The new movie, Deadpool, gained a lot of fame through social media, especially social media platforms like: Tumblr, Facebook, and other blogs. The fandom for Deadpool is very counterculture and is great for younger audiences. That is one of the reasons social media is useful for movies that employ the same target audiences. Social media was full of Deadpool in the coming months before it was released. The movie was initially announced around a year before it was released. The announcement gained some buzz but it wasn’t as visible to all people than it was in the past 3 months. One interesting advertisement that they used (featured in this blog post) showed the movie as a sort of Valentine’s Day movie (which the fans of the series knew was a false statement) and caused a lot of couples to watch the movie on Valentine’s Day. Another thing that gained a lot of traction for the movie are the trailers that circulated the internet before the movie came out. The trailers were very successful in attracting younger audiences (especially male audiences or audiences that were fans of the series before the movie came out) and the movie became the highest grossing R-rated comic book movie ever and the highest grossing film of 2016 (although it did come out in February leaving the rest of the year for other films to beat Deadpool’s success). The success of the movie had much to do with the social media’s following of the movie.
Marketing on Facebook versus Marketing on YouTube
Facebook and YouTube are currently 2 of the most popular social media websites. They have some similarities but they have a lot of differences. Facebook is a social media that focuses on the lives that users face. YouTube on the other hand focuses on the content that users create and basically creates news from the creators’ histories. This is clearly shown in Facebook’s review of the year versus YouTube’s review of the year. Facebook’s review depicts what happened in the news rather than focusing on what has happened in the lives of its users. YouTube’s review depicts the content that their users have created and brings their users into the picture. Knowing this information a marketer can market certain products on Facebook while marketing other products on YouTube. Since the community on Facebook is driven more towards news-worthy events rather on the success of user generated content, marketers can special products for different events in the news while marketers can use YouTube to market any product using interesting videos. Although these communities are different in many ways they are also similar in other ways. Both communities praise high quality videos. Both communities have a social media community at least attached to them (YouTube has Google+). Although these communities are similar in those ways they are different because Facebook allows for easier anonymous public content creation, it has an easier time combining with other social media blogs (such as Tumblr or Twitter) through things such as screenshots. YouTube does have its uses though. YouTube is better than Facebook with video editing capabilities and a better audience at seeking and viewing content that you want to see rather than just content that your friends or followed people share. Overall, marketers should be careful when choosing a social media platform to market on. There are many other social media platforms to choose from, but Facebook and YouTube seems to be two of the most popular of the social media platforms. They both have huge followings (where Facebook has a much bigger following) and each have their uses.
http://yearinreview.fb.com/2015/story-of-the-year/
How Businesses Can Use Tumblr and Other Similar Social Media Platforms
Tumblr is a different type of social media that allows users to create and publish their own content. The following of this social media seem to be very counterculture and similar to the following of the forum, Reddit. Although this social media might be hard to reach because of their status as a counterculture, it is possible to intrude in the community and create a following of your own using this social media. Tumblr is a social media that creates things such as fandoms that are basically the followings of some sort of group of similar interests. The fact that Tumblr uses these fandoms as a way to generate content allows businesses to create their own fandoms and generate buzz for their content. One big industry that this works very well in is the movie and TV show industry. Since these industries use the media in order to gain popularity and views it very often shows its face in social media such as Tumblr. Businesses that are part of these industries should often create social media blogs and post frequently (whether it be a picture, a long blog post, or a blog post in general) to create a fandom to generate buzz for their products.
Instagram Modelling
Instagram is a big social media platform that is used by many models who want to become famous from this social media platform. They usually use it to become noticed by people and hopefully get a job as a model from the people that notice them. It is interesting because there are more men that use Instagram than women. It makes sense because many of the men that use this app use it to view the models. It is much less expensive (free) than looking through a magazine. But, it is still interesting considering Instagram is known as a much more female oriented social media platform than many other social media platforms that can do the same things such as Twitter, which has a much more balanced orientation in the social media. The usage rates between men and women are still in women’s favor because women use Instagram more than men. But, the fact that men use Instagram more than women could be a good marketing opportunity for businesses. They can target certain advertisements on Instagram towards men instead of focusing on women like it seems that they do. This could cause Instagram’s personality to change a bit because it would make the social media platform seem less women oriented, but it would cause a lot of short term profit for businesses that use this strategy.
