Digital Marketing Services

19 No-Cost Marketing Techniques You Need To Learn

2020-07-27T23:59:00.002-07:00

A common issue with many startups is the "no-budget" phase. They have no money to do marketing.

So... What they can do?

There's a low-budget solution for startups with no money! You can focus on these low-budget marketing hacks instead of focusing on costly marketing methods.

The best thing about growth hacks is that they engage alternative methods of growing, which are (most of the times) lower cost.

Obviously, growth hacking isn't completely free. Especially, if the process involves people, employees, or outsourcing.

But these techniques are very powerful and they don't require a huge marketing budget.

1. Get Links From Your Service Providers

To rank higher, a website needs high-quality back-links. Where do you get these back-links? Obviously, buying links is not the advise here. So, what should you do?

Having already build partnerships with service providers or business, gives you an instant source of untapped link potential. Go ahead and reach out these providers and ask them to link to your website.

You will gain a few good quality links and all it will cost you was a few minutes of emailing.

2. Spot the un-linked mentions

Another cool way to get links and boost your website's authority is to search for "unlinked" mentions of your company or brand.

Once you spot such mentions in websites, email the editor of the site and ask them to provide a link. You might find many brand mentions all over the web!

{...A Few Emails Later...}

Boom! Free Back-links! The good kind!

3. Host a Webinar

Starting webinars will introduce your brand and products to a bigger audience. Think about the key here, the topic. The more appealing the topic, the better you'll attract interest.

You should be careful though, webinars take time. You need to brainstorm topics, plan the webinar and the work your promotion. You need to spread the word.

4. The Cross-promote Method

Another bomb marketing method that some companies use is "Cross-Promotion". This method allows you to partner up with other relative businesses who can market your services, in exchange for marketing their services too.

Something like the "shout-out for shout-out" on social media platforms!

It's a win-win strategy, and besides signing a document and an easy conversation, it does't require much work!

5. Blog Comments

The true meaning of marketing is to make your brand presence as popular as possible, right?! One way to achieve this is by commenting on blogs, not with general comments or spam, but by providing value too. Let's see how it works:

First things first: Identify the top 5 blogs on your niche. After that, read and comment on the blogs on a regular basis. As people see you name and brand, they'll become more familiar with it and why not, even curious about it.

By putting your comments, you establish a persistence brand presence. Just make sure your comments are useful and add value. Customers' perception of your brand is shaped by the quality of the comments.

6. Network In Person

You should not miss the opportunity to market in person. You'll meet amazing people in person who you may never meet online.

Everyone you meet is another marketing possibility. You, obviously, don't want to go and shove your business into people's faces, but as work comes up in the conversation, you can tell them about your business and brand.

The whole idea of networking is basically marketing. You get to introduce other people to your business live and in person.

7. Run a Contest

As we've mention in our Instagram posts, contests are an amazing way to get more audience and increase your engagement, especially on social media!

Even though we all have seen scams in this field, online contests are still a great way to gain some low-cost marketing publicity. It's an easy way to get some viral potential and improve your image as a brand.

8. Build a Referral Program

The main characteristics of the best marketing forms are that you can set them up, turn them on organically, automatically, and without much effort or cost.

Referral or affiliate programs may not work for every kind of business, but it always work the try.

Creating an affiliate program basically turns your customers into a de facto marketing department. You don’t spend marketing money unless they first make a sale on your behalf.

9. Use Twitter

Twitter keeps killing it in marketing! It's instant reach and massive output play a huge role on that. Twitter can produce high levels of referral traffic, brand exposure, and give you a nonstop social buzz.

A general suggestion is to follow at least 10 influencers in your niche, follow their followers, retweeting their tweets, mentioning them in comments, engage with them as much as possible. As you start getting more familiar with their platform, you'll you build your own platform.

10. Upsell Your Existing Customers

Most of the times, we trend to focus on gaining new customers, yet we forget our existing customers.

To be honest, the best marketing outcome comes from the existing customers.

Marketing at your own customers is easier and low-cost. You will see extraordinary benefits.

11. Build your relationships with niche influencers

Time to get cozy!

Every industry has a group of powerful players, they control conversations, shape the market, and reach huge audience.

Make these people your friends, and be direct. Provide them with a product, service of yours or partnering with them on a project are some simple and mutually helpful ways to grow your brand.

12. Claim a Hashtag

"Hashtags are the billboards of the Internet." Since hashtags are available on every social platform, you can create a hashtag for your business and use it everywhere you post.

13. Get More Email Addresses

Pay more attention to Email Marketing!

Growing your email list in one the most effective marketing methods.

14. The User-Generated Content

Everyone know that inbound marketing and content marketing go hand by hand. Having great content is key but you should be careful because content marketing can be expensive. Here's a way to gain more content and still have your budget intact:

The use of user-generated content.
Step one of the process: Motivate your existing fans and customers to tell their own story and create content, and boom, you have tons of fresh and engaging content that your audience will love. Your audience will create and share content for you!

15. Talk to Your Fans

Engagement is a key component of a great marketing strategy. Audience and customers love to be loved. You do too, right?! Show them your love and appreciation by retweeting, re-posting, favorite and like tweets and posts, liking their comments, and sharing their status. You cannot expect that a still social media presence will do all the work for you. You need to work for it, by engaging with your audience.

Be sure, they will return the favor and engage at a deeper level.

16. Blog

Blogging, cannot be missing from a list like this! A business blog is an absolutely necessary strategy for online marketing. Use it! Work at it and make it work for you!

17. Guest Blogs

Blogging is amazing but guest blogging is doubly amazing! Posting an article on another blog gives you, instantly more audience and fresh audience! Guest blogging is free. You just need to create a killer article, appealing to the blog's audience, and you might be invited back to write more articles.

18. Create A LinkedIn Group

LinkedIn is a free platform, and yet gives you great marketing opportunities. Many professionals use it a social media tool, a place to put up their resume, and not much else.

LinkedIn is so much more that an online platform to put your resume. Because of its high organic reach is a great place to publish content, connect with powerful people, find people to work with you or for you, and build a marketing group with thousands of members.

All of these with ZERO COST!

19. Offer Free Help to Others

Try giving to others, free of charge.

Of course you're not a charity. you're a business. But why not give away a product, an hour of your time, or a part of the services you provide for a customer who can't afford your services.

Conclusion

Marketing doesn’t have to break your bank account. Like we mentioned at the beginning of this article, marketing can require nothing more than the investment of your time.

Chances are, you can increase your marketing presence today by implementing one of these methods. Pick one and run with it.

What is your favorite no-cost marketing technique?

11 Best Social Media Marketing Tips To Adopt NOW!

2020-06-30T02:53:00.002-07:00

Social media has been used for many years from well-established brands but from newbies, to grow their audience, generate leads and sales. It may seem hard to build a brand using social media, but it’s now easier than ever to do so and connect with people and grow your brand -ORGANICALLY!

No matter if you’re just starting or you’ve been active on social media platforms for years, there’s always some room for improvement.

In this post, we’ll cover social media tips and tricks you can easily apply and optimize your SMM strategy.

General Tips for Any Platform

1. Create a specific strategy for each social media platform.

Every platform has its own pros and cons, that’s why you need to have a unique plan for each one in order to generate engagement. Your platform may not need to be present on every platform, yet you need your pots to be targeted, you need to have a strategy that is unique to the platform you’re using.

A quick way to figure out if the platform you choose is the right one for your business is by answering the following questions:

Why am I using this platform?

Who will reach on this platform?

What post types work best on this platform?

How are my posts unique to this platform?

If you have a hard time answering these questions, you might need to dig deeper into your investing time there. Having answered these questions will help you to build your strategy for this platform.

If you’re doing your first steps there, it’d be better to prioritize the quality of your content over the number of posts and platforms you use. It’s better to create the best ever strategy for your business referring to one specific platform and focus on succeeding there rather than sharing your time on 5 different social media networks with doing a mediocre job and have little or no results at all.

2. Be Consistent

Consistency is a key element when it comes to social media marketing. How often you post should be specific to each social media platform you use. Some networks like Twitter, Tiktok, and Instagram (stories) require you to be active a lot of times per day to get the best result from your audience. Other platforms, like regular Instagram posts, Facebook updates, and Youtube, don’t have such urgent characteristics and you can go easy on them. When you’ve determined your post strategy, take a look at factors such as how the algorithm of each platform works, and if the content is following a chronological order or is curated based on other factors.

This goes back in with your social media marketing plan. You should outline:

How often you plan to publish on each social media platform based on best practices for that platform
What type of content you plan to post on each platform
Who is your target audience on each platform

KEEP IN MIND: Your followers are likely following hundreds or even thousands of other people. If you’re not publishing new content as often as the other accounts out there, it’s easy to get lost and forgotten.

3. Focus on your message

Each platform you use will have it’s own unique demographic. There will be an overlap of the people you’re targeting on each platform, but it’s still important to understand your demographics so you can tailor your message to have the most impact.

Having a focused message will help you create higher quality content that is on brand and resonates with your audience. Having a strong message that you stay loyal to, you can be sure your social media posts are always relevant to your audience.

4. Watch what’s trending

After having your message determined, the next step you should follow is to keep an eye on the popular trends on each platform. If you catch a pattern or a strategy rising, if it aligns with your message and audience, it’d be a great idea to use it to drive engagement.

Be careful, though, to not jump on every trend you see. Creating posts that don’t support your message will not help you gain more engagement and it’s very possible to hurt you by showing your audience something they’re not interested in.

That’s why it’s so essential to have a focused message that you can use as a baseline.

5.Measure & analyze results

Analytics, as referred to in a previous article, is vital for your social media marketing, as you need to make sure you’re getting the best results from your SMM strategy. It’s a sad fact the over 40% of businesses don’t accurately track their ROI at all, which means there’s no way of knowing if their strategy is working or not.

To simplify your tracking process, identify key metrics that are important to your brand.

Some of the metrics that you want to look for are:

Reach and engagement for Facebook
Impressions, retweets, and mentions on Twitter
Clicks, impressions, and interactions on LinkedIn
Engagement and impressions on Pinterest
Likes, comments, and mentions on Instagram
Views and engagements on Instagram Stories

You should track these metrics on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis so you know when and if you need to make changes to your social media strategy.

6. Invest in Video Content

Video content is booming right now! IGTV, the rapid growth of Youtube, Facebook Live, and Tiktok have made social media users consuming more video content than ever before.

Video content not only gives really higher engagement but in fact, networks like Facebook and LinkedIn are giving higher priority in their algorithm to users posting video content. Meaning that brands using video are getting more exposure and reach than the brands that keep using the traditional text and images posts.

7. Join in on communities

Large social networks have smaller communities, and they’re increasing really fast. Whether it’s Facebook groups, Twitter chats, LinkedIn Groups, or Instagram grouped DMs, there are so many opportunities for you and your business to connect with like-minded people and companies in your niche.

Being a part of these communities will help you establish yourself or brand as an authority and let you connect with your more passionate audience.

8. Interact with your audience

No matter the platform you're using, interacting with your audience is the best thing you can and have to do for your business.

Social media users crave authentic interaction with the brands they follow, it builds trust. So on top of posting high-quality and relevant content, make sure you’re keeping an eye on each platform you use and engaging with your audience. Answer questions that come up on your posts, handles, or hashtags.

If you notice other users having a conversation about your brand or product, don’t be afraid to participate in and add additional value. Users want to know that there is a real person on the other side of the computer and not just a bot that sends out links all day.

You want your social media presence to represent a two-way line of communication. Engage WITH people rather than just talking at them.

9. Don’t be discouraged by algorithm shifts

Social media sites are well-known for randomly changing their algorithms without notice, leaving a lot of users frustrated at their lack of exposure.

Instead of looking for a quick fix, aim to understand what’s changed in the algorithm and adjust your content strategy — in many cases, maintaining high-quality content will help you avoid significant consequences from algorithm changes.

When algorithms change, it becomes crucial to stay present and to follow your users where they find the most value. A great example is Instagram. Instagram regularly changes its newsfeed algorithm and many users have noticed a significant drop in engagement in their posts. But Instagram Stories have remained consistent and still post chronologically.

So if your posts aren’t getting as much interaction as you’d like, shift your focus to reaching people through Instagram Stories. You can post a Story when you have a new post on to encourage people to click through to your profile and like the photo. This will let the algorithm know that users want to see your posts and do a better job of showing your posts to people who engage with them.

10. Influencers and micro-influencers

Gaining the trust of your audience on platforms that are so full of content is one the toughest things but a great way to target your audience on a more personal level is to create partnerships with influencers in your niche to help you promote your products or services more organically.

Partnering up with an established influencer activates the following in your niche, your brand gets exposure to a new audience that might no be aware of your company.

You can choose between nano influencers, who cultivate a small but passionate and more personal niche of followers.

As influencer marketing grows, micro-influencers and nano influencers add an extra level of authenticity. They have a loyal audience that knows them and trust them, getting a shoutout from them will let their followers know they recommend you as a brand to trust.

11. Involve your entire team

Your social media team doesn’t have to be the only people contributing to your social media posts.

Encouraging your employees from other departments to help your social media marketing efforts, whether it’s by contributing content to the blog, sharing their photos will show your followers that there’s a team of people behind the brand they follow and this will build transparency and grow their trust in you.

Conclusion

Social media is constantly changing. We see new updates and trends emerging every year, causing marketers and strategists to have to change their strategies in order to keep up. No matter if your audience is huge or you’re just starting, you can always use these tips to build your social media strategy. They can help you go ahead of your competitors and grow faster in a way that adds more value to you and your industry.

What social media tips and tricks that do you use to grow your brand? Let us know in the comments!

Digital News: Why Facebook Content Moderator Mistakes Have Increased

2020-06-11T11:40:00.003-07:00

Have you ever felt that Facebook made the wrong call and deleted your content, banned you from the platform, or even put you in "Facebook jail"?

You're not alone. More than 300,000 users (including our profiles) have experienced issues like these!

According to the latest released report by NYU Stern, Facebook content moderators review posts, images, and videos that have been flagged by AI or reported by users about 3 million times a day. Even CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that moderators “make the wrong call in more than one out of every 10 cases,” which, roughly, translates into 300.000 times a day - mistakes happen.

