Sure Twitter has for some time now been a big name in social marketing, and many marketers already see it as the best option, but the company has not been as quick to give marketers a wide variety of advertising tools as Facebook has been. However, the company has just recently announced some new tools for Twitter advertisers that will relieve them from the past slowness of Twitter’s advertising innovation. The company has of course provided marketers with some tools in the past that have been quite useful, but now the company may be taking things up a notch. In a blog post on Wednesday, the company informs the online public of their new Twitter Ads API.

The company writes in their post that their main advertising goal from the beginning has been not to deliver more ads to users, but rather better and more effective ads. Therefore, the company is releasing their new API which will allow a new group of partner companies to integrate their services with Twitter ads easily. Hopefully, this API will allow advertisers a more vast set of options for their Twitter marketing efforts.

Here is one of the more informational parts of the company’s blog post announcement,

What this means is that as marketers, you’ll soon have the ability to work with our initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns — and integrate them into your existing cross-channel advertising strategies. Equally important, users will continue to see the most relevant Promoted Tweets from advertisers. With the Ads API, marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale.

The company has been testing their new API with a new set of partners since January of this year, and seeing success, they are releasing it to the public now. At the same time, Twitter has announced five of their new API partners, and they are companies which one would absolutely expect to be on board. The new partners include Adobe, HootSuite, Salesforce, SHIFT, as well as TBG Digital. The company reports that they chose these partners because their individual offerings meet the “more pressing needs of marketers.”

This is just the start of our efforts that will give advertisers more choice — and for our partners who are ad tool providers, the Ads API represents a new way for their expertise to meet the needs of their clients.

It seems that along with this new API, Twitter has more big plans for the future of its advertising platform. With this new API though, marketers will have plenty of options for advertising with the social site, and better ways to reach the over 200 million active users on Twitter. Interest in Twitter as a marketing source has grown rapidly in recent months, and it is safe to say that these new advertising options will be a great way to keep that growth in interest on an upward slope.

Social media has not only provided something for college kids everywhere to waste away hours of their life doing, but it has also provided brands and businesses both big and small a very valuable business tool. However, there are bound to be a few businesses in this world that have a bit of trouble using social media correctly, and there are even those that botch their social media marketing campaigns entirely. So, what is it exactly that most consumers are looking for on social media from businesses? No matter the network or social site, consumers seem to like certain things from marketers more than others, and a new study shows just what works best.

This new study from J.D. Power and Associates shows that there must be a strong balance in social media marketing tactics. This means that in order for brands to keep their reputation where they want it in the social world, they must put equal amounts of effort toward customer service on social sites as they do marketing on them. The study measured the experiences of over 23,000 consumers working with 100 companies on social media, both in regard to marketing and customer service. The main finding of the study was that few brands are actually doing all that they should on social media.

Satisfaction of Consumers

The study rated consumers on a satisfaction scale by allowing them to score their satisfaction out of 1,000 points. Of those with high satisfaction, being those with satisfaction scores over 950, 87% stated that their interaction with brands positively impacted the way they think of said brands as well as their chances of purchasing. On the other hand, there were the 10% of respondents with low satisfactions scores, being those less than 500, that said that their interactions with brands negatively impacted their chances of purchasing from the brand.

Who Should Be Paid Attention?

Going further, the study showed that in the age category of 30-49, almost a third of respondents said that they actually do communicated with brands on social media through marketing tactics. In the age group over 50 years, 38% said that they do the same. Unexpectedly, only 23% of consumers in the age group of 18-29 said they interact with companies through their social marketing efforts. Now, for these 18-29 years old respondents, upwards of 43% said that they use social media for social interactions, and only 18% of those over 50 years do the same.

So, while there is a balance in the ways age groups are using social media to reach brands and businesses, there should be a balance in the way these brands put information out on social sites. Many see social media as a great way to make information about new offers and updates on products known to a wide range of consumers. However, what appears to be equally important is customer service, because it has an impact on every age group on the web. Although most brands today do not pay an equal amount of attention to both marketing and customer service, beginning to do so is an easy fix. Social marketing simply need to be willing to take the time to pay attention to consumer interactions within their social pages.

