James Corran

James Corran

Our Authors

James Corran

Paid Social Planner

About this Author

As a Paid Social Planner at iProspect, James' role includes formulating paid social strategy, from ideation to activation, as well as working closely with the rest of the team to provide valuable insight around how integrating paid social is crucial for a client's overall strategy.

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Game On: How To Engage with Sports Fans on Twitter

Any ardent sports fan with a phone knows the pull of the second screen. Whether it's because of a stunning goal or a controversial ref decision, the instinct to pull out a smart phone or tablet to interact in real-time with fellow fans. Increasingly, match commentary is no longer confined to half-time, and now runs throughout the game for millions of online users. In the past decade, Twitter has positioned itself as the social media platform where in the moment conversations happen. There is even a claim that Twitter has overtaken Facebook as the social platform of choice for fans, with one in two users describing themselves as passionate sports fans. Twitter has also highlighted how “spiky” sports trends can be, with enormous peaks during MatchDay. During Euro 2016, England’s defeat by Iceland generated 331,000 football-related tweets on the day. This was a significant increase against the daily average over the course of the tournament, and the same trend is visible in all major sporting competitions since. It’s clear that during major tournaments, while sports fans all unite in their shared passion over the course of the whole competition, it is on the day itself when the majority engage in online discussion. How, therefore, can an advertiser make their promoted tweets stand out in the swirling tempest of tweets that occurs during major sport events? From a media perspective, the opportunity is clear. We recently tested the effectiveness of promoting branded content for an FMCG client during the 6 Nations matches, and received glimpses of just how powerful real-time match commentary can be. With an elaborate set-up in place to produce reactive video tweets commenting on the events of the match, we targeted rugby fans and promoted tweets as quickly as they were produced. We found that even with accelerated spend turned on, we were able to serve out impressions to rugby fans during the match at a rate that was only marginally more expensive than if we had run the campaigns over an entire day. This proved that the number of active users on the platform during the match was enormous, resulting in an ample inventory. In addition, we found that our cost per video view stayed low, and video view rates almost doubled in comparison to our pre and post-match video campaigns. Not only were rugby fans browsing Twitter while the game was still playing out, they were also clearly very engaged with all the rugby content they were seeing there. The key takeaway was that in the world of sports, the game is all important. That’s when the audience is most engaged with their passion, and most eager to trade jokes and opinions while the narrative of the match is unfolding. Therefore, the two key takeaways for advertisers are: Tap into this behaviour with a clear media strategy Make your content contextually relevant to the events of the match These learnings worked wonders on our campaign, as we saw the best results on tweets that specifically called out moments from the game and invited a reaction from the viewer. If a brand can genuinely engage in the events of the game, users will react as they would with a fellow fan. With the world cup coming up, many advertisers are asking themselves how to be present in the excitement. Our advice: find out where the conversation is happening and make sure that you are able to authentically contribute. Get in touch with our Paid Social experts with any questions around how your brand can stand out from the crowd. 0 3 min read

Why Pinterest is the Right Platform for Brands in 2018

In the past few years, the social media landscape has seen a major development: the most successful platforms have marked their territory in terms of user behaviour. Facebook and its star acquisition Instagram have established a 'monopoly' as the places where you project yourself via pictures to your friends and family. Twitter is where you add your voice to wide-reaching conversations. Pinterest has traced a different path and defines itself as the social network for inspiration. Describing itself as a more of a “discovery” platform than a social platform, it is arguably the place to go for ideas when you plan to redecorate your home or undertake a new baking project. Launched in 2010, Pinterest may not be a new platform but as of April 2017, there were 175 million global monthly active users. The majority of their internal data is confidential and although Pinterest is more popular in the United States, there is a growing number of users elsewhere across the globe. This presents an opportunity for brands looking to widen their paid social plans beyond the usual suspects in the UK. Pinterest’s advertising offering essentially boils down to two main placements. Firstly, there’s the Browse placement, which promotes an advertisers video or static pins into the home feed of a user. It targets based on the interests of the user who will see a brand’s pins when scrolling through the pins of users and boards they follow. Secondly, there’s the Discovery placement. This is essentially a paid search offering in that the advertiser bids for their pins to appear in the search results for specified keywords. In terms of creative, both placements can run the exact same pins. By choosing between them, an advertiser is able to exert control over the context in which their pins may be seen by the user. As an example, if you were running a campaign for a drink brand and wanted users to find your pin after searching for a particular cocktail, then you might decide to run a Discovery campaign. However, if you are a fashion brand aiming to drive the visibility of a new eye-catching range, then you would run a campaign on the Browse placement and select some relevant audience interests to target. This two-part approach is commendably easy to understand and action. However, there are some limitations that potential advertisers should be aware of. Firstly, though apparently growing, Pinterest just doesn’t have the coverage that players like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter do. Therefore, it is harder to justify making it a core part of an awareness campaign. Additionally, because the platform is such a different user experience to other social platforms, many of its engagement metrics are unique to Pinterest. This means it can be hard to find like-for-like comparisons when looking at how well a Pin has been received when compared to a Facebook post or Tweet. However, this latter point is also perhaps Pinterest’s greatest asset and one of the best arguments for considering it in a marketing plan. It’s a common criticism of Facebook that all interactions are ephemeral. A thousand likes on your video ad may tell you that people enjoyed it, but unless you have some kind of strategy in place to measure brand uplift or retarget the video viewers, you won’t know whether it has shifted a customer’s purchase intention. However on Pinterest, one of the key engagements for a user is the ability to save pins and add them to their own boards - an interaction that implies an intention to revisit later. Surely this is the kind of brand interaction that advertisers should value highly. Pinterest argues that its users are on the platform because they are open-minded to new ideas, and actively looking for things to factor into their next project. Exactly how this “Pinterest mindset” translates to conversions remains yet to be tested for many advertisers, but we would recommend that brands consider Pinterest a platform worth investing in. Get in touch with our Paid Social team if you have any questions on Pinterest. 0 4 min read

