Branded content

About: Branded content is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 175 publications have been published within this topic receiving 2450 citations.

Influencer Marketing: How Message Value and Credibility Affect Consumer Trust of Branded Content on Social Media

Abstract: In the past few years, expenditure on influencer marketing has grown exponentially. The present study involves preliminary research to understand the mechanism by which influencer marketing affects...

The power of like: how brands reach and influence fans through social media marketing

Abstract: The following white paper is based on a collaboration between comScore and Facebook. The research, which examines the nature of the reach and frequency of branded content on Facebook, is largely based on May 2011 findings from comScore Social Essentials™, but also includes insights from Facebook’s internal analytics platform. The summary below establishes the key findings and implications of this research. Facebook is the dominant social networking site with an audience of approximately 160 million U.S. visitors each month and accounts for 90 percent of all time spent on social networking sites. (Source: comScore) Branded content on social media can take many forms – content shared directly from brands, re-shared content from connections, or social marketing such as Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ad unit. While there has been tremendous focus on counting the incidence of these brand mentions on social networks (and, to a lesser degree, categorizing it), we find that the reach and frequency of social media brand impressions is far more important than simple counting statistics. Facebook users spend more than a quarter of their time on the site consuming and interacting with the Facebook Newsfeed, and this activity represents 4 percent of all time spent online in the U.S. The Newsfeed is also the primary location where branded content is consumed. In fact, users are 40-150 times more likely to consume branded content in the Newsfeed than to visit the Fan Page itself. (Source: comScore) There are typically two potential audiences for branded content on Facebook. Fans of brands on Facebook (those who have explicitly “liked” a brand) are the easiest to reach with social media brand impressions, but the Friends of those Fans also constitute an important incremental audience. Friends of Fans typically represent a much larger set of consumers (34 times larger, on average, for the top 100 brand pages) and can receive social media brand impressions by way of their Friends. In examples from this paper, the reach of branded content among Friends of Fans significantly exceeded the reach among Fans. When a brand focuses on acquiring and engaging Fans it can benefit from a significant secondary effect – exposure among Friends of Fans that often surpasses reach among Fans. In the case of some brands, Facebook Fans may have different aggregate demographic and behavioral profiles than typical brand purchasers, indicating that social media may require different approaches to marketing strategy. The “Value of a Fan” can be assessed in three primary ways: increasing the depth of engagement and loyalty among Fans, generating incremental purchase behavior, and leveraging the ability to influence Friends of Fans.

Branding in the age of social media

Abstract: Social media was supposed to usher in a golden age of branding. But things didn’t turn out that way. Marketers originally thought that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter would let them bypass mainstream media and connect directly with customers. Hoping to attract huge audiences to their brands, they spent billions producing their own creative content. But consumers never showed up. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What happened? The issue is, social media has transformed how culture works, in a way that weakens certain branding techniques. It has united once-isolated communities into influential crowdcultures. Crowdcultures are very prolific cultural innovators. Their members produce their own content—so well that companies simply can’t compete. Consider that people making videos in their living rooms top the charts on YouTube, which few companies have managed to crack. While they diminish the impact of branded content, crowdcultures grease the wheels for an alternative approach, cultural branding. In it, a brand sets itself apart by promoting a new ideology that springs from the crowd. Chipotle did this successfully when it made two short films critiquing industrial food, tapping into a movement that began in the organic-farming subculture and blew up into a mainstream concern on social media. Other good examples come from personal care. Axe revived its brand by becoming an over-the-top cheerleader for the “lad” crowd that arose as a response to politically correct gender politics. Dove championed the other side of the divide, with campaigns that spoke to crowdculture concerns about unhealthy beauty standards for women. Brands succeed when they break through in culture, and crowdcultures are a great vehicle for doing that. But firms can’t identify the critical opportunities by relying on traditional segmentation and trend reports. INSETS: How Cultural Branding Builds Icons.;How One Brand Uses Celebrities to Break Through