Amazing! Facebook Testing New Features for Users

 

As Facebook becoming the one and only place where many people spend most of their time, its effort to transform News Feed into a storefront is once again raising up.

Facebook is in the opening tiers of testing a feature- “Local Market”.

Abs Elmaz, Reader of Social House Media shared the screenshots with SocialTimes, informing about “Local Market” icon.

The feature took the place of icon for messages at the bottom of Fb software.

These are the latest steps Facebook has taken in the retail area. The company has tested “buy” buttons already in its app allowing users to buy products directly without leaving.

It also rolled out “Shop” sections on small businesses’ pages.

Recap: Facebook Introduces SIGNAL, A Social News Gathering Tool for Journalists

“On Facebook we’ve seen that people are coming to our platform not only to connect with friends and family but also with products and brands,” the company said in a blog post. Nearly half of people come to Facebook to actively look for products, the company said.

Elmaz, residing in Melbourne, Australia, brought that clicking “sell” said that the function was no longer to be had in his area once but he stated that every proof of “Local Market” has vanished from his app now.

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How to Decide the Ideal Social Media for Your Business

 

Social media is an inevitable platform when you come to marketing. An efficient social media strategy helps you boost your brand and business. The main idea here is to select the best social media that is apt for your requirements. Approaching a Digital Marketing Agency solves this issue for you.

A large number of social media platforms are available these days. You need to go through them and select the one that offers you the highest potential to reach out to your ideal audience. You need to broadcast the type of content you need to market your company. It is not possible to be the best on every platform. It is better to concentrate on a few of them and try to make your best.

Read Also: Effective Social Media Marketing Tricks for 2015

An online marketing agency will be able to choose out the best for your company. The professionals help you build an amazing online profile to make your mark among the target audience. Here are the most common social media that your social media expert would suggest you:

Pinterest

Pinterest is a simple content sharing service. Members are able to pin or post their videos, videos, and other such content on their boards. Such media are shared among others.
Pinterest is known to have a majority of female users. As such, it will be highly effective for businesses where visual imagery plays an important role. This platform is apt for businesses involving travel destinations, fashion or foods, wedding planning, interior decorating, and so on. A great deal can be marketed about your products by using videos and photos on Pinterest.
Pinterest has generally got a niche market. It serves this purpose really well. You have the option to share posts, comment on posts or boards, and also click to go to the web page from where a particular image came. You could “pin” something on to your board if you like it. The boards are attached to every user’s profile. This helps people see the person or company from where a particular video or photo came.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a very popular networking site. It mainly aims at creating contacts in the world of business. You connect to people or companies, and you could utilize this network to build up your profile.
LinkedIn helps you create professional networks. This way you could connect to people and be there for them when they require your services. There are groups and discussions where you can actively participate to get noted. Politely discussing your interests, showing your transparency, impressing others with your expertise, asking and answering questions, and interacting with others does the trick here. This is not a visual medium, and you get to talk about yourself, and what your business does. Service providers are a majority in here as compared to retailers.

YouTube

This visually driven media is a much more powerful tool than you think. It has got high potential if you utilize it well enough. Homemade and company made videos are found in abundance. People keep posting videos on it hoping them to get viral and earn popularity. If you feature your business in an efficient manner, you can make it big. The user base of this medium is really high, and you get a huge audience. Make it exciting and you will achieve what you want.
YouTube is based on visuals. You could see millions and millions of videos here which have been watched numerous times. Check out the videos that have generated maximum hits to get an idea of what will work out for you. Demonstrating your product, teaching people to do something, and introducing something new are cool ideas to start with.

You may also like: Video Marketing and Its Impact On Your Business

Twitter

Twitter is another popular social media platform that is an ongoing conversation. Twitter is more of a real time thing that is based on “in the moment” concept. Users can choose what to view and whether to respond.
Using twitter, you could reach out to the public and wait for them to respond. Breaking news, questions, updates, opinions, and other such things can be shared via twitter. You “tweet” whatever you feel like. This reaches out to the public. You directly interact with the people here.

Facebook

At this point of time, Facebook is the most popular social media in the world. It is a must for online marketing. The size of Facebook is enough to realise its importance. It is safe to assume that every person is on Facebook.
Businesses have the option to build their profile and show the image they prefer to show out to the public. People get to directly interact by commenting, asking questions, and expressing views. Facebook is more of a long-term commitment.

The main purpose of Facebook is to show out your face to the public. It does not deal with selling alone. You portray your business in a way that users are able to relate to you. By using this platform to its full capacity, you can generate a large number of fans and become popular.

Being active on all platforms is hard and not at all practical. An effective online marketing strategy is to select the three that suit your requirements aptly. Hire a Digital Marketing Agency to choose the best ideas and monitor your online activities. Stay involved on social media and see the difference it can bring out in your business!

Video Marketing and Its Impact On Your Business

 

When it comes to digital or online marketing, the use of videos is gaining in popularity. The reason for this is the impact they provide. It is far greater than mere words as text and even static images. Research by top digital marketing agencies says that on Facebook, videos are clicked more often than mere pictures or text. And we know that Facebook‘s move to auto play videos is only going to increase video viewership.

Sharing of videos through social media has become the recent trend and statistics has shown that sharing of videos is 267% more when compared to posts.

