Social Network Diversification Continues | Social You Should Know

Google Begins Rolling Out Google Photos App

Remember when Google+ announced it was breaking apart into Photos and Streams? This week’s Google I/O conference unleashed a host of Google updates and shed light on the direction Google Photos will be taking. Overall, Google is enticing users to store photos on Google with free unlimited storage (16MP and 1080p video). They also added bells and whistles with impressive search capabilities, photo editing and shortcuts for easy photo sharing to other social networks. Will these features make Google Photos in competition with photo-editing apps and Instagram? Only time will tell. Google Photos is available today on Android, iOS, and web.

Active Instagram Users Also Active on 5 Other Social Networks

While we’ve seen the social networking space diversifying with new networks, new research from GlobalWebIndex uncovered that active users of one network can also be active on others. In this study, they found active users on Instagram also active on an average of 4.83 of the top 10 social networks (defined as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, MySpace, Reddit, and Bodoo).

Social Ad Types

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen the announcement of numerous new ad types on networks like Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and YouTube. From video ads on Pinterest and Snapchat, to in-video ads on YouTube driving to e-commerce pages, many of these give Facebook ads a run for their money. In case you are having a hard time keeping them straight, check out our blog post here to see what you may have missed and to understand the implications for brands.

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3 Ways To Ask Your Social Media Followers For Support

Sometimes when it starts to get nice outside, I’ll leave the office and head up to the roof where there’s a nice little patio setup. It’s really beautiful up there and getting into the fresh air for a few minutes always gives me a new perspective on whatever I’m working on.

So there I was a few weeks ago, enjoying the precious sunshine when I got a panicked call from a former client named Kelly.

We had worked together last year when I lived in Charleston, South Carolina.

Kelly owns a hair salon and has a lot of friends who are clients, so she didn’t want to alienate her followers and friends with some overly corporate social media.

Together we set up a comprehensive social media presence for her hair salon in her own “voice”.

Kelly told me that since I had moved out west, she had gotten a whopping ten thousand Twitter followers.

But she had a problem, she wasn’t sure what to do next. She really liked interacting with people on Twitter and didn’t want to stop doing that to start selling.

In short she wanted to ask her followers to support her without being sleazy about it.

This is a problem I encounter a lot so I want to share with you what I told Kelly.

The 3 non sleazy ways to ask your followers for support.

There are obviously more than 3 ways but to keep short I’m going to share the 3 best ways.

1. Survey your followers. If you’re worried about being sleazy it’s best to start by asking WHAT your followers want to buy rather than trying to sell them what you think they want. I had Kelly ask her followers if they were more interested in information about hair styles or other beauty related services. She found out almost half of her followers wanted tips on other beauty services and she was able to bring a bunch of profitable new services to her salon.

2. Offer them a free gift. Another easy way to get followers to help you out is by giving them a free gift. After Kelly found out her followers were interested in other beauty services she created a few short beauty tutorial videos and tweeted them out. She ended up booking 4 new makeup clients that week, a service she started offering after surveying her followers.

3. Ask for reviews. This is another easy and free way that your followers can help you out without spending a dime. I told Kelly to periodically send out review requests on Twitter and reward anyone who gave her a review with a $20 gift card to her salon. Not only does her salon currently have 67 great reviews on Yelp, but she has had almost every client come in to redeem their gift cards, even clients she hasn’t seen in years.

In conclusion, whether you own your own business like Kelly, already have a career, or are looking to get a job out of college, you can use these 3 tactics to get support from your social media followers and friends.

 

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How to Come Up with Winning A/B Tests Using Data

One way to increase your sales is to improve your conversion rate, right? Although it’s true, conversion rate optimization isn’t easy.

If you just base your tests on your gut feelings, you may find a few winning variations, but chances are, most of them will lose.

So, how you do improve your conversions? You have to analyze data before you run A/B tests. In order to help you improve your conversion rate, I decided to enlist the help of Peep from ConversionXL and his brilliant ResearchXL framework to come up with an infographic that breaks down what you need to do.

Click on the image below to see a larger view:

Click here to view an enlarged version of this infographic.

Conclusion

I run hundreds of A/B tests, and the variations that typically have the most impact are those with drastic changes. To come up with those drastic changes, you need to analyze your data first to see what you need to change.

You can get the data by looking at your Google Analytics reports as well as a heatmap of your site through Crazy Egg. In addition, consider running surveys by using tools such as Qualaroo.

Have you run any A/B tests yet?

PS: Make sure you checkout this framework.

Embed This Image On Your Site (copy code below):

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

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Google Search Will Now Also Feature Content From iOS Apps

TechCrunch – For the last two years, Google has been showing Android users relevant content from apps they have installed on their phones and tablets. Now, it’s also bringing this feature to iOS users and apps.

Last month, Google started showing results from Android apps that users didn’t have installed on their phones, something it will now also do for iOS users. Just like on Android, this new feature will bring a whole new app discovery mechanism to Google Search for iOS users.

As Google’s senior director of its developer product group Jason Titus told us, there is only so much integration Google can do for iOS users because it can’t know exactly which apps you have installed on your iPhone or iPad. Titus, however, also tells us that the company is working with an initial set of partners to make sure that the experience is as seamless as possible.

That being said, other interested developers are being provided with information on how to set up their app to be included in app indexing when the technology becomes more broadly available. Google shared instructions on how to do this on a blog post it published this morning. Developers who want to have their iOS app indexed by Google will have to add deep linking support, then make sure it’s possible to return to Search results with one click, and provide deep link annotations on their site, says Google.

