7 Reasons Why You Need to Go Mobile [INFOGRAPHIC]

Unbelievably there are still some people out there who think mobile is a fad and are still not using it to market their business.

The benefits for mobile are huge and it’s potential is even bigger!

There are many reasons why mobile is taking the world by storm but here are just 7 that should convince you if you are not already convinced.

1. We won’t leave home without it

The mobile is now is part of the family and goes wherever we go. No other marketing channel has this constant contact with it’s customers, all the trusty text message needs is a handset and some phone signal - job done.

2. Your message will get read

With other marketing channels it is hard to make sure that your marketing message will get heard or read, well with a text message you can almost guarantee it.

3. Mobile is more personal

With the huge array of companies out there competition is tough and the choice is hard for customers. Most consumers now are looking for the best service to differentiate between companies and having a company that gives such a personal service via text message is what people want to make them feel special.

4. It’s how people want to communicate 

People are addicted to their mobiles and they want to communicate via them.  

89% of us suffer from PPV syndrome or Phantom Pocket Vibration Syndrome, which is the believe that your phone vibrated when it didn’t. This stems from our want to be contacted on our mobile. 

5. It’s cost effective

The costs are small and the potential is huge. The engagement rates are 6 to 8 times higher than email.

6. It’s how they will be contacting you

The magnificent little mobile device can now do everything from ring, text, email and surf the web. Search Engine Land discovered that 9 out of 10 mobile searches lead to action.

7. Mobile is only going one way - up

While all other media consumption is on the way down mobile is the only one on the way up. (eMarketer)

TV    2009 - 45%     2012 - 38%

Online  2009 - 25%  2013 - 20%

Radio   2009 - 17%  2012 - 12%

Print   2009 - 9%     2013 - 4%

Mobile   2009 - 4%   2013 - 20%  

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How To Convert Visitors to Customers With Your Web Copywriting

Do you have a lot of visitors to your site? Do you do a happy dance every time the number increases or you see someone from a faraway country stop in?

It is really exciting to see all of those numbers and all of those people, but eventually it becomes exhausting and overwhelming when those visitors leave and never become customers. Turning them into customers is important and now is the time to do just that; but how does one go about that? This blog is going to discuss five ways to use web copywriting to convert visitors into paying customers.

How Web Copywriting Helps Convert

1. Get the Blog Going. We say this time and time again, but it is crucial when you are trying to convert visitors into customers. “How does blogging do this?” Blogging gives you the opportunity to become an authority in your field with Google, helping you rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). The higher you rank, the more visitors will come. Once the visitors get to your site, they’ll begin reading through your posts and deciding whether or not your company is worth their hard-earned money.

If the visitors like what they see, they could just add you to their RSS feeds and keep up with your blog. This is where hyperlinks become important in your blog. If you add them throughout your blog posts, you have a higher likelihood of getting visitors to other parts of your site and to your products.

Did you mention a service or product similar to yours such as dog grooming and gourmet food? Hyperlink those terms to your specific service or product, showing readers you do exactly what they are reading about. This will help convert those casual readers into consumers quickly. Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially on the Internet!

2. Publish Yourself. Getting your content published in various formats around the web will also help convert visitors to customers. You can publish Whitepapers, which can give potential clients detailed information about your company or you can publish press releases to make people aware you exist. These are great ways to create interest in your product all while giving potential clients the information they all want. These forms of web copywriting can help act as an FAQ of sorts.

3. Email Is Not Dead Yet. An important part of web copywriting is email. Many seem to think email marketing is going away, but that is simply not the case. We all check our email first thing in the morning and the last thing before we go to bed. We are all hopelessly addicted to the Internet and email, which gives you a perfect opportunity to market your company. Encourage visitors to sign up for your newsletter when they stop by to read your blog. You’ll be surprised at the amount of people who will sign up if given the choice. Don’t force people to because this tends to scare people off. Give them a choice and then send out weekly or bi-weekly emails about services or new blog posts to keep interest alive in readers.

4. Research Your Audience and Keep Researching. Research is the name of the game when it comes to converting visitors into customers. The more you research, the more likely you will hit the target perfectly. Business2Community says that by providing information regarding your services and industry, visitors will already know if you meet their needs. This gives potential clients enough information about your products and shows that you are worthwhile.

Another excellent way to research your visitors and industry is to formulate case studies. A case study will tell an interesting story filled with facts about your current clientele and success rate, which will encourage those reading it that you are a company that is trustworthy. A case study will help you beat your competition and can also help you see any changes that need to be made for your company.

