The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Snap Facebook Social Media Marketing

Carat's Jerry Daykin on why brands should be rethinking Twitter's potential as a video platform

Author

By Rebecca Stewart, Trends Editor

July 28, 2016 | 5 min read

From live-streaming to Snapchat and near-constant Facebook algorithm changes what’s a marketer to do when it comes to navigating the rapidly changing world of social media?

jerry daykin social buzz

Social Buzz judge Jerry Daykin dishes out his advice to entrants in Social Buzz 101 / The Drum

As the deadline for this year’s Social Buzz Awards approaches, The Drum has approached to some of the best and brightest minds in the industry – who just so happen to be judging this year’s awards – for advice.

Dishing out some tips this week is Jerry Daykin, global digital partner at Carat who discusses why relevance and quality should always trump timeliness on social and talks all things Snapchat.

How have platforms like Snapchat, Facebook Live and Periscope changed the social landscape, and how have they impacted the way brands use social?

All the major platforms have shifted their narratives from the early days of fans and engagement to setting themselves up as fantastically rich environments where marketers can promote content at scale. That's the fading out of one opportunity but the start of a much bigger one.

What do you think the ‘next big thing’ in social will be?

The 'next big thing' is always closer than you think, technologies like virtual reality are really still years ahead. Truly tapping into the growing scale of Snapchat or even rethinking Twitter as a video platform with scale to logged out as well as active users is a shift marketers can be making immediately.

Last month, Facebook’s Nicola Mendelsohn, predicted that in five years, Facebook "will be probably all video”, what’s your view on this?

Many marketers have considered Facebook all video for a year already, when buying reach it costs the same to serve a video as a static impression so why not put your best foot forward? The challenge is that existing video assets often work very poorly in news feed, so brands need to adapt their content not just move it across or there's a real risk the shift to video will be a step back.

jerry daykin social buzz

What’s more important on social for brands, quality or timelines?

For me quality is far more important – timeliness can have its advantages but a lot of the time it results in throwing forgettable creative into the busiest and noisiest possible moment. When you think of really successful social campaigns they’re usually anchored around one very powerful, high quality asset and that’s far more memorable than posts that become tomorrow’s fish and chips wrapping. Relevance is a broader and more important factor that might just trump both – but you can be relevant every day using good insights and targeting not last minute panic.

When new platforms emerge do you think it’s best to jump right in or hold back and let others test the waters? Why do you feel this way?

Personally I think you need to wait until the opportunity scales to be big enough to impact your business. Jumping on the early days of a platform and trying to build a following is usually a lot of work which will get instantly trumped when they introduce meaningful advertising products. I’m not sure very many brands have benefited from trying to build up Snapchat presence for instance, versus the huge paid opportunity it now offers them with filters, lenses and video. Of course there can be a PR angle to trying out new things, and the learnings you get are interesting if you invest an appropriately small amount of your time and effort to get them.

With the likes of Snapchat beefing up its ad offering do you think marketers should be shifting their spend towards that and away from more traditional social platforms like Facebook or Twitter?

Snapchat has a compelling offering, especially for reaching a young audience in a place they are engaging on a daily basis. Having said that Facebook still dwarfs it not only in terms of its overall reach, but even reach for that specific young audience, especially when you look globally. There’s no easy answer as to which platform every brand needs to be on but I see an overall expanding opportunity in online video which should benefit a wide number of partners - Twitter for instance is now much more a video dominated platform than it is a place for just 140 character text.

The Social Buzz Awards, sponsored by Buzzoole and Tint, are open for entry until Friday 5 August, for more information on the awards, how to enter and this year's judges visit the Social Buzz Awards site.

Snap Facebook Social Media Marketing

More from Snap

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +