editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

Data Analytics Most Instrumental in Enhancing Customer Experience and Lowering Risk for Organizations

January 10, 2019 No Comments

Innovating new business models and maximizing revenue and profits are the next set of priorities for data analytics

Infosys published a global research on data analytics from the Infosys Knowledge Institute. The survey titled, ‘Endless possibilities with data: Navigate from now to your next’, reveals that a majority of organizations are deploying analytics to enhance customer experiences and mitigate risk.

This research tries to understand how data analytics is becoming core to driving digital transformation for enterprises and makes an assessment of enterprise expectations in a world of endless possibilities with data. It also explores a range of challenges, opportunities, and the role of new technologies in the analytics world.

Highlights of the survey
* 31 percent of respondents identified the use of analytics with experience enhancement. This includes using intelligence generated by listening to internal and external stakeholders to drive extreme personalization and high quality customer service

* 28 percent respondents were interested in leveraging analytics for risk mitigation – predicting risk to enable better decision making, and detecting anomalies that could disrupt business effectiveness.

* Developing new business models by unearthing the latent needs of customers and offering innovative products and services was seen as the primary analytics requirement of 23 percent of respondents.

* Revenue and profit maximization through increasing channel effectiveness, and thereby, enhancing profitability across processes, channels and stakeholder ecosystems was the analytics priority for the remaining 18 percent.

* The majority of respondents in the U.S. (32 percent) and Europe (34 percent) stated they would like to use analytics for experience enhancement whereas in ANZ about 31 percent respondents consider it for risk mitigation.

Functions across organization are benefiting from the possibilities of data. Finance and accounting was found to use analytics the most at 32 percent, followed by marketing and operations at 20 percent and 17 percent, respectively. In terms of the emerging technologies, Artificial intelligence was perceived to deliver increased outcomes when combined with analytics at 37 percent followed by IoT and Cloud Technologies at 19 percent and 16 percent, respectively.

The survey found that enterprises in every industry encountered several challenges that prevented them from implementing their analytics initiatives fully. The biggest challenges stemmed from a lack of expertise in integrating multiple datasets (44 percent of respondents) and failure of understanding in deploying the right analysis techniques (43 percent).

This is where enterprises are looking up to their partners to help industrialize their analytics capabilities by creating an analytics strategy, build an operational framework, and define a process for executing and governing analytics initiatives.

Sourced from BW CI World

In News

In-Feed Native Ads: Measuring Native Advertising

January 9, 2019 No Comments

By Julien Verdier

As published by our co-founder, “Native advertising is a form of paid media where the advertisement is relevant to the consumer experience, integrated into the surrounding content and is not disruptive.” The advertisement is in-feed and is relevant to the content on the page. As CEO of a native advertising platform, I’m seeing the native advertising industry experience phenomenal growth, especially on mobile.

When introducing native to your marketing campaign, you need a clear view of what you want the results to be. In order to succeed with your in-feed native ads, you first need to define what success actually looks like. What is the metric you are going to use to determine whether or not your native advertising is a success? For the majority of in-feed native advertising campaigns, key performance indicators (KPIs) typically fall into one or more of the below:

CTR: Click-through rates (CTRs) are often used as a KPI, particularly when it comes to programmatic native advertising.

Visits: Rightly or wrongly for many advertisers, the No. 1 criteria for success when they run native advertising campaigns is: How many visits did it bring to my site?

Dwell Time And Bounce Rate: These two KPIs often go hand in hand with visits as a measure of success. Dwell time is the measure of how long a visitor spends on a specific page, so it can be used — in a slightly crude fashion — as an indicator of whether someone read and enjoyed the content on the page.

Bounce rate, which is a key search metric, is the indication of what the user did after landing on the page. Did they click back or close the window, or was their interest piqued enough by this page to move along to other pages on the site? Both are metrics used to understand the stickiness of content and websites, and to tell if visitors enjoy these pages.

