Brian Meert's Blog, page 131

Facebook Watch Is Popular Among Gen Zs and Millennials

January 24, 2018
Anne Felicitas

A survey conducted on December of last year found a promising audience for Facebook Watch: Gen Zs and Millennials.

According to the survey by Morgan Stanley, which involved 1,400 US participants aged 16 and older, 40 percent of Facebook users regularly use Watch, and 60 percent of users who are on Facebook three or more hours a day use Watch every week. Participants aged 16 and older claimed to use Watch on a daily basis.

The survey also found that approximately 75 percent of Facebook Watch users watch short-form videos under 20 minutes weekly and nearly 50 percent watch long-form videos that are 20 minutes or longer.

Facebook Watch’s popularity among younger users comes as good news to the social media giant that has been fighting to capture the loyalties of younger users to whom the company’s relevance and future rely on.

Facebook launched Watch in the summer of 2017 in an attempt to increase video content on its platform and declutter News Feed. Watch also competes against rivals Snapchat and Youtube, whose demographics, especially the former, are mostly comprised of younger users.

Watch is a separate tab located on the left column of News Feed, invented exclusively for long-form, short-form, and episodic videos. The shows available to Watch are Returning the Favor, Ball in the Family, Bae or Bail, and RelationShipped. In addition to reality shows and documentaries, Watch also features sports.

Although Facebook has a promising audience for Watch, it is still bested by YouTube, the most widely used video content platform. While 78 percent of respondents said they used YouTube in the past year, only 43 percent said they used Facebook Watch.

The post Facebook Watch Is Popular Among Gen Zs and Millennials appeared first on AdvertiseMint.

When Writing Ad Copy, Ask Yourself These 8 Important Questions

January 23, 2018
Anna Hubbel

Before marketing a product or service, use the 8-question grid of 'before' and 'after.' #adcopy #digitalmarketing
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Effective ad copy captures the problems of your customers and offers solutions to those problems. To do so, you must ask eight important questions about the before and the after of your customers’ experiences with your product or service using the eight-question grid.

In the eight-question grid, you have the “before” state, your customer’s state before they bought your product or service, and the “after” state, their state after they purchased your product or service. Customers in the before state usually have a problem they are seeking solutions to. The solution is your product or service, which brings them to the after state: problems resolved. For example, customers in the before state don’t know how to file taxes alone. Your service, tax preparation and filing, gives a solution to their problem and brings them to the after state where they feel satisfied that their problems are solved.

Questions 1 & 2

What does your prospect have in the before state? What does your prospect have in the after state?

For example, if you are selling a dish soap product that deep cleans and eliminates grease and food stains without harming pots or dishes, this is how you might answer these two questions:

Before: A weak, damaging dish soap

After: A powerful, rejuvenating dish soap

Questions 3 & 4

How does your prospect feel in the before state? How does your prospect feel in the after state?

Using the same dish soap example, here’s what your answers might look like:

Before: Annoyed or Frustrated

After: Confident or In-Control

Questions 5 & 6

What is an average day like for your prospect in the before state? What is an average day like for your prospect in the after state?

Your answers to these questions for the dish soap might look like this:

Before: Meal cleanup is a pain and takes forever

After: Meal cleanup is easy and quick

Questions 7 & 8

What is your prospect’s status in the before state? What is your prospect’s status in the after state?

The before and after responses might look like this:

Before: Unhappy to do the dishes

After: Happy to do the dishes

Baby Bath Example

Here’s a grid that involves answering the eight questions for a soft and safe baby bath tub.  

After answering these questions, the copywriter is able to easily craft the following example ad copies:

“Bath time with your newborn doesn’t have to be a scary, frustrating experience.”
“Say goodbye to bath time stress. You’ll actually enjoy bathing baby in this safe, comfortable bathtub.”
“You’ll feel like Mother of the Year as your baby plays and bathes in the safety of this warm, soft bathtub.”

It’s as easy as that.

Cost of Product

By answering these eight questions, you are also better equipped to come up with the amount you should charge for your product or service. Why? Because the answers to these questions help you establish a distance between the before and after, which is also referred to as value.

If you want to charge more for your product or service, you now have a clear concept of how to do that by making the distance (aka value) between the before and after more apparent in your marketing language. As a result, you have a better marketing campaign that you can easily define.

It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

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Facebook to Reduce News Sources on News Feed

January 19, 2018
Anne Felicitas
Photo courtesy of fortune.com

Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced his second significant change to News Feed this year: reducing the amount of news sources on the feed.

