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Social Media

These YouTube Tools Will Boost Your Video Rankings

Video content is pulling more and more weight in the field of digital marketing, as it becomes easier than ever to post, host, and consume.

Between the astronomical rise of TikTok and the success of YouTube Shorts, not to mention other popular forms of short-form video content, it’s become clearer over time that at least a portion of your budget should be dedicated towards producing good quality video, especially if most of your audience and customer base is online, and social media-savvy.

But simply posting content on platforms like YouTube isn’t enough anymore to profit from your effort. You want content that ranks well and is relevant to people’s searches, bringing you traffic from potential customers, and generating leads.

YouTube Optimization 101

Yes, YouTube videos and community posts require as much optimization as anything else under the Alphabet umbrella. Much of your incoming traffic on YouTube will come from people browsing their Home tab, clicking on related videos with interesting or relevant titles and thumbnails, or through YouTube searches.

Optimizing for these avenues requires you to understand how YouTube ranks videos, what goes into improving your rankings, and how you can translate the data that YouTube provides you itself into actionable advice for future content.

First, it’s important to note that the overall tenets of relevance and authority are still important. YouTube will value content from channels with an established audience, a title that is close to or matches the search term(s), tags that match both the content in the video and the user’s search or search history and view history, and metrics like views and bounce rates.

However, timeliness matters too. YouTube is generally more likely to recommend newer content over older content, even if that older content has a better view count. If you log out of your account and go look up how to install a dishwasher, for example, the first three results will be from within the last 24 months, with less than a million views. Scrolling down reveals older tutorials of over a million, to nearly two million views, dated between seven and nine years ago.

Users can further filter their searches based on duration, certain video features (resolution, VR, location-based videos, subtitles, livestreams), type (video, playlist, channel, film), upload date, view count, and rating. But using the default settings brings you what YouTube considers the most relevant content.

So how do you improve the relevance and ranking potential of your content? Let’s go over a few ideas.

Keep An Eye on Your Metrics

The first and most important tool to use is your own YouTube analytics. Hop onto your own channel studio and head on down to the Analytics tab to reveal a whole slew of information.

You can get an overview of your channel, which provides you with your subscriber count and recent views, as well as overall watch time over time.

YouTube Analytics Reach

Your reach explains how many impressions you content gets (i.e. how often YouTube shows it to users), and what your click through rate is (the rate at which your content is actually clicked on after being shown to a user).

These stats are critical. They are a good metric of how eye-catching your thumbnails and titles are and can be a metric of how relevant your content is to the searches that it is being ranked for. For example, by tightening up your titles, tags, and keywords, you can push YouTube to focus on providing your content to users who are much more likely to be interested in it, and greatly improve your impressions click-through rate.

YouTube Analytics Engagement

Your engagement takes your total watch time (in hours over the last few days), as well as your average view duration. The latter helps you identify if the content you’re producing is being viewed.

Most people don’t finish the videos they start watching on YouTube, and it’s generally rare to have content where people get all the way to the end. But if the majority of people coming to your content are clicking away after a few seconds, that may be a red flag for how you’re targeting viewers. Furthermore, this metric might help you understand what the ideal watch time (and video time) is for your audience.

YouTube Analytics Audience

Finally, the audience tab helps you distinguish returning from unique viewers, and track your channel’s growth and capacity to hold onto an audience. If you see your returning viewers plummet drastically, it’s clear that the content you’ve been producing lately is veering away from what people are interested in.

On the other hand, if that nets you more unique viewers who then turn into a greater number of returning viewers, then it might have been a good idea to shift towards a different niche or angle. Other useful statistics provided by the audience tab include peak user viewing hours (the time period during which most of your viewers are online), your top geographies, viewer age and gender, and other videos and channels they tend to watch.

These are very important data points. The first few hours of a video’s life matter immensely for YouTube, and the better your video does right out the gate, the longer YouTube will recommend it and pass it around.

Encourage Viewers to Subscribe, Like, and Turn on Notifications

While it’s a tad bit annoying, there’s plenty of data to suggest that even just mentioning the like and subscribe buttons helps remind viewers to like a video they actually do like and subscribe to a channel they may have been binging without subscribing.

People do forget to click those buttons and reminding your audience to do so is a small but effective optimization hack to retain an audience, and help YouTube understand that your content is interesting to people. Of course, turning it into a tasteful call-to-action rather than an obnoxious ad helps a lot.

Follow the Trend

Now that you know the basics about navigating YouTube Analytics, let’s take a look at a number of other tools that can help you optimize your video content, starting with keyword and trend research:

YouTube autocomplete – Stumped on what to cover next? Use YouTube’s own autocomplete to figure out the current trend for your niche or channel focus.

Keywords Everywhere – This is a useful browser extension that serves as a keyword research tool by letting you find effective long-tail phrases for your niche.

Doing Adjacent Keyword Research

In addition to researching seed keywords or search terms, you can figure out adjacent keywords through these useful tools:

Keyword Planner – Google Keyword Planner is another effective way to figure out related topics and search terms.

AnswerThePublic – input a certain keyword or phrase to discover a whole network of related terms and adjacent search phrases, or search questions.

Pick the Right Tags

YouTube tags help YouTube’s search engine better sort content and figure out what users might be interested in, outside of other metrics of quality, authority, and relevance. While not as weighty as your overall audience retention and other trends, tags can still help out. These tools help you identify and generate tags for your content:

vidIQ – Provides a slew of growth tools for channels, including tag generation.

RapidTags – A powerful tag generator, among other useful functions.

YouTube Tags – This browser extension helps you view the tags on any video, useful for competition research.

Most of the effort behind making successful video content like that goes into the production, the script, the direction of the video. But a good portion also relies on proper optimization.

If you’re having trouble getting your YouTube content off the floor, some of these tools might help you a lot. Working with the right professionals, of course, will bring you the best results. Give us a call to find out how we can help you grow your YouTube channel, and turn it into a major boon for your business.

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Social Media

How To Use Instagram Carousels to Drive Engagement

Instagram carousels are not a new feature, and were first introduced to Instagram in 2017. So why bring them up now? They’ve regained relevance in 2022 because of engagement trends, signaling a change in how users on Instagram are behaving and consuming content.

While the rule of social media marketing is often that content is king, we have to remember that a king cannot rule without his advisors, chief among them being data. And data shows that Instagram carousels are currently netting greater engagement in terms of clicks, comments, likes, and saves alike.

If you have been diligently using social media to market your business online, then leveraging the potential for growth through carousel ads and carousel posts should definitely be on your to-do list for early 2022. Here are a few important tips and pointers.

What are Instagram Carousels?

Instagram carousels are album posts that contain as many as ten different slides or cards, either one of which can be an image or a video.

Instagram has been letting people upload video and image posts in album form for years now, and it seems the data is showing that carousel posts are becoming one of the best ways to drive up engagement around your brand on the app.

Some key statistics account managers and marketers should know: profiles with less than 10,000 followers have the best engagement when posting more carousels, while the best performing medium for accounts between 10,000 and 100,000 followers was video.

But for accounts larger than that, at 100,000 and more, things switched back over to favoring carousel engagement – with an average engagement of 1.40 percent, versus about 1.1 percent on image and video posts.

In other words: carousel posts benefit the smallest and largest accounts the most.

When posting an Instagram carousel of your own, here are a couple important limitations to keep in mind for feeds:

  • Video cards can be up to 120 seconds in duration.
  • Each card has a maximum file size limit of 30 MB.
  • The uploaded image should be JPG or PNG.
  • Carousel posts can be anywhere from 2 to 10 cards.
  • The aspect ratio for each card should be 1:1.
  • Ideal resolution for image cards is 1080 x 1080 or higher.
  • Text density matters. More than 20 percent text may lead to reduced ad delivery to customers.
  • Maximum text length is 2200 characters.

On the other hand, here are important considerations when setting up your carousel posts for stories:

  • The aspect ratio of your post should be 9:16 (vertical), 16:9 (horizontal), or 4:5.
  • Image and video resolution should be at least 1080 x 1920.
  • Video cards can be up to 15 seconds in duration.

Why You Should Bother with Instagram Carousels

The main reason carousel posts are more interesting for Instagram profiles moving into 2022 is that they bring in more impressions, more likes, more comments, and are more likely to be saved than other posts, especially if you use all ten cards or slides.

Even for accounts with anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 followers, carousel posts were still more competitive than normal image posts at an average of 2.01 percent impressions versus 1.76 percent.

And even more importantly, carousel posts average the highest engagement per impression regardless of profile size. This means that no matter how large or small your profile is, you have the best chance of generating a conversation with your followers through a carousel post.

Being on Instagram at all is crucial at a time like this. Social media is just one avenue into building a better online customer base, which current times have taught us is important.

But Instagram is gearing up to become much more than just a place for people to share pictures and videos from their family vacations. Instagram is gearing up to enable platform-wide ecommerce through small and large online retailers alike, and further empower advertisers to promote and sell their products on the app.

Building your profile in 2022 means laying the foundation for a stronger customer base as Instagram grows into a marketplace of its own.

Get the Basics Right

At the end of the day, creating a good Instagram post to promote your brand is still a matter of understanding and mastering the fundamentals – even if they’re spread across ten cards.

That means writing good copy, making sure it’s clean and proofread, finding a readable font and size to work with, following the ad specs, and keeping things short and sweet. This is before we get to the actual design and content of the post itself – which, of course, is just as crucial.

A good carousel post is one that not only stays true to the fundamentals of good design and readability but introduces flow while maintaining uniqueness per slide.

One update Instagram made to their carousel feature was that if a user scrolled past one slide on your carousel post or ad without engaging with it, the next time it would show up on their feed they would see another slide.

This would increase your chance of making an impact on users – and helps explain why carousel posts have a much higher engagement average than other types of posts. Unlike single images and video, a carousel posts nets you as many as ten different opportunities to make a new first impression on the same user, with the same post.

But that means you can’t have any given post looking completely nonsensical out of context. The art in creating a good carousel post is that you need a flow of posts that make sense individually, but still encourage readers or viewers to slide through the cards and get to the call of action. Here are a few great examples.

Let Your Content Breathe

It’s important not to try and see this as an opportunity to cram more information into a brand-new format – instead, see the expanded format as an opportunity for the same amount of information to be presented in a better, more entertaining, more interesting way.

It’s very easy to lose your readers if you cram too much into your carousel post.

Carousel posts have been around for a while, but Instagram’s changes to the way they’re presented, as well as increased potential for long-term growth and results means that you should be leveraging them this year to make the most of your profile.

Let us help you spruce up your Instagram account, and get your brand the kind of online representation it deserves.

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Facebook Rebrands: Tech Giant Is Now “Meta”

When Facebook first launched in 2004, no one had any idea of the scope it would have just a decade later, or the way it would participate in a societal shift towards digital platforms and new social technologies.

In an effort to preempt future technologies this time, and build on the impact of the platform, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a rebranding and change in his company’s vision.

That new brand is Meta, and its vision is to create a whole new virtual reality (VR)-based social experience called the metaverse. Zuckerberg’s founder’s letter, published in late October of this year, goes into further detail on what that means.

Why Meta? What is the Metaverse?

Speculation and metacommentary aside, taken at face value, Facebook’s rebranding is part of a completely new direction for the company, but one that still remains true to what it’s been focused on over the years – social networking, and the ability to connect and remain connected through the Internet. Except rather than relying on the interface of an app or website, and the medium of a screen, Meta’s metaverse will be utilizing virtual reality.

With the news being so new, there are very few concrete details on what the metaverse will look like, or what it intends to consist of.

What we have are a few details from Zuckerberg on his vision for the project, including his hope that “within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.” Meta states that it seeks to invest $10 billion over the next year alone to further develop the technologies needed to build the metaverse.

This tells us two things: First, Meta is extremely invested in this. The financial commitment is immense, and with it comes a massive manpower commitment as well.

Secondly, Meta intends for the metaverse to be as ubiquitous as Facebook is now. It’s more than a potential new avenue for games. As Zuckerberg claims: “You will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up.”

Virtual reality is far from a new venture for Facebook. The Facebook company purchased VR company Oculus VR in March 2014, for $2 billion, seeing the creation and commercial release of the Oculus Rift and Rift S, following several development kits, and associated software (the Oculus Home and Oculus Store). Oculus’s VR technology has seen applications in gaming, sports, television, education, and media since its purchase by Facebook.

The investment in VR was more than just a way for Facebook to diversify.

Facebook and VR

John Carmack, who was behind much of the technical development of Oculus’ VR technology and joined the company after spending decades programming revolutionary game engines for id Software, spoke up about Oculus VR’s acquisition under Facebook as a sign that the company “get[s] the big picture as I see it, and will be a powerful force towards making it happen. You don’t make a commitment like they just did on a whim.”

However, he has been bullish on the actual creation of the metaverse since before the acquisition of Oculus. “I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse,” he stated at his Facebook Connect keynote following the announcement by Zuckerberg.

“The most obvious path to the metaverse is that you have one single universal app, something like Roblox. I doubt a single application will get to that level of taking over everything.” Roblox is an online game platform marketed as the “ultimate virtual universe”, first released in 2004, with an average of over 224 million monthly players.

His arguments against the intentional creation of a metaverse under Meta’s new direction is that its walled-garden nature would make it too vulnerable to collapse under the weight of individual bad decisions by the application’s managers and executives.

“But here we are,” Carmack ultimately stated. “Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning, and resources are flowing and the effort is definitely going to be made.”

But not all of what he said was sceptical. Concurrent to the announcement, Meta also marketed its VR products Horizon Workrooms and Horizon Worlds, both of which attempt to provide context for what something like the metaverse might look like, on the smaller scale of workspaces and public media events, respectively. With respect to products like that, and the technology associated with them, Carmack stated that: “interacting with other avatars in Workrooms, in particular, can be much more enjoyable than staring at a wall of Zoom faces”.

But these are ultimately small-scale applications with up to 16 other people, versus the envisioned application of VR as a virtual world, where live events with thousands of concurrent users would be possible.

“Everybody that wants to work on the metaverse talks about the limitless possibilities of it,” Carmack said. “But it’s not limitless. It is a challenge to fit things in, but you can make smarter decisions about exactly what is important and then really optimize the heck out of things.”

What Does This Mean for Facebook?

There’s a lot of work left between the proof-of-concept VR technology Oculus and Meta have provided, and the vision Mark Zuckerberg presented this year. But $10 billion is no small investment, and Rome wasn’t built in a day.

If the metaverse, as it’s envisioned, is the next step in social networking, then we might be looking at a literal new plane of reality for in-person events, content creation, large-scale gatherings and small private meetings alike.

On other concrete notes, Meta will start trading under the stock ticker MVRS on December 1, 2021, and Meta intends to report on two new operating segments related to the metaverse in the fourth quarter of 2021, titled Family of Apps and Reality Labs.

Does This Affect Me?

If you’re a marketer for a major global brand, then it might affect you sooner rather than later. Zuckerberg has already alluded to new opportunities for companies interested in digital goods, and as we’ve mentioned, the metaverse will undoubtedly become a new “frontier for advertising”.

But smaller companies shouldn’t write this off as a billionaire’s pipedream, or an elaborate attempt at sweeping headlines related to recent whistleblowing revelations under the rug. If the metaverse is indeed coming to a VR headset near you, it’s sure to present more than a few interesting challenges and opportunities to engage with audiences in a way that’s never been done before.

