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Is It the 11th Hour for TikTok?

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By Phil Britt

With TikTok expected to rake in $10 billion in ad revenue in 2022, a ban would likely have a serious effect on marketers and advertisers.

Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr called last month for the Council on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to take action to ban TikTok, according to an Axios report. And the FBI weighed in on TikTok security concerns this past week.

Though the FCC itself has no outright power to ban the popular social media platform, which has a reported 200 million downloads in the United States alone, the popular app has come under fire due to its Chinese ownership as well as concerns about security and the spread of misinformation. A strong stance by the FCC — Carr is one of five commissioners — could prompt Congress to take action regarding the platform.

Such a ban would have an effect on marketers and advertisers. According to a New York Times article, TikTok expects to generate $10 billion in ad revenue this year.

Below are some of the pros and cons of potentially banning the platform.

Pro: TikTok Is Poor at Handling Data

TikTok should be banned in the United States, said Lyle Solomon, Oak View Law Group principal attorney, citing TikTok’s handling of US user data and its “blatant contradictions” in how it handles the data.

TikTok’s US branch has repeatedly claimed that its data centers are in the country, Solomon explained. “However, the more extensive links of sharing US user data with the parent company, ByteDance, cannot be underplayed. Data from US users was repeatedly accessed within China’s borders by ByteDance employees. Senior TikTok employees claimed that certain ByteDance employees in China had access to all US personal data.”

Chinese law also concerns Solomon because the government can ask Chinese companies for any amount of user data. He pointed out that TikTok’s close ties with its parent company, ByteDance, the fact that Chinese authorities can legally ask for the personal data of US citizens and that TikTok has repeatedly misused US user data has put him in favour of a TikTok ban.

Con: Another TikTok-Like Platform Would Fill the Void

Suggesting that TikTok should be banned is reactionary and fails to consider the nature of such platforms, according to William Pickering, digital marketing executive at The Big Phone Store. “If TikTok were to be banned, another platform would simply fill the gap left in the market, just as TikTok was once Music.ly, and Vine acted as a precursor to both platforms in delivering short-form video content.”

Arguing that TikTok should be banned is taking a prescriptivist attitude toward technology based on one’s own personal biases and refusing to accept the inevitable evolution and proliferation of social media platforms based on current trends, Pickering added. “I think you would be hard pressed to find a member of Gen Z who holds the opinion that TikTok should be outright banned, outside of blatant contrarianism and paranoia over Chinese state surveillance.”

TikTok could make some changes to address objections about its business practices and platform, Pickering said. “But such issues are present on any major social media platform. There are problems with any system based on delivering users’ content specifically tailored to their preferences through an algorithm: such as echo chambers, the grooming of young children, reduction in attention span, etc.”

But a knee-jerk banning of TikTok in its entirety is a refusal to accept that these issues are based on the manipulation of base human psychological traits, Pickering concluded.

Pro: TikTok Is a ‘Cancerous’ Technology

Nima Olumi, Lightyear Strategies CEO, thinks not only that TikTok should be banned, but regulators should also take a hard look at Meta’s Facebook.

“TikTok and Meta are cancerous technologies that destroy human productivity and attention spans,” Olumi argues. “We need to tax social media — either the company or the user — to get daily active usage down. The average American currently spends four hours a day on social media.”

Just over one-fifth (21%) of Americans made 2022 New Year’s resolutions that included reducing time on social media, but, like many such resolutions, there’s no indication of a slowdown, with users spending 95 minutes a day on TikTok alone.

“This is clearly a cry for help,” Olumi said, adding that these platforms detract from a person’s productivity. “Apps like TikTok and Meta are designed to keep users on the platform for as much time as possible. They make their revenue through ad dollars and engagement is the only metric they care about.”

Con: TikTok Ban Would Negatively Impact US Livelihoods

Luke Lintz, HighKey Enterprises LLC founder and CEO, agreed that TikTok is no different from many other social media platforms, though it likely collects more data than others.

