It’s good to be aware of new features, algorithm, and latest changes of all social media that help you to show your products, better. All in all, everything about Social Media.
“It’s been an incredible 13 years, and I’m proud of what
Twitter has accomplished during my time with the company,” Williams
announced in a statement.
“I will continue rooting for the team as I focus my time
on other projects.”
He took over the CEO position from founder Jack Dorsey in
2008 before ceding that position to Dick Costolo in 2010. He left the company
in 2011, and Mr. Dorsey ultimately reclaimed the CEO role in 2015.
Over these few months, Mr. Williams has been drastically reducing his stake in the Twitter company. He held about 14.6 million shares of the company as of December, down from 29 million last April.
Ev Williams is currently the CEO of Medium, a tech company
that enables writers to publish long-form articles. Medium recently got famous
as the venue where Jeff Bezos posted his reply to claimed threats from the
National Enquirer to share specific pictures of him.
Twitter’s board of executives includes Bret Taylor, president, and product officer at Salesforce; executive chairman Omid Kordestani and Debra Lee, president, and CEO of BET Networks. Twitter’s stock closed up 3% Friday, exchanging at nearly $32 a piece for a market cap of the north of $24 billion.
That’s it, guys. What do you think about these sudden changes in twitter? What is happening to the world of social media?
Some Twitter users have been complaining that tweets that were retweeted by users they don’t follow are now displaying in their timeline. The issue, thankfully, is not related to a new Twitter algorithm, as some had worried. Instead, the company said that a bug affecting Android users was mislabeling the “social proof” tag on Retweets.
This is the section of
the Retweet that tells you who, among the users you already follow, had
retweeted your post in question.
The company said that the social proof label is wrong, so
the Android users were observing tweets that looked like they had been retweeted by people they don’t know.
Twitter states the Retweets that showed up were actually tweeted by users the people knew,
but their social proof label was wrong, which made them look out of place. The
designers of Twitter are aware of the query and are working to fix this now.
The bug has been on for a few days, Twitter also confirmed.
The company’s @TwitterSupport account had not yet replied to people asking about this issue, which may have caused some user confusion. After all, Twitter has been known to put what some consider irrelevant information in the timeline — like posts that show you when many users you follow have now all followed another Twitter user or posts that show you that some people have shared the same link, for instance. But even in those cases, that was in-network action — not something like placing random retweets in your main feed.
Until the bug is fixed, Twitter users who don’t like the seemingly random retweets can tap on down arrow to tell Twitter they want to see less content like this.
Facebook just declared its latest round of “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” this time out of Iran. The company took down 356 accounts, 262 Pages, 162 Instagram accounts and three Facebook groups, that showed “malicious-looking indicators” and patterns that recognize it as a potentially state-sponsored or otherwise coordinated and deceptive activity.
As Facebook Head of Cybersecurity Policy transcribed in a press call, Facebook coordinated nearly with Twitter to find these accounts, and by co-operating early and often, the company was able to use that to create our investigation.” Today, Twitter published a postmortem on its efforts to fight misinformation during the U.S. midterm election last year.
As the Newsroom post details, the movement affected a broad
swath of regions around the globe:
“There were multiple sets of activity, each localized for a specific country or region, including Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, US, and Yemen. The Page administrators and account owners typically represented themselves as locals, often using fake accounts, and posted news stories on current events… on topics like Israel-Palestine relations and the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, including the role of the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.”
The Iranian activity wasn’t focused on conceiving real-world events, as we have seen in other cases. In many examples, the content “repurposed” reporting from Iranian spread ideas that could benefit Iran’s positions on different geopolitical matters. However, Facebook refused to link the newly recognized activity to Iran’s government directly.
“Whenever we make an
announcement like this we’re really
careful,” Gleicher said. “We’re not in a position to directly assert who
the actor is in this case; we’re
asserting what we can prove.”
Some of us are a lot more sensitive than others. Make a bad
or negative comment, and some people will
break into tears. Some will take that on board and change their behavior; others will turn into a werewolf and bite
right back!
Dealing with negative comments on social media is a lot more different than dealing with usual complaints, received y chat, email or phone. And there is one reason for it: it is too easy to turn a social media complaint into a complete disaster.
Why should I care about negative comments and complaints
on social media?
Social media is a public place. Every time a user writes something wrong about your product or service, the whole audience on social media can see it. They will judge you based on different criteria:
How quickly did you reply?
What was your reaction?
What was your customer’s
reaction?
How did the whole thing
end?
Social media is all about immediate reaction and quick
response. People present on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter literally live there and can post in the
morning, while having breakfast, after dinner or even in the middle of the
night.
If you choose to have a business profile, you should be
ready to do the same. You might think that no one will notice one negative
comment, but they definitely will! And if
you don’t get response, they’ll get the idea of you not caring about your PR and
your customers.
How am I supposed to reply social media complaints if I
don’t see them?
It’s simple to reply to a complaint that was sent directly to your email, right? In the case of social media, it isn’t that easy! If you are lucky enough, users will tag your brand in their posts, and you will get notifications about it. Things start to get more complicated when people are sharing a lousy word of mouth about your brand, and you can’t respond to it because you can’t see it.
Enter your Brand’s name and optimize your settings. Remember you can choose more than one keyword alert for the search to get more specific information. This way you will get notified immediately when your keyword was mentioned, once a day or once a week. You can choose the language, region, and source (e.g., blogs, news, videos.)
