Facebook Partners With Kaspersky Labs to Get Rid of Malicious Software

Facebook had announced on Tuesday that they have been recently using a new security tool in order to identify and remove malicious software to make the usage of the site easier for people.

Facebook has joined hands with Kaspersky Labs to develop a program along with other security firms like ESET, F-Secure and Trend Micro.

Trevor Pottinger, a Facebook security engineer, said, “Thanks to the collaboration with these companies, in the past three months we have helped clean up more than two million people’s computers that we detected were infected with malware when they connected to Facebook. In these cases, we present a cleanup tool that runs in the background while you continue using Facebook, and you get a notification when the scan is done to show you what it found.”

The program is said to use “a combination of signals to help find infections and get the malware off of your computer for good, even if the malware isn’t actively spreading spam or harmful links.”

According to Kaspersky Lab’s Kate Kochetkova, Facebook users are often prone to various online fraudulent schemes like “phishing,” where faked e-mails are sent to the users to download malware. “Facebook is a major aim for phishers: one in five phishing scams targets Facebook notifications. So be vigilant when you receive emails appearing to be from Facebook: as they can be fake. There are lots of Trojans targeting Facebook users as well,” she said.

Twitter to Enhance E-Shopping Experience with New Product Pages

 

Twitter is finally transforming from being just a social media website to a good marketing platform.

The social media platform has introduced new product page and another page that the company called “Collections” where information about a specific product or places are given. Also, customers can buy products from there.

A product page in twitter consists of things like tweets about the product, user reviews, pricing and sometimes, a buy button. However, Collections page is a bit different. It contains more of recommended products and places selected by a brand or a high-profile curator.

Though Twitter has tried various shopping experiments before, this time they are at a much advanced level. Twitter already has a user base from which they can collect information about different products to be features in product and collectible pages. They can use the information to educate the potential buyers. Also, the website is going to collect a huge revenue with these pages.

Mid-Sized Businesses Get 246% Return from E–Mail Marketing

Only 1.5% businesses are making use of mobile marketing automation but guess what, they earning major return on investment. Marketers enjoy when they get more money than invested. New study on email marketing conducted by Jon Cifuentes evaluating a broad audience of 1,300 marketers and over 48,000 companies revealed that email is still the best way to get maximum return on investment (ROI).

Thanks to email marketing, mid-sized businesses are enjoying 246% ROI. Even though returns are high, email marketing is also one of the most expensive marketing channels to manage.

An analyst at VB Insight, Cifuentes said “You can think of email as the center of orchestrating all of your customer relationships,”, He continued. “It can be an expensive control booth, just based on all the things you can accomplish with it. The infrastructure costs add up. Email infrastructure partners, ESPs, analytics partners, agencies and content services, media spend for growing subscribers, and finally talent to run the show. It adds up, but the potential ROI you can achieve with email marketing shows you how vital it is to get it right.”

Cifuentes discovered similar cost pattern in his “State of Marketing Technology Winter 2015 report”. According to 2,119 marketing technology users email marketing requires high resource for proper management. 85% of the email marketing users are at manager level or above.

Even when email marketing is costly to maintain, there is no doubt in the result it fetches. Small to medium businesses can gain up to 183% return. Enterprise-level organizations average 117% return of investment.

Even after instant in- app messaging grabs the headline; emails have not fallen out of place. According to the prediction of research firm Radicati, email users world wide will be increasing to 2.8 billion over the next four years. Email is still the most prevalent form of online communication.  Email has become the part of daily life for marketers.

For a number of reasons, we’ve been trained to be sold to via email,” Cifuentes said. “It may be that with targeting on a mobile device, there’s just a finer line between useful and creepy. I’m watching that space with interest, and am excited to see new research on data privacy, and consumer preferences”

It’s high time that you target audience with the help of email marketing. High internal costs, expanding target audience and 246% average return at risk, email marketing requires your attention for sure.

100% Growth in Social Media Usage in Rural India

According to the  ‘Social Media in India 2014’ report by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Indian Market Research Bureau (IMRB) International, there has been 100% growth in social media usage in the last one year in rural India. The total number of users in the area is 25 million.

However, the growth is not that high in urban India. It is only 35% there, with the total number of users being 118 million as on April 2015. Almost half of the social media users in urban India hail from metro cities.

There are 143 million social media users in India as on April 2015.  According to the report, 34% of the social media users are college going students. 27% of the lot comprise of young men while 12% of the social media users in India are school-goers.

College going students and young men constitute 60% of the social media users from urban India.

Out of the total number of social media users in India, 61% access the platforms using mobile devices. “The fact that almost two-thirds of the users are already accessing social media through their mobile is a promising sign. With the expected increase in mobile traffic the number of users accessing social media on mobile is only bound to increase,” the report said.

6 Essential Steps to a Successful Blog Post

Content marketing is always one of the top strategies of digital marketing agencies. Blogs play an important role in content marketing. When used in the right way, they can pull a lot of traffic and build exposure. They are a great way for business websites to connect with customers, thus strengthening the brand. It is also a cost-effective way to promote any business. Blogs with useful and engaging content can:

  • Generate leads
  • Grow your business
  • Build your brand

According to HubSpot’s sixth annual report of inbound marketing and sales trends 2014-15, site organic sources such as blogging, SEO and social media are rising in importance.

These simple steps will help to get your blog post found on Google as well as other search engines.

Keep readers in mind

Always write for your readers. Always write something what they may need to know such as solving an issue or some unique insights in to the industry dealt with. Have answer for these questions before you begin a blog.

  • Who your readers are?
  • What is your target audience?
  • How well do you know them?
  • What do they want to know?
  • What problems do they need addressed?

Provide informative and valuable content

Your website’s authority in the industry mainly depends on the value of the content you provide. Informative content have the power to turn readers into customers. Instead of posting monotonous posts regularly, it is ideal to post useful blog tutorials daily or on a weekly basis. Search engines like Google no longer look for specific keywords and to answer the queries of the user. Rather it looks for content and makes their own conclusions as to what your website is all about. So it is ideal to think the way your readers might search for information

Along with giving genuine information, in digital marketing agencies also recommended adding videos or infographics to increase credibility. For instance, if you are talking about SEO tactics, it is better to include a recent video about what Matt Cutts said about this topic or to include an infographics that gives clear idea about the topic.

Choose effective blogging platform

With user-friendly blogging platforms such as WordPress (WP), you can customize the design, write posts and can also easily publish videos, photos, galleries, and slideshows.  With WP’s clean coding, search engines can easily read and index a site’s content. Make sure to choose better SEO plug-ins like Yoast that offers a ‘Snippet Preview’. With this option, you can find how your Meta data will appear in search engines. This plug-in will also tell you how obviously your ‘keyword’ features in the different elements of your meta data.

Use social media

A blog post, however engaging and useful, will not make any difference unless it is discovered by the audience. Social media platforms provide opportunities to drive traffic to your blog. Major sites include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and YouTube. These are powerful tools to promote blog posts as they have millions of subscribers.

Interact with readers

Your blog is a conversation. Though it begins with the information you provide, it continues with comments from readers, and with comment and criticism from other bloggers. To keep your content interactive, make sure to post questions, polls and contests for your readers. This will keep them deeply involved in the conversation.

Focus on Headlines and subheadings

Ensure that the headline you write focuses on readers and not search engines. Boring titles with expected keywords will work no longer, according to digital marketing agencies. Sub headings or H2, H3 tags should also be up to the point. The right choice of these tags helps you to create a digestible, readable and easily scannable post.

Writing great guest posts for other blogs can draw new readers to your blog. Using analytics will help digital marketers as well as bloggers to keep track of how people arrive at their blog and then use this information to improve their blogging tactics.

21 Different Types of Content that are Popularly Consumed

Content Marketing can be hard.

You right thousands of words and hundreds of blogs, without much success.

Why?

The reason is quite simple – you are not giving people what they crave.

But try as you may, if you are a digital marketing agency or a content marketer, you might not be able to understand the popular types of content. The type of content that you think would be popular need not necessarily be the most popular. There might be key ingredients that you might have missed.