Engagement: This is a similar KPI to dwell time, but the process of measurement is very different. While dwell time is typically measured through the advertisers’ website, usually via Google Analytics, engagement is a metric that is usually measured via a publisher, native technology platform or another third-party ad-tracking tool.

What does it mean? It is a measure of how long someone engaged with your content. This could be how long, on average, someone spent reading your branded content published on a site. Or it could be the average length someone spent watching your brand video.

Shares And Likes: For many advertisers, native advertising is a tool to be used to generate shares of their content and likes for their pages. This is particularly true, though not exclusively, with social media advertising. For many advertisers using social media advertising, they are looking for as many shares of their content as possible — shares that hopefully translate into lots of likes for their social media profiles, and more visitors to their site. But, ultimately, shares equal extended reach for your brand’s marketing messages and increase the available pool of relevant customers you can engage with at any point in the future.

Sales And Leads: While soft metrics, such as engagement and visits, are very popular measures of success, native advertising is increasingly being used as a pure direct response marketing channel. For these advertisers, success is easy to quantify: Did I create any sales leads? Did I manage to generate any sales as a result of this native advertising?

Sophisticated advertisers increasingly use native advertising in conjunction with other forms of digital advertising for strong sales results. When combined with data, retargeting, cookies and attribution modeling, native advertising is a growing part of the modern sales lead marketing mix.

Challenges Of Measuring In-Feed Native Advertising

The onset of native and content-based advertising solutions has presented the industry with a complex challenge: How do we establish meaningful and consistent measures that underpin the digital trading environment and allow the evaluation of campaign effectiveness?

Using standard metrics will give you the numbers you want — the impressions, reach, clicks, etc. And through this, you will be able to show whether a native ad was successful compared to other advertising formats. However, I believe these serve as a reporting comparison but do not give full insight into the value of native advertising. How you measure a native ad should differ according to the campaign and its objectives and be tailored toward this.

In June 2016, the IAB U.K.’s Content and Native Council published its Content and Native Measurement Green Paper, in which our company weighed in, along with 15 other companies. If the paper has a conclusion, it’s that there is much work to be done to be open and transparent with all data points for consistent, algorithmic measures and techniques to be developed.

The point on which everyone agreed is that current digital trading metrics were only a part of the solution and that, as with traditional media, there has to be an investment in understanding how people behave with content-based and native advertising before establishing algorithms that measure those behaviors.

Feature Image Credit: Pexels

By Julien Verdier

CEO of ADYOULIKE, AI-Powered Native Advertising platform.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

YouTube Officially Rolls Out YouTube Stories

January 9, 2019 No Comments

By Grace Duffy

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media.

On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show, we explore YouTube’s rollout of YouTube Stories to more creators. Our special guest is Steve Dotto.

Watch the Social Media Marketing Talk Show

If you’re new to the show, click on the green “Watch replay” button below and sign in or register to watch our latest episode from Friday, December 7, 2018. You can also listen to the show as an audio podcast, found on iTunes/Apple Podcast, Android, Google Play, Stitcher, and RSS.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article.

By Grace Duffy

Sourced from Social Media Examiner

In News

Meeting the intelligent data management needs of 2019

January 9, 2019 No Comments

By Mark Bowen

Dave Russell, Vice President for Product Strategy at Veeam, outlines five intelligent data management needs CIOs need to know about in 2019.

The world of today has changed drastically due to data. Every process, whether an external client interaction or internal employee task, leaves a trail of data. Human and machine generated data is growing 10 times faster than traditional business data, and machine data is growing at 50 times that of traditional business data.

With the way we consume and interact with data changing daily, the number of innovations to enhance business agility and operational efficiency are also plentiful. In this environment, it is vital for enterprises to understand the demand for Intelligent Data Management in order to stay one step ahead and deliver enhanced services to their customers.

I’ve highlighted five hot trends in 2019 decision-makers need to know – keeping the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market in mind, here are my views:

Multi-Cloud usage and exploitation will rise

With companies operating across borders and the reliance on technology growing more prominent than ever, an expansion in multi-cloud usage is almost inevitable. IDC estimates that customers will spend US$554 billion on cloud computing and related services in 2021, more than double the level of 2016.

