We are in the midst of a big shift in advertising away from major web portals to social media and search engines, proclaimed Jonah Peretti, the chief executive and founder of Buzzfeed, in a sometimes amusing but extremely informative session today.
Most people have seen the cute and funny content from Buzzfeed in their Facebook news feed, or other social source. Peretti described social media as being the dominant force for the future, especially when we look at how content is discovered by users and then shared. He offered the audience some useful information and examples of how their content has a better chance of success.
Recently the social site went serious. “This Basset Hound running site, now has a serious journalist in charge.” He explained how this evolved by likening the way people interact, discover and share things on the internet with a Parisian Café, one moment you're reading philosophy or the news and the next you're patting a cute dog.
Social is a way of thinking: there are no tricks, you have to be human.
“Learn from the Mormons”. Quite an abstract way to describe how to spend your time with social media was a parallel with the Mormon religion. But, over the past 100 or so years the Mormon religion has grown significantly. They didn’t do this based on the content of their belief. They spend 50% of their time going out to the world and educating people about their religion. Social media execution should be spending 50% of the time developing and making the right content and then 50% of the time talking, marketing and telling people about it.
Peretti broadly extolled the benefits of social media advertising for having a significant improved brand lift with sharing and word of mouth. He explained that Buzzfeed has absolutely no banner display advertising and never has. Instead Buzzfeed has story units and articles that he said get 1-2% CTR.
Buzzfeed works closely with its advertisers, helping them tell a “compelling story” and make it social. They recommend, tell the story a few different ways and push (both financially and with time) the stories that are working. The good advertisers don’t stop there, they continue to learn and build new content.
Matthew Joyce
Chief innovation officer
TMS