One of the main problems, according to the report:

“Major social media companies have marginalized the people who do this work, outsourcing the vast majority of it to third-party vendors.”

Facebook employs about 15,000 content moderators directly or indirectly. If they have three million posts to moderate each day, that’s 200 per person: 25 each and every hour in an eight-hour shift. That’s under 150 seconds to decide if a post meets or violates community standards.

But what if one of the things you need to review is a 10-minute video?

This could mean that a content moderator might only have a few seconds for other posts.
That's not an easy task.

And, as you might expect, all this became much more difficult during the Coronavirus pandemic. With the COVID-19 risk content, moderators were sent home, and without the proper technology, connectivity, and safety requirements met, Facebook’s automated system took full control. That was an unmitigated disaster, leading to widespread blocking or deleting of posts mentioning Coronavirus from reputable sources such as The Independent and the Dallas Morning News, not to mention millions of individual Facebook users.

Those automated systems still have problems.

Sherry Loucks, who runs multiple Facebook pages including one on breastfeeding, doesn’t understand how they work or why they’re blocking her.

“All the pages I run are now blocked by Facebook for ‘spam’ yet I only share credible content from fact-based sources,”

And, she’s concerned about double standards. While over 50,000 people follow the page, Loucks gets routinely blocked for “spam,” a problem that other pages such as one run by Ben Shapiro, with almost seven million followers, doesn’t seem to have.

“I have 16 Facebook pages but only post from four regularly,” “Ben Shapiro posts far more content than I do.

What’s the solution to that?

According to the NYU Stern report, ending outsourcing is one: make sure all content moderators are official Facebook employees, with adequate salaries. Doubling the number of moderators is another way, as well as placing content moderation under the dedicated oversight of a senior manager.

The platform should expand oversight in underserved countries too and sponsor research into the mental health impacts of moderating content from all over the world. And last but not least, the company should expand fact-checking to control the spread of fake news.

As the report says, social media without moderation would be simply unusable:

“Picture what social media sites would look like without anyone removing the most extreme content posted by users. In short order, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube would be flooded not just by spam, but by personal bullying, Neo-Nazi screes, terrorist beheadings, and child sexual abuse.”

That, of course, would be an existential problem for Facebook and other social media platforms.

If the company can reduce the number of false positives, it could also reduce the frustrations of legitimate users who are getting blocked or jailed seemingly in arbitrary ways.

Share your questions and opinions on the comments below! Have you experienced these problems too?

Digital News: Zoom is... Still Crushing IT!

2020-06-10T11:01:00.002-07:00

Thanks to remote work Zoom is gaining more and more territory in communication, especially between B2B.

Zoom Video Communication, the company behind Zoom Meeting. While the company has had nothing but steady growth going back to the first quarter of 2019 (fiscal year, not calendar), the first quarter of the fiscal year 2020 saw an amazing 169 percent revenue increase year over year.

Eric S. Yuan, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Zoom said, "The COVID-19 crisis has driven higher demand for distributed, face-to-face interactions and collaboration using Zoom. Use cases have grown rapidly as people integrated Zoom into their work, learning, and personal lives."

In April (2020), Zoom had already hit 300 million daily users, the grow though came with growing pains:

Zoom-bombings that required security updates (easily prevented now) and reports that the free use of the service may come with compromised privacy

Many companies have banned the use of Zoom, including SpaceX, NASA, and Google. Some of them, to be fair, have been vanished by Zoom (Google Meet/Hangouts). So have done many banks and governments.

Yet, this doesn't seem to troubles or hurting Zoom... but the financials of 2021 will tell us how much this affected the company.

While writing this post, I've found out something I need to share with you.
All the Zoom users need to update their app -NOW - and I have two critical reasons you should:

Researchers found two major security vulnerabilities that could allow a hacker to take over your device.

As Covid-19 made more people start working from home, Zoom has been under the spotlight - but not always for good reasons. Zoom has been through a phase of dealing with some security issues, incidents of Zoom bombing, and privacy scandals but it got better. Now, though, researchers have just found two major security vulnerabilities that could easily allow a hacker to take over your device.

Let's see the bright side of this!

Zoom patched these issues very quickly when the researches warned them. If you install the latest version of the app -which you should have by now, because it's mandatory- you should be protected.

The not so good news is that -at least- one of these security vulnerabilities is pretty serious.

So if your app isn’t updated you need to do it now, urgently.

What Are The Two Zoom Vulnerabilities?

The first vulnerability was an exploitable path traversal vulnerability in the Zoom app version 4.6.10 related to the GIF functionality. Tracked as CVE-2020-6109, an attacker simply needs to send a specially crafted message to a target user or group to trigger the vulnerability.

“Only Giphy servers were originally supposed to be used for this feature in Zoom,” Talos’ Jon Munshaw says. “However, the content from an arbitrary server would be loaded in this case, which could be abused to further leak information or abuse other vulnerabilities.”

Talos says there is a server-side fix for this issue but the researchers believe it “still requires a fix on the client-side to completely resolve the security risk.”

The Second Vulnerability was fixed in May, is a Zoom client application chat code snippet RCE vulnerability tracked as CVE-2020-6110. All an attacker would need to do to trigger this vulnerability is to send a specially crafted message. For the most severe impact, target user interaction is required, Talos said.

In an email, Zoom told me it had addressed both issues in its late April release. “Zoom’s fixes included both a server-side and client-side patch,” a spokesman told me, adding that users can help keep themselves secure “by applying current updates or downloading the latest Zoom software.”

Zoom is trying to constantly improve itself and make the app more secure, resolving issues as quickly as possible and always trying to keep users feels protected and safe while using the app.

(info from Forbes)

8 Tips to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

2020-06-06T12:45:00.001-07:00

Social media. We use at least one platform, daily.
We started stepping to this worlds slowly and now we just can't live without using a social media platform.

Businesses, of course, took advantage of that and a new, revolutionized way added to what we knew about marketing.

This new way needs new strategies, to be more specific, a really well-executed social media strategy that will bring results for brands and businesses.

Just a few of the benefits of an Amazing social media strategy are:

Increased brand awareness
Audience growth
Better connection with the audience
Increased website traffic
Higher lead generation
More conversions (which translates to more sales and money)

So there's no doubt that social media should be an essential part of your overall marketing efforts.

According to statistics, social media is a really large pond to go fishing for your target audience. Not being active on social media as a brand or business would lead to an incomplete marketing strategy.

If you’re ready to start your social media strategy, keep reading. We're doing a deep dive into the best tactics around it!

1. Set your goals and objectives

Having a solid plan, and goals are essential if you want to do start building your social media strategy.

If you don't know what to do, how are you going to achieve it? Not to mention that you cannot measure and evolve your strategies over time and if you don't have some strong goals to start with.

Your goals should align with your overall social media marketing efforts.

Writing down your social media goals is really vital if you want to reach them!

A study has shown that if you write down your goals it's 30% more likely to achieve them and become successful. In some other studies, this number climbs up to 40%.

A few good tips when setting your goals are to make them achievable and keep them broken down into smaller action steps.

2. Do your research and keep your audience in mind

Connecting and engaging with your audience is extremely crucial in today's marketing if you want to make a profit. Yet in order to do that, you have to understand your audience.
You have to be able to know their needs, wants and if possible how they feel (especially during uncertain times)!

Standing in your audience's shoes is now, more important than ever.

A few tips so you will understand better your audience:

Study your audience to get a better look at their soft spots.

Always take a careful look at the demographics.

Show up! Take part in conversations on forums where your audience "hangs out".

Respond to comments on your blog, and put comments on other blogs with the same audience.

Reply to comments or questions on your all social media channels.

Collect the feedback (there are many tools you can use).

Once you feel you know who your target audience is, you'll be better equipped to help them. People want to deal with businesses that care - not just a faceless brand. Which is what makes this step so crucial for any social media strategy.

3. Run contests to boost your strategy

A successful social media contest is one of the most alluring things you can use to increase your visibility, your followers, and your engagement!

The key here is to offer something of great value. Something your audience will find absolutely irresistible.

How to run a contest on social media:

Set your goals (do you want more Facebook page likes? Instagram followers? How many?)

Decide what social media platform you’ll host the contest on

Set a deadline for when it’ll end and when the winner will receive their prize

Create the contest and promote it!

To get mind-blowing results, aim to have your audience do something more. Create the contest in a way the audience will get extra entries for sharing and contest and similar things.

It’s a genius tactic. Your contest will basically run itself!

4. Create your content really carefully

Every piece of content you post on social media should be carefully thought-out and brings a lot of value. If you’re posting just to post something – you’re going about it all wrong.

Depending on the social network you’re posting on, you’ll need to learn the different purposes of each network.

Here are some examples:

LinkedIn – A professional network that is perfect for B2B audiences. It also includes LinkedIn Pulse, a content publishing, and distribution platform.
Facebook – Almost everyone has a Facebook account. Particularly good for news/entertainment-related content. While Facebook Pages struggle to perform, Facebook Groups can be a great way of connecting with your ideal audience.
Instagram – Perfect if your content is highly visual. Static images and short videos work incredibly well but it’s not as good at driving traffic back to your blog.
Pinterest – Similar to Instagram, Pinterest is highly visual.

Once you're more familiar with the different networks, you can focus on which ones you think are the best for you and your business.

An important component of crushing it at your social media strategy is the use of the right words. The way you deliver your message will vary depending on the social media platforms you're going to use.

But, in general, there are many ways to increase your online visibility in all the platforms.

A great way to begin is to learn how to create captivating copies on social media. Therefore, you'll have to use copywriting techniques, to address your audience directly. Use catchy hooks to start your posts.
Try using different content types, like blog posts, videos, photos, ask questions, etc.
Keep in mind to always write a description on every link you post, never just put the headline of the post.

A well-optimized social content will help you see higher engagement rates, more followers, and generate more leads and sales.

5. Keep the sales tactics to a minimum

The rude, traditional marketing went out of the window a long time ago, and for a good reason too. People don't like and do not want to be sold to.

People want to establish real connections and relationships with brands. That's the key ingredient to the special sauce that gets your audience or clients to trust you.

And if they trust you, they'll buy from you.

Watch out: Posting too many promotions in a short time frame can bring you a really negative outcome. People tend to walk away from a promotion bombard.

Alternatively, you can craft valuable content that people actually want to consume. Content that leads buyers to your products or services – without being pushy.

6. Take advantage of video content

The only case you've never seen how powerful video content has become is to be living under a rock.

Especially in social media marketing.

So, if you haven't already, it's now the time to jump on that wagon as soon as possible!

There tones of different ways to use video content in your social media strategy. But live videos are the ones that trending right now.

Live videos allow you to connect with your audience in the most authentic way possible. Plus you can always repurpose your live videos!

People engage with lives by asking questions, so you can show them you're not just a brand by interacting with them during and after your live.

Your audience will see you're a business owner who cares and this will bring you more results than any other promotional tactic. According to Facebook, live videos can skyrocket the interactions and engagement you'll see 6times more than average.

7. Create mind-blowing images

It's not a surprise that crafting mind-blowing images for social media should be a top priority.

A great and free tool you can use -which we use too- it's Canva.

Another option you have is to outsource. Many bloggers and business owners do this - and we can tell - it's well-spent money!

You’ll need to create graphics for:

Cover photos for each social media platform you have
Images for your opt-in freebies (you’ll want to post these on Facebook sometimes)
Facebook and Twitter posts
Instagram images – (You can use copyright-free stock photos or create a graphic using Canva or PicMonkey.)
Infographics
Pinterest graphics
The dimensions for these will change over time. So do your research when creating these to find the right sizes for social media images.

Every business’s images and graphics will vary, but you’ll want to make them cohesive with your brand and always eye-catching.

8. Connect with your audience

If you’re not building relationships with your audience or customers – it’ll have disastrous effects on your business.

Expanding your reach is undoubtedly the ultimate goal. And the best way to do this is by connecting in a genuine way with your audience.

This will lead to targeted people landing on your website and purchasing your services or products. Social media is one of the best tools to bring in new customers or clients.

Smart ways to connect with your audience:

Interact in Twitter Chats
Retweet on Twitter
Survey your audience
Engage in Facebook groups with a similar target audience
Always reply to comments on your Facebook business page

If you can master this, you’ll start to see the leads pouring in.

Social Media Analytics: Why You Need Them & How to use them

2020-05-18T03:33:00.001-07:00

Why do you need social media analytics and how to use them to grow your business or brand!

The "secret treasure" you are probably searching everywhere about your social media activity, is actually much closer than you think! It's your analytics!

The posts you've shared, the interactions you've had with your followers, all the comments you replied to, and all the other activities are extremely useful data.
This information can help your social media marketing in so many ways.

Let's see some of the reasons you should utilize your social media analytics and the tools you can use to track these data effectively.

1. They help you to get to know your audience better
Understanding your audience with the help of social media data can help you in many ways! For example, when you analyze your past posts you can find your unique best time to share. Timing has a key role in social media marketing. Posting when your followers are online and at the highest level of their alertness your post will gain more engagement, traffic, and sales.
Hence, you should analyze your social data and find your unique best time to post on social media.

2 They can reveal to you what the best social networks are for you
Not all social networks work for everyone. Just because some networks have almost or more than 1 billion users doesn't mean they will drive the best results.
There're smaller social networks, that have a more targeted audience and can help you execute your strategy even better.
Experimentation and the use of analytics to measure engagement, traffic, and sales are the best ways to figure which network will work best for you.

This data can be used to focus more on the networks are working for you and which not. You can use these data to prioritize the amount of time you spend on each social network.

A great tool you can use to figure out which social networks bring you the highest engagement you can use a social media dashboard tool, such as Cyfe. A tool like this connects several social networks and you can place data from all the networks in one single dashboard to compare their performance.

3 They can help you to create better content
Tracking your social networks will give you a better view and help you understand what content gives the best results.

On social networks like Facebook and Twitter, you are able to check whether images, videos, or links perform better. While on visual networks like Pinterest and Instagram you can see what type of content performs best.

