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5 Tips to Run Your Instagram Business Profile More Efficiently

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By Arol Wright

Instagram is a powerful tool for both established and up-and-coming businesses. Here are a few tips on how you can use it better.

For any company or business, it is of utmost importance to maintain a presence on social media, and do so in the most efficient way possible. Nailing down your internet strategy is as important as ever, and if you’re a business, it can score you a lot of points to get things right.

One of the biggest social networks around right now is Instagram. It can be a daunting platform to get into, but if you use it properly, it can be a powerful tool for your business. Here are a handful of tips on how you can boost your presence on Instagram.

1. Get the Basics Right

Phone Showing Instagram Insights

When first creating an Instagram account for your business, there are a few things that you need to do before kicking it off other than just putting a name, a profile picture, and a bio. These will be essential for your journey later on.

The first one is to switch your profile to an Instagram business account. This will allow you to access juicy metrics later on, and use some of the tools we’ve detailed later on in this post—and it will also make prospective customers take you more seriously. To do so, go to Settings, tap on Account, then tap on Switch to Professional Account and follow the steps—select the category that best suits your business, and click OK to confirm.

The second one is to put action buttons on your profile. You can add info to your profile, like a phone number or an email, and make it easily accessible via call-to-action buttons on your profile, so people can quickly reach out to you. Create a Linktree link and put it in your profile, too, as this will allow you to both add extra buttons not supported by Instagram and also link to your other social media accounts.

Also, while we’re on it—even if you do all of this, keep an eye on your DMs, because you’ll almost certainly still have people message you there, and you don’t want to lose out on them.

2. Use Facebook Creator Studio

Facebook Creator Studio

To manage both your Facebook account and your Instagram account, this is one of the best options around. It’s an official tool developed by Meta itself, first launched in 2018. A mobile app was also launched in 2020.

Facebook Creator Studio tool allows you to schedule posts on both social networks, and lets you monitor statistics on your profile to know how well your posts are performing. Being a tool developed by the parent company of both Facebook and Instagram, it stays constantly updated and relevant with the latest additions to the platform. And for Instagram, in particular, it’s a very powerful tool, allowing you to do mostly everything short of posting stories. You can post pictures/videos, schedule content, and look at stats on everything from followers to post metrics.

It can do many things, but don’t go overboard, either. If you’re just getting into this tool, in order to make it much more bearable to use, make organizing content your priority and take into account the fact that you don’t need to check out all the metrics or use all tools at your disposal. Stick strictly to what you need.

If you’re an entrepreneur looking to grow their social footprint, you should adapt to what you really need inside Creator Studio. You don’t need absolutely everything—the key is to make things easy, and for that, it is best to use only what is really necessary.

3. Feed Design is Key

photo of a phone showing an instagram feed

Keeping your post feed nice and tidy is something many businesses overlook. And quite frankly, these days, it might very well be one of the most important.

The very moment users click on your profile, they’re going to form their very first impression of your project. And it goes much further than just reading the bio, or looking at your profile pic. They’re also going to take a look at your feed without necessarily looking at each post in deep detail, so make it looks appealing and consistent.

Use websites like Unsplash to get high-quality, free-to-use resources for your content, and use tools like Figma Editor, Canva, or even Adobe Photoshop to create killer images. And while making them, remember to keep a common design language, in order for your feed to have a nice dose of visual harmony.

4. Don’t Be Afraid of Branded Content

Tablet with Social Links

Once you start getting a large social media following, and you’re looking into actually pouring money into your promotion efforts, you can look at branded content.

Instagram’s branded content is pretty much just partnering with influencers and other users for them to promote your product. It’s actually surprisingly effective—things can and often do go viral on TikTok and Instagram, resulting in sales multiplying exponentially. People see their favourite creators using things, and then want to buy those things.

To make branded content, you’ll actually need to reach out to creators. But once you’ve agreed on terms with them, Instagram makes disclosing a partnership to the public quite easy.

Darkposting on social media is another way to serve branded content seamlessly into users’ feeds.

5. Be Customer-Friendly

instagram app

Finally, no matter at which stage of the process you’re in—whether you’re still a growing brand, or if you already have a large following—it’s very important to always be customer-friendly.

Keeping attention to detail, being responsive, and listening to your users are all key parts of not only holding up your social media presence, but also your integrity as a business. If you’re a small or big store selling things, make your price tags visible and be responsive to users looking to buy from you. Keep your catalogue of products visible and easily accessible. Ideally, you only want people messaging you to either buy something or know more about a specific product—always be kind and proactive with them.

Growing on Instagram Takes Time and Effort

The tips we’ve detailed here are not a sure-fire way to grow into a world-renowned brand in a matter of days. That will actually need more dedication and effort. But they’re a good place to start from scratch, or boost things if you’re already established.

