Jesse Stay's Blog, page 6

Facebook & Google Fall Victim to $100 Million Email Scam

Have you ever fallen for one of those email scams? That’s okay. Evidently even tech giants like Facebook and Google can be duped.

According to Indictment, the scheme was implemented from (at least) 2013 – 2015. Allegedly, the one committing fraud had registered/incorporated a company in Latvia that “bore the same name as an Asian-based computer hardware manufacturer” that both Google and Facebook did business with. He made his emails appear to be from the Asian supplier in order to trick the tech giants into making payments into his bank accounts.

According to what a company spokesperson had told Fortune, “Facebook recovered the bulk of the funds shortly after the incident and has been cooperating with law enforcement in its investigation.”

For more information on this story, visit entrepreneur.com

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

 

 

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Instagram Has Reached 700 Million Users!

Since its launch in 2010, Instagram has experienced a constant growth. It was no surprise that Facebook would buy out the app only a few years later.

It has kept up its pace through its own innovation, and even by copying the success of other apps like Snapchat. Just last year, it had managed to grow by a million users (from 500 to 600 million). Now it has reached 700 million users!

Some are saying that in the future, it could become Facebook’s next.. well.. Facebook! What do you think?

For more information, visit nytimes.com (photo credits to ixn.news)

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How I Use Evergreen Ads Inside Facebook to Build Leads

Facebook Evergreen Ads?

One of my favorite Facebook ad techniques to build leads that I like to use for clients is to initiate “Evergreen Ads”. These are ads that appear within the funnel based on certain actions visitors of me or my client’s websites take. These follow a specific, programmed behavior, and after testing repeat over and over again based on actions users take in the funnel. I’ll share more examples of this here in the future, but I’d like to share just one example here.

Creating Your Audience

You can set time limits on your Facebook evergreen campaigns. For instance, if I create an audience of “Everyone who sees my newsletter signup popover or visits StayNAlive.com/newsletter“, I can create one copy of that audience that has a 180 day time limit (everyone in that audience that has seen the newsletter signup in the last 180 days, the maximum allowed), and then create another copy of that audience for just 14 days (this could be modified to 7 days if 14 days is too much).

Creating an Ad Schedule

Then, I should create 2 campaigns (1 dollar a day is often sufficient, per Dennis Yu and Blitz Metric’s strategies – Dennis is one of my personal mentors and I love sharing knowledge and gaining knowledge from him). The first would be a direct lead-gen campaign targeting the 14 day audience – this means for the first 14 days, they’ll see an ad re-prompting them to sign up, right inside Facebook, for the newsletter. Visitors will eventually get sick of seeing this though and will tune out (you need to determine what the magic day this is for your visitors – it may not be 14 days).

The second campaign will target the 180 day audience (again, 1 dollar a day), this time *excluding* the 14 day audience so the minute those 14 days are over, the new ads kick in. The new ads should be more informative and interesting so my audience isn’t constantly being bombarded with not-as-useful lead-gen ads. Now this audience, who has shown interest in StayNAlive.com, will start seeing very useful and interesting blog posts and articles in their feed for the remaining 166 days from you. I’d perhaps set a conversion goal for this audience for them to sign up for my PowerHour, or perhaps fill out a Strategy Assessment form to sign up to receive a proposal from my team (but not link directly to those, again, so I don’t overwhelm them). If I were to take this further, perhaps I’ll have other time limits in this that start later on in the process – perhaps I directly prompt them for my other services after a given time for a brief amount of time, or perhaps I prompt them one more time to sign up for the newsletter. The possibilities are endless in this new “choose your own adventure” game!

BTW, if you saw this article as “sponsored” in your Facebook feed, it’s because it’s the first article after the 14 days I have set to show up for those of you that visit this blog. Pretty cool, huh?

 

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Twitter is Getting Back in the Limelight

Twitter has grown some strong user growth, exceeding the predictions of even Wall Street Financial Forecasts.

In the first quarter of 2017, it has experienced its greatest increase in two years having brought in nine million monthly users! Not only this, but it has exceeded analyst expectations on revenue and earnings!

“We’re delivering on our goal to build a service that people love to use, every day, and we’re encouraged by the audience growth momentum we saw in the first quarter,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced. “While we continue to face revenue headwinds, we believe that executing on our plan and growing our audience should result in positive revenue growth over the long term.”

For more information, visit variety.com

(Photo credits: James Altucher.com, Vince Reed)

 

 

 

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Should Businesses Invest in Snapchat or Instagram Stories?

As the two become more similar, they also become more competitive. Instagram has been copying, and possibly improving, what has been proven to be successful for Snapchat. The core example of this is Instagram’s mimicked use of Snapchat’s “stories” feature.

So, which is best?

According to Forbes, Snapchat is most ideal for audiences from the ages of 18-24. Whereas Instagram has been somehow best suited for those between the ages of 18-29, or even up to ages 30-49. What are your thoughts?