Was this a good move? Who knows. Scepticism and backlash are certainly at an all-time high, and Meta isn’t exactly the best rebrand we’ve ever seen (far from it). But only time will tell.

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Social Media

Facebook’s New Tools for Businesses

Facebook’s new tools for businesses signal an exciting development for entrepreneurs leveraging the platform. Facebook’s new tools for businesses aim to enhance customer-business interactions, improve lead generation, and expand audience reach, particularly benefiting small businesses. They offer greater convenience for customers and provide businesses the ability to rapidly respond to feedback, adapt services, and initiate promotions, taking business communications and engagement to a new level.

It’s an exciting time for business owners on Facebook. If your boutique or brand has taken off at least partially due to your Facebook page, then you may have noticed that there’s a lot to benefit from in Facebook’s ability to foster customer interactions and provide a place for constant and immediate feedback, especially for small businesses that can routinely and effectively monitor comments and posts on their page, and respond immediately with statements, status updates, and even actual product changes and service additions, or promotions.

With Facebook’s new tools for businesses, Facebook intends to help businesses take things to a whole new level via a slew of upcoming new and overhauled business communications tools, which seek to improve on customer-business relations, help with lead generation, help small businesses reach out to larger audiences, provide greater customer convenience, and a lot more. Let’s take a closer look.

A General Overview of What’s Coming

It’s no secret that Facebook is and always has been in the business of sales. With the ability to interface with customers directly and utilize their information to personalize your sales approach like never before, Facebook aims to bring people and businesses closer together.

The added caveat is that they’re now trying to do so while providing people with an expanded range of options to control how their personal information is being used.

But that doesn’t mean the company aims to take away the personalization aspect in sales and marketing. Instead of shifting the focus entirely onto personalized ads, Facebook claims to be ushering in personalized experiences. This means improving the communication tools between customers and businesses.

Improving Customer-to-Business Communications

If customer choice is the big talking point, why not give customers more choices? Or, more specifically, why not give them the opportunity to choose to talk to businesses the same way they might talk to friends and family?

Effectively bringing individual interactions between customers and small business owners back to the same level they once were between shopkeepers and locals – but through the Internet. At least, that’s the vision Facebook is presenting with its proposed changes to customer-to-business communication on its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp.

The first step is to give businesses the option to provide a click-to-message button on their ads, directly connecting prospective customers with the business through Instagram Direct, WhatsApp, and Messenger. No need to first head to the company’s page and click their way through to the contacts – customers could now immediately ask the questions that pop up the moment they lay eyes on an ad.

Cross-Platform Chat Integration

A lot of businesses thrive on the publicity they can get through Instagram, and the functionality and ease of messaging on WhatsApp.

Facebook is trying to bridge any and all gaps between its apps for businesses, making it easier for them to facilitate customer communications and small business marketing efforts – by letting prospective customers immediately start a WhatsApp chat through the Instagram profile of any business they visit.

You might be interested in: How to Supercharge Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Facebook’s New Tools for Businesses Improve Customer Acquisition

It takes a lot of time out of a business owner’s day to communicate with a client before finally being able to put together a quote for them. They can’t risk asking multiple questions at once, because one of them might be ignored or forgotten.

By implementing a customized 4-5 item questionnaire, certain service providers and businesses can get the information they need from prospective clients before the conversation even starts, and immediately give them a relevant quote to start things off.

Aside from quote requests, Facebook has also been testing lead generation through Messenger and is planning to expand on this idea via personalized ads.

Video and Audio Calls for Businesses on Messenger

Through the existing Business Inbox feature on Messenger, businesses on Facebook can now start video and audio calls with customers who prefer a more personal or in-depth sales pitch, or want to communicate with a representative face-to-face.

Audio Rooms for Businesses

Live Audio Rooms were a feature Facebook implemented for public figures, pages, and live streamers as a way to earn or raise money for a cause. New features are being added to help businesses utilize live rooms as a way to gain new customers, for example via product showcases, live reveals, tips and tutorials, and so on.

Expanding the Appointments Feature

Previously only available in select regions, Facebook’s Appointments feature is also going global. It’s exactly as described – a way for businesses to book and manage client appointments more easily.

Updating the Facebook Business Suite

Updates to the Facebook Business Suite will include managing business communications through Messenger, Instagram, and the Inbox, and send emails via the Suite. A proprietary File Manager is being added to help businesses manage content creation for their Facebook pages, engage in A B testing, and more.

Separating Business and Pleasure

After lots of feedback, Facebook is also officially going to provide business owners with the ability to create Work Accounts that allow them to have an individual presence on the platform without merging that presence with their private accounts.

More specifically, it allows managers and executives to control and operate the Facebook Business Manager without requiring a personal account to begin with. According to the platform, this feature is still being worked on with limited businesses and may debut at a larger capacity next year.

Expanding Facebook Business Explore

Facebook Business Explore is a new feature the company launched to help smaller businesses get discovered more easily, by providing customers with the ability to choose interests and get recommended a variety of different businesses based on what interests them, with a focus on local businesses and creators. The feature is now going global.

Most of Facebook’s new tools for businesses revolve around providing both businesses and customers with more opportunities to inquire about items, directly contact businesses via their ads, make it easier to communicate directly with sales representatives and business owners via video, and provide an array of greater options on the business side of things for companies managing their content on Facebook through the Facebook Business Suite.

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Social Media

How To Get Verified on Facebook

There are a few key takeaways for this post, namely:

  • Getting verified can help you distinguish yourself or your brand from the rest of the competition.
  • Getting verified is crucial to combat fake accounts and impostors.
  • The information you use to get verified needs to be up to date.
  • Use as many of your other online profiles as possible to make the case that your account is worth verifying.
  • Provide as many relevant details as you can for your page or professional profile.

Facebook’s verification process isn’t overly complicated, but it might take a few tries to finally get that checkmark. However, you might be asking yourself why you’d even want it to begin with – or what it means to be verified, in the first place.

What Does Getting Verified on Facebook Mean?

If you’ve ever visited a profile or page on Facebook with a blue checkmark, then you’ve seen a verified account. Verified pages or people are entities on Facebook that have had their identities and legitimacy verified by the staff on the platform. Blue checkmarks are usually used to represent and verify public figures and brands.

Why would anyone want this? To begin with, verification provides additional authenticity to your page or profile.

Authenticity on the Internet is becoming increasingly important, not just for the sake of SEO, but for long-term reputation goals, and as a marker of quality.

Oversaturation is becoming a growing issue in industries and niches all over the web, and factors that help set you apart from the competition – even when it’s something as simple as a checkmark – can be a huge boon, not just today, but in the long term too.

But while we’re on the subject of SEO, it bears mentioning that being verified does improve your search rankings – but not on Google. Facebook will be more likely to recommend you in searches, and greatly improve the reach of your page or brand after receiving a little checkmark.

What Are The Requirements to Get Verified on Facebook?

There are a few simple requirements for getting verified. Most of these are relatively concrete, with just one variable being a little vague. Let’s get to that in a minute. The other variables are:

  • Being the right representative of the company or brand you’re trying to get verified. Fans can’t make verified pages for celebrities, and in the same way, no one can set up a verified page for your company or yourself without access to the information that helps Facebook ensure that you’re the real deal.
  • Running only one account or page on Facebook for your business or page. There can be a few exceptions – such as having multiple different pages for multiple different regions, or languages.
  • Filling out crucial details on your page or profile correctly. Facebook isn’t likely to verify an account or individual that has barely set up their page, with little to no content, and little to nothing in the About section. Include a website, phone number, business address, and an informative bio.
  • Content quality and content quantity. Facebook is less likely to verify a page with low-effort content, low-resolution and low-quality images, infrequent posts, and poor engagement. They want a frequent posting schedule that engages users, with high-effort, high-quality content and, if possible, media coverage.

The final, and least concrete variable is notability.

We’re not sure where the breakpoint is, and it might depend on other factors such as the industry or niche your company or brand is catering to, and your business’ existing reputation and outside media presence. However, there seem to be certain metrics that Facebook requires pages and accounts to meet before they can get their checkmark.

Begin the Process of Getting Verified on Facebook

Note that you will be asked to provide an existing page to verify during this process, so it won’t work if you’re trying to get a verification checkmark for a brand or business that isn’t already represented on Facebook.

So, as reiterated earlier, put time and effort into your page or profile. Fill it out to the best of your abilities, upload some content, and get some engagement.

The verification process itself is not too complicated. Facebook has its own online form to get you started. In fact, this is the only way to start the verification process. As you work your way through the form, you will need to:

  • Clarify whether you’re verifying a page or a profile.
  • Confirm authenticity through a:
    • Driver’s license
    • Tax report
    • Passport
    • National identification card
    • Recent utility bill
    • Articles of incorporation
  • Confirm your notability by providing a description of your target audience, your country or region, the category your business, figure, or brand best fits, as well as up to 5 links to articles, social media accounts, and other indicators of notability.

Shortly after sending the form in, you will have to wait for Facebook’s response. They will usually continue the process by asking a few questions to confirm the authenticity of your request.

Certain pages may have different requirements. Facebook may request additional paperwork or authentication material if you are a representative of a large firm or corporation, are representing a public political figure, or a major celebrity. The larger and more important you are, the longer it will take Facebook to verify you. They do intend to be thorough.

What If You’re Rejected?

It’s possible that, upon review, Facebook will simply deny the request to get verified. That doesn’t mean you should stop trying. Facebook disallows pages and profiles from being considered for verification more than once every 30 days, so you will have to wait a month before trying again.

Use that time to improve on your page or profile. Most verification processes fail because Facebook might not feel that you meet the criteria of notability. If you aren’t sure why your request was denied, you can contact the Facebook Support Team for more information. They may be able to help point you in the right direction for your next attempt. Remember that improving your presence and following on other social media platforms will also improve your chances of getting verified.

For more info and tips on making the most of Facebook for Businesses, give us a call.

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Social Media

Instagram Expands with Reels

If you were asked “what is Instagram?” and opened with the answer “it’s a photo sharing app”, you’d be forgiven for making a false assumption – or at least, one that the company is hoping to prove wrong in the near future.

Opening with new features such as Instagram Shopping, and now the newly updated Reels function, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri has announced and gone further into detail on the app’s ongoing and continued expansions, as it plans to diversify in the fields of social media.

Currently, Mosseri identified four key strategies in Instagram’s continued development. Note the highlighted keywords. They are:

  • Supporting creators through new monetization options.
  • Shifting gears towards focusing on video content, with expansions to the aforementioned Reels feature.
  • Expanding Instagram shopping to take advantage of the recent surge in e-commerce.
  • Finally, expanding into messaging. Mosseri’s video post on Twitter explains that more and more people have been using Instagram to communicate, and that in-app communication has been shifting steadily towards direct messages.

No Longer a Photo Sharing App

Changes to Instagram Reels, and Instagram video content, are planned to be much more than yet another feature. Perhaps in part to shift away from the criticism that Instagram might be trying to ape on potential competitors like YouTube or TikTok, and Vine in the past, it is instead part of a general change in direction for the app, towards leaning in on video. In other words, this isn’t a toe-in-the-water gimmick – it’s supposed to be the company’s new direction.

To be more specific, Instagram is banking on making entertainment – both as a provider and a source of revenue for entertainers – its main feature. After all, that’s what most users use the app for, according to their own research.

To support that, Instagram has recently started rolling out ads on Reels posts worldwide. Reels ads are full-screen and vertical and will be toggled in between Reels posts as viewers spend time watching through their feed. The ads can be up to 30 seconds in total length, and can be interacted with through likes, comments, and even a sharing function.

According to the company’s own blog post, these ads will: “help businesses reach greater audiences, allowing people to discover inspiring new content from brands and creators.”

Or, to put it more concretely, they’re coinciding with the release of updated recommendation features on Instagram, designed to help content creators reach wider audiences, improve user experience by bringing them closer to content they might find interesting, and helping advertisers by bringing more views to their ads. A win, win, win, on paper.

Wait, What Is Reels?

Reels is a feature Instagram rolled out nearly a year ago, in August 2020. At the time, it seemed like an attempt to stop TikTok in its tracks – or at least, that’s what the app was lampooned for.

Reels are 15-second multi-clip videos you can record and edit with Instagram’s own in-app sounds, filters, effects, and more. Reels are featured on your followers’ feeds, and you can make them available throughout the app if you’re posting from a public account, via the Explore tab. Since its release, Reels editing functions included:

  • Additional audio from Instagram’s own music library, and your own recorded sounds.
  • Augmented Reality effects, both user-created and from Instagram.
  • Speed up and slow-mo functions.
  • And more

While Reels hasn’t taken off quite as well as its other video sharing competitors, it still has a few impressive accolades, including over 22 percent more engagement versus a regular Instagram post or story in the case of the NBA.

Currently, Instagram is testing a new Reels collab function in India.

Should I Invest More Time Advertising on Instagram?

While the announcement that Instagram will continue to push to support content creators and enable simpler in-app relationships between them and advertisers is exciting, Instagram has always been an effective platform to garner engagement, provided you hit the mark with your niche and content.

Furthermore, almost everyone on the app – an overwhelming 90 percent – follow at least one business, whether it’s Victoria’s Secret or a local coffee shop. Companies know and continue to leverage Instagram as a research tool when looking for B2B partners on products and services – over a third of surveyed B2B decision-makers cited Instagram as a deciding research tool.

In other words, given the audience and the numbers, it’s a good idea to market your products and services on the Gram. You just need the right strategy.

So, What’s the Future of the App?

There’s a lot to read up on Instagram’s business strategies and future plans, but only the people actually making the sausage knows what goes into it.

We’ve already gotten hints that Instagram is planning to bank more heavily on a content creator system, with monetization strategies centered around improved recommendations for users for both content and ads.

We also know that the company is going to continue developing Instagram Shopping, potentially rolling out tested features such as the new AR try-on feature for beauty products in other industries, such as fashion.

And finally, we’ve heard about Instagram’s future as a video platform, or truer to their words, an entertainment platform that is currently prioritizing video.

Advertisers may want to keep an eye on the potential for Reels ads and how best to implement them, as well as watch as Instagram continues to work on its content creator system, which aims to supplant the ongoing behind-the-scenes influencer system where larger accounts get scouted and paid off-app to promote products.

Naturally, Instagram wants its cut – while also enabling everyone else to produce better content, form better partnerships, and provide a better use experience.

At the end of the day, we will just have to wait and see how these plans with pan out. Right now, Instagram remains one of the largest social networks in the world, with well over a billion users.

Tapping into that user base with fresh and original content continues to be a viable marketing strategy. With Reels ads and future monetization options, Instagram aims to make it even easier to appeal to the users it sends your way.

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Social Media

Updates To YouTube Analytics

Growing a successful channel on the world’s largest video platform is not an easy feat, and YouTube’s relatively limited analytics features haven’t made it any easier. Some channels seem to explode in popularity overnight, while others languish for years – even with consistent uploads.

There are many unknown variables regarding how YouTube recommends and promotes content, and new features – from community posts and membership details to the recent rollout of YouTube Shorts – often aren’t sufficiently explained to new content creators.

Thankfully, five new YouTube analytics updates aim to address some of these issues and help give creators a better idea of what direction to take their content in. These five new updates include tools to gauge engagement on some of YouTube’s more recent additions to the platform (including membership and community posts), as well as make it easier for content creators to access and review analytics data on the go.

