Snapchat Cashes In with Snapcash

This article was written by Adele Stewart for Epic Web Studios Blog on 11/18/14 and can be found here.

On Monday night, Snapchat users were surprised to find a Snapvid from “teamsnapchat” announcing their new feature “Snapcash.” Snapchat revealed their recent partnership with Square Cash accompanied by an over-the-top and almost unnecessarily flashy “A Chorus Line” style song and dance video.

For those of you who need clarification, the quick picture/video sharing app Snapchat is partnering with Square Cash, an app that allows users to send and request money for free. Square Cash hopes to make splitting the check, lending money and pay backs a lot easier between friends. Like most mobile wallets Square Cash hasn’t really broke through the system quite yet, but with the help of Snapchat’s 100 million (and then some) monthly users, this might be just the thing they need to edge out apps like Venmo, PayPal, Soft Card and Google Wallet.

As many are already aware, Generations Y and Z spend most of their time buried in their smart-phones and most of their money is laid to rest within those phones’ apps. Snapchat has found a way to quickly infiltrate this market by offering p2p payments between close friends, and emerge into a group of young people who haven’t really thought about the importance of financial awareness before.

Some digital marketing sources see this as a way to better target Snapchat’s newly released ads feature. Square Cash’s terms of service permit “third-party advertising and analytics,” which release user’s age, phone number, and bank card information. With these specific details, they are now able to target paid advertising to exact demographics instead of blindly shooting movie trailers at the general public.

Personally, I knew that Snapchat was going to “cash in” at some point, but I was not anticipating such a quick and ironic sequence. During the World Cup when Snapchat allowed users to upload chats to a Live Story, I figured that maybe they were getting paid to allow attendees to subliminally advertise the event itself. These Live Stories of video and imagery occur regularly now during highly attended about events like D1 college football games, NBA games, and even India's Diwali celebration. Within the next few months, I started seeing ads for movies – namely ones I was never going to see like “Ouija” and “Dumb and Dumber To” – which led me to believe Snapchat was tired of being an ephemeral media sharing app, and was seeking to finally monetize off of their popularity.

With all of this in mind, do you see yourself sharing cash with your friends via Snapchat? With the constant ads being thrown into your feed much like Twitter and Facebook, do you think you’ll continue to use the app? Or do you see yourself deleting it and waiting for the next best thing?

Sound off in the comments below!

Adele Stewart is a Digital Media Strategist at Epic Web Studios, a web development & strategic planning firm in Erie, PA, and Public Relations blogger. If you have questions about running a successful digital advertising campaign, contact Epic Web’s Social Media team today! 

T: @adelemariestew​LinkedIn: /AdeleMarieStew

Digital Marketing for Gen Z: Can Facebook “Even”?

I originally posted this to Epic Web Studios' blog, but wanted to share it on here too.

Once upon a time in a far off digital land, there was a social media platform called Facebook that consumed much of Generation Y’s time in “liking” photos and posting comments. As generations grew and various interfaces emerged, Facebook seemed to remain popular with Gen X but would the younger Gen Z follow along with the Facebook trend?

Recent studies show that Millennials and Gen Z spend “a significant amount of their time online,” and a lot of that time has converted into spending actual dollars online. Gen Z spends almost twice as much money than Gen Y, thus making it important for marketers to follow along – what platforms are Gen Z finding ads from?

As a 25 year old female, a lot of the ads I wind up following come from Facebook.  I don’t always click on Facebook ads (come on – I’m in digital advertising, I know better) but when I do, I typically end up spending money on a dress or a piece of jewelry I really don’t need. Plus, Facebook’s cleverly installed Custom Audience Pixels follow me from the Designer Handbag page on ThredUp to my Facebook news feed the second I log back in. With Millennials dominating Facebook, where is Gen Z hiding… and where are they spending their hard earned babysitting dollars online?

Kids are leaving Facebook. In fact, most aren’t even on Facebook – they begin their social media exploration at ages 10 or 11 through Instagram – posting poorly angled selfies and discolored photos of One Direction posters.  With platforms like Instagram, Vine and Snapchat is it safe to say that Facebook is dead?

The latest Cassandra report found that “nearly half of young people] prefer that brands communicate with them on Facebook — over YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. As they use Facebook more often than other platforms, it’s only fitting they want brands to reach them this way."

They also discovered that while each social medium has particular strengths and weaknesses for marketers, when asked, the young don’t just want to see content, but rather, according to Cassandra, brands "need to provide value, relevancy, and interactivity."

As for advertising, Facebook can help digital marketers customize specific “native” ad placements based on Facebook user data like age and gender, as well as advertisers’ customer data and Custom Audience Pixels.

So in the end, while it seems that kids aren’t quite on Facebook, they will be, and Facebook is already to welcome them to their privacy-intrusive digital marketing network with open arms.

What do you think? Should marketers continue to advertise for the big-spending youth on Facebook?

Adele Stewart is a Digital Media Strategist at Epic Web Studios, a web development & strategic planning firm in Erie, PA, and Public Relations blogger. If you have questions about running a successful digital advertising campaign, contact Epic Web’s Social Media team today! 

T: @adelemariestew

LinkedIn: /AdeleMarieStew

Social Media Effect

If there is anything you've learned this week, hopefully it is that social media works. In case you haven't been following along, on February 15, 2014, Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, received a two-game suspension for punching his then fiancee Janay Palmer, in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino. Up until yesterday, the only footage seen was Rice dragging Palmer's unconscious body out of the elevator.