5. Landing Pages Are Crucial To Creating Customers. A crucial way to use web copywriting to convert visitors to customers is having an incredible landing page. Landing pages are great for taking visitors to the location you want, instead of them going to the overwhelming front page. You may think that customers want to see that front page, but the reality is most people find the main site to be confusing no matter how organized it is. Do you have a specific product you wish to sell to your visitors? Send them to that landing page. This is a great way to generate leads for your company.

Let’s take a quick look at a few handy tips for your landing page:

• Make sure it is simple and only has the basic information you want your visitors to see. Don’t overwhelm them with tons of images and other information about your services; stick to a specific product. This will cut down on any confusion your visitors may have, helping to make them into paying customers.
• Make sure people can navigate around your site easily. The harder it is, the less likely visitors will want to pay you for any service or product.
• As with all web copywriting make sure you are friendly with visitors. If you site is hyper professional, this will come across as snooty and arrogant. However, if you are friendly or down-to-earth, this will come across as someone people will want to work with in the future.

In Closing

Converting visitors into customers isn’t very difficult if you follow the above steps. The more you cater to your visitors, the more they will realize your company is a great one to work with. Don’t be too upset if this doesn’t happen over night. Sometimes it takes a little while for visitors to realize that they want to purchase items from you, but soon you will start watching your customer base grow to meet your website’s visitor rates and that will be a good day, indeed.

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The Increasing Facebook Conundrum

To Facebook or not to Facebook, that is the question.

It's a serious question that any business, marketer etc needs to consider - is Facebook worth our time? Facebook used to be a place where with the right approach, brands etc could make a decent impact without parting with any actual cash. A reasonable amount of people would see your update in their newsfeed - it was nice. Whether that actually achieved anything for the business is another question, and frankly one that the vast majority would struggle to answer, but you at least knew that people would be given the opportunity to see your post.

I've got 9% problems...

Rumours started to circulate last year about average organic reach falling to an average of 9% (organic reach is the percentage of your total fans that have your update served to their newsfeed). You could class that as a kick in the teeth. Why did this happened? Well, Facebook will tell you they're trying to improve the quality of your newsfeed, while others will speculate it's all about the benjamins - they want you to pay to 'boost your posts' in order to increase that reach. Zuck needs more flip-flops.

9% was a blessing

How does 1.5% sound to you? Pretty bad right? Well, in March, Page owners started reporting average reaches of 1.5-2%. We then had the much-publicised Eat24 withdrawal from Facebook, which really brought the issue to the attention of marketers. Since then, there's been a constant debate questioning the sense in even being present on Facebook without having some budget to pile into post boosting and further advertising.

The end is nigh...

Or is it? Well, Clarion Comms carried out some interesting research in April. They tracked three Pages over three months to see if the reported drop was a reality, granted, three Pages isn't exactly an all-encompassing study, but at least it gives us something to consider.  Here are the results...

What does this show? Well, two of the brands (it would be nice to at least know what realm these brands are in) are surpassing the 2% by a large margin, while 'brand 2' is sitting in between that 2-9% scale. Note that brands 1 & 2 have spent money on advertising, but not promoted posts. I'd wager that their higher reach is a natural product of the fact that their ads are taking their Page to a wider audience, which really should cause an increase in organic actions, which makes me think that's isn't a particularly valid metric. A handy bit of data, but far from conclusive.

What about my experience?

At Velocity, we manage a number of Facebook Pages. One of the Pages we were handling (a short-term project) was for a very popular brand in the B2C realm, the updates on the Page used to have a great organic reach (an average of 48% and strong 'engagement'). The project ended in March this year and I worked out the average reach of the last ten posts we published on their behalf. The average organic reach amounted to 0.3%. Ouch. We hadn't changed tact as things had been working very well, this drop was very, very sudden, almost overnight. That 0.3% renders organic activity as useless in this case.

So, is it time to abandon Facebook?

The data is inconclusive. If you look at this chart (via Adage), you'll see that while reach is down, engagement is up...

Again, this data isn't exactly comprehensive in terms of the number of Pages assessed, but it does give some hope that while brands perhaps aren't reaching as many people, they are creating more 'engagement'.

Ok Mike, what should we do?

First things first, make sure you are as aware as physically possible as to what your Facebook activity is achieving for your business, client etc. If you don't have a clear picture of that, you can't even begin to consider the sanity of my next piece of advice for you. De-prioritise Facebook Does that sound crazy? It isn't. If you used to have actual success via Facebook on an organic level, and that's no longer the case, then you have to consider its importance in your marketing mix. That sounds rather obvious, but often businesses (and their suppliers) will plough on regardless, which is just plain silly. It may be the case that you've placed a lot of emphasis on Facebook and Twitter as part of your social media activity and that's fine, but can you make better use of your time by dropping Facebook down your pecking-order? Perhaps you can reach similar audiences in one of the other plethora of other social media options out there? Don't want to remove Facebook from its pedestal? Then, you need to ask yourself...