How quickly should I response?
You should reply as soon as you’ve received a negative comment. Try to aim for responding in at least15 minutes to make a good impression, but if you can’t do that, try to answer in an hour. According to researches, 43% of your customers will expect a “one hour” response time and 30% of them expect a reply within 30 minutes.
The faster you reply, the better you will look in the eyes
of the social media community. Yes, there is no mercy!
How should I react to negative comments?
If you let yourself discharge in public, you’ll be judged by your behavior. You might find yourself discussing with other people who will stand in the trolls’ defense and trust me, that’s the last thing you want! So, whether you’re speaking with an angry troll or customer, make sure you are doing the following:
appreciate them for their
opinion (try not to be too formal, just a “thanks for reaching out to us”
should be excellent)
apologize for the
inconvenience (“sorry to hear that you didn’t like our services/ you’re having
problems with our product”)
inspire them to send you a
private message.
The last thing is essential: whatever happens, you want the
unsatisfied customer to send you a private message.
Should I delete negative comments?
No!I know, you might be intrigued to delete them, but you
should never, ever do that.
The thing is, if you delete a real comment from an angry customer, you can be sure they’ll come back: louder, more upset and more frustrated. Also, negative comments show that you’re a genuine, honest brand. You shouldn’t think about dealing with negative trolls and complaints on social media as an offensive obligation but more as an opportunity.
Opportunity to turn your customers’ lousy experience into a
good one and to turn complaints into compliments.
One primary reason why brands are unwilling to use Twitter
is because of negative customer feedback. More and more often customers are
using Twitter as a forum to place customer service complaints, making brands
wary of joining what seems like a black hole of customer complaints.
Twitter users can apply smartest techniques to grow on the platform and even can buy Twitter followers on WP Dev Shed. But how to deal with the negative feedback? While not all tweets that get on your way will be negative, there is a benefit to having your brand on Twitter: you have control over turning negative feedback into positive ones. Negative feedback will be present on Twitter whether you have a twitter account or not. You can’t control what’s being said about you, but you do have control over your answers to unhappy customers. Here are many ways that you can deal with negative feedback on Twitter.
Kill them with humor and kindness
Last week, ThinkGeek had a typo in an email they sent out to
their loyal customers. They had a lot of Twitter followers point out this typo
through Twitter. Instead of ignoring the typo or getting disturbed at the
hundreds of finger-pointing tweets, ThinkGeek responded with funny tweets to
their followers. One example:
“Can’t you just
see those ThinkGeek monkeys wailing because of their typo? Makes me smile every
time.”
Be honest
Southwest Airlines was having a problem with their website,
getting many angry tweets from exhausted customers. Instead of replying with
the general customer support tweet, Southwest Airlines responded with a genuine
apology and honest answer. It’s hard to stay mad at someone who is willing to
empathize with your pain.
Give them a solution
A Gap client was unsatisfied with the quality of one of her
purchases. The company was proactive in reaching out to the customer to suggest
that she return the product.
Instead of being afraid
of negative feedback on Twitter, embrace the chance to change negative customer
experiences. Reach out to angry customers, frustrated clients or out to make
you look like a fool. The more honesty and empathy you share with your
customers, the more they will appreciate the experience you create for them.
Google is going to shut
down the consumer version of G+ over the following months. The decision follows the discovery of an
earlier undisclosed security flaw that exposed users’ profile data that was attended in March 2018.
A software bug was discovered that provided access to private
profile data of more than 500k users for developers. Still, Google said that
there’s no evidence of developers being aware of this bug. There’s also no evidence
that any data has been abused. The bug was discovered in March 2018. A report in the
Wall Street Journal states Google did not reveal this data sooner because it
feared regulatory inspection.
Google + failed to
live up to expectations
Google admits that G+ has been unable to reach broad user or developer adoption since its introduction. The company revealed that the engagement and usage of G+ are even lower than some might have guessed, as 90% of user sessions remained less than 5 seconds. With that said, it’s not possible that Google+ will be missed, although it’s surely worth noting that it’s shutting down. At one time Google put vital effort into promoting the adoption of G+, including using its information to personalize search results based on what a person’s contacts have +1’d. G+ may have been shut down eventually, but it’s the security breach that pushed Google’s hand.
More on the security
breach
Through a security audit,
Google determined the following:
A bug in one of the G+ user APIs implied that applications additionally accosted Profile to handle that was shared with the user, however not set as public.
Data is compelled to static, changeable G+ profile fields including name, gender, age, email address, and occupation.
The data breach does eliminate some other data a user may have associated or presented on G+ or some other service.
The bug was found and immediately patched in March 2018.
Twitter has set different limits on user activities to decrease the load on their services, as well as reduce the possibility of spammy behavior.
These limits are based on a combination of factors like how old your account is, the speed at which you follow/unfollow, the third-party applications you use for your Twitter account and also if you are using the native Twitter app less frequently.
Some notable updates:
January 6, 2012:
Added lists and unfollow limits.
January 6, 2013: Added
biography character limit & Picture sizes.
May 31, 2013: Twitter
updates the number of Twitter lists you can have and the number of users you
can follow in each list.
August 12, 2015: Twitter
now lets you send direct messages with up to 10,000 characters. The threshold
used to be 140 (similar to standard tweets).
October 28, 2015:
Twitter has raised their follow limit
from 2,000 to 5,000.
October 2016: links,
Media attachments, and screen names in replies no longer count in the 140character limit.
