Twitter is rolling back its threaded conversation layout launched earlier this year. The company announced the roll back of the threaded conversations feature via its Twitter Support account. Stating, “Your feedback shapes Twitter,” the microblogging site wrote, “We asked and you let us know this reply layout wasn’t it, as it was harder to read and join conversations. So we’ve turned off this format to work on other ways to improve conversations on Twitter.”
Twitter started testing the new layout for threaded conversations for iOS and web users earlier this year with the aim of making the conversations on the microblogging site more organised. Twitter wanted to make it easier to read and follow dialogues on the social media platform through the feature. Reports added that Twitter was testing the features for over a year in its prototype app, Twttr. In fact, Twitter is also shutting down its Twttr prototype app that it had launched last year. “We appreciate the feedback you gave us through this run of our prototype app Twttr,” Twitter wrote before adding that for now, they are turning off the Twttr prototype so that they can concentrate on new tests to improve the conversation experience on Twitter. The microblogging site further added that if someone is using Twttr, then they should switch to the main Twitter app to keep up with what’s happening.
Feature Image Credit: Reports added that Twitter was testing the features for over a year in its prototype app, Twttr.
An Instagram business profile can help you engage your audience with high-quality visual content.
Your business may already have a Facebook business page, and because Facebook owns Instagram, the two social platforms integrate nicely. Instagram is also very popular: According to Statista, Instagram has more than 1 billion monthly active users spanning a wide range of demographics.
But before you get started on Instagram, you’ll want to make sure this platform is right for your business. This guide will help you determine if it’s a good fit and, if so, help you get started with this popular social media network.
Is Instagram right for your business?
Instagram is appropriate for many, but not all, businesses. If you’re deciding whether this social media platform is right for your company, ask yourself the following questions:
Who is my target audience?
Is my target audience largely on Instagram?
Do I have the type of business that can be visual?
Do I have the budget and time to maintain an Instagram business page?
Answering these questions can help you determine whether Instagram will help get your brand, products and services in front of prospects. Certain demographics use Instagram more than others, so a different marketing channel may be a better fit for your business depending on its target audience.
Benefits of Instagram for businesses
If you determine that Instagram is a good fit, there are many ways it can benefit your business. Here are some of the advantages:
Creates brand awareness
Helps you engage with customers and prospects
Shows your human side
Allows you to partner with influencers
Drives leads and sales
Differences between a personal and business Instagram account
Instagram personal profiles (also known simply as Instagram profiles) are designed for consumer use, while Instagram business profiles are intended for business use. Later on, we will dive into the key features of Instagram business pages.
If your business intends to promote your products and services on Instagram, you should have a business account. However, you can have both types of accounts.
As an example, life coach Lily Sais has both a personal account and a business account. On her private personal account, she posts personal content about her life and her children for her close family and friends to see. On her business page, Peace from Within, a business that also requires her to get personal with her followers and be vulnerable, she does not post about her daily whereabouts. Instead, on her business page, Sais talks more about anxiety – an issue that her program helps people overcome – and also discusses her coaching program.
Both types of accounts are free to use, but if you want to run ads on Instagram business, you’ll need to pay.
Should I switch my personal profile to an Instagram business page?
If you already have an Instagram personal profile and are wondering if you should switch your account to a business profile, ask yourself these questions:
Would you like to keep your personal account to share personal or private content with your inner circle? If so, keep your current personal page and start a separate business page.
Do you plan on posting promotional content about your business? If so, you should have a business page, but you can also keep your personal page if you’d like.
Just because you have a personal page does not mean you need to post on it often, especially if you end up getting too busy working on your business page. But people who typically already have a personal page with more than a few posts find that they prefer to keep their personal page and start a new page for their business.
Key features of an Instagram business account
Instagram personal accounts offer fewer features than Instagram business profiles. As a business owner, it can be helpful to have access to data that’s available only through business pages and Instagram Insights. Here are some of the additional features you get from an Instagram business account:
Instagram Insights
Instagram Insights gives you access to data on content, activity and audience. Use this analytics tool to discover weekly information about the following metrics:
Posts: the number of posts and stories added to your page.
Engagement: the number of accounts that your account has reached, including the posts that led to impressions, interactions, profile visits and website clicks.
Audience insights, growth: the number of people who followed your page, the number of people who unfollowed your page, the average times your followers were on Instagram in a typical day and the days of the week your followers were most active.
Audience insights, demographics: data on users’ locations, age ranges and gender.