How will Augmented Reality Affect Paid Social?

Augmented Reality, or AR, is one of the major buzzwords of the last few years, appearing in keynote speeches and media briefs across the industry. In this blog post, James Corran, Paid Social Planner, and Ian Adams, Paid Social Account Director, looked at what this technology means for social media. Put simply, AR is any product that superimposes computer-generated assets onto a real-world environment (or usually footage of it from a camera) in real time. Currently, the most prominent application of AR in social media is the lens feature on Snapchat, which allows users to play with fun visual effects that are directly applied to the user’s live camera feed. We’ve already talked about the brand value of Snapchat lens’ fun factor, but we haven’t yet talked about how AR is being adopted across other platforms, or how we expect the field to develop in the coming years. Facebook, one of the emerging players in the AR push, are developing a major suite of products that use AR to provide interactive consumer journeys. Over the last year or so, they have gradually been offering the opportunity to advertisers to promote Facebook AR lenses to users. If users start to adopt Facebook and Instagram AR lenses to the same extent that Snapchat users have, this may become a very formidable placement, offering advertisers the chance to pair the interactivity of AR with Facebook’s unparalleled reach. Another interesting development is that both Snapchat and Facebook are simultaneously developing creation tools for AR lenses called Snapchat Studio and Facebook AR studio respectively. The aim seems to be to democratise the creation process, empowering brands to take control of the creative process by which AR experiences are made. This will be a key development, because currently one of the main blockages in brands adopting AR in their marketing plans are the necessity of working closely with media partners in order to create the experiences they want. An additional example where a company is pushing AR is Apple, who announced its ARKit 2 in June 2018, which is intended to allow brands to easily create 3D objects which can be used for AR experiences. A good example of how this could be applied can be found in IKEA's recent Place App. It allows users to use their phones to superimpose IKEA products into their living space in order to “try out” pieces of furniture before buying or see if a particular chair or table will fit in their flat. It’s reasonable to assume that social media networks will try to integrate these kinds of brand experiences into their platforms in the coming years, and this has the potential to completely reinvent how retail brands handle e-commerce in the social space. One thing to note: the Ikea Place app mentioned above already allows you to take pictures of furniture that you like and match it to products from the catalogue. Facebook has also already previewed the ability to take picture of a product. In its example, a wine bottle on a table then pulls up an interface showing the product online along with user reviews. Conclusion AR is undoubtedly exciting and impressive technologically, but you’d be right to question whether it is guaranteed to catch on or whether it is a fad that ultimately asks too much of the user. It is certainly true that AR experiences, which require a lot of development work on the part of the advertiser, will be made or broken depending on whether or not the audience understand and start to widely use the technology. However, if Snapchat’s success is an indicator, it seems that if brands can leverage the “fun” factor of AR, and produce something that the user wants to engage with, an exciting future of AR augmented experiences nested in existing social channels awaits. 0 4 min read

As a Paid Social Planner at iProspect, James' role includes formulating paid social strategy, from ideation to activation, as well as working closely with the rest of the team to provide valuable insight around how integrating paid social is crucial for a client's overall strategy.