Live streaming offers great opportunities, but without planning, you could be flirting with disaster.
You wouldn't be alone if you hadn't winced once or twice because of a social media blunder you'd seen unfolding or read about in the press.
Perhaps you've spotted an offer that has gotten out of hand, seen an ill-thought-through initiative that's simply jumped on the bandwagon, or read about the totally inappropriate handling of a relatively simple error.
Whichever it was, social media mistakes are easily done without proper planning.
And let's face it, things move quickly in this industry.
With the constant conversation and rapid developments amongst the different platforms, it's pretty likely that you'll have missed an update before you've even finished your morning coffee.
So as we head into another year of exciting enhancements and who-knows-what new launches, we've launched a new…
Live video now available to everyone on Instagram.
Instagram announced another update their platform this week. Instagram Stories will allow you to broadcast live video to your followers as well as being accessible via Explore.
Live Video for Instagram Stories is being pitched as a way to help you connect with your friends and followers who are there to share a moment with you. It is interesting that once you've stopped recording any trace that you were there will have disappeared, which may help the more camera shy of us use live video. I'm looking forward to seeing how brands adopt this new way to communicate with their audience.
Going live couldn't be easier - Just swipe right to access the camera and hit "Start Live Video". The only limitation you have is that you can only broadcast for up to an hour, which should be plenty for even the most seasoned influencer or brand. Instagram…
The new design overhaul of LinkedIn is the biggest in the site's history
Importance: [rating=3] (For B2B marketers)
Recommended source: LinkedIn blog
LinkedIn have just launched the largest desktop redesign since the site was first built back in 2003. They've re-designed the whole experience from the ground up, at the same time as re-designing their mobile app. The idea is to build a site that is more intuitive, simpler and faster to use. The new layout is currently rolling out across the world and should soon be live for all users - we are seeing it for some our team, on which this review is based, but not others.
Some of the most important changes for those using LinkedIn for marketing include:
Changes to the LinkedIn feed, tweaking the algorithm to get better at showing quality content users are interested in. They've also mentioned they'll be using humans as well as algorithms to select the most…
Chart of the day: Facebook advertising cost per click across the World
Facebook advertising cost per click (CPC) is highest in Australia, Norway and Japan, where as Taiwan, Portugal and South Africa were found to be cheapest for CPC ads, whilst cost per "like" was found to be highest in Germany at $0.58 per like and cheapest in Mexico at $0.03 per like.
The study also found that cost per app install was highest in the United States at $2.74 followed by Japan at $2.70 and cheapest in Vietnam at $0.38.
Cost per like was found to be most expensive at 18:00, possibly when Facebook is the busiest.
Younger users were also found to be cheaper to target and females are more expensive.
Notably Instagram was found to be more expensive than Facebook advertising.
Source: Buffer Social and Adespresso
Sample: Adespresso analysed over $100…
Google has begun penalizing the rankings of mobile sites with "intrusive interstitials" (Pop-up ads or email capture lightboxes)
Continuing their ongoing push for the "perfect" mobile experience Google announced via the Official Webmasters Blog "two upcoming changes to mobile search results that make finding content easier for users". Although their headline doesn't mention pop-ups and the article labels them 'interstitials', that's the change we wanted to alert you to since most marketers and web users know them as pop-ups.
The first change is basically general house-keeping for Google. They're looking to remove the labels they first introduced two years ago as part of the Mobile-friendly update AKA Mobilegeddon, to show which sites were mobile friendly (as shown below). It's likely that you have acted to ensure your site is mobile friendly, but if not, sites that aren't mobile-friendly were penalized on smartphone rankings from April 2015 with the signal increased from May 2016 according…
Instagram is letting select brands advertise via its 'Stories' feature
Importance: [rating=4] (For Social Media Managers)
Recommended Source: Instagram Blog
Instagram has just announced it is beginning the processes of letting advertisers make use of the large audience its newish 'Stories' feature has been able to generate since its launch back in the summer of 2016. Again taking the lead from Snapchat, it is introducing the ads in a mid-roll format- that is they will appear between stories the user has elected to see. In a way this is not dissimilar from TV advertising, where the user accepts the ads between content he or she wants to see. The format will however allow for the skipping of ads, so as to not degrade the user's experience.
Instagram reports that over 150 million people view stories content every day. Combine this with the fact Instagram users tend to be young, tech savy and have…
Customer surveys may not be exciting, but they're still crucial to business success
Customer surveys are a traditional marketing research method. The advancement of technology has attempted to push them to the side in favour of other means, such as email. However, there are many reasons not to renounce this particular practice and instead, see them as an addition to the typical advanced strategy. Customer surveys are not a novelty, but they are still relevant in today’s digital marketing environment. Here are 10 good reasons to convince you.
1. Offer Better Services
The primary purpose of any customer survey is getting feedback from clients. However, this feedback is only the means to an end. Just collecting your client’s opinion is useless if you don’t do anything with it. The expected outcome of any marketing research is an improvement. If you have struggled to…
Chart of the day: Celebrities and influencers on YouTube lead the way with earnings.
YouTubers with over 7 million followers are earning $300,000 on average, Facebook and Instagram accounts with over 7 million followers are also getting over half that amount too.
Even just 100 thousand followers on Twitter can lead to earnings of around $2000, but on YouTube an average of $12,500. Twitter seems to be on the cheaper end, whilst YouTube is the most expensive platform for influencer marketing.
Posts on Facebook can cost $75000 for influencers who have over 3 million followers.
Source: The Economist
Our expert level resource, Influencer Outreach Guide shows you how to use to find and monitor influencers using social media
Find out more about the rise of influencer marketing
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27 Dec 2016
Are you using hashtags correctly?
The discipline of marketing is filled with jargon, especially within digital marketing where constant technological change causes prevailing shifts in the landscape. Never have there been more three letter acronyms (TLA).
The elusive ‘hashtag’ symbol, which most people know from entering conference calls, still causes confusion amongst my clients and peers when used on social media platforms. Not so much what they are but when and how to use them. The approach laid out here is by no means an all-encompassing thesis study, merely a brief attempt to demystify the matter in my own subjective opinion.
Hashtags, although used in IT since the seventies in a different context, were popularised by Twitter in the late noughties as a way of clustering similar topics into easily retrievable categories, i.e. search #summer to find all conversations categorised as a ‘summer’ topic. This enables you to join conversations on topics that…
Example of how to harness Instagram to capture new audiences and convert that attention into sales
Instagram is one of the most effective ways to boost your e-commerce marketing. In a recent Yotpo survey of over 165,000 e-commerce businesses, 75% of them reported being active on Instagram. Customer research data is on their side. In fact, the research found that:
Traffic from Instagram is the most engaged: this means that visitors from Instagram stay on a site for an average of 192 seconds – that’s longer than visitors from every other channel, including Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
30% of Instagram users have bought something they first spotted on Instagram: meaning the potential for the browsing conversion to sales is high.
83% of Instagram users reported that they were influenced by friend’s posting about a brand on Instagram: meaning Instagram is a powerful megaphone for your brand’s messaging.
…