At this time, Instagram Insights is not accessible via desktop. Through the app, Insights is updated weekly.
Instagram advertising and promoted posts
Instagram advertising and promoted posts are available only through business accounts. These tools are a key way to promote your Instagram business account to get more followers and increase engagement. To run Instagram ads, you need a Facebook business account with Facebook ads manager.
Product tags for easy shopping
Every e-commerce business can benefit from Instagram’s product tags, which help encourage followers to make a purchase on your page. However, Instagram does not approve this feature for every account. To gain access to product tags, you must meet Instagram’s shopping availability rules. Your page must meet the following commerce eligibility requirements:
Comply with Instagram’s policies.
Represent your business and your domain
Be located in a supported market
Demonstrate trustworthiness
Provide accurate information, and follow best practices
How to use product tagging on your Instagram posts:
Once Instagram approves your account, it’s easy to get started with product tagging. Per Instagram’s instructions, follow these five steps to tag products on your Instagram posts:
Select a photo or video, and add a caption, effects and filters.
Tap the products in the photo that you want to tag. For videos, you’ll see a tray where you can select up to five products to tag.
Enter the names of the products you want to tag, and select them as they appear in the search box.
Tap Done.
Tap Share.
Quick-reply direct messages
Consumers expect fast responses from businesses on social media, especially when they are inquiring about a product they would like to purchase right away. Not all businesses have the resources for around-the-clock social media monitoring. With Instagram’s quick-reply feature, you can send prospects an automated response, which is better than no response at all.
How to set up an Instagram business profile
Setting up an Instagram business profile is easy and can be completed in a few simple steps. Here are two ways to set up your Instagram business profile:
Switching from a personal page to a business page
If you already have a personal profile and you’d like to switch it to a business page, follow these steps:
Log in to your Instagram account.
Select Edit Profile.
Select Switch to Professional Account.
Choose the type of account you’d like to set up based on what describes you best: creator account (ideal for business influencers and any other type of influencer) or business account.
If you’ve decided to start a new business page, follow these steps:
Download the Instagram app onto your smartphone.
Create an account, ideally with your business email.
Choose a username.
Start building your following by finding friends and contacts.
Upload a profile photo.
Add your website.
Craft a company bio.
Create your first post.
Instagram business page setup best practices
To get your page set up for success, be sure to keep these best practices in mind:
Choose a relevant username.
The username you choose should be the name of your business so that prospects and customers can find your page easily.
Select an engaging profile photo.
Some businesses use their company logo as their profile photo. Depending on what your logo looks like, you might choose to go this route. Alternatively, you can do something more creative that still fits your brand. Experiment with different profile photos of people, such as your staff. Your profile photo needs to be 110 by 110 pixels.
Create a profile bio.
You get 150 characters in the bio section to make an impression. Using a few branded hashtags (no more than three, so it doesn’t make your bio hard to read) can help give your page exposure. Your bio should tell a short story about what your business offers. For example, New Jersey-based payment processing company Priority Payments Local uses lists and emojis to draw attention to the bio and make it easier to read.
The most obvious way to use the URL is to add the link to your company’s homepage. This makes the most sense for a lot of businesses, especially e-commerce businesses. But if your company has multiple pages you’d like to connect, consider adding a Linktree, which gives you the flexibility to add multiple links and thus help take users through a sales funnel.
For example, a Linktree for an e-commerce clothing business may have links to the following:
Newest clothing arrivals
Bestsellers
Sale products
A law firm may have links to these pages:
A blog post on what to do if you were just in a car accident (for personal injury prospects)
A free e-book on how to choose a mediator for a divorce
A landing page that highlights the firm’s accreditations
If your business sells both products and services, having mixed links makes even more sense. Here’s how Priority Payments designed its Linktree to feature different types of content:
It’s helpful to have a posting strategy to drive traffic to your page and, ultimately, generate sales from Instagram. Your posting strategy should work hand in hand with your overall marketing strategy and may include the following elements:
Goals. Include both your short-term and long-term objectives.
Target audience. Define the demographics and characteristics of your ideal customer.
Post frequency. Establish how many times a week you will post and how many of those posts will be on page posts versus Story posts. Find a good balance; posting regularly will help you stay top of mind with your followers, but posting too often may turn them off.
Assigned staff. Determine who will manage your Instagram page.
Hashtags. Select relevant hashtags to be included in your posts. Make sure to check out what’s trending so you can gain more traction if those trends are relevant to your business.