Analytics can also help you check how your blog performs. You can check which content is shared more, the number of visits per social network, and even how much time the users spent and how many of them have converted to subscriptions and sales.

A tool you can use to make things, even more, easier is a tool like Buzzsumo

4 Analytics will help you understand competitors
Your competitors are creating content and running social media strategies too and this gives them their own unique data.
If you analyze their data, you will find out easier what is working and what's not. This will help you avoid the mistakes they've probably made and you'll focus on strategies that bring results.

A cool tool to help you with that is Similar Web. You just add the URL to any website and will show you the rate of the traffic the site gains from social media and networks. Then you can "spy" on your competitors' performance on social media and their content using the two tool you saw before, Cyfe and Buzzsumo.

5 They can help you create a better strategy
No one has ever created the best strategy in his first attempt. It takes time and hard work and social media analytics and help you out. Studying your social media analytics frequently will give you the opportunity to find out the mistakes you've made. Therefore, optimizing your strategy can help you eliminate those mistakes and boost your strategy.

Social media analytics tools are really good for that, yet, you need to use a technique that's called "social media listening"

What's social media listening? It's the process of tracking conversations to read and study what people saying about a specific brand, industry, person, business, etc. and to use this data as a leverage for your business.

Social media listening gives you in real-time what people say about you and your business online.
A great tool to give you a helping hand with that can be Sentione. You simply sign up for an account and add in keywords like your brand, product name, company name, etc. and the software will track all the mentions to these keywords and list them out and display the data in the graph report.

6 They will show you how social media campaigns are performing.
Once you start running a social media campaign you need to track it frequently to check if it's moving the way you wanted to.

If it's not going the way you planned it to, you can always make changes to the campaign and improve it and if the results are really bad you can stop it from running.
Sentione can also help you with this too, as it carries an analysis of campaigns to see whether it's having a positive, negative, or a more neutral effect.

Now you know more, you can decide on how to proceed. It's now the time to start spending more time watching and studying your social media analytics to improve your presence in both short term and long term. Having these data from the analytics will also ensure you get more out of the time you spend on social media networks.

Do you use your social media analytics? Is this helpful? Have you noticed any other benefits of tracking it? Please leave your comments down below.

Content Marketing Basics

2020-04-12T03:06:00.000-07:00

Introduction to content marketing

As traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective, you’re probably thinking about the best better way.

Here comes content marketing.

Content marketing is the marketing method of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly targeted audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

The keyword here is “valuable” and it’s what changes the whole definition from something that could describe almost any other form of advertising or marketing method.

Bill Gates, is his essay “Content is the King”, back in 1996, explains the purpose of content in the modern world, and how the internet is going to change the way we create, publish, distribute and consume content.
He sees the internet as a medium, which was something very new and different back then, he sees the revolution internet was bringing to people, on how they get information and communicate.
And this was just an introduction to what was going to happen in the following years. With the spread on the internet all over the world, the content came as one way to reach online users, to attract, interact and sell. It started with websites presenting their business with a few web pages. Then the more dynamic pages came up.

Today, it’s required from website owners to be active, to keep posting new information and fresh content. This is why many sites have a blog. A blog is a way to keep this dynamic approach, to be more active and to keep posting fresh content regularly. The benefits are numerous, from gaining traffic to expand reach through social media distribution and getting new leads too.

As the content has found its purpose in all the parts of online marketing, developing a content marketing strategy is an essential task and it’s something that needs to be managed very carefully with always keeping the right goals in mind.

Let’s check out the Basics!

What is content marketing?
Content is the information, it can be an idea, an experience or some facts you publish online. It’s anything that you produce and publish in order to offer it to your audience. Most of the time, content comes in text form, but it can also be visual, audio or video.

In the field of the digital world, content should have the following qualities:

• Useful
• Easy to consume
• Shareable
• Original
• Relevant
• Compelling
• Evergreen
• Personalized
• Authentic
• Engaging
• Educational
• Entertaining
• Insightful
• Conveying a story
• Contextual

In business promotion, content is used as a way to directly connect with your target group. Each of these qualities is supposed to increase your content quality, you present to your potential customers. While the main purpose is to encourage their interest in your brand or business through this content.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a type of marketing focused on the creation and distribution of online goods that directly or indirectly promote the brand.
Direct promotion associates with the creation of promotional materials and content for advertising purposes. This type is usually used in paid ads or affiliate links.
On the other hand, content marketing is generally void of any direct promotion. The purpose of this sort of content is to increase interest in your products or services. This way, indirect content marketing attracts leads and customers.

The essentials of content marketing

In business, you don’t create content randomly. It’s not only about writing about what you love, personally enjoy (it really helps if you love something and are passionate about it) or about viral posts, everyone is talking about.
In content marketing, you don’t write whatever comes to your mind though. You need to think very well before you’ll start writing

Content creation is so much more than having an idea about a specific topic. It’s a well-planned strategy that’s supposed to give your business certain results, which suggests that you have to think about all the features that can help you create the content that brings you to your goal. Starting from the target audience, to the SEO… Here you’ll find the aspects you need to consider.

Audience
The user experience, in terms of content, translates into “attention to the target audience”, which means that you have to have your audience in mind when you create content. After all, the content is the users primarily. Despite the type of content or the distribution methods you’re going to use, your content needs to resonate with your target group. That said, you should think about the following characteristics:

• Determine your target group
• Think about their possible questions, problems, dilemmas, etc.
• Be able to predict what kind of information can help in these situations
• Write content that is relevant to your target group
• Use the language your target group can identify with

Niche
In marketing, a niche refers to a concentrated topic that meets the interests of your target group, as well as to the products or services you’re selling. It’s the topic you want to focus on, having the intention to specialize in and become a sort of expert. Choosing your niche helps you to focus on a narrow subject, which helps you determine the road for your content marketing strategy.

Resources
This is the next step you need to take. The resources are necessary for content marketing strategy, and they need to be assigned to content creation like on any other strategy.

Competitors
Even though being unique is essential for content creations, it never hurts to check out what your competitors are doing. That’s how you keep up with the trends.

SEO
Search engine optimization’s major task is content optimization. The main purpose is to attract search engine crawlers and get the content indexed. This process increases the visibility of the content and helps the increase of website ranking in the search engine results.

Facebook Ad Review Delay Due To Coronavirus - What Should You do?

2020-03-21T11:01:00.001-07:00

Hello there! We hope you're doing well with this Coronavirus situation, things are going pretty wild everywhere in the world.

It's not only the physical shops and stores that are having a hard time but also marketers are facing some problems.
To be more specific, Facebook advertising has become a little more "hard" sue to coronavirus. Facebook ad reviews delay due to coronavirus and this is the topic, I'd like to talk about today.

Everyone who has tried to run some ads on Facebook has probably seen a warning which says:

"Expect Delays Due to Coronavirus. Due to coronavirus (COVID-19), it may take us more time to review ads. Ad delivery may also be delayed."

This happens because Facebook had shut down its offices and asked staff to work from home during the COVID-19 outbreak, and that means that many contract workers who weren't able to work away from the office are simply not working, so Facebook's capacity has been reduced in many areas.

As Facebook, mostly, uses contractors for content moderation, the company has warned earlier in the week that this could possibly lead to some delays and errors as it depends more on automated systems to detect and remove rule violating posts.

Facebook ads are also managed by contractors, which also means that there will be some delays in ad approvals, and incorrectly rejected ads due to the machines stepping in.

"We use a combination of people and technology to review ads on Facebook and Instagram, and our automated systems already play a big role in that process. Now with a reduced and remote workforce, we’re relying on automated technology even more."

"Well, what should I do?" You may wonder...

Let's see our options. According to the Facebook Help Center, two ways to prevent delays in ad review time are:

Only change the budget or start/end date for an existing ad so it doesn’t trigger a new review.
If your ads are performing well, consider extending the delivery period for those ads instead of creating new ads.

Both of the recommended practices involve already existing ads, so Facebook itself recommends to not create new ads because it's sure that they'll have a significant delay - even for weeks!

What other people do right now, though? We've got some facts for you here:

Brands have dramatically changed their images in their social media ads in the past weeks amid the growth of the COVID-19 pandemic. Videos and Images of people washing their hands and faces have surged by almost 600% according to a study by Pattern89.
The use of "cleanliness" has only been increasing since the Coronavirus outbreak begun. Including not only images and videos about staying safe and clean but with images of people touching their faces, sneezing, coughing, etc, etc. The same study has found a dramatic rise of the "face-mask emoji" in headlines.
As more countries getting in lockdown state and social distancing becomes a prescribed norm, ads have shown a significant drop of the term "human connection" and in travel-related images.

These 3 things are the current trends on Facebook advertising these days - if we can call them like that.

According to our team, the best way to use paid advertisement is to take a break from Facebook ads and utilize the other social media platforms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, even on Youtube. Star with a small budget and see which platform works better for you and your brand, or your clients' brands. Test them out, after all, testing is a vital part for marketers.

Maybe now is the time to try something new and see how it will go. There are a lot of options here for you, there's no need to get desperate because Facebook ads are having some issues right now.

3 Easy tips to revive your marketing strategy

2020-03-04T13:29:00.000-08:00

Whether your company is big or small, or you're a freelancer, learning new marketing skills and refreshing what you already know can help you both you or your team. Here you will find some tips

you can use straight up this minute.

1. Do less, achieve more

Multitasking doesn't really help you get more done in fact it can do more harm than good.

According to a study, it can take even 25 minutes to resume a task after being interrupted. This means, interrupting a task to work on another one can make both projects take much longer to complete.

So how can you keep yourself focused? A simple way to do this is to start every day by choosing one important thing to focus on first. Try picking the most challenging thing on your list. It's much easier to start with the most difficult tasks and then move on towards the simpler.

By starting with that one important task first thing, you get an energy boost that can carry you through the rest of your day.

2. Use the marketing tools you know best

You're probably using one or more marketing tools, either for scheduling, advertising, or to help you manage your social media accounts. But are you as skilled as you'd like to be?

Whether you've just started or you're well on your way, make sure you keep increasing your knowledge with e-learning courses or even Youtube videos, tutorials and ebooks. Until you're confident enough to use these tools, try to use simpler ones or even do things manually.

3. Innovate

If you're feeling ambitious and want to level up, not only your products or services but the whole organization, consider building a culture of innovation.

Incorporating a design thinking strengthens people’s ability to innovate by having them embrace and practice a certain mindset.

To start by what exactly means "design thinking". Design thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s remarkably useful in tackling complicated problems that are unclear or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing

So, the next time you need to solve a problem, you can try to grow your or your team's creative ability by focusing on the principles of empathy, expansive thinking, and experimentation.

It’s great to create an innovative product or service and it's not so great to build one that’s useless to people. That’s why your clients should be your number 1 focus. When you get inspiration from their needs, feelings and motivations, you can create really meaningful solutions to actual problems.

How To Create Your Social Media Strategy

2020-02-29T10:03:00.000-08:00

8 Simple Steps To Create Your Social Media Strategy

1. Set Smart Goals

The first step to creating a winning strategy is to establish your objectives and goals. Without goals, you have no way to measure success or return on investment (ROI). So, set your social media goals that align with your objectives.

SMART is the keyword here, and it's here to help you remember that each of your goals should be:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound

This is the framework that will guide your actions and ensure they lead to real business results.

Focus on tracking the meaningful metrics
Vanity metrics like retweets and likes are easy to track, but it’s hard to prove their real value. Instead, focus instead on targets such as leads generated, web referrals, and conversion rates.

You may want to track different goals for different channels or even different uses of each channel.

Make sure to align your social media goals with your overall marketing strategy. This will make it easier for you to show the value of your work and get executive buy-in and investment.
Take a look at the following board to see examples of the business objectives, goals, and metrics.

Start developing your social media marketing plan by writing down at least three goals for social media.

2. Learn as much as you can about your audience

Create audience personas

Knowing who your audience—and ideal customer—is and what they want to see on social is key to creating content that they will like, comment on, and share. It’s also significant if you want to turn social media followers into customers for your business.

Creating audience/buyer personas will allow you to think of your potential fans, followers, and customers as real people with actual wants and needs. And this will allow you to think more clearly about what to offer them.

Collect real-world data

Let assumptions aside. Thinking Facebook is a better network for reaching the Baby Boomers than the Millennials? Well, the numbers show that Millennials still outnumber Boomers on the platform.

Social media analytics can also give a ton of helpful information about who your followers are, where they live, which languages they speak, and how they interact with your brand. These insights enable you to refine your strategy and better target your social ads.

3. Research your competition

Your competitors are, probably, already using social media—and that means you can learn from what they’re already doing.

Run a competitive analysis
A competitive analysis will help you to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and their mistakes). You’ll get a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own.

As you track competitor accounts and relevant industry keywords, you may notice shifts in the way these channels are used. Or, you might find a specific post or campaign that really hits the mark—or totally bombs. Keep an eye on this data and use to it evaluate your own goals and strategies.

The competitor analysis will also help you spot new opportunities. For example, maybe one of your competitors is dominant on Instagram but has put little effort into Twitter or Facebook. You might want to focus on the platforms where your audience is underserved, rather than trying to win fans away from a dominant member.

4. Do a social media audit

Check your current efforts. If you’re already using social media tools, you need to take a step back and look at what you’ve already done and achieved. Ask yourself the following questions:

What’s working, and what’s not?
Who is connecting with you on social?
Which networks does your target audience use?
How does your social media presence compare to that of your competitors?

Once you have answers to all these questions, you’ll have a good starting point for planning how to improve your results.

Your audit should give you a good understanding of what purpose each of your social accounts serves. If the purpose of an account isn’t clear, think about whether it’s worth keeping it.

To help you make the decision, ask yourself the following things:

Is my audience here?
If so, how are they using this platform?
Can I use this account to help achieve meaningful business goals?

Asking these questions will help keep your strategy on track and focused.

Look for fake accounts
Throughout the audit, you may discover fake accounts using your business name or the names of your products.
These imposters can be damaging to your brand, capturing followers that should be yours. Report them. You may want to get your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts verified to ensure your fans and followers know they are dealing with the real you.