May 2017: Updated
number of daily direct messages from 250 to 1,000
November 2017: The
number of characters in a Tweet has been raised
from 140 to 280.
The Follow limit
on Twitter
You may be new to
Twitter, or you may have been using the platform for a long time and hit the
“2000” limit, which Twitter increased to 5,000. Most social media platforms
have limits in place for the number of users you can “follow” or “friend.” For
instance, Google+ currently has a limit of 5,000 users you can have in your
circles, and you have a limit of 5,000 “friends” on Facebook. This is to stop individuals, brands or
automated applications from abusing the system.
On Twitter, it was
possible to bulk follow thousands and thousands of users in the hope that they
would follow you back. This caused many
accounts to abuse this and follow a lot
of people while not generating engaging content and not having many users to
follow them back.
Not good!
Twitter launched back in March 2006. But it wasn’t until August 2008 that it began imposing limits on the number of users you could follow. Twitter was facing big problems with spam (as Twitter co-founder blogged at the time). There was a lot of backlash at the time, and a lot of confusion. It’s generally assumed that Twitter introduced a 2,000 following limit, which means you could only follow up to 2,000 users. But, this isn’t strictly true.
The Following
Ratio
According to
researches, the magic number is 1,819! This
means if you have 1,819 followers you may break through the 2,000 limits. Below
1,819 you are capped at following 2,000 users.
I haven’t examined
this, but I’m not sure that the same policy will be used for this new limit. To break through the limit, you’ll have to get more than 4545 users
following you before you can go through the 5,000 limits. Let me know what you
think!
Unfollow limits on Twitter
So, how many users
can you unfollow? This is a difficult
question since Twitter doesn’t say.
It’s possible to bulk unfollow using automation tools, but you
have to click on each user manually, and then click unfollow.
Yes, various
javascript hacks are using Google Chrome, but to be honest, you should stay
away from this because it’s likely to get you banned.
So, use your common
sense. I’ve unfollowed over 600 people in one day, but that was a one-off- I
wanted to unclutter my feed, but if I unfollowed 600 people each day I’d get
banned.
So, there you
go. Remember, Twitter is a social network platform- these limits are for our protection.
Do you think these limits are suitable, or do you think they should be changed? Let me know in the comments below.
For a lot of us, being forced to look through old pictures
of ourselves can be an unpleasant experience. Did I really wear that out in public? Why did I do that to your eyebrows?
And what in the world was I thinking with those highlights? But The first big
meme of 2019 is not just making users look at their old embarrassing photos,
but actually share them with the world.
It’s called the #10yearchallenge, and its premise is extremely easy. You share a photo of yourself from 10 years ago next to a picture from today, to reveal how far you have (or haven’t) come. The challenge has taken over every corner of social media. Users are doing it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat.
Remember, back in 2009 we still took pictures
with actual, physical cameras. We even wrote our Facebook statuses in the third
person, wore Live-strong bracelets, and iPhones weren’t useful for much other
than that application where you had to pretend you were drinking a pint of
lager. A lot has changed since then. Right?
The best celebrity efforts
There are a lot of celebrities and stars
getting in on the game to show off their #glowup, although many of them look the same.
Gabrielle Union is in her 40s now but doesn’t let you think she looks a day over 26.
Meanwhile, Jameela Jamil used her
#10yearchallenge to make a point about influencer and celebrity Instagram
culture.
10-year challenge parodies
As always with memes like this, a lot of
people have taken it beyond the original meaning and used it to make hilarious
jokes.
The serious side
But some people have also used the challenge
to make a point about the environment.
So what are you waiting for? Look for your old pictures in those photo
albums and share it on social media to show your #glowup to everyone.
Years ago, the page category of Facebook was chosen when you created it. You’d have to decide whether you wanted a page dedicated to local services, books, and magazines, to sports, or whatever. Once you picked a category, you would get locked in, or at least almost locked in; there was some compliance within your general category, but if you needed to change the overarching super-category, you had to jump through a bunch of hoops.
These days, setting a category for your Facebook page is much more flexible. You are not limited to one type, either; since Facebook lets you fit multiple categories into your page, you can choose up to three. For instance, a local newspaper could choose a magazine category, a local services category, and a website category, and all of them would be legitimate.
Facebook page categories
Facebook has turned the page category box into a pretty
free-form and open selection. There are a lot of different categories to choose; so many I cannot possibly
list them here. Every keyword seems to have a dozen various categories attached
to it. For instance, if I type in these keywords, here are suggestions Facebook
gives:
Local: Farmer’s
Market, Government Building, Government Official, Local Travel.
Music: Artist, Song,
Music Award, Music Video, Music Venue, Music store, Musician/band, Arts and
Entertainment.
The list goes on and on and on. Facebook also lets you put in three different but specific
categories. As they claim, they only hold the three most particular categories. So, for instance, if you added
“music” and “song,” it’s possible that they would only keep “song.”
This means it’s
important to dig down to three relevant and specific categories to fit your
brand. A general contractor for different home repairs might plug in
electrician, plumber, and carpenter, though this might leave out some of their
essential services. Alternatively, they could put in house renovation, overall
contractor, and landscaper.
It’s a good idea to think about three different phases of your Brand and find categories that include as many of the fields as possible to get a general overview of your page type. Remember, though, that different categories can implement various features.
