Pinterest is most often identified with brainstorming ideas and dreaming of faraway places. The platform has recently released new features to enhance the context of each pin, ultimately tying the digital world back to the physical. Retail brands like Kate Spade, REI, and Target are using the platform to create city guides, collect UGC content of their products in action, and collaborate with Pinfluencers for custom campaigns. In the travel industry, destinations and resort properties are capitalizing on the different ‘Rich Pins’ functionality to promote highly visual content with associated context.
Friends, likes, favorites, retweets, page views, followers, you name it; they’re all for sale, but they may not be as “real” as we all think. Originating in places like India, Russia and Pakistan, these bots, or lines of code, are built to behave like real social media users and have been around for years, deceiving people into thinking something is popular or pushing an agenda. The recent surge in this fake user activity has led to Instagram’s first big spam account purge.
Pharrell’s latest single, “Happy,” is taking over the music scene worldwide, inspiring amazing travel videos from around the world. From Vietnam to Buenos Aries, fans have been creating their own versions of the tune inspiring the wanderlust in us all. And a recent compilation of them even caused the star to cry “happy” tears.
The ongoing fight to win over Facebook fans continues. Hot off the press this week, Facebook’s online advertising efforts are looking quite promising with ad clicks climbing more than 70% and ad impressions up 40% since last year. The world’s most popular social network has figured out how to show ads to people who actually want to click on them. Adobe estimates that Facebook’s ad click-through rate rose 160% over a 12-month period. Also this week, Facebook introduced the FB Newswire, a real-time feed of content related to newsworthy events designed especially with journalists in mind.
In addition to rolling out its new profile layout this week, Twitter recently announced new ways for marketers and developers to drive app installs and engagements using a new mobile app promotion suite of targeting, creative and measurement tools that use MoPub’s mobile advertising exchange. According to Forbes, this new ad unit could translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in a very short amount of time, similar to the success Facebook saw with the addition of a similar ad product last year.