 In addition, they’ll also need to let Google know they’re interested in having their app included by filling out an online form here. However, note that simply filling out the form doesn’t guarantee that Google will begin indexing your app; the company will be rolling out the technology to app publishers on its own terms.

Google says the indexed links from an initial group of apps it’s been working with will begin appearing on iOS in the Google search results in both the Google App and in Chrome for signed-in users worldwide in the weeks ahead.

Article by Frederic Lardinois for TechCrunch

Thumbnail from Shutterstock

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Electronics Supply Companies: Growth and Decline

Generally speaking, the electronics supply industry has been experiencing something of a significant decline for the last several years. According a recent IHS iSuppli Industrial Electronics Market Tracker report, eight of the leading industry suppliers all suffered from declining revenues in 2012, for example. Despite the fact that total revenue for the top ten suppliers topped just over $12 billion dollars during the same period of time, only two of those top ten companies actually experienced any type of growth.

However, despite this news, things are not necessarily as bleak as they may seem. One of the keys to breaking free of an industry-wide decline involves not only understanding what put businesses there in the first place, but understanding the types of innovation that will lead them to soaring new heights well into the future.

Image source: pixabay.com

Contributing Factors

The factors that are contributing to a general decline in the electronics supply industry aren’t necessarily new. According to a report that was released by Electronics Purchasing Strategies in 2014, the supply chain challenges that businesses across the industry were facing fell into a number of important categories.

The globalization of the industry in general, particularly when it comes to the manufacturing of electronics parts, is one of the biggest supply chain challenges that businesses have faced in the last several years. The counterfeiting of electronics parts, a general failure to differentiate a company from its competition and the shorter product lifestyle of the electronics components that the industry relies on are all also listed in the report as significant challenges that the industry will need to overcome to break free of the decline of the last several years.

A Positive Outlook

The general need for electronics components is not going anywhere, particularly as technology becomes a more important part of our lives with each passing day. As a result, companies that work with and produce these electronics parts are in an excellent position to weather the decline of the next few years and to experience the type of growth that will allow them to thrive well into the future – provided that they’re willing to rise up and meet these challenges head on.

Electronics Purchasing Strategies indicates that higher productivity with regards to the types of electronics components that are being created is one of the best ways to overcome decline-related challenges, for example, as are forecasts relating to the general positive outlook of the global economy in general.

Suppliers Shift

One example of a company that is stepping up to provide unique solutions to the challenges that the industry now faces is Verical. Launched in 2009, Verical.com is an online marketplace that introduced a pedigree scoring system to help fight the types of major risks that threaten high tech supply chains all over the world on a daily basis.

Counterfeiting in particular is a threat that has escalated in the last few years as the methods that individuals use to create “fake” electronics components have become increasingly sophisticated. On the one hand, the counterfeiting situation is rife with irony – the same technological advancements that electronics supply companies used to remain competitive for years is now being utilized by those with malicious intentions to undermine the marketplace in general.

Verical.com acts as a solution that brings maximum visibility to an industry that needs it now more than ever. Thanks to the pedigree scoring system, Verical is addressing the challenges of the secondary market head on by providing insight into the true source of electronics components, the warranty of these parts, the general authenticity and more. This allows customers to better understand what a particular part really is, what it does and what a fair price in today’s climate for that item would really be.

In redefining what the electronics supply secondary market really is, the Verical Marketplace is in an optimum position to act as a true extension of the primary market itself. Verical.com acts as a trusted source of both information and traceability, allowing electronics components to retain their true value and empowering business leaders with the information they need to be confident in purchases and to make sound decisions well into the future.

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Vox Media to acquire technology news site Re/code

The Washington Post – Washington-based Vox Media is adding the well-respected but financially pressed technology news site Re/code to its growing portfolio of new media properties, the two companies said Tuesday.

Re/code founders Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg announced the news in an official blog post on their news site, which they launched in January 2014 after splitting from the Wall Street Journal at a time when many star journalists struck out to create their own start-up media sites.

Vox, which is led by former AOL executive Jim Bankoff, has been raising venture capital recently to fund an aggressive acquisition spree. Over the last two years, the company has purchased a number of niche sites to create an online publishing empire that covers sports, news, gaming, technology in a way that would be attractive to millennial readers.

Neither company disclosed the terms, but The New York Times, which was first to report the news, said the acquisition was an all-stock deal. Vox is privately held, but Bankoff has made no secret of his plans to take the company public.

Re/code is highly respected within technology circles for regularly breaking news out of Silicon Valley’s top companies. But the site has struggled to win the kind of attention readers give to more established publications. Since its start, Re/code never broke 2.5 million monthly unique visitors, data from traffic-monitoring site Quantcast show.

Vox’s own tech site, called The Verge, draws nearly 12 million readers, according to comScore, although in a press release from Vox, the company said The Verge has an audience of over 25 million.

Re/code, whose top investors included NBCUniversal News Group and media executive Terry Semel’s Windsor Media, was launched during a wave of new media start-ups focused on name-plate news personalities. Statistical star writer Nate Silver in 2013 defected from the New York Times to start FiveThirtyEight, a data-based news site owned by ESPN. Vox Media itself launched a blogging news site called Vox.com with online commentator Ezra Klein, who founded Wonkblog at the Washington Post.

“This is the next big step in our mission to bring you quality tech journalism, because our work will now be amplified and enhanced by Vox Media’s deep and broad skill set,” Swisher and Mossberg’s note to Re/code readers said.

Mossberg, Re/code’s co-executive editor, declined to comment further.

Though Re/code has struggled to attract readers, it has long counted much of its money through must-attend industry conferences and tech events, which have boasted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Apple chief executive Tim Cook as speakers.

Events have become a key revenue stream for online media outlets starved for ad bucks and increasingly competing with not just news rivals, but Facebook, Google and a generation of other digital distractions.

The Re/code purchase would give Vox and its partner blogs a launchpad for hosting events tied not just to tech, but to fashion, food, sports and the other interests it covers.

Re/code’s “renowned tech and business conference division will continue to grow,” Vox Media spokesperson Fay Sliger told the Post. She added that “Vox Media will explore ways to apply Re/code’s leadership in this space to its other media brands over time.”

The change marks an intriguing step for tech media, as Mossberg and Swisher, two of the industry’s most renowned digital veterans with roots in legacy media, find themselves working alongside a sprawling blog ring that launched, in the case of sports blog SB Nation, as a chaotic network of amateur fans.

The news was announced ahead of Re/code’s Code conference, which starts Tuesday night near Los Angeles.

Vox Media now runs seven media brands, including sports site SB Nation, gaming blog Polygon, dining site Eater, fashion blog Racked and its namesake news blog.

Re/code would seem to budge into the territory of The Verge, and Mossberg and Swisher noted the two “occasionally overlap.” But Swisher and Mossberg said that they plan continue to publish at Re/Code’s existing Web site and focus mainly on tech business news and analysts, while Vox said the Verge would continue to emphasize tech culture and lifestyle. The two sites’ review teams, however, will merge, with Mossberg writing for the Verge,wrote Nilay Patel, the Verge’s editor-in-chief.

Re/code will also join Vox’s publishing platform, a combination that Swisher said “will give us access to the new tools and talent we need and want to make Re/code stronger and better.”

Article by Hayley Tsukayama and Drew Harwell for The Washington Post

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Agnochannel – What’s The Definition of a Retailer in 2015?

TL;DR – The Retailer of the Future Won’t Look Anything Like The Retailers of Today

Is Google a retailer? Is Apple? More people search for product information on Google than any other digital source and Apple is now the #2 eCom retailer in the world in terms of sales, and could easily leverage that position. So are these entities true retailers?

Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Retail is the process of selling consumer goods and/or services to customers through multiple channels of distribution to earn a profit. Demand is created through diverse target markets and promotional tactics, satisfying consumers’ wants and needs through a lean supply chain.

By that definition, both Google and Apple are retailers. The larger trend is an outsight shift in consumer behavior away from physical retail to virtual and automated formats. Traffic counts for most of the nation’s physical retailers have been flat at best and mostly declining over the past decade. Are we now at a tipping point where that trickle becomes a flood? Many scaled businesses are seeking to jump in and provide different parts of the supply chain; even Über is becoming a retail service provider by delivering meals and other products to time-starved consumers.

Where is Retail Headed?

With Google, eBay and Amazon all seeking to step into the product editor role based on consumer needs, the future seems to point to a flatter supply chain bringing manufacturers nearer to the end consumer increasing overall channel efficiency. As Amazon has proved through on-click ordering and Prime, removing friction from retailing is a clear path to building loyalty and shopper frequency. Google’s new buy button (along with Pinterest, Instagram etc.) can rapidly redefine how consumers shop as they discover, acquire and share products and services with a single click.

This is obviously not lost on traditional retailers. Walmart is testing unlimited shipping at a 50% discount to current Amazon Prime pricing. It’s likely that most consumers will consider free shipping tables stakes for eCommerce transactions especially for consumables. Mondelez estimates that 10% of its total volume will come from eCommerce within 5 years. For regularly used items like toothpaste, paper towels, potato chips, personal replenishment is available via Amazon’s Subscribe and Save program. The company’s Echo product creates a voice activated list-building functionality that extends its reach all the way into consumer’s homes.

Omnichannel, a buzzword that originated in the retail space several years ago is now the darling of media delivered across multiple digital platforms. I suggest that a new consumer expectation is Agnochannel, where channel becomes less relevant where simplicity, speed and convenience trump other considerations in the purchase hierarchy. The infrastructure for this behavioral change is already coming into being. With Apple Pay already accounting for 1% of transactions and rapidly growing at Apple Watch comes online, it’s reasonable to believe that Apple could also become a retail conduit for consumer products much like it is with iTunes.

Like media, the retailer of the future is what the consumer decides it is.

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New Social Ad Formats for Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat and YouTube

Within the last week or so it seems like every social platform has announced a new ad product offering. The main focus for these ad types, and a hot topic for the social industry overall, is video. The new YouTube, Snapchat, and Pinterest ads focus on video, and the Twitter Objective-Based Ads have the option to concentrate on video views. Let’s take a deeper dive into each of these new ad types and what they mean for your business.

Twitter Objective-Based Ads

Twitter Objective-Based ads have been around since last August to select users in Beta, but they are now available to all users globally. There are 6 objectives available: website clicks/conversions, app install/engagements, video views, followers, lead generation, and tweet engagements. When you select an objective, you only pay for the engagements they target. For example, if your objective is website clicks, you only pay when someone clicks on the link, and are not charged for any other action (i.e. a RT or favorite). Objective-based ads are a great way for your business to drive and pay only for the engagements you care about, and boost the efficiency of your ad spend.

Pinterest Motion-Based Ads

Last Tuesday, Pinterest announced the launch of their Motion-Based Ads on their mobile app. The functionality of these ads are different than the auto-play format that many of the other networks use. When you scroll, the ad moves, but when you stop, so does the ad. Pinterest believes these ‘Cinematic Pins’ will give the user more control and therefore better experience with the content they are seeing. With this announcement, Pinterest also teased other advancements to come for their ad platform. They will be rolling out a cost-per-engagement (CPE) pricing model and more specific pin targeting. The new targeting will allow of marketers to target pins based on life stages and interests. Pinterest has really stepped up their ad offerings over the past year. New pricing models and advanced targeting will also help marketers spend more efficiently on the platform.

Snapchat Two Cent Video Ads

In an effort to drive more engagement and value for Publishers within the Discover platform, Snapchat announced a new ad product called ‘Two Pennies’. Snapchat has opened up video advertising charging two cents per view for a 10-second ad. If you are interested in purchasing these ads, you will need to get in contact with the Publishers on Discover (ESPN, CNN, People, etc.). They are responsible for selling ads to appear between their articles. If your brand reaches similar target audiences as the Publishers on Discover, than these ad formats could be a good investment. If not, your advertising budget is likely better used elsewhere, even though $0.02 per view sounds enticing.

YouTube Click-to-Shop Video Ads

YouTube announced that over the next few months it would be rolling out a new video ad with click-to-shop functionality. The ad will be available on both desktop and mobile. Five seconds after the video starts, the products will appear in a vertical pane on the right-side of the video. On mobile, the products will be listed below the ad if users hold their phones vertically. Clicking on the listed products links to the specific page on the retailer’s website. This new ad formats is a really smart move by YouTube in an effort to connect social video to direct sales. If your brand is producing video content and has e-commerce, I would recommend testing this out when it becomes available.

Overall, the announcement of these new ad formats is exciting for social media marketers looking to gain efficiencies in their media spending. It also further supports the movement and emphasis that each network is placing on social media. Which ad types are you planning on incorporating in your media strategy?

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What $5 Per Day Will Buy You on Facebook Ads

If you want get your posts seen on Facebook, one of the most common bits of wisdom you’ll hear is this:

Pay for reach with Facebook ads. 

Paid advertising on Facebook seems to be one of the most immediate ways to impact the reach of your content. Though it’s not without its questions. How well does it work? What kind of engagement do you get?

And what can you expect for your hard-earned money?

We’ve been testing Facebook ads a bit with Buffer’s Facebook strategy, looking to see exactly what’s possible on a small budget. I’m happy to share our findings with you. Here’s what we found $5 per day will buy you on Facebook Ads.

What $5 Per Day Will Buy You on Facebook

I’d love to jump right to our findings here, then get into the specifics below. We tried three different types of Facebook Ads, each designed with a different objective in mind.

Here are our results: 

• Page Likes – $0.57 per like
• Clicks to the Buffer for Business landing page – $4.01 per click
• Boosted post – $6.35 per additional 1,000 people reached

When we view this in terms of how much $5 per day will buy you, these are the numbers:

• Page Likes – 9 likes per day
• Clicks to the Buffer homepage – 1 per day
• Boosted post – 787 new people reached

How does this jive with your experience on Facebook Ads? 

I’ll be happy to share the specifics of what we tried and how we tried it (and how you can test this for yourself, too.)

One final thought before moving ahead, it might be useful to see how our experience compares to Facebook Ads benchmarks overall. Matthew Kammerer shared an overview of social media advertising in a guest post at the Buffer blog, including the following chart of helpful Facebook benchmarks.

Since we find ourselves in the technology space at Buffer, we can compare to the industry benchmarks in this chart.

Average clickthrough rate: 0.2%

Ours: 0.95%

Average cost per click: $0.20

Ours: $0.97

Average cost per 1,000 impressions: $0.38

Ours: $6.35

A lot of our experience here didn’t quite match up to the benchmarks, likely for a number of factors like this being my first dive into Facebook Ads (lots to learn!) and my not spending the time to truly optimize the campaigns.

Like all the experiments we run and share here, your mileage may vary. And we’d love to hear your experience and results!

How to Set Up a Facebook Ads Campaign

All of Facebook’s ad campaigns run through the Facebook Ads tool, which you can access via a direct link at facebook.com/ads, or by clicking “Manage Ads” in the drop-down menu on your Facebook account, or by clicking any of the CTAs on your Facebook page.

With Facebook, you have many different ways of approaching an ad campaign. These ways can typically fall within three categories of benefits:

• Interaction: Your ad and content right on the homepage allows users to interact with it like they do any other piece of social content.
• Reach: Expand your reach to new potential customers who can interact with your content by commenting, liking, favoriting, retweeting, etc.
• Followers: Brands also report a notable increase in followers through these social advertising options, since brand visibility increases significantly.

For small budgets, you’re likely to get the most bang for your buck with boosting reach. Moz found that $1 per day can grow you audience by 4,000 people (this didn’t quite match our experience, though it’s well worth trying).

Once you’re into the Ads manager, you can navigate with the menu on the left-hand side of the page. To get started with your first ad, click the green button in the top-right corner of the page.

When you click to create a Facebook Ad, you’ll go to a page where you choose the objective for your campaign. There are 10 options here for what you might want to achieve:

1. Boost your posts (more on this below)
2. Promote your page (more on this next)
3. Send people to your website (more on this below)
4. Increase conversions on your website
5. Get installs of your app
6. Increase engagement in your app
7. Reach people near your business
8. Raise attendance at your event
9. Get people to claim your offer
10. Get video views

I won’t get into the specifics of all these as we only tested the top three, but there are some really great resources out there—like this post from Noah Kagan—if you’re interested in learning more about Facebook Ads in their entirety.

How to Set Up a Campaign for Facebook Page Likes

1. Choose the second option from the Create an Ad list: Promote Your Page.

2. At the next screen, select the page you’d like to promote.

3. Choose who will be shown your ad.

The audience can be customized based on all the following demographics:

• Location, starting with a country, state, city, zip code, or address, and refining even further with a mile radius
• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Interests – Facebook looks at a person’s interests, activity, the Pages they like, and closely related topics
• Behaviors – Things like purchase behavior and intent, as well as device usage
• Connections – Choose to show the ad to all people, just those connected to Buffer, or those not connected to Buffer

In addition, with the Connections setting, you can choose advanced targeting, which lets you include or exclude people who are connected to certain pages, apps, or events.

How we chose an audience for the Buffer ad

Facebook recommends narrowing your reach in a targeted way in order to maximize the impact of your ad. We went quite narrow with this experiment, choosing the following audience demographics:

• Location: United States
• Interests: Social media
• Excluded: People who already like Buffer
• Age: 18-65+
• Language: English (US)

This gave us an estimated reach of up to 3,200 people out of 14 million. The 3,200 people are how many we could expect to be online any given day and potentially see our ad.

4. Choose how much you want to spend.

5. Choose an image to create the ad.

You can pick from your library, search, or upload a new one. If you’re able to upload multiple images, you can create multiple ad variations that will run within your campaign, giving you a sort of A/B test to see what works best.

The recommended image size is 1,200 pixels wide by 444 pixels tall.

6. Write the text and the headline.

For the text, you get 90 characters to share a quick message that will appear above your image.

For the headline (which is hidden beneath an Advanced Options toggle), you can use an alternative to your page name, which is shown by default. Headlines can be 25 characters long.

How we wrote the text and headline

We left the page title the same (“Buffer”), although it’s possible we could have tried something like Buffer – Social Media or Buffer App.

For the text, we aimed for a descriptive headline that would help people understand what it is they’d be getting from us. Since we targeted people with an interest in social media, it also made sense to make the message match the audience.

The Best Tips and Tools for Sharing to Social Media

Here’s how the ad looked:

How to Set Up a Campaign for Boosted Posts

1. Choose the first option from the Create an Ad list: Boost Your Posts.

2. At the next screen, select the page you’d like to use. Then select the post you’d like to promote.

3. Choose who will be shown your ad.

You have the same options here as you did in the Page Likes campaign mentioned above.

How we chose an audience for the Buffer ad

For this experiment, we went with a quite targeted demographic: younger San Francisco people with an interest in technology.

• Location: A 50-mile radius from San Francisco
• Interests: Technology
• Excluded: People who already like Buffer
• Age: 21-40
• Language: English (US) and (UK)

This led to a great and targeted group of up to 2,800 people per day who might be served our ad.

4. Choose how much you want to spend.

5. Review your post.

In this section, you can see a preview of your post as it will appear in the News Feed on desktop and on mobile as well as in the right column of desktop screens. You can turn any of these views off so that the ad won’t be shown there.

How we chose what to display

Facebook offers some helpful views of what your ad might look like in various places. The three main spots:

1. The News Feed on desktop
2. The News Feed on mobile
3. The right column on desktop

When it came to boost this post, it seemed to us that the best placement was likely to be in the News Feed instead of the sidebar.

When the content moved to the sidebar, the headline was truncated and the description was truncated. The text itself was harder to see. Ultimately, it just wasn’t intended to be in the sidebar; it was meant for the News Feed.

How to Set Up a Campaign for Clicks to Your Website

1. Choose the third option from the Create an Ad list: Send people to your website.

2. At the next screen, type in the URL where you’d like to send traffic.

3. Choose who will be shown your ad.

How we chose an audience for the Buffer ad

For this ad, we went a slightly different route with our audience selection. We chose to target a specific audience—our MailChimp subscribers—using Facebook’s custom audiences.

To create a custom audience, we chose the option from the audience selection portion of our Facebook ad.

Here, you can choose to create the custom audience from a base of three options:

1. Customer list (like an email list, for instance)
2. Website traffic
3. App activity

We chose to use a customer list for our audience segment. We exported our subscribers from MailChimp and imported into Facebook. Our list of 39,000 names returned 23,900 Facebook users.

We then further segmented the list into specific demographics for location, age, and language. We didn’t quite feel the need to segment for interests since everyone of these folks seemed to be interested in Buffer just by subscribing!

4. Choose how much you want to spend.

5. Choose how you want the ad to look.

Depending on the visuals you’d like to associate with your ad, you can choose to either show one image with your ad or show a gallery of five images that people can scroll to view.

6. Connect your ad to a Facebook page.

This allows the ad to appear in the News Feed as if it came from a page, while the ad itself still goes to your chosen URL.

7. Write a headline.

You get 25 characters max.

8. Write description text.

You get 90 characters max.

9. Choose button text from Facebook’s list of options.

• Shop Now
• Book Now
• Learn More
• Sign Up
• Download

10. Add more text to the Advanced Settings for your link.

11. Choose where the ad will be placed.

In addition to the options above for News Feed and right column, this particular type of ad also includes an option for appearing on Facebook’s audience network, which includes third-party mobile apps.

How we chose what to display

We went with an ad for our Buffer for Business landing page, hoping to encourage any current Buffer newsletter subscribers to take a closer look at our business plan.

The ad itself, well, I’m sure I have lots of room for improvement here!

Reflecting back now, I can see that the headline lacks any information about what it is that Buffer does. There’s no benefit there for the user. The image is from PlaceIt, which does great stuff helping get screenshots and app images that look smooth.

If I were to do it again, I’d likely follow a lot of the advice here in Noah Kagan’s post about Facebook ads.