More Membership Insights and Analytics

YouTube first introduced channel membership in mid-2018, but there haven’t been many ways to track channel membership statistics or get in-depth information on how a channel could best grow its membership numbers.

Now, YouTube content creators will be able to review multiple different metrics to get a better idea of how their viewer membership numbers grow with time.

Aside from total members, YouTube analytics will also track which videos attract the most members, how an upload impacts a channel’s membership numbers, as well as analytics data to help determine whether it’s better to remind viewers about the perks of membership, or whether doing so will detract from membership growth.

Some content creators are anxious about reminding their audience to become members because they don’t want to annoy or upset them. Now they can have actionable data to see whether doing so in a video makes a difference one way or the other.

Content creators will also be able to see their daily changes and check out their number of total members, active members, and canceling members. Note that YouTube channel members are paying supporters, who unlock several channel-related perks (emojis, early videos, badges, and other members-only perks) at the cost of a small monthly subscription fee. A channel member is not the same thing as a channel subscriber, who subscribes to and enjoys the channel’s content for free.

More Data for Mobile Analytics Users

There isn’t much of a point in accessing and reviewing your analytics data on mobile devices when you’re only getting half of the picture. Recognizing this, YouTube added two features to the mobile YouTube analytics interface that were previously only accessible on desktop versions. These are the ability to review what other channels your audience watches, and what other videos your audience watches.

Both of these metrics serve to help content creators get a better handle on what sort of content interests their viewers and better identify how they can target and grow their viewer base – or, potentially, expand into a wholly different direction.

Content creators can currently view up to 15 different channels and videos commonly viewed by their audience, on mobile. Each of these can be tapped, automatically forwarding you to the YouTube app on your phone, so you can watch what your audience watches right away.

More Explanation for Video Performance Metrics

YouTube isn’t adding new metrics for video performance but is expanding its explanation on existing video performance metrics, so content creators have a better idea of where this data is coming from, what it represents, and how it should be interpreted.

For example – YouTube will now explain that you’ve been getting more views than before through YouTube’s recommendations system and that more (or fewer) of your regular viewers have been watching this video than your other videos, allowing you to test new thumbnails.

This can help make YouTube Studios’ analytics a little more intuitive to new users, and help experienced content creators get a refresher on their video performance metrics, and how they should use them to improve on their content.

More Transparency in Revenue and Regional Monetization Rates

YouTube will be providing more information on a channel’s revenue, as well as how viewership changes might affect that revenue, particularly with respect towards viewer regions.

CPM rates (cost per mille, or thousand viewers) differ from region to region, based on where advertisers put their money. This means some regions are more financially enticing to target than others.

The new analytic changes into a channel’s monetization and revenue are meant to help content creators learn more about where their viewers are coming from, and how their revenue is calculated. This is helpful when targeting specific regions.

More Engagement Metrics for Community Content

Community posts are also a relatively new addition to YouTube, and are available to all content creators with over 1,000 total subscribers, one week after passing the 1,000 subscriber benchmark. Community posts can be shared in the form of polls, captioned images, and texts, and are usually used to share upcoming channel events, announce upcoming content, tease new content, get audience feedback (in the form of polls), and generally engage with the audience.

But the problem is that community posts didn’t previously feature much in the way of actionable data. YouTube has changed that with more engagement metrics, letting content creators review how their post has been doing over the last four weeks in terms of views, votes (on polls), and likes.

YouTube is aiming to make it easier than ever to get started on the platform – and a lot of these changes are also aimed at helping new content creators grow at a faster pace, by identifying what works and what doesn’t from day one. YouTube also seems to be paying more attention to mobile content creators, with the introduction and promotion of YouTube Shorts, and the expansion of YouTube’s analytic features on mobile.

Video content is becoming more important year after year, and it can be an indispensable tool for gaining traffic and leads, especially in a competitive market. Wondering if these changes are relevant to your channel? Not sure where to start growing your video content? Get in touch with us to learn more.

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Social Media

Instagram Announces Plan to Develop Influencer Marketplace

Instagram has seen a surge in daily use because of the pandemic, along with the rest of the social media landscape. It has also affected the dynamic and culture of Instagram influencers – and the rise of influence activism and community outreach through social media.

Many of these brand-influencer relationships were formed through platforms like Instagram, as they have for years – but never quite at the volume seen during the pandemic.

In response to this, and to address a slew of other issues surrounding the widespread use of social media to scout and create brand-influencer relationships, Facebook has announced the development of a new influencer marketplace in place of its recent Instagram Shopping feature.

Why is Instagram Announcing This Now?

Facebook has previously stated that they have refrained from implementing any tools designed to improve brand-influencer interaction to keep the app from becoming too commercial.

But it seems that the last few months have changed their mind. The fact is that many have turned to Instagram to support themselves throughout the pandemic or grow their very own brand.

The growth of the brand-influencer dynamic has exploded throughout the last year, and its purely informal presence has paved the way for some serious concerns about equity and exploitation.

This move on Facebook’s part is largely designed to bring transparency to the whole ecosystem and facilitate the exchange of gigs and money between brands and influencers in a way that would allow for a more seamless experience.

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, creators “should be able to get a cut of the sales of things that they’re recommending, and we should build up an affiliate recommendation marketplace to enable that to all happen.” Furthermore, Instagram wants to develop a “branded content marketplace” to match influencers with brands.

Depending on how the matchmaking feature and marketplace will be implemented, it’s plain to see that Facebook would also benefit from a potentially larger share of the pie.

Zuckerberg did note that the plan is to offer “very favorable terms” to content creators and that they’re “not building this from the perspective of us trying to make a lot of money”.

“Branded content is the economic engine behind the creator ecosystem,” said Instagram head Adam Mosseri in an Instagram Live in late April. “Matchmaking is something we can add a lot of value for.”

Other efforts Facebook has previously mentioned and is considering implementing on the app include a tipping system, video and content monetization, and other means of making money through the app.

Rather than shy away from the idea of a commercial Instagram, it seems that Facebook is interested in further exploring the app’s potential for both businesses and personal brands/entrepreneurs. Keeping things informal, Facebook has said, has led to an opaque system where the prices paid for the same kind of posts vary greatly.

What a New Marketplace Means for Businesses and Influencers

So far, all the information Facebook has been willing to divulge has been pointing towards a greater suite of tools to help content creators monetize their work while making it easier for businesses to connect with professionals who would best represent their brand through a proprietary matchmaking system.

But the details of how this affiliate system might be implemented, how matchmaking will work, or how businesses might compensate influencers (aside from an affiliate system) are up in the air.

Assuming the model will work similarly to Instagram’s shopping platform, monetization is likely to be implemented over the app itself, and new Terms of Service from Instagram might specify and disallow brands from paying incentives to creators under the table.

But with no explicit details, it’s important to note that most of this will remain speculative until Instagram makes another announcement for their new influencer marketplace.

A Widespread but Opaque Business Practice

One of the primary motivators Mosseri mentioned during the live reveal was the need to solve Instagram’s problem of having an “opaque system”, where influencers vie for a chance to represent a brand in hopes of building a long-lasting and profitable relationship, even if the first few paychecks are less than promising or take on the form of intangible “exposure”, with no context of how other influencers are being compensated for the same kind of work and effort.

While Instagram has been the cradle for many a highly publicized influencer success story, being an influencer is a risky and difficult proposition in a completely unregulated creator ecosystem, best described as a “winner-take-all economy,” as stated by Brooke Erin Duffy, associate professor of communication at Cornell University. “The lack of regulation amplifies these imbalances” between so-called “idealized influencers” and “aspiring influencers”.

A marketplace may help aspiring influencers earn enough to continue to develop their talents while encouraging more content creators to consider Instagram as a platform with similar potential to YouTube or Twitch as a means to connect with brands, develop and nurture audiences, and monetize one’s entertainment talent.

That earlier point – about mirroring YouTube’s business model for creators – is yet another motivator behind Facebook’s embrace of a more commercial Instagram. With TikTok and YouTube vying for supremacy on video content, Instagram is seeking ways to edge out its competitors – or at least keep up with them.

Watch Out for New Developments

We’re sure to hear more from Facebook and Instagram as development on their marketplace continues. More information will be needed to gauge how this change might affect businesses that rely on influencers to build their audience.

In general, this change will help smaller influencers get noticed and matched to respective local as well as global brands and make money through Instagram. It will also incentivize spending as much time on the app as possible – as influencers will no longer have to link to outgoing shops and platforms and can instead both promote and sell products through the app itself.

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Social Media

Facebook Confirms: Instagram For Kids Is Coming

According to an internal post obtained by BuzzFeed News and a statement from Mark Zuckerberg given at a Congressional hearing earlier in March, Facebook is currently prioritizing the development of an Instagram for Kids, specifically targeting audiences below the age of 13.

Instagram’s vice president of product, Vishal Shah, wrote to employees on the company message board in early March, stating: “I’m excited to announce that going forward, we have identified youth work as a priority for Instagram and have added it to our H1 priority list.”

As of right now, Instagram does not allow individuals under the age of 13 to use the service. However, the protections put in place to prevent younger teens and children from joining the app are not very strong.

Some speculate that the decision to create a new app specifically for younger audiences comes in part from an interest in protecting existing younger users from the negative influences of the social media app, ranging from increased potential for self-harm, body dysmorphia, and cyberbullying, to exposure to conspiracy content and extremism.

Instagram for Kids is On the Way

One way or the other, Facebook has confirmed that Instagram for Kids (not the official name) is in the works. But it has also stated that the development of the product is very much in its early stages, meaning we know little of what to expect form Facebook in terms of additional protections, privacy, service costs, monetization techniques, and advertising.

What we do know is that the internal memo identifies two specific priority missions of the company: “(a) accelerating our integrity and privacy work to ensure the safest possible experience for teens and (b) building a version of Instagram that allows people under the age or 13 to safely use Instagram for the first time.”

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s intentions for an Instagram for Kids center around working out issues that the current app has with underage audiences.

“There were clearly issues that need to be thought through and worked out, including how parents can control the experience of kids, especially kids under the age of 13,” Zuckerberg explained at the hearing. “And we haven’t worked through all of that yet.”

The US government is concerned about Facebook’s apparent lack of transparency towards crucial information such as how many of Instagram’s users are estimated to be under the age of 13, especially given the company’s track record regarding privacy and conspiratorial content, as well as cyberbullying.

During her opening statement in the virtual meeting, Republican Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers asked: “What will it take for your business models to stop harming children?” Perhaps this app is one of Facebook’s answers to that question.

Justified Worries and Concerns

An estimated 95 percent of teenagers have access to a smartphone, with the overwhelming majority of them logging the most hours on Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. In 2018, nearly half of all surveyed teens stated that they were online “almost constantly”.

That number has assuredly risen since the pandemic, at a time where teens have been all but encouraged to lead their social lives almost wholly through digital means. But all that connectivity comes at a steep price, according to various studies.

While only a quarter of teens in 2018 found that social media’s impact on their lives has been mostly negative, another Pew survey from the same year found that 59 percent of teens experienced one of the following forms of abusive behavior on social media:

  • Offensive name-calling
  • False rumors
  • Receiving unsolicited explicit images
  • Constant asking of where they are, what they’re doing, who they’re with by someone who isn’t a parent
  • Physical threats
  • Having explicit images of themselves shared without consent

Social media is a relatively young and volatile technology, and negative content is to be expected, especially at the sheer volume at which data is being produced and consumed on the Internet today. Unfortunately, teens and children with access to these apps and websites (often against the companies’ own Terms of Service) are most at risk of experiencing the negative impact of this content.

There’s more than just name-calling and unwanted messages on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Other concerns include the rampant spread of misinformation and conspiracies, and the platform’s potential for radicalization.

In part, the decision to create a separate app for children may help protect some of them from the less savory elements of online social media without attempting to do the impossible, which would be to cut them off from a growing online social ecosystem.

Of course, there’s a clear incentive for the company here. An Instagram for Kids would help stave off some of the criticism headed for Facebook over the negative influence that its apps may be having on kids especially. Furthermore, it may given them an opportunity to funnel young users into their other networks when they become of age.

What This Might Mean for Parents

Now more than ever, being a parent and trying to protect one’s child from negative interactions in the outside world is incredibly difficult. Parents will continue to have to supervise and monitor how their children interact with the Internet and use social media, something Mr. Zuckerberg claims he does at home as well.

Facebook also suggested that a potential Instagram for Kids might expand parents’ options for monitoring their child’s use of social media, further empowering parents.

How Will Facebook Monetize an Instagram for Kids?

But perhaps the most crucial question is: what about the money? Facebook and most other free social media platforms monetize their data aggregation and advertising functionalities, allowing users to use their services for free while selling the ability to target and market to hundreds of millions of people.

But if Facebook is planning on creating a platform that specifically allows advertisers to target children on the Internet, it may be entering a regulatory maze. So far, the company has been unclear as to how they are planning to monetize an Instagram for Kids, or to what degree advertisers may be able to work with Facebook on such a platform.

The comparable YouTube Kids has been heavily changed to comply with the FTC’s children’s privacy law, with the onus largely being on content creators to correctly label and monetize their content according to whether it targeted kids or not.

In many cases, YouTube would designate content as “for kids” depending on viewership and the nature of the content and would strictly control engagement and monetization on such videos, even if that content wasn’t flagged as for kids by the respective creator.

Many videos with subject matter usually associated with children (including popular video games and comic book characters) may be intended for mature audiences. Furthermore, terms like “kid attractive” and “kid directed” are not at all clearly defined by the FTC. So far, YouTube is relying on machine learning to try and better distinguish between content intended for younger audiences, and content for more mature audiences.

What the content on an Instagram for Kids would look like, and how advertisers would be allowed on the platform, are unanswered questions for the near future. Keep an eye on this space.

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Social Media

YouTube Introduces Shorts: A Platform to Rival TikTok

“And the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks.” The first video ever uploaded to YouTube in April 2005 was a simple 18-second clip of entrepreneur Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo, filmed in front of an elephant enclosure.

Since then, short, viral clips have often defined YouTube’s success as the premiere video content platform on the Internet. But since the platform’s inception, other websites and apps have had their chunk of the video traffic pie, prioritizing short-form content over the larger and longer videos often found on YouTube – rival apps and platforms like Snapchat, Vine, and the latest competitor TikTok, have forced YouTube to redefine and reiterate.

In its attempt to outbid TikTok on short-form video content, YouTube has developed and soft-launched YouTube Shorts.

What is YouTube Shorts?

YouTube Shorts is a new function or app (titled a “video experience”) integrated into the YouTube platform. YouTube Shorts is dedicated to short-form content, designed to be created and edited entirely on mobile devices.

The company is claiming to be working on lowering the barrier of entry on creative video content, while attempting to capitalize on the difficult year its Chinese competitor has had.

Prior to its release in the US this March, YouTube Shorts exclusively launched in India, and so far, it lets creators upload short clips with musical overlays, as well as giving users tools to string clips together and create hands-free videos through a countdown timer.

Earlier last month, YouTube further expanded the Shorts toolkit by giving creators the option to sample and remix audio from other Shorts, overlay text, and more.

YouTube Shorts and YouTube Stories

The main difference between YouTube Shorts and YouTube Stories is that content uploaded to the short shelf will be permanent unless you decide to remove it. YouTube Stories, modelled after the success of Snapchat, deletes each Story after one week.