After the NFL's investigation, they suspended him for two games, much to many people's dismay. How is a "two game break" justifiable punishment for someone who knocked his fiancée unconscious?! By the end of July, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell claimed that Rice wasn't entirely to blame for the incident, saying Palmer provoked him and was even seen hitting her fiancée first. Despite the very public issue, Rice and Palmer wedded on March 28th.

On September 8, TMZ publicly released elevator footage of Ray Rice’s assault on his then fiancée, during the week of the Raven's first big rival game against the Pittsburgh Steelers. The video was disturbing and so controversial that football players, journalists fans and even celebrities immediately took to social media to express their feelings.

Due to the outcries from many over the immorality of the situation, against Ray Rice and the actions taken by the NFL, the Ravens have decidedly terminated Ray Rice's contract with the team as of September 8th.. Following suite, the NFL, who have claimed that they "never saw this footage," have also terminated Rice indefinitely from the league. This is the "Social Media Effect” – had this not been brought on by a social media hurricane, action would not have been taken. 

“Ray Rice Wasn’t Fired Because He Hit His Wife, He Was Fired Because He Became a PR Nightmare.”

I believe that without Twitter, Ray Rice would still be sitting the first two games of the season out, and playing as their running back by week three. Your thoughts? Opinions?

Social School

Hootsuite recently asked their followers if they wished social media is a prevalent thing when they were in school. Users answered just how I expected:

So obviously they were very excited. It does make you stop and think, though... If I had social media when I was going through grade school and high school, Facebook and Instagram would have saved me my most recent hassle of pitching things from my memory box. If social media existed as it does now, I would have been able to upload some of my early dance recitals and concerts. I'd be able to delete some of the horrific photos of me with nappy hair, braces and thin wire framed glasses. I definitely believe if I had social media when I was in school, that the issue of cyberbullying would have been addressed years ago and that makes this idea a little bit scarier, even though there are so many other positives. 

When you really think about it though, we didn't need social media when we were in school. We were pleased with our back to school photos our parents would take in front of the school. We liked boasting to our classmates when we had straight As, and never felt the need to post our GPA as our status. We spent recess rolling around in dirt and left covered in bruises and pride, not engrossed in Pinterest boards or Kanye West's Twitter updates. We had fun without social media in our faces 24/7, and I think we came out okay.

What are your thoughts? Do you wish you had social media in school? 

Facebook Engagement - the New Focus Group?

I wrote this article for my company's blog. I felt it bared relevance to my PR blog as well. I am currently working in Social Media, where I am constantly studying advertising trends online. The argument of CPC vs CPM has been a battle I have yet to conquer- although, this post has helped me out a bit.

If you have any questions or comments, let me know. I would love to hear other opinions!

Advertising has become more digital in the last few years, making qualitative research tools like focus groups merely an image of the past. However, marketing technology firms haven’t lost sight of the concept. The usage of Facebook engagement has become more a prominent tool in social media advertising.

According to a recent SocialCode article, if an ad campaign is created to evoke as much interaction as possible, it will wind up targeting a small group but at a high frequency. A recent article explains that a more successful campaign would focus on reach and frequency, the two variables that are used to measure the success of TV campaigns. 

The US marketing technology firm SocialCode recommends using engagement to test which ads work the best. The company’s SVP of marketing Max Kalehoff, explains that the “threshold rate of engagement is around 2-5%.” Kalehoff recommends putting money behind it and making it a promoted post. This increases engagement 1%-4%, justifying spending in return. 

According to Facebook partner Datalogix, 99% of offline sales in fact came from people who had seen ads on Facebook and did NOT engage with them. 

When you think about it, Facebook Ads are just digital billboards. When you optimize a campaign for clicks (CPC), you are limiting its potential to be seen by everyone who “passes by.” Optimizing for engagement ads essentially target people advertisers know that people will “like” or “comment” on. But when it truly comes down to marketing, are you inevitably targeting the audience that are going to buy your product or attend your event? 

For example, there’s a billboard for a pair of sunglasses that you pass every day on your daily commute to work. Maybe you saw it Monday morning and completely erased it from your mind. However, every day you pass by it and finally by Thursday morning you’ve committed to memory that you are going to get those sunglasses after work. 

That’s it. No engagement involved. No stopping in the middle of the street yelling, “Wow! I love these sunglasses! I’m going to buy these sunglasses!” No tagging it with a thumbs up sign. Just plain old ‘goal-accomplishing’ and a nice Return on Investment. 

How is this anything like a focus group? Focus groups are usually a small group of people who are guided through discussion by a moderator, and observed by their answers. This helps marketers decide the audience in question for their product, event, post, etc. 

CPMs bring the right people to your page, often times from the comfort of their own home or office. From there, you can easily uncover any insights and gain leads on who you should be targeting your posts to. 

You've heard my opinion - so what do you think? In terms of CPC vs CPM – which do you find to be the most useful in terms of your marketing research tools?

Adele Stewart is a Digital Media Strategist at Epic Web Studios, a web development & strategic planning firm in Erie, PA, and Public Relations blogger. If you're having difficulty understanding how to optimize your Facebook advertising, contact Epic Web's Social Media team today!