The idea of a product that is aesthetically pleasing being one that has a good user experience is a common misconception.
When you hear the term “UX Design”, you might conjure up mental images of well designed websites, apps or interfaces. You might picture their beautiful color palettes, engaging animations, or fresh layouts. While these aspects certainly can contribute to a great user experience, the idea of a product that is aesthetically pleasing being one that has a good user experience is a common misconception.
An interface that is well designed from a visual point of view will not necessarily be one that will provide a good user experience. In fact, often times a product will be designed a certain way in order for it to be visually appealing, yet this design will actively hinder the user’s experience.
Take the Apple Magic Mouse.
While it certainly is designed well from a visual point of view, with its sleek, minimalistic design, it is not designed well from a user experience point of view. This is due to the fact that the re-chargeable mouse features a lighting port on its underside, making it a real challenge for the user to charge the mouse while using it. The lightening port was likely placed where it was in effort to compliment the design, yet this placement makes the experience of charging it frustrating.
Another example of this phenomenon is this air fryer.
Although its modern look does look nice from an aesthetic point of view, if we take the user experience into account, it becomes evident that it is not designed well. Since the icons on the screen are not labeled, it can be difficult for the user to determine the actual functions of each option. While the icons were likely unlabeled to improve the look of the product, this lack of labeling can interfere with the experience of using it.
Yet another product that is not designed well from a user experience point of view is this cat mug.
While the mug is certainly cute and creatively designed, its ears are positioned in a way that can poke the person drinking from it in the eyes, making it a user experience failure. Although the ears were added to the mug in order to make it look better, their positioning actually hinders the experience of drinking from it.
These examples illustrate that while a product may be designed well in that it is aesthetically pleasing, it can, in fact, be designed quite badly from a user experience perspective. Additionally, while a design decision may have been made in effort to make a product more visually appealing, this decision can ultimately render the product a user experience bust.
In essence, the purpose of UX design is to design products in a way that helps users be more successful at carrying out the things they are trying to accomplish. A product’s beautiful design will not be valued by its users if there is something getting in the way of them using it the way they want to. When designing products, we therefore want to ensure that the users are able to accomplish their goals in the optimal way, even if that way might not be the most aesthetically pleasing option.
A full one-third of the globe is currently sheltering in place at home, a number so staggering that it’s hard to truly comprehend. As COVID-19 rips through our healthcare systems, upends our social connections, and transforms our economies, there’s a significant, fascinating, and long-overdue side effect at play. The world, at last, is understanding the critical role played by digital accessibility.
In a matter of weeks, hundreds of millions of us have turned to the internet as our sole source of commerce and communication. Working from home and sheltering in place, we now order our groceries online, we fill our prescriptions online, we speak to our colleagues and our bosses online, we socialize online, and we seek out entertainment online. But imagine if we couldn’t log on and click to order milk or bread, if we couldn’t read the text of an online coursebook, or if the flashing video of a film or commercial caused us physical harm?
This is the crisis that the nearly 61 million Americans who live with a disability have to be prepared for every day. With the coronavirus, as online access becomes the single most important form of connection and survival in our lives, that grave challenge is at last apparent.
The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed 30 years ago this July, and it laid out strict regulations and guidelines for providing equal access to public spaces for all Americans, including those with disabilities. But public spaces are not limited to just buildings and sidewalks; they also exist on the internet and in the digital realm. And while our nation has done commendable work installing and adapting to the physical needs of access, it still lags behind significantly when it comes to accessibility online.
In a 2019 study, Web AIM, which runs accessibility analyses of top websites, found that more than 99% of websites violated some aspect of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, standards set forth by the Worldwide Web Consortium, which are considered the gold standard for determining accessibility.
These include low contrast text, missing text alternatives for images, buttons without text, and empty links. For web users with auditory and visual disabilities, these amount to online dead ends. They block navigation and they serve as a barrier to access and vital services.
For many people with disabilities, leaving home is difficult. Digital accessibility allows those with disabilities to telecommute. And it’s good business, too. It opens up employment opportunities and guarantees livelihoods. It allows those who cannot drive to a doctor’s office to speak to their doctor on the phone or via video chat. Sound familiar? Suddenly, we are all homebound, and we are all in need of access to goods and services online. Suddenly, we all understand the reality that Americans with disabilities have been grappling with for decades.
And solid accessibility online doesn’t only serve those with auditory or visual challenges. The most critically at-risk sector during this global population is our elderly population, for whom staying home can literally mean the difference between life and death. But older Americans struggle in navigating the internet in their own ways. Tiny text, unclear links, and auditory input that is overwhelming or unclear can also block their access. Good digital accessibility will serve them as well, and it’s vital we ensure that it’s a priority for all websites.
Before COVID-19, online accessibility was moving forward, but at a crawl. The pandemic has shifted it into higher gear, which is an ironic and a welcome silver lining. Telecommuting, once an occasional option, has proven itself to be a potential long-term solution for many global companies. Online commerce, once an alternative to brick-and-mortar retail, has revealed itself, through its convenience and scope, to be a preferred way of shopping for millions of Americans, and it will likely only continue to expand after shelter-in-place laws are lifted.
So, for nearly every business, digital transformation is moving faster, and for those who had not yet taken the time to perform a full accounting of their website’s accessibility level and begin a design overhaul, it’s now a do-or-die topic.
And most critically, there is a new empathy in play for the need for digital access. Before COVID-19, it was easy to understand why a person in a wheelchair might need a ramp to enter a building, but the reality of a homebound person struggling to click through a government site to pay taxes felt obscure and out of reach.
Now, that struggle—which is just as difficult, important, and pertinent in our society—hits closer to home. We’ve all been able to experience what it feels like to not be able to do the basic things that, only a few short months ago, we all took for granted. Let’s take those lessons as we recover from this pandemic and apply them as building blocks to the better, healthier, and more accessible society we will build moving forward.