The features of Page Categories on Facebook
Facebook’s limitations on what pages can do is a little of an old system, and I wouldn’t be shocked if they remove or revamp it in the next year or two. I’ll sum up how it works now, but don’t be worried if it changes; just let me know in the comments and I will look over what they have changed. For now, you can use their table as a reference here.
Right now, ten features
of a page are “variable” depending on your page category. But actually, only 4
of them are changeable. According to Facebook, every page has:
The ability to compose a
short description of the Brand or entity that it represents.
The ability to link to a particular website for the Brand or entity the
page represents.
The ability to list special
services that the brand or entity provides.
The ability to turn on
review system and ratings (previously attached to being a local business) so
that fans and followers can review and give star ratings to the brand or
entity.
The ability to add an email for people that use it as a method of
contacting representatives of the brand or entity.
The ability to enter a
phone number, again for people to use to contact the brand or entity the page
represents.
Also, some categories
have access to extra features, such as:
The ability to include an
address is only available to Facebook pages in categories that intimate a
related business address, such as brands and organizations, companies, people
or sports entities, and local services.
The ability to display a location map with a mapping system powered by
Facebook, beneficial for people to locate a company branch near their location;
available to the same categories as above.
The ability to list
particular business hours of operation, where hours of service can mean the
distinction between a customer making a drive or being disappointed when they
arrive.
There is some adaptability in what is and isn’t allowed, and I think that Facebook defaults to “allowed” whenever possible. For instance, a page that represents a book would not be allowed to include business hours, but if they are also registered as a local service, they should be allowed.
How to change your page category on Facebook?
While creating a new
page, or editing your existing page, you can choose or change your categories at any time. To edit your page’s category, you should follow these steps:
Click “about” on the left side of your Facebook page.
Click “Edit” right next to the “Category.”
Enter up to 3 categories and choose what you want from the
dropdown list that appears.
Click “Save.” And voila!
You can change your
page’s category as many times as you like, there are no limitations for that.
If you can’t find a category that
describes your Page, try to choose the closest available option.
If you have any other questions about Facebook
categories, you know you can always ask us in the comments below.
Every year social media sees a new trend come to life that brings people together to take part in the awesome “challenges.” Over the years we have seen trends that include staying still, crazy dances, laying down, and pouring freezing cold water over yourself that have swept the social media. We’ve gathered a list of the top challenges ever to hit the internet and included some of our favorites.
1- Planking
The Planking Challenge is the best of them all. Planking
started it all when it filled Facebook feeds everywhere from 2010-2011. The
term planking began in 2008 in Australia when Sam Weckert and friends decided
to create a Facebook page to share pictures of the best planking pictures.
Since then, Planking has generated multiple different variations, including
Gallon Smashing, Owling, and the best of the best, Tebowing.
2- Tebowing
Tebowing is the act of bending on one knee and putting your elbow on your knee and your fist on your forehead. After the Denver Broncos defeated the Miami Dolphins during the 2011 NFL season, quarterback Tim Tebow got down to one knee and performed the pose. Jared Klienstein posted a picture later that night doing the pose and then created a blog on Tumblr dedicated to sharing photos of people Tebow-ing. Tebow also has a Twitter record for most tweets associated to a sports event – with 9,420 tweets per second – when Tebow and the Broncos defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers in the NFL Playoffs on a game-winning touchdown pass in overtime to Demaryius Thomas.
3- The Harlem Shake
The Harlem Shake isn’t the dance from the 1980s; it is a 30-second video that starts with one person in a helmet or mask on, dancing to the opening of “Harlem Shake” by Baauer surrounded by people who are not paying attention. At 15 seconds, the song got a bass drop, and that’s when the video involves a jump cut to the entire group dancing wildly usually using costumes and props. The Harlem Shake trend was generated by Youtube user “DizastaMusic.” Youtube users started replicating the original video and uploading their own.
https://youtu.be/YUAVW1ny-4o
4- Ice bucket challenge
What began as a fundraising campaign, the ALS Ice Bucket
Challenge immediately transformed into one of the most significant viral
challenges ever, drawing in celebrities, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah, and
Bill Gates to do the challenge. The challenge started in 2014 when golfer Chris
Kennedy was nominated by a friend to take part in the Ice Bucket Challenge, not
correlated with ALS at the time. He was to pick a charity to donate to and then
pass it on. He selected ALS and passed it on due to relative suffering from the
illness. The challenge spread from New York to Boston to Florida; soon after,
it got through all of the United States.
5- cinnamon challenge
The Cinnamon Challenge is a trendy food challenge that
requires people recording themselves, eating a spoonful of cinnamon in under 60
seconds without drinking anything. The challenge, comparable to the Kylie
Jenner ‘Lip Challenge,’ was met with an inspection due to health risks of the
mouth and throat from swallowing cinnamon and was mainly posted through
Facebook and YouTube.
6- in my feelings challenge
This popular dance craze has been mopping the social media, with thousands of users (even celebrities!) sharing videos doing the same moves to the tune of Drake’s hit Scorpion song “In My Feelings.”
We have all been there, right? Around a dinner table, around a campfire, held captivated and speechless while listening to a great story. Why? Because we all love stories. So if you could use storytelling on social media, then why wouldn’t you be doing so? You can get the advantage of the most basic part of human nature! So, let’s look at some ways to use storytelling on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Let’s break down storytelling in each social media. You can perform different methods in every social media platform to make the most of your storytelling.
