One of the biggest social media marketing buzzwords this year will doubtless be: amplification. Social media amplification is the concept of taking a positive action – a purchase, a light-touch interaction or full-on review – saving it and then sharing it far and wide. After all, 90% of us trust recommendations from friends – so surely it makes sense to push the genuine endorsements we do receive to their absolute limit?
Here are a few examples of amplification in action:
Sponsored Stories
Facebook has created a million and one ways of of passively sharing and endorsing products, but the Sponsored Story is it’s biggest attempt to capture and extend the lifetime of positive action. Companies can pay to re-post any positive actions you make relating to them into the right column of your friends’ Feeds. Sponsored stories have their critics – and with Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s starting to push them into actual newsfeeds, as if they were genuine recommendations, the chorus of disapproval is likely to intensify.
Embedded Tweets
Twitter recently launched embedded Tweets as a nifty means of extending the lifetime of Tweets from a nanosecond to, potentially, forever. Sadly I don’t have the feature yet, but when I do, I’ll get a little link under the Tweet that offers me an “embed” option, so I can post a real, live, working Tweet onto any web-page. Fleeting remarks from influential Twitterers can now be RT’d by visitors to your website for years to come – and it’s free.
#WhyCBS? Twitter Campaign
If you missed this, watch the video here. A couple of Columbia University students decided to ask other students why people should choose to study there. They posted this simple, hasthagged question to a few friends and watched as boat-loads of bite-sized endorsements flooded in. This was pre-embedded Tweets, so they took screen shots of the best ones and put the whole exercise into a video on YouTube. Smart cookies.
Social Adverts Using Trending Content
Like several players in the social advertising space, Infinigraph has developed a clever way of curating trending content – i.e. the content people share and engage with the most – and enabling publishers to re-purpose that content and use it to drive engagement in other places. The example here is of The Grio, a news site, which added an Infinigraph-generated advert featuring trending content from it’s Facebook page. This ad generated a click-thru rate of 0.2% – much higher than normal ads – and increased engagement. On a different but related site it got a CTR of 0.5%, which is close to phenomenal.
Ashley
so what is amplification? How is this amplification? this didnt really help at all seriously?
Luke Brynley-Jones
I’ve added who does what, for clarity: “Amplification is the concept of [a brand] taking a positive [customer or advocate] action – a purchase, a light-touch interaction or full-on review – saving it and then sharing it far and wide.”