Among the many options digital marketers find themselves faced with today, one of the more useful tools that quite a few marketers have taken advantage of are offers, deals and coupons. As far as most people are concerned, the best place to turn with plans of starting an offer or coupon campaign is to Groupon. The company is widely known as the best option in the online deal field, but it seems that they are soon to have a huge amount of competition to deal with. Not only is Google the dominating name in things like search advertising, display advertising, and even mobile advertising, but the company has decided to begin their takeover of the online deal business as well. Sorry Groupon, but you probably should have seen it coming.

After all, after looking back at beginnings, Google was working on offers and deals as marketing tools all the way back to 2010. Groupon, which is a company that began sometime in 2008, did not really bring online coupons to the level of popularity they are at today until 2011. With Google keeping back a bit for the past few years, the company has had time to test, develop and improve their coupon and offer tools to match the consumer wants and needs. However, Google has tools at their disposal that Groupon does not, allowing the company to take their deal offerings for advertisers to a whole new level.

Now that Google has been testing their offers and daily deals for a few years, they are making the tools public and available to the millions of advertisers that use Google’s resources for their marketing campaigns. Evidence that Google was planning to build upon their deals and offers has been seen for a few months now, as they slowly extended their service. Now, the company is tying their deals and coupons into their AdWords tool, making it available for all AdWords advertisers to use.

The actual presentation of these deals and offers to online consumers is actually very simple, but promises to be incredible effective. Advertisers will now have the option, while setting up the usual search ads one would set up in AdWords, to include a deal or offer within the advertisement. Beneath the text and link of the advertisement will appear the description of the offer. Next to this description will appear a yellow-orange button that says View Offer. With this tool, advertisers will be able to take advantage of two ad formats at the same time, all within AdWords and all from Google.

With that stated, it is incredibly simple to see just how heavy of a competition Groupon has on its hands here. Simply stated, there is a good change that Groupon will lose its top spot in the online offers business, as Google has already dominated many of the other marketing methods that the company has delved into. Now that this feature has been released, we can probably expect a growth in the usage of deals and coupons by advertisers, as well as a growth in use of AdWords itself.

Some great news for the golden boy and serial entrepreneur, Trent Silver: his purse business is taking off in leaps and bounds. Despite some minor legal issues in the Cash For Gold business, he had made a name for himself very fast in the industry and is the genius behind several successful businesses on the net. His new business model of buying and reselling purses looks like it will be a hit.

Already despite being only a few months old, his purse business seems to be taking off. So much so that he has already bought another business, Persenickety.com a successful purse blog in order to use their audience to drive more sales. I knew when I first talked to him that he’d be continuing to grow businesses, but I never thought he’d go from the Cash for Gold King to the Cash for Purses..ummm.. Queen?

More information about this acquisition below:

 CashForPurses.com, the online purse exchange site, has acquired content site Pursenickety.com, The Designer Purse Blog, in an effort to provide further education and information to its customers.

Unlike CashForPurses.com, which allows customers to sell their designer handbags, Pursenickety.com will be strictly informational. “Since we are committed to educating our customers so that they can make informed decisions regarding their purse transactions, acquiring Pursenickety.com just makes perfect sense,” says CashForPurses.com founder Trent Silver. Silver is a veteran digital marketing and interactive advertising expert, having started his first successful recommerce business at age 18.

Mark Knowles, founder of Pursenickety.com says, “Much as I hated to let go of Pursenickety, things move on in the Internet faster than almost any other business model. When I saw CashForPurses.com, I immediately knew it would be a perfect fit.” He adds, “I wish CashForPurses.com the best going forward.”

Pursenickety.com, founded in 2008, contains hundreds of articles covering all aspects of the world of designer purses, including such names as Dior, Coach, Marc Jacobs, Christian Louboutin, Chanel and more.

“The designer purse information is excellent, but what first caught my eye was Pursenickety.com’s Eco-Friendly section,” says Silver. “Our company is dedicated to addressing environmental issues – CashForPurses.com is, after all, a form of recycling.”