On-premises data and applications will not become obsolete, but that the deployment models for your data will expand with an increasing mix of on-prem, SaaS, IaaS, managed clouds and private clouds.

Over time, we expect more of the workload to shift off-premises, but this transition will take place over years, and we believe that it is important to be ready to meet this new reality today.

Flash memory supply shortages, and prices, will improve in 2019

According to a report by Gartner in October this year, flash memory supply is expected to revert to a modest shortage in mid-2019, with prices expected to stabilise largely due to the ramping of Chinese memory production.

Greater supply and improved pricing will result in greater use of flash deployment in the operational recovery tier, which typically hosts the most recent 14 days of backup and replica data. We see this greater flash capacity leading to broader usage of instant mounting of backed up machine images (or copy data management).

Systems that offer copy data management capability will be able to deliver value beyond availability, along with better business outcomes. Example use cases for leveraging backup and replica data include DevOps, DevSecOps and DevTest, patch testing, analytics and reporting.

Predictive analytics will become mainstream and ubiquitous

The predictive analytics market is forecast to reach $12.41 billion by 2022, marking a 272% increase from 2017, at a CAGR of 22.1%.

Predictive analytics based on telemetry data, essentially Machine Learning (ML) driven guidance and recommendations is one of the categories that is most likely to become mainstream and ubiquitous.

Machine Learning predictions are not new, but we will begin to see them utilising signatures and fingerprints, containing best practice configurations and policies, to allow the business to get more value out of the infrastructure that you have deployed and are responsible for.

Predictive analytics, or diagnostics, will assist us in ensuring continuous operations, while reducing the administrative burden of keeping systems optimised. This capability becomes vitally important as IT organisations are required to manage an increasingly diverse environment, with more data, and with more stringent service level objectives.

As predictive analytics become more mainstream, SLAs and SLOs are rising and businesses’ SLEs, Service Level Expectations, are even higher. This means that we need more assistance, more intelligence in order to deliver on what the business expects from us.

The ‘versatalist’ (or generalist) role will increasingly become the new operating model for the majority of IT organisations.

While the first two trends were technology-focused, the future of digital is still analogue: it’s people. Talent shortages combined with new, collapsing on-premises infrastructure and public cloud + SaaS, are leading to broader technicians with background in a wide variety of disciplines, and increasingly a greater business awareness as well.

Standardisation, orchestration and automation are contributing factors that will accelerate this, as more capable systems allow for administrators to take a more horizontal view rather than a deep specialisation.

Specialisation will of course remain important but as IT becomes more and more fundamental to business outcomes, it stands to reason that IT talent will likewise need to understand the wider business and add value across many IT domains.

Yet, while we see these trends challenging the status quo next year, some things will not change. There are always constants in the world, and we see two major factors that will remain top-of-mind for companies everywhere….

Frustration with legacy backup approaches and solutions

The top three vendors in the market continue to lose market share in 2019. In fact, the largest provider in the market has been losing share for 10 years. Companies are moving away from legacy providers and embracing more agile, dynamic, disruptive vendors, such as Veeam, to offer the capabilities that are needed to thrive in the data-driven age.

The pain points of the Three Cs: Cost, complexity and capability

These Three Cs continue to be why people in data centres are unhappy with solutions from other vendors. Broadly speaking, these are excessive costs, unnecessary complexity and a lack of capability, which manifests as speed of backup, speed of restoration or instant mounting to a virtual machine image. These three major criteria will continue to dominate the reasons why organisations augment or fully replace their backup solution.

The arrival of the first 5G networks will create new opportunities for resellers and CSPs to help collect, manage, store and process the higher volumes of data

In early 2019 we will witness the first 5G-enabled handsets hitting the market at CES in the US and MWC in Barcelona. I believe 5G will likely be most quickly adopted by businesses for Machine-to-Machine communication and Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Consumer mobile network speeds have reached a point where they are probably as fast as most of us need with 4G.