The news around you might be boring. But as a content marketer, you should be able to make it interesting. Here is a popular infographics listing out 21 types of content everyone craves for.

 

08-06-2015 21 Different Types of Content that are Popularly Consumed

 

 

Source

 

Be sure to voice your opinion in the comment section.

 

Tricks to Make Your Content Visible to Internet Audience

What’s your idea of successful web content?

Most commonly, people think it’s avoiding grammatical errors, placing keywords perfectly and using simple language.

Agreed. These are important aspects of great website content. But, these points alone can’t make it the most successful web content. To say that web content is successful, it should be visible to millions in the Internet. For that, simply posting the content in a website is not enough. You should put some extra efforts so that your content is in the spotlight!

Follow these simple tactics to help your web content earn attention:

Research vastly

More you research on a topic, that much comprehensive your content will be. You should be spending about 60-70% of your total time on research before you start writing. This will help you understand the subject very well. Your research can include infinite number of topics such as present trends, hottest topics, key words that work etc.

Check quality using SEO

If you thought Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was just about inserting key words, you are wrong. SEO can search for the issues that hinder the visibility of your content in the Internet. Seek help from an SEO expert to do that for you would be beneficial. You may need to spend time and money for the same, but it is worth the effort.

Do not stuff keywords

Integrating keywords into your content can have a great impact on web traffic and search engine rankings. But, it doesn’t mean that you must intentionally incorporate keywords into every sentence you write. High keyword density is only going to make your content boring. It’s not going to do any good for you.

Keep it short and sweet

Long and complicated sentences can make any reader dizzy. Internet users in particular, are impatient readers. They’ll lose interest in your content if they see long, tiring sentences and paragraphs. Stick to short and simple sentences that the readers can understand. You can also try methods like subheadings, bullet points, numbering etc. This can make the content appealing and interesting.

Be unique

Research is good. But, it doesn’t mean that whatever you researched must reflect in your content as it is. Try to be different.  You can express your views about the topic in the content. Be natural with your thoughts. But, do not act like a pro. The readers of your content may be anyone from a beginner to an expert.

Add quality images

More than words, it’s the images that attract web traffic. Also, the number of image searches is at a rise these days. Therefore, never take them lightly. The images must be relevant to the content. Also, they should be unique.  Images don’t just mean those placed between texts in a blog. It can be Infographics, graphs, pie charts etc. that go with the text of the content.

Share your content

Nowadays, everybody uses social media platforms to share anything online. Why not use the same platform to promote your business?  You can use popular social media websites to share your content and earn potential customers.

The above mentioned tricks can be used to instil interest among global audience and help your business to flourish.  However, this is not the end! There are many more ways you can use to turn an ordinary web content into something unique.

Impact of Social Media Marketing on Businesses

When everything is available to your customers with the click of a button, social media’s importance is obvious. They help you to create an emotional connection with your customers. If a single person can grow a business successfully just by using social media, imagine the potential when it is combined with strategic planning and marketing!

To use social media to its fullest, businesses must understand its impact on the customers and how it could be manipulated to achieve their respective targets. Social media doesn’t have any value when it’s used inefficiently. To get an idea about how valuable it could be to online brands and digital marketing agencies, keep on reading.

Exposure

The base of any business is to be known by its customers. By using simple social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter regularly, a business can increase its percentage of recognition immensely.

Just open an account in any social media and start posting press kits, announcements, offers and what not. When a business is active on social media, it is going to end up in customers feed and becomes more visible with every click. There is method to the madness, though. There are thousands of brands on social media. To be visible among them, you should be an expert or hire an expert.

Revenue

A business that is in direct contact with its customers tends to cut the unnecessary gate keepers in between. Hence it reduces the need for manual labour considerably. When a digital marketing agency takes advantage of social media, it increases your business while cutting down the labour costs. It ends up with an obvious revenue gain.

Target Research

Earlier, businesses used physical surveys and human resource agencies to research its target customers. With the help of social media, one can create its own surveys and tests for its audience. It takes considerably less time since it’s all virtual and immediate. Businesses can know about its target customers’ personal and demographic details without even asking. It helps to come up with focused offers and promotions.

