The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Facebook hashtags are pointless, but promoted tweets are genius in the right hands

By Iona St Joseph

September 4, 2013 | 4 min read

Facebook hashtags are pointless

The Robin Thicke parody made waves this week

The world was set alight when Facebook announced that it was introducing hashtags, but EdgeRank Checker has found that adding them to your posts could actually affect your chances of it going viral.

Its research found that posts that use hashtags actually have less viral reach, on average, than posts without hashtags.

This is excellent news, as it means that hopefully brands will read this and stop using hashtags immediately, making the world a happier place.

Customer complains via promoted tweets

The businessman who used promoted tweets to complain about his experience with British Airways made social media dorks sit up in awe yesterday when the story broke.

Why had no one thought of doing this before?! It has always seemed like a privilege that was restricted to brands on social, so it was interesting to see a member of the public use promoted tweets to get his problem noticed.

He paid $1,000 for the promoted tweets, and received 76.8k impressions and 14.6k engagements. You can’t deny that’s a pretty good ROI.

I can only hope that the people who use Twitter to whinge constantly about EVERYTHING don’t get wind of this, otherwise we’ll never hear the end of how the world offends them.

Instagram hotel

A new hotel in Sydney is looking to boost its profile using Instagram, offering anyone with over 10,000 followers a free night’s stay.

With a giant photo frame in the lobby and a ‘selfie’ space where guests can snap themselves, those that stay are encouraged to share their images, generating a nice slice of PR for the hotel.

While the offer is quite elitist (how many people have over 10,000 followers?!), it’s quite nice to see people using Instagram to promote their brand.

If 9,963 of you fancy giving me a follow, I’ll tweet you a selfie from the hotel lobby. Promise.

Robin Thicke parody removed

Bad news for feminists again this week, as a feminist parody of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” was removed from YouTube yesterday.

The original song has been accused of blurring the lines between consensual sex and rape and was parodied by some uni students from Auckland. The new video involves, essentially, a gender swap, with the women taking the reins.

The video had over 450,000 views when it was taken down, but after appealing the decision, the video has been re-uploaded. Hurrah!

I would be interested to know why the video had been removed, whether it was from complaints or if YouTube deemed it unacceptable. A number of celebrity music videos often border on being incredibly inappropriate, and a number have been removed (we remember, Justin Timberlake, we remember). I wonder if many are just pushing the boundaries to see what they can get away with…

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +