by Fronetics | Nov 29, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Marketing, Social Media
Also in social media news November 2017: Snapchat opens conversation tracking “Snap Pixels,” Facebook links Messenger to your News Feed Ads, and Instagram Stories hits 300 million daily active users.
The holidays have everyone thinking about shopping and meal planning, but social media is staying focused on expanding and improving. There’s been a big push by the most popular sites to introduce users to new content. And businesses are seeing increased options for getting in front of potential customers.
Here’s your social media news for November 2017.
Facebook Rolls Out Its Self-Discovery “Explore Feed”
Facebook has officially rolled out its new Explore Feed, which will help users discover more content across the social media network. Explore will recommend content that it thinks you might find interesting, including posts, articles, photos and videos from users and Pages that you don’t currently follow.
“We’ve heard from people that they want an easy way to explore relevant content from Pages they haven’t connected with yet,” says Facebook in a statement on their website. Businesses should be optimistic about the potential for users interested in content like theirs to find their pages through the new Explore Feed.
On mobile, the Explore Feed is accessible via the “More” menu in the bottom navigation section, while it’s housed along the left sidebar within the “Explore” section on desktop.
Instagram Stories Expands to Your Camera Roll
Instagram Stories now allows users to upload any photos and videos from their cameras. In the past, Instagram limited Stories to photos and videos taken in real time to give viewers “glimpses” into a user’s day. The social media network felt this update offers more flexibility and creative choices to its users.
Twitter Launches Self-Serve Advertising
Twitter has officially rolled out its self-serve advertising subscription to the public. Twitter’s Promote Mode will automatically amplify a business’s tweets to reach the best audience and grow followers. Promote Mode was designed with the goal of letting small businesses and personal brands more easily run ad campaigns on Twitter’s platform by automating them, for the price of $99 per month.
Facebook Messenger Makes Sponsored Messages Available to Businesses
Facebook announced that in the next few months advertisers will be able to send promotions to customers who have previously communicated with the brand directly through Messenger. “When it comes to communicating with a brand, 54.4% of U.S. social media users said they preferred messaging channels, including Messenger, over email, phone and online chat,” writes Facebook on its website. Facebook’s goal is to create a more personalized experience for customers by having promotions come through Messenger, instead of on a generic post.
Facebook Rolls Out News Feed Ads that Link to Messenger
With Facebook’s new messaging platform, businesses and developers can take the customer experience to a new level by creating news feed ads that directly open to Messenger conversations. According to Facebook, this new ad format “combines the powerful audience targeting and selection capabilities of ads on News Feed” with “the identity and canonical nature of Messenger conversations” and is available to all Facebook advertisers.
Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status Hit 300 Million Daily Active Users
Up over 50 million daily active users since June, Facebook reports that Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status have reached 300 million daily active users. These numbers are almost double SnapChat’s daily active users, once again showing the increasing popularity of Facebook and its counterparts.
Facebook Rolls Out Facebook Polls with Photos
Always wanted to know what people think about your brand and your competitors? Now creating polls to get the answers is easier than ever. Facebook officially launched Facebook Polls with the option to add pictures or GIFs. Businesses will be able to track polls about their products or services, as well as the feedback. “Facebook Polls will provide an easy way to spur conversation, gather opinions or organize plans.”
SnapChat Opens Conversation Tracking “Snap Pixel” to Marketers
SnapChat recently introduced Snap Pixel, a conversation tracking tool that allows brands to measure the effectiveness of video snap ads on their site traffic. Marketing Land reports that the new Snap Pixel will soon be available to all advertisers as a measurement tool and for retargeting purposes by the end of the year.
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by Fronetics | Nov 28, 2017 | Blog, Manufacturing & Distribution, Marketing, Social Media, Supply Chain
Manufacturers who are active and engaged on Facebook are more likely to introduce product innovation than those who are not.
If you’re killing time during business hours on Facebook, you may actually be onto something valuable. Well, no, — scrolling through your sister-in-law’s vacation album is unlikely to help your business. But recent studies show that staying attuned to user feedback on Facebook may actually help manufacturers create better products.
The practice in question, social listening, is the process of monitoring social media to identify and assess what users are saying about a company, individual, brand, product, or service. We’ve written about how social listening can help your business — you can gain market intelligence and learn how your company, products, and services are being perceived.