Organizing your content better and being proactive will set you apart from a big crowd.

By Arol Wright

Arol is a tech journalist and Staff Writer at MakeUseOf. He has also worked as a news/feature writer at XDA-Developers and Pixel Spot. Currently a Pharmacy student at the Central University of Venezuela, Arol has had a soft spot for everything tech-related since he was a child. When not writing, you’ll either find him nose-deep into his textbooks or playing video games.

More From Arol Wright

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10 ways to build your brand on social media

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By Leesa Davis, Stacker

By Leesa Davis, Stacker

Sourced from The Pantagraph

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The Easy Technique For Staying Visible In Social Media

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By William Arruda

In the new virtual or hybrid world of work, it’s harder to remain visible among our stakeholders. This makes your presence in social media even more important than it was in the pre-Covid times. You want to avoid the “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” career trap. Yet many professionals I speak with are just not that interested in spending a lot of time creating and sharing content online every single day. It feels like a distraction from their “real work” and a giant time sink.

If that’s how you feel, here’s some really good news. There’s a way to be visible, available and valuable to the people you seek to influence without having to take on the new job title of Social Media Maven. It’s called content curation, and it should help you breathe a sigh of relief. When you share other people’s content, lots of great things happen. You:

Save time

The first benefit is the most obvious one. You save time. Lots of it. When you curate, instead of spending an hour on creating new content, you just spend a minute making others’ content visible to your audience.

Learn

When you’re curating others’ content on the topic you want to be known for, you’re learning from their experience and perspective. This gives you insights you can use to amp up your performance at work, and it helps you hone your own point of view. And this is critical to defining your thought-leadership and personal brand differentiation. Let’s face it, there are lots of people who do what you do, so it’s valuable to have your own opinions, systems and processes so you can stand out.

Connect authentically

By sharing someone else’s content, you’re helping them increase their visibility. This is a great way to start to build a relationship with an author or thought-leader in your field. We all know the best way to create a solid network is to give to others. One of the greatest gifts you can give people is acknowledgement of their hard work and the opportunity to be visible to a wider, yet targeted community. This is a powerful long-term networking strategy that doesn’t come with the slimy feeling of asking someone for something. Dorie Clark in her bestselling book The Long Game put it this way: “True networking is not about trying to get something as fast as you can. When we set out to make friends and build relationships, rather than to simply get something, it feels entirely different.”

Boost your brand

By connecting yourself with the author’s content and by putting the spotlight on the experts quoted in the article, you start to connect your brand with theirs. It’s called brand association. You link yourself with those who are known or revered or at least visible to a community you seek to impact. That brand association affects what others think about you.

Demonstrate company loyalty

When you share content that comes from your company (through your company’s LinkedIn page, for example), you become a digital brand ambassador, and a few good things happen. First, you get seen internally as someone who’s engaged in what the organization is doing. By actively pursuing content to share, you learn about what’s happening outside your job function or department, and you become visible to others in different parts of the organization. You also make your company’s content much more visible and valuable. We know from the LinkedIn Blog that only 3% of employees post or share company related content to their feed, but these posts make up 30% of social actions (likes, and shares).

So if you’re feeling like you should be more involved in social media, but the thought of the effort has been holding you back, consider consistently curating content. It’s a simple but speedy way to increase your visibility without having to work the night shift on social media.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By William Arruda

William Arruda is a keynote speaker, author, co-founder of CareerBlast.TV and creator of the LinkedIn Profile Type Indicator (LPTI) which measures your LinkedIn profile likability and credibility.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Sourced from Forbes

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‘It’s not a peanut butter spread approach’: How advertisers are adapting to a more nuanced social landscape

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By Kimeko McCoy

The days of the one-size-fits all social media approach are seemingly over. Advertisers say the way people use social media is changing, pressuring brands to abandon broad campaigns and instead create content for each individual platform.

“There’s this idea that because it’s social, [and] it’s called social, they’re all the same. And they’re not all the same,” said ​​Karen Piper, director of strategy at GROW digital agency. “It’s like this false notion that we’ve had for like the past 10 or 15 years, like digital lets us reach everyone.”

As the social media landscape becomes more competitive, it also becomes more nuanced, according to advertisers. Competition for user attention and media dollars has led platforms to roll out more individualized product features for users and advertisers. And in the digital age, people are increasingly weary of being advertised to, meaning advertisers have to fit their creative into each platform more seamlessly to reach their desired audience.

“It’s making them focus on the platforms where [customers are] experiencing the advertising instead of just the brands and what the brand has to say,” Piper said.

