Why Are Retailers Ignoring Their Customers On Social Media?

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Businesses are increasingly using Facebook to advertise their business to one of the largest audiences in the world, but a new survey suggests many businesses are forgetting social media is a two-way street.

According to a Sprout Social study, the majority of retailers are ignoring their customers’ requests on social media, a finding which is very troubling considering consumers are turning to social media to seek customer service and find information about businesses.

The statistics from the Sprout Social Q4 2015 index say retailers failed to respond to over 80 percent of consumer questions and requests on social media over the last year. Perhaps surprisingly, retailers were least likely to respond during the holiday shopping season. Throughout Q4 of 2014, only 16.35 percent of customer queries to retailers received any form of response.

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It is understandable that retailers are swamped during the holiday season, and may not have the extra man-power to closely watch social media. However, totally ignoring your customers on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms can create a tidal wave of unhappy customers and lost potential buyers.

Retailers saw a 21-percent increase in inbound social media messages in the last quarter of 2014, but the majority of those went unanswered.

“Social media is an integral part of consumers’ daily lives and a critical communication channel for brands to engage in conversation with their customers during the holidays,” Sprout Social CMO Scott Brandt said in a release. “Whether answering a product question or confirming a customer’s gift order, brands have an opportunity to positively influence awareness, customer loyalty, positive sentiment and seasonal sales through social media engagement.”

One problem appears to be that retailers aren’t paying attention to where their customers are trying to reach them. In the past, Twitter has been the primary social media platform for customer service related questions and requests. However, Sprout Social’s study suggests a shift is occurring as more shoppers rely on Facebook to contact brands.

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It appears retailers haven’t picked up on the shift though, because the new statistics show retailers sent out 114 percent more messages on Twitter in the last six months.

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“It’s worth taking a deeper look at customer service on Facebook since it is generally where people are seeking answers from retailers,” said Brandt. “Bottom line: You should be able to improve your response rates and times if you understand where people are reaching out to your brand in the greatest numbers.”

For more interesting findings from the study, download the full Spout Social Index for free here.

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Schedule Your Holiday Hours On Google My Business In Advance

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Google Christmas

Source: Current360

With Halloween in the rear-view mirror we have officially entered the holiday season, and Google is rolling out new features to help businesses prepare. Google My Business announced it is launching a new feature that allows businesses to set their holiday hours in advance, so shoppers will always know when you are open.

In the past, businesses had to manually update their hours manually if they changed their hours for the holiday season, and when the season is over you had to go back in and change the hours back.

Now, if you know ahead of time when you will start running your holiday hours, you can schedule your Google My Business page to automatically update your opening hours when the time comes. Google will also tell shoppers if what they are seeing are special holiday hours.

If your closing hours are flexible, there is also a new option to have a message displayed saying “hours may differ.”

The feature will stick around, so if you have regular special hours for other events or holidays you can also set those up ahead of time.

How to Schedule Special Hours on Google My Business

  • Log in to your Google My Business account and select the location the hours will apply to.
  • On the “Location details” page, scroll down until you see the “Special hours section” and click the link.
  • Select the date when the hours will begin and enter the opening and closing times for that day.
  • Click the box next to “Closed” if your business will be closed on a specific day. You can also set your hours to 12:00am-12:00pm if you are open 24 hours.
  • Click “Add another” to add more special hours for the location.

For more information on the features or setting up your special holiday hours ahead of time, check out Google’s help center article.

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YouTube Announces Ad-Free Subscription Service ‘YouTube Red’

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YouTube has long been a favorite platform for online video advertisers, thanks to its full-featured and highly effective ad service. However, that might be changing in the near future.

YouTube has announced it will be launching an ad-free subscription service starting on October 28th, in order to meet the demands of users.

The new service, YouTube Red, claims to give users “exactly what they want” by providing ad-free and offline viewing capabilities.

If you absolutely can’t stand ads, you can get rid of them entirely by subscribing for the cost of $9.99 a month.

Thankfully, you aren’t just paying that much for removing ads from your cat videos. YouTube Red will also contain original content from some of YouTube’s biggest names such as PewDiePie and College Humor, launching in 2016.