http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/important-instagram-stats/
Instagram Advertising and Demographics: What You Need To Know
Another Issue/Use of Social Media Part 2
Bernie Sanders is another candidate that has gotten recognition from social media, but social media has caused his view from the Democratic voter base to skyrocket recently. There are many recent trends in social media that have helped to show Bernie as a better candidate than the other front runner, Hillary Clinton, but one that shows up a lot in social media is a meme that compares what fans of Bernie think he would have an opinion on versus the opinion that Hillary Clinton would have on an issue. This meme depicts Bernie as someone who is knowledgeable and does his research on things before being asked about the issue while depicting Hillary Clinton as someone who would have to write an essay by 2 hours so makes things up and gives very generic and ambiguous answers to certain questions about issues. Another meme that seems to be trending on social media, especially mediums such as Facebook or Twitter, is a meme that shows everything that Bernie’s ideas would do to the economy and how his views would be better in the long run. The social media activity has created a lot of success in the younger audiences in America. Before all of the social media activity, Hillary was a shoe in for the Democratic candidacy. After the social media activity, Bernie showed himself as a valid Democratic candidate.
One of the Issues/Uses (depending on your political stance) of Social Media Part 1
In this political year, social media is a huge reason why many of the political front runners have gotten to where they are now. These two political leaders are: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. It seems that both of these presidential candidates have gained tread through social media. With Donald Trump it doesn’t seem like much of the reasons why he is front runner come from social media praising him or anything. It seems that social media has made people hate him more and in fact run away from his political party. From some data from other election years I have found that it seems that the Republican party is either losing some of their Republican voter base or that their Republican voter base isn’t voting because of them not thinking that any of the Republican candidates deserved to be in office. There are a lot more factors to put into this than social media alone, but social media plays a core role in the lack of Republican voters during this election year. The anti-Trump memes and other social media actions seem to be causing Trump’s fans to get angrier and scaring many Republican voters away from the party. The social medias that are being used to depict Trump in this way are mediums such as: YouTube (online news channels, bloggers, etc.), Facebook, Twitter, and various other social media mediums.
Memes
Throughout social media, memes seem to be gaining in popularity throughout the years. It’s interesting thinking about why memes are popular and how businesses can actually use memes in order to gain popularity with younger audiences. Memes seem to be popular because of in-group and out-group bias in the internet. In-group and out-group bias takes a play here because people who belong to certain groups like things that belong to that group. Businesses can use this in order to attract consumers from different groups of people. Some companies, like “truth”, are starting to create social commercials in order to persuade people to join causes. Normal companies can do the same things to try and persuade others to use their products. Since memes are a relatively new thing for businesses to use there hasn’t been that much use of it, but it can be a really interesting and creative thing to use in advertisements.
How Social Media Helps Make Games More Popular
One of the most popular video games of 2015 was the game Undertale. This game is a very simplistic that’s greatness seems to come from its characters, these character’s designs, and the storyline that came with these characters. The characters Sans and Papyrus seem to pop out in social media, especially on websites such as Tumblr and Twitter. I’m going to show how these characters were depicted on these social media channels (mostly just Tumblr) and why I think these characters stood out over the other characters in the story.
Sans: He is a jokester with a kind heart and great admiration for his brother Papyrus. Most of his depictions on Tumblr seem to be in a comedic way because of the jokes that he makes in the game and this seems to be the basis of the love of this character.
Papyrus: Although they are both comedic skeletons (like literal skeletons), Papyrus takes a much more romantic view on the general public. Fans of this character romanticize about this character for two reasons: first, in the game there is a section where the main character can romanticize and date Papyrus and they are going along with that and second, some fans like the way that Papyrus talks and how he as comedically funny as Sans.
Both of these characters have been greatly loved by fans of this game and this game has been greatly improved, saleswise, because of these characters.