TikTok is expanding into a wide range of industries and partnering with major merchants to launch a marketplace to compete with Amazon, Lintz added. TikTok has already figured out the top of the marketing funnel, so the expansion will enable users to buy products and services without leaving the TikTok platform.

“Banning TikTok is not the correct solution because there are so many US content creators making their livelihoods from TikTok, and many users enjoy the platform,” Lintz added. “I believe the correct solution is setting guidelines for a USA majority stake ownership in TikTok.”

Final Thoughts on Banning TikTok

There is no questioning the popularity of the platform, nor its use as an effective marketing tool for many. Even so, members of both major political parties are wary of anything involving oversight by the Chinese government, and the privacy of personal data is a major concern, with the United States and European Union continuing to strengthen laws concerning personally identifiable information.

So the debate regarding whether or not to ban TikTok is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

By Phil Britt

Sourced from CMSWire

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Podcasts and Audio Outpace Streaming Video, Hit $4.9B in Ad Revenue During 2021

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By J. Clara Chan

An IAB report finds that digital audio — defined as podcasts and streaming for music and radio — had the largest year-over-year growth rate compared to streaming video and social media advertising.

Podcasts and streaming for music and radio has seen the largest growth in ad revenue, hitting a total of $4.9 billion in revenue during 2021, according to a report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau released Tuesday.

With a nearly 58 percent year-over-year growth in ad revenue — up from 13 percent the previous year — the digital audio category outpaced streaming video, social media, search and display advertising growth during 2021, the report found.

The majority of growth in the digital audio category came from mobile devices, which brought in $4.1 billion in ad revenue and accounted for 85 percent of the category’s total revenue. Revenue on desktop devices for digital audio paled in comparison at $739 million, the report said.

But in terms of total dollars, search continued to drive the most revenue for the year at $78.3 billion, followed by display advertising at $56.7 billion. Digital video was the third-largest ad revenue driver, bringing in nearly $40 billion in 2021, representing a 51 percent year-over-year growth.

The report also found that social media advertising was able to recover from some of the decline seen in 2020 at the start of the pandemic to bring in a total of $57.7 billion last year. But companies like Facebook parent Meta and Snap are continuing to contend with revenue declines caused by Apple’s iOS privacy changes, which went into effect last year and allow users to opt out of tracking, the impact of which may not be fully seen until later this year.

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Source: IAB / PwC Internet Ad Revenue Report, FY 2021 IAB / PwC

By J. Clara Chan

Sourced from The Hollywood Reporter

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To Pay for Social Media Advertising Or Not When, Why, Why Not, How!

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Sourced from B&T Magazine.

Nicola Moras (main photo) is an online visibility expert and author of Into The Spotlight, a guide to help you step up your online visibility, become a rock star in your industry and make your business thrive. In this guest post, Moras takes a look at the pros and cons of paid social media advertising…

To the uninitiated social media advertising can have the allure like that of the holy grail to Indiana Jones. Whilst the adventure may not be quite the same, put a foot wrong and BOOM! You end up falling into the abyss of closed ad accounts, pages shut down and worse – you could lose all the equity you’ve spent time building up on your pages.

I’ve heard the cries time and time again: “Social media advertising doesn’t work” and “We did an ads campaign and we got nothing from it”. The fact of the matter is this: most people who try to advertise on social media fail dismally – not because the advertising doesn’t work, but because the strategy they’re using quite frankly, sucks.

It’s tough to know what to do. We’ve all heard the success stories from using social media advertising, so why does success seem so elusive? We’re badgered by the platforms to ‘Boost to reach more people’ and to ‘advertise to reach more people’. There’s the prompts that tell you that ‘this post is getting more engagement than usual. Boost to reach even more’. Phew. No wonder everyone’s confused. Throw into the mix the adverts managers, the placements, the targeting, the creative options and what platform to choose.

