LONDON – Following the re-launch this week of Twitter for Business, which includes information and tools for new business users, there has never been a better time for brands to incorporate the social network into their overall marketing strategy, says integrated PR, search and social media agency Punch Communications.

“With the addition of the recently launched Twitter Cards for Apps, Products and Galleries, and the new deep-linking feature for mobile apps, Twitter offers lots of opportunities for content discovery and sharing.”

The new look for the Twitter for Business website features topics such as best practice guidance, assistance on building a Twitter community, advice and information on promotional tactics and marketing tools, and an abundance of success stories from brands such as Cadbury Wispa, Cirque du Soleil and the British Heart Foundation.

The new website will help businesses to better understand how the network will best work for them, and offers a great introduction to the available advertising tools, which help to grow a brand presence on Twitter and target potential customers by location and interest.

Pete Goold, managing director of Punch Communications, says: “Twitter is a valuable podium for businesses of all shapes and sizes, and we have assisted many clients to successfully build brand loyalty and engagement on the platform.

“With the addition of the recently launched Twitter Cards for Apps, Products and Galleries, and the new deep-linking feature for mobile apps, Twitter offers lots of opportunities for content discovery and sharing.”

With the growing importance of visibility in social search, Twitter has become a vital addition to the online marketing plan of businesses large and small. A company’s Twitter presence provides existing customers with an additional channel for feedback, allows them to easily discover the latest company promotions, and entices new customers to find out more about the brand. When fans can form connections and start conversations with their favourite brands in real-time, they know that these business are prepared to listen, engage and build meaningful relationships with consumers – which is becoming increasingly more important during the current shift into a digital society.

Punch Communications provides integrated services to small businesses and global brands alike. To look beyond average PR companies and find out what an integrated PR, social media and SEO agency could do for your business, call Punch on +44(0) 1858 411600 or visit www.punchcomms.com.

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Tookitaki (www.tookitaki.com) is a social audience discovery and retargeting platform that has recently launched its beta version at iAccellerator’s¹ Demo Day in Ahmedabad, India.

With incubation funding recently secured from Bangalore tech start-up incubator Srijan Capital as well as other angel investors², Tookitaki is looking forward to demonstrate just what its platform can do for advertisers conscious of media budgets waste.

Tookitaki At A Glance

In their own words, “It all began from a simple idea to go social and capitalize on the problem – too much data, not enough time to squeeze the best. Tookitaki built on this idea to help enterprises explore and engage with relevant people across the social web.”

“We help marketers discover their audiences via analyzing social graph data. Simply put, a marketer can define criteria to describe an audience and our machine learning algorithm based on contextual search can “locate” a potential audience. We then provide RTB-based platform to reach out to the discovered audience.“, says Abhishek Chatterjee, Founder & CEO, Tookitaki.

Tookitaki scans social media platforms – Facebook and LinkedIn at the moment, with Twitter to be added soon – to identify products and brands that people talk about. Tookitaki’s audience discovery engine will then help advertisers identify and connect with the very people who are interested in their products.

By targeting the right audience with the right ads at the right time, followed by retargeting campaigns across both Facebook and the general web, Tookitaki promises to address three shortcomings of most online advertising campaigns:

- low engagement: at an average 6.2%³ engagement rate, plenty of brands fail to make the most out of their targeted audience

- low CTR: 0.1%⁴ appears to be an average click-through rate across banner ads in the United States, while we’ve all experienced CTRs even significantly lower than this in recent years;

- high bounce rate: at a whopping 40%⁵ average bounce rate, many ad budgets are wasted towards the final stages of their attempt to engage the desired audience.

The tools employed by Tookitaki in the quest of bridging the general web and the social media while creating targetable audiences include:

- Facebook Custom Audiences, helping brands to serve ads exclusively to their targeted audience;

- Intelligent Programmatic Advertising, assisting media buyers in fine-tuning their targeting.

Tookitaki will be facing tough competitions from more established and well-known players such as AddThis, RadiumOne, Lotame, Hearsay Social, as well as from smaller, newer companies like Perfect Audience or Velocity. Its founders remain confident that Tookitaki will be able to find its place on the market and prove value to its advertisers.

The Tookitaki Team

Tookitaki is the brainchild of Abhishek Chatterjee and Jeeta Bandopadhay.

Abhishek has a passion for real-time problem solving and loves to do different. After completing his BE in Computer Engineering from University of Pune, he pursued a MS in Computational Biology (Applied Mathematics) from University of Southern California. He brings in a wealth of experience to Tookitaki, having worked with DoubleClick (Google) and JP Morgan New York as an algorithmic engineer for 5 years.

