Tag Archive for: Social Media Marketing

Facebook Highlights Huge Increase In Video Uploads and Views

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Expect to see a lot more videos in your Facebook feed. According to the social media platform, people around the world are posting 75% more videos to Facebook compared to this time last year, and that growth is even greater in the U.S. where video uploads on the social network have risen 94%.

Unsurprisingly, this surplus of video content has also led to a much greater amount of videos being featured in users’ news feeds. Facebook says the number of videos featured in news feeds has risen 360% over the past year.

“With people creating, posting and interacting with more videos on Facebook, the composition of News Feed is changing,” said Facebook in the announcement. “Globally, the amount of video from people and brands in News Feed has increased 3.6x year-over-year.”

“Since June 2014, Facebook has averaged more than 1 billion video views every day. On average, more than 50% of people who come back to Facebook every day in the US watch at least one video daily and 76% of people in the US who use Facebook say they tend to discover the videos they watch on Facebook.”

With the fast growth, Facebook is poised to overtake YouTube as the primary place for marketers to post videos, especially as previous studies have found that on desktop Facebook has already surpassed YouTube in monthly video views.

Facebook also included suggestions for video creators to ensure you get the most reach possible for videos on the platform:

As a creator, you should be conscious that people will discover your video in News Feed next to a photo from a friend or a status update from a relative. Your video needs to fit in, and it needs to be something that your audience will want to watch and share.

With the launch of auto-play and the surge in mobile use, it’s also important to focus on posting videos that grab people from the first frame of video. Shorter, timely video content tends to do well in News Feed. Keep in mind that auto-play videos play silently in News Feed until someone taps to hear sound, so videos that catch people’s attention even without sound often find success.

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Twitter Starts Showing Users New ‘While You Were Away’ Feature

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Twitter is making some big changes to its feed for the first time since the company established itself as a major social media platform. Users are spotting a ‘While you were away’ feature which helps sort through the noise of your feed to find the best content.

The feature is not available for everyone yet, but the increasing number of users seeing it suggests it will be fully available soon. Twitter is currently declining to confirm when a full release is expected.

‘While you were away” is the first notable non-chronological feature available on Twitter, making a significant break from the traditional time-sorted feed on the site. Twitter indicated something similar was coming back in November, when the company said it would allow you to find the ‘best’ tweets from your feed since you last opened Twitter.

“Every time you open the Twitter app, you’ll see something great,” said the announcement.

In the past, Twitter would alert users to popular Tweets with email and push notifications. The new feature should streamline the process to make it easier for users to catch up with their friends without having to scroll through endless posts.

‘While you were away’ may also have some potential benefits for businesses as well, depending on the platform’s algorithm. With continued visibility of successful posts, there is a greater chance for people to see anything you share once it has gained traction.

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Pinterest Expands Promoted Pins To All Users

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Pinterest started 2015 with a bang by expanding Promoted Pins to all users yesterday morning. Promoted Pins were first introduced early last year when a beta roll out was given to a select number of advertisers. The social platform announced the expansion Monday, while also providing some pretty astounding statistics about Promoted Pin performance.

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Here are some of the benefits Pinterest claims Promoted Pins can provide:

  • Promoted Pins perform as well or better than organic Pins.
  • Brand advertisers achieved about a 30% bump in earned media from people who saw a Promoted Pin and saved it to their own boards
  • Promoted Pins are repinned 11 times more than organic Pins on average.
  • Promoted Pins draw engagement from users well after a campaign has ended.
  • Businesses typically outside of Pinterest’s core categories and interests were also successful with Promoted Pins.

While these findings sound nice, it is important to remember that Pinterest’s beta launch of Promoted Pins was given to a select number of well-established brands. While the new promoted posting system may carry some weight, the data is based on a test of high-quality targeted ads. Your mileage may vary.

To help businesses get introduced to promoting themselves on Pinterest, the company is establishing the “Pinstitute” – a new interactive program to educate businesses on how to connect with users and improve their return on investment.

