28 Oct Twitter Launches Brand Sponsored #Stickers

Microblogging giant Twitter, which released its unique Emoji stickers earlier this year, recently announced that they will now be allowing brands to use these stickers in a sponsorship capacity. Just a few months ago, online giants such as Techcrunch first reported that Emoji stickers had come to Twitter, and various companies were finding some success marketing these via their social media platforms. In the beginning, though, these stickers were of the run-of-the-mill variety, where businesses had to sift through the available ones in order to find those that were most suitable for their message.

Changes to Twitter Emoji Stickers

Although the photos were available for businesses large and small right at the end of July 2016, it is only as the summer concludes and fall begins that the branded variety is now available to help companies promote themselves.

As you would expect, one of the giant corporations is already onboard. Pepsi is ratcheting up the opportunities for its followers to engage by allowing them to place branded Pepsi Emojis on top of the photos they take and post. President of PepsiCo, Brad Jakeman, is banking on this as a progenitor of more conversations about the company. To date, Pepsi is using about 50 promoted badges of company loyalty in a dozen countries, such as India, Mexico, the U.S., Russia and Canada.

Twitter is also banking on corporations such as Pepsi being on board to spark even more interest in their promoted Emoji badges.  In their initial trial run last year, Pepsi’s rival, Coke, was actually a driving force of the beta (it wasn’t available to everyone). Anheuser-Busch and Pepsi were also in on the exclusive beta-run, during a time when the promoted #Stickers reportedly cost a cool $1 million per package. Clearly, even today that they’re widely available, only the most profitable brands will be buying into Twitter’s deal.

How Does it Work?

Twitter released an official statement revealing details of how it all works. Any brand that comes onboard can make between four and eight promotional Emojis that their users can then add to personal photos that they upload to their servers. They function as a sort of visual hashtag, where the accepted designation is #Stickers.

In general, visual media appears to be reigniting a new storm of customer engagement in the mobile space these days. Snapchat, which has risen to a nearly $25 billion valuation to date, capitalizes on this fact in perhaps the most obvious way with their video platform and geo-filters for photos. Facebook has done something similar, and Twitter’s latest promoted stickers are seeking to grab some market share. After all, Twitter still isn’t profitable; the hope is that adding a visual element to the stream of words for which the platform is known can infuse it with new life.

Please contact Blast Creative for all of your social media marketing needs.