Content design. Figure out what your posts will look like. Will you have a special template for certain posts? For example, you might have a special design for sales posts to help with brand recognition.
Voice. Determine how you want to represent yourself to your audience. For example, will your posts be serious or funny? If your audience includes mostly professionals in your field, you might include industry-specific terminology, but if you’re targeting the average consumer, you’ll want to avoid this kind of jargon. The voice of your social media messages also ties back to your overall brand messaging.
Customer service strategy. If your business is new to social media, you’ve probably never had to respond to comments from prospects and customers on social media, so you’ll need a strategy for how to handle these interactions. Your responses should be guided by an established protocol. For example, what should you do if you receive a negative comment? All responses need to be crafted with care.
Once all of these pieces are in place, you’re ready to post on Instagram. Revisit your posting strategy periodically to determine what is working and what isn’t, and adjust accordingly. Pay attention to your audience’s behaviour and needs to craft truly engaging content that resonates with your audience.
Marisa Sanfilippo is an award-winning marketing professional who has more than six years experience developing and executing marketing campaigns for small and medium sized businesses with a focus on digital marketing. After graduating Stockton University with a B.A. in Communications and minor in writing, Marisa worked as a freelance journalist for numerous publications, ultimately earning a position as an e-marketing specialist for a credit union. While in that position, she earned HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Certification and helped build the organization’s digital marketing strategy from the ground up. Her efforts helped lead the credit union to success on and offline including: a 200%+ organic increase in Facebook followers, a sales generating blog, and much more. Later on, she worked on a social media campaign that gained recognition by The Huffington Post.
Think quality over quantity when it comes to content.
Digital marketing is essential for any business these days. Seventy-six percent of people think marketing has evolved more in the past two years than it did over the previous 50 years. To scale your business, you need quality content more than you need quantity of content. But, with so many channels to cover, and a limited budget and time, how do you fully leverage your business’s digital marketing potential?
Copysmith is an innovative tool that helps businesses generate high-performing copy for all of your marketing needs without spending a bundle. It uses the power of artificial intelligence to write copy, word by word, keeping it completely original and sounding natural. You can use Copysmith on ads for Google, Facebook, or Instagram, for product descriptions and taglines, or even to write complete blogs. The qualitative assessment is as good as human-written copy, but there’s no brainstorming or editing rounds involved. In just the click of a button, you can generate a dozen ads, edit the copy to make sure it’s perfect, and launch them immediately.
Copysmith makes it easy to manage all of your campaigns across all of your platforms in a single hub, and even integrates with Shopify, WordPress, and Gmail. You can export generations of copy via CSV and share copy with teammates to get feedback before launch.
Copysmith is so easy to use, it’s earned #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt. Normally, a lifetime subscription to Copysmith’s Starter Plan would be $228, but right now, you can get one for just $59.99.
Digital marketing is advancing each and every day. Every business will progress (or decline) depending on current trends and specific marketing strategies they set forth. The trends and strategies that are seen in digital marketing boil down to one crucial aspect: content creation. Content creation is crucial in digital marketing because it attracts and engages consumers, which leads to an increase in business.
Content can be as simple as making a statement. Anything from professional, financial, legal or technical advice to posting an entertaining GIF can all be considered some form of content. It is imperative to identify your target audiences because they are the ones who consume your content and essentially bring your business to life. Every business should know their target audiences, area(s) of focus and the type of content necessary to produce. Identifying these will effectively promote and improve the online presence of your business.
Identifying Your Target Audience
Convert your target audience to loyal customers by creating winning and distinctive content. The content you create will help you connect with your target customers’ needs and personas. Research and strong analytical data is required to secure all information needed to increase the traffic to your business. Gaining access to your target audience’s personal information (name, age, gender, geographic location and job title), along with answering questions and identifying their challenges, will help you improve the content you make and fine-tune your business agenda.
To adequately cater to new and current customers, research tactics such as interviewing past customers, conducting surveys and analysing the traffic you receive is vital. Use Google Analytics to view your site traffic and to analyse your audience by looking at the insights displayed. Having a very specific agenda that bookkeeps information such as key demographics, key psychographics (attitudes, aspirations and other psychological criteria of a person), challenges and preferred communication will help you create outstanding content that is unique and authentic. After identifying your target audience, the overall goal is to provide value to each consumer with the type of content you create.