Blogging is a great hobby. With blogging, people learn a lot.
Consistent blogging dramatically improves learning, reading, and writing skills of the blogger.
Aside from that if blog is maintained efficiently, it also pays a lot. Many bloggers had already left their jobs and doing full time blogging to make a living.
I will discuss top successful bloggers and their achievements in our upcoming but right now I’m going to discuss how to start a WordPress blog step by step.
If you are a passionate writer and want to share your thoughts with large audience, then you must start your own blog. To get easily started, WordPress is the best platform to start blogging.
So, let’s start how to start a WordPress blog.
5 Steps to Start a WordPress Blog
1# Find Niche
Blogging niche is one of the most important things, newbies usually ignore. I have seen many people who are highly motivated to start their own blog, but they don’t explore the right niche. They just follow successful bloggers and their blogging niche instead of starting a blog in which they are passionate and expert.
To start a blog, you first need to find your niche. Let’s say you are expert in finance, and you love to write on it. So, it highly recommended that you should start your blog on this niche.
2# Buy a Domain Name
This is second important step while starting a blog. A good domain greatly represents the niche. As I said, if you are going to start a finance blog, you need to find a domain name which can easily be assessed that it is relevant to money or finance.
Web hosting is also important because when you start your WordPress Blog, you will host your website data and files on the web hosting.
Currently, there are dozens of companies offering great web hosting services. However, I recommend you buy a domain name and web hosting from same domain registrar and web hosting company. It’d be easy for you to manage your domain as well as hosting at one place.
I was reading a blog on Voucherist.com, a good website for vouchers and promo codes. They have mentioned some good domain registrars and web hosting companies. You should read it. It will help you to decide from where you should buy your domain name and hosting.
Note:If you are a beginner and want to save money, you should try to explore coupon code before buying a domain and hosting. GrabHub.co.uk is a great place to find such coupons and promo codes. Similarly, you can also read about other best coupon sites here.
4# Buy a WordPress Theme
For starting a blog, a good looking and elegant WordPress theme is necessary. At beginner level, you can start with free version themes already exist in WordPress directory. But I suggest you buy a premium WordPress theme for blogging.
Premium themes are great because they have awesome features and they look gorgeous. Further, the author of the themes usually upgrades themes and you will receive updates accordingly.
From Themeforest.net, a leading website for WordPress Themes and Plugins, you can buy a good WP theme for blogging.
Check out this resource Best WordPress Themes for Blogs by SmallBizProducts.com. this resource will help to choose the best theme. If you ask me, I suggest you buy a NewsPaper WordPress theme. It is not only good looking but also offer great pre-built demos.
5# Install WordPress
After purchasing domain name and hosting, the next step is to install your WordPress blog on it. Check this guide on how to install WordPress on Cpanel by WPBeginner. They have mentioned step by step guide on how to install WordPress and WP theme via Cpanel.
Check out this video, it will also help you to install WP.
Wrapping Up
These are basic steps to start a WordPress blog and I have tried my best to explain it in easy manner. The attached resources will help you a lot to find the right product and services to start your own blog.
By Salman
Author Bio:Salman is a regular contributor at fincyte.com. He often writes on business and tech topics. Check out his recent blog on best productivity apps.
Making the right choice now may save you time and effort in the future
So you’ve decided to build a website. But what sort of website do you need exactly? Knowing the answer to that question before you dive headlong into designing and building will save you a lot of time, effort, and possibly headaches later on.
Websites can perform a variety of functions, and often require different technology and coding, as well as different infrastructure for web hosting.
Things you need to consider are the type of audience for your website, how many visitors the site is likely to get per day or week, whether the website is likely to be used on non-standard devices like electronic kiosks, or whether you need to integrate with external systems for things like address look-ups or drop shipping.
To help you determine what type of website you might need, we’ve taken a look at some of the more common types.
1. Main business website
Nearly every business has a website or should have if it doesn’t already. Some major companies may have more than one website, but in those cases, there will be one main site, the one that comes up first in search results when you enter the name of the company into a search engine.
Sometimes also known as a brochure site, a business’ main site should present all the information you’d need to know about its products and services. It should also offer quick and easy methods for making inquiries about sales, support, or marketing.
Larger companies that have different divisions or offer a wide variety of products and services for multiple markets may have different sites for each of those areas on what’s known as subdomains. For example, if the main site is at www.domain.com, a subdomain would be something like subdomain.domain.com.
In those sorts of situations, the main site would only have a few pages at what is known as the top level, with most of the links going to the individual subdomain websites. Doing it this way means the structure of the main site is less complex and it easier to find the information you’re looking for.
2. Create a blog
Blogs first appeared in 1997, just a few years after the Internet was created. Originally, the term was weblog because blogs were, and still can be, a web log or online journal of the blog author.
Although there are still many blogs that are written by individuals, these days blogs have expanded in their size, scope, and range of topics. Many companies have a blog on their main website, which is often like a news section. And many blogs are focussed on a particular topic and can have multiple writers contributing articles.
Blogs that are focussed on a particular topic, for example, technology or fitness, become attractive to advertisers as they can target specific audiences that are interested in their products or services. Advertising income means that a blog can become a business in itself, hiring writers and spending money to maintain and improve the site.
Another type of blog that has emerged in recent years is the vlog, or video blog, which works in a similar way to a traditional blog except that the medium of communication is video instead of writing.
Because blogging is so popular, with many people seeing it as a way to earn a primary or supplementary income, there is a huge number of tools you can use to create a blog. There are many free blogging platforms, such as Blogger or Tumblr. Or you can build your own blog using free website builders like Wix or Weebly, or the most popular blogging tool, WordPress.
