Blog Archives

If you’re not part of the generation that knows what it means to embrace the ‘YOLO’ philosophy, then you probably aren’t familiar with the popular acronym ‘FOMO’, or with the scientifically proven FOMO syndrome that afflicts virtually every social media user at a given point in time.

What is FOMO?
FOMO (fear of missing out) is defined by The New York Times as “the blend of anxiety, inadequacy and irritation that can flare up while skimming social media”. Sound familiar? FOMO is that feeling you get when you’re trying to enjoy a quiet night in while your friends keep Instagramming photos of their wild night on the town.

University of Essex confirmed the tangible effects of FOMO – in a study which proved that seeing decadent pictures of food (also known as gastroporn) on Pinterest and Instagram actually made people enjoy their food less.

How FOMO can benefit your business
So how can marketing-savvy business owners use the FOMO phenomenon to their advantage?
Simply put, you want potential customers or clients to feel as if they are missing out if they aren’t engaging with your brand – either by attending your corporate events, visiting your shop or following you on social media. At Point and Stare, we’ve come up with innovative ways of using social media platforms Twitter and Instagram to do just that.

Through the use of customised hashtags and URLs, we help you build hype around any corporate event you may be planning. Then, we create fully branded and moderated live Twitter and Instagram feeds that you can display on screens throughout your event, showcasing all of the tweets featuring your customised hashtag or URL. This encourages attendees to tweet or upload Instagram photos throughout your event, and in so doing—you get their followers wanting to know more about your event and your business.

In other words, Point and Stare’s creative use of social media dashboards allows you to generate targeted FOMO that will encourage Twitter or Instagram users to attend your next event and engage with your business.

Avoid your own FOMO
Applying psychology to marketing is nothing new, and has been proven effective over the last few decades – tapping into the FOMO effect is no different. If you’d like to find out more on how Point and Stare can help you promote your business or corporate events, contact us today. If not, you may be left wondering who else is out there using Point and Stare feeds to effectively market their business while you’re sitting in your office brainstorming your own ideas … see what we did there?
#FOMO

April 9th 2014 has passed – the day Facebook announced further changes to its advertising options, including the end of sponsored stories and the beginning of (the euphemistically phrased) “improved targeting options”. These new developments come as no surprise, as Facebook’s intentions to shift towards paid advertising have been abundantly clear for some time now, particularly after it killed organic reach for business pages in December of last year.

Time to dig deep—into your pockets
This move by the social media powerhouse is understandable, however, given the vast number of businesses vying to get their content seen. The only way to prevent Facebook from becoming nothing more than a virtual billboard is to get businesses to start paying for that precious limited space. This means that overall organic reach of business posts on Facebook is in steady decline;
Facebook spokespersons have confirmed this, stating that the best way to get your brand’s content seen is to pay for it—plain and simple.

Although Facebook’s increasingly monetised approach to its ad options has sparked indignation, the reality is that social networks are media platforms and businesses just like any other: they are capitalising on an opportunity to make money while protecting their users from being flooded with excessive amounts of advertising content.

Twitter is following suit, and has increased its advertising options to include promoted accounts, promoted tweets and promoted trends. Meanwhile, other social media platforms are no doubt exploring their paid advertising options as well.

Not the end of the world
So as a business owner, what can you do to get around social media’s new thrust to make businesses pay to maximise the reach of their content? Unfortunately, in the case of Facebook, you’ve got to bite the bullet and pay up if you want your content (and your brand) to get noticed. However, there are other ways to promote your business with social media beyond the realm of paid Facebook advertising.

The first important step is to diversify your social media presence. Don’t rely on Facebook as your only means of creating brand awareness and building your online audience. Instagram and Pinterest are brilliant, fast-growing social networks that afford businesses endless scope for creative, dynamic social media marketing—at no cost.

The second step: get innovative! There are different ways of employing social media that are more effective than simply sharing branded content with your followers. At Point and Stare, we help businesses to promote their brand through live, interactive Twitter and Instagram feeds projected on screens throughout their business’s events. By using customised hashtags and URLs, you can maximise your marketing spend and get the most out of social media before, during and after your corporate event; this way, your marketing budget doesn’t have to be entirely allocated to Facebook posts.