The “Pinstitute” helps you learn about what kind of Pins perform the best, what users are interested in, and what products will be coming from Pinterest in the future. The program will also invite select groups of brands and agencies to quarterly workshops. The Pinstitute will have provide webinars and other online education tools tailored for the needs of local and smaller businesses.

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Instagram Purges Fake Accounts, But Large Brands Are Largely Undisturbed

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Instagram LogoMany celebrities and popular internet figures were shocked last week when they lost thousands upon thousands of followers in the Instagram Rapture. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise, as Instagram gave warning they would be deleting fake and spammy accounts, but the purge of useless accounts still caused an uproar across the social network.

Celebrities were the hardest hit, as Justin Bieber lost over 5 million followers, or 15% of his total followers. Kim Kardashian lost 1.3 million, but rapper Mase received the most embarrassing lost as his 1.6 million followers dropped to only 100,000 in under 20-minutes. His account was deleted quickly after.

Instagram was clear the purge would be coming in their announcement they had hit 300 million active followers. They noted spammy accounts had already been deactivated for violation of community and were not included in the count.

“When we remove accounts from Instagram that don’t follow our Community Guidelines, you may see a decrease in your follower count,” the company wrote in its blog post. “This shouldn’t affect engagement from authentic accounts that like and comment on your posts.”

Celebrities may still be reeling from their large drops in followers, but most marketers are celebrating and larger brands haven’t seen much of a change. For marketers, the deletion of spam accounts means better analysis of how many people are being reached with each post.

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Instagram Beats Twitter in Major Brand Engagement

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Source: Wired

Source: Wired

Instagram made big news recently by speeding past Twitter in active users, reaching 300 million to Twitter’s 284 million. Perhaps surprisingly, Twitter’s board members didn’t seem concerned by the numbers. Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and board member didn’t mince words when he reportedly told Fortune “I frankly don’t give a s*** if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.”

Well, if the last report wasn’t enough to give Twitter’s board pause, maybe a new study on brand engagement will make them less flippant.

Social analytics firm Socialbakers compared the top 25 brands in Instagram engagement with the top 25 on Twitter and found Instagram received up to 50 times more engagement rates per post.

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By comparing three months of data ending December 9, Socialbakers found the average Instagram post for a major brand has a per fan engagement rate of 3.31% (counting likes and comments), whereas top brands on Twitter only receive an average rate of 0.07% per tweet including retweets, replies, and favorites.

Throughout the three month period of the study, brands included averaged 38 times more total interactions on Instagram (6.5 million a month) compared to Twitter (167,000). Socialbakers didn’t release a full list of included brands, but they did divulge five brands appearing on the lists for both Twitter and Instagram: Victoria’s Secret, Starbucks, GoPro, Forever21, and Aeropostale.

Socialbaker’s report isn’t much of a shocker in light of past reports. A previous Forrester Research study released last May found Instagram’s per follower engagement rate for major brands to be an astounding 120 times higher than Twitter.

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Facebook Gives Business Pages New Call-to-Action Button

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Facebook has been rolling out tons of new features aimed at improving business pages lately, but the most recent feature could be the most important of them all. Yesterday, the social media site announced it would be launching call-to-action buttons visible on business pages.

As the announcement explains:

“Pages are an important destination for people on Facebook, and we’re building new ways for people to interact with businesses through them. Today, we’re announcing a new call-to-action feature that will help Pages drive business objectives.”

This new feature allows users to more quickly make the action they are most likely to be looking for, and you can more efficiently direct visitors on your page to your most valuable destination. Whether you want users to sign up for your mailing list, browse your e-commerce store, or book a reservation, there’s a button to fit your needs.