1. Headline: Give away something for free
2. Text: Social proof showing why the reader should care
3. News Feed Link Description: Give call to action for them to get benefit

For example:

Over to you

I feel like we’re quite early on with learning best practices for Facebook Ads at Buffer. I’d love to get any insight you have in this area and hear any tips you might be willing to share!

Overall, the cost of advertising on Facebook seems like it could be most helpful to us in terms of boosted posts as we were able to get more than 750 new people to check out our content for only $5.00.

What has been the best success you’ve found with Facebook Ads?

Image sources: IconFinder, Unsplash, Pablo

The post What $5 Per Day Will Buy You on Facebook Ads appeared first on Social.

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Why Link Building Is NOT the Future of SEO

Over the years, SEOs focused all their attention on link building. Why? Because it impacted rankings more than anything else.

Although links still help with rankings, the big misconception in the search world is that the majority of your time and effort should be placed on building links.

So, if building links is not what you should be spending your time on, what is? It’s user experience—because it will impact rankings more than anything else.

Here’s why user experience will impact your rankings more than links will: 

What’s best for users is best for Google

As you already know, Google makes a large portion of its revenue from ads. If users started to see search results that weren’t relevant, what would they stop doing?

Using Google, right?

If Google wants to continually ensure that it stays the leader in the search game, it has to provide users with the best results. This doesn’t come down to links or on-page code. It comes down to user experience.

Sure, having links and an optimized site ensures that search engines can crawl your site, but Google would rather rank a relevant to a search query webpage with no links than one that contains hundreds of links but is only somewhat relevant.

Here’s how I believe it measures the relevance of a search result:

• Click-through rate – as you know, this metric is about the number of people who see a listing and actually click through to the site. For example, if most of the searchers inputting a specific query are clicking on the second listing and not the first, it should tell Google that the second listing is more relevant.
• Bounce rate – if users are hitting the back button within their browsers and going back to the search listings page, chances are they didn’t find what they were looking for, especially if they click on another listing after they hit the back button. In an ideal world, Google wants to give you the best result first so you don’t have to keep going through listings to find the answer you are looking for.
• Time on-site – after users perform a search, they tend to click on a listing. Assuming a portion of those people will hit the back button, Google will eventually (if it already isn’t) analyze the time it took the user to hit the back button. If users do this within three seconds, it will tell Google that the result is less relevant than the result that kept users on-site for five minutes before they clicked back.

In essence, the sites with the best user experience are going to win in the long run. That means sites with good quality content, media, etc. will tend to rank better in the long run.

Plus, the sites that put their users first tend to generate the highest number of social shares and backlinks organically. They don’t focus on manual link building; instead, they focus on providing the best user experience.

What’s an example of a great user experience?

Google the phrase “online marketing.” You’ll see Quick Sprout towards the top.

As you can see below, my site has the least number of backlinks compared to a lot of the webpages that rank beneath me. Just look at Wikipedia and Forbes who rank below me. Both of those sites have many more backlinks than I do.

So, what’s the main difference? The page I send users to provides a much better user experience. I spent over $40,000 creating that guide. I know it sounds crazy, but I am now finally seeing the fruits of my labor.

Another great example of how Google values user experience is when it penalizes a site. For example, if BMW gets penalized for unethical link building, Google still has no choice but to rank BMW for the term “BMW.”

Why?

It’s such a popular query that users would be really upset with Google if it stopped ranking BMW. Users wouldn’t care if BMW did unethical link building—they just want to get to BMW’s site.

Granted, Google can ding BMW’s ranking for generic keywords, but if it dings them for brand keywords, it will hurt Google’s reputation with users more than it would hurt BMW.

What does this mean for you?

By no means am I saying that you should ignore SEO. Optimizing your code for search engines, building links when you have spare time, and growing your social media channels are all activities you should continually do.

But they shouldn’t be your main focus.

You should be shifting the majority of your focus to building a great product or service as that is what users want. And when you aren’t building, you should be creating great content.

You need to provide content so great that people will want to not only read it but also bookmark it, share it, and tell their friends about it. Your content should be so detailed and helpful that no competitor would dare to copy you as it would take too much time and energy.

In addition, you should be signing up for Google Webmaster Tools and continually analyzing your click-through rates. You can get this data by clicking on “search traffic” in the navigation bar and then clicking on “search analysis.”

Your goal should be to get more clicks out of every impression. You can do this by following the tips in this article.

Conclusion

SEO isn’t rocket science. Sure, Google has a ton of PhDs working for it, but its goal is aligned with yours: Google just wants to provide users with the best possible experience.

So, if you can create the best product/service and write the best content out there, you will be helping users. Eventually, Google will see this, and your rankings will climb. You may not see the best results in the short run, but over time things will get better.

What do you see as the future of SEO?

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Get Social on Your Retirement Travel Plans

It’s never too early to think about retirement.

Some people start planning when they fill out the paperwork for their first job. Others wait a bit down the road, but it makes sense to think about it before it is too close.

For those thinking about it, it’s not just the day to day stuff on their minds, but also things like, say, travel.

With people staying in better health well into their retirement years, travel is something many look forward to doing in their retirement. It doesn’t have to be just bingo and early bird specials; retirees can see the world.

As the following article looks at, sometimes planning for retirement travel around the world takes a little help, and believe it or not, social media can do just that.

Social Media Sites

Whether it’s a site geared toward travel or retiring or both – it’s out there. Retirees can use a plethora of social media to plan great adventures.