5. Set up accounts and improve your existing profiles

Determine which networks to use (and how to use them)
As you decide which social channels to use, you will also need to define your strategy for each network.
For example, Benefit Cosmetics’ social media manager, Angela Purcaro, told eMarketer: “For our makeup tutorials … we’re all about Snapchat and Instagram Stories. Twitter, on the other hand, is designated for customer service.”

It’s a good exercise to create mission statements for each network. These one-sentence declarations will help you focus on a very specific goal for each account on each social network.

Example: “We will use Facebook ads to target a specific audience in order to increase sales.”
One more: “We will use Instagram for promoting and sharing our company culture to help with recruitment and employee advocacy.”

If you can’t create a firm mission statement for a specific social network, you may want to rethink whether that network is worth it.

Set up or optimize your accounts
Once you’ve decided which platforms to focus on, it’s time to create your profiles—or improve the existing ones so they align with your strategic plan.

Make sure you fill out all profile fields
Use keywords people will use to search for your business
Use images that are correctly sized for each social media network.

6. Find your inspiration

It’s important that your brand be unique, but you can still get some inspiration from other businesses that are great on social.

Who do you enjoy following on social media? What do they do that compels people to engage and share their content?

For example, National Geographic is one of the best on Instagram, mixing stunning visuals with compelling captions.

Then there’s Shopify. The e-commerce brand uses Facebook to sell itself by showcasing customer stories and case studies.

Each of these accounts needs to have a consistent voice, tone, and style. Consistency is key to helping your followers understand what to expect from you. They’ll understand why they should keep following you and what value they will get from doing so. It can also help keep your branding consistent even when you have multiple people working on your team.

Your followers' opinions are really valuable. Ask them!
Customers can also offer social media inspiration. What are your target customers talking about online? What can you learn about their wants and needs? If you have existing social channels, you could also ask your existing followers what they want from you. Just make sure that you follow through and deliver what they ask for.

7. Create a social media content calendar

Sharing great content is vital, of course, but it’s really important to have a plan in place for when you’ll share content to get the maximum impact. Your social media content schedule also needs to consider for the time you’ll spend interacting with the audience (yet you need to go for some spontaneous engagement as well).

Create a posting plan

Your social media content calendar records the dates and times at which you will publish types of content on each platform. It’s the perfect place to plan all of your social media activities—from images and link sharing to blog posts and videos. It includes both your day-to-day posting and content for social media campaigns. Your schedule ensures your posts are spaced out properly and published at the best times.

Once you have your calendar ready, use scheduling tools to prepare your posting in advance rather than updating constantly throughout the day. This allows you to craft the language and format of your posts rather than writing them on the fly whenever you find the time.

8. Test, evaluate, and adjust

Your social media strategy is a really important part of your business, and you can’t believe you’ll get it exactly right on the first try. As you start to implement your plan and track your results, you may find that some strategies don’t work as well as you’d expected, while others are working even better than expected.

Re-evaluate, test, and do it all again
Once data starts coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy frequently. You can also use this information to test different posts, campaigns, and strategies against one another. Regular testing allows you to see what works and what doesn’t, so you can adjust your strategy in real-time.

Ask your followers, email list, and website visitors whether you’re meeting their needs and expectations, and what they’d like to see more of. Then make sure to deliver on what they tell you.

In the social field, things change very quickly. New networks rise, while others go through significant demographic changes. Your business will go through stages of change as well. All of this means that your social media strategy should be a living document that you look at frequently and modify as needed. Refer to it often to keep you on track, but don’t be afraid to make a few changes so that it better reflects new goals, tools, or plans.

When you update your social strategy, make sure to let everyone on your team know. That way they can all work together to help your business make the most of your social media accounts.

Top Instagram Stats for 2020

2020-02-29T03:52:00.001-08:00

Let's take a look at some IG stats briefly at first, and then to dive into more details you need to know if you're using Instagram for business.

1 billion active users monthly
500 million people use Instagram stories daily
The gender mix on Instagram is pretty much even; 52% women - 48% men
63% of users log in at least once a day
Instagram users will spend an average of 28 mins per day on the platform in2020
200 million Instagram users will visit at least one business page daily
Instagram's potential advertising reach is 849.3M users
1/3 of the most viewed stories are from businesses
75.3% of U.S businesses will use Instagram in 2020
Brands post an average of 2.5 stories per week

1. Instagram is the second-most downloaded free app in the Apple app store

Only YouTube had more downloads in 2018 (2019 statistics are not yet available). That’s a good indication that Instagram is continuing to attract new users—as verified by the Instagram user statistics you’ll see later in this post.

2. Instagram is the 10th most popular Google query

About half of the top 10 searches are generic terms like weather, news, and videos. But Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Amazon also feature in the top 10, and all ahead of Instagram.

Still, since Instagram is not primarily used through a web interface, the app’s high download rank is a more relevant figure.

3. Instagram is currently hiding like counts and video views in 7 countries

Instagram started hiding like counts in Canada in April, and in six more countries in July.

Those countries are:

Australia
Brazil
Canada
Ireland
Italy
Japan
New Zealand

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that Likes no longer matter. In fact, since 41% of Canadian content creators said engagement dropped after like counts were hidden, it means it’s more important than ever to create powerful Instagram content that inspires engagement.

Instagram user stats

Who exactly is using Instagram? These Instagram user statistics reveal the details of Instagram’s audience right now.

4. 1 billion people use Instagram every month

That makes Instagram the second-ranked traditional social network in terms of active users, behind Facebook. When considering all social platforms, Instagram ranks fifth – behind Facebook, YouTube, Whatsapp, FB Messenger, and WeChat.

5. 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day

In the three years since its launch, Stories has become a huge part of what makes Instagram so popular.

With half a billion people using Stories every single day, it’s clear that Stories are an important channel for brands. (You’ll find more Instagram Stories stats throughout this piece that further emphasize this point.)

6. 89% of users are outside the U.S.

Of Instagram’s one billion users, only 110 million are located in the United States. Americans are the largest Instagram audience, but they’re very far from the majority. Rounding out the top five countries for Instagram users are:

Brazil: 70 million users
India: 69 million users
Indonesia: 59 million users
Russia: 40 million users

This is important information when thinking about how to define your target audience on Instagram, and what kind of content to create.

7. Instagram will reach 112.5 million U.S. users in 2020

That’s a 5.4% increase over 2019, as estimated by eMarketer, which also predicts the network will reach 117.2 million U.S. users in 2021.

Sure, we just told you that the U.S. audience represents only 11% of all Instagram users. But it’s still an important audience that’s growing consistently.

8. Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform in Canada

Instagram’s growth numbers in Canada are even more impressive. The social network saw a 20.4% growth in Canada in 2018, and a 7.3% growth in 2019. eMarketer predicts further growth of 6.1% in Canada, to 12.6 million users, in 2020.

9. The country with the highest Instagram percentage reach is Brunei

Brunei might not have the most Instagram users, but it is the country where Instagram reaches the highest percentage of the population: 60%, to be precise. Compare that to 37% of people in the U.S. (see below).

Rounding out the top five countries with the highest %age reach are:

Iceland: 57%
Turkey: 56%
Sweden: 55%
Kuwait: 55%

If you’re marketing to people in these countries, Instagram could be an especially effective platform for both organic content and paid Instagram posts.

10. 37% of American adults use Instagram

That’s a slight increase from 35% in 2018. Keep in mind that the%age of people using Instagram varies substantially by age group, as the network is far more popular with younger users:

18–29: 67%

30–49: 47%

50–64: 23%

65+: 8%

Again, you’ve got to do your research to determine the age breakdown of your own followers, but these Instagram user statistics provide a good starting point for thinking about your buyer personas.

11. Instagram is the most popular traditional social network among U.S. teens

Only YouTube is more popular with teens, and there’s some debate about whether to classify the video-sharing site as a social network. Seventy-two percent of U.S. teens say they use Instagram, compared to 69% for Snapchat and 51% for Facebook.

12. The gender mix on Instagram is pretty even: 52% female and 48% male

However, in the U.S., a substantially higher percentage of women (43%) use Instagram than do men (31%).

This discrepancy shows that you can’t make assumptions about demographics on Instagram—or any other social network. And you definitely can’t make assumptions about the demographics of your own followers. Instead, use social media analytics tools to get detailed information about your own audience, for a better content strategy and ad targeting.

For more details, check out our post that breaks down all the key Instagram demographics for social media marketers.

Now that you know who’s using Instagram, let’s look at some Instagram usage stats to reveal how they’re using the network, and how often.

13. 63% of Instagram users log in at least once per day

And 42% check multiple times per day. Only 16% log in less than once per week.

You’ll need to do some research to figure out exactly when your particular audience is likely to be online, so you can figure out the best times to post.

14. Instagram users will spend an average of 28 minutes per day on the platform in 2020

eMarketer predicts this minor increase from 27 minutes in 2019. In comparison, time spent on Facebook is slightly decreasing. Instagram saw more time spent per day than Snapchat for the first time in 2019.

15. 200 million Instagram users visit at least one business profile daily

So, what are Instagram users doing during those 27 minutes? A large portion of them are checking out business profiles. Is yours one they might want to visit?

16. 62% of people say they have become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in Stories

If you’re not using Stories yet, this is one of those Instagram stats that strongly suggests you might want to start. Not sure what to post on Stories? We made a list of 20 Instagram Stories ideas to get you started.

17. 11% of U.S. social media users shop on Instagram

Not surprisingly, the top reasons for using Instagram are looking at photos and videos. But more than one in ten users are using the platform specifically to shop or find new products.

Earlier in the buying cycle, people are using Instagram a lot. Fully 81% of people use Instagram to help research products and services.

18. 130 million Instagram users tap on shopping posts every month

Like the Instagram stat above, this shows that people are making purchases directly from Instagram.

Shoppable posts are still a relatively new feature on Instagram, and the even newer checkout feature makes it possible to buy products without even leaving the Instagram interface. If you’re not using shoppable posts yet, check out our post on how to sell products on Instagram.

19. More than 50% of Instagram accounts use Explore every month

The Explore tab is a place for Instagram users to discover new content and new accounts to follow. Getting your content featured on Explore is a key way to expose your brand to new followers.

20. For back to school, Instagram users posted twice as many red apple emojis as green

Why should marketers care? It’s true this is a pretty random Instagram statistic. But it shows that even small differences can affect how well people connect with something.

There’s no logical reason why people should prefer red apple emojis to green apple emojis, but they do. Could this extend to their preference for apple color in Instagram posts or ads? Only testing can tell you for sure—just like testing is the only way to know for sure what colors, words, and content types connect best with your audience.

21. The heart love sticker is the most popular Giphy sticker in Stories

And the most used face filter is heart eyes. Meanwhile, the red heart emoji was used 14 billion times in 2018.

22. 14% of U.S adults use Instagram as a news source

That’s nowhere near the percentage of people who get news from Facebook (52%), but it’s still worth considering when thinking about how to roll out new product launches and other brand announcements. Women make up the majority (62%) of news consumers on Instagram.

23. Instagram’s potential advertising reach is 849.3 million users

That’s 14% of adults aged 13 and over. This represents a 5.9% quarter-on-quarter increase in advertising reach in Q3 2019.

24. Instagram advertisers can reach a youth audience of 52.9 million

To be specific, this Instagram stat refers to users aged 13 to 17. That makes Instagram third in terms of youth advertising reach, behind Facebook (113.3 million) and Snapchat (66.9 million).

25. Brands pay Instagram influencers between $100 and $2,085 per post

On average, of course. For videos, brands pay an average of between $114 and $3,138, and for Stories they pay between $43 and $721.

Of course, this information is just a starting point to consider when thinking about how much to pay Instagram influencers for your own campaigns.

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26. U.S. Marketers spend 69% of their influencer budgets on Instagram

That’s way more than on any other network. YouTube comes in second at just 11%. If you’re planning to incorporate Influencer marketing into your strategy, Instagram is the best place to start.

Why do brands work with influencers? And how effective is this strategy? Get the details in our post on how to make the most of influencer marketing.

27. U.S. marketers spend 31% of their Instagram ad budget on Stories

They spend the other 69% on newsfeed. That’s a mix of about ⅓ Stories and ⅔ newsfeed. It’s a good balance to consider when planning your own Instagram advertising mix.

28. Instagram will earn $12.32 billion in ad revenue in 2020

According to predictions by eMarketer. That’s a big jump from $9.08 billion in 2019 and just $6.18 billion in 2018. Instagram’s ad revenue growth is outpacing that of its parent company, Facebook. That indicates brands are feeling more confident in Instagam’s ability to convert.

29. 73% of U.S. teens say Instagram is the best way for brands to reach them about new products or promotions

That’s significantly higher than the next-best options, Snapchat (49%) and email (37%). If you’re marketing to Generation Z, Instagram is your go-to platform.

Instagram publishing stats

Here are some fast brand publishing stats for Instagram.

30. 75.3% of U.S. businesses will use Instagram in 2020

That’s the prediction from eMarketer. They suggest only Facebook will beat out Instagram, with 87.1% of U.S. marketers using that network. If your business is not yet on Instagram, you should know that your competition is likely already using this powerful tool.

31. Brands post an average of 2.5 Stories per week

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the idea of incorporating Stories into your Instagram mix, this stat may provide some relief. To stay on par with other brands, you don’t need to be posting Stories every day.

32. One-third of the most viewed Stories are from businesses

Stories are a more laid-back and intimate form of content on Instagram, but they can be very powerful for businesses.

However, you can’t just repurpose your Instagram newsfeed posts for Stories. We’ve got seven tips to help you build a powerful Stories strategy that can help you catch up to other brands.

33. 60% of businesses on Instagram Stories use an interactive element every month

That includes location tags, @-mentions, polling stickers, and so on.

They’re using these interactive features for good reason. The polling sticker increased three-second video views in 90% of beta campaigns, and Dunkin’ Donuts saw a 20% lower cost-per-view when they used the sticker.

34. Brand Stories have an 85% completion rate

That’s a big year-over-year jump from 69%. This may be because brands are using shorter Stories now, with an average of 5.2 frames in 2019 compared to 6.9 in 2018.