YouTube Stories may be a way to keep your audience engaged and interact with them – but YouTube Shorts may be recommended to viewers years later, much like any other video on the platform, and may gain traction long after its upload date.

The Latest, But Not the First

YouTube’s latest addition to the platform may be the first time it has stood up to TikTok specifically, but it isn’t the first time a company has tried to capitalize on TikTok’s troubles in India and the US.

Instagram launched its Reels function to very little fanfare and much criticism, and Snapchat’s Spotlight feature has gone so far as to provide would-be users with a financial incentive for uploading to the platform: $1 million a day, given to the users with the most entertaining uploads. Meanwhile, Clash has acquired Byte, and Reddit bought Dubsmash – clearly, the short-form video content market is growing.

Will YouTube’s hat in the ring pull ahead of other bite-sized social media contenders? It’s still too early to tell.

YouTube’s main advantage in the race for the top spot may be its existing user base and content creator ecosystem. The platform has over two billion monthly active users, and preliminary statistics out of India show that YouTube Shorts content accumulated 3.5 billion daily views.

If you haven’t considered investing some time and resources into video content, then Shorts may not just be an excellent potential entry point for your brand, but also marks the first time the platform has specifically empowered users without a dedicated video content creation setup, providing multiple recording and editing tools directly within the app itself.

Can You Create YouTube Shorts?

Before its global release, YouTube Shorts were exclusive to a few select creators – that’s changed recently, and anyone can start making Shorts today. Using YouTube’s Shorts camera, your content will be limited to 15 seconds.

But any vertically filmed video with up to 60 seconds can get picked up by YouTube as a Short. For these longer Shorts, the minimum criteria may be subject to change, but right now, the only requirements are that:

  • The video must be under a minute in total length.
  • The video must be vertically oriented.
  • The video must be uploaded as normal.

YouTube then automatically picks out videos that fit its YouTube Shorts format and feature them on the short shelf. Using the hashtag #shorts may make it easier for the platform to pick your video up.

Where Can You Watch YouTube Shorts?

YouTube Shorts can currently be found on the YouTube mobile app, on a section of the homepage called the short shelf. Each video is filmed in a vertical format, and YouTube is currently working on how and why each Short is displayed for any given user.

Rather than Stories, which are shown to subscribers and generally keep a viewer on the creator’s page as they flick through a few days’ worth of short content, Shorts are recommended based on viewing history much like normal video content, with users being given the option to subscribe to each new creator they come across during their bite-sized binge.

For videos longer than 35 seconds, YouTube is still giving Shorts content creators the option of adding an end screen element.

YouTube Shorts for Advertisers

Businesses looking to leverage YouTube Shorts might like to know that these videos aren’t currently heavily monetized.

You can make money off of them but given their length and the experimental nature of the new product, the majority of the profit for a channel producing YouTube Shorts would come either from the fact that new viewers might check out the other, more profitable content on the channel, or they may become potential leads as a result of the content.

That doesn’t mean Shorts you produce today may not end up being vastly more profitable in the future, once YouTube figures out how it’s going to monetize its new video format. Until then, perhaps the greatest value in the new format is its potential for brand exposure, as YouTube is and will continue to heavily push Shorts in the coming weeks.

YouTube Shorts are currently being found by viewers either through the short shelf, a channel’s page, in the user’s subscription feed, and through YouTube search.

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Social Media

Clubhouse App 101: What Is It?

The Clubhouse app is a social networking platform based on audio chat. Users can join virtual rooms to listen or participate in live discussions, ranging from casual conversations to expert panels on various topics. Launched in 2020, it quickly gained popularity for its unique format, enabling real-time, voice-based interaction and networking opportunities, distinguishing it from text-based social media platforms. Clubhouse fosters a sense of community and immediacy in digital communication.

Growing up, did you ever accidentally hear a neighbor’s conversation through the baby monitor? That’s kind of what Clubhouse is like, except everyone knows you’re listening – and it’s completely legal. Plus, it’s significantly more secure than baby monitors.

Clubhouse is the new iPhone-only invite-only social media platform. It’s recently gotten a lot of buzz thanks to celebrities like Elon Musk and Bill Gates popping into the platform to say hello. Jordan Minor of PCMag says it’s like Twitter was a podcast you live in. Others equate it to a Zoom where everyone’s cameras are off, since it can be difficult to keep up with who is speaking.

Though it was initially founded in March 2020, it is quickly gaining steam as a beta-only platform… just like Pinterest did many years ago…. Except with visual media.

Clubhouse contains no images or video. The only images on the platform are user profile pictures. That’s part of what makes it so different from the heavy hitters like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Before we take a look at how you can include this app as part of your social media strategy, let’s discuss how it works, and how to jump into the conversation… if you’re lucky enough to get invited.

How Clubhouse Works

Getting an invite means a fellow iPhone user has given the app access to their entire contact list. It means whoever invited you trusts you and thinks you’ll appreciate the network – since invites aren’t easy to come by until you’ve been using the app for a while.

Users can create or join Clubhouse rooms. Creators serve as moderators who can speak freely or address other members who wish to participate. You can see who is talking by looking for a halo around their photo.

Any user is free to create an “open” room that allows any other users to join. “Social” rooms are only for people you follow to join. “Closed” rooms are invite-only, so only the guests who accept the invitation can participate. “Clubs” can create recurring rooms (weekly chit-chats, anyone?) with members.

You can follow other users or clubs, to find out when they are participating or moderating in a room.

The Clubhouse Hallway is the Facebook Newsfeed, where you can get updates about what your followers and audience are doing – and take a look at what is popular.

The Clubhouse calendar is where you’ll find a list of upcoming events. Any Clubhouse user can add to the calendar. When you add a room of your own to the calendar, it will notify your followers for you.

Frequently Asked Questions About Clubhouse

Are the Conversations Permanent?

No, the conversations disappear after the moderator ends the chat. However, many users are finding workarounds so that they can record conversations. To be sure you’re not breaking any laws, make sure you mention in the room description that the conversations may be recorded. This way, people who don’t want to be recorded can know upfront whether they want to join the room or not. It’s best to assume clubhouse conversations are being recorded, just to be safe.

What can I listen to on Clubhouse?

If you can imagine it, chances are, someone is talking about it on Clubhouse. And if there’s a niche, there’s likely room for it. If you can’t find anything to listen to, you can always start your own.

How many people can be in a Clubhouse room?

There can be up to 5,000 people in a Clubhouse room at any given time. Thankfully, though, not everyone is allowed to speak at once. Moderators control who can speak and when.

Do I have to talk? Can I just listen?

You’re not required to participate in any conversation unless you create the room and serve as a moderator. Moderators aren’t required to let you speak, though if you want to try, you can virtually raise your hand. Plenty of people just listen.

Can I delete my account if I change my mind?

Right now, the only way to delete your account is to send an email to the company to request it.

Any word on when it’s coming to Android?

As of this writing, there is no indication of when the app will become available to Android users. We just know that it will eventually open to everyone.

Can I monetize it?

Not directly. I’m sure that just as all other social media platforms before it there will eventually be a way to earn money from your Clubhouse rooms, but right now, there isn’t. That’s not to say you can’t use it to nurture your audience of prospects and current customers into purchasing your products or services, though. Use it as a way to establish your expertise, trust, and authority. Then, direct your Clubhouse followers to your other resources online.

Using Clubhouse as Part of Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

Clubhouse isn’t something that just any business should rush to be part of. It’s not the right fit for all businesses, and trying to be everywhere at once isn’t the right way to approach social media. Ultimately, it’s best to use it to establish your expertise, rather than trying to get creative with it. You can expand brand awareness and your audience overall.

Search to see what others in your niche are doing channel-wise. Are they creating their own clubs? Jumping into relevant conversations? Do you have enough of a following to bring in listeners, or should you just be participating in other chats?

Alternatively, it can be a great way to get market research. Listen to the questions people are asking, and find ways to provide answers – not just within Clubhouse, but for blogs, ebooks, and more.

It will be interesting to watch this social media app. If you’re part of the pilot program there, I’d love to hear from you. How are you becoming part of the conversation? Are you using it to build communities?

And for you, Android users, are you interested in the idea that Twitter is rolling out Twitter Spaces – something similar to Clubhouse? What about the rumor that Facebook is too, building something similar?

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Social Media

Instagram Guides Now Available to All Users

In May, most of the country was used to the idea of working from home, with the understanding that this isolation would be indefinite. Instagram used this to launch its Guides feature, focusing on mental health.

Initially, Guides were only available to certain content creators, organizations, publishers, and public figures. It allowed those accounts to create curated collections of content, using their own profile as well as the profiles of other Instagram users.

Earlier this month, Instagram announced they’ve expanded the Guides feature to all users.

What is Instagram Guides?

According to a press release, “After Guides were first introduced in May, Instagram saw strong community response and requests for increased availability. Guides provide another way for the community to connect with their favorite accounts, discover new products from people they may not already follow, and get inspired by what content people are loving on Instagram.”

Guides, as a concept, was intended to target travel content. However, because of the pandemic, leaving the country isn’t allowed. Instagram pivoted the direction to promote self-care tips and suicide hotlines. As Black Lives Matter protests started unfolding across the country, Instagram Guides began to include an array of resources for the black community.

The goal is to provide users with another way to post longer-form content going beyond photo and video. Not only can creators dive deeper, but they can also create a multimedia experience to engage and expand their audiences. Guide creators are able to include their own tips and commentary alongside the content they curate.

The expansion tells us though, Instagram is focusing on keeping users on its platform, rather than directing traffic to content creators’ blogs or websites.

Types of Instagram Guides

Back in August, TechCrunch reported changes to Instagram Guides. Users can choose between:

  • Places Guide: This guide recommends a person’s favorite places.
  • Products Guide: A guide for recommending your favorite products to others.
  • Posts Guide: A guide showcasing a variety of posts on a similar topic.

Right now it seems most people are using the Posts guide type. They make a great way to show step-by-step processes, so they are wonderful for recipes, DIY projects, crafts, etc.

Where Guides Display on Profiles

At this point, Guides are currently featured prominently on account pages. They are generally placed between IGTV and Tagged Photos. They may also be featured in the Instagram Shop. The Instagram Shop is another new feature within the app that connects creators with new customers.

By linking guides to shopping, there is plenty of space for brands and influencers to build style Guides. Linking these guides to their IG shops may help boost sales during the pandemic recession.

When visiting another person’s profile, you’ll see a Guides icon on the feed tab that will take you to all the guides they have published.

How to Create an Instagram Guide

  • Tap the + icon on the top-right corner of your profile page. Select “Guide.”
  • Choose your guide type.
    • If you choose Posts, you’ll recommend posts that you’ve either created or saved in the past.
    • If you choose Products, you’ll only be able to curate products available from an Instagram Shop.
    • If you choose Places, you’ll be able to share location-based recommendations, such as a city guide or restaurant.

After you create your Guide, you can share it to Instagram Stories, or share it with other uses. Tap the paper plane icon at the top right of your screen.

Are you excited to see what you can do with this new feature? I’d love to hear your thoughts and see your guides in the comments below.

Categories
Social Media

Instagram Saves are the New Super Like

Likes are a thing of the past. Saves are where it’s at – and brands like yours need to pay attention. Instagram has been testing the removal of likes for a while now, which left brands scrambling, at first, to find a replacement success metric. That success metric is here – the private “saves” metric.

Instagram saves are a signal for how the Instagram algorithm works. The more saves your posts get, the more people will see it, according to the algorithm. That means, if you want to grow your account, focus your efforts on getting people to save your posts. Understanding how certain signals work can mean the difference between successful social media development and a campaign that lacks results.

How do you do this? Before I get into that, let’s take a closer look at what Instagram saves are and how the algorithm uses them.

What are Instagram Saves?

They’ve been around for a couple of years, as a way for people to collect and save their favorite posts. All it takes is tapping the “bookmark” icon at the bottom right corner of a post. It gets added to Saved posts so it is easy to find again.

What are Collections?

Collections provide a way for users to categorize saved posts. You can create a collection based on any classification you want to organize your posts with. The goal is to allow users to create a personalized library of their favorite posts.

How the Algorithm Uses Instagram Saves

The more saves your posts get, the more likely the Instagram algorithm will position your posts within the Explore page and higher within people’s feeds. Saves are one of the seven key factors the algorithm uses to rank posts in a feed. These factors include views, likes, comments, and saves. It sees the number of saves as an indicator of quality. The more likes, comments, and saves a post gets, the better – and it’s even more powerful if that engagement occurs quickly after the content is posted.

Why Instagram Saves are so Crucial

Instagram is testing removing post likes from a number of countries. The experiment first started with Canada but has expanded to include Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Ireland, Italy, and New Zealand. As this shift continues, the number of likes a post gets is less important, and the focus is now more about the overall engagement the posts get, including the number of saves and comments it gets.

Businesses are now starting to track the number of saves as part of their engagement rate calculation.

Engagement Rate = (Likes + Comments + Saves) / Impressions x 100

The “super like” term comes from James Nord, the CEO of the influencer marketing platform Fohr. A like is a way for a user to tell brands they’ve seen and enjoyed the content, but a save is an indication that this value is so strong they want to come back to view this content again later.

If you look at the posts that get the most saves on your profile, you can see the kind of content your audience is most connected with, which helps further fuel your content strategy.

Ways to Get More Saves on Your Posts

Not getting a lot of saves on your content? Use these tips to help boost your numbers.

Create Infographic Style Images

Photography is important, but mixing things up is never a bad idea. Infographics are a great way to make data-heavy or educational content more digestible. People may want to save it for later so they can take a closer look at the information on their own time. They serve as good reference material.

Write Better Captions

Your captions need to be more than emojis. Use the space to create value for your followers. Make your captions longer and richer. Think of each caption as a mini-blog post. The more valuable and interesting the content, the more likely your audience will save it. Go above and beyond.

Ask Your Audience

Just like you would ask your audience for likes, you can also ask them to save your content, too. The key is to include a call to action in your post caption. When done correctly, it not only acts as a friendly reminder to your audience that your content is worth saving.

Create Quotes

It may feel a little like filler content, but they’re a great way to increase saves. People love to have a collection of quotes to share with their friends and family, so you should create some to include in your regular content rotation. They can be inspirational, funny, or otherwise related to your brand or products.

Aim for Evergreen Content

Instagram moves quickly, and you should never assume that your followers will ever see your post more than once. Timely and new content is important to the algorithm. That’s why you have to create content your audience wants to come back to again and again. Whether it’s a year-long calendar of events, a tutorial, a reference sheet, a checklist, a workout, or something else – it should be something that is relevant to your audience today, next week, month, and year.

Create Tips and Hacks Posts

Who doesn’t love an industry tip or something they’ve found online to help them save time? I’ll never forget when I learned how easy it was to pop popcorn in the microwave in a brown paper bag. Not only is it cheaper, but it also eliminates the chemicals in pre-made microwaveable popcorn bags. It was something I learned online, and I come back to again and again.

If you can craft educational content in this format, you can help users to get to know your products or services while also helping them learn something along the way. That is the perfect way to boost saves.

While there’s no official word on where “likes” stand in the United States, making adjustments to your strategy now to boost saves will certainly help if and when they disappear from the platform here. If you have an international brand, accounting for it now is essential.