2019 will be more about the technology becoming fully standardised and tested, and future-proofing devices to ensure they can work with the technology when it becomes more widely available, and EMEA becomes a truly Gigabit Society.

For resellers and cloud service providers, excitement will centre on the arrival of new revenue opportunities leveraging 5G or infrastructure to support it. Processing these higher volumes of data in real-time, at a faster speed, new hardware and device requirements, and new applications for managing data will all present opportunities and will help facilitate conversations around edge computing.

Feature Image: Dave Russell, Vice President for Product Strategy at Veeam

By Mark Bowen

Sourced from INTELLIGENT CIO

In News

7 Content Marketing Tasks to Automate Right Now

January 8, 2019 No Comments

By Aaron Agius

Rapid advances in AI technologies mean marketing automation is no longer optional. It’s a mainstay of modern marketing.

Not all content marketing tasks can or should be automated. No matter how far AI advances go, software will never replace a human for crafting an insightful and meaningful blog post.

But as you go through your daily content tasks, it’s worth asking, “Can this be automated?” Chances are, many of them can.

Let me help you choose the areas to automate to plan your approach effectively.

Proofreading: Grammarly

Cost: Free browser extension or paid premium version

You could write a great piece of content, but your readers won’t trust it (and many won’t even read it) if it’s full of spelling and grammar errors.

It takes a lot of time to go through a draft with a fine-toothed comb to find and correct every mistake.

Tools like Grammarly can automate proofreading in a more comprehensive way than the usual spelling and grammar features found in Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

The free Google Chrome extension offers basic spelling and grammar corrections in almost every place you write content across the web – web-based emails, social media updates, Google Docs, etc.

The paid version ($11.66 per month) picks up more advanced errors and suggests enhanced vocabulary. It also can identify plagiarism to help make sure you don’t duplicate content.

Email marketing

According to a recent survey from Econsultancy, email is the most effective channel. It helps you garner and follow up on leads and helps prospects through the sales and after-sales processes.

But data shows that companies are spending far too much time producing emails. According to The Litmus 2017 State of Email Report, 68% of companies take at least one week to produce one email. With most companies reporting having one to five emails in production at any given time, that means a lot of time is spent just on email. Yet there’s an abundance of automation software to choose from, including BuzzBuilder Pro and Mailchimp.

List building: BuzzBuilder Pro

Cost: $250-plus a month

Taking into account the testing of content and subject lines, cold lead generation can take months to execute.

BuzzBuilder Pro helps automate and speed up list building. It helps craft personalized cold emails and integrates with your LinkedIn account to send follow-up emails. Other features include a web form builder, social media marketing, and hot lead alerts.

Automated emails: Mailchimp

Cost: Free and paid versions (starting at $10 per month)

From a simple “Thank you for signing up for our newsletter” to “You have items in your shopping cart,” emails offer you an opportunity to keep your customers informed and engaged.

Mailchimp is up there with the best of the automated email software. It lets you store thousands of contacts at a time, segment and A/B test them, and create campaigns that you can save and reuse later. It also lets you schedule your email send times to get the optimal open and click-through rates.

Its automation feature lets you set up complex workflows based on triggers so your customers receive the right kind of email at the right time.

BONUS TOOL: GetResponse (pricing starts at $15 per month) covers much of what Mailchimp does (email workflow automation, triggered events and emails, and lead nurturing). But it’s expected to introduce a CRM feature to allow brands to measure their relationship with their customers in the same place they automate their email workflow.

Social media promotion: Zapier

Cost: Free trial; tiered pricing starting at $20 per month)

Promoting your content via social media is another time-consuming task, especially if you manage several platforms at a time, from pinning to Pinterest, to tweeting via Twitter, to uploading to Facebook. And that doesn’t include the time to “like” and share other content.

Platforms like Buffer are great for bulk-uploading your content in advance and scheduling it to send out to your various social accounts. Integrate it with Zapier and this process can be automated.

Once you set up your Zapier account, you link it to your social media profiles. You also need to set up your RSS feed. If you need help with RSS, read this guide.