 

For more information, visit Forbes (photo source: Christina Mack/E! Illustration)

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Restricted Mode is Now More “LGBT-Inclusive” YouTube Says

YouTube got slammed by the LGBTQ last month after it became known that their “Restricted Mode” included LGBTQ themes and were blocked as “mature content”.

YouTube has since claimed it was a mistake and that now the videos are readily available.

“We were unintentionally filtering content from Restricted Mode that shouldn’t have been,” Johanna Wright, YouTube VP of product management, wrote in blog post.

For the full story, visit nbcnews.com (photo source: segundoenfoque.com)

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Facebook is Giving Money to Publishers to Produce Videos

Facebook will be paying publishers to produce videos so they can promote their new ad products!

Testing for mid-roll Facebook ads began last fall, and then earlier this year.

Produced videos will have to be at least 90 seconds long, so that at least one ad can be dropped in the middle of play. Live videos will have to be at least 6 minutes long.

For more information, visit recode.net (photo source: pdevice.com)

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Social Media Advertising Spending Is Up 60% From Last Year

Why is this? Because social media is becoming an increasingly crucial element in brand strategy! Even as consumers’ behaviors fluctuate with other forms of digital media and devices, their need for social media has gown constant. Thus, most advertising budgets seem to be getting their best return on investment through social media!

With the help of Stay N Alive, you can utilize social media marketing to its fullest and get the results you are looking for!

For the full report, visit adweek.com (photo source: business2community.com)

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Augmented Reality is Coming to Facebook!

(Image source: Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

Evidently, nobody was more inspired by Pokemon Go than Facebook’s very own Mark Zuckerberg. To him, it showed that the future of augmented reality is coming and its coming fast!

Although virtual reality was his original focus, Zuckerberg announced at Facebook’s annual F8 developers’ conference that their new focus would be making augmented reality tools for third parties. These features will include making custom masks, filters, and other effects!

Not only will this enhance users’ experience, but this will give Facebook the edge it needs to keep up with its competition. Snap Inc.’s Snapchat has already pulled ahead with virtual reality through the use of face-warping filters and its newly introduced feature that captures backgrounds and lets users interact with them in 3D.

For the full article, visit The Wall Street Journal

 

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Do You Have This? Facebook is Testing a GoFundMe Fundraising Competitor

Today I got an invite in my email for a special fundraising feature being offered early to administrators of official nonprofits on Facebook, allowing us to test a new feature which allows people to create our own fundraisers for our own personal profile or for a Facebook friend. The feature is modeled after the existing “Fundraisers” product offered by Facebook to officially verified nonprofits, and allows their fans to create their own fundraisers to raise money for the Charity.

This new feature seems to allow any user on Facebook to raise money for any reason (I’m guessing there will be limits), very similar to the model of GoFundMe, or similar fundraising sites. As a test, they’re asking early users to create a fundraiser around education, such as raising money for tuition, books, or tuition for someone else. Here is the text of the email:

I decided to put this to the test, and raise money for none-other than my daughter. The product is phenomenal! You start by going to http://facebook.com/fundraisers (available to everyone I believe now, but only for raising money for non-profits), and start by clicking “Create Fundraiser”.

It pops up a window, asking who you want to create the fundraiser for. It offers the new options of “Friend” or “Yourself”. Those are the critical new elements. If you don’t yet have this feature yet it should just say “nonprofit”, or you may not even see this dialog at all:

Once you select either “Friend” or yourself, it takes you onto the next dialog. Selecting “Friend” allows you to pick a friend you want to raise money for. I’m assuming “Yourself” allows you to create something for someone not in your friends list, or perhaps a cause that isn’t an official non-profit.

Once you select a friend it lets you enter pertinent details like selecting a picture (for friends it lets you select from their profile images or upload your own), as well as details about the fundraiser, how much you want to raise, and when the fundraiser expires. Once submitted, it will also prompt you to enter in information for a checking account to deposit money to – it’s not clear what the fees are related to this. Currently the submitted fundraisers go for approval to Facebook, I’m assuming to be sure they’re education-related (a cause Mark Zuckerberg is passionate about).

Once approved, you get an email that looks like this:

For my daughter’s fundraiser I now get notifications any time someone donates, and a progress bar shows up showing how close we are to reaching the goal. I was also given the opportunity to invite friends by friend list, so I sent an invite to all my family members. Once launched you can also send regular updates very similar to a Facebook Event, and supporters will all get the message. This is what her page looks like:

Overall this is an extremely powerful feature that, when launched to the masses will be used heavily for fundraising for friends and personal causes. Previously, sites like GoFundMe allowed this but the setup was burdensome and complicated. This was an extremely simple process, very social, and allowed me to never leave Facebook to set up. Sites like GoFundMe need to be worried about this one!

In the meantime, if you want to play with it, you’re welcome to contribute to my daughter’s education and see this amazing new feature in action!