The continual trend of brands embracing online platforms and adopting new apps, social media and technology is again evident, with Starbucks today announcing their brand new introduction of mobile ordering in 2014, supporting a whole range of Starbucks digital marketing strategies currently in the market.
Social media and digital marketing online is continuing shifting the possibilities of how brands engage and change customer’s opinions. The slowing of sales in traditional bricks and mortar stores has seen the shift in purchasing attitudes online and the need to reach users in new and innovative ways. Businesses are now competing not only with their neighbour, but stores on the other side of the country, the world and online.
Brand experimentation with social media platforms is currently being tried by many marketers to reinforce a brand’s online digital marketing presence with dominant social media platforms Facebook and Twitter still leading the way. This is unsurprising due to both these platforms perceived maturity, high penetration within the mass market and advertising customisation abilities, perfectly suiting the purchasing power of marketing departments or small business owners.
It’s been a year since Twitter launched Vine on to our mobile and desktops with over 40 million users worldwide, the 6 second video sharing app has been quickly adopted by marketers. As reported, Twitter UK head of sales Dara Nasr told Marketing Week, “the constraint of six seconds has driven creativity among brands. [A diverse range of brands] have already been successful in creating videos that entertain, inform and amaze their followers and we can’t wait to see what other brands come up with in 2014”.
It’s clearly a challenge for some brands to carefully articulate their brand story in six seconds and marketers experimentation with this platform is still in its’ infancy stage. As Vine slowly grows out of its infancy stage, marketers will look for analytics to justify their marketing spend.
Paul Armstrong, owner of Digital Orange Consultancy, also suggests other issues that need to be overcome before marketers devote a significant chunk of their budgets and resources towards it, “Vine still needs a lot of improvements when it comes to content filtering for copyrighted content, protection against mature content and most importantly for brands, an ad system that works with Twitter.”
It isn’t strategic for marketers to integrate all the latest social media trends touted to be the “next big thing” so it is likely as we have seen in the past, only the truly innovative companies, industry leaders or those companies with robust budgets will be first to embrace any new social media platforms in their infancy stages. However, if your company finds a social media platform they can truly embrace, underscore always recommends embracing it and becoming an early adopter rather than surfing the crest with the masses allowing your company to be the industry leaders and first to benefit from opportunities associated with understanding a platform before any of your competitors.