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Social Marketing: How To Use Social Media Platforms To Reach Customers

Are you ready to expand your audience and customer base? Want to learn how to leverage social media to benefit your small business? If youre new to social media, at least in the business sense, and have yet to harness its marketing powers, you wont believe how easy it is to dive right into its sea of potential customers. Heres a look at how to get started with four of todays most powerful social media platforms and how to make them work for you.

Facebook With over1.94 billion usersworldwide, Facebook is the ultimate medium for connecting your business with people in your locale and all around the globe. Considering the wealth of Facebook advertising and exposure options, its an ideal starting point for any business. Facebook can be used in the traditional sense to share videos, photos, updates, and more to foster a growing sense of community around your business or product. However, you can also set up a Facebook ads account and laser target customers for pennies on the dollar.Whichever route you take, if you opt for one over the other and not both, Facebook is a goldmine definitely worth exploring.

Twitter Twitter allows you to post short text comments and updates, photos, videos, polls, links, and more to share and interact with others. Although its not as widely used as Facebook, it ranks among the top 10 websites in the U.S. in terms of popularity and is used by over 300 million people worldwide. If you have fun or interesting content to share, Twitter can help you quickly spread the word. Hashtags can be used to help boost posts, and if something you post is retweeted by someone with a large following, your content and your business can potentially go viral. The result will be a flood of new interest and sales.

That being said, you dont simply want to share your own media and links all the time. Instead, you should share plenty of relevant, interesting content from around the Web and other Twitter users as well. The key is finding the right balance.

Pinterest Pinterest allows you to pin content to digital bulletin boards for display. The pins can also be organized into categories for easier viewing. For example, someone may have a holiday board featuring pins of different craft Christmas decorations or a food board with pins of recipes and so on. Rich Pins can also be used to share special information like location maps, event details, and product descriptions. Pinterest is highly visual. In fact, each post can only be a video or an image. While you dont have to spend all day pinning on Pinterest, making sure your boards remain organized and easy to find can be a little time-consuming.

Pinterest is also more of a niche network and geared towards a female audience. In fact, some of the platforms most popular categories include beauty, fashion, photography, exercise, food, and DIY projects. Nonetheless, theres a bevy of ways to use this innovative platform and benefit from its highly active user base.

Instagram Instagram is another highly visual social media platform based specifically on image and video posts. Owned by Facebook, Instagram has been undergoing a popularity explosion in recent years and now has over 600 million active users who post primarily about travel, art, fashion, food, and similar subjects. Unlike the other social media platforms, Instagram is by and large entirely mobile. While its not quite suitable for all niches, if you want to harness the power of Instagram to boost your business, its important to post only the highest quality photos and videos. Like Twitter, hashtags can be used smartly to help ensure your Instagram success.

For some business, marketing through a primarily visual platform isnt always intuitive. Getting creative with your marketing and making use of these platforms, however, can greatly expand your customer base. Some companies, like ACN Inc, have managed to build successful marketing campaigns on these platforms, and you can too.

Bottom Line As a business owner, chances are you have limited resources and a lot to accomplish.Fortunately, social media marketing is incredibly low-cost and allows you to directly connect with current and prospective customers. However, what you save in dollars youll pay for with your time, so you need to be smart with your tactics and efficient with your resources. By doing so, youll be building your brand and pulling in social media profits in no time at all!

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Social Marketing: How To Use Social Media Platforms To Reach Customers - HostReview.com (press release) (blog)

For governments interested in suppressing information online, the old methods of direct censorship are getting less and less effective.

Over the past month, the Thai government has made escalating attempts to suppress critical information online. In the last week, faced with an embarrassing video of the Thai King, the government ordered Facebook to geoblock over 300 pages on the platform and even threatened to shut Facebook down in the country. This is on top of last month's announcement that the government had banned any online interaction with three individuals: two academics and one journalist, all three of whom are political exiles and prominent critics of the state. And just today, law enforcement representatives described their efforts to target those who simply viewnot even create or sharecontent critical of the monarchy and the government.

The Thai government has several methods at its own disposal to directly block large volumes of content. It could, as it has in the past, pressure ISPs to block websites. It could also hijack domain name queries, making sites harder to access. So why is it negotiating with Facebook instead of just blocking the offending pages itself? And what are Facebooks responsibilities to users when this happens?

The answer is, in part, HTTPS. When HTTPS encrypts your browsing, it doesnt just protect the contents of the communication between your browser and the websites you visit. It also protects the specific pages on those sites, preventing censors from seeing and blocking anything after the slash in a URL. This means that if a sensitive video of the King shows up on a website, government censors cant identify and block only the pages on which it appears. In an HTTPS world that makes such granularized censorship impossible, the governments only direct censorship option is to block the site entirely.

That might still leave the government with tenable censorship options if critical speech and dissenting activity only happened on certain sites, like devoted blogs or message boards. A government could try to get away with blocking such sites wholesale without disrupting users outside a certain targeted political sphere.