Overwhelmed yet? You’re in good company. The good news is that there is a simple way to navigate it to ensure that should you choose to spend your hard earned dollars on advertising on social media, you’re going to get a return. (Otherwise don’t do it!)

1. When should you pay to advertise?

There is a golden rule to advertising on social media and that is this: Only advertise when you are generating leads and or sales. Generating a lead means obtaining a name and email address from someone. You can then stay in contact with them through your email marketing. A lead is not a ‘like’ or a ‘follow’.

The only other instance that you should pay to advertise on social media is if you are wanting to actively promote something that you are selling. For instance your event, product, program or a service.

If you are not wanting to do either of the above, then you should not be paying for advertising!

2. Why would you?

Facebook is the best social media advertising platform available to us right now. The platform has the biggest volume of users sitting at 2.45Billion monthly active users. Half of those are active daily and on mobile devices. You have the most targetable audience online sitting there in Facebook daily. Your people are on Facebook. It doesn’t matter what you’re offering, what you’re selling, what business you’re in. Your people ARE on Facebook. They may well not be on there using it the way you are. They may be using it to stay in touch with

their families, check up on what their children are doing. They may even be using it for work.

When people are on social media, their guards are down and they are more likely to be inspired by your content, your marketing and your advertising than on any other medium available to us right now.

3. But how do you do it?

Firstly, you have to know who your audience is and you need to identify a problem of theirs that you can solve. You will create something of value that you can give to them for free in exchange for their name and email address. You’ll then email it to them! (All of this should be automated, by the way!).

When you know who they are and the free item (digital ideally) you’re going to give to them, it’s time to head into the Ads Manager. Do not ‘boost’ a post from your page. You always want to use the Ads Manager facility within the platform. You can test, measure and fine tune within the ads manager. It’s very difficult to do it should you choose to create an ads campaign any other way.

From there, you’ll choose your audience targeting (you can be very specific), your creative and hit SUBMIT! Test and measure for a short period of time. A couple of days should be enough to see the leads starting to flow.

Social media advertising is the best it’s ever been…when you have the right strategy behind you.

Sourced from B&T Magazine

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A Complete Overview of Social Media Advertising for Small Business

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By Anders Hjorth

Social media advertising allows businesses to reach users during their prime time and in pleasant, entertaining and engaging ways. Find out which platform suits your needs.

Social media has become a mass media, but a personalized one. Remember that scene from the film Minority Report where Tom Cruise walks through a shopping mall and the interactive ad displays address him as a different person, because they scanned his new eyes and took him for someone else?

Social advertising is moving in that direction: No user experience is ever identical to another on social media.

Each screen a user sees comprises numerous elements, that are all optimized by algorithms, which in turn feed on data the user has declared, and on behavior the social network has detected. Some of these elements are advertising. Personalized to the user’s profile, and designed to be a part of the experience.

Overview: What is social advertising?

Social media provides a useful and entertaining experience to its members for free. In return, social media platforms monetize user data by providing powerful digital advertising solutions to advertisers.

Advertising through social media takes the form of banners, posts or videos. Social media ads, many very creative, blend in with the context and appeal to the user.

Snapchat campaign for Bacardi

In a Snapchat campaign for Bacardi, branded filters were used to enable users to send branded postcard-like snaps to their friends from the music festival they were attending. Source:

Snapchat

Benefits of advertising on social media

One of the great benefits social media provides to businesses is the establishment of a direct relationship between you and the user. Advertising through social media creates, extends and activates these relationships. Let’s look at social advertising benefits for businesses.

1. Audiences can be precisely targeted

Users enter their data into social platforms: names, photos, job titles, location, marital status, friends, and much more. Social platforms monitor behavior and interest.

This data enables advertisers to reach the right audience and create targeted ads for it. If an advertiser has a well-defined target market, they can deliver it via social media advertising. Advertisers no longer target media channels, they target audiences via media platforms.