Can you up your game?

To increase organic reach, you need to be putting out content on your Facebook that people want to get involved with. Is your content good enough? Can it be improved? Monitor, and I mean really monitor the effect of each update - what is creating the biggest reach and engagement? Are you linking back to your site or content within it? What updates are causing the best traffic and what are those people doing when the arrive on your site? Up your game and focus on the wins.

Can you shell out?

If you have budget available to put towards post boosting and wider Facebook advertising, then you can still achieve solid results with a blend of paid and (quality) organic activity. However, and you'll be sick of hearing this from me, please don't throw money at it without knowing what it is achieving. We are now advising startups or businesses making their first moves into social that to achieve real impact with Facebook, they have to be willing to spend some money. If they can't do that, then a realistic outlook of likely Facebook success is required. It may be the case that maintaining simple presence (and monitoring it) is the best approach, without putting blood, sweat and tears into it.

Concluding thought

All is not lost when it comes to Facebook, but people need to be more clear than ever on what they're trying to achieve with it and be realistic about success and likely growth. Don't be scared about not being on Facebook, its not a prerequisite.

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3 Ways to Supercharge Your E-commerce Email Strategy

A person’s email address may be the most valuable piece of info an e-commerce company can know about a customer. It is a method of delivering important info and a means of learning more about a subscriber (e.g. when, where and with what do they open email?). In addition, email also has the highest ROI in comparison with other digital marketing channels, such as social media or content marketing.

Unfortunately, many companies are failing to see the full potential of email because they are only sending unoptimized marketing blasts. While promotional newsletters are a good start, there are many advanced email techniques and triggered message campaigns that e-commerce companies can use to gently nudge subscribers to take a certain action. Next time you’re trying to get customers to join your email list, redeem a coupon, make a purchase or share an invite with their friends, consider using one of these techniques.

1. The Email Receipt Opt-in

It’s confirmed. The internet is now America’s favorite shopping destination, but that doesn’t mean brick-and-mortar stores will be disappearing any time soon. Shopping is transforming into multi-channel activity. People discover (yay Pinterest!) and research products online, then make purchases in-store. The opposite holds true too, with customers checking out how products look, feel and fit in-store and then go online to find the best price--a practice also known as ‘showrooming’.

Retailers with both a brick and mortar and online presence, can use email as a good way to adapt to this type of new shopping. An email receipt can help tie the two experiences together for your customers. Next time, at the in-store point of sale, offer to email the receipt to your customer, rather than to print it. This is not only good for the environment, but also provides a great opportunity to ask if the shopper would like to subscribe to your newsletter for news about ongoing promotions or special events.

2. The Helpful Reminder

Your customers are busy (and sometimes forgetful) people. They may leave items behind in shopping carts or forget to redeem their birthday deal before it expires. Smart marketers can use email as a gentle reminder to nudge customers to make a purchase or to complete another desired action.

A couple examples of helpful reminder shopping emails:

Shopping cart abandonment

Oops, a customer’s shopping experience was interrupted, but that doesn’t mean she’s gone forever. Send an email featuring the items left behind in her cart and include a no-brainer call-to-action checkout button. If the first shopping cart abandonment email doesn’t convince , you can also send a second email with a promotional coupon to nudge her to make the purchase.

Promo expiry

Do your customers know that your semi-annual sale ends in two days? It would be helpful to send a reminder email one day before and then another one a couple hours before the end of the sale to make sure your customers have enough time to shop the sale.

Back in Stock

Oh no! Your customer tried to purchase an item that is no longer available. Rather than having her check back repeatedly to see if the item is back in stock, e-commerce merchants should allow customers to sign up for a helpful email notification for when the item is available again. The “back in stock” email should also include an easy checkout button to encourage the customer to make the purchase.

3. The Social Experience

Shopping is traditionally a social experience, but e-commerce is not always optimized to be interactive. A great way to make e-commerce social is to integrate your email campaigns with social media.

If you’ve enabled logging in via a social network that collects birthdates, such as Facebook, on your website, you can launch a special birthday email campaign. The email would display the upcoming birthday’s of a customer’s friends and family to inspire the spirit of gift giving.

Another social shopping and email tactic would be to design a referral bonus program to encourage customers to invite their friends to join your site. The best way to activate the referral program is to build a landing page that allows people to input their friends’ email addresses or to share the invite via social media. You can promote the landing page through a complementary email campaign.

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Why Instagram is a Credible Alternative to the Fading Facebook & Twitter

Social media has indeed brought new blood to the whole realm of digital marketing. While its effectiveness over email marketing as a marketing approach is debatable, but as a standalone marketing tool, social media is pricelessly critical for any digital marketeer looking to make a serious impact.

Social media marketing as an advertising methodology has been a gift for brands that have been struggling to expand their reach in the real-world market. It has helped them weave around marketing stratagems that pitch them for the best of results and gain a stronger foothold in the market strewn by equally competent competitors.

Thanks to the whole multitude of platforms that are available to us, we are able to leverage and deliver the power of social media for accelerated brand growth. And Facebook and Twitter have surely led the charge by being instrumental in making social media the phenomena that it is today. The ease with which they have allowed the marketeers address the advertising needs of their businesses is what differentiates SMM from the herd of other ways of marketing.

However, there is every chance (and evidence) that platforms of the likes of FB and Twitter might choke on their own excesses. The signs can already be seen and this is why the seasoned marketeers are already embracing other social media tools in order to ensure their brand continues on its trajectory that is headed north. And this is where Instagram steps in.

Why Instagram is the Answer

For socially engaged consumers, Instagram comes across as the de facto best visual based platform that enthralls them with some of the most beguiling pictures scattered all over this relatively new social media player.

• This virtual platform is filled with frenzy that has gone a long way In helping businesses make an instant personal connection with their consumers from all locations and demographics.
• Updating some appealing pictures and appending hashtags to them while uploading has proved to be a fuss free way or brands to capture attention and imagination of their targeted audience.
• Brands not just focus on their own products, but they use pictures that throw light on the various intriguing aspects of the industry they are operating within.
• The Consumers are an important part of the marketing strategy of brands since most of the brands active on Instagram have, at some point in time, run campaigns wherein they as their customers to share their own picture and a part of some contest. This paves way for a lot of user generated content, perching the brand further ahead than its competitors.

If you are still to register your brand's presence on Instagram, but are contemplating the same, it is recommended to do so without wasting any more time. But if you are already there, yet to make an impact, here is a bunch of things you can try:

Get Creative

Every once in a while, you shall share some some product pictures to serve the purpose of creating a social media page of your brand. However, it doesn't have to be a humdrum exercise where you click a stock-images-like photo and upload it with a very subtle and formal tagline to go with it. Having a little bit of fun should work wonders. Add your brand character to the photos. As your consumers to share their own pictures with one of your products. You can then aggregate all the photos and choose the best among them, giving away freebies to the lucky few ones. The investment is far lesser than the returns you are likely to achieve with this strategy.

You can also try clicking the same object from different, more interesting angles and use certain tools like Picassa to add more hues to the photo or add effects like Vintage (which works with just about everyone) to the images.

Post Some Candid Pictures of Your Company

Quirky stuff works everywhere. And who said your Instagram brand page has to be all about product pictures. The shots of your employees engaged in a fun activity (no pun intended) can seize the attention of your followers and pave way for some conversations.

Publish a Story About Your Brand

With the pictures helping your storytelling, an intriguing piece of story about your brand might get you all the attention you have been vying for in a manner most effective. Let the images and the text represent your brand's values and bring out the brand character.

Once in a While, Let you be the One Following Your Follower

why can't it be the other way round, why can't it be, for once, you, the brand, liking a picture uploaded by your follower? And this holds especially relevant when they are getting clicked with your product. You might go a step further and comment on the picture in order to be more visible and command attention of the circle of friends of your follower.

Keep a Tab on the Conversations Happening Around Your Brand

On a platform like Instagram, or for that matter, Twitter, it's easier to find out what people are talking about your brand and determine whether the discussions should bother you or not. Only a few months back, Maker's Mark announced that they would be diluting the alcohol in their offerings in order to cope with the fast rise in demands. The announcement triggered negative conversations about the brand over the various social media platforms. Maker's Mark was sise enough to take the discussions seriously and this prompted them to reverse their decision.

Use The Oldest Trick in the Book – “Write a Caption”

No matter how cliched and mainstream it gets, the posts where you ask users to add their captions to a particular picture always manage to seize attention. So, take a picture of one of your products and ask the followers to come up with some wacky one liners for the same. You will be surprised by the numbers you get.

If Your Post Has Anything to Do with Any Public Figure, Let them Know

If you are updating your followers with the name of the upcoming Johnny Depp movie, you have a chance to grab more eyeballs. Using #johnnydepp will make your post visible to anyone who is keeping an eye on the conversations happening around the actor. However, when you include the Instagram handle of Depp, there is a chance that the he might share your post among his followers. And you know what that means!

As social media cuts more ice with the general audience, the number of social media platforms are also increasing by the day. And it's not just the sheer number that commands attention, but also the fact that even with this huge influx, there are some exceptionally useful social media platforms that manage to knock the doors and Instagram happens to be a fine testament to the fact.