But all sorts of user-generated contentfrom calls to revolution to cat picturesare converging on social media websites like Facebook, which members of every political party use and rely on. This brings us to the second part of the answer as to why the government cant censor like it used to: mixed-use social media sites. When content is both HTTPS-encrypted and on a mixed-use social media site like Facebook, it can be too politically expensive to block the whole site. Instead, the only option left is pressuring Facebook to do targeted blocking at the governments request.

Government requests for targeted blocking happen when something is compliant with Facebooks community guidelines, but not with a countrys domestic law. This comes to a head when social media platforms have large user bases in repressive, censorious statesa dynamic that certainly applies in Thailand, where a military dictatorship shares its capital city with a dense population of Facebook power-users and one of the most Instagrammed locations on earth.

In Thailand, the video of the King in question violated the countrys overbroad lese majeste defamation laws against in any way insulting or criticizing the monarchy. So the Thai government requested that Facebook remove italong with hundreds of other pieces of contenton legal grounds, and made an ultimately empty threat to shut down the platform in Thailand if Facebook did not comply.

Facebook did comply and geoblock over 100 URLs for which it received warrants from the Thai government. This may not be surprising; although the government is likely not going to block Facebook entirely, they still have other ways to go after the company, including threatening any in-country staff. Indeed, Facebook put itself in a vulnerable position when it inexplicably opened a Bangkok office during high political tensions after the 2014 military coup.

If companies like Facebook do comply with government demands to remove content, these decisions must be transparent to their users and the general public. Otherwise, Facebook's compliance transforms its role from a victim of censorship, to a company pressured to act as a government censor. The stakes are high, especially in unstable political environments like Thailand. There, the targets of takedown requests can often be journalists, activists, and dissidents, and requests to take down their content or block their pages often serve as an ominous prelude to further action or targeting.

With that in mind, Facebook and other companies responding to government requests must provide the fullest legally permissible notice to users whenever possible. This means timely, informative notifications, on the record, that give users information like what branch of government requested to take down their content, on what legal grounds, and when the request was made.

Facebook seems to be getting better at this, at least in Thailand. When journalist Andrew MacGregor Marshall had content of his geoblocked in January, he did not receive consistent notice. Worse, the page that his readers in Thailand saw when they tried to access his post implied that the block was an error, not a deliberate act of government-mandated removal.

More recently, however, we have been happy to see evidence of Facebook providing more detailed notices to users, like this notice that exiled dissident Dr. Somsak Jeamteerasakul received and then shared online:

In an ideal world, timely and informative user notice can help power the Streisand effect: that is, the dynamic in which attempts to suppress information actually backfire and draw more attention to it than ever before. (And thats certainly whats happening with the video of the King, which has garnered countless international media headlines.) With details, users are in a better position to appeal to Facebook directly as well as draw public attention to government targeting and censorship, ultimately making this kind of censorship a self-defeating exercise for the government.

In an HTTP environment where governments can passively spy on and filter Internet content, individual pages could disappear behind obscure and misleading error messages. Moving to an increasingly HTTPS-secured world means that if social media companies are transparent about the pressure they face, we may gain some visibility into government censorship. However, if they comply without informing creators or readers of blocked content, we could find ourselves in a much worse situation. Without transparency, tech giants could misuse their power not only to silence vulnerable speakers, but also to obscure how that censorship takes placeand who demanded it.

Have you had your content or account removed from a social media platform? At EFF, weve been shining a light on the expanse and breadth of content removal on social media platforms with OnlineCensorship.org, where we and our partners at Visualising Impact collect your stories about content and account deletions. Share your story here.

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Online Censorship and User Notification: Lessons from Thailand - EFF

New York Times

The Censors' Disappearing Vibrator New York Times I discovered later that the second half of this episode featured two segments with celebrity guests that did not survive the Singapore censors' scrutiny: Jane Fonda wielding a vibrator and Asia Kate Dillon discussing her nonbinary gender identity, both ...

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The Censors' Disappearing Vibrator - New York Times

Rachel Zuckerman, Guest Opinion 6:34 p.m. CT May 19, 2017

Guest Opinion(Photo: Press-Citizen)Buy Photo

Journalists have been distraught since the 2017 presidential campaign. We are struggling with how to deal with fake news, increased calls for censorship, and negotiating what freedom of the press looks like in the digital age.

These conflicts are all important topics that must be debated. As journalists, we should be introspective about our role moving forward. However, while we negotiate the appropriate level of censorship or the best way to report on President Donald Trumps latest tweet, we miss the bigger picture.

Where are the critical discussions happening around education and media literacy?

Only about 1 in 3 American adults had a bachelors degree or higher in 2015, according to census data. Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight identified education, not income or other demographic factors, as the largest gap between Trump and Hillary Clinton voters. Clinton overwhelmingly outperformed Trump in counties where most people had at least a four-year degree.

The Trump campaigns fear-mongering and emotional appeals likely resonated more among people with lower educational levels than Clintons policy-oriented message. Trumps appeal also contributed to his ability to sow distrust in the media among his less educated base.

Yet, journalists have still arrived at a place where we debate semantics do we call false statements lies or falsehoods? Concurrent debates about censorship emerge. Is it beneficial to the public to censor hate speech and fake news that could perpetuate violence? Some journalists may feel the need to self-censor to avoid the criticism of a politically charged president.