Here are tips on using digital storytelling on your social media accounts today:
1- Show your company’s Human side
People connect with other people, not brands. So to connect your audience, you should show your brand’s
human side. The goal is to form a personal brand that resonates with your
customer and to do that; it’s essential that your brand tells a story.
Share:
What you are learning
What you are doing
A look behind the scenes
And at the same time, do not share too much personal
information. You should always remember that social media is not your diary. Whatever you choose to share with your audience,
just make sure you are comfortable with
the whole world knowing about it.
2- Share your brand’s story
Customers don’t buy into brands; they buy into the story behind the brands. Just as you use your
blog and website to tell your brand’s story, so the same thing with your social
media. Improve your brand’s message and share the ideas you stand for. For
example, if you run an organic store, known for the focus on overall health and natural products, then you should use
social media to share information that is related to that message. Everything
you post is a way to reinforce the story you are communicating. This can build credibility for your brand and
makes your content relevant.
3- Be narrative in your updates
One of the best ways to tell a story on
social media is to do exactly that, tell a story. You can do it on Facebook by
turning your status updates into minimal blog posts. But it’s not just Facebook
that is open to digital storytelling. Even twitter with its 140 character
limits, can be a great tool for digital storytelling. Actually, working within a character limit can encourage creativity
in you. Do you really think it isn’t
possible to tell a story in 140 characters? Consider these examples which prove
that writing stories can still be short:
Even the photo-sharing
platform, Instagram, can be used for storytelling. Just as you post your photo,
write a caption that tells a good brief narrative. While a high-quality picture
is necessary for an Instagram post, a
good caption can help you complete the story by sharing a narrative. For your next Instagram post, you can share a brief
story about the picture within more than three sentences. Instagram captions
are limited to 2200 characters, and after three lines, the caption becomes shortened with an ellipsis.
4- Share Consecutive Posts to Tell a Broader Story
Another good way to share a story on social media is by using
continuous updates to tell the story,
like a story series, from the beginning to end. For example, on twitter
you can first tweet:
“Came home to a house so
quiet I could hear a pin drop.”
Followed by:
“But then we walked into
the bedroom, where a big surprise was waiting.”
Followed by:
“Both kids had constructed
a giant fort & fallen asleep in the middle of furniture & blankets.”
5- Contain elements of your story into posts
The concept of “story” is so
simple; it can feel hard to understand and break down. So, if writing
stories feel complicated, try to focus on
the basic elements of story and try to contain them in your content. Elements such as:
Relatable characters:
The reason you like to share the
human side of your brand is that it makes you more relatable. Each good
story has relatable characters with interests and personalities. You can make
your business that sort of character by
letting your followers in. Furthermore, creating figures in your narratives is an excellent way to develop people your audience finds engaging.
Conflicts:
People like drama! So stories are more compelling when they
include resolution and conflict. So whatever you are sharing, contain details
about the conflict associated with your
work will drive more readers in.
Structure:
The most basic building blocks of a proper story are pacing. First,
this happens, then this, then this. The beginning,
middle, end. Use this kind of narrative arc any way you can. Any story which
tries to drive action should have an
introduction, a body and a CTA at the end.
Backed by purpose:
A story with no purpose
is just claptrap. It would be easy to get
lost in the background noise and lose track of why you are telling it. Why are you telling
a story? What is the critical takeaway you aim for the reader?
Simplicity
Try to keep it simple. Cut out all the unnecessary parts. It
doesn’t matter how good you think a sentence, photo or video is. If it doesn’t
add any value to your story, ditch it.
Authenticity
First, you should decide if the story is true to you. Don’t
try to embellish it or draw out a facade to cover the truth behind the story.
People will be able to tell if you are lying and it will fail.
The environment for telling a story
If you’re telling a story to your friends during a lunch
break, you’re going to be telling it
differently than in front of a full auditory at the Olympia London’s Conference
Centre. The structure of a story depends on the environment you are in. When you’re storytelling on social media
platforms, the user’s screen is your room for the context. So you should create
something good enough for them to stop scrolling and pay attention.
6- A mix of practicality and passion
Create, try, test, do! You can always create as much content
as possible and see which works best. It needs a lot of work and a flaming
passion. But it isn’t practical. Passionate people are so focused on spreading
their message that they burn out their budget, resources, and eventually their own passion. And with such a crowd of content
shared on social media, it’s effortless to get lost in mixed signals and
disorganized data.
You need to understand your audience and scale their engagement. Map out significant performance indicators to recognize the success of the stories you’re telling. Storytelling on social media won’t get you immediate response. It’s not like hanging around a campfire telling a story and observing people’s reactions. You’re restrained by things like numbers of likes, shares, comments with which you are trying to “measure” the user’s retention, engagement rate, and the chance of conversion.
7- Teamwork
Working with a team will help reduce the workload; still,
the production and approval processes can get very complicated. For example:
You have a story outline
planned.
You seek out an audience to
target and test it.
You collect feedback,
mostly unstructured.
You gather information into
a structure and make proper adjustments (to the story, audience or both)
You publish the story and
analyze results and engagement.
Although a mere framework, each step holds a lot of
synchronization, approvals, resources, time and effort. With a loyal team, you
are decreasing the logistic needs, but it gets confusing to onboard new
members.
Final thoughts
The world today is driven by social media, we’re all in the
“always online” state of mind. No matter how liberated we are as people, in the end, we
are all driven by emotions. Self-actualization and validation are our primary motivator for sharing a story. Do not
mix digital storytelling with content marketing;
it shouldn’t be marketing itself. Just try to connect with your audience
and have fun!
