CHARLIE-HELEN ROBINSON ON-AIR; DRIVE TIME TARGETING OVER 50’S

With Michael Smyth

WELCOME.

Update for listeners; here’s my MP3 ABC Radio Segment Collection

As requested by Lisa Adelaide, leader of the Red Hatters.

Pinning

If we hark back and think of our scrapbooking days (everyone’s got a mum or aunty who’s done that craze surely?), you will get an instant impression of what Pinterest is and does. It’s all pretty much female crafty centered and it’s a big search engine with a stack of images that have been categorized for you to find.

**Say you are looking for a new colour scheme in your loungeroom? Pinterest will provide you with inspiration from what people have “pinned”.

Pinning is like having a bunch of cork boards or a journal that you pin or stick magazine cutouts to for inspiration. These online scrap books and journals inspire our wardrobes, home design, recipes and garden designs. People pin their own pictures, or like and share others.

Women love this stuff. And it shows too. 70 million people now use Pinterest and about 80% of those are women. There are, to date, about 30 billion pins (bits of content).

The most pinned item is Garlic Cheesy Bread: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/238550111481940397/

The most talked about pin is an inspirational piece about an elderly couple: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/59602395038082142/

The most popular pinner is Joy Cho with her Oh Joy! profile having well over 13.4 million followers. She has 89 boards and over 11k pins. You can probably guess the content categories seeing as it’s female orientated?

If you are in retail, pinning is a great strategy as each pin links back to a website. If that website happens to be an online store capturing a sale, even better!

Linking your Pinterest content to your website (or online store) is simply a great way to draw traffic in. You could be talking about anything. Just remember pinning is attractive, visual and female orientated. If the pinners like your content, it will be “repined”. Like a retweet (we all understand that concept these days, yes?).

Here are 4 Key Rules for Pinterest:

1. Everyone must have a recipe board. Even if you don’t use recipes! Food is one of the biggest resharing items on Pinterest.
2. Keep pins “faceless”. Pins should be design or visual, not about a person. Unless of course they are a celebrity, famous person and perhaps include a quote.
3. Website traffic from Pinterest increases each year, so include this in your online retail strategy. Always link to “something” from your pin.
4. Keep your own Pin Boards sorted. Pinners are neat freaks and like categories, and easy displays of content.

Stripe Not Black and White

On the go payments via mobile on Twitter? Maybe. It’s a grey area.

http://recode.net/2014/08/22/twitter-is-working-with-payments-startup-stripe-on-its-commerce-initiative/ “Twitter and Stripe representatives declined to comment.”

Social Commerce.

It’s a given that mobiles and smartphones give retailers one of the biggest opportunities to reach, engage and understand their consumers and there have been varying degrees of success using the f-commerce or social commerce philosophy over the years. The most simple outcome seems to be people putting the items up for sale on Facebook among friends. It is what it is.

However, Twitter is not giving up. They appear to be in discussions with the company Stripe to bring to their newsfeed a version of on the go payments. Stripe is known for their online payment gateway.

About 70% of adult social networkers shop online. Ask around. You will be surprised how many do. Sites like Gumtree, EBay, Etsy, Living Social, Scoupon, Amazon are all included in this category. These online stores now roll off our tongue like household name shopping malls the equivalent of David Jones and Myers.

Get the picture?

OK, can you now imagine a link from Twitter to a page that includes your favourite author releasing their new book or a new “must have boys’ toy gadget”?

People are much more mobile app savvy with more and more services being supported this way; even a bus route can be mapped out easily. The result is, people have more trust in many services, confidence in sharing information and are generally more aware of the risks and know how to manage them.

It will be a win win if Twitter provide the service as it will make the online stores more accessible to the general consumer.

To like or not is the question.

Like or lurk. Many times I have encouraged people to like something, don’t just hold back and lurk. Well now I’m encouraging more. We all love the like on Facebook (we even count them after posting a photo or video). We aim for it, push for it, hold competitions to get it, and shout from the roof tops if we don’t.

People like to be liked. It’s human nature. But for an individual, it turns out it’s not the best practice. It screws up the newsfeed in a most curious way. Facebook uses an individual’s likes to work out which ads and content to share. And it’s not always great.

What they have now announced is a shift and adjustment in their (technical) algorithms. The click-bait posts from pages are screwing up their own algorithms, as are the short coded links.

What does this mean?

Quite simply, and firstly, a post status that encourages a reader to click to get more content will fade from the news feed. You know the ones “OMG I can’t believe what she wore that, click to see”.

And secondly, a shortened link within a status will get short change too. You see, a link added as a shared item carries more information for the reader to assess if they wish to follow that link, and Facebook have reviewed user behavior and decided you prefer that style of link as well.

Facebook have worked out some pretty crafty ways to make sure they target the right type of content, ie like how long a person stays on the website when they leave Facebook etc. I suspect we’ll see a drastic shift in how ALL companies share their information and try to engage with their audience. Otherwise you won’t see from them at all.

How long it takes for a company to work out the next “catch” is anyone’s guess but rest assured someone will.

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/news-feed-fyi-click-baiting/

News Feed FYI: Click-baiting

By Khalid El-Arini, Research Scientist and 
Joyce Tang, Product Specialist

Today we’re announcing some improvements to News Feed to help people find the posts and links from publishers that are most interesting and relevant, and to continue to weed out stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don’t want to see. We’re making two updates, the first to reduce click-baiting headlines, and the second to help people see links shared on Facebook in the best format.