beautiful bytes: marketers get new toys

Twitter has been relatively quiet this week (although the cynic in me is bracing myself wondering what mammoth change they’ll announce for their platform next week), so it has been a pleasant week reading updates from the rest of the social universe.

Introducing Google Tag Manager

In every organisation I’ve ever worked in, tags – or rather, the implementation thereof – have always been one of those tasks that have caused much friction between the marketing and development departments.

Marketing has tags that need to be on every page, or a group of pages, in order to track user behaviour or enable other features – these could include affiliate programmes, meta information plugins, Google Adsense and Analytics and Facebook Open Graph. The dev team is focused on keeping their code as clean, well-documented and as unbloated as possible, so finding a place to put the tag usually ends up with some kind of hack needed. Remembering to remove it again is another story.

So Google Tag Manager is an absolute godsend for both teams. It’s a neat container that only needs to be implemented once, and then marketers and other campaign managers can log into Google Tag Manager to upload, switch off, delete and manage their tags for their campaigns as they like.

 

Facebook has another go at gifts

Remember Facebook Gift Shop that closed in 2008? Well, it’s back in business as Facebook Gifts.

There are many factors which will hopefully improve the product’s prospect this time around. Online shopping, the growth in tablet use and deeper integrations between platforms and services have all served to increase the confidence of users in purchasing online.

With family in Asia and the US, I was a big fan of the potential of Facebook Gifts back in the day, especially as I’m not great at remembering birthdays. But the selection wasn’t great. This time around Facebook Gifts may provide online retailers with a viable platform on which to sell their products without them having to invest in their own Facebook stores.

I’m very much hoping that Facebook Gifts succeeds this time around in order to promote purchasing within Facebook – as this should see some positive behavioural benefits to donating in Facebook.

 

Hello, Marketers – love, Tumblr

Union Metrics, the makers of Tweetreach, has licensed their analytics platform to Tumblr meaning that, for the first time, Tumblr users will be able to see which of their posts or reblogs performed the best.

This move is in line with the platform’s growing popularity with marketers as, we reported recently, Tumblr’s visitor count puts it in the same ballpark as Pinterest, the third highest referring social media platform.

Until next week

 

Rochelle

Image credits: Union Metrics, Facebook