• Facebook – Facebook is good for pretty much everything, and finding travel information is one of those things. You can use your own feed directly to ask your Facebook friends about places they’ve enjoyed and what they’ve done in the planning. You can also get advice on retirement planning.
• Meetup – Meetup is a site where anyone can form any group. You can organize a new group or join an established one. Whether it’s about retirement planning, travel, or a combination, this is a great venue for finding people with similar goals and shared experiences.
• Twitter – By using a hashtag, you can find virtually anything on twitter. It’s a great forum for finding blogs and expert opinions and insight on your topic. You can follow experts and with the short tweets, only spend time reading what you find is interesting to you.

Considerations:

When planning for retirement travel, you ‘ll need to think about a few things.

For instance:

• What are your travel goals? – Do you want to vacation and relax, or travel and immerse? There is a difference, and you’ll need to assess your goals when deciding what to do.

• Think about your financial situation – Are you all set? Do you still need to save? Does extravagant travel fit your plans, or do you need to stick to a strict budget?

• How is your health? – Will walking around all day wear you out? Maybe you’d rather have transportation everywhere you go and travel with a group. These are things to consider.

• How long do you like to be away? – Does a week away make you nervous? Think about any obligations you have at home, can they do without you? Try to figure out how long you can comfortably be gone before planning anything.

Retirement can be an exciting, adventure-filled time.

Don’t wait too long to start your planning, and call upon social media to help you with your travel plans.

Bon voyage!

Photo credit: Image courtesy of Shutterstock

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5 Rules for Artists When Using Social Media to Promote Art

As an artist, you have your work cut out for you when it comes to promoting the art you make. There is a considerable amount of competition, and if you don’t employ the correct techniques, you’ll fall far behind. One of the best ways to promote your art is to do so through social media, but it will only be successful if you go about it the right way.

1. Optimize Your Website for Search

To begin with, one of the most important things you can do to optimize your SEO campaign as a whole is to make sure your website is optimized for search. To do this, make sure your website is up to date with the latest algorithm updates from Google. You should especially make sure your page is optimized for mobile so that the 80 percent of mobile internet searchers can open your website on their device.

Your website needs to be fresh, run smoothly, and load quickly, or else your social media efforts will be in vain. If you can’t convince a visitor to stay, your first SEO priority should not be social media marketing.

2. Create Content for Sharing Purposes

As per SEO rules, blogging is one of the best ways to make your page visible to web searches. Once you’ve created a fair amount of relevant content with appropriate links and keywords, you’ll want to share it through social media.

To make your content more shareable as an artist, you’ll want to write on topics that are relevant to your trade. You might also want to offer special treats in your content, like a “behind-the-scenes” look at your studio or your art creation process. You can do this through blogs, infographics, videos, or other media. Just be sure that it has a compelling, clickable title.

A good sign that your content is working is when your post receives multiple shares, likes, and comments. If it’s not working, you might want to rethink your strategy

3. Make a Facebook Page

According to this list of statistics from Socialnomics, Facebook is almost always the number one ranker for weekly traffic in the United States. It’s the biggest social network in the world today, and because of that, it’s extremely important that you get a Facebook page devoted to your brand.

Facebook is an excellent vehicle for building awareness of your trade and for promoting your artwork. It’s also one of the best places to connect with galleries. For example, according to this press release from Park West Gallery, they now have a Facebook page “with a large number of members that grows daily.” By connecting with galleries such as this one, you can gain important connections from both prominent galleries and other artists.

4. Establish a Social Presence

Though Facebook is the most prominent of social media networks, it’s not the only important one you should be using to connect. Twitter helps you build a following for your art gallery. Pinterest is the perfect place to show off your artwork. Google Plus can help you find local attention and connect with professionals. A social presence in any network is essential for finding followers who will love and share your work.

In order to establish a strong presence on any network, be sure to show your artwork instead of just telling followers about it. Short tweets about something you’re working on are great, but they aren’t nearly as impactful as visual representations.

5. Try Facebook Ads

Finally, if it’s in the budget, experiment with Facebook ads. These ads are a relatively budget-friendly way to promote your work and connect with buyers.

You can place ads for individual art pieces, or sell tickets to a gallery you’re hosting. Though many people ignore the ads, a large number of your followers will be looking to purchase what you’re selling, especially if you use targeted marketing techniques.

As an artist your social strategy is only as good as your efforts, and with the right resources and marketing, you’ll eventually find that your name climbing the list of artist rankings.

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Top 5 Focus Areas that Every Mobile App Developers Should Know

To talk of focus areas as per recent mobile app development trends there are too many things to talk about. Most of these areas are into limelight to make majority of mobile app development companies eyeing for them. There are increasing focus on enterprise apps and quicker development. There is also renewed focus on mobile gaming from last year. Obviously, wearable tech has come in a big way to enliven many hopes and upset a few calculations and it is there to stay. Incorporation of business analytics through mobile apps is another horizon that is looming large. While there is a really bucketful of focus areas in mobile app development and you cannot write off any of them, there are few that deserve more attention. Let us have a closer look at our chosen 5 focus areas that every mobile app developers should know.

1. Enterprise apps and rapid development

Businesses are experiencing highest ever demand for mobile apps and with this increasing demands and expectation mobile app development companies are expected to deliver apps faster than ever. Reducing the development time is now the prime focus of most developer firms. Equally faster pre-launch preparation and marketing endeavors are guaranteeing that an app can hit the market in record time meeting expectations and gunning for downloads at a rapid pace. In this context rapid app development tools and frameworks are enjoying great popularity among developers. Rapid development in spite of consistent focus on business conversion, better user experience and monetization is increasingly becoming a force to drive app development. Huge growth in enterprise apps became the prime factor in pushing this growth.