All of the services listed above will take care of web hosting for you so you don’t have to pay for it yourself. However, WordPress can also be self-hosted if you’d like more control over the hosting environment.
3. Product and services affiliation
Advertising is one method that a website can use to bring in income. Another is through what’s known as affiliate marketing. You take a product or service you like, create content on your website that promotes it, and then every time the seller of that product or service makes a sale, you earn a commission.
How this happens is that the seller provides you with an affiliate link. Every time a visitor to your site clicks on a link to the seller’s website using the affiliate link, your site ID gets recorded on the seller’s website. If the visitor continues to complete a successful transaction, a percentage of the sale is recorded against your affiliate ID.
This may sound like a route to easy money, but unfortunately, it’s not. Once you get everything set up and your site has a steady stream of visitors, it can be. But getting to that point doesn’t happen overnight.
You first need to build up a certain amount of content to attract visitors. Then you need a way of letting people know you have the content they might be interested in. This could be through word of mouth or an active social media campaign, or you might have to pay for advertising. And once you’ve got people to visit your site, you’ve got to earn their trust so they keep coming back, which means providing quality content.
All of this can take a long time to achieve. The rewards can be great, but many people believe that direct selling is a more reliable way to earn income from a website.
4. E-commerce website
A site for selling products and services is known as an e-commerce site. Many e-commerce websites would have been started by businesses that originally sold from a physical location and then branched out online to reach more customers. Nowadays, there are many businesses that only exist online.
There are many different avenues to selling online. You can create listings on well-known auction and shopping sites like eBay or Craigslist. Or you can choose to create your own website with a service that specializes in creating e-commerce websites, such as Shopify or BigCommerce.
If you’re looking for more control over your website, including the web hosting and technology used, you can build a website with an existing shopping cart framework like Magento or OpenCart. Alternatively, you can build something completely customized from the ground up, which would require specialized knowledge and would be more expensive.
Whichever method you choose, you need to ensure that your catalog can be searched easily so people can quickly find what they’re looking for. And once the customer has found what they want, ordering and completing the transaction should all happen smoothly. This will leave the customer with a positive impression and make them want to come back to buy again in the future.
If you choose an existing e-commerce platform, most of these considerations will have been taken care of already. But you might not have as much control over how the site looks or functions. Building a site yourself may give you that control, but will be more expensive.
5. Support systems website
We mentioned subdomains earlier when discussing the main business site. Subdomains, or even completely different domains, can be a good idea for a variety of different reasons. Here are a few of those.
Brand identity
Some companies own many different brands and the brands are often more well-known than the parent company.
For example, Ben & Jerry’s is owned by a company called Unilever. Unilever has its own website, as does Ben & Jerry’s. It wouldn’t make sense to house the Ben & Jerry’s brand under the Unilever website because people wouldn’t necessarily associate Unilever with the ice cream maker.
Unilever also owns so many different subsidiaries that to try and fit them all into a single website would make the website hard to use for visitors, and even harder to maintain for the business owners.
Pure support
Many businesses, particularly those with a large number of customers, or those that exist solely online, will have separate websites just for their support services.
Customers usually need to log in to their account to access support, and then they’ll have a variety of different methods at their disposal. Help desk tickets and 24/7 online chat are two popular methods, but support websites will often also have large libraries of help documents or FAQs.
Lead generation
If you have a new product or service that you need to promote, creating a stand-alone lead generation website can ensure it has the maximum impact.
Often just a single page, lead generation websites may look radically different from the main website of the business. Their primary aim is to lead the visitor to some specific interaction, whether it be filling in a contact form, or adding their email address to a mailing list.
Other website types
We’ve only really scratched the surface of all the different types of websites that exist. But many are variations on the ones we’ve covered or could have features from several different types.
Social media websites could be viewed as being larger, more complex versions of blogs. Gallery websites for artists and photographers are similar to e-commerce websites but may not necessarily sell anything online.
Then there are other different types like online learning portals, sports websites with results and team information, news websites, and sites for presenting data about the weather or stocks and shares.
One thing that all good sites will have in common, though, is that they must have interesting content, and the content must be presented in a way that is easy for site visitors to access. That means having clear and logical navigation, along with pages that load quickly.
These are interesting times to be a travel blogger and a frequent floater (I cruise – a lot) who does not fly and visit lounges or stay in hotels or get on cruise ships. I have to admit I am getting more than a little bit stir crazy but understand staying home is the wisest choice for my family.
The one mega upside of being stuck at home is time to do an endless list of projects that I have had on my “to do list” as well as a number of things my wife has wanted help with. I blogged a few weeks back about my mega computer upgrade that was FAAAARRRRR overdue. Having used it for a while now I have to tell you I am simply thrilled. But it was missing a few things.
Enter some of my old technology! 🙂
I friend of mine, when I was lamenting of only have one monitor (an HP Pavilion 27″), asked me if I had some old tablets laying around.
The result, as a blogger, is I can have the blog up and running for posting, Flipboard up and running for constant news and travel updates, the BoardingArea home page up as well as Twitter for updates.
Perfect!
It also affords me a bunch of other perks when not in “blogger land” if you will. I host a bunch of ZOOM meetings and this setup allows me to host ZOOM on one monitor (and my USB HD Webcam sits nicely on top of my 27″ monitor and slides side to side) and use another tablet logged into the ZOOM meeting as a vanity monitor to see what I am really broadcasting. The other two I can use to have info I am using during the presentation as well as the last one for media shares.
Again – Perfect!
Lastly, when I am neither blogging or ZOOMing I have a sweet setup for my financial life. I can have my financial software and trading platform up, stock quote streaming on another, CNBC on another screen, and a browser on the 4th screen.
All of this I have been able to create using a bunch of older tablets that were sitting on a shelf collecting dust. Yes, I did have to get a few things like:
But these were minor costs to be able to create such a user friendly and efficient multi-screen experience for all aspects of my current stuck at home life.
What do you think? Have you been updating your home tech during the COVID mess? Are you as ready as me to get back to travel once it is safe to do so? – René
Rene’s Points For Better Travel, a division of Chatterbox Entertainment, Inc. has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Rene’s Points For Better Travel and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Social media has revolutionized human relations and transformed the way we communicate. It has created a new type of celebrity thanks to the power of personal branding.
And businesses are increasingly realizing how direct person-to-person relations via digital channels can be beneficial to their sales and marketing.
To master this new type of business communication, most companies could use a bit of social media advice and some digital marketing tips. So, we’ve gathered a collection of social media tips for business in this article.
They’re easy to understand, easy to execute, and should prove valuable for any small business social media marketing operation.
8 effective social media tips for your small business:
Learn about your audience
Choose your primary and secondary social networks
Use a mix of hero, hub and help content
Repurpose your content
Leverage inbound marketing and partnerships
Set up social commerce
Evolve your content from articles to video to live
Plan and automate
8 social media marketing tips for small businesses to try
Whereas social media marketing has become an advanced marketing discipline where experts compete for excellence and for outstanding results, it’s also a playground where any business — big or small — can make a difference for itself.
The following social media marketing tips can be implemented by practically any business. (Take special note of Nos. 4 and 8, which are our favorite social media tips on this list.)
1. Learn about your audience
One of the great benefits of social media is the access to market data it provides. Social media platforms are data-driven platforms designed to tailor advertising to their users. In the process, they provide access to some of that data to businesses.
While running your social media activity, you’re constantly learning more about your audience. However, you can gather audience insights for a marketing plan in a more structured way.
Define your target: First, define what characterizes your target market. Perhaps you have several segments with different characteristics you can outline.
Estimate segment sizes: Go to Facebook audience insights and enter the characteristics for each segment to gather an estimate of the audience size.
Learn about their media consumption: Identify which publications your audience reads, what they watch, and who they listen to and follow on the internet by looking up their media preferences with SparkToro.
2. Choose your primary and secondary social networks
There are so many communication opportunities via social media marketing that you can easily spread your efforts too thin. By choosing one primary social network where you concentrate your efforts, you’ll get the biggest return on investment.
Other networks can be part of your small business social media strategy as secondary networks that you utilize in a more opportunistic way.
How to select your primary social network:
Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to pick one social media network and stick with it. Here’s one approach.
Analyze the options: Analyze the user characteristics of the various social networks via information they share with you. Make a list of candidates for your primary social network.
Compare with your target audience: Compare and contrast the characteristics of the users on each platform with the characteristics of your target audience to find the best fit.
Evaluate your strengths: You probably have more affinities and more reach with one or more of the social networks on your list. Objectively evaluate your strengths on each platform.
Apply weights: Set up a simple spreadsheet where you can score each social network on attractivity, audience fit, and strengths. You can weight each score to account for the most important elements. Then pick your primary network, and mark the others as secondary. Build your social media strategy around this primary social network.
3. Use a mix of hero, hub, and help content
Google has a challenge. Its advertisers were brought up with search marketing but were not necessarily educated on how to use Google’s other great advertising channel: YouTube.
Google therefore created a conceptual framework for working with YouTube. This framework helps define the role of video content, which by nature is more expensive to produce and distribute.
Whether you plan to use video or not, the YouTube strategy playbook — which uses the three Hs of “hero,” “hub,” and “help” — can be of great use when planning social media activity for your business.
How to establish your content mix:
Creating a mix of content with the three Hs is very focused on the hero content, or the driving elements of your business’s storyline that you want your broadest audience to see. Let’s look at what you need to do to establish your content mix with this in mind.
Content audit: The first thing you need is an overview of your existing content and events that can be used in your content strategy.
Brainstorm: The fun part of the process is the brainstorming and idea-testing for your hero content. Aim to find a unique and remarkable content idea that resonates strongly with your audience and emphasizes your brand’s differentiation.
Plan around the hero content: Some of the other content you use in your social media strategy can be built around the hero content. Other content pieces act as “hubs” and will simply help your brand stay top of mind. And “help” content is more traditional company information that you place around and between the more story-driven hero content.
Build a content calendar: The three types of content come together in a social media content calendar, which helps you stay organized and share your content in a consistent and effective way.
4. Repurpose your content
If you’ve followed our second tip, you may be wondering how to best utilize your secondary social networks. You may also be overwhelmed by the thought of needing to publish content to your social networks multiple times a week.
This is why content repurposing is an important strategy. A publication has a limited life span on social media, and in order to generate a return on your investment in a piece of content, you need to maximize its usage.
How to thoughtfully and effectively repurpose your content:
The initial version of your content should be optimized for your primary social network. Subsequent versions can be formatted to suit other networks, perhaps using a more visual angle, a different perspective, or simply different text.
Optimize for your primary network: The first time you publish a piece of content, it should be optimized for your primary social network. Each social network has its own ideal mix of image, video, text, emojis, and hashtags.
Adapt to secondary networks: You will likely need to make changes to the format of your content when publishing it on your secondary social networks. Perhaps you’ll only use parts of the content you prepared for your primary network.
Republication: One piece of content can typically be presented several times to your primary audience. This is useful as you never reach 100% of your followers with one post since everyone is online at different times. Using different text and images for subsequent publications is a good way to make sure your content doesn’t appear stale or repetitive.
Repurposing: Content in which you have invested significant time or money can be repurposed at a later stage. Perhaps you can update a survey you ran, provide a new editorial angle, or redo the graphics. A good way to organize the use and reuse of content is to build a social media content calendar.
5. Leverage inbound marketing and partnerships
Inbound marketing is an approach by which you create and publish content that will drive interested users closer to your offering.
It’s a structured process using planning, scoring, and automation to manage long customer interaction processes. It’s a great approach to marketing for small business, especially in the B2B space.
How to put inbound marketing into action:
Inbound marketing is about using content to drive users to your offering without reaching out to them with advertising.
Analyze the user journey: Users travel through various stages before they become prospects for your offering. You first need to identify what questions the user is asking before they’re ready to move to the next step in the user journey.
Create and publish content: With the stages of the user journey in mind, create content that corresponds to each stage, and think of mechanisms that will bring the user to the next stage: Newsletter subscription, whitepaper download, webinar registration, etc. This is the stage where you’ll actually use social media platforms to publish your content and engage with your audience.
Automate the funnel: One of the aims of inbound marketing is to create an automated lead generation process. It uses content and publications on social media to generate interest and subsequently works like a content relationship management tool. You’ll need a technical solution such as HubSpot or Salesforce Pardot to pursue this approach seriously.
6. Set up social commerce
Users can be strongly influenced by social media but may not be used to buying products there. There is, however, a rising trend of social commerce on social networks like Instagram and Pinterest.
Facebook also recently launched its Page shops, adding e-commerce functionality to business pages on its platform.
How to use social commerce in your social media strategy:
Social commerce is a shortcut from social media to e-commerce. It can be an interesting opportunity for companies with strong social media activity and the possibility to sell online.
Prepare product information: In order to sell online via social media, you need the same information as for any other e-commerce activity: product titles and descriptions, images, prices, and an order fulfillment solution.
Choose your platform: If your primary social network has e-commerce functionality, go with that platform. If it doesn’t, consider trying one of the leading social commerce platforms: Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook.
Build the e-commerce functionality: It’s fairly easy to set up social commerce. Products and prices can be entered individually or as a product feed so your shop is up to date.
7. Evolve your content from articles to video to live
When you first consider content for your social media marketing plan, you might think about articles and images.
But video content has become accessible to small businesses now that platforms like the Facebook Live Producer empower you to create professional-looking live video content. You might even want to make video your hero content, as we saw in tip No. 3.
How to make smart use of video:
All you need is a smartphone with a good camera to start producing live video. We also recommend adding a good-quality microphone or headset.
Plan your video content: For video content, you need to create a title, write a script, and find the right filming location with good lighting and an appropriate background.
Test-run your video: To overcome the fear of looking silly and get used to speaking to the camera, do at least one test run. A teleprompter software tool can be helpful as well.
Set it up as an event: You can create video content for later publication or create a live event. Whichever you choose, make sure to build awareness before publication to drive more views and more engagement.
8. Plan and automate
Running social media activities is about efficiently using resources. The best way to organize any social media activity is to plan ahead and automate as much as possible.
There are a number of simple social tools to help with automation that each perform specific tasks, or it can be done using a more complete social media software suite that covers all of your automation needs.
How to plan and automate your social media activity:
If you’ve built your content mix using tip No. 4, you may have started using a content calendar as the nervous system of your social media strategy. Now, all you need to do is connect your primary and secondary social networks to your content via automation.
Define your primary social network: As described in the first tip, you should first define your social network set-up and decide where primary content goes.
Build your content calendar: A content calendar is a key component of a social media strategy. Build your calendar by placing the hero content first and scheduling supporting content around it. You will likely have a regular flow of hub content, and the amount of help content you produce will depend on your business activity and commercial calendar.
Automate publication: Bring it all together with automation software that allows you to connect your content to your social media accounts. Schedule posts to each of your social networks in advance, keeping your content calendar moving like a well-oiled machine.
The best social media tools for small business
Social media automation tools will help your business automate the implementation of your content strategy. In the tips above, we’ve mentioned various tasks for which these tools are useful: in implementing a content calendar, automating publications, and planning ahead.
Let’s look at a few tools that work in different ways.
1. Later
The core functionality of Later is to build a visual content calendar and schedule image posts to Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Later’s visual overview of the calendar is one of the best we’ve seen.
The content calendar view of Later is visual and well adapted to planning Instagram posts.
2. MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is great for getting the most out of your content. It’s the content repurposing, recycling, and automation champion.
A unique feature of MeetEdgar is the automatic creation of post variations submitted for approval.
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one the best and most complete social media management tools covering the entire spectrum of automation, management, research, and reporting functionalities for your social media activity.
Sprout Social provides a wide variety of reporting options, including content performance across the social media channels you are using.
Learn from what you do and focus on where you win
Most social media activity only pays off in the medium to long run, which can be frustrating to businesses looking for quick wins or a rapid return on their investment.
But some of the above tips are sure to generate value for your business even in the short run as they can help you focus on what’s essential and what tasks are the best use of your time.
Focus your efforts, optimize your content output, plan ahead, and automate where you can in order to get the most out of your small business’s social media strategy.
There are some things you can do to limit Facebook’s web of surveillance, but not much
Instagram is a massive money-maker. Parent company Facebook doesn’t release figures on how much money the division makes but reports claim it generated $20 billion in advertising revenue in 2019 alone – that’s a quarter of Facebook’s entire yearly revenue. Or, to put it another way, more money than YouTube makes for parent company Alphabet.
At the heart of Instagram’s financial success is two things: advertising, the Stories feature it nabbed from Snapchat is now filled with it, and the data that powers all that advertising. There’s a lot of it.
Instagram, through its integrations with Facebook, uses your personal information to show you adverts that it believes you’ll be mostly likely to click on. This information comes from what you do within the app and Facebook, your phone and your behaviour as you move around parts of the web that Facebook doesn’t own.
First off – everything you do on Instagram is tracked. Almost every online service you use collects information about your actions. Every thumb scroll made through your feed provides it with information about your behaviour. Instagram knows that you spent 20 minutes scrolling to the depths of your high-school crush’s profile at 2am.
The data that Instagram collects isn’t just for advertising. The company uses your information – for instance, what device you use to login – to detect suspicious login attempts. Crash reports from your phone can help it identify bugs in its code and identify parts of the app that nobody uses. In 2019 it ditched the Following tab, which showed everyone the public posts you had liked.
Other than deleting the app completely there’s very little you can do to stop Instagram tracking your behaviour on its platform, but there are things you can do to limit some of the data that’s collected and the types of adverts you see online.
Delete (some) of your data
Want to see the information you’ve given Instagram? Head to the app’s settings page and tap the security option. Here there’s the choice to see the information Instagram has collected about you and download it. If you tap on ‘Access Data’ you’ll be able to see all your password changes, email addresses and phone numbers associated with the account, plus more about how you use the app.
In total there are 25 different categories of information that are collected – these range from interactions with polls that you’ve completed in people’s stories to hashtags you follow and changes to the information in your bio. Instagram’s access tool can be found here.
While it’s possible to see all of this data, there isn’t a lot you can do with it. Your search history can be deleted through the Security menu options, although when you do so you only delete it locally. Instagram and Facebook still know what – or who – you have searched for. “Keep in mind that clearing your search history is temporary, and that searches you clear may reappear in your history after you search for them again,” Instagram says.
It is also possible to delete the contacts that you may have uploaded to Instagram from your phone – this includes names and phone numbers. Uploading your contacts allows Instagram and Facebook to provide friend suggestions but also builds out its knowledge of your social activity.
This Instagram page shows whether you’ve uploaded any contacts and allows you to delete them. Deleting them will not stop new contacts being added to your phone from being uploaded. The setting can be turned on or off through the settings menu on iOS or Android.
The option to download your data includes photos, comments, profile information and more. This has to be requested through the Security menu.
Location
You probably use Instagram on your phone. By default, Instagram’s location gathering abilities are turned-off by default but you’ve probably inadvertently turned the feature on while adding your location to a post or story.
To change this – or at the very least check if you’ve given it permission – you need to visit the settings on your phone. It can’t be done through the Instagram app.
On Android, navigate to settings then tap on apps and find Instagram. Here you can see whether you’ve given it permission to access your location, microphone, device storage, contacts and more. You can turn these settings on and off, allowing Instagram access to your location all the time, only while you’re using the app or to completely deny it.
If you own an iPhone, the process is similar. Tap your way to the phone’s settings, go to privacy and then location services and find Instagram. Here you can choose whether location tracking is on all the time, when you’re using the app or off completely.
Control ads in stories
As Facebook has tried (successfully) to make more money from Instagram, it has filled it with adverts. What you see is all powered, technically, by the parent company. Facebook is the ads server for Instagram and the two are inseparable.
Instagram shows you ads based on what it and Facebook think you like. This is based on what you do while on Instagram (e.g. liking posts from particular brands) but also what you do on websites and services not owned by Facebook. Facebook’s Pixel is a tiny piece of code that’s on almost every website you visit and collects information saying you have visited it. The Pixel gathers data about your activity online and links it to an identifier and that helps decide what ads you’ll be shown.
It’s just one way data is collected that feeds into the company’s bigger advertising machine. “Advertisers, app developers and publishers can send us information through Facebook Business Tools that they use, including our social plugins (such as the Like button), Facebook Login, our APIs and SDKs, or the Facebook pixel,” Facebook’s data policy says. This includes what you buy and the websites you visit.
So what can you do about it on Instagram? The controls are limited. Within the app, though the settings tab, you can see your ad activity. This shows you the ads you have engaged with – such as commenting on posts, liking or watching the majority of. There’s also links out of the Instagram app that explain adverts on the platform within the settings tab.
If you don’t like an individual ad it is possible to hide it by tapping the three dots that appear next to the ad and tapping hide. It’s also possible to report an ad if it could break Instagram’s policies.
To really attempt to control ads on Instagram, you need to go to Facebook. Here it’s possible to change preference settings, which will apply to Instagram as well as Facebook. There are no ad preference settings for people who only have an Instagram account and not a Facebook account. The company says it is working on building controls within the Instagram app.
Facebook’s ad preferences page is a mine of information. It shows what Facebook thinks your interests are, companies that have uploaded information about you, how ads are targeted, ad settings, and ads you’ve hidden. To change the adverts you see you need to spend a short amount of time on this page working through the settings.
Some key choices that can be made are in ‘Your Information’. Here you chose not to see ads that are based on your employer, job title, relationship status and education. The businesses section allows you to stop businesses who have uploaded information about you from showing you ads. And ‘Ad Settings’ stops Facebook products showing you adverts based on information that’s collected from other websites and services you visit.
For any of this to apply to Instagram, the company says your accounts need to be connected. “To make sure your ad preferences are applied, connect your Instagram account to your Facebook account,” it says.
Delete Instagram
If you’re just fed up with Instagram in general you can delete the app. You can’t delete your Instagram account from within the app – we’re not sure why – but instead you have to visit this page. From here it’s possible to delete your account. “When you delete your account, your profile, photos, videos, comments, likes and followers will be permanently removed,” the company says. Or you can temporarily disable your account. This can be done here.
I recently spoke with a CEO who expressed frustration with the lack of cooperation in his organization. One incident in particular stood out. A smaller product group within his firm landed a new client. After the deal closed, it was revealed that another (larger) product group was calling on the same client.
Instead of collaborating, both teams pursued the business on their own. While the niche product group did close business, the larger team did not. The result was a relatively small sale, a lot of internal he-said-she-said, and a less than united company in the eyes of the customer.
Had the teams collaborated, they could have provided a more robust solution, behaved as joined forces, and potentially won a much larger deal. The client even commented, “Don’t your people talk to each other?”
