Mediaboss Marketing

By the time you figure out what works, it doesnt.

Thats social media for you a constantly changing frontier where best practices are best because theyre unique and interesting, standing out from the crowd. They challenge the status quo, suggesting a new and better way of engaging with an audience.

And then a bunch of other people figure out how to do the same thing.

Well, it doesnt have to be that way. If youre able to learn some core best practices, you can apply your skills to whatever social trend-of-the-day may come along. Some things, like authenticity and responsiveness, will never go out of style.

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A new infographic from Yeager Marketing shares some timeless advice for building a better social marketing strategy. (Which by the way is worth it.) Did you know, for example

Thats less than a fifth of a full-time employee. Yet those are results that many businesses would gladly hire someone to do for 15 hours a week if it drove the same results.

If youre looking to maximize your efforts, squeezing the most from those six hours a week, heres what you need to know:

Check out the infographic below to learn more

Bob Hutchins (Franklin, TN) runs Buzzplant (www.buzzplant.com), A 12+ year old Internet marketing agency targeting the faith/family market. His team was an integral part of the online campaign for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, The Chronicles of Narnia, Soul Surfer, and many other movies, books, music releases, and Viewfullprofile

Originally posted here:
How to Build a Sustainable Social Marketing Strategy [Infographic] - Business 2 Community

June 29, 2017

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery is how the old saying goes, but Snapchat likely isn't charmed by other social apps copying its capabilities.

From offering vertical video ads to releasing its own versions of Stories and face filters, Instagram has been adopting many of Snapchat's distinguishing features, and it could be taking a toll on how marketers view Snapchat. Consider: A Social Media Examiner survey found that 54% of the more than 5,700 marketers polled say they commonly use Instagram; however, just 7% said the same about Snapchat. And while 24% of respondents said they regularly use Instagram ads, just 1% said they regularly use Snapchat ads.

So, what unique benefits can Snapchat offer marketers that Instagram cannot (and vice versa)? We compared the two social apps and outlined each of their appeals below.

Instagram

Instagram has a larger audience than Snapchat

A social network's clout is often measured by its user base, and Instagram is beating Snapchat in this numbers game.

In April, Instagram announced that it had 700 million monthly active users. Snapchat hasn't revealed its monthly active user count; however, in May, it announced that it has 166 million daily active users. Even though this isn't an exact side-by-side comparison, the magnitude of Instagram's audience can be gauged by looking at its Stories feature. According to TechCrunch, Instagram Stories has 250 million daily active users that's more than the number of daily active users Snapchat has on its entire platform.

Instagram has a shorter conversion funnel than Snapchat

One reason Instagram may have a higher user base is because it has a shorter conversion funnel.

According to Thomas Cilius, CEO and cofounder of Snaplytics (an analytics and marketing platform for Snapchat and Instagram Stories), Snapchat's content has almost no virality. So, consumers aren't likely to see a brand's Snapchat content unless they're already on Snapchat and they're already following the brand.

To acquire new followers, brands have to already be in contact with consumers and promote their Snapchat username via other channels, Cilius explains, such as via other social networks. However, this is where things get tricky: Cilius says consumers have to be interested in the brand enough to start following it on Snapchat (this is where some drop-off can occur), and they have to already have a Snapchat account.

Marketers can rely on other methods like Snapcodes or deep-linking to up their follower count, but these tactics aren't as effective. According to Snaplytics' Q4 2016 Snapchat Quarterly Report, 64% of new followers analyzed in Q4 2016 searched for a Snapchat username, compared to 25% and 9% who used Snapcodes or deeplinking, respectively.

Instagram, however, gains followers by having people like your profile, Cilius explains, which generally happens after people have browsed hashtags, see trending content, or specifically search for the brand. Consumers can also discover brands on Instagram through influencers.

Instagram embraces influencers

Speaking of which, influencer marketing is another place Instagram seems to have a foothold. Check out these figures reported by Digiday: According to the 2016 Influencer Marketing Report by visual marketing solutions provider Chute and influencer search engine Thuzio, 89% of the more than 200 marketers surveyed say they work with or find influencers on Instagram; however, about half (45%) say the same about Snapchat. Research company eMarketer also estimated that 2016's global influencer marketing revenues totaled more than $570 million for Instagram alone.

Orli LeWinter, SVP of strategy and social marketing for digital marketing agency 360i, says Instagram offers influencers a bigger community with more scale. This creates a greater sense of efficiency, she says, in terms of ensuring that the content they invested time and resources in is seen. Influencers can also often use their high Instagram follower count to negotiate pay.

It's a currency they know how to barter with, Cilius says.

Then again, consumers in different countries can exhibit different social media behaviors. In Germany, for instance, 55% of the roughly 1,600 Snapchat users surveyed say they follow celebrities, according to eMarketer. What's more, 22.2% follow between 11 and 20. Germany's Snapchat users are predominantly teens. According to eMarketer, 65.7% of users polled are 14 to 19 years old.

Instagram is owned by Facebook

When it comes to favorites, marketers have a fondness for Facebook. According to the Social Media Examiner study, 94% of polled marketers say they regularly use Facebook. In fact, 62% of respondents consider Facebook their most important social channel.

There's a reason for all of this, of course. Facebook has robust targeting capabilities for its slew of ad products and offers marketers more performance metrics than other social platforms out there.