What do you think?
What is your social media secret ingredient?Tell us your story of
social storytelling in the comments below.
Facebook is just like an onion. You can use its features at face value, but if you dig a little deeper, you will find things typically hidden in your day-to-day interactions on the platform, such as Messages. “I use Facebook Messenger and check my inbox constantly,” you may say. Still, you may not know that you have some hidden messages on the Facebook messenger waiting for you to read.
Usually, when you check your Facebook Messages, you are only
seeing chats from your friends. That isn’t actually
all of your them. Facebook filters messages from people you aren’t friends with
on the platform. Typically, this is helpful—many of those messages are just
spams. However, every once in a while, a specific message from a
not-yet-Facebook-friend ends up in that no man’s land.
How
to find hidden messages on Facebook?
You can follow these steps to check your hidden messages:
Open Facebook on the desktop.
Tap on the message icon at the top right of your screen.
In the menu that pops up below, you can see that “message requests”
is grayed out next to “recent.”
Click on message requests. Here are the messages from users who
want to chat with you, but aren’t yet your friend on Facebook.
You can also click “See filtered requests” at the bottom of the
menu for more missed messages.
You can also receive these messages from the Facebook messenger:
in the app, go to your settings, then tap “people.”
tap “message Requests” then “Filtered Requests.”
This will show you all the
messages Facebook considered unworthy of your time.
Once you find out about this secret inbox, it’s a good idea
to check it every once in a while, just
to make sure you didn’t miss anything
important.
What do you think about this hidden inbox? Are you curious who have messaged you? Go ahead and check your hidden messages on Facebook.
Pinterest is my BFF! It has been my BFF for a long time, and I have found out that it has huge potential for business if you know how to
use it. According to the recent researches, Pinterest is driving more online
traffic referrals than Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google and the average pin results in .78
sales. That’s something, isn’t it? Ok,
now that I have tweaked your interest, do you want to know how to use Pinterest
for your business? You have come to the right place, in this article I am going
to share 10 Pinterest tips and tricks for you, business users.
Pinterest has taken the same concept as the other social
platforms and created a social networking site that lets you create picture
collections online – like an online scrapbook. It is fundamentally a photo
sharing platform where the users are allowed to create albums on a theme or
pattern.
Pinterest is an excellent opportunity for businesses because
it can be a gateway for their services, products, and even their content. It is
a good way to lead with content and allow
the social interaction to take a secondary role. Brands will be able to see
what their audience care about instead of who they care about. The market research on its own is priceless from a branding
perspective! Are you there yet? If not, this is how you can get started:
Create quality content related to your niche
You should create content-rich boards and share your content
just as you would on any other social media platform. Pin your content and
product to themed boards on Pinterest followed by shortened links that let you
track your Pinterest traffic. Make sure that you are representing your service,
product, and content in a visually
appealing way, because it will draw people’s attention. They won’t read the
subtext in other words. Stand out, try to
be creative and most important; be unique.
I recommend a minimum of 10 boards with at least five pins in each, because that’s where people
check when they come to your site. Whatever you do, just do not leave your boards empty. You should give your visitors a
good first impression. They should know that you are engaging, active and have great content.
Make yourself a brand
Remember to feature your business name on your Pinterest profile. If you are trying to brand your business name, you should have your business name as your Pinterest username. In the “about” section, write a short description about who you are, what you do and what are you passionate about. This section is similar to the bio area on Twitter and should be as brief as possible but provide a proper description of your work and how you solve a pain point for your target audience.
Connect your Pinterest account with your Twitter and Facebook accounts. And of course, remember to include a link to your website as it’s displayed as a clickable link under your bio! You can use URL Shorteners like iLink if you can’t decide which link to put on your Pinterest bio.
Interact with other users
If you come across a pin that you like but are not
necessarily beneficial to your audience or be something that you would pin to
one of your boards, you should consider liking them rather than repining them.
Anytime you like someone’s pin; they will get notified. So, it may grab their
attention and get them to follow you on Pinterest.
Include keywords to show up on search results
Hashtags are no longer useful on Pinterest as the platform
looks for keywords in pin descriptions. While writing your pin description,
make sure you use the relevant keywords., keywords most users would use to find
your content. This makes it easier for
you to be exposed and will gain more
followers for you as well. And as you may know, more followers = more exposure.
Mention other Pinterest users
You can mention people in your Pinterest comments or pin descriptions to catch their attention or to recognize someone special. A ‘mention’ on Pinterest is much like Facebook and Twitter. Just type the @ symbol before the person’s name. A drop-down box will appear, and you can select from the users appearing in the search result. But remember you can only mention people who are following you on at least one board.
That’s all guys; you
can use these tips to grow your business on Pinterest. Also if you have any
other questions about social media marketing, you can ask us in the comments
below.
The social media content forest is getting a little scary for brands who don’t have content strategies. Because it is noisier and more crowded than ever, the methods that worked in past years wouldn’t work in 2019. Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Twitter are being made to use stronger algorithms and filter out the noise, fluff, spam, and irrelevant content so that they create the exciting conversations, organic engagement and elicit feelings of connection to the social network. The social network platforms are feeling the pressure as much as any social media marketer working in any business.
Boost your social media marketing
with a good content calendar
If you want to get a grip on your social media marketing in 2019 and see
unbelievable, measurable results, then you should employ a content calendar.