• As predicted by IDC a whopping 35% of large corporate will leverage enterprise mobile app development platforms for the sake of developing and deploying mobile apps across various business verticals and organizations under their banner.
• In anytime soon enterprise app stores will be a reality as there will be millions of enterprise apps. Such mobile app stores will help B2B application exchanges.
• Rapid and agile development will continue to gain focus as addressing business concerns and solving problems through mobile apps will be crucial for competitive edge.

2. Cloud driven mobile app

Cloud is not mere storage option for non-device specific access to information in a mobile age. Cloud technology now plays a key role in the development of mobile apps across various niches. 2015. The focus on the capacity to integrate and sync mobile apps over a range of different mobile devices will be decisive factor. The non-device specific sharing, storage and networking capacity is already considered as a standard capability for vast majority of mobile app niches and in the time to come with rapid cloud adoption this will encompass every mobile app niche in the vicinity. The cloud approach will continue to remain as important for mobile app development companies as this would make developers capable to build apps with wider accessibility across all devices without letting the user compromise on functions, feature set and data.

• With widespread adoption of BYOD cloud capability will get bigger push.
• Rising enterprise apps will make cloud capacity more demandable.
• Cloud capability in mobile apps will clear all device and location constraints businesses face in leveraging mobile apps.

3. Wearable Tech

Apple Watch after its launch became the most hyped wearable tech device in 2014. With a sales figure that quickly touched around 15 million it shown how consumers were expecting the device with hands crossed. If the whopping sales figure is one aspect of the growth story that wearable devices and apps are experiencing then on the other side there are burgeoning capacity of mobile apps on this new platform. Though until now apps on these wearable devices are mainly companion apps that are run in unison with mobile apps, they are showing increasing capacity with standalone feature and design element on their wearable version.

• Mobile app developers are bound to give equal focus on wearable device apps and mobile apps, because both versions will complement each other, in usability and sales.
• Smartwatch apps will soon have standalone feature irrespective of their mobile counterparts.
• Wearable apps will continue to grow as a key contested area among developer companies.

4. Internet of Things

Use of multiple devices in our daily lives with increasing digital capability to communicate with each other will make Internet of Things the new horizon to explore by the mobile app development companies.  Already fluid interaction through apps among a range of devices including smart TV, smartwatch and home automation devices is shaping this new reality and multi-device tech interface.

• With Internet of Things apps will not only engage number of devices but they will grow bigger and richer with contextual capabilities as per the device in use.
• Multi device responding capability will be a big determinant factor in making many apps popular.

5. Big Data and Business Analytics

The huge volume of digital data which is increasing in big leaps with every passing day will revolutionize analytics in every field. But the impact will particularly be awesome in business analytics. With increasing number of enterprise apps and Big Data analytics being exposed to them, will really prove huge for the decision makers. In the one hand, employees will be brought forward more into decision making because of their constant mobile engagement in and out of workplace through enterprise apps and on the other hand, variety of business data across niches, people and locations will produce higher accuracy and agility in analytics.

• App developers have to look for more robust data analytics tool for enterprise apps.
• Real time business analytical input from employees through their enterprise apps will play key role in business decisions.
• Processing niche specific data for faster business insights will be sought after increasingly in mobile apps.

The areas mentioned above only represent the most prominent avenues of change that mobile apps across niches are showing these days.

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Rare iOS bug can cause text messages to crash your iPhone

CNET – A quirky bug in Apple’s iOS can crash and reboot your iPhone if you receive a certain text message.

First revealed by a Reddit user on Tuesday, the bug works as follows: Someone texts you a message with a specific string of Arabic characters. If your iPhone is locked, and you receive a notification of the new text, iMessage crashes and your iPhone proceeds to reboot.

iOS bugs are nothing new. Since its release last September, iOS 8 has been beset by glitches that have forced Apple to continually issue updates to resolve certain issues. But this latest bug is much more random and rare than others, so it’s not something that would affect a wide audience. And it’s one that users can resolve themselves without waiting for Apple to issue a fix.

What’s the cause behind this newly-discovered bug? It’s not the Arabic characters per se but the way iOS tries to handle the full text string, as described by AppleInsider. The Unicode characters that attempt to render and display the string chew up too many resources when your phone is locked and the notification of the message appears.

The folks at AppleInsider sent the same text string during a normal iMessage conversation, and the iPhone did not crash or reboot. That test suggests the glitch lies more within iOS’s notifications process and not within the iMessage app.

Several iOS users have chimed in on Reddit and Twitter to report the problem. But it’s not one likely to affect most people. First of all, you’d need to be texted that specific string of characters while your iPhone is locked. That means you’re not going to receive it accidentally but rather from someone who knows your mobile number and is purposely trying to crash your iPhone for some reason.

What if you do bump into this particular bug? There are a few ways around it.

You can always turn off notifications for text messages, but that’s hardly an ideal solution. Instead, you can simply trigger another text message. You can ask the person who sent you the original message to send a new one, assuming that person didn’t send it maliciously. Otherwise, you can send yourself a text message easily enough by telling Siri to do it or using an iOS app that lets you share content via iMessage. The new text message essentially supercedes the older message, so you can use iMessage again.

Apple knows about the problem and is working on a fix.

“We are aware of an iMessage issue caused by a specific series of unicode characters and we will make a fix available in a software update,” an Apple spokesperson said.

Apple didn’t say when the fix would roll out, but it could pop up as soon as the next iOS update appears. Developers are currently beta testing iOS 8.4, so Apple may have time to squeeze in a fix before it rolls that latest update.

Article by Lance Whitney for CNET

Thumbnail from Shutterstock

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