Types Of Content
Content is used to entertain, educate and persuade. Businesses gain better visibility online by focusing on the content they create, increasing their exposure and attracting new leads. Every type of content produced should resonate with each consumer and provide them with a great deal of resources. High levels of engagement depend on the type of content generated.
• Blogs: Blogs are a great way to provide content and optimize search engines. Boost organic traffic by attracting potential customers who are looking for answers and other information that your business specializes in. With any blog, it is a great idea to create link pages within them so other people can share your post. Writing blogs is one way to have more interaction and develop strong customer relationships.
• Memes: Memes are videos or images that include correlating captions. Memes have become extremely popular this generation and are always going viral throughout social media. People create memes by embedding specific text into edited clips from videos, television and movies. Memes can easily create traffic because they are a fun way to engage people on social media.
• Live video/webinars: Online streaming is an effective way to increase traffic for any digital marketing strategy. Live videos and webinars allow businesses to inform their audiences, connect with them virtually and answer any questions or concerns they may have. Businesses can easily broadcast a live video or webinar to an online audience on multiple platforms.
Content Drives SEO
Content creation is to SEO as peanut butter is to jelly. Content increases traffic to your business and helps you become more visible online. Including valuable content on a business page gives owners the opportunity to reach more clientele. Content is created to be posted throughout the internet to build brand awareness and generate a larger audience. Every search engine has a variety of ways to index and provide information that determines your business exposure. These algorithms will decide the ranking of your business depending on a person’s search query.
Content creation benefits SEO because the words produced in the specified content highlights keywords that consumers search. These keywords are relevant to your business because it may create a higher ranking in the search engine result pages (SERPs). More keywords will result in a higher click-through rate (CTR) that will increase traffic and potentially bring new clients to your business. It is important for your content to be strong enough to appear in relevant search queries.
Keyword placement, backlinks and website visitors are all extremely crucial in the world of SEO. Lacking content will result in no keywords being found, no page for your future customers to view and no improvement in your SEO. Giving customers the best content possible is needed to eventually help lead your business page to one of the top search engine results.
Social media campaigns are an integral part of brand marketing strategies. A good post can elevate awareness and reaffirm the coolness of a brand, but what happens when you go viral for all the wrong reasons?
When it comes to PR disasters and brand blunders, it can be easy to forget there’s a person behind the post. Brands and social media managers alike will inevitably make mistakes.
From poorly timed tweets, to questionable GIFs and insensitive comments – these mishaps come in many different forms, in any type of industry and in companies of any size.
In today’s ‘cancel culture’ climate it can be difficult to weather the storm of a social media disaster. So, we asked our Twitter community for some practical advice on how to handle it in style.
Feature Image Credit: The Drum’s Twitter audience share tips on managing a social media crisis
There are lots of ways in which you can put Instagram to best use to ensure you have a high and steady flow of traffic towards your fashion site. These ways are so many in numbers that it may often leave you overwhelmed. However, there are a few specific tips and tricks that you can follow to make the best use of Instagram to increase fashion traffic. Most major brands follow these tricks and therefore you can consider these to be tried and tested OK.
This may seem like a no-brainer to you because advertising is what you primarily do in marketing your business. Well, advertising through billboards, TV commercials, and another print and broadcast media is entirely different from advertising on Instagram.
On most of the social channels, you may not find it as easy to advertise as it is on Instagram. This is due to the different formats in which you can advertise on Instagram. These are:
Photo ads: These ads look much similar to the regular photo posts with the only difference that these typically have a Sponsored label above the photo. In addition to that, these also have a Learn More button at the bottom right-hand corner under the picture.
Video ads: Much similar to the photo ads, these video ads also look the same as the regular video posts along with a Sponsored label at the top.
Carousel ads: These are specific ads that look identical to the photo ads but using this feature you can post multiple photos at the same time which the viewers can swipe through.
All these three Instagram ad formats will appear in the home feeds of the users. These ads primarily support four different objectives of advertising any product namely:
Video views
Click through to your website
Mass awareness and
Mobile app installations.
All these will serve your primary objective: to increase the traffic on your fashion website.
Selling your fashion products
Use all the new features to sell your fashion products on Instagram. In May 2018, Instagram has added a new payment feature that can be used by select users. In addition to that, Instagram has also rolled out a Checkout that all users can use.
All these features potentially have a big effect on small businesses as these features allow the users to buy products without having to leave the platform. All that the users will be required to do in order to complete a transaction includes:
The name
The email address
The billing info and
The shipping address.