 

­Despite the immense numbers of advertisers that have allocated a majority of their time and ad dollars to new and innovative advertising techniques, such as things like mobile and social, display advertising is still a method that remains the main priority of many digital advertisers. The problem is, these display advertisements do not seem to be performing quite as well as they used to in past years. A recent comScore report that was released on Valentine’s Day entitled the “2013 U.S. Digital Future in Focus,” tells us that about three out of every ten display ads never rendered in-view. As we know, this number is not good for display advertisers, and performance seems to be taking a significant drop.

In the report, comScore writes,

comScore research showed that an average of 3 in 10 ads are never rendered in-view, leading to significant waste, weaker campaign performance and a glut of poor-performing inventory that imbalances the supply-and-demand equation and depresses CPMs.

Needless to say, the poor performance of display ads has negatively affected display advertisers in multiple ways, those ways which are listed by the company above. However, the report found that in the fourth quarter alone, somewhere around 1.4 trillion ad impressions came in. When compared to the year prior, this would stand for a 6 percent increase and improvement for Q4.

Now, hearing of these numbers, and seeing how so many ads were never even rendered in-view during 2012, marketers clearly need to make some changes. According to their report, in looking to predict the turnout of display ads in 2013, comScore sees marketers making these big changes. The company expects display advertisers to use data in more effective ways, which will essentially lead to a decrease in these useless and wasted display ads. In addition, marketers will be using data that shows the ability of ads to monetize and they will also use more targeting techniques, helping to improve their advertisements and hopefully bring up performance quite a bit.

In the report, Linda Abraham, comScore CMO and EVP of Global Product Development is quoted in making the following statement.

2013 is poised to be digital’s most exciting year yet as the growing ubiquity of digital platforms presents marketers with nearly endless opportunities to connect and engage with consumers. It’s clear that the dynamics of the marketplace have fundamentally evolved through the adoption of smartphones and tablets and the increasingly ‘digital’ nature of all media. Navigating this changing landscape requires a holistic understanding of the key trends, underlying drivers and new opportunities that the digital ecosystem will bring in the year ahead.

Although comScore’s report covered many types of advertising across the web, the state of display advertising struck me as particularly interesting. Although display is one of the oldest forms of marketing on the web, marketers are still having trouble delivering them properly, due to data issues comScore suspects. The company has high hopes for display marketers this year, and we can only hope that they are right in their predictions.

Up to this point, advertising on Facebook has not caused much of a problem for those users that have to view the ads every time they log in and scroll the News Feed. In fact, most people enjoy the advertisements shown to them, considering they are affiliated with those brands and companies that they have liked on the network voluntarily. Many users actually like pages on Facebook for the sole purpose of receiving advertising content and updates from these brands and businesses. However, there may be a new advertising method on the horizon for Facebook that could potentially screw up the balance between advertiser and Facebook user. There are no confirmed plans of it ever being put in place, but the idea is roaming around the brains behind Facebook’s marketing tools.

According to a recent article from TechCrunch, during an interview at the Future of Media Conference last Wednesday, a keynote with Facebook VP of Business David Fischer revealed thoughts on new marketing tools to come to Facebook. They are not exactly ads that we have never seen before, but they certainly work better in some places than others.

The type of ad I am referring to is auto-play video ads, and during the interview at the conference, Fischer contemplated the ads within the News Feed. He stated that the ad type already exists on Facebook in a way, as Facebook advertisers are already able to post videos and promote them to get more views on them. Even though these ads have to be clicked on, they already work well. However, Fischer stated that advertisers have been requesting a way to more effectively grab attention with video ads on Facebook, instead of simply having them blend with the other stories in the News Feed.

After being asked to provide an example of a company that is effectively using video ads like these, Fischer stated, “You know I think YouTube has moved in the right direction by putting more control in the user’s hands, with the five-second TrueView thing.” Even though YouTube and Google are the main competitor of Google on the web, Fischer stated that he could see video ads like those on the video sharing network, working for Facebook in a similar way.

“I believe there are ways we could do it. There are ways that could be destructive and distracting to the user experience. But there are ways that could potentially balance user experience with advertiser experience. We haven’t put a product out yet because we haven’t had one we’re comfortable with. But if we could, then we would do it.”

The question is; how might this new advertising method affect the way users enjoy the Facebook experience. As of right now, the majority of Facebook advertising takes place quietly, resting in the News Feed for users to see alongside the content of friends and family. Adding noise and visuals like auto-play ads, ones that will potentially take up the entire Facebook homepage for at least a five second interval, may disturb users, and make some shy away from the use of Facebook.