Categories
Social Media

Ads for IGTV Are Coming

IGTV ads are a monetization feature on Instagram, allowing creators to earn revenue by including short advertisements in their IGTV (Instagram TV) videos. These ads, typically lasting up to 15 seconds, are inserted at natural breaks in content, offering brands a new avenue to reach audiences. This feature not only benefits advertisers with increased visibility but also supports creators financially, fostering a thriving content ecosystem on Instagram.

Instagram is promoting IGTV videos in its main feed in an attempt to increase popularity among advertisers and influencers. IGTV is Instagram’s foray into long-form vertical video content on mobile devices. It launched last summer and was the first major update to the platform since Instagram stories was released in 2016. It helps to move Instagram into a space that has long been dominated by YouTube.

In the constant rivalry between Google and Facebook, IGTV represents a new attempt for Facebook to compete with YouTube and set up as an alternative destination for both content creators and businesses in the $1.7 billion Instagram influencer marketing industry.

IGTV is closely connected to the main Instagram platform as the same accounts are used across both formats and can be exist either through the stand-alone app or Instagram. Instagram has also worked to ease fears about IGTV struggle to attract eyes by featuring aspects of IGTV with the main app by including previews of IGTV videos in the main Instagram feed which cause subsequent views to Skyrocket.

Why IGTV and Not YouTube?

For brands thinking that they should just use YouTube, it’s important to understand how IGTV has differentiated itself from YouTube. IGTV content is presented in a vertical format with an aspect ratio of 9:16 rather than horizontal that is seen in most video platforms. IGTV focuses on mobile first which is a lucrative opportunity for Instagram and marketers alike. With Instagram, the videos on IGTV can range anywhere from 15 seconds to  10 minutes. Verified or larger accounts can record for up to an hour with the eventual intention of providing this video link to all users. Creators are not limited to what kinds and formats of content they can produce.

Influencers who have a following on Instagram may struggle to translate that popularity to YouTube where the space is crowded so an Instagram based video-sharing platform can give existing Instagram influencers a launchpad for moving into video without starting from scratch. it also gives them a chance to carve out a new Niche and expand the types of content they create which in turn allows them to diversify their sponsored content and brand partnerships.

Brands will have the opportunity to reach their target audience the new ways and increase their visibility with new audiences. Google has been encouraging longer-form video on YouTube for years now and Instagram understands the marketing potential of the longer content for developing the all-important positive influencer and brand connection. IGTV is just another way for brands to exercise their marketing muscles.

Unlike Stories which took off quite well in 2016, IGTV has had a harder time getting the ball rolling. Long-form video on Instagram is still in its early stages so many creators are reluctant to start devoting their time and energy into the platform. IGTV content takes longer to shoot and edit than a simple photo or a 15-second story.

Only recently has Instagram discussed adding ads to IGTV so until now there have been limited marketing options for brands. For creators, without the advertising platform, Instagram isn’t paying for the content made by influencers, so there are few financial incentives.

The Catch-22 for Instagram

Why has it taken so long to get here? Instagram wants to make sure the platform has legs and that people are willing to stick around and view the content. If IGTV uses ads too soon, then the users may not want to stick around through mid-roll ads to see if the content is good enough. They have to make sure that they’re content creators are creating high-quality content that their audience is interested in and watching. However, when the content creator has other avenues for monetization, it’s hard for them to justify investing their resources in IGTV content creation.

Instagram has plenty of money – they earned $20 billion in advertising revenue last year, which was a major portion of Facebook’s income. But they’re not going to throw money at the platform if it’s not going to get a return on investment.

Instagram is under a lot of external pressure, from content creators who are making money on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Watch, and Byte, with revenue-share options. IGTV needs content if they want to grow and stay relevant, but can’t expect that people will provide it without revenue-sharing.

Internal Experiments with Monetization Programs for IGTV Creators

In an interview with TechCrunch, Instagram confirms that it is prototyping an option for IGTV creators to earn money by showing advertisements with their videos. By giving creators a sustainable and hands-off way to generate earnings from IGTV, Instagram hopes they will be inspired to create more high-quality content on the platform.

Right now, Facebook watch video producers earn a 55% cut of the revenue from their ad breaks that are inserted into the middle of their content. There is no word on what the revenue split would be for IGTV, but because Facebook tends to run its ads across all of its apps with the same buying interfaces, it may stick to that 55% approach so that creators get the majority of the money earned.

In the past, Instagram only words with a limited set of celebrities paying to offset small production costs for IGTV content but did not offer a way to earn a profit. That left creators looking to sponsored content or product placement to earn money or trying to push their followers to platforms like YouTube where they could earn money from their ads. This lack of monetization may have contributed to the absence of great content on IGTV.

It’s not clear as to whether IGTV monetization policies would be different but for Facebook, they require users to:

  • Follow all normal Community standards
  • Share authentic content without clickbait, sensationalism, misinformation, or fake news
  • Share original content they made themselves
  • Avoid restricted content categories including tragedy or conflict, sexual or suggestive activity, strong language, explicit content, misleading medical information, politics, and government, and debated social issues.

What are your thoughts about IGTV ads? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Categories
Social Media

A Closer Look at LinkedIn Live

LinkedIn Live is a feature on LinkedIn that allows individuals and organizations to broadcast live video content to their network. This platform is ideal for hosting real-time discussions, interviews, and presentations, enabling direct engagement with professional audiences. It’s a powerful tool for thought leadership, brand promotion, and community building, offering interactive elements like Q&A sessions, which foster deeper connections and conversations within the LinkedIn community.

LinkedIn recently announced updates to LinkedIn pages including the ability to stream live video. Originally launched last year, LinkedIn live was only for individual accounts, but now it’s going to be available for pages.

You can use it on your own LinkedIn page or on your company’s profile. Either way, you decide to go, this feature has a high potential for making a major impact on your LinkedIn strategy. According to LinkedIn, those who use LinkedIn Live get seven times more reactions and 24 times more comments than users who rely on standard videos.

What is LinkedIn Live?

LinkedIn Live is the social media platform’s live streaming option. Users rely on a variety of third-party streaming tools to create their content and then broadcast it to their LinkedIn network. It’s similar to live versions of other platforms like Instagram and Facebook and that your video content goes directly to the page in real-time and people can interact with you.

Some major companies have found unique ways to make use of it. For instance, Best Buy used it to highlight an interview with the company’s CEO. Others have used it to host ask me anything sessions to interact with customers.

At this time, you can live stream on LinkedIn for up to 4 hours. Once the live stream is over, it becomes a native video on LinkedIn. after that, you can include the link in follow-up materials or promotions. Though direct sponsorship of the content remains unavailable, there is analytics information including the number of views, watch time, and unique demographics including the company’s, rolls, and locations of the viewers.

How to Create LinkedIn Live Streams

Before you can go live on LinkedIn, you must apply for approval via an online form. Once you’re approved, you’ll get an email that will point you toward the approved streaming platforms you can use. You’ll choose the one that best suits your needs and sign up for an account, then connect your service to your LinkedIn account.

From there, you’ll log into the streaming service you chose and start your live video. Be prepared to interact with viewers on LinkedIn as that’s one of the main benefits of live streaming. It’s a good idea to have a script or general outline so you can make sure your video content is helping you work towards your company’s goals on LinkedIn.

Ways to Use LinkedIn Live

Answer Questions

Perhaps the biggest benefit of using a LinkedIn Livestream compared to a standard video post is the ability to interact with your audience in real-time. If you find that you get a lot of questions from your followers are customers, you can host a live stream to answer them for your entire audience.

Introduce Staff

Putting a face to a name creates a stronger connection between the audience and the people you mention. Followers may feel more comfortable interacting with you and your team after you put a face to the name. Live video can introduce your employees with Q&A or just some basic information about each person.

Show Your Company Culture

LinkedIn is a powerful recruiting tool and can help you bring new talent to your company. Live streaming on a regular basis can help people be what it’s like behind the scenes and your company, which may make it more appealing for applicants.

Special Events

If you attend or host any special industry events, using LinkedIn life is a wonderful way to share the experience with your followers. It can make people want to attend the event in the future or share valuable information from the sessions.

Announce New Products or Services

if you want to get people excited about a big announcement for your business, you should go live to make your announcement. Promote the launch of new products or services with extra posts that lead up to the big reveal.

Demonstrate Products or Services

If your business offers products or services that require a bit of an explanation, live streams could be the perfect format. Demonstrating how to use your products or services in a video Lets people see how everything works firsthand. And because you’re alive, they can interact with you or ask you questions throughout the process in the event that something isn’t crystal clear. This is a worthwhile strategy for companies that offer software tools and related products that have a lot of features to go over.

Interview Industry Experts

If you have connections with others who have a lot of influence in your industry or with your target customers, using a live stream to interview them could be an effective strategy. They will likely share insights that are valuable to your audience and they may share it with their followers as well to help you increase your reach even more.

Discuss Industry Issues

LinkedIn is a wonderful place to make industry connections and establish yourself as an expert. Going live to discuss a trending topic in your field can help start conversations with other professionals while also giving you credibility on a variety of subjects relevant to the industry.

Start a Recurring Series

You’re likely to get more viewers in a live stream if people anticipate your content. Rather than just going to live whenever you feel like it every now and then, consider starting a series that goes live at the same time every week or month. And remember, promote it in the days leading up to the Stream. This gives people a better chance to actually be logged in when you go live especially on a platform like LinkedIn where people are not checking in as often as they would on say Facebook.

Share Tips or Tutorials

Tutorials are among the most popular format for online video because they give your audience actionable tips that will help them accomplish a specific goal. On LinkedIn, gear your tutorials toward a B2B audience with topics such as setting up an account on a new advertising platform, or editing photos for social media.

With live streaming, the possibilities are nearly endless. If you need help coming up with content ideas that you feel may resonate with your audience, look at your website analytics. What pages or areas of your website are most popular? What are the most commonly asked questions on support tickets? Do a little keyword research to find out more about questions people are asking as they relate to your industry, products, or services. Plan your live streams in advance just as you would plan any other kind of social media content for the greatest chance of success.

Categories
Social Media

How to Optimize Your Twitter Profile for Your Business or Brand

To optimize your Twitter profile for your business or brand, start with a professional, brand-aligned profile picture and cover image. Craft a concise, impactful bio that clearly conveys your brand identity and includes relevant keywords. Utilize pinned tweets to highlight key messages or campaigns. Regularly post engaging content and interact with your audience to build a consistent, active presence that reflects your brand’s values and mission.

Are you looking to enhance your brand’s presence on Twitter?

In this article, you will discover how to optimize your Twitter profile for your business, unlocking the full potential of this powerful platform.

Imagine your Twitter profile transformed into an engaging, brand-reflective powerhouse, drawing in followers and amplifying your message.

Dive in now to learn the key strategies for making your Twitter profile a beacon for your brand!

How to Optimize Your Twitter Profile for Your Business or Brand

More than 330 million people use Twitter every month, and more than 350,000 tweets are posted every single minute. There’s no doubt that potential clients and customers are there, and if they are, your business should be, too.

But beyond your potential clients and customers, there are others you should be looking for and paying attention to on Twitter, as well. It’s also a place where influencers, bloggers, and journalists are looking for fans, brands, and company stories. When they look for something in your industry or vertical, you want to make sure your business shows up.

Don’t forget about the passionate customers who go to Twitter to voice their concerns, complaints, and opinions. If conversations about your brand are taking place, you want to monitor them, participate, and steer them in the right direction. Social listening tools make it possible to keep an eye out for mentions of your business whether or not you’re tagged in the tweets.

The first step to succeeding at Twitter is creating the right kind of profile.

1. Pay Attention to Your Twitter Bio

You have 160 characters to wow your potential audience with. You need to use relevant keywords and hashtags. However, if you choose to use hashtags they will be clickable and may distract from your bio. If someone does click through to the hashtag make sure you’re not inadvertently driving them to your competition if you’re using an industry hashtag.

2. Include a Header Image

The Twitter profile header image can be likened to a magazine cover. You want to change it on a regular basis and use the space to showcase your brand. It’s much larger than your profile image – with the recommended size being 1500×1500 pixels, so you can do a lot more with it. No matter what you choose to do, however, make sure it coordinates with your profile image for better aesthetics.

You can use your header image to feature:

  • New products
  • Top-selling products and services
  • Book launch
  • A team photo
  • Your store or office
  • Your business at a trade show
  • A special event

Regardless of the photo you choose, optimize all of your images by saving the image filename with branded keywords. This increases your chances of being found in an image search.

3. Carefully Select Your Profile Image

Your business or brand needs to use a version of its logo that is easy to recognize and represent your brand. If your logo features a lot of text or doesn’t show up well in the small square of your profile image, you may want to consider creating a secondary logo to use with Twitter and other social media profiles you.

As you determine whether or not you need to create a separate logo, you need to consider image size, color, and how it will look from a mobile device. the recommended file size is 400 by 400 pixels. Twitter supports JPEG, GIF, and PNG file formats up to 2 megabytes in size.

4. Drive People to Your Website

You can use the link space in your bio to drive people directly to your home page, but you can do more than that. Consider sending Twitter followers to some specific pages on your website instead of the basic homepage. Because Twitter is often used to store stories, You may wish to consider linking to your blog or company newsroom. As an alternative, you can point your followers to download a free ebook or checklist, subscribe to your email list, or sign up for a webinar.

5. Add a location to Your Profile

If you are a local business, make sure to fill out the location part of your Twitter profile. This allows Twitter’s algorithm to match your content with other locally-based audiences so your content gets in front of the right people. If you’re not a local business, you can still enter the location of your corporate office, or, you can opt to skip it altogether.

6. Make Sure You Have a Public Profile

Take a second to make sure your tweets are public. Within your settings, look at the privacy and safety section. Make sure the box next to tweet privacy is unchecked. If you do not have public tweets, your business or brand will not get discovered.

7. Pin a Tweet to Your Profile

If you equate your Twitter cover image to a magazine cover, the pinned tweet is your featured story. Pinning a tweet to the top of your profile is an option that many people tend to skip but it is valuable in terms of optimizing your profile. It gives you a space to showcase content.

Of course, this means thinking strategically when pinning tweets. Include a strong visual with a clear call-to-action and relevant keywords along with strategic hashtags and a link back to your website or blog for more detailed information.

New users landing on your profile will see the pinned tweet as the first thing in your Twitter stream, so you wanted to make a good impression. Like your cover image, you can change it up regularly to draw attention to whatever you need to promote.

8. Make it Easy for People to Direct Message You

To optimize your accessibility and make your brand more approachable on Twitter, remove the privacy from your direct messages. In the settings area, head to “Privacy and Safety.” Scroll down the page and look for the direct message option. Check “Receive Direct Messages from Anyone.”

Without this option checked, you and the person sending the DM have to follow one another. That can be difficult to manage if you’re trying to use Twitter as a customer service vehicle.

Taking these actions will make it much easier for you to build a Twitter following and engage with your audience there.

Categories
Social Media

Questions to Boost Your Social Media Marketing

There are several questions to boost your social media marketing. Effective social media marketing hinges on asking the right questions. These include understanding your target audience’s preferences, determining which platforms they frequent, and identifying the type of content that resonates with them. Questions about engagement metrics, such as which posts generate the most interaction and why, are crucial. Regularly assessing these aspects can significantly enhance your strategy, ensuring your social media efforts align with audience needs and marketing goals.