As Brandon Biancalani, head of paid media at social agency Modifly, put it, the ad experience has to become endemic to the platform. Meaning, users are looking for ads to be an unintrusive part of their social media experience, and advertisers will need to be more mindful of how they appear on each platform.

“That’s kind of been an ode since the beginning of internet marketing; people don’t want things shoved down their throat,” Biancalani said. “Instead, we have seen success with user-generated content snippets, entertaining product value videos, and use of relevant trends.”

For a large swath of advertisers, social media is the go-to platform to authentically get in front of a generation of shoppers who increasingly do not want to be advertised to. Historically, brands have had a set-it-and-forget-it approach, setting up social media business managers and running ads across platforms, per Biancalani. But as people’s social media habits change, advertisers will need to take a more granular approach. It’s part of the reason influencer marketing is booming right now, he added.

“There’s a lot of business integrations now on these platforms that I feel like a lot of brands aren’t fully taking advantage of,” he said. “Specifically, they just want to set up their business manager and start running ads — and there’s a lot of integrations now for businesses to be literally seen even organically in these platforms.”

It’s something that Biancalani said Pinterest and TikTok have done well. TikTok users are more likely to resonate with ad creative that is real and native to the platform. Meanwhile a hard sale, product conversion video may better resonate with Facebook audiences, he added.

“It’s not a peanut butter spread approach,” said Sennai Atsbeha, vp of brand marketing at Gymshark apparel company. “We can’t approach every community with the same strategy.”

As the nine-year-old brand looks to scale and reach new audiences, Atsbeha said the social-first company ensures an authentic partnership with each influencer it works with based on that influencer’s platform of choice.

“That content is very different from some of these other platforms,” he said. “So it’s important that we understand what makes the content different, what makes that athlete or that individual special within that space.”

It’s a similar story at State Bags company, where CMO Meghan Holzhauer said the brand works with a lot of content creators and influencers to keep the ad creative feeling native to the platform.

“This UGC style creator content has consistently been some of our best performing creative so we’re doubling down on the strategy,” Holzhauer said in an email.

With each passing generation, shoppers are getting smarter and more particular about how and where they interact with brands, according to Courtney Berry, managing director at Barbarian, a creative digital agency. Going forward, the changes are going to push advertisers to think about social media advertising in the context of a full-funnel marketing strategy — one with multiple parts, she said.

“Thinking through all of that complexity and that nuance at the beginning of the campaign is very crucial,” she added.

Feature Image Credit: Ivy Liu 

By Kimeko McCoy

Sourced from DIGIDAY

 

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How my company used social media to increase traffic and revenue — for free

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By Zapier

You know who loves to give advice? Everyone. Especially when it comes to marketing. But what do you do when that advice requires a budget—a budget you don’t have? What happens then?

I’m the founder of a small sustainable, socially responsible, and zero-waste fashion label that works with a community of women single parents in North Macedonia. Operating from a country with such limited resources can be, to put it mildly, challenging. I founded the company back in 2013. It started as a marketplace for local designers, which quickly expanded to cover international designers from all over the world.

business

Four years into it, we pivoted to become a standalone fashion label. The shift was driven by my desire to make a change in the society I lived in. At the time, I was working with a woman-run studio, and the seamstress became a single parent. I was not only impressed by her strength but also inspired by her tenacity and an iron will to provide her child with better circumstances than she was born in.

That’s when I made the decision to make Bastet Noir, a socially responsible brand. And as the business grew, so did our community of women single parents. Today, we’re proud to say that we work with five woman-owned studios, operated by either women single parents or women micro-entrepreneurs.

What used to be a small, local business has grown into—granted, still small—a global brand with customers from all over the world.

We used every tool in our toolbox to make it happen with virtually no budget—just a pipe dream and persistence and will to make it real. Here, I want to talk about what we did on social media to make it happen.

The power of social media for a local business

Even if you don’t choose to invest in social media, you should still have an up-to-date presence. One way to do this is by automating your brand’s social media, doing things like automatically sharing all new blog posts with your followers.

As a bootstrapped company operating from a country with limited resources, our marketing budget was—and still is—practically non-existent. Everything we make is reinvested back into our community of women single parents, so throughout the years, we had to think of creative ways to attract customers. Social media was one of the most successful.

Succeeding on Instagram without a budget

Ok, let’s rewind for a second. When we started out back in 2013, Instagram still wasn’t a thing. That’s why it took us a while to get to our desired target market in the United States. When we finally got on the platform two years later, it took us almost a year to decode it and figure out a way to grow and attract the right followers.

Since we weren’t located in the U.S., our first few hundred followers were based in Macedonia. The only way to target the U.S. was to pay for ads—which we, of course, didn’t have the money for. So how did we make it work? Through a lot of trial and error, yes, but most importantly, by establishing a captivating and powerful story behind the brand.

All of our posts and stories aligned with the narrative we were trying to tell. The gist: we were a sustainable, zero-waste, and socially responsible label that worked with women single parents in North Macedonia, and we helped these women earn much more than the industry average monthly income of $300. In addition to the storyline, the feed needed to have an aesthetic that would be recognizable for our brand, so we chose several color tones that best represented our label.

We planned our content a month out, which gave us time to hone the copy and research hashtags (we found that sustainability- and small business-related hashtags were our first priority). For all of this, we used the social media planning tool Later, which helped us a lot, especially with the visual part of how the feed would look.

Next, we attempted to bridge the gap between our social media strategy and our content strategy. We began by using People Map to create a list of the women we wanted to cover on our blog. The app helped us target editors, writers, social media managers for fashion magazines, and women entrepreneurs, all located in the U.S. Once we found their profiles, we found their emails—either from their Instagram profiles or using Rocket Reach.

Note: Be sure to follow all applicable rules around cold emailing prospects and give people ways to opt out of continued communication.

We composed an email to each woman, explaining our business and personalizing it to each recipient to demonstrate our interest (for example, we mentioned what had impressed us about them). Most of them didn’t respond back, but the ones that did were more than happy to extend their selfless help: we got a number of women to do interviews with us for our blog series, Cool Faces of Bastet Noir.

 

business

 

Since all of these women worked for publications like Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue Business, and Elle, this enabled us to gain credibility. And since most of them shared the stories on their social media accounts (including Instagram), we started getting engagement from their followers. We even got traction on our website, since they were sharing the links on their feeds and stories.

 

 

Since advertising wasn’t an option due to lack of funds, this was the only way for us to utilize the power of influencers. Our entire investment was the production of the piece and the shipping cost to send them the outfit—and all we asked for in return was a few photos of them wearing the pieces, so we could include them in our blog posts.

You can start small even on social. To help, here are three workflows that can help you automate your Instagram for Business account so you can focus on the more personal parts of marketing.

Using Reddit for marketing

Reddit is a bit tricky because many of the communities prohibit advertising and, of course, anything they consider spammy, like sharing discount codes, links to your own website, and even introducing your brand. That means you need to engage with the community on another level. Start a conversation, answer questions, and show that you’re an authority on the topic. Then, if they’re interested in learning more about your brand, you can share links. If you do it before someone asks, you risk being banned from one of the most engaged internet communities.

 

reddit

 

We joined a few subreddits, including r/findashion, r/ethicalfashion, and r/Etsy, but r/FemaleFashionAdvice was the most important one for us. This community has 1.7 million members that we knew would be interested in our brand. We started talking with people on various threads, mostly giving them styling advice. This gradually evolved into me posting photos of my outfits, wearing Bastet Noir of course. People started asking where I got some of the items, so I shared links to the website. And that did the trick: we saw a tremendous increase in traffic, and orders started rolling in.

How to use YouTube for free marketing

We only started working with YouTubers at the beginning of 2020. I guess you could say we arrived a bit late to the party, but in our defence, we truly believed that we weren’t able to afford their rates—which was true to a point. A YouTuber who has more than 10,000 views on a video charges at least $3,000 for a 30-60-second brand mention. And that’s just for a mention, not a dedicated brand video. For a brand like ours, it’s way too expensive.

Instead, we decided to see if anyone would like our clothes enough to promote them for free. First, we prepared a list of hundreds of YouTubers whose styles we believed matched our brand aesthetic. We found them by searching on YouTube for keywords like “minimal style,” “ethical fashion,” and “environmentally friendly fashion”—and several variations. Most of them didn’t even respond back, which makes sense. But the ones that did were so taken by our cause that they selflessly offered to cover our brand.

Here’s an example from Chloe Kian and one from Cat Creature. These reviews and their support helped us bring in more traffic to our website and create brand awareness—and as a result, we saw increased revenue.

Using Pinterest for eCommerce marketing

Pinterest is the best social media platform for discovering new things to buy. Since the platform itself is highly visual, people usually go there to organize their shopping lists—that makes it great for any eCommerce brand. And if your store is on Shopify, you can use the Pinterest app to get what they call rich pins, which means that the description and price on Pinterest will be pulled directly from your website.

The best way to increase followers and get repins is to use shared boards, community boards made usually by Pinfluencers (yes, that’s a thing). And how do you find these boards? You can do a little Google search, or you can use PinGroupie like we did. PinGroupie lets you find and filter boards according to categories, number of followers, and other criteria.

If you decide to lean into Pinterest for your marketing, here are 5 tips for using Pinterest for business.

We’re currently members of about eight boards. The most important one for us is called Fashion + Friends, and it has more than 600k followers. The beauty of these boards is that, once you’ve been approved by the admin, the things you post appear on the feed of every follower in that board. That means millions of potential customers around the world—without investing a single dime. These boards sent traffic directly to our site and also helped us rank higher on Google.

One tip: go for boards with more than 10k followers. Boards with fewer followers probably won’t do you any favours—they’ll just sit on your profile and collect dust.

And there you have it: that’s how we used our no-budget social media strategy to increase traffic and get sales.

This article by Daniela Milosheska was first published on the Zapier blog. Find the original post here.

By Zapier

Sourced from TNW

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Twitter to label all state-affiliated Russia media

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By Samuel Benson

The latest steps come as Russian disinformation spreads.

Twitter will begin labelling content from Russian state-affiliated media websites, the company announced Monday, amid a flood of Russian-backed disinformation related to the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The company began labelling and de-amplifying official Russian media accounts in 2020, Twitter said. The additional action announced on Monday applies to individual Twitter accounts that share links from those state-affiliated sites.

“Since the invasion, we’ve seen more than 45,000 Tweets a day from individuals on Twitter sharing these links — meaning that now the overwhelming majority of content from state-affiliated media is coming from individuals sharing this content, rather than accounts we’ve been labelling for years as state-affiliated media,” Twitter spokesperson Elizabeth Busby told POLITICO in an email.

Twitter maintains a continually updated list of media organizations belonging to the Russian Federation and 20 other countries, and the new label will automatically apply to any tweeted URLs from a designated state-affiliated media website.

The social media company also announced it will continue to de-amplify articles from these websites by barring the URLs from the platform’s top search function. Twitter also will not “recommend” tweets that include articles from the sites.

The move comes after Russia used “false flag” operations to justify its invasion of Ukraine, including false information disseminated through social media to portray Ukraine as the aggressor. Last week, reports from state-affiliated Russian media falsely reported a Ukrainian civilian genocide, a claim that went “unchecked and unchallenged.” Similar Russian-backed falsehoods compiled millions of likes, comments and shares on Twitter and Facebook, a POLITICO review showed.

Twitter blocked advertisements from all accounts owned by Russia Today and Sputnik in 2017. In 2019, the company banned all state-backed media advertising and political advertising.

Feature Image Credit: The company began labelling and de-amplifying official Russian media accounts in 2020, Twitter said. | Matt Rourke/AP photo, file

By Samuel Benson

Sourced from POLITICO

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Customer Engagement: Improved Through Technology

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Sourced from NewsReports.com

It is more crucial than ever for businesses to use information technology to improve customer engagement as they expand and adapt.

Customers can interact with businesses in a variety of ways in the digital age. This includes chatbots, social media, and other channels. Businesses must ensure that they are utilizing the most up-to-date technologies. They must do this in order to engage with their clients in the most efficient manner possible.

Consider using the most cutting-edge technology that companies are adopting to boost customer engagement.

Make use of social media.

For businesses, social media is now more vital than ever.

Customers continue to find social media accounts to be one of the most effective ways to communicate with businesses. Many businesses have adopted social media in recent years, but not all of them are efficiently using it.

First, engage with people on your social media profiles whenever possible. Make sure that each of your social media profiles has an easy contact option so that customers can simply get in touch with you.

Keep an eye out for people who mention your brand or product in their postings, as well. As much as possible, reach out to them and engage in discussion with them. This ensures that they are aware that you are paying attention. In addition, it shows that you are aware of any knowledge they may have about your product or service.

Customer engagement is improved by providing a live chat option.

In the digital age, live chat functionality is becoming increasingly vital.

Customers desire to contact businesses as much as possible. Furthermore, many prefer live chat over other types of communication. As a result, organizations should seriously consider using an online message platform with live chat capability. This allows your consumers to interact with you as much as they want. In addition, it lets them contact you in the method that is most convenient for them.

Furthermore, having a live chat platform allows organizations to effectively address their customer support needs.

Many online messaging systems can provide users with automated responses. They can do this based on the information they provide. This ensures that each consumer receives the finest possible service from your company.

Make a user-friendly website to ensure customer engagement.

One of the most significant methods to engage with your customers is through your website.

Every day, customers are online, whether on their PCs or on their mobile devices. They will go to your online store if they wish to buy your products or services. As a result, companies must ensure that their websites are simple to navigate and use.

It all begins with the design. Every online store should have a contemporary design.

It needs to appeal to customers who are accustomed to social media sites on a daily basis. If you run an online cosmetics business, for example, your virtual storefront should resemble the virtual shops of prominent social media networks. That’s because this is what your potential clients are used to seeing.

Make sure that your online business is very easy to navigate. You can, for example, include a quick-search bar at the top of each online storefront page. That way customers can find what they’re looking for quickly.

You may also make movies to show clients what they need to do to complete a transaction. In addition, guarantee that clients have the information they need. Make sure they can use the various aspects of your online store. Therefore, focus on virtual video production while creating the video.

Use mobile channels for customer engagement.

People nowadays are constantly on their mobile gadgets. They use these gadgets to surf the web, check email, and connect to social media sites.

Businesses must ensure that they can interact with clients while on the move. This entails developing a mobile-friendly website that includes services such as live chat. This allows customers to communicate with you.

Chatbots can help you increase engagement.

Chatbots are another common means of business-to-customer communication. They enable organizations to interact with clients in real-time, 24 hours a day.

This, of course, enhances customer engagement. Virtual chatbot technology is being used by many businesses to boost customer satisfaction. In addition, it helps cut response times and improve overall service quality.

Businesses are increasingly using chatbots to connect with their customers. The finest chatbots provide virtual self-service.

In addition, they allow users to seek assistance without having to wait for a human to respond. This is especially useful if you need to contact a customer service person after work hours. Customers can get speedy service without having to contact a person.

Virtual chatbot technology is also for other applications. Chatbots, for example, can collect information from customers. In addition, it can provide verbal or written training on how to use your products or services.

The way businesses connect with their clients is changing as a result of technological advancements. As a result, businesses must ensure that they are utilizing the most up-to-date technologies. They must do this in order to engage with their customers in the most efficient manner possible.

Sourced from NewsReports.com

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4 Red Flags for Pinterest’s Future

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By Leo Sun

The social media company still faces an uphill battle.

Key Points

  • Pinterest’s stock has been hit by downgrades and price target reductions over the past two months.
  • It’s struggling to retain its top executives, and its insiders continue to dump the stock as it hits fresh 52-week lows.
  • The stock looks reasonably valued relative to its growth, but the lack of new buyout rumors at these levels raises a bright red flag.

Pinterest‘s (NYSE:PINS) stock hit an all-time high of $89.90 last February during the Reddit-fuelled rally in meme and growth stocks. However, the stock subsequently plummeted about 70% as concerns about its decelerating user growth in a post-lockdown market spooked the bulls.

Investors might be tempted to buy Pinterest after that massive decline, but they should pay close attention to four red flags which recently appeared.

1. A series of downgrades

First and foremost, Pinterest has endured a series of price target reductions and downgrades over the past two months.

Last November, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak reduced his price target from $77 to $53 but maintained an “overweight” rating on the stock. In December, J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth cut his price target from $55 to $50 and maintained a “neutral” rating.

That same month, Loop Capital’s Rob Sanderson cut his price target from $66 to $50 but maintained a “buy” rating, while Citi analyst Jason Bazinet cut his price target from $48 to $42 and maintained a “neutral” rating. Earlier this month, Guggenheim’s Michael Morris downgraded Pinterest from buy to neutral and cut his price target from $46 to $39.

All of these analysts expressed similar concerns: that Pinterest’s monthly active user (MAU) growth would remain sluggish in a post-lockdown market, that it could lose its early mover’s advantage in the “social commerce” market to nimbler social media rivals, and that its online advertising business was vulnerable to competition and macroeconomic headwinds.

Those concerns are all valid, but investors should always take Wall Street analysts’ forecasts with a grain of salt — especially since they only lowered their price targets after Pinterest’s tumbling stock dropped through them:

PINS Chart

Source: YCharts

Furthermore, even the lowest price target now represents a significant premium to Pinterest’s current price — although that could quickly change if these Wall Street analysts hastily cut their price targets again.

2. More executive departures

Pinterest needs to test out fresh strategies to curb its post-lockdown decline in MAUs, which dropped from a peak of 478 million in the first quarter of 2021 to 444 million in the third quarter. Unfortunately, Pinterest seems to be struggling to retain its top leaders as its growth decelerates.

On Jan. 25, The Information claimed that Pinterest had lost at least seven senior executives in recent weeks. That list includes:

  • Corporate Development Chief – Gary Johnson
  • Core Product Chief – Omar Seyal
  • Creator Marketing Chief – Colleen Stauffer
  • Global Business Development Chief – Ravi Adusumilli
  • Content and Creators Leader – Silvia Oviedo Lopez
  • Consumer and Brand Marketing Head – Celestine Maddy
  • VP of Sales and Partnerships – Meredith Guerriero

All of those departures come just a few months after Pinterest’s chief accounting officer Lily Yang and Evan Sharp, its co-founder, board member, and chief creative and design officer, both abruptly left the company. That ongoing exodus, which coincides with Pinterest’s loss of momentum in a post-lockdown market, strongly suggests that the company could turn in an ugly fourth-quarter earnings report on Feb 3.

3. More sellers than buyers

If Pinterest’s stock was getting undervalued, its insiders should be buying up more shares. But over the past three months, Pinterest’s insiders still sold slightly more shares than they bought as its stock plunged 44%.

Insider sales don’t always indicate that a company is in trouble. But in Pinterest’s case, that lack of insider enthusiasm coincides with its executive exodus and raises a bright red flag for its future.

4. No more offers from PayPal and Microsoft

Last October, Pinterest’s stock briefly rallied after a Bloomberg report claimed PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) was interested in buying the company for about $70 per share in a $45 billion deal. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) had also previously approached Pinterest with a $51 billion bid in 2020. PayPal subsequently said it wasn’t interested in buying Pinterest “at this time,” while the talks between Microsoft and Pinterest fizzled out.

Pinterest has an enterprise value of just $18 billion today, yet PayPal and Microsoft haven’t made any new offers for the company. If they thought Pinterest’s downturn was temporary, they would likely have stepped up again with much lower offers. But that hasn’t happened yet, which suggests that either Pinterest’s growth has peaked, or its potential suitors are waiting for its stock to drop even further before making a new bid.

Should investors buy Pinterest’s stock today?

Analysts still expect Pinterest’s revenue and earnings to grow 25% and 22%, respectively, next year — and its stock looks reasonably valued at 20 times forward earnings. But with so many unanswered questions about its sluggish MAU growth and plans for the future, I’d rather wait to see Pinterest’s next earnings report before considering it to be a turnaround play.

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Feature Image Credit: Pinterest.

By Leo Sun

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The Business of Harnessing the Power of Social Media

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As business owners and entrepreneurs look to harness the power of social media in a shifting digital landscape, they will need to have an excellent grasp of social media fundamentals and keep up with evolving social media trends.

Social media platforms and channels continue to evolve, challenging businesses to adjust social strategies to capture the attention of target audiences, build brand visibility and generate leads. As business owners and entrepreneurs look to harness the power of social media in a shifting digital landscape, they will need to have an excellent grasp of social media fundamentals and keep up with evolving social media trends.

The sheer number of social media users makes a compelling case for businesses to increase their social media acumen. As of April 2021, social media platform users reached a global total of 4.33 billion – that equates to more than half the world’s population which stood at 7.85 billion at the start of April 2021.

On average, users spend nearly 2.5 hours on social media. Much of this time is spent on the larger social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. This captive audience provides business owners and entrepreneurs a powerful opportunity to reach and connect with key stakeholders. The most effective way for business owners and entrepreneurs to do this is by adhering to best practices when it comes to social media fundamentals and making it a priority to keep up with evolving social media trends. The following are a few of the social media fundamentals and trends every business owner should either master or be aware of.

Know your audience

Today, competition for capturing the attention of target audiences on social media platforms is fierce. And, considering that according to one oft cited study, the average human attention span is eight seconds which is less than the reported 9-second attention span of a goldfish, brands don’t have much time to attract notice.

Competition for mind share and dwindling attention spans make it critically important for brands to understand who their audience is to most effectively connect and engage with them.

The process of knowing the audience includes determining what social media platforms they most use and researching what their ‘pain points’ are, what their needs and wants are and what content will most appeal to them. Surveys, customer data and social media analytics can help companies refine social media strategies to ensure the right audience is targeted with content that is relevant and personalized to them.

Find brand voice

Brand voice is defined as the distinct personality a brand takes on in its communications. A strong social media strategy starts with companies knowing who they are and what they represent. According to a Sprout Social Index survey, brands that stood out more to consumers on social media had more memorable content (40%), had a distinct personality (33%) and told compelling stories (32%). Sprout Social noted that “in all three of these aspects, brand voice plays a significant role. You can’t have a distinct personality without a distinct brand voice.”

Developing an authentic voice aligned with company branding develops trust and recognition with audiences, allows key stakeholders to get a clear sense of company values and connects audiences more deeply to brand messaging.

Consistently post content

An intentional social media strategy that focuses on posting content consistently keeps audiences engaged, develops loyal followers and boosts brand awareness. In the social media realm, lack of consistency is a sure way to lose audience interest.

Research from Hootsuite revealed the ideal number of times a day (or week) to post for each platform:

  • On Instagram, post between 3-7 times per week.
  • On Facebook, post between 1 and 2 times a day.
  • On Twitter, post between 1 and 5 Tweets a day.
  • On LinkedIn, post between 1 and 5 times a day.

To stay on top of posting regularly, business owners can develop a social media content calendar as a tool for scheduling out social posts each month. This strategy can help businesses plan for and tie social posts to holidays, recognitions and upcoming events. Using a content calendar to develop a consistent cadence of posting also allows companies to analyse what content is working and what is not so that the content strategy can be fine-tuned across platforms to ensure that posts most effectively resonate with and engage target audiences.