You will not
achieve goals you don’t plan for and can’t measure. A media calendar will let
you organize and prepare your content so that you can use content to attract your target audience and
achieve your brand goals.
Content is not a random set of words, videos or pictures you pay an intern or
an SEO agency to create and hope it magically boosts your community and
generates more leads and revenues although
some inefficient agencies may try to sell you on this fact, run from them.
“Create it, and they will come running” has never worked, and it’s absolutely not a strategy for success in 2019.
You’ll get out of
your content marketing what you place into it. The best place to begin if you want to get a grip
on your content is by a content calendar. You should also make sure that your content is part
of your more significant business and marketing and strategy.
Your content marketing must be the air you and your target audience
breathes as they explore your brand, not just purchase your products.
Organization and Planning is your solution to success in the crazy noisy online
world of today, trust me!
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is an umbrella term embracing all marketing forms that
include the production and sharing of content to engage target audience bases.
Content marketing contributes to the impression that producing high-quality,
relevant and valuable data to prospects and consumers drives valuable consumer action. Content marketing
helps you retain user attention and improve your brand awareness.
In simple terms, content marketing lets you sell to your client without
actually selling to them. You instead have a communication with them that draws
them to you and your brand with relevant, high quality, and valuable
information.
How a Content Calendar Helps You
handle Your social media Marketing?
The purpose of this blog is not to give you an MBA level education on
content marketing. Doing this much in one simple blog post would be impossible.
So here are some tips to help you so through planning your media calendar. There
are three things you need to consider while evaluating your channels:
Where is your target audience? If your audience is
more active on one social media platform over another, that platform is where
you need to be adjusting your efforts.
Which
platform had the most growth in the last year? If you see enormous
growth on a platform, look through your analytics to understand why. Is it a
particular content type that’s attracting people’s attention? Alternatively,
maybe a precise campaign boosted your growth?
Where are
your engagement and traffic coming from? Is there a specific
social channel that seems to be engaging your customers and driving more traffic to your website? What is your brand
doing on that channel differently than others that are causing that difference?
Find Out Which Types of Social Media Content You’ll Create
you have to decide which types of posts you’ll be sharing across each of
your social media channels.
There are four different post types that your brand can publish on social
media:
Pictures: Including single photos or gallery posts.
Videos: Including live video streaming or natively uploaded video content.
Text: Sometimes one catchy copy is all you need.
Links: Links to external content (curate or downed) would fall under this
category.
Depending on your brand’s abilities and which
platforms you’re on, some of these content types might be more valuable to you
than others. If you’re already posting consistently on different social media
platforms, use in-app analytics for each platform to look for spikes in traffic
and engagement.
Here are some tips to create the best content
calendar in 2019:
Take a brand selfie
Brands need to see the art and value of first-person or “selfie” video content. Customers are becoming less accepting of old promo-based messaging. A selfie approach to video content on Instagram stories, Snapchat and IGTV, make your brand more relatable. Users spend hours watching their friends on IG Stories and Snapchat, so encourage them with content that offers a firsthand look at your business.
Understand Your Social
Audiences
Most brands don’t ever consider this when they are
running ads. Find out where the prospect is about their problem. When marketing
to someone who doesn’t understand they have a problem vs. someone who realizes
they have a problem, the message is very different. Social media is about
segmenting people so you can be relevant to the right customer at the right
time.
Quality Over Quantity
As platforms grow, brands jump onto these trends
and flood the social media platforms with average content in an attempt to ride
the wave. This causes the audiences
they’re trying to attract to tune out before they’ve even processed what brands
are trying to reach. Control the impulse to create content for the sake of
doing so. Be profitable.
Invest in Data Research
Invest your money and time in data research. Companies that understand and continuously optimize their social media marketing strategy are winning the customer retention war. They’re targeting the correct audience. Numbers don’t lie — businesses that prioritize trends and stats will be the ones we notice in 2019.
Craft a Significant
Brand Narrative
Optimize your business narrative to step up social
in 2019. It’s not enough to generate a content calendar based on product or
brand messaging. Your content needs to be compelling and evocative to lead
people to action. Evaluate your brand story and make sure it’s inspiring and
stands out between the social clutter. Ground your content in that message, and
it will undoubtedly rise above.
Engage with Relevant
Influencers
As social networks like Instagram continue to get
impressive audiences, it’s time to think outside of the old advertising box.
More users, look to influencers for their suggestions on products, what to
watch, experiences, etc. Reach out to a public figure in your industry and ask
if they will promote your product in a post.
Create a Perfect Social
Media Strategy
Snapchat Story Ads, IGTV, Facebook features and
everything else are methods, not strategies. The best way to up your game is to
up your strategy. Do some research and Learn more about your audience.
Creating a stable, research-based plan will help you leap in 2019.
Be an Early Adopter
Do not hang around to observe if anyone is going to
leap to use a new feature and if it works for them before trying it yourself.
Experiment with every new feature that rolls out. You will quickly discover if
it will work for you or won’t be a big hit, and you’ll receive a massive boost
as a trendsetter by being the first one to try it in your industry.
Conclusion
Now, I understand this seems like much work. It
takes time to put features, systems, and workflows in place. These updates will
make things faster and more productive, but the implementation still needs some
time commitment. However, you know what? It’s well worth it! A well-planned and
well-organized content calendar will make a significant difference when it
comes to traffic and leads coming to your site. Most brands share content
without any purposes or thinking behind it.