2. Social ads address “awareness”

The “hierarchy of effects” model, often used in marketing and advertising to describe the mental stages a user moves through before purchasing a product, contains three stages:

  • Cognitive (awareness and knowledge)
  • Affective (liking and preference)
  • Conative (conviction and purchase)

Social media advertising is good at addressing the cognitive and affective stages. This makes advertising on social media complementary to direct mail, search marketing, or retail media, which have their strengths at the conative stage.

3. Everything is measurable

Every social media ad impression leaves a digital trace. Every click can be tracked. User characteristics and user behavior can be related to each instance of advertising within a social platform.

So much data exists that it becomes challenging to figure out what is significant and what isn’t. Once advertisers choose the right social media metrics, however, this data will be easy to track and optimize via the social platforms.

4. Social advertising is scalable

Social media advertising costs for a campaign can start as low as $10, and the advertiser has control over timespan, targeting and creative. It can also cost $10 million and cover the globe. Between the two, advertisers have ample room to test, learn and adjust.

Marketers, mainly using social media advertising to boost and enhance their content strategy, can monitor and manage it directly through their favorite social media management tool.

5. Social ads can trigger actions

Whereas social media advertising is often used for building awareness, it can also trigger actions. It generates likes and follows, and can also generate clicks to your website and create leads for your sales and marketing teams.

There is even a rising social commerce trend, where social media advertising feeds directly into the conative stage: users can buy products directly on social media.

The 5 best social media platforms to advertise your small business

The Facebook Ads platform is dedicated to social media advertising, and the Google Ads platform also spans other forms of digital advertising. We will focus on the social media advertising aspects of seven digital advertising platforms.

Platform 1: Facebook Ads: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger

Facebook controls the most powerful advertising platform in the world, as it combines Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger together on the same infrastructure.

Most advertisers, however, will consider Facebook and Instagram to be two advertising platforms, and WhatsApp and Messenger to be additional features.

Characteristics of the Facebook ads platform:

  • Massive reach
  • Very powerful targeting
  • Innovative and adaptive ad formats
  • Machine learning used to improve performance
  • Most controversial use of user data

Facebook Ads by, itself, is probably the strongest social ads platform and is now also the backbone for advertising on Instagram. Depending on your campaign objective, the platform can activate one or more of its advertising channels.

Platform 2: LinkedIn Ads

The LinkedIn advertising platform stands out for its strong business focus. It’s increasingly integrating with the Microsoft Advertising platform and has access to a powerful technological backbone in its mother company, Microsoft.

Characteristics of LinkedIn Ads:

  • Clear business focus
  • Strong targeting of professional audiences
  • Maturing platform
  • Reputation for high cost

Platform 3: Twitter Ads

The Twitter advertising platform is not as powerful as the two above platforms, but Twitter has an interesting positioning as a great add-on for other social networks. The quality of its user data is not as good as the other platforms, but it is strong on topical and thematic targeting and for events.

Characteristics of the Twitter ad platform:

  • Lower volumes
  • Strong topical targeting
  • Specific communities and events
  • Reputation for low costs
  • Complementary to business activity on Twitter

Platform 4: Google Ads: YouTube and Google My Business

Google never created its own social network despite the efforts put into Google Plus and other initiatives. However, many consider YouTube to be a social media platform and the more recent Google My Business platform also has some social media resemblance.

Characteristics of the social media dimension of Google Ads (YouTube and Google My Business):

  • Massive video reach on YouTube
  • Low cost per view on YouTube and innovative ad formats
  • Strong integration with the Google advertising technology stack
  • Effective social-local advertising on Google My Business

Emerging platforms: Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat

The social media landscape is constantly changing. Recently the video-driven social media platform TikTok has entered the scene in a significant way. Its closest competitor, Snapchat, had experienced spectacular growth.