Engage in social listening

Social listening allows companies to monitor and analyse digital interactions and conversations related to company, product, competitor and industry mentions across social media channels. Talkwalker notes that social media listening gives companies the view from 30,000 feet by “pulling conversations from social media and analysing the conversations in aggregate for insights.”

Social listening can help companies understand whether mentions are increasing or decreasing in a given month, whether people are engaging with content, what is trending related to a specific industry or topic and whether sentiment/feedback is positive or negative.

Now let’s take a look at some evolving social media trends.

Video

The popularity of video content on social media will continue to grow. Consider that on average, more than 100 million video hours are watched per day on Facebook and according to data from Limelight Networks, user generated content such as videos on social media significantly increased in popularity, doubling over the past year to four hours per week.

Video content is also going short form. The fact is, most social media users don’t have time to watch videos that are longer than a few minutes, making the optimum length for these shorter videos about 90 seconds or less. Audience preference for short form video content is a major reason for the surge in popularity of video-sharing app TikTok which reached 1 billion active global users in September 2021.

Stories

Immersive and interactive, stories remain one of the most popular features on social media. The personal and ephemeral nature of these 10-15 second photo or video posts make them more compelling to audiences than newsfeeds. They are typically a vehicle for brands to more casually share the inside scoop on company updates and showcase products and services.

Instagram is one of the most popular platforms for this feature, reporting 500 million daily active Stories users worldwide in 2019. Currently, 9 other social media platforms have their own version of stories available including business networking platform LinkedIn.

Live stream

Live streaming is trending on social media now. Companies are using this approach to stream behind-the-scenes content, announce new products, demonstrate products, give facility tours and host live Q&A sessions. Live streams also allow businesses to inject more personality into their social media with challenges and giveaways as well as surveys and polls.

As a tool for real-time engagement, live streaming is a great way to increase brand awareness, improve and enhance communication with target audiences and gain a deeper understanding of audience interests.

By

Entrepreneur Leadership Network Contributor

Juda Honickman loves growth, strategy and being creative with disruptive brands. Currently serving as CMO for Slinger Bag Inc., an innovative sports brand focused on game improvement, Honickman previously held senior marketing positions in global consumer and tech companies.

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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Pre-Launch Marketing Strategies

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By Faith Walls

Marketing your business begins even before you illuminate that ‘open’ sign. Setting up a pre-launch marketing strategy is one of the best things you can do for your brand. The worst case scenario is launching your business only to realize you have failed to rally the appropriate audience for your services. Entrepreneurship is an uphill battle and requires someone who is comfortable with rejection and does most of their thinking outside the box. If you eat failure for breakfast (and you might have to, if that budget is small enough), then tackling the hefty job of marketing a new business should be no problem for you.

It is no secret that many businesses fail within the first five years of operation (upwards of 80%). You can set your company up for the highest chance of success by being proactive instead of reactive in the marketing world. Planning your pre-launch marketing strategies is equally as important as filing your DBA or purchasing insurance for your company.

Create a Social Media Editorial SOP

Having a social media plan is crucial to the success of your business. This determines where your energy and efforts should go in terms of digital promotions. Your social media marketing plan is the cornerstone of your organic and paid online advertising. Content marketing consistently generates up to three times more leads than per dollar versus paid search marketing. Establish a clear SOP (standard operating procedure) regarding social media so that there are no gaps in your team’s efforts. It is ideal to have a designated content creator. This of course falls to you if you are currently the sole employee within your business.

Content organization software such as Sprout Social and Later offer cross-platform scheduling and community management options. Here you can simply plug in the pre-established content and queue it up for a later date. Additionally, keeping a spreadsheet of proposed content allows you and your team to plan in advance and make edits within a single working document. Here you can write post copy, link to the approved images, include appropriate links, and manage hashtag lists.

Plan for Email Marketing

Email marketing ROI (return on investment) is one of the highest-grossing digital media tools today. Consumers benefit from consistent company updates and promotions delivered right to their inboxes. In a 2021 business survey, 59% of consumers reported that brand marketing emails impact their purchase decisions. Having a setlist of email recipients allows you to notify existing customers of sales and special discounts. Email marketing also generates increased traffic to your website, as you can easily link your page to copy and image blocks within the newsletter.

Schedule a Launch Event

It’s true that in this day and age, most of your pre-launch marketing efforts are likely geared towards the digital space. However, there is a significant benefit to promoting your services within your local area. As your business opening day draws closer, consider planning a pre-launch event to generate even more local interest.

By Faith Walls

Sourced from HEY Socal

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