People, the channel

Abstract

Across the social media landscape, there has been a decline in the reach of organic content. As a consequence, brands wanting to reach a large number of users are investing heavily in ads. Nevertheless, the need to capture the very essence of social — a two-way conversation on a one-to-one level — remains. Succeeding here requires brands to be contextually perfect; but can an ad placed in a social feed ever be contextually perfect, given that customers do not open Twitter to go shopping? This year, there will be an opportunity for brands to deliver visually rich and engaging content to the individual customer at a time that is suited to them — and not in the social feed. This depends on brands doing the following: (1) using notifications intelligently, (2) augmenting context with social data, (3) leveraging more ‘discover’ tabs, (4) generating more visual content, and (5) measuring non-verbal communication. All of these components contribute to what social marketers must focus on in order to win: people.