React World and Why It Failed
Recently, The Fine Brothers (a YouTube personality program) got in trouble for a couple of videos they made announcing a new program that they were creating. This failure has overtaken social media and has largely hurt their business. Their program called React World, is a system where YouTube creators would create reaction videos using The Fine Brothers’ format and they would share in the profits as well as give notification of their reaction videos on their channel as well as other social medias. The Fine Brothers have largely been in trouble for things that happened outside of their two videos on React World because they have been trying to trademark certain terms such as React, Teens React, etc. Consumers were mad because The Fine Brothers have been known to take down videos that use their videos with free use laws in mind and also taking videos down for using their trademarked terms. The two personalities, Benny and Rafi Fine, have told people that they were not responsible for taking down the videos but their company has taken those videos down. In their apology video, people have been fired up against them because of the body language the Brothers used when they talked about explaining what their program actual consists of. One of the brothers rolled his eyes a lot in the video and people have been angry about that since it feels like they weren’t acting sorry for the video that they made about React World. Another backlash that was made was in response to a tweet that the Fine Brothers made towards Ellen DeGeneres. This tweet showed how they felt like they were entitled to recognition when a network like the Ellen Show has a segment where kids reacted to old technology. They felt like the format was very similar to theirs and wanted their fans to blast Ellen DeGeneres’ Facebook with Kids React Tweets. There are websites being made that count the amount of subscribers that The Fine Brothers have and showing the steady decline of subscribers as of 2/2/2016. On Saturday 1/30/16 The Fine Brothers had around 14.1 million subscribers. Now, their subscriber count is around 13.7 million. In the span of 4 days, The Fine Brothers have lost around 400,000 subscribers and the numbers are still going down. It seems like the people that started the movement to unsubscribe from them have created a sort of game where people would unsubscribe to The Fine Brothers and monitor their subscriber count losses. It is a sort of social media craze that popped up merely days ago based on a decision that The Fine Brothers made. The Fine Brothers have made an apology where they state that they will take away any trademarks that they currently had over the YouTube system because they say that they realized that this trademark system would allow for them to bully other smaller YouTubers into submission. The Fine Brothers’ failure to react correctly to social media backlash is a lesson one can learn about reacting to bad public relations. People shouldn’t react in a way that seems unapologetic. People can see behind unapologetic dialogue. The fact that they lost hundreds of thousands of fans with this one idea can show the power of social media and how quickly people can begin to hate you after they loved your company for so long. It takes just one bad idea to make a good apple a bad apple.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CaD12AdUcAYUsPD.jpg:large
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2016-02/02/fine-brothers-retract-reaction-trademark-claim
http://superfame.com/post/fine-bros-youtube-news-update-apology-removal/
User Generated Marketing and Why It’s Important
In today’s world, consumers want to be included in the marketing process. Consumers want their favorite companies to create products that they want and maybe even suggest different products that they would create. This is very clearly shown in Lays’s Do Us a Flavor marketing campaign. Consumers were asked to create different flavors for a new potato chip product and winners were chosen from the people that suggested flavors that earned a prize for their creation as well as their product being put into stores. What companies have learned from this successful campaign is that consumers want to be included in the creation process of new product designs as well as being featured in things such as advertisements and commercials.
Another interesting example of user-generated marketing is the T-Mobile Breakup Letter campaign. T-Mobile decided that they would pay the cancellation costs of breaking away from other cell phone services and created a FaceBook app that would allow consumers to write a Breakup Letter to their previous cell phone service companies and share this on social media. T-Mobile then used the responses of this marketing campaign to create their own ads.
And yet another successful example of user-generated marketing came from Target in their Acceptance Letter campaign that was a compilation of many people opening up their acceptance letters until it came to one person who wasn’t accepted. Target employed the person who got denied to opportunity to go to college in order to try and give him a future and try and give him a better opportunity to go to college later in his life. Along with this campaign Target pledged to donate $1 billion to schools by the end of 2015. This connection to their consumer’s emotions created business for Target and made people, of all ages and races, want to buy at Target.
Today, companies are moving towards humanitarian efforts in order to appeal to the younger audiences as well as older people who want to help efforts such as the environment, education, etc. Things such as social media allow companies to share their humanitarian efforts with even more people and create opportunities for greater success with certain campaigns while also being dangerous if such campaigns fail to work.
http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-lays-reveals-2015-winner-of-do-us-a-024658376.html
http://www.postano.com/blog/10-great-examples-of-user-generated-content-campaigns
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