**This post was selected as one of the top digital marketing articles of the week by UpCity, a B2B ratings and review company for digital marketing agencies and other marketing service providers.**

Companies of every size are looking to improve their social media marketing effectiveness. Digital platforms are constantly innovating the way brands are found, shared, and experienced. The number of global social network users is expected to reach 3.09 billion monthly active users by 2021, and global Internet users spend about 136 minutes per day on social media websites.

Many organizations have responded by spending more of their resources on digital marketing. Technology now accounts for 29% of total marketing expense budgets according to a recent study. And digital ad spend for 2020 is estimated to reach about S385 billion.

Consumers today react to services, products, and ad campaigns and real-time through social media which creates new to bans on companies. It’s important to generate and sustain high engagement and enthusiasm which requires clarity around your company’s goals and values.

Successful digital strategies are not about looks or style but if it between what your brand’s promises and what it delivers. If you want to develop or improve your current social media strategy, here are several questions to boost your social media marketing:

What Are Our Goals?

When it comes to startups and Niche products, your social media marketing strategy may start by testing ideas, creating awareness, and building anticipation for new products and services. In other situations, your goals may be far more specific such as increasing real-time brand engagement, generating Quality Sales leads, boosting sales, or working on geographic expansion.

After you set your goals, you must identify your metrics for success. Are you looking to gain likes? do you want to start an online conversation around a certain issue? or do you want to inspire people to make a behavioral change,  for example encouraging your followers to drink more water? the metrics you choose muscle I’m with your marketing goals.

The volume of data available can make choosing the metrics challenging. Clearly defining your metrics, along with the timeline and budget ensures that your campaign is on track. Not only do goals allow you to clearly measure your progress, but they make it easier to figure out where you should focus your time and effort on social media.

How Are We Currently Performing?

Assuming you’re already launched on social media, it’s a good idea to take a look at where you are now to set benchmarks for your growth and engagement goals. Take a look at all of the social media networks where you currently have a presence and see how things are going. Take a look at how often you’re posting, how much engagement you’re getting, and the types of posts you are creating. Compare it to the competition for an idea of how well you’re doing.

What Platforms Should We Use?

Making decisions around platforms you should use needs to be based on your understanding of your customer’s identity and preferences. Different social media platforms appeal to different demographics so you need to research and find out which one’s your audience use online.

If you have a younger audience, you may be able to more effectively reach them on newer platforms such as Snapchat or TikTok. However, health and wellness brands that emphasize aesthetics might want to focus on Instagram with a more visual strategy. The same logic applies to geography. If you want to reach people in China, you need to focus on WeChat or Weibo but if you want to reach people in India, WhatsApp is the popular choice.

It may be tempting to try to be everywhere, but spreading yourself too thin means you’re spending less time on each network overall. In the end, it’s better to do one or two social media platforms well than to have a subpar presence on three or more.

What Does Our Content Strategy Look Like?

A lot of the time, companies have the budget, team, agency, and ideas in place but they haven’t really considered content. Not doing so leaves goodwill and revenue on the table as one survey showed that 46% of customers say they follow brands because of the inspirational content. You need to understand the kinds of contents for instance videos, pictures, or articles that will drive engagement with your audience.

A great content strategy creates conversation and sharing with the brand and other users. To be effective, your content needs to be useful, unique, insurable. if you have content that is sensitive, your content strategy needs to consider that. For example, if you are in the mental health industry, you may experience the lack of engagement on your Facebook page because the users aren’t comfortable engaging on those issues on a public platform.

To combat this, the strategy was adjusted to encourage users to chat with the brand by using private messaging options are social network sites. They also created resources that allowed people to get answers to their questions securely with expert articles shared be exclusive password access through the private Chats on the social networking platforms.

Are We Ready to Talk with Our Audience in Real-Time?

Social media interactions are two way –  driven by both consumers and brands. That means your company needs to show that it is listening and engaging with concerns, suggestions, and questions. Organizations that can seize the moment will generate Goodwill and brand awareness. For instance,  when a Twitter user recently mocked a South African man for proposing in a KFC,  the company stepped in and provided the couple with the wedding planner. Other brands such as Audi, Woolworths, and Coca-Cola chipped in to support the couple providing them with gifts and experiences.

Today’s brands have a much bigger responsibility and ability to connect with and inspire customers. Trusted plans are more likely to attract business and social media is a powerful tool to create that trust with your audience. By taking the time to answer the questions covered in this blog post, you can make sure your social strategy aligns with your goals and ultimately adds value for your audience.

Categories
Content Marketing

What 912 Million Blog Posts Tell Us About Content Marketing

Here’s what 912 million blog posts tell us about content marketing: Longer posts typically generate more backlinks, a crucial factor for SEO. While most posts don’t receive external links, those with more in-depth research and unique insights do. Engaging headlines and visually appealing formats enhance shareability. These findings underscore the importance of quality, relevance, and strategic distribution in successful content marketing.

Backlinko and BuzzSumo partnered together to analyze 912 million blog posts to glean insights about content marketing today. They looked at factors such as content format, headlines, and word count and how it correlates with backlinks and social media shares. The findings they discovered were quite interesting.

In this article, we explore what

Long-Form Content Gets More Backlinks

When it comes to building backlinks, long-form content significantly outperforms short articles and blog posts. There are other industry studies that find a correlation between long-form content and achieving first page Google rankings.

But, it doesn’t seem that anyone has investigated why that longer-form content tends to do so much better. Does the algorithm prefer longer content? Or, is it that longer content is better at satisfying searcher intent?

While the study doesn’t make it possible to draw conclusions, the data suggest that backlinks are part of why long-form content tends to do better in Google’s ranking.

Content longer than 3,000 words gets an average of 77.2% more referring domains than content that has fewer than 1,000 words.

Want to Maximize Social Media Shares? Aim For 1,000-2,000 Words

Long-form content gets more social shares than short content, but once you go over 2,000 words, your returns start to diminish. That makes content that falls between 1,000 and 2,000 words the ideal option for maximizing the number of shares you get from social media. Content in that range gets an average of 56.1% more social media shares than content that comes in under 1,000 words.

Most Content Online Doesn’t Get Backlinks

Backlinks, or the number of external links to a piece of content, are an important part of how Google ranks content – as shown in their How Search Works report. We found that getting links is difficult. The data showed that 94% of the content earns no external links.

Getting someone to link to your content is hard. Getting links from more than one more website? That’s even tougher. Only 2.2% of content on the internet gets links from multiple websites.

Why is it so hard to earn backlinks? Again, this is a situation where you cannot answer the question from the study data lone, but it’s most likely a result of the fact that there is so much content published every day.

WordPress reports that 87 million posts were published on their platform in May 2018, 47.1% more than in May 2016. In two years, that’s 27 million monthly blog posts, making it harder for each piece of content to earn backlinks.

Looking at a 2015 study, 75% of the content in the study had zero links, and when you consider that this study’s data showed 94%, it demonstrates that it is much more difficult to earn links to your content than it was five years ago.

Social Shares Aren’t Distributed Evenly

The data in this study indicated that only a small share of outliers get the most social shares. 1.3% of the content in the study received 75% of the social shares. But when you look closer, it becomes even more disproportionate. 0.1% of the articles in the sample accounted for 50% of the total social shares. That means half of the social shares go to a small number of viral posts.

No Real Correlation Between Social Shares and Backlinks

There is no correlation between the number of social shares a piece of content receives and the number of backlinks it earns. Content that gets a lot of backlinks doesn’t typically get shared on social media. And the content that gets a lot of traction on social media, doesn’t usually earn a lot of backlinks. Those shares on social media don’t translate to more backlinks.

This is a surprise for many since one of the SEO “best practices” involves sharing your content on social media. The idea behind this is that by getting your content in front of more people, you’ll increase the chance that someone will link to you. In theory, this makes sense, but it doesn’t play out the same way in the real world – because people share and link to content for different reasons.

Create content that caters to your goal. If you want to go viral on Facebook, try a list post. If you want to get more backlinks, opt for visual content like infographics.

Longer Headlines Correlate with More Social Shares

Other industry studies show a relationship between long headlines and social shares. The data in this study also found that to be true. Very long headlines do better than short headlines by 76.7%. “Very long” is defined as being between 14 and 17 words. It plays out the same way when you consider the character count at 80+. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule.

Question Headlines Get More Social Shares on Average

Interestingly enough, headlines that use a question mark at the end perform well right now. Headlines using a question get 22.3% more social shares compared to headlines that don’t follow the question format. This could be because they add an element of intrigue that boost click-through rate. Many people decide to read a post because they want to know the answer to the question in the headline. That said, they aren’t a magic bullet guaranteed to boost all your social shares and traffic.

There’s No “Best Day” for Publishing New Content to Maximize Social Shares

While social media platforms have best times of the day and best days of the week to get engagement, there doesn’t seem to be a best day of the week to publish your content if you want to maximize social shares.

Though Sunday had a slight edge compared to every other day of the week, the difference in shares between content published on Sunday vs. other days of the week was only 1.45%…hardly a reason to only update your blog on Sundays.

Rather than focusing on a best day of the week or best time of the day – learn what works for your audience based on metrics you have on hand. The best time is always when your audience is available to consume and share your content.

 

Categories
Social Media

Twitter Offers More Support to Researchers for Accountability

Twitter offers more support to researchers for accountability. Twitter’s initiative to support researchers reflects a commitment to transparency and accountability. Providing data access helps study platform impacts on public discourse and misinformation. It includes sharing tweet datasets, user engagement metrics, and algorithm insights. This support aids in understanding social media’s role in society and developing strategies to combat harmful content.

Twitter has kicked off 2020 with a new hub for academic researchers. The new hub is designed to make it easier for them to access information and support around its APIs. You can find the new page, called Twitter Data for Academic Researchers, here.

There you’ll find links to apply for a developer account to access Twitter’s APIs along with the details of the different APIs offered and links to additional tools for researchers. Those tools cover data integration, access, analysis, visualization, infrastructure, and hosting.

Twitter says that over the past year they’ve worked with a number of people in the academic research community and learned about the challenges they face. They also learned about how Twitter can better support the research community in their efforts to further understanding of the public conversation. Twitter has created this feature in an effort to make it easier to learn from the public conversation.

Twitter also says that they will provide more enhancements and resources for researchers throughout the year.

At this point, tracking conversation flow on Twitter still means playing a game to determine whether you’re dealing with a bot or not. In Europe, Twitter is one of several platform giants that, in 2018 signed up to a voluntary code of practice on disinformation. It is committed to addressing fake accounts and online bots. It’s also committed to empowering the research community to monitor online disinformation through access to platform data that remains privacy compliant.

On the new landing page for researchers, the company writes: “At Twitter, we value the contributions of academic researchers and see the potential for them to help us better understand our platform, keeping us accountable, while helping us tackle new challenges through discoveries and innovations.” They also pat themselves on the back with the claim that, “if it exists, it’s probably been talked about on Twitter.”

If Twitter can live up to its promises of active engagement with researchers, it could capitalize on Facebook’s parallel missteps in academics support.

Facebook was recently accused of transparency washing with its own API for researchers. A group of 60 academics said the ad archive API was as much a hindrance as a help.

Months later, Facebook was still being reported to have done little to improve the offering.

What Academic Researchers Can Expect

If you qualify as an academic researcher, you can apply for an account. Twitter believes that making their data available to the academic research community will improve their service and make it easier to learn about the world. Twitter says they value the contributions of academic researchers and see the potential for them to help the company better understand the platform, keep them accountable and help them tackle new challenges through innovation and discovery.

Levels of API Access

Standard APIs

This is the free, standard APIs that are ideal for getting started, testing and integration, or validating a concept.

Premium APIs

Twitter’s premium APIs provide scalable access to Twitter data for organizations that are looking to experiment, grow, and innovate.

Enterprise APIs

The Enterprise APIs provide the highest level of access to those who depend on Twitter data. This is what you’ll need access to as a researcher.

Ads APIs

The Ads API provides partners a programmatic way to integrate with the Twitter Ads platform.

When you apply for Access, you will have to indicate the primary use of Twitter data. When it comes to academic research, you’ll have the option to choose between doing academic research, teaching, or selecting a student option.

You’ll verify the Twitter username details associated with the developer account. You’ll need to fill in all the required data about your organization including your legal entity name, the organization Twitter name, optionally, your website URL and a few other details.

From there, you’ll describe your intended use of the Twitter API. You use your own words to indicate how you plan to use it. You’ll also describe your plans to use the features, indicating whether you will plan to display tweets or aggregate data about Twitter outside of Twitter.

From there, you will check your information and accept the developer agreement then verify your email account. your application will be reviewed and you will receive a notification with the result.

In more recent news, Twitter has rebranded to X.

Categories
Social Media

Making the Most of Your Social Media Calendar

Making the most of your social media calendar is essential to creating social signals around your brand. Effectively utilizing a social media calendar involves planning content, aligning posts with marketing campaigns and key dates. Regularly updating content types (images, videos, blogs) keeps the feed fresh. Timely engagement with trending topics and audience interaction is crucial. Analyzing performance data helps refine future content and posting schedules.

To make the most of your social media marketing efforts, it helps to have a calendar with a plan of the content you want to share, and when. Thanks to automation tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, it’s even possible to load a number of posts in advance and schedule them to post at certain times.

But having a plan to post content and knowing when it will go live is one thing – and making that calendar and schedule work for you is another. Let’s take a look at some of the things you should consider as you plan out your social media content – whether for the next day, week, month,  or year at a time.

To get started, take a look at our guide on How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar.

How Many Posts Per Day? Per Network?

Organically, your posts aren’t going to show to the majority of your social media following. That’s because the platforms want to have their fair shot at getting you to pay for advertising, so they can boost their revenue.

But, if you have content that your social media audience responds to and engages with, you’ll increase the likelihood that a larger portion of your audience will see what you post.

That’s why it’s important to strike a balance between the right number of posts on each network you include in your social media strategy, and your overall post frequency. If you post too much, you run the risk of people feeling like you’re the only thing they see. If you don’t post enough, few people may see your content at all.

And certain networks, like Twitter, move so fast that your new content doesn’t last long before it gets lost in feeds. That’s why it’s expected that you will post more there every day than you would on Facebook or Instagram.

Uses these informal guidelines to help you decide how often to post to each social platform you use. There are no strict rules to follow. Post frequency and timing tends to vary from one niche to another.

  • According to Socialbakers, post once a day for best engagement.
  • Plan on up to 15 tweets per day, according to research studies summarized on CoSchedule.
  • LinkedIn data, courtesy of Buffer, tells us you’ll reach 60% of your audience if you post there 20x/month.
  • If your brand uses Pinterest, Buffer suggests you should pin five to 30 times per day.
  • Brands can easily post to Instagram up to 15 times a day, where it is relevant to their niche to do so.

Looking at your calendar tells you where to fill in gaps and where to remove the extra messages on the days and times that are overcrowded.

If you want a guideline to follow that’s specific to your niche, take a look at your top competitors. Pay attention to any patterns you see. Look at the dates and times on the posts that have the most engagement, and test your own activity based on that.

Post Timing Matters

In addition to post frequency, the time of day your content goes live matters, too. Think about it. If you post at night when the majority of your audience is asleep, you are not likely to get a lot of response.  By the time your audience wakes up and browses through social media, your content will be buried in their feeds, by content that has been posted more recently.