Recommended Read: Video Content Marketing Trends 2015

Why Videos?

What videos have achieved is not a big secret, but what has led to this boom in video marketing is something to be analyzed. So, what is so special about videos?

  • The engagement power of a video is very high. While a reader may leave a post mid way, a video is capable of holding him onto his seat, simply because it has the capability to tell a story.
  • A video can easily convey an emotion to the viewer when compared to a reading an article or any other content.
  • Time is an important factor. A thousand words article may take some time to read, whereas the same article can be explained elaborately through a video.  1.8 Million Words = 1 minute video is something to keep in mind.
  • An average user of the internet sees 32.2 videos in a month and 16 minutes and 49 sec is the time he spends on watching online videos in a month.
  • A 2010 survey showed that the advent of videos increased the click through rate by 96%.
  • Moreover videos can also increase brand association by up to 139%.

How to Make Videos that Can Make an Impact?

While it is true that videos can make the impact that can push your products online, one should be really careful about the videos that they make. A bad video can be as viral as a good one. If not made properly, a video can do more damage to your business and you may not even realize it. So how to make videos that can boost your business?

  • Knowing what the audience wants is the key. When marketing a product online using a video, it should target the audience to whom the product or service is intended for. The viewer should easily relate to the video and understand what it is.
  • What is the product, how it works, how it helps the user, how can the viewer get the product, are the common question that the video must answer.
  • Remember, the idea of making a video is to free the viewer from reading a lengthy description page and hence save his time. Therefore making a 5 minute video can be suicide. The video should be short and simple.
  • Videos that are 15 sec or shorter are shared 37% or more than those between 30 sec to 1 minute.
  • The video should be engaging right from the beginning. If not, viewers may choose to skip them midway. 8 seconds is the amount of time within which the video must grab the attention of the viewer. VisibleMeasures, a popular consumer behaviour research team found in their research that 20% of viewers click away after 8 sec or fewer.
  • The video must be visually appealing to the audience and there should be clarity in the idea presented.
  • It was also found that 16% of YouTube videos that are liked or shared are on Tuesdays between 11 am and 1 pm. Hence, care should be given about when and where to post a video.

You may also like: Role of Visual Content in Digital World

The importance of videos is clear. But one should also keep in mind that video alone cannot help boost your product or services. Giving importance only to videos may also affect your online marketing strategies.

When combining videos with full page ads, it can boost engagement by up to 22% as compared to using them individually. It is noted that while 80% of the visitors go for videos, the remaining 20% prefers text. Even though it is a smaller percentage, it is an important one. A comprehensive technique is vital for online marketing.

Choosing Good Content: Criteria by Google

 

Google is a God among search engines. It is the most-used search engine world wide. Google handles more than three billion searches per day.

Having a website in the first page of Google is not at all easy. But what makes a page relevant enough to be placed at the top of search results? The answer is simple, it’s the CONTENT and how you promote it.

“Content isn’t King, it’s the Kingdom.” Lee Odden

Google has introduced numerous filtering procedures that reject low-quality content from search results. For increasing the traffic of a page, stuffing the keywords and building thousands of links were previous methods of content marketing.

New and fresh technologies are introduced by Google day by day which resulted in drastic changes. It was after the introduction of the new technology that search engine optimization has undergone radical development and these two methods of stuffing and building yields no results at all. Pages consisting of original and quality content gain the very best ranks in Google search results.

Read Also: What Is Content Curation? How Is It Relevant To Digital Marketing

The new technology made it possible for Google to exclude all those pages with low-quality write ups and no information. Users can easily get access to high-quality materials without wasting time on useless materials.  Few strategies help good content to stay in their position for a long time

 “Content is the reason search begun, in the first place.”  Lee Odden

Follow these steps to help your content retain its position:

Updating your content:

  • Update at least once a week
  • Quicker the content is updated, higher the chances of people visiting the page
  • Frequent updating keeps the page active and content can retain good position

Construction of content:

  • The content must be organized attractively
  • Spelling mistakes should as less as possible
  • Grammar errors are prohibited in good content
  • A good content have less than three spelling mistakes and four grammatical errors
  • Google uses check feature in Microsoft Word in order to check the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in contents
  • Proper nouns, new words or words from other languages are not included in the list of probable errors
  • Short sentences always win the game: a good write-up has short but to the point sentences
  • A paragraph must contain only 3-4 sentences with each sentence consisting of 10-12 words
  • Bullet points can make things more clear and make a write-up interesting. People usually concentrate more on points to paragraphs

For the popularity of a page, good content is absolutely necessary. A writer’s skill plays an important part in deciding how Google views a web page. Gone are the days of stuffing keywords and link building. Now, quality speaks.

Quality content is the backbone of any website. Google’s algorithms have now evolved to detect duplicate content. They also take into consideration a lot of other factors such as user engagement, links, image optimization, page load time and other 200 plus factors.

Recommended Read: Importance of Strategy in Content Marketing

Tips for Creating Good Content:

  1. Original Content Always
  2. Create Strong Headlines
  3. Your Content Should be Actionable
  4. Provide Answers in the Content
  5. Always be Accurate about the Reports
  6. Be double sure about the source of information
  7. Content must be Thought-Provoking
  8. Communicate with the audience through the content by Adding Images and Video

Keep your sentences short and to the point