But two researchers from the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) have taken things a step farther. They studied data from nearly 3,000 German manufacturing and service firms to analyze the role that Facebook plays in the innovation process. What they found was that the probability that a company introduced a product innovation was significantly determined by firms’ adoption of a Facebook page and by the activity by users, measured by both quantity and quality.
The researchers, Irene Bertschek and Reinhold Kesler, discuss their findings in detail in this article published in the Harvard Business Review. So you can skip to the bottom line, we’ve pulled out a few key takeaways for manufacturers:
Negative comments are your friend…
…if you take them seriously.
While you might cringe when you seed a negative customer comment on Facebook, what the researchers found was encouraging: “Surprisingly, only the share of negative user comments was significantly predictive of innovation, perhaps suggesting that customers were helping to steer companies away from bad ideas.”
To make this work for you, it’s important that you pay attention to negative reviews, actively engage with them, and pass along relevant information to the people within your company who can address the issues. For more ideas, check out this post for tips on dealing with negative customer comments.
Simply being on social media isn’t enough — you need to be actively and intelligently engaging.
The study found that companies who were “using keywords in their posts that encourage users to leave feedback were significantly more likely to release a new or improved product.”
In other words, to gain the kind of valuable feedback that allows your products and services to improve, you need to be intelligent about soliciting it. “When developing social media strategies,” suggest Bertschek and Kesler, “companies should not only focus on marketing aspects, but also consider the potential for the firm’s innovation success.”
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by Fronetics | Oct 25, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Current Events, Marketing, Social Media
Also in October’s 2017 social media news: Vimeo is getting in the live streaming game, Instagram doubles its ad dollars, and YouTube will be taking over America’s favorite past time.
While the fall season has many of us wrapped up in blankets with flavored lattes, social media sites are spicing things up in lots of other ways.
Shopping for the holidays just got easier thanks to Instagram. YouTube is taking over Major League Baseball. Twitter is making those Throwback Thursdays way more convenient. And Facebook wants us all to know you can’t judge a book by its cover.
Instagram Expands Shopping Capabilities on the App
Instagram is teaming with Shopify to create the capability for brands and retailers to sell products directly from their Instagram accounts. Shoppers will be able to click on the experimental tagging links and purchase products directly through the app. Instagram is working overtime to have 500,000 retailers available for the upcoming holiday season, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. “Discovery is at the heart of the Instagram experience. Together with Shopify, we are enabling new ways to turn discovery into exploration, allowing Instagrammers to find new things from brands they love and businesses to find opportunities to build relationships with these valuable customers,” Instagram said.
YouTube Named Presenting Sponsor of the World Series
YouTube is working overtime to promote its live TV service by becoming the presenting sponsor of the MLB World Series. Kelly Merryman, YouTube’s managing director of content partnerships in America, said in a statement that the deal serves to underscore the kinds of popular sporting events that are available on YouTube TV. The multi-tiered deal serves as the first national ad campaign for the video platform and will include national TV ads, on-air mentions during each game, in-stadium branding, and more.
LinkedIn Tests Geofilters for Events and Conferences
LinkedIn is testing the ability for users to tag events and conferences with location-based filters, taking a page from Snapchat. As part of the platform’s new native video tools, LinkedIn is giving conference attendees the opportunity to add dedicated event frames to the videos they create while attending such functions. The illustrations are styled like conference badges, with the user’s profile photo in the right-hand corner. The badges also indicate the user’s role (such as a speaker, panel member, or attendee).
Facebook Tests Publisher-Information Button on Articles
Facebook is experimenting with adding a publisher-information button to articles shared in your News Feed that will provide additional information about the author and context around the article without having to navigate away from the site. The test was born out of feedback from the Facebook Journalism Project, which the ‘Book launched to ensure the credibility of content shared by its users . By creating transparency around publishers and their content, Facebook says its helping users to make more informed decisions. “Helping people access this important contextual information can help them evaluate if articles are from a publisher they trust, and if the story itself is credible,” wrote Facebook.
Twitter Adding a Bookmarking Tool
Twitter has announced its plan to add a new bookmarking tool to its app. The “Save for Later” tool will allow users to save a tweet to read later on. The feature’s impending launch was first unveiled on Twitter itself, naturally, when Head of Product Keith Coleman announced that a new way to save tweets was in the works as a result of a company HackWeek project dubbed #SaveForLater.
