Immediate Future weekly digest:

April 19, 2013

Facebook wants to know what you’re doing

This week we have taken a look at the new changes Facebook is rolling out! Facebook is about to launch a brand new update which will affect our Facebook status updates. They are soon to become much more interactive due to a set of new changes where users will be able to express what they are watching, eating or listening to on the site. According to Facebook, if you share that you’re watching a movie like Jurassic Park, your post will contain the movie icon with a link to the movie’s page and then be added to your timeline in the Movies section. The same applies to any books you’ve read, restaurants you have visited and music you have listened to. This new update could prove to be great for brands! It gives them a chance to see what people are watching, reading and listening to, allowing them to find out more about their demographic and what they are really interested in. To find out more and have your say click here!

Is Facebook driving away teens?

This week we have discussed whether teens are being driven away by Facebook’s new updates or whether they are leaving in favour of other, newer, more specialist social media platforms. New research has shown that whilst Facebook and YouTube are still important for many teens, their popularity has been falling steadily amongst this demographic over the last year. It has been suggested that Facebook is now focusing more on the 18-49 demographic which is so important to many advertisers. However, we can see that teens are not abandoning social media. Rather they are leaving Facebook in favour of ‘cooler’ platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr. Is Facebook just failing to be the next new thing? Or is it right to focus on the more advertiser friendly 18-49 demographic? Click here to read the blog and be sure to let us know your thoughts!

Why brands should embrace the interactive YouTube video

In 2010 YouTube launched annotated videos allowing you to link to other videos within your own video. This update opened up a great opportunity to create highly engaging videos for fans. However, despite being launched 3 years ago many brands have kept interactive videos at arm’s length. This blog explores various reasons as to why brands should embrace the interactive YouTube video. To give you a little glimpse, interactive videos could be used for making useful ‘How to’ guides – revolutionising the way we learn.

To find out more reasons why brands should embrace the interactive video click here.

How to use hashtags on Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn

Hashtags are everywhere! They are now the standard way to label social media posts, not only on Twitter but also on Google+ and increasingly on LinkedIn. Monitoring hashtags is an easy way to spot a social media trend and to respond accordingly. But, it is rather unclear what kind of hashtags tend to trend on these three major social channels, so this week we compared trending hashtags on a given day (in this case, 17th April 2013) to understand the differences between the platforms! Recent events and consumer products were found to be trending on Google+; politics, sports and bespoke hashtags on Twitter and industry-specific, generalised topics on LinkedIn. How do you diversify your use of hashtags on different social platforms? Let us know your thoughts and read the full blog here…

Gazing into the crystal ball of B2B in social: Google+ looks to be the next big event

Social media is a fast-moving, ever-evolving beast – for all marketers it’s a constant challenge to stay one step ahead of the game. We can’t be 100% sure of the future of social, but we can certainly have a jolly good inkling. The results of B2B Marketing’s Social Media Benchmarking report nod to the growing importance of Google+ as a playground for B2B marketers. The results of the survey found that although Google+ is the no. 1 social platform for a mere 36% at present, participants said that Google’s network would be three times as relevant in 2014 as it is now! B2B Marketing sums up the results of the study with this good-looking infographic. Click here to read the blog and check out the great infographic!

Latest Posts

A B2B buying decision rarely happens with one person. It’s usually a buying group with different roles, risks, and opinions, and the deal moves when your champion can explain the choice internally. That’s why forwardability matters more than engagement.

Design and disability are so often discussed in terms of basic “accommodation” and “access,” yet my visit to the V&A’s Design and Disability exhibition completely shifted that perspective. Rather than framing disability as an issue to be fixed, the exhibition presents it as a culture, a rich set of identities, and a radical design force shaping practice from the 1940s right up to today.

Lurkers are your biggest audience and they’re deciding in silence. They watch in feeds, sanity-check you in comments, communities and reviews, then repeat whatever proof is easiest to quote internally. That’s why social feels harder, it’s no longer a click machine, it’s an answer surface. Ofcom shows AI summaries are now common in search results, and YouTube remains the UK’s biggest social utility by reach and time spent. If your story is inconsistent, your evidence is scattered, or your customer proof is buried, lurkers can’t do the job of trusting you for you.