When life gives you lemons…
While business owners round the world lament the end of the golden age of free social media advertising, we prefer to look at the silver lining. Rather than resting on your laurels and getting lost amidst the millions of businesses glutting Facebook, use the shift towards paid ad options to give you the incentive to revitalise your online marketing strategy and start engaging your imagination.

If you need a helping hand along the way, at Point and Stare, we’d be more than happy to show what an outside-the-box approach could do to promote your brand. To find out more, contact us today.

The second largest social network in the world, with vast global influence and infinite marketing possibilities, Twitter is an online marketing tool that every business should strive to master. However, before you can unleash any of your social media marketing campaigns, you need Twitter followers who will actually respond to those campaigns and benefit your business.

Like any marketing endeavour, increasing your Twitter following in your target market requires a strategic approach. Below are our top tips for building your business’ Twitter audience using handy technological tools, clever search tactics and good old common sense.

• A clear, precise description of your business on your profile will encourage a following that is actually interested in your products or services. Avoid vague or confusing language that will discourage the right users from following you, or that could make your business appear unprofessional.
• Include your city or location in your business’s Twitter bio if possible, as this will encourage people with a connection to your area to follow you. This naturally increases the likelihood that your interaction with these users will convert into tangible benefits like new customers and higher revenue.
• To ensure that your followers are relevant to your business and marketing goals, seek out, follow and engage with Twitter users whose profiles and bios show them to be a part of your target group. Google Alert and other useful tools like ManageFlitter and Mention allow you to conduct keyword searches of user content and to filter user bios, so you can find the most relevant users for your business. Engaging with random people who aren’t part of your target audience will make your marketing efforts less effective.
• Create quality content that is relevant to your brand and that will generate greater awareness of what you have to offer. Tweeting at least five times a day at peak usage times will also maximise the visibility of your content and encourage the growth of your following.
• Use hashtags intelligently, and your Twitter audience in your target demographic could easily soar. Highly recommended hashtag strategies include the use of customised hashtags and having a live interactive Twitter wall at your corporate events to encourage attendees to tweet with your customised hashtag. This is a great promotional tactic for before, during and after any business event.
• In addition to using customised hashtags, your daily tweets should include relevant and trending hashtags that your target market would use for searches. Using random hashtags that users are unlikely to search for won’t serve any marketing purpose.

The above are our top tips for getting a substantial and relevant Twitter following. We also happen to be experts in using interactive screens featuring live Twitter and Instagram feeds as brilliant promotional tools at corporate events. To find out more on how our fully branded and customised social dashboards could build your social media following and promote your business, contact us at Point and Stare today.

There’s no denying Instagram’s value as a marketing tool. Focusing strictly on images, it’s arguably the most impactful social media app; and when used innovatively, like through our live interactive Instagram feed that can be featured on screens throughout corporate events, Instagram is easily a top contender for one of the most effective marketing platforms available.

With its uniquely visual focus, and little scope for user interaction beyond comments, likes and tagging, Instagram is closer to traditional print advertising than any other social network. Unlike Facebook timelines or Twitter walls that can become cluttered with posts, shares, re-tweets and quotes from other users, Instagram profiles tell a bolder, clearer story through each user’s tapestry of uninterrupted photos—instantly creating a distinct image and impression of what a given user is all about.

Developing your brand image
The beach bunny Instagrammer will naturally post photos of beaches, bikinis and sandy toes; the city slicker’s Instagram profile will be filled with shots of sleek skyscrapers and nights out clubbing. Has Instagram therefore led us to subconsciously develop a brand identity for ourselves? Do we find that we tend not to post photos that don’t link directly to the personal brand we’ve created?

It’s an intriguing phenomenon, and one that will undoubtedly vary for every person; yet it is undeniable that distinct themes emerge when looking through a user’s Instagram wall. The ‘sexy, glamour girl’ will have a profile filled with ‘selfies’ before nights on the town, while the yoga instructor’s profile will mainly feature images of nature, yoga poses and herbal tea (regardless of any wild party nights he or she may have recently had).

Greater self-awareness and prudence
The next question is whether or not this inadvertent movement towards self-branding and self-marketing is a bad thing. Not necessarily. Depending on your industry, using Instagram to create an image for yourself—whether consciously or not—could certainly work in your favour. With so much of our lives now projected to the entire world via the Internet, perhaps it’s time for us to all start thinking about our self-branding; maybe it would get university students to think twice before posting photos of themselves drunk or dancing on tables, for example.