However, longer Stories have greater reach. That means the ideal length of a Story depends on your specific goal.

35. Instagram represents 10.7% of social referral share to e-commerce sites

That’s way less than Facebook’s 80.4%, but more than any of the other social networks.

36. Stories stickers enhance video performance 83% of the time

However, for photo Stories, using two stickers actually reduces performance. Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, recommends using stickers when they “help communicate key information about your brand or product,” but avoiding them if they “contribute to visual clutter.”

37. How-to tutorials are the most popular form of Instagram video content

Followed by behind-the-scenes posts, interviews, and news coverage. Buzzfeed’s Tasty videos may be the best-known example of how-to videos on Instagram. Think about what kind of fun, quick, easy-to-implement instructions related to your business or niche you could convert into a short Instagram video.

blog.hootsuite

Social media statistics to fuel your 2020 strategy

2020-02-29T03:39:00.000-08:00

The social media scenery changes almost as quickly as you hit “retweet.” New trends pop up as platform developers design new features and algorithms that influence user behavior. Likewise, some topics, trends, and features quickly become outdated and, eventually, obsolete.

For instance, think of how it was once the norm to post on someone’s Facebook Wall. Now you hardly see that anymore, and you’ll probably find it weird or rude if someone posts a message on your Timeline. And think of how Instagram came up with Stories in 2016 and in just three years managed to attract over 500 million daily users of the feature.

That’s enough evidence of how fast the social media landscape is constantly changing.

So it's vital for marketers to always stay updated with fresh trends and social media statistics that could have an impact on their already existing strategies.

Here are 59 social media stats you should make a note of in 2020:

Facebook:

When it comes to social media platforms, Facebook seems to keep its dominance. It remains the most used platform among both marketers and consumers, according to the Sprout Social 2019 Index. Here are some remarkable social media statistics related to Facebook:

89% of marketers use Facebook in their brand marketing efforts.
83% of surveyed consumers use the platform.
66% say they Like or Follow a brand on the platform.
By the third quarter of 2019, the platform had attracted 45 billion monthly active users.
Live video is becoming a vital tool for social marketers, and 42% of them have already developed a strategy for Facebook Live.
From posting a median of 0.97 posts per day, brands are seeing a median engagement rate of 0.09% on the platform across all industries.
Along with its growing user base, the platform also sees an increase in revenue. It generated $17.65 billion in total revenue in the third quarter of 2019.
Out of this, a majority came from advertising. This isn’t too surprising considering how Facebook had over 7 million advertisers during Q3 of 2019.
Facebook use among U.S. marketers is on a slight increase from 86.3% in 2018 to 86.8% in 2019. This number will likely reach 87.1% in 2020.

Instagram:

Among all social media platforms, Instagram probably sees the most evolution with new features every few months. In 2019 alone, the platform was testing a new display layout for IGTV, hiding likes in the U.S and introducing “Reels” mode similar to TikTok. And in late 2019, Instagram introduced a layout feature for Instagram Stories, allowing users to post multiple pictures on one screen. This goes to show how Instagram constantly attempts to stay relevant and update its features with the changing times.

So it’s only natural that the platform will continue to see an increase in user count and engagement. These Instagram-specific social media statistics draw a more precise picture:

Instagram now has over 1 billion monthly active users–a 42.86% increase from 2017 when it had just 700 million. That’s a lot of growth in two years’ time.
Among these users, 90% follow a business on the platform, suggesting that Instagram users are interested in hearing from and about brands.
The platform also takes the cake when it comes to engagement. Brands are driving a median engagement of 1.60% across all industries on Instagram.
Instagram continues to be the most popular influencer marketing 89% of marketers in a Mediakix survey say that it’s the most important social media platform for influencer marketing.
78% say that Instagram posts are the most effective content format for influencer marketing, while 73% say the same about Instagram Stories.
Instagram profiles saw a follower growth rate of 9.4%–16% during the first half of 2019.
Considering these factors, it’s not too much of a surprise that the platform is seeing an upward trend in ad revenue–jumping from $23.66 billion in 2018 to $28.52 billion in 2019. According to projections, Instagram will likely net $33.71 billion in ad revenue during 2020.
Instagram is also the only platform where there’s a significant increase in usage by U.S marketers. The number jumped from 69.2% in 2018 to 73.2% in 2019, with the possibility of reaching 75.3% in 2020.
Videos seem to perform much better on the platform, seeing 49% higher interactions than image posts.

Twitter:

Twitter still stands strong as one of the top social media platforms in spite of a slight drop in user count during the last two quarters of 2018. Marketers should continue to keep an eye on the latest social media stats specific to the platform if they want to include it in their marketing mix.

As of Q1 2019, Twitter has about 330 million active users worldwide.
79% of Twitter users like to discover what’s new, making it the top platform for discovery.
People are also 26% more likely to view ads on the platform than on any other leading platform.
Brands send out a median of 0.86 tweets per day, for which they see a median engagement of 0.048%.
Median engagement rate per post on Twitter across all industries
Twitter saw a 9% year-on-year increase in revenue for Q3 of 2019 with $824 million.
Its domestic (U.S) revenue experienced a higher-than-usual growth of 24%, while its international income grew by 12%.

Pinterest:

Pinterest is a platform for inspiration–whether it’s for home and seasonal décor, recipes, gifts or DIY crafts. People use the platform to discover new brands and products, find new things to try and get purchase inspiration.

Here are a few relevant social media statistics if you’re using Pinterest to market your brand:

Pinterest has 300 million Global Monthly Active Users (MAUs).
These users are highly active on the platform and have saved more than 200 billion Pins in total.
77% of weekly Pinners have discovered a new brand or product on the platform.
98% report trying new things they find on Pinterest.
83% of weekly Pinners have made a purchase based on the content they saw from brands on Pinterest.
The platform sees a 30% year-over-year increase in monthly active users.
During Q2 of 2019, Pinterest saw a 62% year-over-year increase in revenue, earning $261 million.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn has a completely different audience type compared to other social media platforms and is the largest professional network. This makes it the ideal platform for B2B marketers as well as employers and job searchers alike.

Check out these fresh social media stats if you’re going to include LinkedIn in your marketing mix:

The platform currently has over 660 million registered users, with 303 million of them being active on a monthly basis.
90 million of these users are senior-level influencers, and 63 million are in decision-making positions.
LinkedIn has proven to be an effective platform for lead generation and customer acquisition. In fact, it’s 277% more effective than Facebook in generating leads.
45% of marketers have also gained customers through the platform.
65% of B2B companies have used LinkedIn paid ads to acquire customers.
95% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for organic content marketing, making it the top-rated social media platform.
It’s also the top-rated paid social media platform, with 76% of B2B content marketers using it.
B2B organic content marketing by platform
Naturally, the platform is seeing an upward trend in its revenue. While it generated $5.2 billion in revenue in 2018, the number went up to $6.7 billion in 2019.

Social media advertising:

Although organic growth is what we all strive for, changes in social media algorithms have made it much more challenging to achieve. Paid advertising has become somewhat of a necessity, rather than a choice, for businesses that want to gain more visibility and strengthen the impact of their social marketing efforts.

Make the most of these social media advertising statistics to fuel your paid social efforts for 2020:

Marketers are spending more on social media advertising; with social media, ad spends amounting to more than $89 billion in 2019.
According to projections, this ad spends will see an annual growth rate of 8.7% and likely reach $102 billion by 2020.
Mobile users contribute to a majority of social advertising revenue. In fact, 94% of the Facebook advertising revenue for Q3 of 2019 came from mobile.
The average ad spends per internet user also sees a gradual increase in mobile, jumping from $13.49 in 2018 to $15.40 in 2019. In 2020, advertisers will likely spend $16.85 per mobile internet user.
Average ad spend per internet user by desktop or mobile
There’s a significant increase in the adoption of new digital video ad formats like shoppable ads and Stories ads. And marketers are increasing their digital video budgets by 25% year-over-year.
In fact, social network video ad spending accounted for 28.7% of total video ad spending, at $10.35 billion. We should expect to see a further increase in this number in 2020, as marketers invest around $12.48 on social media video ads.
Pinterest experiences the highest increase in advertising reach with a 4.1% quarter-on-quarter increase. Instagram comes second with a 2.9% increase, and Twitter comes close with a 2.5% increase. LinkedIn sees a 2.2% increase in advertising reach quarter-on-quarter, while Facebook sees a 0.4% increase.

Social consumer statistics:

Learning about the latest social media advertising statistics and platform performances gives you some insight into the current social marketing scene. Some social media stats also give you insight as to what other marketers are doing on different platforms.

But the most important is to begin to understand consumer behavior and preferences on social media. For example, there’s a growing appreciation for transparency and social awareness among consumers, with social media playing a crucial role in showcasing these brand values.

Check out the following consumer-related social media statistics that will help you take a consumer-first approach with your social media marketing:

Social media helps increase transparency, which can prove to be rewarding for brands in spite of the challenges it brings. In fact, 53% of consumers say they’re more likely to purchase from brands that are transparent on social. And 86% of Americans say transparency on social media is more important than ever before, which means they’re willing to take their business to a competitor if they see a lack of transparency.
Acknowledging mistakes, giving a straightforward response to customer questions, providing product/service pricing and showcasing manufacturing practices are some of the top ways for brands to demonstrate transparency through social.
53% of consumers expect brands to be transparent about product/service changes and company values on social media.
67% of consumers consider video to be the most transparent type of social media posts.
most transparent social post types
Social consumers expect brands to be more socially conscious, with 70% saying that it’s important for brands to take a public stand on social and political issues.
Taking a public stand can also have its own negative implications because 55% of consumers say that they would boycott brands whose views don’t align with theirs.
47% of consumers expect brands to speak up about these issues over social media.
According to 40% of consumers, collaborating with a relevant non-profit is the best way for brands to take a public stand on social media.
With that said, 53% of consumers also believe that brands are only taking a stand for marketing and publicity. This makes it crucial for you to support causes that you genuinely believe in and make your support clear from the very start.

The Conclusion

From these social media statistics, there are a few key takeaways that will help you adjust your strategy for 2020. First, the expanding adoption of video and live video makes it important for you to incorporate them into your marketing mix. Think about running video ads or streaming live broadcasts of company events, for instance.

Second, prioritize mobile users when advertising on social media as they contribute the most to social advertising revenue. Expand your focus on platforms like Pinterest and Instagram (if you aren’t already) as they offer higher engagement and ad reach.

Most importantly, brands need to follow their strategy to appeal to the conscious consumer as social and political responsibility seems to be a huge influencing factor in purchase decisions and brand loyalty.

What did you think of these social media stats? Which ones stand out the most to you and how will you use them? Let us know in the comments below.

5 Mistakes That Keep You Behind on Instagram

2020-02-27T13:27:00.001-08:00

Let's take a look at the 5 Biggest Instagram mistakes that are stopping you from growing and some solutions.

Instagram is a great platform to move in and start to engage with your audience as the engagement rate is on 2.2% while on Facebook is only 0.22%. This visual platform can provide you your great views and leads, and also help you build a better relationship with your audience and customers, yet as with every other social media platform you need to do some work and try to avoid some mistakes.

Let's take a look at the 5 biggest Instagram mistakes that are stopping you from growing and get your account to the next level! (and some simple solutions too!)

#1 Instagram Mistake: Posting inconsistently

Posting inconsistently is the number one mistake people make on Instagram.

Something we totally get it, life gets crazy and you get busy. And after having a really long day the last thing you want to do is think about Instagram, what to post and to create your contenet. BUT if you want to grow your account and see real progress you need to be consistent.

How to fix this:

Check your Instagram insights to see what days and time your followers are most active, based on those analytics you can create your posting schedule - and stick to it.

Take, create and edit pictures in bulk, create a folder on your phone or pc with all your photos that are ready to be posted, plan your feed in advance, start using an Instagram scheduling tool to help you stay organized.

#2 Instagram Mistake: Not engaging with other people

Another huge mistake people make is not engaging with other users. Look, Instagram is a SOCIAL media platform, meaning you need to be social!

You can’t expect people to follow you and engage with your content if you don’t do the same thing, right? You always get what you give and that’s why you need to give!

Give your time, give likes, give follows and give shoutouts!

How to fix this mistake:

Spend at least 20 minutes each day on liking/commenting on pictures in your home feed. (I prefer to spend 20-30 minutes before I post to engage and then, I'm going back to answer to all the comments!)
Spend some time engaging with people in your niche - you can find them through hashtags.

Respond to all the comments on your pots and start a conversation with your followers (a great way to do this is by asking a question in your caption or on your stories).

Respond to DMs or thank people with direct messages for their support on your page and content.

#3 Instagram Mistake: Playing games

No, I’m not talking about games you play with your followers on your stories and cute stuff like these. I am talking about the follow/unfollow games, leaving spam comments, buying followers and similar things.

They are not only against Instagram’s terms of service but also a waste of your time as people will see right through you and won’t engage with your account.

Buying followers or using some kind of automated liking/commenting tool might seem like a “quick way to grow” but these things will only be proven harmful for you in the longterm.

How to fix this mistake:

The answer here is simple: Just DON’T do it
Put some effort to grow your account organically, build relationships with your followers!

#4 Instagram Mistake: Posting low-quality photos

I'd never thought I'd be mentioning this but here we are!

We all hear about how important it is to use the right hashtags and engage with other people to grow on Instagram but those things are only an ADDITION to having amazing content.
Instagram is a visual platform and the main reason people will follow you is, obviously, your content.

Creating great content is the first step in growing your account and getting followers, Instagram's algorithm is constantly changing and gets better daily, so you need to have unique content and really awesome graphics. Instagram has the ability to understand if your account is genuine or fake, and unique posts have a really important role here!

How to fix this mistake:

Take your pictures during the day. Avoid taking pictures after sunset as they won’t turn out as sharp and clear. Don’t take pictures in direct sunlight.
And if you create graphics, just use royalty-free images (or mention your source), same about quotes and try not to copy other's images. It's really tiring for Instagram users to watch the same images and quotes over and over again with just a few changes.