Improving cooperation is an increasingly urgent challenge for leaders. When location-based teams left the office to work remotely, social interactions that may have once fostered collaboration evaporated.
Why didn’t the CEO’s two teams communicate? After all, they work for the same company, collaborating could have increased their scope and reputation. Failure to collaborate cost the firm revenue and potentially damaged their rapport with a major client.
Most companies have their own stories about silos; be it between two product divisions, HR and Finance, or Operations and IT. The larger the organization, the worse it gets. Lack of collaboration and cooperation stymies innovation and has a chilling effect on morale. Longer-term it can plummet customer engagement and brand reputation.
In my experience, silos are rarely rooted in malice or even turf defending. Emotionally and psychologically, humans are hardwired for collaboration and connection; we simply cannot survive (in any sense of the word) alone. Being a human is a team sport.
More often, a lack of collaboration is the (unintended) result of misaligned systems. Leaders who want to break through silos to create cooperative, united, purpose-driven organizations, must address the root causes. Unfortunately, in most large organizations:
Systems point people inwards, to concerns about themselves and their department, instead of outwards, towards teammates and customers.
Systems reward individual achievement instead of collective impact.
Systems push the immediacy of financial results instead of steadfastness of strategy and purpose.
Below are three common barriers to collaboration. We’ll start with the most obvious and move to the more insidious.
Compensation drives self-orientation
A team that gets compensated only on their own product line is hardly set up to collaborate. The same is true for any team that is commissioned or bonused solely on department-based metrics. For example, in the situation described above, if the team was compensated for overall company performance (in addition to individual performance) they may have been more incentivized.
Yet there’s also another, less obvious sign of self-oriented compensation in the earlier story: the sales team was exclusively paid when the deals closed. There was no incentive for client retention, referrals, client satisfaction, or even the effective use of the solution. This drives the team’s mindset to think self-first.
What to do instead:
In addition to individual performance compensation, add group performance and customer retention into the compensation mix. Discuss these shared objectives as often as you do individual targets.
Metrics are internally focused
When success or failure is defined by internal-only metrics, customer-impact is absent from the conversation. When a team or individual thinks: How can we hit our targets? they look inward. When leaders ask, How can we make a difference to customers? people think more holistically.
Inserting the impact on customers a lens for decision-making broadens the horizon, instead of each group focusing on their own metrics, the entire group is working towards helping customers.
How to change the frame:
Include customer success metrics as part of the overall organizational narrative. Here’s the difference: Internal metrics are: revenue, profitability, conversation rates, pipelines, etc. Outward looking metrics are things like customer satisfaction, net promoter scores (NPS) and customer retention. Make these outward looking measures as present and important as internal sales, financial and production targets.
Short-term success is prioritized over longer-term impact
One reason people don’t cooperate is because they don’t feel like they have time. An organization who defines itself by the team’s ability to hit quarterly targets is always going to feel the urgency of the short term. Organizations who define success by the ability to make a sizable, lasting impact on their customer-base think more long-term.
Where to point your team:
Tether the team to a belief in something bigger than themselves. Belief that customers are out there, and they need your company to help them seize opportunity, grow their businesses, or reduce risk (or whatever else your solution helps them do) prompts more innovative and noble thinking than the drumbeat of simply hitting today’s targets.
Lack of collaboration doesn’t happen by design. It happens by default. The traditional framework and language of business points us inward, towards short term self preservation which stymies collaboration.
The 9-to-5 workdays, the coffee breaks, the water cooler discussions — these are artifacts of a bygone time. Yes, remnants of them still permeate our corporate landscapes, operational workflows, social rituals and even our technology choices.
Recent events have launched a disruption of our daily work lives — but maybe that is just what we needed.
Right now, we face a choice of drastically slowing the global economy or compelling hundreds of millions of end users to be productive members of their organizations from home, right now. But the truth is this shift is possible.
And if it’s possible, what else is possible? What truly happens when you fundamentally change to a remote workforce versus preferring a primary campus attendance model? Secondly, what do you need to unleash this potential?
One of the first changes we have seen occurring for thousands of customers is that with remote working models, the best tend to rise to the top. Perhaps it is the lack of office politics or other constraints. But it’s more likely the result of added productivity of working when work needs to be done (not between eight arbitrary hours defined in a 1940s industrial model/production line economy). I want to use a phrase called “intrapreneurship.”
Unbridled in many ways, these remote office workers become not just stellar individual contributors — they become innovators. Having no formal training in psychology, I can only surmise what the possible effects of the comfort and agility, lack of bumper-to-bumper traffic and abbreviated eating and sleeping habits can have on productivity. But perhaps a better way of looking at this is to say we get back those minutes and hours we used to spend preparing for and navigating to and from work. This is not to say we are going to work more hours from home; we are going to work better hours.
As I think about this, it’s safe to say we have become an intellectual economy versus a manufacturing economy. So many of us no longer screw widgets on thingamajigs made by the low-cost bidder. Our service-based economy is based on intellectual property. Better said: ideas. And ideas flourish when people are liberated to pursue them unfettered by conventions or outmoded practices.
The internet is the greatest platform ever created by man for the proliferation of ideas. It is not for this reason only we should find models that use it to work. However, it is a compelling one. Virtualization, while it was and continues to be one of the greatest data-center recapitalizations of all time, also taught us the power of abstraction. Abstraction in the virtual technology vocabulary means the willingness to disassemble computer systems and re-assemble them in new ways using hypervisors and micro-services to replace prior system architectures. Abstraction becomes a key way to bypass our dependencies on any one device located in a single place. When the full capabilities of your computer can go anywhere at any time, then you can also work productively anywhere and at any time.