The emergence of new players like TikTok and Snapchat makes it hard for existing players like Pinterest or Twitter to keep growing because they are all fighting for the attention (and dollars) of the same audience.

Emerging social advertising platforms:

  • Pinterest: The creator of pin boards where users can gather images from around the web thematically and share with others, is still going strong. It’s finding itself a positioning on social commerce, as it has the power to inspire users for their purchases. If the platform can generate sales and connect to its advertising, it has strong arguments for attracting more advertisement.
  • TikTok is reaching a young audience massively and strongly influences this group. Its recent advertising offering is creative, including formats like stickers, filters, and overlays.
  • Snapchat has also seduced a large young audience which can be difficult for advertisers to reach. Its creative, innovative, and fun use of digital media shines through in its advertising formats.

Campaign on TikTok in Thailand

In a campaign on TikTok in Thailand, Colgate used an innovative ad format. They designed a clickable “branded effect” triggering a visual effect of exploding hearts when users made a “kissy face”. Source: TikTok

Social ads are a world of opportunity

Social media advertising is a mass media that can entertain, influence and seduce its audiences. Social media platforms provide powerful targeting capabilities and innovative ad formats.

Advertisers can start small and scale infinitely, but need to be very clear about their objectives, to reap the benefits of social ads. Finding the right social network and reaching the right audience can be challenging, but the opportunity is huge and the benefits can be significant.

By Anders Hjorth

Sourced from the blueprint

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Too Much Social Media Advertising can Hurt Sales. Yikes!

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By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Social media marketing is currently a very popular practice for businesses. But it isn’t all success and roses. A recent Temple study shows that businesses must find a proper balance in order to avoid negative results. So for businesses who currently rely on social media marketing to attract new customers, listen up.

While the potential for social media marketing seems almost limitless, a study led by Ph.D. candidate Shuting Wang and senior associate dean of research Paul Pavlou reveals the exact opposite. The Temple professionals recently conducted a study which looked to determine the specific value of social media marketing in relation to data from WeChat and a Chinese shoe retailer.

The study revealed that while social media advertising had a positive impact on increasing customer sales in the short term, it actually created a negative impact on the business in the long term.

When looking at the specific figures, the business witnessed a 5% increase in sales on the same day following a social media post. However, this same post increased the chance that customers would unfollow the business by 300%. Within five months, the retailer experienced a 5% decreased in sales paired with a 20% loss of online followers within a year.

With regard to these findings, Shuting Wang notes that people often “get annoyed” by a company’s post in the long term compared to the short term. “In that case, they will unfollow, which will lead to a long-term decrease in purchases,” Wang said.

sales, marketing, social media, online sales, social media marketing

Researcher Paul Pavlou believes this phenomenon can be contributed to the way in which companies often “over-do” social media.

“They see that the more posts they put out there, the more sales they’re going to see,” Pavlou notes. “Companies should be more careful with this and focus more on their long-term goals. Social media marketing is so quick, so immediate that companies say, ‘Well, let me leverage this as much as possible in the short term,’ and they may actually miss the big picture.”

While the study findings support the idea that too much social media advertising can hurt a company’s sales production, there are contextual factors which also play a role. Professor Paul Greenwood notes that these factors include, “What time of day it is, and where people are located.” In addition, the professor notes that people in large cities “Unfollow a lot faster…and if you post during rush hour, people unfollow a lot faster, but if you post at off-peak hours or smaller locations, that effect seems to go away.”

While the full extent of social media marketing trends have yet to be identified, Greenwood believes that future research will look to address whether dissatisfied customers go to competing firms or simply stop purchasing in general. This information will drastically help businesses fine-tune their social media strategies going forward.

While the Temple study revealed the potentially harmful effects of social media advertising, it is important to note this only took place when attempting to sell products. Businesses who have a balanced social media approach, or one which incorporates potential sales with public relations, are much more likely to create productive customer relationships in the long run.

For some interesting case studies on this topic, click here.

 

 

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