With updates from Facebook, Twitter and Google+, this week’s #SocialMediaMonday investigates a new flavour of ice-cream, using advertising platforms to complain about an airline, a surprising newcomer in the number two spot for social networks and more. As with each week, we’ve broken this down by social network, starting with Facebook.
Think about all the ads you’ve seen on Facebook, really think about it. Out of all the ads we see on a daily basis, Facebook does a very good job of keeping out profanities. But what if something isn’t actually profanity but Facebook sees it that way? This is exactly what has happened when a recent ad was disapproved automatically by Facebook for the use of inappropriate language in a birdwatching advert. Every year, birdwatching enthusiast flock to Christmas Island to see the magnificent seabirds. A seabird is also known as a ‘booby’ to enthusiasts, which is where the confusion on Facebook came from. The Christmas Island Tourism Association began running Facebook ads in order to promote the upcoming “Bird’n’Nature” week, but the ads never made it Facebook.
The original ad read “Some gorgeous shots here of some juvenile boobies.” And contained an image of a young seabird. Members of the birdwatching community wouldn’t think anything of the language used in the ad although Facebook automatically declined it. Originally, it was suspected to be because of the word “boobies” so the Marketing Manager of Christmas Island appealed the ad. After the appeal, the ad was still refused, apparently because of the use of the parallel word resulting in “juvenile boobies”. The majority of people reading the ad won’t be part of the birdwatching community and this ad could be seen as offensive.
In other, lighter news, Facebook has been immortalised – in ice-cream. That’s right, Facebook has been made in to an ice-cream flavour by two enterprising ice cream makers in Croatia. One of the owners of the Valentino ice-cream shop in Tisno noticed his daughter’s obsession with Facebook and decided to create an ice-cream flavour for other fans of the social giant. The ice-cream flavour is achieved by mixing blue syrup with vanilla ice-cream and is apparently already a huge hit among fans.
The first bit of Twitter news this week involves a relatively new advertising platform – promoted tweets. A disgruntled British Airways customer bought a promoted Tweet to complain about his father’s lost luggage:
The Twitter handle @HVSVN belongs to the user Hasan Syed who was furious at his father’s lost luggage and the lack of support from the airline. Although British Airways didn’t respond to the promoted Tweet, it did catch the attention of Marty St George, senior vice-president of marketing and commercial at JetBlue Airways:
In other Twitter news, Topsy has now released functionality that allows you to search through any Tweet posted from any account, ever. Topsy, a social-analytics company based in San Francisco opened up an archive of the entire history of Twitter to the public. This archive contains more than 425 billion Tweets dating all the way back to 2006. Previously, the archive only went back as far as 2010, when Topsy and Twitter began their partnership. The real time benefits of this new function allow marketers to travel back through Twitter time to see the most effective campaigns as well as historical Tweets around specific events/news for reference.
Google+
It’s no doubt that Google+ is growing in both popularity and functionality. The growth has been phenomenal based on the recent reports by GlobalWebIndex, a London based analytical company. In the short time Google+ has been released, it has gained distance on the social giants that lead before it. Two main studies took place, one to look at the popularity of social apps currently and one to look at social network active user numbers. Both results may shock you.
The first study, focusing on mobile apps, places the Google+ mobile app at number four on the most used social apps in the world. This placement is behind only Google Maps, Facebook and YouTube and head of the likes of Twitter and Instagram. See the graph below for full breakdown:
Another study from the same company, analysed the top five social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+. Facebook is the most actively used social network on the internet with 62% of all registered accounts being actively used. With 318.4m active users, Google+ is second in this list. With Google+ being the second most popular social network in terms of usage and the fourth in mobile app usage, the rising social platform has made leaps and bounds since its inception in June 2011.