All these will be saved by Facebook, being the parent company of Instagram to use it for any future transactions.
When it comes to the payment options, Instagram offers users a variety of options such as:
Mastercard
American Express
Visa
Discover and
PayPal
Since all these remain in closed beta there is no liability of the businesses.
You can also take the advantage of the Shoppable Posts to sell products on Instagram. You will simply have to create a catalog of your fashion products and connect it to your account after tagging the product in a way much similar to tagging a person in a post.
However, to create a shoppable post you make sure that:
You have a business account
Sell physical goods and
Comply with the Merchant Agreement And Commerce Policies of Instagram.
If you create such a catalog of your fashion products through Shopify, Facebook, or Big Commerce, it will surely enable you to reach out to more customers and increased the traffic on your website eventually.
Other tips and tricks
There are also a few other tips and tricks that you can follow just like experts like Stormlikes in order to get the most out of your Instagram account.
Links: You must know that links usually do not work in Instagram captions. It is workable only when you share a link in your profile. This will take the user to your site. Therefore, make sure you do not place the link anywhere else to loos on your potential traffic and could-be customer.
Relation: You must also make sure that all your posts are related and most relevant to your brand and the fashion products. It can be tempting to share pictures of food and animals that you see on other social networks but that may not have anything to do with fashion. This will look disjoint and confuse your followers.
Promotions: The best way to increase traffic to your website is by running promotions and giveaways. However, your fashion products may be too costly to give it away just like that, you can arrange for a sale or contest, ask users to repost an image with a specific custom hashtag, and others that will also make them visit your website.
Response: Your response to the comments of other users will play a significant role in increasing traffic to your fashion site. Good or bad, always reply to the comments made by the users on your photos. This will raise the level of interaction and will show that you care, follow, and pay attention to your followers, adding value to them.
Embed posts: On your website embed Instagram posts from the desktop version of it. This will convey a strong message that you are active on this platform and will in turn help you gain more traffic to your website.
Influencers: Using Instagram influencers is perhaps the best way to promote your fashion product and business. Since these influencers have large followings on Instagram, you will automatically have the opportunity to reach out to a large number of audiences with your fashion product.
Share posts: Make it a pint that you shore your posts directly to your story. This will raise the level of interest amongst your users and you can promote your fashion product easily.
You may also use other interactive features to build relationships and online conversations such as questions sticker in Instagram Stories, IGTV, and others. This will make your account appealing and direct users to your fashion site.
Turn your weekends into a time to learn something new.
In business, you should always be growing. And part of that is learning new skills and trends that are happening in your industry. It’s hard to find time for professional development but with early Black Friday deals on courses in the Entrepreneur Store, you might be able to work something out. We’ve rounded up some of the top deals on online classes available now, and you can get all of them for an extra 15 percent off when you use code SAVE15NOV at checkout.
Have something to sell? Then you need to be on Shopify. In this 30-hour guide to SEO, drop shipping, design, branding, and more, you’ll learn how to build a Shopify empire with help from the experts.
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Amazon is the country’s largest marketplace for one major reason: It makes it easy for anyone to sell on their platform. Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) is Amazon’s dropship program that helps independent sellers earn money through Amazon. This course will teach you how to use this industry monster to earn passive income.
Certified financial analysts (CFAs) earn the big bucks to help individuals and businesses manage and grow their finances successfully. As you might expect, to get into this career, you need some pretty unique knowledge. This training will prepare you to ace the entry-level CFA certification exam on your first try.
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Google is the world’s largest advertising platform, facilitating both paid and organic opportunities for digital businesses. But it’s one thing to advertise on Google, it’s another entirely to build your website to be fully SEO-optimized. In this course, you’ll learn how to optimize your website for organic traffic, and grow traffic through paid efforts.
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About two years ago, my wife Anika and I decided to give up our jobs as stewardess and hotel concierge in order to pursue our dreams of living as digital nomads. Since we left the corporate world, we have ventured into various models of online business, from ecommerce to lead generation and coaching, all while traveling to more than 85 countries around the world. Today, we help individuals who are tired of working 9-to-5 jobs become successful online and start their own digital nomad fairy tales.
Since the start of 2020, remote working has become a key element in the fight against the ongoing health crisis. And although traveling might still come with a few hurdles during the next 12 months, it appears that many businesses have changed their attitudes toward working from home. This provides an excellent opportunity for those who are looking to break the mould and work through their computers and smartphones instead of a tight and noisy city office.