Knowledge

With all the free information available on social media, it’s a piece of cake to stay informed all the time. By just navigating competitors’ accounts, it’s easier to know about their current marketing plans. It would, in turn help your digital marketing agency to devise a much better strategy.

Traffic

Social media can increase website traffic like no other with proper planning and execution. If a business wants its website to be more noticeable, bettering social media techniques is a must. By adding hash-tags, reposting and placing ads, the number of customers a business reaches is extraordinary.

When a customer clicks a post in social media, it evidently leads him to the website. The more active a business stays among different social media, that much increase can be seen in its website traffic. With more traffic, the search engine results will go higher.

Customer loyalty

Businesses can create significant relationships with its customers through social media. By reaching the target directly, a digital marketing agency shows transparency. So, it gains the customers’ trust easily, which is the core of any kind of marketing.

By being active, digital businesses inspire its target to contact them directly and quickly. Digital brands can develop its content and enhance its offers as it gets customer feedback with a simple click.

In this competitive digital age, there is nothing you cannot do with social media. Businesses could hold major marketing campaigns online by spending next to nothing. When used with awareness, social media could play a major role in dynamic business models. By raising brand awareness to cutting costs, social media marketing has become the name of the game!

Things Every Business Owner Must Know About Digital Marketing

Ever since it was introduced, digital marketing has been doing wonders in business world. With passing time, the opportunities that Internet provides are immense. As a result, the world of digital marketing is changing much faster than you can even imagine!

 But, the misconceptions among business owners regarding digital marketing prevail as it is. They cannot be blamed. After all, the primary duty of a business owner is just to run his/her business without any problems. They aren’t digital marketing experts. Therefore, you cannot expect them to know everything about digital marketing.

Digital marketing is a way to connect with your potential customers. So, business owners must not be completely unaware of it.  Here are some essential things you must know about digital marketing:

PPC isn’t the only option

A few years ago, PPC was the most advanced digital marketing option. At present, it doesn’t have much of an impact. But, people still spend lots of money on PPC like it is the only digital marketing option. Well, it’s not.

If you have already started with PPC for your business, let it stay. But, do not forget to look for other digital marketing options as well.

Money matters

If you thought that you will not have to spend a single penny to digitally market your business, you were wrong. Digital marketing is not a magic wand that you wave and voila! You have your website traffic increasing.

You will have to spend a decent amount of money for content marketing. It includes creating content, publishing it, promoting through social media etc. There are other options as well, that are available for free. But, you cannot be sure of the advantages. If you spend enough time and money in digital marketing, you‘ll surely reap the benefits.

Content is king

It always was, is and will be the king, until Internet exists. The digital world exists with the help of different articles, blogs, Infographics, videos, images etc.

In fact, digital marketing is meaningless without content. To have your presence felt in the Internet, you must have great content.

SEO is still valid

Many articles have been appearing in the internet, predicting the death of SEO. For your kind information, SEO is not dead. It will continue to stay until digital marketing era ends. Even now, some kind of optimization is being done on a daily basis while posting content online.  It is necessary to improve your page ranking.

SEO has undergone some changes in the past few years. It depends on the changes in the algorithm of search engines.

Mobile marketing is the latest trend

Myntra, the e-commerce giant, shut down its website and went mobile-only just few weeks ago.

The reason? They have already realized that mobile marketing is the next big thing!

From browsing websites to socializing, people have been using their mobile phones. As a result, mobile-friendly websites have become a demand than a desire.

Every business that wishes for an online presence must have a mobile-friendly website.

Conversion optimization for digital success

Conversion optimization is the fastest way to Internet success. It is the best way to expand your digital experience.

Conversion happens when audience does what you want them to do. It can be anything, like subscribing to your newsletter, buying your product etc. Website optimization attracts more users to do that.

Conversion Rate Optimization isn’t free. You have to spend money to hire professionals who can optimize your website and make the required changes. But you’ll never be at loss.

Digital marketing in the present era demands basic knowledge and immense action from the entrepreneurs. You need not know every bit of details about digital marketing. But you should be acquainted with the right things.