“You’ll see less public content, including news, video, and posts from brands…expect news to make up roughly 4% of News Feed—down from roughly 5% today.”

Not all news sites will perish from the algorithm change, however. Rather, sites that are trustworthy, informative, and local will be prioritized on the feed.

This change, according to Zuckerberg, ensure users’ time spent on Facebook is time well spent. Additionally, it is a way to combat the pervasive presence of fake news on its platform.

“There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation, and polarization in the world today. Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them, ” says Zuckerberg.

Facebook’s quality surveys will determine which news sites will have priority on the feed. The surveys will ask users whether they are familiar with a news source and whether they trust that news source. The responses will show which organizations are trusted by their followers and which are broadly trusted across society, including people who don’t follow that source.

The change, says Zuckerberg, will not affect the amount of news users will see on Facebook. Rather, it will allow trustworthy news sources to dominate the feed.

Last year, Facebook revealed that its platform was manipulated by Russian “troll farms” before, during, and after the 2016 US presidential election. The troll farms published organic and paid fake news containing divisive and controversial political messages. The reduction of news sources on News Feed is one of Zuckerberg’s 2018 resolutions of fixing Facebook.

The announcement came as a Facebook post from Zuckerberg’s personal account, following up on his first announcement on News Feed changes last week.

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3 Questions to Ask When Choosing Colors for Your Logo

January 19, 2018
Anna Hubbel

Choosing the right color scheme for your logo is an essential part of building your #brand. #colorpsychology #logodesign
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Crafting a logo to represent your business takes a lot of consideration, especially when it comes to color choice. Colors have a psychological influence, so it’s important to choose ones that accurately convey the purpose of your business, as well as elicit the emotions you want your customers to associate with your brand.

Social Media Today shared an infographic created by Design Mantic as a color guide when choosing a color scheme for your logo. The guide walks you through three simple questions to ask yourself in the decision-making process.

What Do the Different Colors Mean?

This is the most important question to consider about color. By knowing what emotions or feelings are associated with each color, you can better determine which fits your business best. For instance, the color red represents passion, energy, danger, and warmth. Purple represents wisdom, dignity, wealth, and luxury. Green represents nature, ethics, growth, and freshness, and pink represents fun, flirting, feminism, and cuteness.

See the infographic for a full list of colors and what they are associated with.

Photo Courtesy of Design Mantic
Should You Use Single or Multiple Colors?

For a better understanding of this question, think about the logos for Target and Twitter. Both use one color in their logo. The infographic says using a single color maximizes impact. Using multiple colors, on the other hand, such as Google and Microsoft do in their logos, conveys diversity. Base your decision on the goals you have set for your business. Which is more important in your mission a bold statement or diversity?

Where Are Your Clients Based?

Is your audience demographic based primarily on a local geographic area? If so, it may be a good idea to incorporate a color that appeals to the area’s cultural feel.

If your target audience is global, explore what colors may mean in differing cultures. As the infographic points out, for example, the color red is associated with luck in China, and white represents death and mourning in India.

Once you’ve designed your logo to your liking, make sure you trademark it.

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How to Use Snapchat for Promoting Your Next Event

January 19, 2018
By Ajay Thyagarajan, head of marketing at SwipeStudio

how to use #snapchat for promoting your next event.
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This article originally appeared on Swipe Studio. 

In this day and age, Snapchat perfectly fits the bill in being privy to what’s happening and making users feel that much more special. You could even say Snapchat is a cut above the others at that. This is attributed to the content the platform uses: personal, unique, and snackable. In that moment, only you took that picture of the food you’re eating, the concert you’re attending, or the dress you’re buying. That is one of Snapchat’s biggest winning streaks, and now, as a business owner, yours. Here is a preview of what this post will talk about.

The ephemeral nature of Snapchat’s content might just be the perfect fit for your next event. It’s one of the best ways to generate curiosity and leverage the resulting fear of missing out (FOMO). Here’s an analogy to explain that. If there’s a flash sale with a 50 percent discount on everything from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. only on that one day, wouldn’t you step on the gas and be there for that hour? Just reading or seeing that made you feel that element of urgency, didn’t it? That urgency is induced because of the short duration of the sale. Perplexing as it may be, the sense of urgency and exclusivity invites its buddies.