He is the founder and CEO of Tookitaki, keeping an eye on overall strategy. Additionally, he works very closely with the product team to make sure brands and companies are well-connected to their preferred events and relevant people.

You can reach him at abhishek@tookitaki.com

Jeeta is the life and breath of Tookitaki. She completed her MA in English, then moved on to pursue a degree in Integrated Marketing and Communications from St. Xavier’s College in Kolkata. She is very lively and has the unique talent of talking in a convincing tone on subjects she has no clue (hey, these are her own words!). She gels quick and easy with anybody and enjoys networking. Her previous employer is the media conglomerate The Times Group, where she worked on some of their business journals.

She is the chief marketing officer at Tookitaki and she is currently busy building rapports with clients. In the free time, she keeps thinking of innovative marketing strategies and talks about Tookitaki to anyone she meets.

You can reach her at jeeta@tookitaki.com.

Other members of the vivacious and fun Tookitaki team include lead designer Sudipta Mallick, along with algorithmic engineers Nishant Kumar (previously with Microsoft) and Niraj Kumar (ISM Dhanbad).

You can try out the Tookitaki platform at http://beta.tookitaki.com/ or take a demo tour at http://tookitaki.com/demo/index.html.

1. iAccelerator is an initiative of CIIE (Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship), set up at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) to foster innovation-driven entrepreneurship in India.
2. Reported Tookitaki angel investors are Aakrit Vaish, director of Flurry Inc.; Miten Sampat, VP Product Strategy at Neustar; Anuj Pulstya, member of the Indian Angel Network; Maneesh Bhandari, investor director at Framebench; Anand Ladsariya, owner of Everest Flavours, and Nitin Agarwal, owner of NM Fashions. 
3. Source: comScore
4. Source: Wordstream
5. Source: Wordstream

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Komli Launches Ad Sales Dedicated to Twitter’s Promoted Products Suite In SEA

Mumbai – Komli Media, Asia Pacific’s leading digital media technology company, has signed an exclusive partnership agreement with Twitter that will help expand the availability of Twitter’s Promoted Products suite of advertising products to marketers in Southeast Asia including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

Under the partnership, Komli will manage all of Twitter’s Southeast Asia sales and develop the regional market for Twitter and its Promoted Products through a series of education and training programs for agencies and large advertisers. A dedicated Komli Engage sales team specializing in Twitter’s advertising products will now offer advertising solutions including Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends which are currently available only to marketers in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Latin America.

“We’re really excited to be working with Komli as we enter into Southeast Asia, which is one of Twitter’s fastest-growing markets,” says Shailesh Rao, Twitter’s Vice President of International Revenue. “We are seeing significant interest from marketers who want to use our Promoted Products to build their businesses and connect with consumers. Working with Komli, and its management team, gives Twitter a strong partner with an established footprint throughout the region.”

“We are pleased to partner with Twitter. Together, we will offer marketers new and relevant opportunities to engage audiences in SEA and drive brand value. Social media growth in this region is among the highest in the world, and Twitter is one of the most recognized and utilized platforms in our region,” says Akshay Garg, Vice President, International and Managing Director for SEA.

More than 800 million – or 50% – of the world’s social network users are in Asia. Fifty-four percent of Singapore’s internet population are regular social users. Matt Sutton, GM Engage, runs Komli’s social media business unit and is bullish about the opportunity this represents for SEA’s advertisers, saying: “We’re witnessing huge user growth on social media platforms in the SEA region. No surprise then that the research suggests the majority of our consumers consult social media before making purchases. Twitter’s entrance is a major opportunity for advertisers in the region to expand their social media marketing options.”

Komli Media (http://www.komli.com) is Asia Pacific’s leading media technology company with solutions across display, mobile, video, social, search and data for advertisers, agencies, and publishers. Komli is leading the charge in developing the next-generation of digital advertising technologies, such as a Real-Time Bidding (RTB) performance advertising platform (ATOM) that integrates audience data to improve ROI. Headquartered in Mumbai, Komli Media has over 400 employees across 18 offices in India, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Middle East, North America and United Kingdom. Komli has raised capital from leading venture capital investors including Norwest Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, Helion Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Western Technology Investment.

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HOUSTON - FrogDog, a national marketing strategy and execution firm, this week released the results of a three-year national longitudinal research study on social media. The study shows how social media use has changed over time.

Highlights from the study:

• Facebook continues to be the dominant social media platform for every social media purpose—spreading marketing messages, business networking, connecting with friends and family, keeping abreast of the news, and finding sources of entertainment—according to 80 percent of respondents.