Instagram has achieved instant fame in the web world and it can be owed to the user-friendly and visually appealing interface of this platform. Thanks to the seamless way it facilitates interaction among the brand followers of a certain brand, the popularity has grown from strength to strength and it's setting the standards for the newer players to follow.

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SMToolbox: Grow Your Google Plus Engagement with Steady Demand

Data is great, but insights that allow you to improve your performance are much more valuable. In my view, successful tools have to give you more than simple data. This week in SMToolbox, we review Steady Demand Pro, a good example of a tool that goes beyond data monitoring to provide practical insights and constant prompts to help you improve your performance on Google Plus.

Why Google Plus Matters

Google Plus is far more than a social network. It is part of a much bigger ecosystem that involves search, authorship and authority. There is already clear evidence that Google Plus will improve your SEO. These benefits are driving an increase in Google Plus users, as there are now over 300m active users. The increasing adoption of Google Plus creates a virtuous circle: as the network becomes more valuable, the more people use it, and the more people use it, the more valuable it becomes. 

However, Google Plus has never been the easiest of platforms, and it took me some time to get my head around things. Hence, I was very keen this week to review Steady Demand Pro, which is a tool designed to make it easy to manage one's Google Plus page. Last week, Steady Demand founder and serial entrepreneur Ben Fisher gave me a tour of the new tool.

Ben and the team wanted to develop a tool that is easy to use and which provides practical insights to help people improve their performance on Google Plus. I am pleased to say they have succeeded on both counts, as Steady Demand Pro takes the management of Google Plus pages to a new level.

Monitoring Your Google Plus Page

Steady Demand Pro provides all the the monitoring data you would expect from a social analytics tool. When you first load your profile, the tool automatically pulls in the last year's worth of posts. I have briefly outlined below some examples of the monitoring data provided by the tool: monitoring engagement by post type, engagement by time posted and top sharers. You can also review this data both for your own page or your competitors' pages.

Understanding the tabs is important. Connections relate to a page level, whereas Engagement is at the post level. This helps you see what posts caused a rise (or fall) in connections or engagement. Below is the monitoring report for your Google Plus Page’s engagement by post type.

You can see quickly how well your different post types are performing and the relative proportion of plus ones, shares and comments. What Steady Demand also does is provide useful information such as the signal to post ratio. In this case, you can see that Photos have a much higher signal to post ratio than Articles. 

Below is the monitoring report for engagement by time period.

This report clearly shows you the peak time periods for engagement and the top 5 hours. It also provides you with a complete table for each hour of the day and the signal to post ratio. The audience for the Google page here is on the west coast of the US, whereas I am in London; hence you can see that the highest post to signal rate is 3am UK time.

Below is a monitoring report highlighting the top sharers of your posts.

The tool allows you to report on comparative time periods. Thus you can compare this month to last month, but also compare the last three months to the previous three months. All reports are available as HTML and as PDFs, so it makes reporting on Google Plus page a breeze. You can also share reports by providing read-only access via email to your clients or others on your team.  

Actionable Insights To Improve Your Performance

The real aim of the Steady Demand team is to ensure you are doing well and making the most of your Google Plus page. This is where Steady Demand Pro excels as a tool. It reviews your activity, then recommends various ways you can improve your performance.

The team at Steady Demand have developed a model of a perfect Google Plus post. This has three factors: the length of a post, the use of hashtags, and the use of mentions. Steady Demand’s research has found that you get more engagement on Google Plus if you include all three of these elements in a post.

Steady Demand Pro mechanically assesses each of your posts for these elements and gives each post a score from 0 to 3. To prove the improved performance of a perfect post is not just a hunch or supposition; Steady Demand provide a live feed of all the posts for your Page, showing the average number of signals per post and their mechanical score. See the example below.

Thus you can see clearly that in this case, perfect posts gain twice as many signals as a post without any of the three elements.

Steady Demand Pro analyses all of your posts for a specified time period and provides you with a useful summary, as shown below. The great thing about Google Plus is that you have a few days to go back and edit your posts, so you can try to improve them using the insights from Steady Demand Pro.

One of the features I like about Steady Demand Pro is the way it provides you with alerts. For example, if you have low engagement on a post it will alert you and recommend some changes you can try to improve engagement.

Steady Demand Pro also alerts you about questions you are asked on Google Plus. Sometimes I can get lost in Google Plus. I may see a notification, but if I don’t deal with it immediately it disappears and I don’t always remember to find it again. Thus I can miss things and forget to reply to people. The great thing about Steady Demand Pro is the reminders. There is a nicely named ‘lonely comments’ feature: if there is a comment on the thread that has not been responded to, it will remind you with an alert. It will also prompt and encourage you if you have not posted in the last 72 hours.

