That Lot's Tiny Trends: use Stickers to drive your brand's social engagement
The Tiny Trends series explores the weekly highs and lows of social platform trends. Selected by social creative agency That Lot, the series offers tips on how to use these changes to keep your brand's social media footprint at the cutting edge. This week takes a look at why everyone should be using Stickers to drive engagement.
In 2016 more than 6bn stickers and emojis were exchanged every single day, and an enormous 22% of these shares were happening on social. As social platforms slowly morph into messaging platforms, the use of stickers on them is set to significantly increase.
Take advantage of the sticker-sphere
Just as brands previously started experimenting with the use of emojis in their social messaging, now is the time to try the tiny trend of stickers in your social strategy. Before emojis became commonplace in commercial messaging, they provided a lot of cut-through for the brands who were brave enough to try them; stickers may provide a similar opportunity.
Be inventive with ideas
Experimenting with Stickers is a great pathway to engagement with users:
- Ask your audience to guess what’s underneath the sticker. This is a nice way to incorporate platform-specific aesthetics;
- Use stickers to provide context instead of relying on copy in the post - Instagram and Snapchat’s Geostickers are a great way to share your location;
- Work with social platforms to develop unique stickers for campaigns.
The evolution of Stickers
We’re already seeing the evolution of stickers with Snapchat and Instagram’s ability to ‘pin’ stickers to a moving object in a video, creating fun animated effects.
Stickers are essentially an evolution of emoji, allowing more expression and personalised reactions with room for endless variations. Emojis are tightly controlled by the Unicode Consortium but stickers can be created by anyone, with platforms like Twitter and Messenger collaborating with brands for special sets of them for campaigns.
Stickers are a brilliant way to express feelings, display a sense of humour and engage in playful communication. However, they are also a useful tool for marking your brand as part of a larger campaign. There is no escaping that the visual language of emojis and stickers are here to stay. Everyone is using them to express themselves; the question is, will they be using yours?
You can read the full blog here.
Check out last week's Tiny Trend, It's time to go portrait on Instagram.
That Lot is a social content company that has worked with The Apprentice and Nandos and collaborated with The Drum Network to produce Create Britain.
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