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Twitter Has A Ways To Go Before It Has A Payment Platform (DigitalTrends)
American Express announced it would be partnering with Twitter to enable a tweet-to-pay feature. This means after syncing your AmEx card, all you have to do it use specific hashtags to buy and order certain items. It’s just the latest partnership between Twitter and AmEx, which have been working together for a while now to bring payment services to the platform. In March of last year, AmEx introduced a hashtag-to-save program, a tiptoe into the more fully-fledged service it’s now launched. But as is generally the case with Twitter features, tweet-to-pay is sort of old news. A handful of outside apps have been paving the way to making Twitter a true e-commerce platform long before the limited, daily-deals-like announcement from the micro-blog and American Express. What Twitter and AmEx have launched seems like more of an experiment than anything else. Read >>
The Rise Of Paid Social Ads (Nielsen)
Marketers are increasingly viewing paid social media advertising as part of their marketing tool kits. According to a recent report by Vizu (a Nielsen company), the majority of advertisers say they use paid social media advertising in conjunction with other online and offline advertising (66 percent and 51 percent, respectively). Only 5 percent of advertisers report running primarily social-only campaigns.
When asked which online tactics they typically run their paid social media advertising alongside, advertisers’ top three responses were: online display (83 percent), online video (46 percent) and mobile (40 percent). In the offline world, advertisers said they combined their paid social media ads with print (52 percent), followed by TV (37 percent). Read >>
Azimo Adds Facebook Integration To Squeeze Western Union (TechCrunch)
Azimo, the UK-based social money transfer service aiming to disrupt an industry dominated by legacy players Western Union and Moneygram, is rolling out integration with Facebook to make it easy for users of the social network to send money to one another. A first for the remittance industry, claims the company, with perhaps PayPal-to-PayPal transfers coming closest. Read >>
Why Twitter Bought Bluefin Labs For $90 Million (All Things Digital)
Bluefin's affinity analysis can be part of Twitter’s way of marrying data to its ad-sales pitch, and can make a more compelling case to the brands to spend more on social advertising, directing brands to the best times and places to run said ads. In other words, Twitter can say "a promoted tweet about brand X may work great during this time slot, directed to these users, according to all this Bluefin data we’ve compiled." It’s the same thing TV pitchmen and women have been doing for years, only with loads more research, studies and time behind them. Twitter’s battle for ad dollars when competing with the tried and true hasn’t been easy, as it hasn’t exactly had a robust analytics service to back up the company’s claims of importance. Read >>
LinkedIn SlideShare Develops Real-Time Tracking Content Analytics (MediaPost)
LinkedIn’s SlideShare created a feedback loop for marketers in its series of Pro product suite apps, a paid service geared toward marketing experts. It houses presentations, documents and videos on brand channels. The tool, Send Tracker, released Tuesday, allows marketers to manage and track content, as well as develop sales leads, from the social site through emails. Marketers upload content into SlideShare to share publicly or privately and attach it to an email. Send Tracker follows how others interact with it. Users receive a real-time notification via email when recipients look at the content. It records how much time the person spent on each page and whether they clicked or copied the content. Read >>
Sony Says Facebook Can Make Or Break A Film (The Wrap)
Movie studios can no longer use marketing to turn bad movies into financial successes, Sony CEO Michael Lynton said, explaining that social media has robbed them of that tool. Sony been one of the most aggressive studios at using social media to market its movies and build awareness in advance of a film's theatrical debut. "The biggest issue for movie studios has always been that some films are good and others aren’t so good," he says. "Originally, marketing was supposed to smooth that out. But we can’t do that anymore. With social media, you can no longer hide the goods." Read >>
Measuring The Cost Of Social Media (BusinessBlogs)
We need to consider ways to calculate and measure the return on investment social media represents. We know that effective social media campaigns are long-term, are about engagement and ultimately about relationship development; but can that ever equate to dollars and cents? Is it possible to put metrics around human interaction and communication? As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In this financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can be applied to other forms of investment (i.e., time). So to begin you must have the end in mind. Planning and having solid goals and concrete baselines are crucial to calculating this return on investment. Read >>
The Social Media Lead-Generation Horse Race (Brafton)
The race is on to see which platform will continue to have an impact in the business world moving forward. Could it be the reigning champion Facebook or one of the networks in the lead-gen pony pen? Read >>