Free Steady Demand Audit

Steady Demand is keen to give back to the community and provides a free audit tool. You can type in your Google Plus page address and the audit tool will run checks on your page; it will also check if you have a +1 button on your web page (in Pro this is a constant check; if your button disappears through a web update you will be notified automatically). The audit also reviews the quality of your recent posts against the three mechanical checks. Following these checks, Steady Demand provides you with a free audit report. 

Summary

If you are serious about improving the performance of your Google Plus page, then Steady Demand Pro is the tool for you. The key benefits from my perspective are ease of use, clear monitoring reports and actionable insights and recommendations.

The personal plan is $12 a month for two profiles, and the business plan is $24 a month for 5 profiles. The Steady Demand Pro personal plan is for small businesses that can’t afford an agency, while the business plan is ideal for agencies who want to manage up to 5 Google Plus pages.

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Facebook Cleaning Up Its News Feed By Reducing Like-Baiting And Spammy Posts

Bad news for spammers and like baiting sites on Facebook, the company is on a house cleaning mode. To make its news feed more engaging so that users spend more time, Facebook is performing a series of improvements to its News Feed to reduce stories that people frequently report as spammy and that they don’t want to see.

Facebook states that, “The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important and relevant to them.”

Improvements to the Facebook News Feed would mean wielding its axe on “Like-baiting”, frequently circulated content and spammy Links.

“Like-baiting” posts which explicitly ask News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive, will henceforth be detected by Facebook and won’t be shown on the News Feed.

Facebook states that: “When we survey people and ask them to rate the quality of these stories, they report that like-baiting stories are, on average, 15% less relevant than other stories with a comparable number of likes, comments and shares.”

However, recent update will not impact Pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans.

Stories from Pages that would be repeated again and again by pages will also be de-emphasized from News Feed. Besides stories in News Feed that use inaccurate language or formatting to try and trick people into clicking through to a website that contains only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads will also be impacted by the new changes.

Facebook informs that, “The update we are making today improves News Feed to reduce cases of these spammy links, and in our early testing we’ve seen a 5% increase in people on Facebook clicking on links that take them off of Facebook – this is a big increase in the context of News Feed and is a good sign that people are finding the remaining content in their News Feed more relevant and trustworthy.”

Facebook has been working for some time now to make its News Feed more engaging to hold its users on its platform. Spam on Facebook has become a nuisance. Last year Facebook along with YouTube were reported to be the networks most infested by spam. This is a sensible move from the social networking giant which is struggling to stop users, specially the teens, from moving out to spend time on other networks.

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How Facebook Influences TripAdvisor

With Facebook reducing page posts’ organic reach, forcing brand managers to spend more and more in order to maintain a dynamic community on the king of social media, there are many companies outright questioning their presence on Facebook moving forward. In the travel vertical, I even hear some folks say they’d rather invest more time and money on a platform such as TripAdvisor, undoubtedly a key player in the travel decision-making process. It makes sense. Yet, once you take a closer look at how TripAdvisor has evolved in the past 18 months or so, you start realizing a lot of its growth and impact is actually due to… Facebook!

TWO DIVORCES, ONE WEDDING

If we go back in time just a little bit, it helps understanding the present situation with TripAdvisor. Founded back in 2000, it was purchased in 2004 by a holding group that later spun it off as a subsidiary of Expedia Inc. TripAdvisor grew in time to become the leading authority in terms of travel-related content, comments and reviews. But at the end of 2011, Expedia decided to let go of its subsidiary, so TripAdvisor was back to being a free-agent, so to speak.

Just around the same time, however, Google also decided to let go of TripAdvisor as its source of content for reviews and comments related to travel suppliers (hotels, restaurants, attractions, etc.). Earlier on that year, Google had purchased Zagat, then Frommers, so it could now do with its own resources. Early 2012, with ongoing critics about fake reviews and fraudulent comments across its site, things were not looking so good for TripAdvisor.

In the meantime though, TripAdvisor had already begun sharing content with Facebook, integrating its content through Facebook’s Graph. To the point where today, TripAdvisor has been seeing the biggest growth of its history coming from the past 18 months. One example? There were 100 millions reviews written on TripAdvisor between 2000 and 2012. In 2013 alone, another 50 million reviews were added! A 50% increase, in one year. The integration of TripAdvisor within Facebook’s Graph also explains how TripAdvisor is now seeing 260 million unique visitors… per month!