As journalists, we fail to address societal problems when we become too self-centered. While we focus on how journalists should do their jobs better, we miss reporting on the fact that many of these issues would be mitigated with increased education and informed news consumption.

The editor-in-chief of The Daily Iowan, Lily Abromeit, agrees.

The reason fake news is such a problem is because people believe it, she said. I'm kind of starting to think that people don't really understand how to read a news article and what to look for to understand if it is legitimate.

A 2016 study from Stanford confirms Abromeits analysis. The research found that students at almost all grade levels cannot recognize fake news online.

Therefore, rather than disputing the limits of censorship, our time would be better spent thinking about how to integrate media literacy training into the classroom in addition to making education more accessible to Americans. Increased rates of educational attainment would equip more of the U.S. population with the critical thinking skills necessary to navigate our complex modern media landscape.

In an era of fake news and alternative facts, journalists must be diligent. We should question how to do our jobs better, but we should also press the public to demand education for the millions of Americans who have not received sufficient opportunities.

I realize it actually isn't probably very easy. But still important enough to be worthwhile, Abromeit said.

Rachel Zuckerman is a recent journalism and political science graduate from the University of Iowa who also served as student body president.

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Fight 'fake news' with education, not censorship - Iowa City Press Citizen

Allowing the telemarketing industry to self-regulate the Do Not Call Register and identifying more ways to reduce industry red tape are among recommendations for transforming the media and internet regulator.

While the Australian Communications and Media authority has performed its regulatory role "efficiently and well over the last 10 years", the Department of Communications' review found its governance should be restructured to include five full-time members, including a deputy chair as chief executive, rather than two part-time members and a chair and deputy.

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An American man sick of getting calls from telemarketers invents a phone robot to waste their time.

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One of those to be charged is the son of the Australian Taxation Office Deputy Commissioner Michael Cranston, who will appear in court.

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The families of the victims of the Lindt Cafe siege are scathing of the police decision to delay storming the cafe. In an interview with ABC's Four Corners, they say they were devastated to hear during the inquest that police only planned to enter the Lindt Cafe if gunman Man Monis killed or seriously injured a hostage.

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Key crossbench senator Nick Xenophon has made his support for the government's new bank levy conditional on the tax applying to foreign banks.

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Unveiling a $400 million donation to charities and cancer research, mining magnate Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest stood with politicians in Canberra to celebrate the biggest private donation in Australian history.

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Some of the statements made by Commissioner Andrew Scipione and his deputy Catherine Burn at the time of the Lindt cafe siege in 2014.

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Survivors of the Lindt Cafe siege reveal how they managed to escape the terror of being held by Man Haron Monis.

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Fourteen people are taken to hospital after dozens of passengers were injured after a truck and a Melbourne tram collided Monday morning.

An American man sick of getting calls from telemarketers invents a phone robot to waste their time.

The ACMAhas not had a permanent chair since Chris Chapman left in 2016, with Richard Bean acting as chair for the past 15 months.

The review was commissioned in mid-2015 by Malcolm Turnbull when he was communications minister. current Communications MinisterMitch Fifieldsaid the government supports all 27 recommendations.

Having a five-member full-time authority will "ensure that the ACMAis equipped for the complex task of regulating a dynamic and increasingly integrated communications sector", Senator Fifield said on Monday.

Among the 27 recommendations are that the ACMAexamine whether four roles it currently provides can be referred to industry for self-regulation, including the Do Not Call Register and taking action on spam.

The Do Not Call Register is 10 years old and holds about 10 million landline and mobile numbers. It is managed by Salmat under contract to the ACMA, which investigates complaints. The review suggests compliance is high enough that the telemarketing industry could take over management of this register with the ACMA staying on as regulator.

It is recommended that enforcement and investigation of breaches of the Interactive Gambling Actbe given to the ACMA. Currently the ACMAcan only referbreaches. It has referred more than 120cases to the Australian Federal Police, which has previously declined to investigate complaints.

Interactive gambling is illegal in Australia, it includes activities such as placing betswhile a game is in playand online casino-style games.

The authority may take control of classification from the existing Classification Board. The current scheme is fragmented and split between too many bodies, the review found. The Tax Office may be given responsibility for collecting spectrum and licencefees.

However, the ACMAmaylose its cybersecurity programs, which the review recommends be transferred to the Attorney-General's Department, where the Australian Cyber Security Centre is located.

The report also recommends the ACMApublish a report every two years on "initiatives undertaken to identify and reduce regulatory burden on industry and individuals".

Labor's communications spokeswomanMichelle Rowlandcriticised the department for taking so long to release the report, which she said was "of such modest and unremarkable substance".

She said the ACMA needs to be properly funded with capacity to promote principles-based legislation so laws are not outdated too quickly.

"The underlying problem was that this government never really knew why it commenced theACMAreview in the first place, and neither did stakeholders," she said.

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Telemarketers may be given control of Do Not Call Register in regulator shake-up - The Sydney Morning Herald