Moore’s law is something I refer to, as it is center stage in this new evolution of the modern workspace. The speed of processing power per dollar increases forever. There is no reason our new distributed, remote, work-from-home architectures cannot fully embrace this computing reality. A model with rich and robust edge devices and operating systems coupled with intelligent, pervasive, learning, secure, centralized and managed cloud services looks to be the ideal model.
The real disruption of this new work-from-home scenario is this: We are already emerging better, smarter and more agile. This is not a bumper sticker. This trend has been accelerating over the past decade, and adoption must move even faster if we are to equip ourselves to live in a world where “disasters” can now bypass borders swiftly.
The early adopters are tirelessly innovating and topping barriers, and a wave of “fast followers” are right behind them reading the pages of the newly inked “Work From Home” books being written across our agencies, organizations and enterprises worldwide.
Web collaboration platforms, tele and PC-presence, chat, teams, data sharing, VDI, DaaS, RDS, application publishing, server-based computing, clouds, hyperconverged infrastructure and more are all available right now to enable a completely new re-imagining of what your workforce could and perhaps should be.
For those organizations willing to re-imagine, there are a few logical steps you can take that are near fool-proof. I call it “cloud staging.”
Get a topological overview of what your current configuration looks like. Said another way, do an instant assessment to find out what your users have at their fingertips and, secondly, how they are using it. Like Google maps, know your starting position.
Look at the results of your assessment and realize that storage, applications, compute and networking do not need to be landlocked inside a PC from a big box store.
With your current work-from-home constraints, what applications are your users already using? There is a good chance they should be woven into your strategies. What new cloud services for data (Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox, AWS S3, etc.) and applications could you begin to use companywide?
The benefit of step-by-step cloud staging is that an organization can start small. Begin by backing up your data. Next, move on to replacing legacy applications with SaaS or cloud services. Most options are now just clicks away versus weeks of physical hardware delivery, configuration and deployment.
Fail fast. If designs fail, replace them. Do not stick to bad ideas just because we take a great deal of time making them.
Stay informed. The stream of consumable data on new ideas, new deployments and new architectures has never been more visible. There is no monopoly on good ideas in the modern workplace.
This is your opportunity to truly re-power your end user computing strategies. This is the real disruption of working from home.
Over the last decade, there has been an explosion in social media data, and at the same time, AI/ML models are also getting better at predicting people’s interests and purchasing habits. For example, social media data can be processed and analysed using AI models to find meaningful correlations to precisely target products and services to specific users.
Businesses can also leverage analytics models on data collected from social networks and use computational frameworks like Apache Hadoop for analysing large volumes of data. A lot of companies have been using social media data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram LinkedIn, Snapchat to improve their marketing ROI and target consumers by analysing users’ platform behaviour in relation to demographics.
But, there’s a caveat! While social media data provides great insights into the behaviour of users, they may also face user privacy-related issues.
Social Media Analytics Vs Privacy Violations
Ever since the Cambridge Analytical scandal and the introduction of regulations such as GDPR, it has become more stringent for companies to leverage social media analytics for targeted advertising. The impact of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a catalyst in this regard when it was found that third-party applications on Facebook were mining users’ data for political campaign profiling.
In the past, third-party data aggregators scraped social media sites and collected personal sensitive data, which was then resold to companies. Now, with the introduction of regulations that prohibit that practice, will social media analytics become redundant or less effective for companies?
Events such as the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, massive security incidents like Equifax breach, and later on GDPR paved the way to tighten the norms on how personal data is collected, stored, and processed. In the past few years, the lawsuits against these tech companies on privacy norms have only strengthened the trend.
Companies around are therefore preparing to become more compliant with the regulations and what data they collect of users. Facebook, for example, has now become more transparent to users specifying what data they collect and what information they provide third-parties for their advertising campaigns.
Social media profiles have personally identifiable information and other sensitive data that can be used by data scientists to create models for specific products, which can generate more sales. The challenges with collecting social media data can depend on the kind of data collected (non-personal social data or personal data) and how the data is utilised. It also depends on the applicable laws and regulations in geography. For instance, in Europe, It will be more difficult for social media analytics companies to execute to their full potential using the data, versus Asian countries where privacy laws are less stringent.
Privacy Compliant Social Data Analytics
Without having to profile users using digital identifiers like IP or Mac addresses and cookies, there is still a lot which can be done. Companies are looking at GDPR compliant data processing on social media data, with proper consent and transparency for how personal data is collected and utilised for analytics. Here non-sensitive social media data is used for increasing sales or generating marketing insights with CRM integration, which is an appropriate use of social media ‘likes’ to achieve specific business goals. On the other hand, if sensitive personal data is mined to track users or survey their purchase habits, then that could be a violation at least in some global geographies.
For companies, it is important to be careful about the nature of data collected for analytics and ensure it’s not personal in nature, as it can attract penalties. To counter this, proper data governance programs have been put in place for analysing social media trends and making sure that there is no violation.
Even if there are fewer datasets available for social media analytics on personally identifiable data, social media analytics companies are expected to keep utilising non-personal data for sentiment analysis, sales trends, visualisation, and acquiring sales leads, all within the boundaries of regulations. For example, by monitoring social media, one can determine customer sentiment analysis on non-personal data, which can be converted into actionable insights.
The Roadmap For Social Media Analytics
The bottom line is that the collection and utilisation of social media data are complex, involving multiple sources and data management challenges. This is confusing for analytics professionals and social data analytics companies to identify the legality of collecting such kind of social media data.
This means that companies will continue to use popular products such as Google Analytics to track social media campaign performance, conversions, and ultimately understand the return on investment from social media marketing efforts. Other large companies like Salesforce, IBM, SAS have products for social media data analytics.
While social media analytics will continue to play a role in sales and marketing, other areas like risk management and fraud detection are also becoming more prominent. Here, law enforcement companies are leveraging social media analytics to extract and analyse the data generated from various data sources.