In case you can't come up with something unique, just repost from others and give them the credits.

#5 Instagram Mistake: Using too broad hashtags.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make on Instagram is using hashtags like #business or #fashion that are too popular and too broad.

What do I mean by that?
Let’s take a look at #fashion. At the moment, there are 775m posts under this hashtag.
All the top posts have over 1k likes and have been posted less than an hour ago. The possibilities of your photo showing up in the top posts are close to none. And not only that, most of them aren’t even fashion related. There are selfies, food, even nature.

The reason I'm telling you this is to help you understand that using this kind of hashtags would do absolutely NOTHING for you, your post will get lost among so many photos. That’s why it’s so important to use less popular hashtags where your post has a chance to appear higher, so more people see it. This means: more people see it > more engagement > more followers.

Besides looking for less popular hashtags, it’s also essential to choose hashtags that are related to your photo.

How to fix this mistake:

Search for less popular hashtags
Use relevant hashtags
Niche down ( look for more specific hashtags)

Now if the latest solution seems to you like a huge work or you're struggling to find the best hashtags for you, I can help you with that a bit more, just Click Here

6 Social Media Trends To Watch in 2020

2020-02-18T08:30:00.000-08:00

Social media marketing is one of the most powerful methods of marketing right now, and it will continue to grow in popularity as we dive deeper and deeper into the digital age.

Living in the digital age has opened up a new world of opportunities, not just for regular people on a global level but also for brands that are looking to develop into doing online business as well. In fact, the internet has allowed more entrepreneurs and businesses to rise up than ever before by giving an inexpensive and all-inclusive platform for people to begin gaining a profit through their own channels.

In the present and the immediate future, the face of social media marketing will continue changing as we move more toward trends that include personalization and connection and away from trends that commercialize brands and made them seem distant and isolated from their audiences.

The need for putting more effort to genuinely engage and build relationships with your audience grows bigger than ever before. If you don't work on that, you will probably start to stumble and fail to grow in a digital world where everyone is looking to build connections.

Your audience, instead of turning to you, will turn to your competitors who are happily dominating over your niche by providing both great services and products, as well as a confident brand for them to build a relationship with and grow to trust and love.

As social media platforms keep evolving we try to predict the next big trends.

So here I will share with you the trend predictions for social media marketing in 2020, based on past experience and great observation.

Social Media Trend #1 - Shopping on Social Media Will Expand.
Social Media Trend #2 - Stories Will Become Marketers Favourite Thing
Social Media Trend #3 - New Opportunity: Micro/Nano-Influencer Marketing
Social Media Trend #4 - Rise of Social Media Communities
Social Media Trend #5 - Video Content Will Dominate.
Social Media Trend #6 - More advanced, dynamic and direct social ads

Let's analyse each one and see what they mean and how can be used!

1. Shopping on Social Media Will Expand.

This is a trend that will continue to grow. Increasingly, you no longer need to leave a site or platform in order to make a purchase or a product you've found.
You can go from seeing something you like while scrolling Instagram to giving your credit card information and making a purchase instantly.

I believe we're going to see more brands turn in this direction, and while currently it’s mainly being used by larger, well-established businesses, I think 2020 will give smaller brands, and hopefully even startups, access to tools like this.

2. Stories Will Become Marketers Favourite Thing

For a while, Stories were just a Snapchat thing, but then Instagram and Facebook Stories came out, and now even YouTube has its own stories format.

Stories can present viewers with more genuine insight, as the videos are often created on the spot. And there's a tremendous field of opportunities in the Stories. Since Stories content disappears rather quickly, this is the perfect time for marketers to capitalize on the fear of missing out (FOMO) and to offer flash sales and deals that only loyal users will learn to look for.

3. New Opportunity: Micro/Nano-Influencer Marketing

Micro-influencer marketing has been especially successful this year, as customers tend to connect with influencers who are more focused on niche experts.

On the other hand, many Instagram users have been avoiding influencers with 1,000,000+ subscribers; moreover, they’re perceived as more sales. Nano-influencers are influencers who are even smaller, have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, and that means that their audiences are even more niche and engaged compared to micro-influencers.

In my opinion, big Influencers will start lagging while Micro and Nano influencer marketing with start gaining ground. A celebrity influencer is likely to be paid to promote something, plus there’s a good chance that they haven’t even tried the product, so it’s difficult for the followers to trust their recommendations.

Micro-influencers have also been known for their marketing strategy that involves the promotion of products they’ve tried personally and liked. This builds trust in their followers, therefore, the engagement rate in micro-influencers is high and, most importantly, relevant. Micro-influencers have the best chance at establishing trustworthy relationships with their followers, they achieve the highest interaction.

Partnering with a micro-influencer would be an effective strategy to connect with the target audience and promote products in a meaningful way.

Nano-influencers have a great chance to build small communities of engaged followers, as the last are more likely to trust their word over a celebrity who’s often paid to support a product or service.

Partnering with a nano-influencer can give a business the advantage of a great opportunity to promote their products in a more meaningful way, as these influencers create engaging, relatable content.

4.The Rise of Social Media Communities

This may not be something new, but it is definitely something that is becoming more popular now than ever before!

Social media communities are basically social groups that are created by brands to provide a networking platform for their customers/clients. These are usually private groups that like-minded people can join to chat about their shared interests.

Facebook Groups are an excellent example of such social communities. Many brands use groups like these to bring all of their existing and potential customers together and engage with them in a meaningful way. Group members can discuss several topics, share their experiences, or seek solutions to their problems.

Social media communities can also be utilized to launch new products or services, seek customers' feedback, and gain valuable customer insights.

5.Video Content Will Dominate

Video content is one of the most engaging forms of content and will soon dominate social media. Whether it is short videos like those popular on TikTok or Stories or long-form content on YouTube or IGTV, videos are the future of social media content.

According to a Cisco study, by 2022, 82% of all online content will be video content. This definitely shows how important it is to start utilizing video content to stay relevant in social media.

If you’re not currently creating videos, it is now the time to include it in your content strategy. In the near future, videos will rule social media and anyone who doesn’t realize that will have a tough time.

A great starting point can be the use of features like Stories both for your social media content and for advertisements. You can also add videos to your social media posts, even on platforms that were traditionally dominated by image or text content.

6. More advanced, dynamic and direct social ads

Brands are still investing massively in social ads and there's a good reason for that. Customers are becoming increasingly comfortable with the concept of social shopping in general.
Combined with the fact that ads are becoming more advanced, it’s easier than ever for brands to encourage direct sales from clients on social media.

For example, Facebook’s roll-out of personalized ad experiences delivers products to customers, changing formats (carousel, collection) and calls-to-action based on who it’s being served to, this has a great dynamic.

In the meantime, the introduction of Instagram shopping also highlights the increase in direct social selling.
The platform essentially represents extra arm for e-commerce and brands looking to start selling on Instagram without having to funnel followers to a bio link.

Even LinkedIn’s ad platform has lately evolved to help B2B brands get their products and services in front of relevant customers.

The point here is that companies don’t need to be shy about selling via ads in 2020. They have plenty of options to be more targeted and compelling growing almost universally across all the major social platforms.

The importance and benefits of social media

2020-01-01T14:14:00.001-08:00

It's 2020! A decade is starting and let's face it, we all have a pretty good perception of how social media works, right? Many people have increased their brand awareness through social media platforms and even build their brand and businesses. We all use daily, at least one, social media app either for work or fun but do we really know everything about them?

Let’s go back to the basics. What is marketing? Marketing is the activity and process for creating; communicating and delivering offerings that have value to customers.

Now, let's take a look at social media marketing.

The purpose of social media marketing is to build a brand and increase a brand’s visibility, through building relationships and communicating with potential customers.

These two seem to go hand-in-hand. Although you may still be wondering, why social media?

‘‘Social networks are one of the fastest-growing industries in the world’’.

Social Media and Social Networking Sites

Similar to content marketing, due to the continuously developing internet marketing industry, there are countless digital media and social networking sites, all of which have a unique characteristic and purpose.

Let's see some social network examples:

Facebook is the biggest and arguably most powerful social network in the world with 1.55 billion active monthly users. Regardless if you are a startup or fortune 500 company, you need to be on Facebook and start engaging with your customers.

Twitter is known as the ‘‘in the moment’’ platform and boasts a respectful 255 million active monthly users. Twitter is a perfect online marketing tool for businesses that want to reach out to people (and are ready for a reply). The key is to be quick and smart!

Instagram is a visual platform designed for customers to post, share, comment and engage through digital media. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

LinkedIn is regarded as a professional social networking site. LinkedIn largely focuses on B2B marketing rather than B2C

Snapchat and TikTok, which is constantly growing, especially between younger ages!

What’s your take on any of the above social networking sites? Are there any other sites you display your digital media and connect with customers on?

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Having a social media presence without a proper strategy and plan can be just as damaging for your business as no plan at all.

“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and maintain a clearly-defined audience.”

Set Goals. Start big and work down.

Know your target audience. Don’t just use demographics but expand.

Social Media Platform. Decide which platform will help you connect with your audience. Will this take the form of a blog, video, podcast, etc?

Social Network Strategy. Focus on a social network that adds value. Just because a network has over a hundred million active users doesn’t mean it will instantly contribute to your brand’s objectives.

Measurement and Testing. What does success mean to you? You need to constantly analyze your strategy to understand how effective it is. Engage with your audience, find out what works and what doesn’t.

The benefits of social media

1.Increased Brand Awareness

Social media is one of the most cost-efficient digital marketing methods used to syndicate content and increase your business' visibility. Executing a social media strategy will considerably raise your brand recognition since you will be engaging with a large audience of customers.

2.More Inbound Traffic

Without marketing your business on social media, your inbound traffic is limited to your usual clients. The people familiar with your brand are probably searching for the same keywords you already rank for. Without utilizing social media as part of your marketing strategy, you'll have much more trouble reaching anyone outside of your loyal customer circle.

3.Improved Search Engine Rankings

Although posting on social media might get your business some site traffic, more effort than that is needed to see significant success. Search engine optimization is very important for achieving higher page rankings and gaining traffic to your business website. While social media doesn't immediately increase search engine rankings, Social Media Examiner states that more than 58% of marketers who have been using social media for one year or longer still see improved rankings.

4.Higher Conversion Rates

With increased visibility, your business gets more chances for conversion. Every blog post, picture, video, or comment may drive viewers to your business's website and increase traffic. Social media marketing allows your business to provide a positive impact through a humanization factor. When brands are interactive by sharing content, commenting, and posting statuses on social media, it personifies the brand. People prefer to do business with other people, rather than companies.

5.Better Customer Satisfaction

Creating a voice for your company through these platforms is important in making more friendly your company. Customers appreciate knowing that when they post comments on your pages, they will receive a personalized response rather than an automated message. Being able to answer each comment shows that you are attentive to your visitors' needs and try to provide the best experience. Every customer interaction on your business's social media accounts is an opportunity to publicly demonstrate your kindness for your clients.

6.Improved Brand Loyalty

One of the main goals of almost all businesses is generating a loyal customer base. Acknowledging that customer satisfaction and brand loyalty usually go hand in hand, it is important to continually engage with your consumers and begin forming a bond with them. Social media is not just restricted to introducing your brand's products and promotional campaigns. Customers see these platforms as a service channel where they can interact directly with the business.

7.More Brand Authority

Customer satisfaction and brand loyalty both play a role in making your business more authoritative, but it all comes down to communication. When consumers see your company posting on social media, especially replying to customers and posting original content, it makes you appear more trustworthy. Constantly interacting with customers shows that your business cares about customer satisfaction, and is available to answer any questions that they might have. Happy customers are eager to spread the word about a great product or service and they usually turn to social media to express their opinion.

8.Cost-Effective

Social media marketing is perhaps the most cost-efficient piece of an advertising strategy. Signing up and creating a profile is free for almost all social networking platforms, and any paid promotions you choose to invest in are a relatively low cost compared to other marketing tactics. Being cost-effective is such an asset because you can see a greater ROI and retain a bigger budget for other expenses.

9.Gaining Marketplace Insights

One of the most helpful benefits of social media is marketplace insights. What better way to know the thoughts and needs of your customers than by straight-talking to them? By monitoring the activity on your profiles, you can see customers' interests and opinions that you might not otherwise be aware of.

It's obvious that social media marketing has its benefits, so if your business doesn't already have the appropriate profiles, create them now! Fill out your business' info and post some engaging content to begin getting followers. Ask people related to your business to "like" and "share" your page to help build your profile. With consistent updating, the right social media marketing strategy will lead to increased traffic, better SEO, higher conversion rates, improved brand loyalty, and much more. There are no reasons not to include social media in your marketing strategy. As it is so cost-effective, there is hardly anything to lose. Your competition is probably already on social media, so don't let them take your potential customers. The sooner you start, the better the results for your business.

Success Stories From YouTube: Karina Garcia

2019-12-14T03:52:00.000-08:00

Did you know that almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day?

YouTube gets over 30 million visitors per day. In an average month, 8 out of 10 18-49 year-olds watch YouTube. Somewhere among all these views, miracles happen! Well, not exactly miracles, most of the success stories include months even years of hard work.

Before you said "yeah, right! how much of a work someone needs to do to post a video? The answer is simple! A lot of work, from brainstorming ideas for the next video to how to distribute your content and keeping up with the comments, emails, suggestions, etc, etc.

So here we have an amazing girl who was a waitress and now guess what? She is a youtube star!
Karina Garcia has millions of views on her videos.

Beauty and lifestyle vlogger who runs a popular self-titled YouTube channel, formerly called TheKarinaBear, where she posts hauls, DIYs, and makeup tutorials for her 9 million subscribers.

She made her YouTube account in 2012 but didn't start posting videos until 2015. She gained followers incredibly fast thereafter, with more than 250,000 subscribers in six months.
Garcia is known as "the Slime Queen" and rakes in seven figures annually thanks to a YouTube channel that features slime videos, her own crafting line, and three books as well as multiple brand deals. She now has an estimated net worth of $4 million.