Starting October 28th, anyone in the US can sign up for a free one-month trial of the service, which will be available for mobile and desktop. The company says it will be expanding to other companies before long.

It is unclear exactly how this will affect advertising earnings and YouTube has not said if there will be revenue sharing amongst publishers. However, if YouTube Red catches on it be the final push to make some video advertisers finally turn to Facebook’s video platform.

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Google Announces Over Half Of All Searches Are Coming From Mobile Devices

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Last week, during Recode’s Code/Mobile conference, Amit Singhal, senior vice president of Google Search, announced that over half of all searches conducted on Google each month are coming from mobile devices.

Mobile has quickly become a dominant force in search, but it has only overtaken desktop in both search and ad volume over the past year.

For this count, Google is not including mobile devices with screens over 6 inches in size, such as tablets. According to the company, Google is primarily counting mobile views as those coming from smartphones.

During his announcement, Singhal explained how the definition of search is changing as the way people interact with their devices and the internet evolves:

“Search as we think about it is fundamentally how you will interact with computing. Computing may live in a 4-to-6-inch device, it may live in a desktop, it may live on a 1-inch round device.”

The news was leaked by John Mueller on Google+ this week, while offering a warning to those who have yet to make their sites mobile-friendly:

“More than half of Google’s searches are now coming from mobile. If you haven’t made your site (or your client’s sites) mobile-friendly, you’re ignoring a lot of potential users. “

According to Search Engine Journal, Google also announced it has indexed over 100 billion links within apps, showing how Google is growing beyond the traditional idea of the web page.

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The Keys To A Successful Holiday Email Campaign [Infographic]

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Retailers across the country are preparing for the upcoming holiday season, but you never want to waste your efforts on marketing practices that won’t produce results.

According to a recent report from Campaigner, social integration, mobile optimization, list segmentation, and personalization are the keys to running a successful holiday email campaign this year. The report comes from a survey of 198 internet retailers conducted in August of this year.

Social integrations were the breakout star of the survey, with almost three-quarters (71%) of the respondents identifying these as the most important add-ons for your holiday email campaigns. Similarly, 70% predicted mobile sales would continue to rise this year.

Over half (57%) of the participants said they would be prioritizing email list segmentation this holiday season, with 40% planning to prioritize personalization.

The infographic below shares these insights and more from the Campaigner survey.

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Instagram Launches Official Account Dedicated To Helping Businesses

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Social media marketing is a great way to connect with your audience and raise awareness for your business, but getting started can be difficult. Every social network has its quirks and kinks to manage and you can’t use the same recipe for success across all platforms.

That’s why Instagram is launching a new official account, dedicated solely to sharing business tips and case studies to help inspire your marketing and advertising on the popular social photo platform.

The aptly titled @instagramforbusiness launched yesterday, starting with a showcase of Ben & Jerry’s, a company that has been marketing itself on Instagram since the platforms very early days in 2011.

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Instagram says business has always been an essential part of Instagram from its very start, and it expects even more to follow suit following the launch of Instagram ads.

In the future, the company will be sharing content through the account designed to inspire and motivate marketing and advertising efforts on Instagram. Here’s what you can expect to see shared on the new account:

“Each week, we’ll run exclusive, behind-the-scenes stories that inspire, inform and showcase the work done by three important groups in our business community from all around the world—brands, small businesses and creative agencies.”

In the coming week, the account will be sharing stories from a local Chicago florist called Flowers for Dreams and New York creative agency BBDO.

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Facebook Is Challenging YouTube With New Video Features

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Before long, Facebook’s video service is going to look a lot like YouTube. Facebook announced several new features to their mobile app that will seem very familiar to YouTube users and will make videos an even larger part of the Facebook platform than before.

Among the features is the new ability to collapse videos into a floating window, so you can browsing your Facebook seamlessly while you watch a video. The change will make watching videos on the platform less of an interruption and more a part of the experience.

Facebook is also testing implementing a new list of recommended videos to watch next after users finish watching a video. If you don’t see something that piques your interest, you can also look in the all new dedicated Facebook video feed, where you’ll find nothing but user shared videos.