If you are thinking about packing on some new skills that don’t demand your physical presence at an office, here are three exciting niches that are not only likely to grow in the next decade, but that are also perfect for remote work.
1. Data-driven marketing
Analysts believe that global B2C ecommerce sales will reach and estimated $4.5 trillion by 2021. In such a fast-growing industry, the need for digital media marketing experts is omnipresent. However, in this day and age, everyone and his mother is calling him or herself an online marketer. Knowing the basics about marketing just doesn’t do the deed anymore. To cut through the noise of tens of thousands of self-proclaimed marketing geniuses, we advise focusing on a bit more complex yet highly efficient marketing strategy: data-driven marketing.
Today, data-driven marketing is a key priority for marketing executives. According to recent reports, 40 percent of companies are seeking to increase their data-driven marketing spending, and 64 percent of marketing executives say that data-driven strategies are essential in today’s economy. While it may sound confusing at first, data-driven marketing is actually not that hard to execute. Did you ever run a social media or search engine ad and later optimized it based on the results that you were getting? This is essentially a very comprehensive form of data-driven marketing.
Thanks to the incredible value of reliable data these days, almost every bit of software tracks user behavior and collects information that might be highly valuable for your marketing decisions. To become a data-driven marketing specialist, you need to learn how to generate useful data, how to extract it and, most important, how to use this data to your advantage.
As you might have noticed, data-driven marketing requires a distinct set of marketing skills, including social media marketing and search engine marketing, which are very effective for gathering data, as well as content marketing and traditional advertising, which are great for using the data to improve marketing results. Nevertheless, as only a few are willing to go this extra mile, becoming a data-driven marketer allows you to position yourself as a valuable team member no matter where you currently are in the world.
2. High-quality content production
Before the introduction of the web 2.0, distributing one’s own ideas and opinions on a large scale was usually reserved for a limited number of people, mostly in the media industry. However, with the rise of user-generated content and social networks, this has changed quite dramatically. Today, almost everyone can upload original content, whether it is in the form of small posts, blog articles, images or videos, at an infinite number of virtual places and at any time.
If you can monetize your content, you can actually make quite a good living off of it. But monetization doesn’t mean merely pushing out tweets for the sake of content. This won’t make anybody rich — well, at least in most cases. Considering that hundreds of millions of human beings are uploading billions of content pieces every day, the key to success is quality.
User-generated content can play a significant role in marketing. According to research conducted by Bright Local, 92 percent of people rely on user-generated content when making a buying decision. In addition, as marketing software behemoth Stackla recently reported, about 57 percent of consumers believe that only a minority of brands create authentic content. The demand for influencers from not only major platforms such YouTube as Instagram but also from native channels like blogs and podcasts is expected to grow significantly over the next few years.
The beauty of a content production business is that you can choose from a variety of methods to produce, distribute and promote your content along a broad range of potential topics and niches. Immense possibilities for scaling your operation exist. It may take some time to get the ball rolling, so start by putting out content that supports an existing business or your personal brand. This will allow you to prepare your journey as a profitable content producer ahead of time.
3. Virtual jobs
Thanks to the rapid spread of COVID-19 regulations among workplaces, 2020 has sparked an immense number of new virtual jobs, many of which are expected to remain virtual even after the conclusion of the health crisis. This still relatively novel form of employment does not require any physical presence in an office or even a certain country and is thus perfect for digital nomads both with and without prior work experience.
Besides rising health concerns, another key reason for the substantial increase of virtual employees is the fact that they cost businesses significantly less than in-house job positions, since virtual jobs require less office space, fewer extras and often lower salaries or hourly rates. The opportunities for virtual jobs are plentiful and varied.
As more businesses start to recognize the benefits of remote work, both regular employees and freelancers may have many more opportunities to fulfil their dreams of becoming digital nomads.
Bounce rate is a scary thing for people that don’t know the ins and outs of this particular vanity metric. I consider it as a vanity metric since there are a variety of reasons, both good and bad, that can skew the numbers. However, bounce rate is still a metric that can help diagnose what’s wrong with your pages and even your site. How do visitors interact with your pages? Do they find what you’re looking for? Are they not satisfied with what you’re displaying? All of these can be answered by diving deeper into your bounce rate metrics. So, here’s what you need to know about bounce rate and how do you use it to deepen your understanding of your site.
What is Bounce Rate?
