Category: Mobile Marketing

Facebook social media marketing takes on YouTube

| April 8, 2015

The most popular social network is now changing its approach to video in a sizeable way.

Social media marketing at Facebook is changing its angle so that it isn’t just a rival of other networks, but of other forms of media sharing, as well, as it has now placed its focus on an entirely new full screen mobile video experience.

Video is seeing a tremendous growth over mobile and Facebook is clearly gearing up to get in on it.

The idea is to introduce a video experience to the mobile app at a dramatic scale. This will certainly have appeal to those who are interested in using this type of media for social media marketing. It is also a direct reflection on the amount of time that people are spending on their mobile devices when it comes to social networks. At the F8 developer conference, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg had already indicated that his social network and YouTube would soon be in direct competition with each other.

This new form of social media marketing will change the way that videos are shared on Facebook.

social media marketing - youtubePreviously, it was possible to share video on Facebook, but in order to do that for free, it would need to be posted somewhere – most commonly on YouTube – so that a link could then be posted and the video would embed into their timelines, blogs, or websites. However, Facebook now allows users to host videos on the social network and then embed them into their blogs and websites.

Facebook already plays a very important role in video, as statistics from Business Insider have indicated that every day there are 3 billion streams of videos on that site alone. That represents the data even before embedding could move the social network onto other sites, as well. Typically the videos played on Facebook were embedded from YouTube. Now, that will no longer be necessary and it will likely cause things to change quite dramatically in the way that people share their videos.

The potential impact that this can have on social media marketing trends are considerable and it will be interesting to watch the shift in usage.

The popularity of mobile games double revenues at Supercell

| March 27, 2015

The success of several of these apps made it possible for earnings to break the $1.7 billion mark last year.

Supercell Oy, the company behind hit mobile games such as Hay Day and Clash of Clans, has managed to double its own earnings due to the continuing popularity of this kind of app throughout 2014, bringing its revenues to $1.7 billion, that year.

The company from Finland has actually seen a tripling of its earnings that are specific to its top games.

The annual revenue that the company brought in from its leading mobile games – Hay Day, Clash of Clans, and boom Beach – actually managed to triple in its growth, last year. Supercell explained that its earnings from last year had risen from having been a notably lower $570 million in 2013. While that figure was, obviously, still very healthy, this also shows a staggering increase over the span of a year. Its pre-tax earnings, before interest, depreciation, and amortization, were $565 million, last year. In 2013, that figure had been $267 million.

A great deal of the success of these mobile games came from certain specific markets around the world.

Mobile Games - Doubled RevenueThese markets – such as China and Korea – were exposed to highly localized and strategic mobile marketing campaigns that proved to be greatly successful and drew significant appeal. This type of achievement has proven to be a very challenging one for Western game developers in the past, said Ilkka Paananen, the co-founder and the chief executive at CEO, when speaking at a news conference.

SoftBank Corp, a telecom giant from Japan, purchased a 51.4 percent share of Supercell in October 2013 for $1.5 billion, an amount that they may now be considering to be a bargain, considering the consistent success and growth of the company, so far.

That company will be receiving a $170 million dividend payout from the mobile games firm as a result of the earnings that were brought in throughout 2014. This, according to data that has been made available by Supercell. It will be interesting to watch the success of the company to see whether it will be capable of maintaining this trend instead of allowing the achievement to become a flash in the pan.