Click on the “explore” tab to set up your cause-and-effect triggers. In the following example, when a new item is published to my blog, it’s automatically posted to my Facebook page.

Set up a few cause-and-effect triggers so each time you publish a blog post it automatically gets promoted on your social media.

Workflow automation: IFTTT

Cost: Free

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a go-to for any marketer wanting to automate content workflow. Since its 2010 launch, it’s been free. The automation possibilities are almost endless.l

IFTTT lets you connect your online “services” (e.g., social media accounts, WordPress blog, Gmail account, Google Calendar, and even other external blog RSS feeds) and set up condition statements (applets) that trigger an automation.

For example, you can set up an applet so that every time you post to Facebook, it immediately shares it on your Instagram account. Or, if you want to regularly share industry or topic-related news from The New York Times, your applet could automate posting news from a category (e.g., world news) to your Twitter feed:

Other IFTTT recipes to consider:

Sync your WordPress site with social media so when you post a new blog article it immediately shares to your social profiles.
Sync your Instagram and Pinterest accounts so every time you post a photo on Instagram, it is shared to one of your Pinterest boards.
Sync your YouTube account to social media so every time you upload a new video, it posts to your social profiles.

Monitoring and analysis: Google Analytics

Cost: Free

Google Analytics lets you set up custom reports to automatically send updates on the data you want to focus on. It can be helpful to identify what content is getting the most engagement and pinpoint content areas that drive the most traffic and conversions.

Time to do more

Content marketing is time-consuming work that requires daily input if it’s to bring any kind of ROI. And time, as we know, is money.

But, thanks to advances in big-data technologies and AI, automation is more cost-effective and user-friendly than ever. If you want to streamline your content ideation, creation, curation, and promotion, then it’s time to automate.

And better still, automate your analytics so you’re receiving regular and accurate insights into how your content is performing.

With these tasks automated, you’ll be freed to do more strategic work. Knowing that a lot of your content marketing is ticking on by itself will give you the breathing space to think about new and creative directions in which to take your content marketing.

What tasks do you automate? What tools have you found helpful? Please share in the comments.

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Automate your education in content marketing. Subscribe for the free weekday newsletter from the Content Marketing Institute.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

By Aaron Agius

Aaron Agius is an experienced search, content and social marketer. He has worked with some of the world’s largest and most recognized brands to build their online presence. See more from Aaron at Louder Online.

Sourced from Content Marketing Institute

In News

How to Build a Facebook Ad Funnel

January 8, 2019 No Comments

By Juupiner

Do you want more conversions from your Facebook ads?

Wondering how funnels can help?

To explore how you can build Facebook ad funnels that improve conversions, I interview Susan Wenograd.

More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Susan Wenograd, a Facebook ads expert who specializes in Facebook ad funnels. She’s also a consultant and regular speaker on Facebook ads.

Sue explains how video-based funnels create micro-conversions.

You’ll discover how to nurture prospects using a Facebook ad funnel.

Facebook Funnels

Susan’s Story

Susan got her start in ecommerce in the mid-2000s, when she worked for Circuit City. Back then, her focus was email marketing and paid search. After she moved to another job, she learned about Facebook advertising. At the time, Facebook ads were easier to learn because Facebook had half of the advertising features it does now.

Running Facebook ads, Susan was able to experiment and get to know the platform. She loved that these ads took her back to the marketing 101 stuff she enjoys: branding, content, the language you use, and so on. Facebook ads allowed her to use a little more creativity than paid search did.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article.

By Juupiner

In News

A new trove of internal Facebook emails is a stark reminder: You are Facebook’s product

January 8, 2019 No Comments

By Kurt Wagner

Facebook’s business is built on collecting and capitalizing on peoples’ personal information.

Your personal data has always been the key to Facebook’s business — and Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have used access to that personal data to strengthen strategic partnerships and hurt competitors over the years. At one point, Zuckerberg even considered selling users’ personal data to outside app developers.

That much was clear from a new trove of internal Facebook emails and other documents released by British lawmakers Wednesday. The documents had previously been sealed as part of an ongoing lawsuit filed against Facebook in California, but were made public by Britain’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which collected the documents last week.