You can use your social media analytics to see the times when your audience is most active. Base your posting time around that, so your audience is online to interact with the content as it goes live. The more engagement you get right away, the more likely your content will be shown to a larger percentage of your followers.

Post timing varies for each social network,  and for each niche or industry.

The majority of the studies analyzed data in the United States. 80% of the population lives within the Eastern and Central time zones, so those two time zones are likely the best bet for optimal reach – unless you know for sure your target audience is outside of those.

Run some tests of your own to find out what works best for your personal audience, starting with guidelines for your niche and adjusting from there. Here is another place where studying your main competitors can help.

Repeat Shares Are Okay

Social media posts, especially on Twitter, have a short life. It’s okay to share some of your old content again. Do you want to share the same thing on Facebook twice in the same day? Probably not. But something you shared early in the morning on Twitter could easily be shared again in the evening hours.

That said, you should still make the majority of your social media content new and original. Between your content and stuff you’ve curated from others to provide value to your audience, you’ll want to wait a bit before you start sharing older content again.

When you update an old post on your blog, definitely share it on social media again to let your audience know that you’ve breathed new life into the post.

Don’t Blanket Post

As tempting as it may be to share the exact same thing to all your social media networks at the exact same time, it’s safe to assume that if someone is following you on Facebook, they are also following you on Twitter. You don’t want to bore your audience with the same thing over and over.

Each social media network is different, and with it, come nuances that call for you to adjust the way you post slightly. On Facebook and Instagram, you have enough room to write a mini blog post that describes your content. But on Twitter, you have a character limit. Even though that character limit has been extended compared to what it was when Twitter launched, it’s still highly restrictive compared to what you can do on other platforms.

You’ll get far better results by adjusting your content slightly, to better fit the needs and aesthetics of each individual social platform you’re using to share the content.

Measure Your Results

To ensure you’re getting the best possible ROI on your social media efforts, it’s important to continue to measure your progress. Keep track of your follower growth, engagement rates, which hashtags get the best response, and so on. Add UTM tags to your links and track their progress in Google Analytics. Or, use a URL shortener so you can track link opens.

If you’re not getting the results you expect, experiment with one thing at a time so you can determine what factor influences your results. For instance, adjust your post timing without adjusting content type or frequency. Testing too much at once will make it hard to figure out which change produced the results.

If you’d like help with your social media marketing strategy, get in touch with us today.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Marketing Your Business Beyond Social Media

Marketing your business beyond social media involves leveraging SEO for organic search visibility, email marketing for direct customer communication, and content marketing to establish thought leadership. Networking at industry events and public relations can enhance brand presence. Collaborations and sponsorships also provide avenues for outreach, and community involvement can strengthen local connections.

Social media marketing offers a great place for businesses to spark conversation, build trust among their target community, and engage with people interested in their products or services. Over the years, social media platforms have developed into well-designed advertising platforms, essentially evolving into pay-to-play platforms where free, organic visibility isn’t as available as it once was.

Fortunately, social media marketing is just one of many channels available for business marketing. For the best results, we recommend developing a strategic omnichannel marketing campaign – an approach that not only involves several types of marketing but creates a cohesive conversation between you and your customers.

In this article, we’re exploring the idea of marketing your business beyond social media.

Clients Love Rewards

Your customers love to know they are special and a rewards program is a perfect tool to convey that message. Take a look at bookstores, grocery stores, and even gas stations. Reward cards are everywhere and people love to sign up. Any business can create a rewards program. You can offer a percentage discount after so many qualifying purchases (some set a minimum of $10-$25 purchase). Service-based businesses can reward for referrals with free services.

Host Anniversary Parties

When your business reaches a milestone, such as your opening date or when you made your first profit, have a party. Send invitations to your email/address list. Provide discounts and fun things to do in your small business. Play games or host a raffle. One business would pull out a wheel of “fortune” that they created on their own. Everyone had to do a small task (sing a song, answer trivia, etc) in exchange for a coupon for a free item. People love parties and discounts and will bring friends who don’t know your business with them. That introduces you to new potential clientele.

Host Your Giveaways In Person

Even though people love giveaways on social media, you can also do them in your brick and mortar store. One business has one for every holiday in the calendar year. Their vendors will donate an item and the store will take something from the clearance shelves to include in the basket. People come into the shop to fill out a paper with their name and phone number for a chance to win. This can be adjusted for those that also have a service business.

Create an Event With A Local Business

While other businesses are your competitors, come of them can be complementary. Consider a special event working with another company. Pizza companies may want to team up with a beer and wine company. A local women’s shoe store might want to have a wine and cheese party with another business. Be creative and look to another company that can help boost your connections. It can also be beneficial if they use a lot of social media to advertise the event.

Support Local Non-Profits

All cities and towns have non-profits who work hard at raising funds and awareness for social issues. Find one or two that is an important one for your business and find ways to support them. This may mean that you are advertised on walk-a-thon or 5K t-shirts. You provide coupons for services or items for a swag bag. You provide space for their informational material in your brick and mortar store. You financially support their efforts annually or for specific fund drives.

It doesn’t have to be just a social issue either. Some businesses will support local sports teams in their neighborhoods. Some will work with local boys/girls scouting troops or fund raise with a house of worship. There are a lot of ways to support your local community while getting an advertisement in return.

Reach Out To New Neighbors

Welcome Wagons were a big deal way back in the day. People would create welcome baskets for people who were new to the neighborhood as a welcoming gesture. Very few towns do that and when they do, it’s up to the individual to request the Welcome Wagon. You can choose to be a part of a Welcome Wagon if it exists or you can take it into your own hands. A nice card with a discount coupon is a great way to welcome a new neighbor and garner interest in your business. It’s a personal touch and that can go a long way.

Personalized Business Mail

Personalized business mail might sound like an oxymoron but it’s a great way to be personable with your clientele. Consider sending holiday cards to your loyal customers. You do not have to include any discount or sales ads, just the card. In this day and age, it’s not too often that mail is personable. We send e-cards, emails, and a card is more intimate. When we receive a card, we feel that the other person (or business) really values us. You can also take it a step further with condolence, birthday, congratulations, or anniversary cards. Your customers are another type of family and those who nurture it are the most successful.

Connect With Brand Ambassadors

There are ways to get your business known on social media by allowing others to talk about you. Brand Ambassadors are common on Instagram but can be an asset on any social media platform. They can be a “face” of your company or review your products/services to the masses. You can partner with them on

marketing campaigns to bring new customers to your events. They can help advertise your giveaways, contests, or rewards programs online for you. Just be sure you are in compliance with FCC and TOS agreements on social media platforms regarding advertising and transparency.

Jump On The Podcast Train

Podcasts do use social media, but you can do this one regardless of your platform. Connect with folks who have local podcasts or to podcasts related to your niche. You “appear” in a studio or through a phone call. Some podcasts are filmed for cross-posting to YouTube or Facebook, but many are recorded for various podcast platforms. It gives you an opportunity to talk about your business. It can be about exciting new changes happening, events, grand openings, sales, or discussing your involvement with the community.

Social media is helpful, but there are so many other ways to keep your business relevant. A good marketing plan has a variety of techniques that work. Use what you can, dismiss what doesn’t work, and be flexible.

Categories
Social Media

New and Upcoming Twitter Features You Need to Know About

There are several new and upcoming Twitter features you need to know about. Twitter continuously innovates, introducing features to enhance user experience and engagement. Recent and upcoming features include improved algorithms for more relevant content, enhanced tweet analytics for better engagement insights, new ad formats for increased visibility, and advanced tools for combating misinformation. Features like voice tweets and increased character limits for select users are also being tested, aiming to diversify user interactions on the platform.

Data shows Twitter has 330 million monthly active users and 134 million daily active users. An estimated 63% of Twitter users worldwide fall between the ages of 35 and 65 years old making it appealing for brands with a more mature demographic compared to Instagram or SnapChat. In the US, the average adult Twitter user appears to fall closer to the lower end of that age range with a median age of 40.

For brands that have a target audience on Twitter, it makes sense to stay up-to-date with new and potentially upcoming features on the platform. It has been around since 2006, making it one of the oldest social media platforms online today. To keep up with the competition, they must continue to innovate and improve the platform. Much of what you see on this list aims to do just that.

Conversation Insights Tool

Twitter added a new tool to the Publisher Insight portion of Media Studio. With it, publishers can see tweets they may have missed using the social network’s content listening tools, which go beyond Hashtags and mentions.

Tweets that are found are displayed on a customizable dashboard that allows publishers to see what people are saying about them minute-by-minute, over time.

The conversation insights tool includes a number of features such as:

  • An interactive graph that displays the number of tweets there are about the publisher
  • The top accounts that are talking about the publisher or engaging with its content, filtered by frequency or follower count
  • A timeline of tweets about the publisher that can be filtered by follower engagement thresholds as well as tweet format, language, and verification status.

In the future, publishers will be able to engage with tweets, share tweets or reply directly using the tool.

Follow Specific Topics

After several months of testing, Twitter is launching the new topics option which allows users to follow specific topics and have the two appear within their Twitter stream along with the specific accounts they follow.

On your home timeline and in search results, users will see prompts to follow topics. Tap the follow button in the prompt and your Twitter experience will be personalized based on your interest in the topic. The platform may also match you with other topics that they think you would be interested in and based on your activity and profile such as the tweets you view or like.

This feature is intended to improve tweet discovery and boost engagement. By highlighting more relevant content instead of putting it on users to find the key accounts to follow, Twitter is trying to make it easier for users to stay in touch with conversations of interest while cutting out some of the junk that flows through their Twitter stream.

Remove Me From This Conversation

According to Twitter’s VP of Design and Research, Dantley Davis, there are five main features that he’s looking forward to in 2020. Of course, this doesn’t mean they are definitively on the way, but considering the source, there’s a good chance that we can expect to see the remove me from this conversation along with several other features to be rolled out within the next 6 months.

This option would allow you to remove yourself from a tweet exchange the same way you can currently remove yourself from Twitter’s direct messages. At this time there’s no way to remove yourself from a conversation if you’re directly mentioned or tagged in an image so you can mute the conversation which does have a similar effect. This approach, however, would provide a clear separation to help you remove yourself from spammers.

Tweet This Only To These Friends, Hashtag or Interest

This feature has been discussed before Twitter’s Head of Product discussed it in an interview with The Verge and followed it up with a tweet poll posted by Twitter product designer Brittany Forks. This option would allow you to choose specific audiences for your tweets which may provide a new range of considerations for tweet communication. This approach would allow for morning close chats and discussions that don’t take over the feeds of other less interested followers.

These additions would give Twitter users more control over their conversations while potentially opening up new use cases for the platform. Of course, there’s nothing definitive here because they have not been confirmed but they do offer interesting food for thought on additional features.

Remove This @Mention from This Conversation

With this approach, the other people mentioned in your tweets can remove themselves from the conversation. Though it seems similar to the remove me from this conversation option, the fact that this is also an option leads us to believe that you would not be able to remove @mentions from other users’ tweets.

Don’t Allow People to @Mention Me Without My Permission

This is a safety measure that would allow you to stop people from adding you to a tweet thread unless you approve it. This may be helpful for those dealing with abuse or bullying or to get rid of trolls who are only mentioning your profile to get under your skin. This option allows you to avoid blocking them outright but gives you more control over your on-platform presence.

Don’t Allow RT of This Tweet

At first, there doesn’t seem like there would be a lot of situations where you wouldn’t want your tweet to be amplified. However, if you’re replying to someone directly and you don’t want it taken out of context, it could be useful to turn off retweets. Or if a tweet of yours is blowing up for the wrong reasons, you may be able to turn retweets off after the fact. Getting rid of the option to retweet could also prompt more direct engagement. If you are unable to quote tweet or retweet someone, you may be more inclined to reply to them about it instead.

Testing Emoji-Like Reactions for DMs

Twitter is testing the use of emoji-like reactions for direct messages. It is highly similar to what Facebook added to Messenger in 2017. That feature allows users to designate an emoji response to each specific message.

Testing a Switch Accounts Option

In early November, it was noted Twitter is testing out a new option that would enable users to switch accounts within the tweet reply process. Doing so makes it easier to manage multiple account interactions on the go which is a wonderful option for social media managers who handled multiple accounts.

this feature could help those who manage multiple accounts keep tabs on relevant mentions and activities but also act on the same at any time. This is functionality similar to what’s already available in TweetDeck where you can switch over to an alternate account and any time when responding to a tweet. At this time, there is no word on a full roll-out of account switching within tweet replies.

Categories
Social Media

Top Social Media Trends to Watch in the 2020s

Social media has been evolving quite drastically over the past decade. In the early days, it was all about MySpace. Facebook, launched in 2004, was limited only to college students and Google+ came and went (RIP, Google+) as Google attempted to take their slice of the pie.

What began as a way to stay in touch with friends and family has evolved into a branch of marketing. As social media continues to mature, and we move into the next decade, here are a few trends I expect to see in the coming years.

More Privacy and Better Security

Privacy has always been a concern for many social media users as has security. With major data breaches happening on a regular basis, users are becoming more cautious about the information they are making available via social media. Though not limited to just social media, data shows that as of the first half of 2018 there were 609 global data breaches pertaining to identity theft. In 2018, there were 1,244 data breaches in the United States alone.

When we sign up for Facebook, we are required to provide basic information about us and as we continue to use the platform, we are prompted to fill out other information as well. The data has been collected by the social media giants and used for advertising dollars among other things.

In response to Facebook’s data breach, additional privacy and security measures are being taken to protect user-information, however, we can’t be sure any of these solutions will be foolproof. As technology continues to grow, we can expect privacy and security to continue to improve. Still, it’s advised not to put anything on social media that you want to keep completely private.

New Social Media Platforms

I’ve already written about TikTok and how it has grown massively. Within the past two years, the platform has become a great hit among teens and now businesses are capitalizing on it. But beyond Tik-Tok, there are a number of new social media platforms popping up. Many of these promise not to sell your data and will not be ad-based because they want to be different from Facebook and Twitter.

The lack of advertising dollars puts a struggle on the ability of the new social media platforms to stay afloat,  so it will be interesting to see what happens to them. Recently, the founder of Wikipedia launched WikiTribune – where people are currently on waiting lists for access unless they contribute a monetary donation of $12.99/month or $100/year.

Beyond WikiTribune, other social media platforms that are gaining traction include:

Social Media TV

We consume more online content than ever before, with the Internet going to great lengths to replace TV. With streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and the latest Disney+, along with YouTube, there’s no reason to believe that social media video content doesn’t have the potential to completely replace TV.

YouTube data shows that among 18-34-year-olds, YouTube on mobile alone reaches a wider US audience than any television network. Data shows Netflix has over 158 million subscribers as of Q3 2019, and Disney+ had 10 million subscribers within one day after launch.

Millennials are consuming so much online mobile content that Samsung believes they want vertical TVs – and they may be right!

Engagement Becomes More Important

Engagement is already vital to your success on social media. Without it, you’ll have a hard time convincing the social media algorithms that your content is interesting and people enjoy it. In the past, it was a simple as getting a bunch of likes and followers to make your content appear authoritative and popular on social media.

The algorithms have since shifted away from this strategy since it is clear that these can be fabricated by purchasing likes and followers that are from fake accounts. Because of this, it’s becoming more and more crucial to focus efforts on comments, shares, and live features across Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Take advantage of video features available to you, because the video will rank better in feeds than text or images, even text and images that have a lot of likes but no comments.

