After two days of appearing in front of Congress, Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook platform largely avoided any negative repercussions, it grew!
Last month, Facebook experienced the biggest “scandal” in the history of the company when it was revealed that tens of millions of users had their data improperly and illegally compromised in the interests of targeting voters for the 2016 US presidential election. A clamor was heard from Facebook users worldwide and when the public DEMANDED answers, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress. After two days, he exited unscathed. Not only did Facebook largely avoid any negative repercussions, it grew.
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What…
Embedding a video on your site can increase conversion rates by up to 80%!
Over the past few years, video has steadily become a more important element of digital marketing. With many social media platforms introducing increasingly video-focused algorithms, social video is fast becoming the most visible aspect of social media marketing. Some companies have also been leveraging video in their email marketing, in some cases resulting in a 96% higher click-through rate.
If used strategically, video marketing can benefit to your business tremendously. It has been shown to have a fantastic impact on ROI with a proven track record of boosting brand awareness, increasing lead generation and improving conversion rates.
This useful infographic from One Productions will guide you through the process of planning your next video marketing campaign. It provides a practical advice on how to calculate your ROI as well as a useful break-down of the video metrics…
6 implications for selecting and managing today's and tomorrow's marketing technology
We've been sharing the latest Marketing Technology Landscape map by Scott Brinker, @chiefmartec for several years now. You've almost certainly seen one of the earlier iterations since it has been widely shared. I love it because it's a USEFUL infographic - it prompts marketers to review their current Marketing Technology and take action to improve their Marketing Technology Stack.
When I discuss it with marketers when speaking or training, it certainly has a big impact, not always in a good way... It prompts that "OMG how do I cope?" fear amongst marketers and business owners due to its complexity. But, for me, from a positive POV, it shows the opportunity of the many tools we have available to deliver more relevant, more personalised communications today. It's inspired the Smart Insights team to create our own Martech infographic which includes both insight and operational tools…
Back at the start of the year, we told you that Mark Zuckerberg had boldly announced a significant change to our Facebook newsfeeds
An updated algorithm would see posts prioritized by family and friends over public branded content.
[embed]https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104413015393571[/embed]
I said it was bold.
Why the change?
This flip-reverse in direction has come out of a lack of mobile advertising inventory on Facebook, and a general dissatisfaction amongst users that the platform isn’t ‘very social’ anymore.
Just take a look at your own newsfeed and you’ll probably see post after post from brands whose Pages you follow, video content from media outlets or sponsored adverts, but you’ll also have noticed a few other posts sneaking in. I’m talking about posts your friends have commented on, or events they have expressed an interest in.
Facebook wants more of this kind of content. It wants to predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about,…
How marketers can take advantage of the latest Facebook update
The dust has now settled following Facebook’s announcement of a change in their algorithm to ensure users see more content from friends and family and less from brands and pages. In a bid to boost the number of meaningful interactions people have with Facebook, the change has led to fears of a further slump in visibility for some business pages but also optimism from influencers and brands with a dedication to high quality content.
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’Content shock’ is still a challenge for marketers
For many brands the new algorithm change will not be a huge surprise and for the largest…
How to ensure you track performance against target
KPIs, we all have them, sometimes we set them for ourselves, often they are set for us! The question is, are the KPIs you are reviewing supporting your efforts into making the boat go faster? Are they translated from business goals or just a bunch of metrics someone thought they may as well stick on a weekly powerpoint dashboard because Google Analytics spits out a sexy graph?
This post explores how you can ensure you are using the KPIs that are helping you track performance in line with your business goals? KPIs give an integral pulse on the business that helps keep you be aware of what's really going on and they allow you to exert control to pull the right levers to keep on track according to what actually matters. For me, the key when setting KPIs for marketing and digital marketing is to start with the business goals.
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Chart of the day: Marketers are most concerned with improving email engagement
New research has found that improving email engagement, followed by increasing sales revenue as well as increasing the number of subscribers are the top priorities businesses have for email.
Top priorities have moved from wanting the most subscribers possible to increasing engagement to retain those subscribers and earn revenue from them. Improving the quality of subscribers was also important for just under 4 in 10 participants of the research (38%).
Most businesses said they were successful in achieving their strategic aims for email marketing, the vast majority rated themselves either very or somewhat successful.
The biggest barrier to their success was found to be improving the quality of subscribers, marketers want to make sure they have the most relevant subscribers for the services and…
Why and how you should define goals vs objectives carefully?
I’ve found that goals and objectives are often defined and used differently within different companies or parts of a business and this can lead to problems when creating processes to track and improve marketing performance. This post gives a short summary of the difference between goals and objectives and why it matters!
Typically in businesses you see that objectives are specific, they cover the SMART or SMARTER criteria for objectives which make it possible to set specific targets for a time period and measure against these using sales or analytics systems. That’s the way it should be, I think, this is the de facto standard!
But in some businesses or some student case studies, “goals” are used to refer to specific objectives too. Perhaps it’s not helped that confusingly, in Google Analytics, goals are specific quantifiable metrics which are often used as…
WhatsApp, announced that it was not requesting any new rights to collect personal information in the agreement it created for the European Union
Barely a day passes without another social media platform notifying me of updated terms of business. Now, in a new twist to the ongoing data protection saga that is European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) - due to come into effect on 25th May 2018, WhatsApp intends to ban under 16 year olds across Europe from its system. Potentially that represents a significant chunk of its 1.5bn users. (WhatsApp is the fifth most popular social network with 12 -15-year olds, after Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube).
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According to researcher eMarketer, about a fifth of Snapchat users in the US are aged…