Garcia said her family of eight, which lived in a two-bedroom mobile home, struggled when she was growing up. She said that almost four years ago, she was on a break from college and working as a waitress for her brother when she started making YouTube videos.

"I wasn't in school. ... I had like nothing going for myself," she said. "I remember thinking, like, 'What am I gonna do with my life?'"

Her sister was posting beauty videos so Garcia followed suit, making videos of her own DIY crafts. At the time, she said, her channel had around 60,000 subscribers.
Later that year, Garcia did a DIY slime video from a simple recipe she'd found on Pinterest. The video took off, mostly because there weren't many slime videos being posted to YouTube at the time, Garcia said.
Once she started posting slime videos, her subscribers hit 1 million.

"It was just so fast and it's funny because people call me 'Slime Queen' on YouTube or 'Slime Girl,'" she said. "I was so shocked when I started blowing up over slime. I was like 'Wait? What the heck?'... I was honestly shocked."

These days, Garcia doesn't just make slime. She experiments with different textures and scents and even puts slime into a balloon to create a stress ball.

"Slime has evolved a lot...It's not just a basic slime now. Now, they smell like cookies. Now, they smell like your favorite ice cream," she said. "A lot goes into it," Garcia said her income comes from her YouTube videos that now feature ads, her three books (two on slime and one on crafting), and her Craft City line as well as other deals.
The Craft City line, which she started in October 2017, was initially exclusive to Target but is now sold at other retailers including Michael's, Jo-Ann Stores and Ross.

Follow the link below to find her YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheKarinaBear/featured

information from: naibuzz and abcnews.go

P.S So you, my dear friend who keeps saying that you can't do it, I'm sure you can! Just do not give up!

Instagram Questions: 6 Ideas to use them to market your business

2019-11-14T11:29:00.002-08:00

Instagram introduced during the summer of 2018, a new feature called “questions” stickers that can be added to your Instagram Stories.

Instagram Stories are an engaging and fun way to start conversations with followers, and when used properly, can help you stand out from a crowded marketing field, create a solid relationship with your followers, and help people get to know your brand.

Of course, many individuals use this feature as well, but with a little creativity, it also has many different uses that can help you market your business. So why not give it a try?

There are many ways to use the Instagram Question Sticker to grow your brand and your business. We're going to see six different ideas that you can implement right away.

1. Answer Questions About Specific Products or Product Lines
Entrepreneurs and business owners tend to be an innovative group of people - always introducing new features and services. Sometimes followers don’t know why they would need a new feature or service, or they may not understand what it does.
When that happens you need to educate your customers and followers in order to let them know what problem this new product/feature/or service solves.

Instagram questions are an excellent way to answer customer questions in real-time about any product or service, and it’s especially good for answering questions about new and innovative lines that you’re bringing to the market.
This kind of feedback is priceless to business owners. It can help you address any weaknesses in the product or feature, give you new ideas, and help you develop sales copy around the features that your customers really like.

Getting feedback directly from your followers is one of the best ways to make sure you sound like your target market.

2. Create Custom Audiences
People who engage with your brand are more likely to buy from you. You can use questions to increase that engagement. Once someone engages with you on Instagram you can then create what’s called a “custom” audience, which means you can create ads that are only shown to people who already interacted with you – often referred to as a “warm” audience.

Then you can show this engaged warm audience the appropriate ads that promote your products and services. Often engagement audiences are some of the most profitable ads you can run.

And while you will always need to find ways to attract new attention to your brand, it’s important to advertise to those people who already like you and engage with you.

3. Use Instagram Polls to Create Short Surveys
People love to take polls. Just look at any social media feed and you can see just how many people are giving their opinion on “best hits of the 80s” or just about anything else at any given time. Using polls can help you calculate the interest around a particular product line so that you know where to put your advertising spending, and have a better idea of what your customers are more likely to buy.

Starbucks often uses polls to ask their followers which drink from the two compering is their favorite one. This not only helps them decide what coffees to feature but also can build engagement and desire around new products

If you have a small amount of inventory and are figuring out what to spend more money on, this type of poll can also really help to estimate what might move better for you in order to maximize your sell-through by picking the most popular item to hold inventory in.

4. A Traditional Q&A
If you have a business where people are interested in what you do or who you are behind the scenes, then this approach can help to create raving fans.

For example, if you make original artworks to sell on Etsy then you can ask people “What kind of art inspires you?”
Or if you’re a life coach you may ask “What questions do you have about anxiety?”
These types of questions can help your followers get to know you and can help you find new roads of interest and communication with your followers.

For instance, in the life coach example, you may get answers that allow you to develop a new mini-course or email marketing series around a specific type of anxiety that your community brings up over and over. If you do your research this way then the solution you offer will be tailored to your community and be likely to get higher conversions.

There is another great benefit to asking a question like this as well. When people like you, they’re much more likely to buy from you and this type of Q&A helps to create a more personal bond and closer connection with your prospects.

5. To Get Ideas for a FAQ page
This might be a bit of an unusual way to use Instagram Questions, but it works well. By simply asking your followers to “ask you anything” you can find out what’s on their mind and what their most frequently asked questions actually are. This approach beats guessing what your followers have questions about.
What works well is creating a spreadsheet with all the questions that you get. Then you can sort the spreadsheet to see the most common questions. You can use those to create a high-quality FAQ that your customers will love, both on your website and in the Stories Highlights section of Instagram.

6. “How Can I help?”
If you’re an influencer or an expert, this can be a powerful strategy to build trust with your audience. The best bet here is to set a time limit on how long you’re going to be online. Say something like “I’ll be answering questions for the next 20 minutes. Ask me anything.” And then answer the questions. This can be an amazingly effective strategy at building credibility as an expert in your field.

Jeff Bezos: This Is the Number 1 Sign of High Intelligence

2019-11-01T04:20:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wonder what the Amazon founder looks for when he wants to know if someone is really smart? This article is here to answer that question.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sits atop one of the most successful companies of our time, not to mention a personal fortune of some $150 billion. I assume we can all agree that by any meaningful definition the guy is pretty smart. It's also obvious he has a talent for surrounding himself with other intelligent people who can help make his vision reality.

But how does he find them? That's a question he addressed when he stopped by the Basecamp offices a few years ago, the company's founder, Jason Fried, reports on the Basecamp blog. And the answer Bezos gave was the exact opposite of what most of us would expect.

Smart people are actually wrong a lot.

Most of us, when we want to figure out if someone is smart, ask if the person is frequently right: Do they have correct knowledge about the world and their area of expertise? Do they come up with the right answers when faced with difficult problems? Do their predictions turn out to be right?

But Bezos's strategy isn't just to look at how often people are right. Instead, he also looks for people who can admit they are wrong and change their opinions often.

Bezos has "observed that the smartest people are constantly improving their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they'd already solved. They're open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking," Fried reports the Amazon boss saying.

"Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

That willingness to consider new information goes hand in hand with a willingness to admit your old way of thinking was flawed. In other words, to be super smart you have to change your mind a lot. Essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Bezos apparently agrees that consistency is overrated.

"He doesn't think the consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait," Fried reports. "It's absolutely healthy - encouraged, even - to have an idea tomorrow that contradicts your idea today."

It's not just 19th-century philosophers who agree with Bezos. Modern science does too, although psychologists have a less poetic way of speaking about the flexibility of mind Bezos prizes. They call it intellectual humility. Studies of decision making show that people who are more willing to entertain the idea that they' re wrong make considerably better decisions. Being wrong, they understand, isn't a sign of stupidity. It's a sign of curiosity, openness to new information, and ultimately smarts.

So next time you're trying to determine if someone is actually super smart or simply bluffing, don't ask whether they're always right. Alternatively, ask when was the last time they changed their opinion. If they can't name lots of times they were wrong, they're probably not as smart as they want to seem.

Instagram Threads: Facebook's latest attempt to clone Snapchat

2019-10-04T02:24:00.000-07:00

"Facebook is pushing deeper into direct messaging with a new Instagram companion app called Threads"

Facebook Inc, on Thursday, announced the launch of Threads. A messaging app for Instagram users

The app will be available both for iPhone and Android.

What Is It?

"Threads" is a camera-focused app that allows Instagram users to share their status or instantly send photos and videos to people they’ve added to their list of close friends.

Through this new app, users can upload status, share location and battery status with their close friends on Instagram, the social media company said in a blog here post.

Facebook has been focusing on Instagram, its fastest-growing revenue generator, as its core platform has been under scrutiny from regulators regarding privacy and the spread of misinformation or fake news.

Users can also enable “auto-status” feature, which would automatically update their battery life and status based on the current location, the company said, adding that the feature is an opt-in. Precise location information collected for auto status will be specific to Threads and will not be used for ads, Facebook said.

One of the few unique features included in Threads is the ability to select friends and set their profile photo as a camera shutter button so that they can send photos and videos to that person in just a couple of taps.

“For your smaller circle of friends, we saw the need to stay more connected throughout the day, so you can communicate what you’re doing and how you’re feeling through photos and videos,” the company said in a blog post. “That’s why we built Threads, a new way to message with close friends in a dedicated, private space.”

The app borrows several elements from Facebook's competitor Snap, whose Snapchat app focuses usage on sending photos and videos through private messages. "Threads" was first reported by The Verge in August. Snap shares fell in reaction to Facebook’s announcement on Thursday afternoon. They were down as much as 7%.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has launched a Snapchat clone or a spinoff Instagram messaging app.

In 2012, Facebook launched an app called Poke that mimicked Snapchat, and it did it again in 2014 with an app called Slingshot. Neither app took off. Facebook tried once again in 2017 with Direct, a spinoff Instagram app focused on messaging that the company announced plans in May to shut it down.

sources:

https://www.cnbc.com

https://www.reuters.com

WeFoundOnline: The Best Business Advice and Tips for 60 Top Entrepreneurs

2019-09-09T03:06:00.000-07:00

This post is about the article we found on ryrob.com, titled "60 Top Entrepreneurs Share Best Business Advice and Tips for Success". It's a great source of motivation for new entrepreneurs and freelancers.

Here you'll find the links and some of the parts that our Digital Marketing Services' team picked up:

1. Richard Branson

“The best businesses come from people’s bad personal experiences. If you just keep your eyes open, you’re going to find something that frustrates you, and then you think, ‘well I could maybe do it better than it’s being done,’ and there you have a business.”

2. Arianna Huffington

"If you're going to start a business, you need to really love it, because not everybody is going to love it. When The Huffington Post was first launched in 2005, there were so many detractors. I remember a critic who wrote that The Huffington Post was an unsurvivable failure."
"When you get reviews like that and detractors like that, you have to really believe in your product. When you really believe in your product, you are willing to deal with all the naysayers and persevere." For more advice from Arianna, watch her full interview on Inc.

3. Sophia Amoruso

"Don't give up, don't take anything personally, and don't take no for an answer; you never know what you're going to learn along the way. The people who told me no, were the people that eventually told me yes; so don't forget it. "The people who told me no, were the people that eventually told me yes; so don't forget it."

4. Tony Robbins

"The most painful mistake I see in first-time entrepreneurs is thinking that just having a business plan or a great concept is enough to guarantee success. It’s not. Business success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics. And, frankly, most people’s psychology is not meant for building a business. My business advice? Think honestly about who you are, what you want to accomplish, and what mindset you need to have to get there. Because the biggest thing that will hold you back is your own nature. Few people are natural risk-takers or emotionally ready for the challenges of building a business. You can’t just sign up for a marathon and run it without ever training. You have to increase your capacity and become fit. Being an entrepreneur requires similar kinds of emotional and psychological fitness so that you don’t become the chokehold on your business’s success."

5. Guy Kawasaki

“My best business tip is to focus on the prototype. Don't focus on your pitch deck, business plan or financial projections. If you get a prototype out and you get enough people using it, you never have to write a business plan, do a forecast or do anything like that. A prototype is where you separate the BS from reality."

For more, you can follow the link below and don't forget "sharing is caring"

60 Top Entrepreneurs Share Best Business Advice and Tips for Success

How Search Engines Work?

2019-08-23T03:20:00.000-07:00

The purpose of this article is to provide you with a quick introduction to how search engines work.

We all use google. We've used it thousands of time so far, just to find answers and information, we didn't care about how it works. Now it's the time to dive in this part, that's why you clicked this link, right? You want to know how this giant called Google (and other search engines) work. Getting a glance on this process will help you to get an idea of what to need to achieve with SEO.

Search engines play a huge role in our daily life, on the way we get information or buy things. Whenever we have a question, the first thing we do it to open Google and do that search either by typing in the search box or through voice search. We expect to find what we're looking for in seconds and mechanically we click one of the top results given by the Google Search.

This translates into:

Google has to respond fast to every search request and provide with accurate results, therefore they have to do a lot of preparation work in advance.

This process is broken down into 2 major steps:

Crawling and Indexing
Ranking process (search algorithms)

Crawling and Indexing

Throughout this process, Google creates an index of ALL the websites that are publicly available on the Internet.

Consider this as a telephone catalog but much bigger and instead of keeping names and telephones it keeps key information about a web site.

Webpages that have been discovered by the search engine are added into a data structure called an index. The index includes all the discovered URLs along with a number of relevant key signals about the contents of each URL such as:

The keywords discovered within the page’s content – what topics does the page cover?
The type of content is being crawled – what is included on the page?
The freshness of the page – how recently was it updated?
The previous user engagement of the page and/or domain – how do people interact with the page?

To achieve this, Google has a number of programs called spiders (aka crawlers or bots) that crawl the web, collect and enter this information in the Google database for additional processing.

The crawlers are responsible for both finding new pages and monitoring existing pages for changes.

Over the years Google has become remarkably good at this and they can identify and index important information almost instantly.

Google has hundreds of spiders monitoring the web and an enormous database of storing and processing all the information.

Ranking Process and Search Algorithms

The mission of search algorithms that run through the ranking process is to make able for Google to give you a direct answer or present you with a list of websites that are most likely to satisfy your request, every single time you type a query into the Google search box.

Search algorithms are complex computer programs that analyze the data in the Google index and make decisions as to which websites to show in the results for any given query, and at what order.