“I believe there is considerable public interest in releasing these documents,” tweeted Damian Collins, the committee’s chair. “They raise important questions about how Facebook treats users data [sic], their policies for working with app developers, and how they exercise their dominant position in the social media market.”

The emails, which mostly date from 2012 to 2015, include conversations from Facebook’s top executives about the company’s developer tools and data-sharing practices before widespread changes were made to limit access to some user data in early 2015.

A Facebook blog post says the emails were “cherrypicked” from the lawsuit and represent “only one side of the story.”

“I understand there is a lot of scrutiny on how we run our systems. That’s healthy given the vast number of people who use our services around the world, and it is right that we are constantly asked to explain what we do,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post published Wednesday. “But it’s also important that the coverage of what we do — including the explanation of these internal documents — doesn’t misrepresent our actions or motives. This was an important change to protect our community, and it achieved its goal.”

The emails aren’t necessarily scandalous, but they do offer a glimpse into how Facebook thinks about user data, and how access to that data was core to Facebook’s success and business.

Facebook considered selling user data

One of the biggest misperceptions about Facebook is that the company sells your personal information. In reality, Facebook uses that personal information to target you with advertising, but it holds onto the bulk of the data itself.

But in 2012, Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook charge some outside developers for accessing and collecting data on users through the company’s APIs, software that allows Facebook to share data with other apps.

“If we make it so devs can generate revenue for us in different ways, then it makes it more acceptable for us to charge them quite a bit more for using platform,” Zuckerberg wrote. He suggested that developers could offset these charges by spending money on Facebook ads.

Facebook ultimately decided not to charge for this kind of data sharing, but the consideration is a reminder of how Facebook has built an entire business on peoples’ personal information.

“Like any organization, we had a lot of internal discussion and people raised different ideas,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page Wednesday. “Ultimately, we decided on a model where we continued to provide the developer platform for free and developers could choose to buy ads if they wanted. This model has worked well. Other ideas we considered but decided against included charging developers for usage of our platform, similar to how developers pay to use Amazon AWS or Google Cloud. To be clear, that’s different from selling people’s data. We’ve never sold anyone’s data.”

Facebook used personal data to strengthen — or weaken — competitors

Access to the personal information of billions of people has put Facebook in a very powerful position. The emails show that the company used access to that information as a bargaining chip with potential competitors.

In some cases, Facebook granted other businesses, like Netflix and Lyft, special permission to access information that other companies didn’t have. In other instances, Facebook cut competitors off. When Twitter launched the video service Vine in 2012, Facebook cut off access to its friend graph. That meant users who signed up for Vine with their Facebook account couldn’t see and connect with all of their Facebook friends inside Vine, an ability that would have theoretically helped Vine create a network much faster.

In another email Zuckerberg sent in November 2012, he suggested Facebook “enforce our policies against competitors much more strongly.”

It’s not a surprise that Facebook would limit its data sharing in a way that didn’t boost up competitors. It would be more surprising if Facebook hadn’t done this. But again, the underlying theme here is that Facebook’s competitive business advantage lies in having access to people’s personal information, an important understanding at a time when regulatory bodies are likely looking at Facebook’s competitive practices more closely now than ever.

Facebook knew there were risks in peddling users’ private information

Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica fiasco, in which a third-party research firm gained access to the personal information of tens of millions of Facebook users without their permission, raised a number of questions about the company’s data-sharing policies.

One of the most important was whether or not Facebook was ignorant about the risks of sharing user data, or just didn’t care about them.

Wednesday’s email dump makes it look like Facebook didn’t really care. In the email from Zuckerberg mentioned above, he acknowledged that making Facebook’s sharing tools free would lead to “abuse.”

“Not charging still means people will overuse and abuse our APIs and waste money for us,” he wrote to many of the company’s top executives. “I still think we should implement some kind of program where you have to pay if you use too many of our resources.”