The dedicated video feed acts much like your normal News Feed, but exclusively for video and can be found by tapping the “Videos” icon along the bottom navigation menu of the Facebook app.

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If you see something you think you might want to watch, but can’t at the immediate moment for some reason, you can now save it for later, allowing you to easily return when you are someplace more suitable for watching video. All your saved videos can be easily found in the “Saved” bookmark in the menu.

Facebook is still working out the kinks on most of these new features, so don’t expect them to be rolled out too soon. Instead, it appears the new features will see a slow testing and rollout phase, with no telling when we will see a full launch.

 

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Sales Forecast Predicts Booming Online Sales This Holiday Season

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Source: Nordstrom

Source: Nordstrom

Halloween isn’t even here yet, but many retailers are already prepping for the holiday sales surge. According to the National Retail Federation, those retailers can also plan on seeing an even more sales than last year. The NRF predicts sales will jump 3.7 percent to $630.5 billion in November and December 2015.

While the total amount of sales is still expected to rise this year, the increase isn’t as large as the boost in 2014. Last year’s sales grew 4.3 percent compared to 2013.

Online sales are expected to see a large amount of this increase, outpacing the overall growth by rising between 6 and 8 percent this year to $105 billion.

According to the NRF’s report, holiday sales could account for around 19 percent of the retail industry’s total annual sales, projected to reach $3.2 trillion. Those predictions exclude auto, gas, and restaurant sales.

“With several months of solid retail sales behind us, we’re heading into the all-important holiday season fully expecting to see healthy growth,” said NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay. “We expect families to spend prudently and deliberately, though still less constrained than what we saw even two years ago.”

“Price, value and even timing will all play a role in how, when, where and why people shop over the holiday season,” said Shay. “Retailers will be competitive not only on price, but on digital initiatives, store hours, product offerings and much more.”

The NRF holiday sales forecast takes into account many factors including consumer credit levels, disposable personal income, and previous monthly retail sales releases. The numbers do include a non-store category which considers direct-to-consumer, kiosks, and online sales.

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Google Display Network Commits To Only Charge For Ads That Get Seen

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This week, Google announced it would make a big change to ensure advertisers are only charged for display ads that are viewed.

During a keynote discussion at SMX East in New York, Brad Bender, vice president of product management of the Google Display Network said: “I’m pleased to announce that GDN is moving to 100% viewable. We’re going to migrate all of the CPMs in the system to viewable CPMs. All advertisers will be able to see viewable metrics so they can make better decisions.”

Bender told the audience the change will be rolled out to GDN users in the upcoming weeks. The change is likely to be received warmly by advertisers as there has been some concern over statistics (provided by Google) claiming 56 percent of online display ads never have the chance to be seen.

These ads are often not seen due to being low on the page or on a non-activated tab.

According to Marketing Land, Bender said Google has been working on the viewability issue and did not charge advertisers last year for over 70 billion impressions that went unseen.

For more on the change, read Google’s announcement on the Inside Adwords blog.

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New AdWords Feature Lets You Target Ads By Email Address

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Over the weekend, Google announced a powerful new feature in AdWords that will allow advertisers to target their audience unlike ever before. Through Customer Match, a new feature rolling out in the coming weeks, advertisers will be able to target ads by email address.

After you upload a list of email addresses, Customer Match will pair them with the corresponding Google users who you can target ads to. Advertisers can also target ads to similar audiences who share similarities with the individuals in the email list.

Customer Match is capable of targeting ads to anyone signed-in to Google on Gmail, Search, and YouTube.

With the audience sets generated by Customer Match, you can craft ads specifically build around reaching them, such as in the example provided by Google:

“Let’s say you’re a travel brand. You can now reach people who have joined your rewards program as they plan their next trip. For example, when these rewards members search for “non-stop flights to new york” on Google.com, you can show relevant ads at the top of their search results on any device right when they’re looking to fly to New York.”

There are still no details about any security measures in place to protect customer email addresses uploaded to Customer Match, other than stating the process is conducted in a “secure and privacy-safe way.”

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