If used wisely, all social media can present an opportunity for promoting oneself, both at a personal and professional level. Above all, the important message is not to allow any of your online profiles to make you vulnerable to negative backlash. So whether you’re using Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, or any of the other sites and apps out there, share snippets of your life carefully and with caution — you never know who might be viewing your posts and forming an opinion of your own personal brand.

Social networking can be a brilliant way of improving your brand or company’s online presence, connecting with your target market, and placing your brand on the map. However, a poorly managed social media profile can also be extremely detrimental to a corporate or individual public image, with potentially far-reaching negative repercussions.

A pornographic Twitter fiasco
Across the pond in the US, Carlos Martinez, pitcher for the St Louis Cardinals baseball team, recently experienced the backlash of badly handled social media when he embarrassed himself and his team by filling his Twitter wall with pornographic posts. After the media reported on Martinez’s unsavoury tweets—much to the dismay of his mortified team—the sportsman cleaned up his profile in an effort to make amends. Unfortunately, however, the damage to his brand image as an athlete has already been done.

Recent incidents involving the hijacking of Starbucks’ and Marks & Spencer’s promotional hashtags by indignant Twitter users also serve as proof that social media profiles need to be properly managed and monitored if businesses want them to work as effective marketing tools. If not, having active social media accounts could easily backfire.

Proceed with care—and professional expertise
Using social media with creativity and caution will not only help your business’ profiles stand out from the millions of other business profiles out there, but it will also protect you from the kinds of damaging incidents described above. At Point and Stare, this is our speciality: our live and fully interactive Twitter Wall and Instagram Feed blend ingenuity and security by allowing businesses to use social media in a way that’s different and intriguing, while also moderating all user posts.
This is because we know that having a social media account is not enough to promote your business or develop your brand identity on its own; social networks are merely tools that need to be implemented intelligently and strategically in order to achieve your marketing objectives.

To find out more on how we can help you harness the full potential of social media while shielding your business from unnecessary negative backlash, contact us at Point and Stare today.

One of the highlights of the American and international sporting calendar, the 2014 Superbowl drove home a major success for social media network Twitter. Statistics show that this year, the number of top brands opting to use Twitter for real-time marketing (RTM) during the NFL championship game nearly tripled, whilst fewer brands opted to use Facebook.

Leaving Facebook in the dust
This is a clear indication of the increasingly common view that Facebook is used more for discussing events and issues before and after they’ve happened, whereas Twitter is at the forefront when it comes to live interactive marketing. Twitter’s ability to create online trends through its popular trending feature and the use of customised hashtags has made it the go-to social network for brands that want up-to-the-moment interactive advertising.

Twitter’s leading position in this respect was consolidated just one year ago at the 2013 Superbowl, when global biscuit powerhouse Oreo used the Superbowl blackout as a prime marketing opportunity, with their tweet: “You can still dunk in the dark.” The ingenious tweet got over 15,000 re-tweets, increased Oreo’s Twitter following by 8,000, and placed the brand in the international spotlight for its quick thinking and creative use of social media in the face of a potential disaster.

Strategising for spontaneity
However, Oreo’s famous tweet was no accident: according to the Vice-President of Cookies at Oreo’s umbrella company Mondelez International, the blackout tweet was the result of a carefully constructed social media RTM strategy that made the brand ready to respond to any and everything that happened during the Big Game.

This is the kind of responsive, reactive marketing strategy that is essential for modern-day marketers. The era of social media calls for businesses to think on their toes, with a backup plan for every eventuality. In this respect, Twitter seems to be the way forward for many businesses who may have previously opted to stay with the more familiar territory of Facebook.

Luckily, Twitter allows for lots of creativity in RTM. Take our live Twitter Walls, for example.

Point and Stare generates a fully branded and moderated live Twitter feed that can be displayed on screens throughout any company event, where people at the event or anywhere around the world can have their tweet featured by using the customised hashtag or bespoke URL. This means businesses can leverage any corporate event as a prime marketing opportunity to build brand awareness and brand affinity.

Taking on the challenge
Twitter’s Superbowl success this year serves as a reminder that today’s marketing calls for innovation and immediate responsiveness above all, so embrace it and remember that every event (be it a blackout or otherwise) could be the marketing opportunity that will catapult your brand to international greatness – all in under 140 characters so, get in touch today.