It’s not entirely clear what Zuckerberg meant by “abuse” — it’s hard to imagine he foresaw that issues like Cambridge Analytica would arise the way they did. But it’s also clear that his concern wasn’t what that abuse might mean for users. The fear was that abusing the APIs would hurt Facebook’s business.

What’s the takeaway?

You could easily walk away from this email dump and think, “This is just how ruthless businesses work.” That’s true, and Facebook has proven that it is very, very good at making money from the personal information it collects from its users.

But Facebook has always positioned itself as a mission-driven company out to make the world a better place. It wasn’t just another win-at-all-costs business, but the place where you post your baby photos and stay in touch with your friends from college. Facebook’s product created a level of intimacy that others did not.

What we’ve learned over the past month — from Facebook’s dealings in Washington to its relationship to oppo research firms to Wednesday’s email dump — is that Facebook is a ruthless business, and your personal data keeps it alive.

Feature Image: Facebook CEO Mark ZuckerbergAlex Wong / Getty

By Kurt Wagner

Sourced from recode

In News

How One Can Run an Online Startup?

January 7, 2019 No Comments

By Nikhil Kale and Satyam Shastri

Once you start a business, consistency is all you need for it runs for a long time, be consistent with your marketing, constantly provide the items you intend to sell.

The world we live in is changing and this particular change can be seen in every aspect of our life. And social media has been one of the biggest reason behind this change. The way it has revolutionized everything is just amazing. Right from connecting with people spread around the globe to getting news and information within seconds to expanding your business worldwide, social media platforms can be used for anything. The only key here is the right way or approach needed.
Now, business is that one thing which not only needs the right approach but also, determination, ideas, execution, hard work and what not. Using social media is one such important or in today’s world, mandatory element. So, what exactly is the right way? What steps one should take? Here are a few points which might help you:

1) Know Your Business
It is important to know your business before working on it. What’s important here is how well you know the very market you belong to. Research as much as you can. Try to understand and note the risk factors before taking everything online. People who despite having a steady business offline fail to achieve the same online. So, before you create a site and start selling your product or service, observe and see what others are doing.

2) Understand Your Target Audience
This is one of the most important factors. The moment a seller gets to know his/her audience, his/her consumer, no one can take away the profit from him/her.

3) What are the Dos and Don’ts
Social media marketing comes with a number of dos and don’ts. Never overdo anything, even while advertising. Be subtle with your words and provide the right amount of information needed. Online business is solely based on trust and being an entrepreneur, you should totally respect and keep it. Once you cheat a customer, that trust and the goodwill you have been working for, dies.

4) The Right Platform for Your Business
There are a number of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and what not. It is important to the right platform needed to start a business. For some, Facebook’s algorithm work, for others something else. This, yet again totally depends on the type of business you want to have and research helps in knowing the right platform.

5) The Team
Social media marketing has a number of elements and a person alone cannot really tackle everything and for that, a team is needed. Assemble the right team; people who have the right knowledge of various software, who understand the algorithm and even know the right kind of posts needed.

6) Understanding the Trend
Social media is all about trend and if you are not following, you are going to be left out. And the same applies to an online business. If you keep selling things which are not in trend anymore, you are likely to get out of the market soon.

7) Consistency
The last yet the most important point. Once you start a business, consistency is all you need for it runs for a long time. Be consistent with your marketing, constantly provide the items you intend to sell. Keep updating your business related pages on regular basis.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock.com

By Nikhil Kale and Satyam Shastri

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

Twitter Marketing: Creative Ways to Connect With Your Audience

January 7, 2019 No Comments

By Michael Stelzner

Wondering how Twitter engagement can help your business? Looking for tips on sharing authentic tweets and conversations with prospects?

To explore creative ways to interact with your Twitter fans, I interview Dan Knowlton.

More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Dan Knowlton, a creative marketer, speaker, and trainer. He co-founded KPS Digital Marketing, an agency that specializes in social and video marketing.

Dan explains why he stopped using Twitter automation tools and how other tools help marketers engage with fans more effectively.