Vimeo Launches Live Streaming Platform
After acquiring Lifestream, Vimeo is launching its own live-streaming platform called Vimeo Live. The new platform will allow users the ability to create, edit and distribute live events. The paid membership is promoting better viewer engagement, speedy support, and in-depth analytics to track your progress.
Instagram Grows by 100 Million Users in Four Months and Doubles Advertisers
Instagram is having a pretty good year. It has reached over 800 million monthly users, with 500 million daily active users. This is a 100-million-user increase since April. And the platform’s growth doesn’t stop there. Instagram also reported it has 2 million advertisers. “Time spent watching video on Instagram is up more than 80% year over year, while the number of videos produced per day has increased by 4x from last year. With the emergence of innovative mobile video formats, like Instagram Stories, business are finding more opportunities to connect with their audiences, whether on the go or in the moment,” wrote the Instagram Business Team on its Business Blog.
YouTube Debuts New Ad Tech Tools for Brands
YouTube is making it easier for advertisers to get in front of their target audiences. Marketers can now reach potential customers based on their searches and the videos they’re already watching with four new ad tech tools:
- Video Ad Sequencing, which allows advertisers to create a video funnel that moves users through a planned sequence of video ads;
- Director Mix, which automatically customizes video content for different audiences;
- Custom Affinity Audiences which allows advertisers to define audience targeting based on users’ YouTube searches;
- Neilsen’s Matched Panel Analysis, which allows advertisers to measure the impact of video alongside other Google campaigns on offline sales.
The video site is hoping to make it easier to create a relationship between what advertisers have to offer and the people that are interested in those offers.
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by Fronetics | Sep 26, 2017 | Blog, Current Events, Marketing, Social Media
Also in September 2017’s social media news: YouTube gets a new look, and LinkedIn adds a native advertising network.
With fall officially in swing, social media platforms have turned up the heat. During the month of September, Facebook has launched its original video content tab and begged music executives for the ability to download songs. YouTube reworked its mobile app and came out with a fresh, new design. LinkedIn introduced us to its new Audience Network. And Instagram just got easier to troll at work. Here’s this month’s social media news.
Facebook Watch Makes Its Appearance on Profiles
Facebook has officially rolled out its new Watch tab, which allows users to subscribe to original video content. The tab was available to a test audience in August, but is now open to all users in the U.S. on mobile, desktop and Facebook’s TV apps. Facebook is hoping to boost ad sales through the new content and create one more reason for people to continually check back in on their newsfeeds for content they can’t get anywhere else.
Apple Unveils iPhone X
On the heels of the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus release is the newest Apple must-have: the iPhone X. The X introduces a new wraparound screen and Apple’s cutting-edge technology, Face ID. Face ID is enabled by the TrueDepth camera and projects and analyzes more than 30,000 invisible dots to create a precise depth map of your face. This will allow users to access Apple Pay by simply looking into their screen. The phone also includes powerful new augmented reality features. At a press conference, the tech giant demonstrated high-fidelity visuals placed dynamically in the real world, viewable through the iPhone’s camera lens.
YouTube Unveils New Logo and Features on Mobile App
YouTube continues to evolve with its growing popularity. Recently, the video site came out with a sleek new design. The new logo and icon are cleaner, more flexible, and better designed for a multiscreen world. YouTube has also added speed up and slow down features to playback and the ability to browse new videos while viewing video content. YouTube is hoping these changes will continue to increase user engagement and usability.
Instagram Moving to Your Desktop
Instagram just launched instagram.com, allowing users to view Stories on their desktops. Soon, users will be able to create and post Stories to the website from their phones, as well. “Stories has quickly become an important part of the Instagram experience — over 250 million people use it every day to see what their friends are doing in the moment. Now we’re excited to bring stories to people who use Instagram on the web.”
LinkedIn Introduces New Audience Network
LinkedIn has launched its new LinkedIn Audience Network, “a native advertising network that enables you to reach even more professionals with your ads by placing your Sponsored Content on high-quality, third-party publishers across mobile and desktop.” The new network was created to help businesses increase their marketing footprint, cut budgets, and expand their content’s reach. LinkedIn assures marketers that it has “taken measures to ensure brand safety within [its] recently launched LinkedIn Audience Network,” such as vetting partner publishers to verify that they meet its advertising guidelines and regularly monitoring campaign activity on the network.