Matt Southern broke down the 7 call-to-action button options announced so far, along with briefly explaining what each is likely to be used for. Facebook’s announcement did not go into details beyond the names of the buttons, but you can get an idea what to expect below:

  • Book Now: To direct visitors to book a table at your restaurant or, a room in a hotel, or a similar kind of reservation.
  • Contact Us: You can likely use this to direct visitors to a contact form, or if you’re brave perhaps it could be a button to email you directly.
  • Use App: If your company has its own app this could be a button to open the app on your mobile device.
  • Play Game: If you’re a mobile app development company this could be a link to play your latest game.
  • Shop Now: Direct visitors to your e-commerce store.
  • Sign Up: Direct visitors to your mailing list sign up page, or a webinar sign up page, or something like that.
  • Watch Video: Pretty self-explanatory, direct visitors to watch a video of your choice.

For an example of how these buttons will work, you can see the business page for Dollar Shave Club, who has had access to these call-to-action buttons already. Apparently it is working well for them:

“Over the course of a three-week test, the Sign Up call-to-action button delivered a 2.5x higher conversion rate versus other comparable social placements aimed to drive new user acquisition.”

These buttons will roll out in the US over the next few weeks and worldwide next year.

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Instagram Surpasses Twitter With 300 Million Monthly Users

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Instagram LogoInstagram is quickly becoming one of the most popular social media platforms around. With new estimates saying Instagram pulls in 300 million monthly users, the photo- and video-sharing app has bypassed Twitter’s official user count of 284 million. The new numbers mark a 100 million user increase since March.

The company announced the milestone yesterday, along with the announcing that Instagram would begin verifying accounts similar to Twitter’s method of certify celebrity or high-profile accounts.

The verified badges for public figures and brands will be coming within the week according to Instagram, who says the badges “will make it easier for people to identify and follow the authentic brands they care about.” The blue badges will appear next to names on their profile pages, as well as in search.

The increase in users leaves only a few social media sites ahead of Instagram, including Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram’s companion company Facebook. The site is extraordinarily popular among youth and brands, and predictions see it continuing its fast growth.

In the announcement, Instagram also said it would be purging fake accounts from the site, so brands can expect to see a relatively small follow count decline.

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Google+ Now Allows You To Pin Your Most Important Posts

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It can seem like the entire world hates Google+ sometimes, but in reality the social media platform has carved out a niche audience that has stayed loyal over several years, and recent changes have given the platform a strong presence in local search results.

As Google has upped the presence of “local packs” or groups of local results on searches that appear to be geographically linked and this has given businesses with Google+ profiles a big step up in visibility.

Google+ gets beat on for not having near the number of daily active users as sights such as Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, but it is not going anywhere soon simply because of how useful the site can be. Now Google+ has made it even easier to keep the most useful information in a prominent location on your page by pinning the most important posts at the top of your feed.

You can use this to keep business information such as contact numbers or location info in a highly viewable place, but this can also be extremely useful for bringing attention to sales, special promotions, or any other big events coming up for your business that you want the public to know about.

To pin posts, just click the drop down arrow at the top-right corner of your published updates and select ‘Pin post’ as in the example below.

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The feature has already rolled out on desktop and Android but, in typical Google fashion, iPhone users will have to wait until they decide to share the feature with iOS.

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The Biggest Shifts In SEO You Need To Know For 2015

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search-engine-optimization-411106_640If you are still running SEO the same way you were at the start of the year you are already behind the curve. SEO is constantly changing and proper SEO strategies need to be well-planned enough to stay on target over long periods of time while also flexible enough to adapt to the constant guideline changes, algorithm roll-outs, and new ideas about usability.

In the past year alone, Google has pushed out 13 updates to algorithms that the public knows about. That number is just the big algorithms that people might know by name such as Penguin and Panda, while there has also been a multitude of more incremental changes that have gone undocumented in the public.

You don’t have to rebuild your SEO plans from the ground up every time there are significant changes over at Google, but you need to keep the biggest changing trends in mind as you progress and refine efforts. As we head into 2015, consider the most important shifts in SEO thinking that have happened over the past year.