YOUR FACEBOOK NETWORK’S INFLUENCE

Okay, so let’s take a tangible example of how Facebook impacts results on TripAdvisor. Since I am headed to Toronto in a few days, I might want to see which hotels are ranked highest according to TripAdvisor before I make booking arrangements. With my Facebook account active, TripAdvisor recognizes me (see screen shot below):

Right, so I know I have 140 hotels to choose from. The funny thing is what happens next… You may have never noticed it before – it’s been around for a while – but there is button that can change how the selection will appear: by ranking, by price or by distance. And more importantly: by friends! Now when I made my research online, I did not pay attention to this, and the button was set on “by friends” by default, so these are the results I got for Toronto:

So rather than seeing the #1, #2, #3 and so-on ranked-hotels, I actually will see the hotels that best ranked among my friends’ reviews. Thus, the first result is the Drake (#9 out of 170) followed by Park Hyatt (#18 out of 170). Again, this makes sense: review sites have a lot of influence, so compound this factor with an extra layer of peer validation, or friends validation, and you have a powerful combination. But some purists may scream at this, in particular properties who have no presence whatsoever on Facebook.

And what if you strictly want to see the rankings as per TripAdvisor score, not withstanding friends influence? Here is what you get:

Notice how, at the top, there is still a message to invite you to go into “by friends” mode, telling me there are at least five of my direct Facebook friends who have been to the city and perhaps written a review. Notice also that even though the results are from highest to lowest, starting at #1 this time, there is still some information linked to my Facebook network: friends of friends have reviewed the #2 and #3 properties, so I may want to check them out first.

SO WHAT?

Well that’s the question, ain’t it? If anything, the examples above demonstrate clearly how the social media landscape has evolved in the past two years, with a higher level of integration. So having a strong, vibrant community on Facebook not only helps you foster great customer service or perhaps conduct some research and development, not to mention a few promotional initiatives, it also impacts how your hotel, restaurant or attraction will perform and get seen on TripAdvisor. Food for thought, as they say.

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5 Free Apps to Simplify Your Digital Life in 2014

Being productive has been made so much simpler thanks to amazing advances in technology. At an arm's-length, we have some great time-saving apps and tools to use while on the go; however, we are still finding it hard to actually find the time to use these apps.

Like most people in the social media world, my phone goes everywhere with me and I don’t even turn it off at night. Living in the digital era, we need to find a few apps that are easy to use and help productivity. Here are 5 free apps to simplify your digital life.

1. Hootlet

Pretty much from day one, I have been a huge fan and advocate of social media scheduling dashboard; Hootsuite. I use social media for no more than 20 minutes a day, thanks to Hootsuite and their google chrome extension Hootlet. If you find a blog or interesting article that you want to share across all of your social media platforms, just clicking on the Hootlet extension icon on your browser will allow you to do this very easily.

2. Vizify

I sometimes find it frustrating when I am looking at a business or professional profile on social media as I usually have to look at not only LinkedIn but Facebook and Twitter too. Vizify is a great site builder which allows you to consolidate all of your networks into one professional looking site free of charge. All you have to do is link your existing social networks and data will be pulled automatically.

You may have to spend some time on the layout to make sure it looks right but the end show is very impressive.

3. Evernote Web Clipper

Evernote Web Clipper has saved me on various occasions. The web holds so much great content that sometimes, you forget to bookmark a website or save it. Evernote Web Clipper is a browser extension which lets you “snip” sites you encounter online and store them in Evernotes Cloud server. You can select just a small piece of text, an image or a whole page and even annotate it through highlighting, text and arrows. This can also be shared via email or through social networks.

Make sure you set up an Evernote account before installing their Web Clipper extension.

4. LastPass

Since 2008,  LastPass has been offering users the ability to store your login credentials so that you don’t have to remember all of your different online passwords. With so many creative hackers out there, it is important that you make sure your passwords are as safe as possible.

The great thing about LastPass is that the way they store all our data is in a form that even the NSA can’t read. LastPass is free however for the mobile edition, prices start at $12 per year.

5. Sunrise

Calendars. We all use them however, they are very plain and boring. I use Google Calendar as my preferred application however the Sunrise app for iPhone brings everything into one. I not only see Facebook friends’ birthdays, I see Foursquare check-ins and much, much more.

Sunrise allows you to respond and send event invites from inside the app itself and has a great weather feature in the form of a little icon next to your events so you know when to bring out the dreaded umbrella.

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Five Useful Google Chrome Extensions for Social Media Marketers

One aspect sometimes overlooked when talking social media strategy is browser extensions. There are numerous blogs on the topic, if you go looking, but it’s one of those things that the people who know, know, and those who don’t might miss out if they don’t ask. Extensions are a valuable time saver, and it’s worth ensuring these are noted when offering advice to any business or person looking to increase their social media profile. And with that, here are five Google Chrome extensions that I’ve found highly beneficial as I go about my daily social media interactions.