• For entertainment, Facebook remains king, with 78 percent of respondents spending their leisure time on the social media giant. YouTube (at 55 percent) remains the second destination respondents chose for entertainment. Facebook and YouTube have not lost any footing in this category; both received almost identical numbers in 2011.

• Twitter is relevant when delivering marketing for 60 percent of respondents; however, Twitter usage is declining.

• LinkedIn has emerged as the leading social media platform for professional networking, with 77 percent of respondents preferring LinkedIn over Facebook, at 48 percent. Additionally, LinkedIn has increased as a destination for information over the past three years, moving up almost 15 percent since 2010.

FrogDog’s survey also revealed several emerging social media platforms that garner a mention for use in reaching customers and clients, including YouTube, Pinterest, and Tumblr.

Also, by comparing results from prior years, the firm determined that social media platforms have become more relevant in all forms of business communications with clients and customers.

FrogDog CEO Leslie Farnsworth said, “I felt certain we would see a year-over-year increase in the number of companies with formal social media strategies. Instead, the percentage stayed relatively flat in 2010 and 2011, at 38 percent and 36 percent, and only increased to 58 percent in 2012. I’m surprised it’s still only at 58 percent. Developing these strategies is critical.”

For additional results from the survey and further analysis, including charts and graphs, read FrogDog’s 2012 Social Media Survey Results.

Farnsworth is available for interviews on the topic with all media outlets.

About FrogDog

FrogDog is a national consulting firm that has helped companies with marketing and communications strategy and execution since 1997. FrogDog’s customized approach helps clients across a variety of industries and business sectors thrive. For more information, visit www.frog-dog.com.

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Revolutionary Twitter and Facebook News Feed Aggregator App Learns User Reading Preferences, Dynamically Updates Content, and Delivers Relevant Messages That Matter Most

St. Petersburg, Russia – i-Free Innovations, a mobile applications and games developer and publisher, today introduced Relevance, a social media aggregator app for iPhone that syncs feeds from Facebook and Twitter into a seamless stream of messages that matter most to users. Built with an intuitive algorithm that learns user preferences while they read news and communicate with friends, Relevance removes the need to manually customize the feed and delivers more and more interesting and valuable information every time the app is opened.

Relevance for iPhone is FREE to download and can be found on the iTunes App Store at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id541057001

By analyzing the user’s social graph (i.e.: # of common Twitter accounts followed / # of Facebook friends in common with the authors), the characteristics of messages (i.e.: number of likes, comments, replies and re-tweets, etc), and the overall popularity of authors (i.e.: followers and friends of Facebook), Relevance continually works in the background to deliver information that is truly relevant. And, Relevance allows the user to mark certain messages as uninteresting, devote more time to certain authors or posts, and vote certain authors up or mute them entirely. As soon as the user opens the app, it begins collecting this information and dynamically updates the delivered content based on the new feedback with every refresh of the newsfeed.

Other great features include the ability to manually input how much time a user can devote to reading posts (from 1 minute to 1 hour), defining the time period for which users can see their updates (from the last 15 minutes to the last week), and preview content display, which displays pictures or websites from links included in received messages. And, with just one tap, these links can be fully opened if the user wishes to do so.

“Relevance displays messages in order of importance to the user, not chronologically like other similar apps on the market today,” said Kirill Petrov, Managing Director, i-Free Innovations. “The intuitive technology behind Relevance takes into account a user’s social graph along with the characteristics of messages to deliver information they WANT to see, not just what’s next!”

Device Requirements:
* iPhone
* Requires iOS 4 and higher
* Size – 10MB

About i-Free Innovations
i-Free Innovations, a subsidiary of i-Free Ltd., features a unique team of professionals dedicated to the development and publishing of applications and games for smartphones and new network devices. Under the i-Free umbrella, i-Free Innovations is constantly engaged in research of new prospective technologies for a company that has experienced tremendous growth in the CIS since 2001 and internationally since 2006. i-Free, known as a specialist developer and implementer of innovative projects in mobile and NFC technology, electronic finance, digital content distribution, and electronic payments and micropayments, makes its products available in more than 100 countries, grossing over US $200 Million in sales in 2011. Headquartered in St. Petersburg, Russia, i-Free also successfully operates offices in Moscow, Kyiv (Ukraine), Minsk (Belarus), Almaty (Kazakhstan), Mumbai (India), Beijing (China) and Sao-Paolo (Brazil), employing over 500 staff. i-Free partners with the leading cellular operators in Russia and the CIS, with global mobile equipment vendors, banks, transnational brands and trademarks, major media holdings, publishers and Internet resources. For more information, visit www.i-free.com/en/.

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