Twitter Adds Team Managements Feature
Now your colleagues can keep their Twitter passwords to themselves. The social media app just launched a new team management feature, called TweetDeck Teams, which allows multiple people to login to the same account without sharing passwords. The new feature divides users into three categories: owner, administrator, and contributor, and gives various levels of functionality to each category.
Facebook Artificial Intelligence Training Bots to Mimic Emotions
Facebook’s AI researchers are working to introduce the first robots that can replicate human emotion through subtle facial expressions. In newly released papers, the researchers discuss their overall success with their efforts and the affects this could have on videos in the future. These researchers are hoping the bots will one day improve the avatars in virtual reality.
Facebook Offers Hundreds of Millions for Music Rights
Facebook is offering up cash — and lots of it — to music producers and creators so users can legally include songs in videos they upload to the site. Reports indicate that Facebook has offered hundreds of millions of dollars to make the deal happen. Music owners have been negotiating with Facebook for months in search of a solution, and Facebook has promised to build a system to identify and tag music that infringes copyrights.
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by Fronetics | Sep 20, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media
When it comes to social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, post once a day to improve engagement and visibility.
There has been endless research about the sweet spot for posting frequency to social media sites. The results all point to the same conclusion: there is no one-size-fits-all answer. You have to distribute content consistently over time, at the right time and in the right place for your business.
That being said, we at Fronetics do have some informed, data-based opinions about posting frequency for certain social media platforms. For example, we’ve written extensively about our Twitter experiment, in which we found that tweeting 40 times per day works best for us and most of our clients.
But for other platforms, we find that more doesn’t equal better. In fact, it can often equal worse. Let me explain why.
Why you should be posting less on Facebook and LinkedIn
We strongly believe that most B2B companies should post no more than one time per day on Facebook and LinkedIn. We also suggest that businesses only post during the workweek on LinkedIn. That is because of the way people use these networks — and because of how the platforms’ algorithms value content.
Firstly, though we’d like for prospects to be thinking of our brands constantly, they don’t. And they don’t want to. Think of that one family member that inundates your newsfeeds with posts. Though you might have liked to see a photo from that person now and again, the inappropriate posting frequency causes you to think negatively about each post you see.
And you are a business, not a family member. When you post too frequently, your business loses credibility, and followers view your posts as spam. Even on LinkedIn, which is a network for professional content, over-posting leads to disengagement.
Remember that the lifespan of a Facebook post is about 5 hours, and with LinkedIn, it’s even longer. (One of the first posts on my feed right now is from 5 days ago.) So you don’t need to provide a constant stream of content to get your audience’s attention. Your focus should be distributing the most relevant, interesting content you can. Which is related to the second reason we recommend posting only once a day on these networks: algorithms.
Facebook estimates that each user’s newsfeed must filter 1,500 possible stories from friends and pages every day. Ain’t nobody got time for that! So Facebook, like LinkedIn and other networks, uses an algorithm to determine the content you’d like to see most, based on feedback you provide. That feedback comes from actions you take: hiding posts, liking and sharing posts, and commenting, for example. It even considers how often your friends and the world at large engage with a post. This helps the algorithm filter down to the approximately 300 stories per day on your newsfeed.
All this means that the more engagement you can get on your posts, the more likely they are to be one of the 300 (in other words, appear in the newsfeeds of your followers). The more often you post, the less likely you are to foster engagement, diluting your chances of success and visibility.
So how can you increase likes and comments on your Facebook and LinkedIn posts?
Here are 3 tips for improving your posts to foster engagement.
1) Be strategic.
Instead of sharing content or publishing on an ad hoc basis, create a strategy and schedule to manage posting on social media. Work ahead of time so that you can evaluate what you’re posting from a 10,000-foot perspective. But be flexible enough so that you can always sub out scheduled content for breaking news or content related to current events when it makes sense.
2) Craft better posts.
Spend less time crafting a lot of posts, and more time producing quality content your audience will value. I recently talked about the 10x content rule. If your content is better than everything else that’s out there, people will gravitate to it.
3) Be smart about when.
When you’re only posting once a day, it’s important to make every post count. Use built-in and third-party analytics tools to determine when your followers are using these platforms. Schedule your posts to publish just before the greatest time of active use.
At the end of the day, there’s a fine line between annoying your social followers and remaining top of mind. Maintaining a dynamic and fluid posting strategy will ensure that your social efforts drive followers to action, rather than drive them away.
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