Among the many Facebook marketing and business tools that the company has released in the past few years, one of the favorites of the average Facebook user is the Offers feature. The Offers feature is that which allows users to get discounts from brands and businesses on Facebook whose page they have liked. All the user has to do is claim the offer by clicking the Get Offer button, and an email will be sent to the user with more information on said offer. Seeing great results with the Offers feature, Facebook has decided to test a new version which will allow users to shop immediately, get reminders before promotions end, and it will also allow users to choose when they want to share offers, or if they even want to.

According to Inside Facebook, a spokesperson from Facebook announced that the company is working with just a few retailers around the world in this test, and that no other pages will be affected during the testing period. For most pages, offers will continue to appear in original format during the testing period.

The hopes with this new version of Offers are to get users to take better advantage of the feature; making Offers a big part of running a brand Page on the network. Hopefully, the new version will be more successful in leading users to bring in direct sales for retailers. At the same time, the new version will help users quite a bit, reminding them to actually use the Offers being presented to them while allowing them more control over the sharing of their shopping activities.

According to the article from Inside Facebook, this is how the new version will work differently from the current:

For e-commerce offers in the test, users will see two buttons: “Shop Now” and “Remind Me.” Previously, users could only select “Get Offer.” When users click “Shop Now,” they will be taken directly to a retailer’s website. When they click “Remind Me,” users will be sent an email and at a later date will be reminded with a notification on Facebook. It is up to each retailer when they will remind users about their promotion, but they can only send one notification per offer.

Although this feature will be great for Facebook users that enjoy receiving offers on Facebook, the true aim of this new version seems to be increasing conversions for Facebook marketers. By ultimately increasing a user’s number of paths to purchase, it may turn out that they are more likely to do so. According to Inside Facebook, Facebook has said that 42 million users on the site have claimed an offer at some point, regardless of how many have redeemed them afterward. Either way, the success from Offers is there, and Facebook is trying to make the most of it for marketers. Inside Facebook writes, “Enabling users to visit a retailer’s site directly from an offer and sending them notifications to remind them to make use of the offer could reduce the number of offer claims that don’t lead to sales.”

Digital marketing is still deep in a period of growth, and it can be seen through the many types of marketing on the web, such as social, search, mobile, and video. Video in particular has been doing quite well, as the everyday internet user becomes more and more interested in images and video, and less so in text. The internet marketing industry, like most others, is in a constant state of change; however video marketing is lagging behind a bit in this change. Sure, there is still ongoing growth in video marketing, but video is not quite changing and improving in the ways that other types of digital marketing are.

A company called Videology, which specializes in providing ad tools to marketers, recently released some new numbers that show evidence of the lag that video advertising is experiencing. First off, in the final quarter of 2012, the figures from Videology show a growth of 52 percent in comparison to the three months prior. With such a huge growth in just a matter of months, video marketers must be seeing great success with these ads, and it may even mean that some TV advertisers are realizing that digital is the way to go. As more ad dollars go to digital video advertising, TV advertising goes down.

However, even though there is a rapid growth in video ads according to Videology’s figures from the last quarter of 2012, their numbers also show that video advertising has not progressed far past what it was when it first began on the web. What I mean is, while most types of digital advertising have taken into consideration the way the internet world has become a multi-screen world, video advertising still takes place almost entirely on desktop platforms. In fact, the exact numbers from the company show that while only 5 percent of video ads are on mobile devices, and only 3 percent are on connected TVs, the other 92 percent of video ads are shown on desktop PCs.

Of course, these numbers do not mean that video marketing is stuck in the past, but rather the industry is just a bit behind on the times. This could potentially be because of the great performance that video ads have always seen on desktop. However, as the world becomes more focused on the mobile web, video advertising will soon make a much larger shift as well.

So, it will be very interesting to see the numbers change as far as platform shares of video advertising go. Based on the growth numbers reported by Videology in this recent research, it is easy to estimate that video will continue to grow at a rapid rate. With this growth, and the further progression of the multi-screen trend among consumers, it will not be long before the number of video ads on mobile skyrockets far above 5 percent.