlers on drugs, and poor Elise Christie being knocked over, injured and disqualified.

What has been different about the viewing figures for this event is the online audience. 35% of viewers were watching events online. Stats on this viewership indicate that of those watching the Olympics, 90% had a second screen. 89% also regularly watched Youtube whilst 88% were on Facebook. Only 55% of those who watched the Olympics online were on Instagram on their second screen.

These figures will be of great interest to advertisers who will be keen to get the biggest ROI on their Olympic marketing budget.

Snapchat bespoke lenses

This is something we’ve been campaigning for for a while now. Snapchat have finally unveiled the technology that allows brands (and individuals) to create their own lenses. Previously we were limited to created geo-filters and adverts, however now our creativity can express itself in all its augmented reality glory.

150 templates and lenses can be personalised with text, emojis, dates, times and location — with Lenses starting at £5.99. It may not be the total autonomy we’re hoping for, but it’s a good place to start.

Facebook Messenger set for a big 2018

With over 60 million businesses using Facebook Messenger, and over 1.3bn of us mere mortals on the platform, it’s not a controversial statement to say that the platform had a good 2017. However Facebook Messenger is predicted to have an even bigger 2018.

According to Adweek, marketers should consider mobile phones to be the primary marketing tool to connect with their customers. Not only does this enable brands to build up a mailing list, and communicate directly to people that are interested in their brand, but messages sent via the platform are over 3.5 times more likely to be opened and read than emails.

It’s being predicted that we will soon start to see Messenger icons on websites in the same way that we’ve become accustomed to seeing links to other social media platforms.

By 2020, 30% of searches will be via voice

If you’re like me, and have become accustomed to barking orders at devices that don’t have voice control due to your over-reliance on Siri and Alexa, don’t worry. The strange looks on the bus and in the office could be about to disappear. Gartner, a marketing research company, have predicted that in the next 2 years almost a third of our internet searches will be conducted using a voice search.

This has significant implications for businesses who will need to tweak their digital marketing strategies and spend to account for this market. This new development also presents an opportunity for early adopters to get ahead of rivals. A great article can be found here about how to take full advantage of this new trend.

That’s your lot for this month, we hope you’ve found this vaguely interesting or useful. We’ll be back next month to give you another update on the world of digital marketing.