Having a good content calendar gives you a considerable advantage and develops your social media authority. Try it, give it 4 to 6 months and come back here to share your results!
Almost everyone uses Facebook, but can we all agree that sometimes it kind of sucks? For every great picture or story you see on Facebook, you will see tons of low-quality memes, disturbing content, and even frustrating user interface elements. Let’s put a stop to all these for good. We will cover fixes for some of Facebook’s most common issues so you won’t have to put up with them anymore.
1- How to shut up excessive posters?
We all know someone like this:
Your friend posts too many
potential rants.
Your grandma has no idea
how to use Facebook and posts nonsense all the time.
That one friend who posts too many photos of their pet.
A colleague who
copies and pastes a post
filled with grammatical errors to let you know they still hate cancer!
These situations result in a dilemma. You don’t like to
unfriend these people on Facebook and hurt their feelings, but you are also
sick of their posts. The solution here is to unfollow them; you will not see
their post updates anymore, but you remain friends.
How to unfollow someone on Facebook?
You can unfollow the annoying friends by these simple steps:
Go to their profile page
Click on the following box
on the right side of their cover picture
Select Unfollow [Username].
Now you will not have to suffer from their posts. You will
still be friends though, so you can check
their timeline anytime you want to find out what they’re up to. They won’t receive a notification of you
unfollowing them, so don’t worry, you’re safe! Enjoy your clutter-free
timeline.
2- Create an important friends list
On the other hand, there are
a few friends whose posts we don’t want to miss. Facebook is changing its algorithm all the time, so you might not
even see some of the updates from your friends. To prevent this, you can specify
your closest friends and get their updates at the top of your feed, every time.
Go to your friend’s page
whose posts you don’t want to miss
Click the following box
again
Select “See First” from the
options
Now Facebook will always show you their updates right away.
Whether you use this for Facebook stalking or not is up to you!
If you really cannot miss an update from a special someone,
you can get notifications when they post something new. To do this:
Go to your friend’s page
Click the “friends” box
Choose “get
notifications” from the options on the list.
Now Facebook will send you a notification every time they post something on the platform.
3- Get rid of the targeted ads
Facebook makes a lot of money from advertising. Therefore,
it spends a lot of time trying to show you the most relevant ads hoping you
will interact with them. By default, Facebook just
tracks you everywhere you go on the platform and uses your browsing habits to
select the best ads for you. You can get rid of these personalized ads and see
only general ones for your age group and gender.
How to disable personalized ads?
To opt out of these
ads you should:
Click on the small drop-down arrow at the top right of Facebook’s
window
Select “settings.”
Select “ads” on the
left sidebar
Open the ad settings
category on the resulting page
Now you can change the
first two options to “No” and the third option to “No one.”
This will stop
Facebook from using your browsing history to show you targeted ads.
4- Stop sharing posts with everyone
Just like you get sick of seeing people’ posts, sometimes
you don’t want to share your updates with all of your friends. Maybe you don’t want your boss to see what you
were up to on your day off, or don’t need another load of your mother’s
commentary on what you have to share. By using these few methods, you can simply hide your posts from certain people.
If you want to hide a post
from someone once:
click on the audience
selector button (the one that says Friends or Public) on your post.
Select Friends except
(username) and search for the one you don’t like to see your post.
Click on the red Remove button to keep them
from seeing your post
Save Changes to finish.
To prevent someone
from seeing all of your posts, you can add them to your Restricted list. Users
on this list won’t be able to see anything you post unless it’s set to Public or you tag them in it. To
add someone to your restricted list:
Go to their Facebook page
select the Friends button,
click Add to another list
Scroll down and click the
Restricted list.
5- Block annoying app invites
Facebook features lots of stupid games, all of them designed
to waste your time and money. If you’re sick of friends asking for some extra
lives in Candy Crush, you can block all Facebook invites and requests by a
person or by game. To do this:
Go to your settings
Select the blocking tab
this time
Find the block app invites
field and enter your annoying inviter’s name
This way you will automatically block all their future
requests, and don’t worry this doesn’t affect any part of your interaction with
them on the platform.
You can also enter the app’s name in the “block apps”
field to prevent it from contacting you.
6- Common Facebook errors
We conclude with tips for a few common errors people get while trying to access
Facebook.
Forgot Facebook password
Forgetting your Facebook login information is one of the most
common issues people run into. You should
try to recover your Facebook account if you can’t log in, but first, make sure your account isn’t hacked, or else you need to report the
problem to Facebook.
Write down the email address or phone number you have added to your
Facebook account.
Once you managed to
identify your account, click continue
Facebook will send you a
security code via email or SMS.
Enter the code, and you will have your account recovered.
Can’t connect to
Facebook
Since Facebook in one of the biggest platforms on the web,
it rarely faces an outage. If you can’t get on Facebook, follow these steps to
diagnose the issue:
Check a website like down
detector to see if Facebook is really
down. If it is, you can’t do much more than waiting.
Visit another website to
make sure of your internet connection. If your internet connection is down, you
can restart your phone, wifi, or cellular to fix it.
Clear the cache and cookies
of your browser
Try to open Facebook in an
incognito window or another browser, and if
it works, something is wrong with your current browser.
Disable your VPN or any
other tracker-blocking extensions you are using and try to connect to Facebook
directly.
Reboot your device and
router.
That’s it.
Which Facebook annoyances drive you crazy?
Do you have any other issues with the platform? Leave a
comment and let us know about it.