The initial algorithm was created back in 1996, by the Google founders (Larry Page and Sergey Brin). At the beginning the algorithm was simple but over the years it has become very complex. It is believed that it takes more than 255 factors into account before making a decision.

Recently Google incorporated their Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology into the search algorithm so now the ranking decisions are made by both robots and the logic that is maintained by humans.

There have been many engineers who tried to decrypt the algorithm and understand exactly how ranking works but... it still remains Google’s precious secret!

Though, there are some known factors that Google admitted that are part of the algorithm (like page speed, information security (SSL) and mobile-friendliness) but the rest were never officially released or admitted by Google.

One of the main goals of SEO is to present Google with the right signals so that during the ranking process, the search algorithm will ‘pick up’ your site and show it on top of the search results.

What about BING and other search engines?

Google it might be the most popular search engine with more than 60% market share but it’s not the only one. There are other search engines like Bing, Yandex, duckduckgo that hold the other 40% of the market.

In general, whatever optimization changes you make to your website to satisfy the search giant will help your rankings in other search engines as well.

Local SEO: 11 tips you just can't ignore

2019-07-27T11:20:00.001-07:00

Local SEO helps businesses to get noticed and sends customers to your door.

If you run a local business, understanding SEO can make a significant difference between success and failure.

Keeping in mind that local search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal an operator. Statistics show that internet search is how people find and interact with local businesses.
Research has found that almost 50% of all the searches on Google are for local information. Add the fact that more than 85% of people who search for a local business on a mobile device call or visit that company/store within 24 hours, and that shows us that local search is an excellent way to put your business in front of potential consumers.

SEO is a complex system, and local SEO is determined by a whole different set of factors. But there are some tips you can put into practice to get your business ranking in search results.

1. Get your Google "My Business" info right
Google My Business and Bing Places for Business are free directories, and they're absolutely vital for local SEO. These databases let you manually provide search engines with information about your business, including business name, address, phone number, opening hours, website link and photos.

You should make full use of these directories. Surprisingly, many of your competitors don't. Some of them haven't claimed their listing on these directories, and a great amount has too little information there,

These are free services, and they spoon-feed search engines relevant information about your business. Using them gives you the chance to appear in Google's local search results listings with your business marked on a map, your opening hours and your contact info.

Moreover, you can also use Google My Business to provide updates about your business. The Google Posts section allows you to add information about upcoming deals, events or offers and the updates are displayed in Google's search engine results pages (SERPs).

When you sign up, Google will contact you via mail to verify that you're actually the business operator. Once you're verified, you can provide all the information you can. To get the most out of these listings, make sure you provide up-to-date information on your business and upload some high-quality photos of your business' exterior, interior, and some products.

2. Add a map on your website

Embedding a Google Map to your location on your website is a simple process, and helps customers easily navigate to your business. Customers who land on your website looking for your business don't want to navigate away from your site to find you on Google Maps. Installing Google Maps on your site keeps your visitors there, increases your dwell time and lowers your bounce rate.

3. Ask for reviews

Reviews are such a powerful signal to search engines and a vital signal to consumers.

Online reviews can either give your business a serious boost or seriously hamstring you. It's important to ask happy customers to leave you an online review. Make it easy for them by providing a link. Even more important is creating happy customers in the first place. If your business is delivering on customer service, asking for reviews should be easy.

4. Different business locations - different URLs
If your business has more than one location, make sure each location has its own URL with its own contact info page. This makes it easier for search engines to differentiate between your locations and provide the correct information for each one.

5. Get your business listed
In addition to Google My Business and Bing Places for Business, there are a number of other directories where you can list your site. These citations are essential local SEO ranking signals. They provide valuable backlinks to your site, and they help build your authority and increase your visibility.

Directories you should look into are yellowpages.com, Yelp, Tripadvisor, the Better Business Bureau, and Citysearch.
Some of these sites will automatically grab your information from Google My Business or from other sources. But you want to make sure you claim all your business listings so you can update or edit information. Moz Local is a helpful tool to manage your local citations.

6. Be consistent with your contact info
You need to ensure that everywhere your contact information appears, it appears consistently. This means if you shorten your address as "St.," it needs to appear as "St." in every source; your contact info page, your Google My Business listing, your directory listings and so on.

You also need to make sure every page on your site and every external directory listing correctly lists your phone number and your opening hours. Not only will inconsistent business information confuse search engines, but it will also frustrate potential customers.

7. Pay attention to technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of making sites easy for search engines to crawl and index. There are a few technical factors search engines are looking for when they crawl your site.

They want your site to:

Be easy and logical to navigate
Understand how the pages relate to one another
Load quickly
Be mobile-friendly.

However, the main takeaways are to keep an eye on your site's speed, make sure it's designed to be mobile responsive and make sure it's easy to navigate.
As a local business, you might not search as deep into technical SEO as a major corporation, but you need to make sure you have the basics covered.

8. Do some networking for backlinks
Backlinks, or links from other sites to your website, are one of the most powerful ranking signals search engines take into account. Each backlink works as a vote of confidence from another website. Don't be afraid to do some networking to get backlinks.

One way to get backlinks is to join your local Chamber of Commerce. Not only will you get a link from the Chamber of Commerce website, but you'll also have the chance to meet other business owners who can be a possible source of backlinks. If you're not direct competitors, consider offering them a link to their website in exchange for a link to yours.

You can also build backlinks by contacting local journalists and publications and informing them about your business. Getting reviews from local publications can give you a serious boost in the SERPs.

9. Provide a separate URL for each product or service
If you provide a variety of products and services, make sure each one has a unique URL with its own content. Lumping all of your products and services on one page makes it harder for search engines to view you as an authority in a specific area because you're sending too many disparate signals on a single page.

10. Create great content
Finally, the best step you can take for your SEO is to provide great content that delivers value to your site visitors and brings people back to your site again and again.
"Content is the King" as Bill Gates said. Start a business blog and write about topics related to the product or service you offer.
Publish More Locally Optimized Content. Attach your blog posts into local events while still focusing on the industry you operate in. Great content brings people to your site and it keeps them on your site. Traffic and the amount of time, people spend on your website are significant ranking signals for search engines. If you give people content they find valuable, search engines will take note.

11. Make your website mobile-friendly
Since 2007, mobile users have been increasing until now, and it has exceeded the number of people using a desktop.

With this, Google has taken websites that are mobile-friendly as a ranking factor. So if your website is still not mobile-friendly, think about how many potential customers you are losing.

Why Is SEO so Important?

2019-07-21T03:59:00.002-07:00

First things first! What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.

Search engine optimization is now more important than ever and it is essential for every webmaster to understand the true meaning of SEO as well as the potential it creates for every business.

If your business depends on customers visiting your website, then you should take a second and ask yourself if you’re happy with the number of customers you’re receiving from your site. If the answer is yes and you’re overloaded with
work, then you probably already had your site optimized or chose other means of promotion. However, being here and reading this article, probably means that you're in search of answers or suggestions to drive more traffic to your website.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s address why optimization is important.

The majority of search engines users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and gain visitors or potential customers to your website or your online store, your website needs to appear in one of the top positions.

Users trust search engines and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching, increases the web site’s trust.

SEO is a good way to increase the social promotion of your web site (for free)! People who find your web site by searching Google or Yahoo are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media channels

Let's be more practical, SEO is an essential part of the online world when it comes to actually make money but the web is a HUGE place and you might need some extra help. That extra help has a name, SEO - Search Engine Optimization!

Whatever your company sells or offers as a service is more than likely offered by many others. Some of your competitors have probably already had their site optimized. My point is that there are probably 100’s if not 1000’s of sites ahead of you in the search engines.

A professional SEO can rank your site and bring EFFECTIVE traffic your way. Let’s use an example.
Let’s say you’re selling candles and you want your site to come up in Google when someone types in “candles”.

Now there is definitely some competition going on to rank for that term, but not a whole lot. You’re competing with roughly 7 million other sites using that term. Now you’re probably saying to yourself 7 million! That’s a lot! It may sound like a lot, but it’s not that bad.

The term “candles” was searched for a total of 2,580 times over the last 110 days. This is according to a very accurate tool we use to find key terms to use. Let’s say you rank #1 for that term and you get everyone who searched for that term to click on your site. Now, assuming you get 10% of the total traffic to complete a sale, that is 258 sales.

Assuming a candle is 5 dollars and each person only purchased ONE candle. 5×258 = $1290 Not bad right? The hard part is done. That’s getting people to your site. Now all you have to do is sit back, relax, and watch sales increase. The possibilities are endless

Do I need SEO for my website ?

2019-07-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

Yes! Yes and YES...

...Because when all is said and done, the only way that an Internet-based business is going to thrive is through increasing traffic to a particular Internet-based venue.

Traffic to a website is the key to the success of Internet business. One of the most effective methods of increasing traffic to a business website is through search engine optimization or SEO.

These days, a great number of people search for information about businesses that are operating on the Internet and the World Wide Web through search engine searches. Additionally, lots of people
tend to visit only those websites that are generated after a search engine search that are listed towards the top of the search results. Therefore, if you want to have people visit your site after a search engine research, you will have to work to make your business website rank high on the search engine result page.

Through search engine optimization or SEO, an online business can accomplish the goal of having its link listed higher on a search engine search result list.

Nowadays, there are many professionals that specialize in SEO. As a result, if you are new to the Internet, if you are new to the world of Internet business, you will want to consider hiring a professional. While SEO definitely is something that a business owner or administrator can master in the long run, if you are new to the Net and really are intent on getting your business up and running, you will want to take the time to consider engaging the services of an SEO professional. You can avoid the trials and travails of the learning curve — and get your online business up and running (fast) in a shorter period of time by engaging the services of a qualified SEO professional.

In conclusion, you also need to keep in mind that SEO is only one of the Internet marketing tools that you should use to promote and expand your Net based business enterprise. SEO alone and without other marketing techniques will not be enough to ensure business vitality and success in the long run. The Internet is very competitive and you will want to include SEO optimization as one of the marketing tools that you rely upon to promote your business enterprise

Digital Marketing Services

19 No-Cost Marketing Techniques You Need To Learn

A common issue with many startups is the "no-budget" phase. They have no money to do marketing.

So... What they can do?

{...A Few Emails Later...}

Conclusion

11 Best Social Media Marketing Tips To Adopt NOW!

Social media has been used for many years from well-established brands but from newbies, to grow their audience, generate leads and sales. It may seem hard to build a brand using social media, but it’s now easier than ever to do so and connect with people and grow your brand -ORGANICALLY!

In this post, we’ll cover social media tips and tricks you can easily apply and optimize your SMM strategy.

General Tips for Any Platform

Conclusion

Digital News: Why Facebook Content Moderator Mistakes Have Increased

Have you ever felt that Facebook made the wrong call and deleted your content, banned you from the platform, or even put you in "Facebook jail"?

You're not alone. More than 300,000 users (including our profiles) have experienced issues like these!

What’s the solution to that?

Share your questions and opinions on the comments below! Have you experienced these problems too?

Digital News: Zoom is... Still Crushing IT!

Thanks to remote work Zoom is gaining more and more territory in communication, especially between B2B.

Eric S. Yuan, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Zoom said, "The COVID-19 crisis has driven higher demand for distributed, face-to-face interactions and collaboration using Zoom. Use cases have grown rapidly as people integrated Zoom into their work, learning, and personal lives."

While writing this post, I've found out something I need to share with you.All the Zoom users need to update their app -NOW - and I have two critical reasons you should:

Let's see the bright side of this!

What Are The Two Zoom Vulnerabilities?

8 Tips to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media. We use at least one platform, daily. We started stepping to this worlds slowly and now we just can't live without using a social media platform.

Businesses, of course, took advantage of that and a new, revolutionized way added to what we knew about marketing.

So there's no doubt that social media should be an essential part of your overall marketing efforts.

If you’re ready to start your social media strategy, keep reading. We're doing a deep dive into the best tactics around it!

Social Media Analytics: Why You Need Them & How to use them

Why do you need social media analytics and how to use them to grow your business or brand!

The "secret treasure" you are probably searching everywhere about your social media activity, is actually much closer than you think! It's your analytics!

Content Marketing Basics

Introduction to content marketing

Let’s check out the Basics!

What is content marketing?

The essentials of content marketing

Facebook Ad Review Delay Due To Coronavirus - What Should You do?

Hello there! We hope you're doing well with this Coronavirus situation, things are going pretty wild everywhere in the world.

Everyone who has tried to run some ads on Facebook has probably seen a warning which says:

3 Easy tips to revive your marketing strategy

How To Create Your Social Media Strategy

Top Instagram Stats for 2020

Social media statistics to fuel your 2020 strategy

5 Mistakes That Keep You Behind on Instagram

6 Social Media Trends To Watch in 2020

Social media marketing is one of the most powerful methods of marketing right now, and it will continue to grow in popularity as we dive deeper and deeper into the digital age.

So here I will share with you the trend predictions for social media marketing in 2020, based on past experience and great observation.

The importance and benefits of social media

Success Stories From YouTube: Karina Garcia

Instagram Questions: 6 Ideas to use them to market your business

Instagram introduced during the summer of 2018, a new feature called “questions” stickers that can be added to your Instagram Stories.

Of course, many individuals use this feature as well, but with a little creativity, it also has many different uses that can help you market your business. So why not give it a try?

Jeff Bezos: This Is the Number 1 Sign of High Intelligence

Instagram Threads: Facebook's latest attempt to clone Snapchat

WeFoundOnline: The Best Business Advice and Tips for 60 Top Entrepreneurs

How Search Engines Work?

Local SEO: 11 tips you just can't ignore

Local SEO helps businesses to get noticed and sends customers to your door.

If you run a local business, understanding SEO can make a significant difference between success and failure.

SEO is a complex system, and local SEO is determined by a whole different set of factors. But there are some tips you can put into practice to get your business ranking in search results.

Why Is SEO so Important?

Do I need SEO for my website ?

While writing this post, I've found out something I need to share with you.
All the Zoom users need to update their app -NOW - and I have two critical reasons you should:

Social media. We use at least one platform, daily.
We started stepping to this worlds slowly and now we just can't live without using a social media platform.