To foster more engagement, ask a question in the post and do your best to reply to all the comments. If you can’t reply to them all, at least make sure you’re replying to as many as you can so that your audience knows you’re paying attention and the social media algorithms see that interactivity and engagement.

As time goes on, we can expect to see the way we engage with our social media audiences shift, but no matter what, the actual engagement will always be an indicator of quality and interest.

Social Media Becomes the Primary Source of News Information

As the internet works to replace TV and newspapers, more people turn to consume information, especially news, on the internet. Many users find the breaking news stories on their feed and use that to navigate to the main news site for more information.

With social media, the news spreads fast, with Facebook and Twitter becoming the main sources of news. Forbes conducted a survey that revealed half of the internet users surveyed say they hear about the latest news on social media before they ever hear about it on a news station. The survey also found a 57% increase in traffic to news sites from social media websites.

“Social on Social” Communities

We already see a lot of social on social activity, because of groups within Facebook and Twitter parties on Twitter. As social continues to evolve, it will become even easier to build a small social community around a niche or topic. As more of these communities form, it will be easier to find and filter information on various topics and niches.

At this point, your social media platform won’t just be a platform, but a platform that supports a platform. It presents the chance for these mini social communities to represent their social media presence as their own platform.

What are your thoughts on these trends? Do you have any other ideas about how we can expect to see social media evolve over the next decade? Share them with me in the comment section.

Categories
Social Media

An (Almost) Exhaustive List of Social Media Abbreviations and Acronyms

Understanding social media abbreviations and acronyms is essential for effective communication in an out of your social media marketing department. 

If you’ve been observing social media conversations, you have undoubtedly seen these acronyms and lingo. We’ve all had that awkward moment when we’re staring at something that we don’t understand.

Many of the social media acronyms get thrown around casually in captions, comments, and conversations between people. Social media acronyms and abbreviations are essentially the airport codes of the internet. You must know them to start and you generally have to pick them up on the fly.

When you’re in charge of creating social media marketing content or responding to your customers, you must know the most common social media acronyms. This helps you understand what your audience is saying and allows you to better speak their language.

There are of course some acronyms that may find their way into business meetings, marketing, or sales report this makes it even more important to know what they stand for so that you can become better at your job.

That’s why we have compiled this extensive list of social media acronyms and abbreviations to help you stay current with the latest lingo.

Network Specific Abbreviations

Let’s begin with the common acronyms that are related to specific social media networks and go from there. Though these network specific acronyms are intuitive, it’s important that you know them well.

FB: Facebook

IG: Instagram

TW: Twitter

YT: YouTube

LI: LinkedIn

While participating on social media across any of these networks, you may also come in contact with acronyms that refer to features on them. These are especially important if you are on Twitter where abbreviations are commonplace due to character limits. Knowing them helps you improve Communications with followers and your team members.

DM: Direct Message

This refers to a message that is sent between two users. These are mostly used on Instagram and Twitter. Users and companies generally ask followers to DM for more information.

PM: Private Message

This term is a more generic phrase for one-on-one communications that are not visible to the public. This could also be used to describe DMs.

RT: Re-Tweet

When you share someone else’s tweet to your own feed, you are retweeting them. Companies, celebrities, and influencers alike often after followers to “RT” a post to increase its visibility.

MT: Modified Tweet

This is similar to a RT, except you’ve made some changes to it for brevity, or added your own thoughts to it. It’s also known as a Twitter Quote.

Social Media Abbreviations and Acronyms

AFIK: As Far as I Know

AMA: Ask Me Anything

These refer to social question and answer sessions. Brands and influencers often host AMAs on Reddit, Twitter, or in a live stream.

BRB: Be Right Back

This is a relic, but it is seen on social media when the time is right.

BTS: Behind the Scenes

If you want to show your followers what a day in the office is like, use this to give them a behind-the-scenes look.

BTAIM: Be That As It May

BTW: By The Way

This is a quick and easy way to add more information, throw shade, or go on a tangent.

DAE: Does Anyone Else

DYK: Did You Know

Offer a fun fact to your audience but save valuable character space with this one.

ELI5: Explain It To Me Like I’m Five

Most commonly used on Reddit, this is a way to say that you want someone to take a complex topic and simplify it so it is easier to understand.

FBF: Flashback Friday

This is one of the many ways to throw back to throw back to the past. There’s also TBT for Throwback Thursday, and WBW for Way Back Wednesday, if you want to share something and it’s not Friday yet.

FBO: Facebook Official

When a person or people decide to become public enough about their relationship to put it on their Facebook profile.

FF: Follow Friday

A tradition in which people send tweets recommending other Twitter users they think are interesting to follow.

FOMO: Fear of Missing Out

This is a social-bred phobia that demonstrates the anxiety of missing out on something while you’re away from social media or the internet. There’s also its opposite, JOMO, which stands for the joy of missing out – the happiness you feel when you’re not so hyperconnected.

FTW: For The Win

The sometimes sincere, sometimes sarcastic declaration at the end of a post to signify something positive.

FYI: For Your Information

This abbreviation is usually delivered with sass.

HT: Hat Tip

This is a virtual nod for credit to the original source, or the place you got the material from. It may also be written as H/T.

HTH: Here to Help/Happy to Help

This is used to show that you are available to help someone with something, or that you were glad to be able to be of assistance.

ICYMI: In Case You Missed It

This is used to re-share content that followers may have missed before.

IMO or IMHO: In My Opinion or In My Humble Opinion

This is used as a disclaimer for sharing a hot take on something. Some people think the H stands for honest, though we’re not really sure why anyone would share a dishonest opinion.

IRL: In Real Life

Some people will say that the internet is real life, and prefer to use “away from keyboard” (AFK) as the better way to refer to things that happen offline. But IRL is used to indicate that something is happening in the reality that exists outside of the internet – such as when two friends who’ve only known each other online meet in person.

LMK: Let Me Know

When someone uses this, they want feedback, or need to know the details about something that has yet to be determined.

NBD: No Big Deal

Typically used as a humble brag for something that is really a big deal.

NSFW: Not Safe for Work

This one is literally not safe for work. You’ll want to really think about using it on a corporate account.

WFH: Working from Home

Most often used in online chats with friends and coworkers, but has some use in social media, too.

SMH: Shaking My Head

For those moments you’re shaking your head behind your computer screen.

TBH: To Be Honest

Used to soften the blow of a negative opinion or a humble brag.

TBT: Throwback Thursday

Like FBF for Flashback Friday, but on a Thursday

TFW: That Feeling When

Generally used ahead of something that you relate to – usually with a meme.

TGIF: Thank God It’s Friday

Not the 90s ABC television lineup – just an expression of happiness that the weekend is almost here.

TIL: Today I Learned

Used when someone learned something new.

TL;DR: Too Long; Didn’t Read

Used to share content that’s too long for most people to want to read, usually accompanied by a short summary of the important part.

WBW: Way Back Wednesday

Like Flashback Friday and Throwback Thursday, but on a Wednesday.

Business Specific Social Media Abbreviations and Acronyms

These are acronyms that are frequently used in a business setting. While you’ll generally use these acronyms in your marketing meetings and communications, they are also useful for social media communications in certain niches.

B2B: Business to Business

This refers to companies that cater to the needs of other businesses.

B2C: Business to Consumer

This refers to companies that sell products or services directly to consumers.

CMGR: Community Manager

Community managers are responsible for managing and nurturing a brand’s relationship with a community. This should not be confused with a social media manager. Social media managers are responsible for managing a Brand’s social media presence across multiple platforms.

CTA: Call to Action

A written, verbal, or visual prompt to do something. “Sign up”, “Call us today”, “Subscribe”

KPI: Key Performance Indicator

A measurement to determine how effective something was at reaching the intended benchmark or goal.

ROI: Return on Investment

The amount of profit made as a result of a purchase or expense. This is one of the most common ways a business tracks the success of its campaigns.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing

A method of advertising on the internet that refers to purchasing ads on search engines to drive traffic to your website

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

A tactic to try and improve where your site appears on the search engines for relevant keywords to drive organic traffic (traffic that you didn’t pay for) to your website.

SERP: Search Engine Results Page

The paid and organic results a search engine delivers on the page for any given keyword.

SMB: Small and Midsize Businesses

Small businesses – those with less than 50 employees. Mid-size businesses – those with less than 250. You may also see them referred to as small and midsize enterprises, or SMEs.

SMP: Social Media Platform

Used to refer to the site of a particular social media network

SMM: Social Media Marketing

The practice of using a SMP to build brand awareness and consideration through building relationships and lead generation.

SMO: Social Media Optimization

Much like SMM, this involves using the appropriate SMP for your marketing efforts and making adjustments to attract the right kind of followers and leads

SoLoMo: Social, Local, Mobile

The convergence of mobile with locally targeted social media marketing that becoming more popular because of geolocation technology.

SRP: Social Relationship Platform

A centralized platform that allows companies to post on multiple social media websites, monitor, moderate, and analyze their activity. Examples include Buffer and Hootsuite.

TOS: Terms of Service

The legal rules you agree to follow when you use a SMP.

UGC: User-Generated Content

Any content – posts, videos, images, etc. that is shared by users of a SMP or other website.

WOM: Word of Mouth

The viral buzz of brand conversation through a company’s active encouragement.

Technical Abbreviations and Acronyms You May See on Social Media

API: Application Programming Interface

A set of tools and protocols that allows software developers to connect the backend of one system to another. For instance, Google Maps makes APIs available to allow other companies to integrate map technology.

CMS: Content Management System

Platforms like WordPress that allow for content creation and management.

CPC: Cost Per Click

Also known as pay per click (PPC), this refers to the price advertisers pay for each click they earn on a campaign.

CPM: Cost Per Thousand Impressions / Cost Per Mile

This refers to either the cost of 1,000 impressions on an ad, or the cost per mile driven.

CR: Conversion Rate

The percentage of people who have taken action. This is a key metric when calculating ROI.

CRM: Customer Relationship Management

The act of (or platform by which) creating and managing customer relationships from lead through conversion.

CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization

Measures taken to improve conversions.

CTR: Click-Through Rate

The percentage of people who click on a link after being given the option to do so.

CX: Customer Experience

The relationship a customer has with a company through all touchpoints.

UX: User Experience

In digital design, this refers to how effectively people interact with systems. Good UX aims to understand values, needs, barriers, and abilities.

ESP: Email Service Provider

A third-party company that offers email services such as newsletters and marketing campaign services.

GA: Google Analytics

Analytics platform for websites that allows you to track website visitors, bounce rates, referral sources and more.

PV: Page Views

The total of how many visitors have landed on any given page. The total number of page views along with unique page views is tracked.

RSS: Really Simple Syndication / Rich Site Summary

A format for syndicating web content that makes it easier to share content with a wider audience.

SaaS: Software as a Service

Cloud-based applications that are available to users anywhere there is an internet connection.

SOV: Share of Voice

The amount of exposure a company owns in comparison to its competition.

UI: User Interface

The visual part of the system that has been designed for the end user.

URL: Uniform Resource Locator

The global web address of a website or webpage.

UV: Unique Views

The number of individual views of a page, image, or video. If a single user views something 10 times, it results in one unique view, but 10 page views.

Categories
Social Media

Global Launch of LinkedIn Events

In October, LinkedIn announced the global launch of LinkedIn Events. This feature allows members to create, share, and discover professional events. This program hopes to foster offline community building and help members nurture deeper professional relationships. LinkedIn data shows the chances of people accepting connection requests on LinkedIn increases two-fold if they have attended a face-to-face meeting.

What is LinkedIn Events?

With LinkedIn Events, all members can create and join professional events. They will be able to have conversations with other attendees on the platform and stay in touch online after the event ends. LinkedIn Events also allow members to create private events to enable members to have safe conversations in a trusted closed-door environment. Invite filters allow members to tap into their professional network and find members based on their industry, school, company, and location to help curate their guest list.

Ajay Datta, Head of Product, India at LinkedIn had this to say:

“At LinkedIn, our core focus is to help our members connect and build lasting professional relationships. Face-to-face interactions are key to realizing this vision and bringing online communities to life. With this launch, our members now have a safe and trusted avenue to engage with their network online and offline. We see them using this product to host networking meet-ups, workshops, alumni meet, product launches, and other face-to-face gatherings.”

LinkedIn Events is the first product to be built out of the Bengaluru Research and Development Center for a global audience. The Bengaluru R&D Center also conceptualized and built the LinkedIn Lite Android app. Since 2017, it has scaled to more than 70 emerging markets across the globe and supports more than 21 languages. As of October, the app had seen more than 10 million downloads on the Google Play Store.

Datta added this to his statement:

“After the launch of LinkedIn Lite, I am excited to roll out our first ‘made in India, for the world’ product out of LinkedIn’s Bengaluru R&D Center. With Events, we are now taking on a larger mandate of building products to foster offline communities and help our members connect offline. This launch showcases LinkedIn’s commitment to the Bengaluru R&D Center and in the team’s talent in building world-class products.”

In addition to LinkedIn events, the team is developing and testing other methods to connect members such as business cards, proximity-based Bluetooth beacons, and QR codes.

How to Create a LinkedIn Event

  1. Visit the “Community” panel found on the left side of the newsfeed and click “+Create.”
  2. Enter a description, date and time, and venue information for the event.
  3. Invite your connections using a number of filters including location, company, industry, and school.

Though optional, sharing the event as opposed is highly recommended. This allows you to leverage the power of the feed to reach relevant attendees.

You can easily track attendees and invitees from the event page. The event page also allows you to post updates and interact with other attendees. The LinkedIn algorithm automatically provides timely and relevant notifications to attendees to ensure they don’t miss any important updates about your event. Members who have joined the event can also invite people from their own networks to attend.

Finding Relevant Professional Events to Attend

As a member, you can also search LinkedIn to find professional events. You will see invites in you’re my network tab. You can do the event and choose to attend from there. Look through your LinkedIn feed to discover events that people in your network have shared. Once you have chosen to attend an event, you will be able to see the details of who else is going so you can connect with other attendees. You’ll be able to share updates along with photos and videos on a dedicated event page and in your main feed. You will be able to continue to interact with other attendees and organizers both during and after the event.

LinkedIn began running a pilot program of LinkedIn Events in key metropolitan cities around the world last November. Two members share their experiences in the blog post announcing the global rollout.

Michael Quinn, Ernest & Young Senior manager said:

“What I really like about LinkedIn Events is the fact that I can plan an event with my network and not be required to go to another platform to organize the event. I’ve organized events all across the country, and LinkedIn Events made it incredibly easy for me to market those events and invite my local connections to that specific location. Since I was sharing the event through a post, it also enabled my network to share the event with people they felt would be interested in attending.”

Anna McAfee, a community creator, and educator said:

“What I really like about LinkedIn Events is the fact that I can plan an event with my network and not be required to go to another platform to organize the event. I’ve organized events all across the country, and LinkedIn Events made it incredibly easy for me to market those events and invite my local connections to that specific location. Since I was sharing the event through a post, it also enabled my network to share the event with people they felt would be interested in attending.”

Now that you can use LinkedIn Events much the same way you can use Facebook Events, will you be interested in finding events to attend in your local area? Will you be using it as another platform to share the events you are hosting?

I’d love to hear thoughts. Talk to me in the comments below.

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