A website’s bounce rate is the percentage of users that left the page/site that did not take any further action after entering such as opening a link, clicking a CTA button, filling out a form, etc.
Users that exit immediately without taking further actions are aptly called “bounces”. Since they only opened your page/site then bounced immediately away.
Where Can I Find My Website’s Bounce Rate?
Your website’s bounce rate is easily viewable in your Google Analytics account. You have to own or at least be able to view our website’s Google Analytics Property.
Once you’ve opened your site’s GA property, easily maneuver to the Audience dropdown and click on Overview. You’ll immediately see your site’s bounce rate.
You can further refine it by checking a specific page’s bounce rate. You can even check the specific bounce rate of the devices used by your site’s visitors.
What is a Good Bounce Rate?
A good bounce rate differs based on the industry your site is in. That’s why a single study about bounce rate won’t always apply to your website. So, here’s a helpful resource made by Custom Media Labs on benchmark bounce rate averages for different industries:
20% – 45% for e-commerce and retail websites
25% – 55% for B2B websites
30% – 55% for lead generation websites
35% – 60% for non-eCommerce content websites
60% – 90% for landing pages
65% – 90% for dictionaries, portals, blogs, and generally websites that revolve around news and events
You need to remember that these are the industry standards, so if your site’s bounce rate is either higher or lower than the average then there might be something to improve or fix on your site and/or page. So, what are some of the common causes for having too low or too high of a bounce rate?
Why Your Bounce Rate is too High or Low
There are a variety of factors that affect your bounce rate – most of them include on-page factors that you can easily fix, improve, or change. They include:
Site Speed
A slow-loading page or site can be a definite reason for visitors to bounce. Aside from negatively affecting your bounce rate, a slow loading speed will also affect your site’s rankings. Why? Because Google has stated the importance of better page loading speed since it will be a part of the Page Experience Update that will be rolled out in 2021.
So, not only will you improve your bounce rate by speeding up your site, but it will also help you adjust to the upcoming algorithm update. To help you start, here’s a complete guide on optimizing for the core web vitals – an integral part of the page experience update. Additionally, there is a multitude of resources that you can use to check your site’s current loading speed.
Title Tag and Meta Description
Maybe the problem isn’t what’s on your page, but what the users see before they enter your page. Your page’s title tag and meta description is the introduction to your page – it sets the expectations of the user, and it’s their first impression of your page. This means that what is contained in the title tag and meta description will be the one dictating what they expect to see inside your page. So, if your page does not align with what your title tag and meta description says, that’s an automatic bounce.
Misleading title tag and meta description is a simple problem to fix since you have direct control over these factors and you can search for a keyword that the page ranks for to check how it looks in the SERPs. Either align what is contained in the content with your title tag and meta description or adjust the meta tags to better fit the content of the page.
Aside from having misleading meta tags, another possibility is that your page’s content is not up to par with what the user wants to see or it simply does not contain the answer they were looking for.
This is where search intent and proper content optimization comes into play. Why? Because when you have a proper understanding of these two facets, it will help you create specialized content that users would want to see.
On a more technical aspect, it is possible that your website is not properly optimized for mobile. This is especially alarming in this day and age where most of the searches are made through mobile devices.
So, if your site is not mobile-optimized, this means that the design is low-quality, text may be hard to read, and gives an overall bad experience to the visitor.
Work with your developers to avoid this particular instance since this is much like the slow loading speed wherein it does not only lead to a negative bounce rate, but it also affects your site’s rankings.
UI/UX
Another technical aspect of your site is its UI and UX. Is the site’s design pleasing to the user’s eyes? Is navigation to specific pages easily achievable? Do the design elements not interfere with your visitor’s experience in your site?
Those are just some of the things that you have to take note of when it comes to understanding bounce rate since there will always be times where you won’t be able to determine which factor negatively affects your bounce rate until you think about the page or site’s design at the end.
Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager
Lastly, bounce rate is calculated by Google Analytics. This means that proper implementation of the GA or GTM tag is essential to having an accurate bounce rate. There are multiple instances where the improper implementation of your GA or GTM code can lead to skewed analytics data, such as:
The tag was installed multiple times in the site’s source code which leads to multiple hits being fired when only a single user entered your site. This significantly lowers your bounce rate which is, simply, skewed data.
Not all pages have the tag installed in their source code. This means that the data you’re seeing in your Google Analytics account is skewed as well.
