Check out how Facebook's preparing you for Valentine's Day, how to curate and plan content (even if you don't have tons of your own), and how Vine plans to win over kids (and parents). Skim to seize the day!
When puppies upstage halftime. This week's viral chart-topper was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a Budweiser Super Bowl ad that revisits the Clydesdale and puppy whose friendship won so many hearts over the past few years—making this the third straight year that a Budweiser ad's been the most-shared. Newsweek recaps the game's big ad themes (dadvertising was hot), and Venture Beat scored them. AdWeek explains what it takes to win the Super Bowl: Serving up the unexpected and having a war room. But maybe things really boil down to knowing what fans like (chips and beer).
This year's Super Bowl ranked the most-watched show in American TV history, which means that even if you're a Seahawks fan, you did win a little. It also means that Katy Perry's perplexing halftime show was the most-watched ever, yielding plenty of memes for a GIF-thirsty Internet. The most popular of those was the dancing shark. Walkaway lessons for brands looking to score in 2016? Wordplay and teasers help, but—crucially—be culturally relevant (which probably means be compulsively meme-able).
Left Shark isn't the hero we need, but the one we deserve. https://t.co/KcCHQ6QuXa pic.twitter.com/COlofdlcUB
— James Dator (@James_Dator) February 2, 2015
When the Medium hijacks your message. Obama revealed his 2016 fiscal budget strategy and posted the complete document on Medium, a three-year-old self-publishing platform, initially targeted to social influencers and created by Twitter. (Medium conveniently tells you how long it takes to read its articles. The budget will take 3 hours and 51 minutes.) If the target wasn't obvious enough, he also wrote Millennials a love letter on Medium about their role in shaping the new American economy. "We've bet on America's young people," POTUS writes. "And today, I'm betting that you'll continue unleashing new ideas and new enterprises for decades to come." (Also, Like and Share!) Some media institutions were critical of the act; others were more open to this administration's efforts to be social in the modern sense. It probably says more about us than about the gov that its budget-sharing tweet scored fewer shares than Budweiser's Clydesdale ad.
Real-time tweets return to Google—giving you yet another incentive to tweet often and with relevance! Google's made a deal with Twitter to show up-to-the-moment tweets in search results, starting later this year. The move will doubtless drive brands to tweet more often to score search juice; and if the engagement justifies the activity, Twitter will likely enjoy higher ad revenue this year.
But that's not the only place Tweets will appear... Twitter's also inked a deal to syndicate Promoted Tweets on partner sites and apps owned by Yahoo Japan and Flipboard, meaning sponsors will get plenty more bang for their buck. The ads will share the same look and feel as the platforms they appear on, but Twitter hasn't explained how the integration will work for tweets that include videos, which it wants to focus on more this year. In any case, if this works out well, expect Sponsored Tweet costs to rise (again)... and for a whole lot more media companies to sign up for some paid tweetage. Below, an example of what a Nissan-sponsored tweet might look like inside the Flipboard app:
Say hello to Quick Promote! Twitter's been busy. To facilitate impulse Sponsored Tweets, Twitter's launched Quick Promote to appeal to small and midsize businesses. Why risk your ad dollars on a big untested Twitter campaign? Instead, use Twitter Analytics to see which of your existing tweets perform best, then use Quick Promote to amplify that tweet directly from your dashboard. The tweet will go out to users whose interests match your follower base. "We found that users who see a relevant Promoted Tweet from an SMB are also 32% more likely to visit that business," Twitter chirps. Heigh-ho.