You’ll also discover tips for starting conversations and building relationships on Twitter.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article

By Michael Stelzner

Sourced from Social Media Examiner

In News

5 Bad Habits Marketers Should Drop in 2019

January 7, 2019 No Comments

By Albizu Garcia

Habits are hard to break – especially the bad ones. In marketing, bad habits manifest in a number of different ways, but five of them, in particular, can cost hours of productivity, not to mention lost opportunities, if they become part of the pattern of a marketer’s daily routine.

Audit your marketing team’s practices against this list of bad habits. If you’re doing any of them, replace them with more effective, efficient practices, and start strong in the New Year.

1. Getting bogged down by the data

Google Analytics has become an invaluable tool for marketers to track how their campaigns perform, as well as to see how much traffic their website receives. However, organizing and analyzing data becomes a problem when using every website’s native analytic tools, as the information may not always align. Data from Google Analytics, scheduling tools, and all of the social media channels may differ depending on when the data is collected.

Trying to use multiple tools can lead to inconsistency and misrepresented data. In 2019, ensure that the marketing team doesn’t fall into this trap – it’s important to focus on a few analytics tools to maintain consistency.

Figure out which KPIs are most helpful in tracking performance and forget about the rest.

2. Having too many or too few CTAs

Effective content should be clear in its message and include clear calls-to-action (CTAs). Not having a CTA will likely result in a user losing interest and clicking off of the page, while alternatively, having too many CTAs can lead to confusion and end with the same results. This can have a negative effect on bounce rate and the average time people spend on your site, both of which are essential to Google rankings.

By adding clear CTAs to your content, marketers can guide how users interact with their website, leading to longer engagement and higher rates of conversion. In 2019, marketers should make sure to include clearly defined CTAs – ideally one per page.

3. Posting erratically on social media

An erratic social media strategy is a big no-no, and a bad habit that marketers need to leave in 2018. Having a consistent social media strategy and planned content, will help marketers avoid scattered posting.

For smaller brands without a strong following, posting should likely be limited to once or twice a day across all social media platforms. Too many updates over a short period of time, without user engagement, can have a negative effect on reach and visibility. Consistently posting 1-2 times a day, with the aim of educating and entertaining, rather than selling, will help grow an interested audience organically. Taking on the mindset of “quality over quantity” on social media can help achieve higher growth and increased engagement.

Using scheduling tools to organize and plan social media content is another option marketers can, and should, incorporate to break out of the pitfall of a messy social media strategy in the upcoming year.

4. Mass emailing random people

There’s no place for mass emailing non-subscribers in 2019.

This is the online equivalent of junk mail, and it can have a detrimental effect on branding. Successful marketing should be concentrated around creating a dialogue between a company and its customers. Bombarding uninterested customers with outbound marketing techniques is outdated and ineffective. And since the EU’s GDPR laws came into effect May 2018, it’s also illegal.

Email campaigns should solely focus on an address book of contacts that have clearly subscribed. A well-put-together newsletter that’s sent out at the same time and day to an already intrigued customer base will garner more engagement and interaction. Furthermore, effective content marketing which offers consumers something in return for signing up will see an increased amount of subscribers.

In 2019, marketers should avoid sending mass emails to a general audience, and focus on sending intriguing emails, with clear CTAs to encourage conversion from already interested consumers.

5. Not adding to the marketing toolbox

Marketers can get into a loop and end up using the same tools over and over again. As marketing is ever-changing, updating your marketing “toolbox” is necessary to stay competitive – otherwise, you run the risk of leaving your current audience disinterested, missing out on new customers, and ultimately, resulting in stagnation.

Maintaining brand identity is important, but so is avoiding repetition. Unique and fresh approaches can keep a trusted brand interesting. For example, blog posts that would have formerly been made up of text and pictures could be supplemented with embedded video or infographics.

The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to learn new skills and to test new tools so that the entire marketing team stays ahead of the curve. Start by banishing these common bad habits now and ensure the team has the right tools and practices in place to achieve your 2019 goals.

By Albizu Garcia

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Sourced from Social Media Today