Key Takeaway
Bounce rate is not the metric you want to be using to measure the success of your website and even your SEO. But that does not mean that it has no potential uses. A bounce rate is a metric that will help you gain deeper insights into how users interact with your site. How your content fares, your new design or pop-up, etc. All of these can be measured using bounce rate, among other data.
It’s up to the SEO and webmaster how they gain those important insights and how they use bounce rate as a stepping stone to improve their site’s performance and search success. What’s your experience with bounce rate? Let us know in the comments below!
The essence of brand is differentiation. It is how Egyptian ranchers claimed cows 4,000 years ago and how shoppers find favourite products today. Yet differentiation is often lost in the lookalike land of B2B marketing. Language, imagery, colour palettes, personality and websites all seem to blend together. This was the challenge for Paz Macdonald when she became chief marketing officer of Software AG in January 2019.
Describing that brand as “still water, hold the ice,” Macdonald began the process of discovery and reinvention with a brand audit. It pointed to the need for a makeover from the ground up, including a new identity, a new website and a new promise: “Living connections.” As a result of these efforts, launched in May 2020, Macdonald now describes the brand as “a sensible but a nice cocktail,” one that is fuelling engagement across the company’s newly invigorated communications channels.
Where did you start with the brand transformation?
One of the first things we did was to take the emotion away. Let’s get a brand audit done. What do people actually think when they hear the word “Software AG?” We asked our customers. We asked people that were potential prospects, Gartner, Forrester, our board, our sales organization. We asked the entire field organization. We did a very detailed audit and the feedback, actually, it’s like it held a mirror up to us. It was like, “We’ve got a problem; we need to fix this.”
What did you discover in the brand audit?
Some of the imagery we were using was with millennials doing handstands and things. That’s not the audience we’re going after. We also saw our language was dated. We just needed to talk in a very, very different way. One of the questions I ask about brands is, “If this brand walked into a bar and ordered a drink, what drink would it order?” I think the brand that we had at the time when I joined was probably a still water. Hold the ice.
How did you synthesize the audit’s findings?
There were three threads that we had to bring together. One was a brand audit, which led the direction of everything that we had to do. One was a decision that the website, which is our shop front, which was doing us a disservice, had to change. We had to change the platform; we decided to go with Adobe. And then the last thing was actually writing the content, the words and pictures, and the design.
What was the solution?
We are primarily an Enterprise Integration, an IoT platform. What that means is that there’s so much that we do in the background and you can’t see and touch what we do. That’s how we came up with “living connections,” the messaging that united everything we do, because we decided that our essential role in the world was the pulse that keeps the world living and thriving.
That was the thread, and everything fell into place. We simplified the homepage to help people find us and we focused on customer journeys. At the end of the day, we wanted to make it as simple as possible for somebody to find what they were looking for on our site, rather than this mass encyclopaedia of absolutely everything we’ve done over 50 years.
How long did it take to get to the website launch?
Software AG also had lots of disparate sites as well. We had the main site. We’d made acquisitions [and] some of them kept their own sites. Some products had several websites. We had to bring 15 disparate websites onto the new platform. We connected Adobe with our external agency, and everybody worked together. The audit was done in May 2019 and then the website was launched May 15 of this year.
Did COVID affect your brand messaging?
Never. We thought, if anything, we needed to have more of that language than ever before, because it still is the values of who we are. The audit helped us define the main characters and what products we should be focusing on so that people got what we did.
How did you educate employees?
If I could do this again, I’d bring the employees on the journey with you. Big lesson learned. Even now, we still need to educate people by doing a series of explainer videos. We’re going to do these short little videos just to make sure people understand and see the full picture. All of those things just help make them feel part of the process, because it’s easy for marketing to forget about the people that are your biggest champions, which are your employees.
What are signs the rebrand was successful?
There was a point where we were getting about 1,000 net new followers on LinkedIn a week. In 21 months, we had about 67,000 followers on LinkedIn. We crossed the 100,000 mark about a month ago, which is phenomenal. That pace was incredible. People were doing a double take. We walk into a bar now; we’re going to order a sensible but a nice cocktail. This is a brand now that fits our age and our stature. There was more engagement, more likes, more comments, people commenting more as well.
People started to notice us and that, for us, started to translate to more marketing qualified leads with all the other changes we made as well. We’re seeing better engagement of mobile users, up by 400% from the year before. More people are hanging around, sessions are improving, all the metrics are going in the right direction. We just need to build on that now and check whether the journeys are working, that we’re converting.