Snapchat Is a Hive of Activity

A hive with 178 million daily active users, to be exact. Imagine the amount of honey you can draw from that. People are using Snapchat to send snaps to their friends, find interesting things on Discover, create Stories, use quirky filters and lenses, and so much more. Additionally, people send three billion snaps every day. That’s three billion snaps your next event can be a part of. How? Read on.

Snapchat Can Help You Cause a Stir

One of the most important things events are characterized by is they’re location based. A music concert, a flea market, a food festival, or a cars expo, whatever the event may be, it’ll happen in one or multiple geographically bound locations. Snapchat has devised a great opportunity to leverage the location attribute, and it’s called geofilters.

Snapchat geofilters are graphics that overlay the images you click. They are related to a particular location and the events happening there. In one shot your brand will have interacted with your fans and their friends in a fun and contextually relevant way.

Geofilters are perfect for event advertisements because they safely lure your customers to your event. By sharing a live experience virtually, your audience is showing, not telling, their community what they’re doing, creating a cascading effect of “Omg, look what’s happening there! Let’s go now.” That’s how your event sells out.

With Snapchat, you can reach a whole new set of audiences such as Millennials, a demographic that is more difficult to reach through television, print, or other traditional marketing methods. Geofilters are the perfect creative outlet for that audience to create exciting stories that they share with their friends.

Now, let’s play a game. I created three events and three examples of geofilter designs for each. At the end of it, you can respond in the comments section below, stating if you fit into any one of these examples.

1. If it is a sports event

Sports events are all about the teams, the passionate crowd supporting and cheering, and the rivalry. Passion, excitement, and loyalty are emotions you could play on while creating geofilters for a sports event.

Let’s say you own a sports pub and today it’s the Barcelona vs. Real Madrid match. You have a huge screen, and you are telecasting the match. You’ve decked up your bar with banners, posters, and slogans of both the teams. You’ve even customized the menu with drinks named “Messi-ng with your head.” There are multiple opportunities for geofilters here. Any geofilter you create will have your branding on it. Here are two ideas.

A. Geofilters can be perfect for running contests where you give away coupons. For instance, you could run a happy hour coupon contest for all those who take a snap with your geofilter and send it to you. This makes sure that your customers are in the location of your pub, thereby helping you increase your sales.

B. Geofilters with the teams’ logos, banners, or famous players can add a big winning fun element to your pub, making you stand out from the rest of them.

2. If it is a music concert

Music concerts are high energy and extremely entertaining. The geofilters have to bring out those elements in their designs along with the genre of music, the location of the concert, and the audience the artist is attracting. If you are sponsoring or organizing the event, you can include your branding in the geofilter, thereby making sure you reach not just the people attending the concert but also their friends. Let’s say it’s a Beatles concert. Here are two ideas.

A. The geofilter design can have titles of their most famous songs with related graphics. For instance, for the title “Yellow Submarine,” a small yellow colored submarine could be part of the design.

B. Imagine clicking a picture with the Fab Four. The design can include a sketch of their faces, placing them at four corners of the screen so everyone feels like they’re taking a picture with them.

3. If it is a restaurant

Everyone takes pictures of their food. There are numerous contests you can run at your restaurant with geofilters. Let’s say you own a restaurant called The Steak Out.  Here are two ideas.

A. “Stake out at the Steak Out” could be your geofilter. You can run a contest where you tell your customers the first five people to send you a snap with the geofilter gets a 50 percent discount on their meal for staking you out.

B. “Staken out for dinner!” could be another geofilter which your customers can use if they come to your restaurant for a dinner date.

Now, it’s your turn. Comment with the event and your ideas for the geofilter.

Snapchat Is a Way of Life

It’s no longer just a tool that teenagers use to take pictures. It’s a platform for communication and, more important, discovery. The best part is even a shaky video of your dog with a Burger King crown is perfect for Snapchat. It has taken away the need for creating the perfect image by making it disappear in an hour or a day. That, honestly, is like finding that breath of fresh air amidst all that social overwhelm. Snapchat has a way of humanizing marketing content, and this opportunity to tell the story exactly while it’s happening is golden.

Ajay Thyagarajan is the head of marketing at Swipe Studio, an online platform that allows businesses to launch their Snapchat Geofilters and Lens campaigns. To get started with creating your own Snapchat Geofilter, use a tool like Swipe Studio.

The post How to Use Snapchat for Promoting Your Next Event appeared first on AdvertiseMint.

Do Real People Stop Spam on Facebook?