1. Pinterest’s ‘Pin It’ Button – This is a pretty basic tool, but one which is a great help in ensuring you remain active on Pinterest. The Pin-It button gives you the ability to pin any image to your Pinterest page quickly and easily. This is great for pinning relevant pieces to your Pinterest pages as you search and read, but more importantly, it makes it incredibly easy to pin your own images and blogs straight to Pinterest – and having the Pinterest logo constantly present on your browser screen always keeps it front of mind as you go about posting and sharing. Pinterest is sometimes under-valued as a marketing platform, so anything to help keep it active, keep you pinning and engaging with the site, is well worth utilising. Make sure you customise the text when you post, adding relevant hashtags for each pin.

2. Hootsuite’s ‘Hootlet’ – I’m a big fan of Hootsuite and Hootlet is an excellent addition. Hootlet allows you to share content via your Hootsuite account direct from the page as you search. It gives you access to all the regular Hootsuite functionality, with options to choose the network/s you share to, ability to create and edit messages and scheduling selections. Hootlet will also automatically shorten the link for the piece before adding it into the message window. As a regular Hootsuite user, this comes in handy, as any content I add is sent to my schedule in Hootsuite, so I can go back and check when it’s set to go in amongst any other planned tweets and posts. Another great aspect of Hootlet is the addition of Twitter search results to compliment Google searches. Just type your terms into Google, get your search results on screen and then click on the Hootlet pop-out , peeking out from the right-hand side of the screen. The pop-out will expand to show all Twitter matches for the search term/s you’ve entered – a great addition to your research capabilities.

(Note: The Buffer Chrome extension has similar, if not better, content scheduling functionality to Hootlet, but as a Hootsuite user, the integration of the browser and the Hootsuite dashboard, and the social search capability, puts Hootlet ahead. If you’re a Buffer user, the Buffer extension is a must)

3. CircleCount – Google+ still holds many mysteries for a lot of users. While the learning curve is quite steep, the platform has some great functionality and passionate communities that make it worth the time it takes to familiarise yourself with the network. One way of getting more integrated with Google+ is by using the CircleCount extension. A click on the CircleCount icon opens up a new page of Google+ data on any blog post you’re reading, including info on public Google+ pages that have shared the piece, how it’s spread through the network (through crossover links in a bubble graph) and influencers who’ve interacted with the content. This is a great way to monitor the reach of your own content and engage with users who’ve read your stuff, as you can use the overview to click through to each individual who’s shared your content. From there, you can thank the user for sharing the piece or initiate a conversation based on the content, a stepping stone to further relationships. When you’re in Google+, CircleCount gives you access to further data about each individual post and user, including ‘Ripples’ for each post and options to add it to a shared circle or to your favourite posts via CircleCount. The CircleCount extension a useful addition to have, especially if you’re trying to get more involved with your Google+ communities.

4. Klout (beta) – Some don’t care about Klout, some do – either way, influence metrics are going to become more important, and Klout is the current leader of the pack - it's worth making yourself aware of it, even if you don’t feel it’s highly relevant. The Klout extension adds every user’s Klout score to their profile image in Twitter, giving you a measure of each person’s influence. This is important for locating industry influencers and ensuring you establish connections with them where possible. It’s an extra data point to use in your interactions – it’s not to say that anyone should be addressed any differently because of it, but if someone’s Klout score is in the 80s and they re-Tweet one of your posts, you definitely want to be aware of it. Influence metrics are important, and can pay a big part in spreading your message to a wider audience. Being aware of who you’re interacting with can be of major benefit – and any additional data you can get on this front is worth having.

5. RiteTag – Rite Tag helps you find the best hashtags to use to maximise the reach of your message. The system takes into account how often a hashtag is used then assigns a colour code to each based on that data – a red hashtag is overused and it’s likely your message will get lost in the flood of other posts using the same one, a blue hashtag is under-used and your content’s potential to be found will be limited because fewer people are looking for it, and a green hashtag is just right. You can also run a hashtag audit on your profile, or anyone else’s, in one click, which will show how good your hashtag use is overall. There are always queries about hashtags, and there are various tools available to help you work out which to use to achieve best reach, but having that info right there, within your message, is a great help. The overused info is particularly useful – most hashtag apps will show you the most popular tags, which in itself is great, but understanding overuse, and how that can be detrimental to reach, this detail is good to know as you're putting together your posts.

There are a heap of other extensions available in the Chrome Store, access to streams of additional data that may be of significant benefit to your day-to-day tasks. It’s worth spending some time going throughto see what’s there - there might be something that saves you major amounts of time and/or uncertainty, helping you work smarter not only for yourself, but also for your clients.   

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