1. Focus on Mobile Traffic

This may not be the newest shift in SEO, but it is more important than ever and all indications suggest mobile isn’t slowing down any time soon. Google has also shown their commitment to improving the mobile web with the introduction of mobile analytics tools and new warnings for users who are about to click on non-mobile friendly websites.

You can see if your site passes Google’s mobile-friendly test here, but don’t stop with that. Ensure your mobile site lives up the standards set by your desktop page and your company to keep mobile customers coming.

2. Optimizing for Alternative Search Engines

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that 2015 may be the year when Google’s iron grasp on search market share could start to crumble. Google has lost some major clout as Firefox replaced the search giant with Yahoo as the default search engine for the browser. Google’s agreement with Safari is also ending this year, and Apple seems keen to replace their competitor’s search engine with a more neutral option such as Bing, Yahoo, or even DuckDuckGo.

Even if Google maintains a strong majority of the market share (which they likely will) you should still make it your mission to be visible across all platforms, not just the most popular one.

3. Stop Focusing on Rankings and Start Looking at ROI Metrics

Rankings are so last year. Since all the major search engines have put a heavy emphasis on personalized search results that cater to users’ interests and location data, there is no guarantee your site will show as the top result for someone else even if it is the top result for you. Instead, turn your attention to return on investment. It offers a more accurate depiction of how your online marketing efforts are working, and gives a more direct understanding of the value of your SEO.

4. Emphasize Social Media

In the past, emphasizing social media basically meant blasting the same updates across every platform you can find. But, social media has matured and users won’t respond to your efforts if you treat every platform as the same. You should learn the unique demographics and behaviors of any social media platform you are considering sharing on, and ensure your ideas, voice, and medium match the crowd.

More importantly, social media users expect brands to more than just yell at them. Users expect ways to engage your brand and establish a more personal connection. The best solution is to isolate two or three social media platforms that best suit your brand and build on your efforts there. If you can really succeed there, you won’t need to be on the other social sites.

5. Earn Links, Don’t Hoard Them

You have most likely heard the routine proclamations that “links are dead!” more than once since Google began cracking down on weak or suspicious link portfolios. However, this is no truer now than when the internet first gained a foothold in our society. Links are still the most influential signal of trust and authority to search engines and that is going to stay the case for quite some time. However, the game has changed in a couple important ways.

Back in 2011, you could purchase countless low-quality links to masquerade as a reputable site. Now, Google has means of seeing through the mask. Google can analyze link quality and they don’t take kindly to poor quality, irrelevant links meant to boost visibility without effort. In 2015, earning a single high-quality link the right way is worth more than any number of links you could buy or collude to gain. Put your effort into proper SEO and you’ll find success. Rely on shady tactics and Google will be hunting for you.

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Facebook Closes The Like Gate Starting Wednesday

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like-gateTomorrow marks a rather significant change in Facebook policy as they close the so-called “like gate.” As announced in August, Facebook has decided that pages will no longer be able to require likes to enter contests or view content.

Facebook said the change was intended to guarantee people are only using likes on pages they really want to engage with, not due to “artificial incentives.” Interestingly, this is also one of the few changes Facebook has made recently to receive widespread praise.

Most social media and marketing professionals agree like gates were far from the best means of achieving the desired result, often drawing in many who have no real interest in a business. Emeric Ernoult, CEO of AgoraPulse, gave the example of pages which used giveaways of iPads or other popular consumer goods to inflate likes.

“It was too easy to make mistakes,” Ernoult told Marketing Land. “There have been too many people doing things that were actually hurting them but they didn’t realize it.”

Most importantly, the rule change doesn’t ban pages from simply asking for likes, which Ernoult agrees is an overall better policy. “You are asking now, you are proposing. You’re not forcing and that’s a big difference,” he said. “And I think it will force page owners and marketers to think about how sexy they could be and how appealing they could be. Instead of, ‘Of well, they’ll have to become fans anyway so we don’t have to explain.'”

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