January 18, 2018
Anne Felicitas

Do real people stop spam on #Facebook ? Find the answer here. #socialmedia #spam
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Immediately after posting a link to a group, I received a message from Facebook that made my heart plummet, as the guilty would when enduring a reprimand. “We removed this post because it looks like spam to us. If you did post this and don’t believe it’s spam, you can let us know,” the message said. When I posted the same link to three other groups, I instantly received the same message.

Facebook removes a post it perceived as spam.

In the numerous times I’ve posted the same link to several different Facebook groups in one session, Facebook has never removed my posts. Nonetheless, eager to correct my transgression, I replied by clicking the it’s-not-spam button attached to the message. I then received an automated response that stated Facebook will review my post again.

Soon after its automated response, Facebook sent me another message: it recovered my posts because they weren’t spam after all. This news, although positive, left me perplexed. I wondered why Facebook thought my posts were spam in the first place.

Facebook instantly responds to the message.

According to Facebook Help Center, spam is “contacting people with unwanted content or requests. This includes sending bulk messages, excessively posting links or images to people’s timelines, and sending friend requests to people you don’t know personally.” My transgression may have fallen under excessively posting links to people’s timeliness, although in my case, groups. But how did Facebook know I violated its policy?

Facebook fights spam in two ways. One, it relies on the watchful eyes of users. When you spam timelines and news feeds, someone can report you to Facebook. Once Facebook employees receive that person’s report, they will investigate the case and contact you, keeping the reporter’s name and personal information confidential. Two, according to a Facebook representative, Facebook also uses automated systems to fight spam on its platform.

“We also implement automated systems to stop the spread of certain types of content that very clearly violate our Community Standards. For example, we use automation to recognize and stop spam attacks.”

Users can report a post as spam.

Because it’s too much of a coincidence that different people from four different groups marked my posts as spam the second I published them, and because the messages I received from Facebook were instantaneous, as though they were automated, it’s much more likely Facebook’s automated system saw that I was posting the same links to multiple groups in one sitting, perceived my action as spam, removed my posts, and sent me a warning. But why did Facebook decide to restore my posts?

According to the same Facebook representative, Facebook also employs people who decide whether or not an action did violate Facebook’s Community Standards.

“Of course, a lot of the work we do is very contextual, such as determining whether a particular comment is hateful or bullying. That’s why we have real people looking at those reports and making the decisions.”

It’s likely after I responded to Facebook’s warning message, an employee looked into my case and decided my efforts weren’t spam after all.

In the past, relying on technology alone hasn’t been the best way to combat abuse on its platform. That’s why Facebook has the Community Operations team that resolves issues from spam to cyberbullying to hate speech to terrorist threats and why Facebook promised to hire 3,000 more reviewers last year when several violent videos emerged on its platform. But with a platform servicing billions of users, a platform buzzing with activity 24 hours each day, Facebook needs technology to help employees combat as much abuse on its platform as it can.

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How to Control What Visitors Post on Your Facebook Page

January 18, 2018
Anna Hubbel

As transparent and engaging as you may want your Facebook page to be, nobody likes a troll. The best way to prevent users from trolling your page is by preventing visitors from posting on your page, which you can do by changing your settings.

Prevent #trolls from trolling your @Facebook page by changing your settings. #facebookhowto
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Steps for Changing Visitor Page Settings

Step 1: After logging into your page, go to “Settings” at the top right of the page.

Step 2: With the “General” tab selected, find and select “Visitor Posts.”

Step 3: You then have the option to select either “Allow visitors to the Page to publish posts” or “Disable posts by other people on the Page” (depending on your preference).

If you’ve selected “Allow visitors to the Page to publish posts,” you have two options to choose from: “Allow photo and video posts” or “Review posts by other people before they’re published to the Page.”

If you select to review posts, you are able to review posts first by going to “Posts by Others” in your activity log. By approving a post upon review, you can then choose to allow it on your page.

Step 5: After you’ve specified your preferences, select “Save Changes.”

Additionally, when it comes to visitors’ posts, you can also:

Hide or delete individual comments
Block words and turn on the profanity filter
Ban specified users from your page
Turn off reviews for your page

If you want to change more of your page settings, you can also learn how to turn off similar page suggestions on your Facebook page.

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10 Percent of Total US Ad Spending in 2018 Predicted to Go to Facebook

January 17, 2018
Anna Hubbel

The year 2018 is looking exciting for social media, eMarketer is predicting. Both Facebook and Snapchat are expected to see ad revenue growth (especially Facebook), and it’s unlikely that we’ll see any less of either social media company in the headlines around political ad transparency.

10% of total US ad spending in 2018 predicted to go to @Facebook . #futureofsocialmedia #emarketerforecasts #emarketer
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Ad Revenue Growth

As predicted by eMarketer, Facebook will take $1 of every $10 spent on both digital and non-digital advertising in 2018. Additionally, the powerhouse social media company is expected to reach $21.57 billion in US ad revenues this year. That’s double what will be spent on newspaper advertising and almost as much as print advertising spends in entirety (which will total about $23.12 billion).

To top it off, that 10 percent Facebook will account for this year will bump up to 11.3 percent in 2019, eMarketer forecasts.

Photo Courtesy of eMarketer

Snapchat, meanwhile, is expected to generate $1.18 billion in US ad revenues this year. Considering Snapchat’s failure to meet desired revenues early last year, this number is promising and likely comes from Snap’s new conversion into a more advertising-friendly platform. For example, in May 2017, Snapchat rolled out its self-serve ad manager, and in the summer, released advanced mode for Ad Manager. Additionally, the network recently introduced Context Cards, which provide users with basic information about local businesses.

Ad Transparency

Facebook has made national headlines as of late in regards to political ad transparency. A majority of the scrutiny has come from the recent discovery of politically divisive ads originating from Russian troll accounts who distributed the fake news across Facebook during the 2016 US presidential election. Since then, Facebook has been the center focus of ad transparency issues.

In light of these and similar events, Facebook has taken full-throttle, zero-tolerance actions to increase transparency and safer experiences across the platform. For instance, the network placed a temporary block on ads excluding ethnic and racial groups and removed self-reported targeting to prevent discrimination. Additionally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a 2018 resolution to fix Facebook’s mistakes.

Zuckerberg also just recently announced a major change to News Feed, which will decrease the amount of businesses’ content on the feed to promote more meaningful interactions between friends and family.

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How to Turn Off Similar Page Suggestions on Your Facebook Page

January 17, 2018
Anna Hubbel
Photo Courtesy of TechCrunch

When users visit your Facebook page, you want them to have your page at the forefront of their minds. You may prefer that they don’t see suggestions for pages similar to yours while they are visiting your page. These suggestions typically appear in the People Also Like section of your page, on the right-hand side. Conveniently, there’s a way to turn off these page recommendations. Note that only page admins can turn off page suggestions.

Turn off page suggestions for your @Facebook page in 4 easy steps. #facebookhacks
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Step 1: Go to “Settings” at the top right of your Page.

Step 2: With the “General” tab selected at the left, select to edit “Similar Page Suggestions.”  

Step 3: When the option to include your page when recommending similar pages appears, click the box next to it to check or uncheck it.

Step 4: Save your changes.

It should also be noted that by turning off page suggestions, you also stop your page from appearing in the People Also Like section of other businesses’ Facebook pages.

 

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Effective Mobile Video Techniques According to Facebook Study

January 6, 2018
Anna Hubbel

A recent Facebook-commissioned study revealed common themes in effective mobile video techniques, primarily the use of brand type and brand placement. Using 759 video ads from more than 300 brands, the study surveyed viewers’ responses regarding brand recall, the viewers’ ability to remember the brand in the video they saw.

A recent @Facebook study revealed common themes in effective #mobilevideo techniques, primarily the use of #brandtype & #brandplacement.
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Video ads created for mobile first, the study revealed, performed the best. “Mobile first” simply means the videos were created specifically for mobile, using shorter duration times and displaying the brand within the first few seconds. In contrast, videos adapted to mobile, displaying the brand early in a long video, and traditional narratives, displaying the brand later in the video, did not perform as well in brand recall.

According to Social Media Today, clearly identifying brand early on helps solidify the message, as well as show credibility and relevance. Additionally, establishing the brand in the first few seconds of the video was crucial in improving aided recall, giving users cues to help them remember the brand.

Photo Courtesy of SocialMediaToday

As previously mentioned, brand type was another theme uncovered in the study. Differing types include a smaller presence, such as adding the brand as a watermark, or a stronger presence, such as placing the brand front and center. Facebook found that stronger brand types performed high in aided recall as opposed to those with a weak presence. It’s also worth noting that shorter videos, as in mobile first ads, unsurprisingly performed better than videos with longer durations.

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