Facebook is the most developed out of all of the social platforms when it comes to the tools and APIs they provide, LeWinter says. She also says marketers and agencies are more comfortable using Facebook's tools because of the social network's longevity although, it has had a few measurement hiccups along the way.

As a Facebook-acquired company, Instagram gets to take advantage of these targeted advertising capabilities. Moses Velasco, chief product evangelist for social marketing and analytics solution provider Socialbakers says marketers can create targeted ads on Facebook and seamlessly run them on Instagram. This allows marketers to broadcast their ads across two platforms with massive audiences at once.

Instagram's metrics are easier to measure.

Snapchat works with several measurement solution providers, like Nielsen and Millward Brown, to track metrics like viewability, reach, resonance, and reaction (i.e. sales lift). However, Velasco says it's still very difficult for other vendors to provide clients with Snapchat performance analytics.

Indeed, in a previous DMN article, Erna Alfred Liousas, an analyst for research and advisory firm Forrester, described Snapchat's metrics as skimpy and listed the following as some of its main metrics: how many users viewed an ad, how many times a brand filter or lens was used, and how many people swiped over an ad to see additional content. Tiffany Elliot, who at the time was an analyst for advisory firm Digital Clarity Group, also said in the article that marketers could track number of users, screenshots, times users snapped them back, and whether a story was watched all the way through.

Instagram, however, can leverage Facebook's reporting capabilities and offer deeper insights on its followers' demographics and post/Stories engagement.

Overall, you're just always going to get more level of detail from Instagram and Facebook than you are on Snapchat, LeWinter says.

Snapchat

Snapchat doesn't have to fight as hard for eyeballs

Snapchat and Instagram serve different purposes. According to Cilius, Instagram is a platform people use to follow brands, friends, and influencers; Snapchat, however, is more of a platform for one-to-one communication with peers.

But Cilius says this can actually work in marketers' favor. If a consumer follows a brand on Snapchat, he says, that brand becomes a member of that consumer's exclusive club. As a result, there's less competition for eyeballs, he says, and consumers are more likely to engage with a brand's content.

According to the aforementioned Snapltyics report, 54.8% of followers for an account will open a story. What's more, 87.5% of those people will watch the story from the beginning to end, according to the report.

Snapchat embraces authenticity. While Instagram is a platform used to share edited and curated content, Snapchat's content is more authentic. Indeed, Cilius points out that the content has to be posted in real-time. This gives brands the opportunity to appear more human and produce genuine content, like Stories about people who work for their companies, Velasco says.

Snapchat is a favorite among young consumers.

Snapchat is known as being the app for teens. As Business Insider reports, investment bank and asset management firm Piper Jaffray found that 39% of the approximately 5,500 teens surveyed said Snapchat was their favorite social network app compared to 23% who deemed Instagram their favorite.

However, teens seem to use both apps regularly. According to the aforementioned study, 81% of teens say they use Snapchat every month versus 79% who say the same about Instagram.

What's more, Snapchat seems to be attracting older consumers. eMarketer predicts that 70.4 million people in the U.S. will use Snapchat this year; 6.4% of this population will be made up of consumers 45 to 54 years old. Although, consumers 18 to 24 years old will still make up the majority this year (about 30%).

Snapchat isn't Instagram.

Despite all of Instagram's benefits, Snapchat still has one thing over the app: It's not Instagram. Some people just prefer one platform over the other, and marketers need to still communicate with their consumers in the channels in which they play.

According to a study by comparison app Wishbone reported by the Huffington Post, 75% of the more than 32,000 young consumers surveyed said they would not consider deleting Snapchat even after Instagram debuted a similar Stories feature. What's more, 57% said they would not consider deleting Snapchat if Instagram implemented filters. Although, this study came out in 2016 and Instagram didn't launch its face features until May 2017, so their sentiments may have changed.

You still may need to cater to two different audiences across channels, Velasco says.

Read the original post:
Instagram Versus Snapchat: a Side-by-Side Comparison - DMN

June 30, 2017 BerlinGerman lawmakers approved a bill on Friday aimed at cracking down on hate speech on social networks, which critics say could have drastic consequences for free speech online.

The measure approved is designed to enforce the country's existing limits on speech, including the long-standing ban on Holocaust denial. Among other things, it would fine social networking sites up to 50 million euros ($56 million) if they persistently fail to remove illegal content within a week, including defamatory "fake news."

"Freedom of speech ends where the criminal law begins," said Justice Minister Heiko Maas, who was the driving force behind the bill.

Mr. Maas said official figures showed the number of hate crimes in Germany increased by over 300 percent in the past two years.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter have become a battleground for angry debates about Germany's recent influx of more than 1 million refugees, with authorities struggling to keep up with the flood of criminal complaints.

Maas claimed that 14 months of discussion with major social media companies had made no significant progress. Last week, lawmakers from his Social Democratic Party and Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Union bloc agreed a number of amendments to give companies more time to check whether posts that are flagged to them are illegal, delegate the vetting process to a third party, and ensure that users whose comments are removed can appeal the decision.

But human rights experts and the companies affected warn that the law risks privatizing the process of censorship and could have a chilling effect on free speech.

"This law as it stands now will not improve efforts to tackle this important societal problem," Facebook said in a statement.

"We feel that the lack of scrutiny and consultation do not do justice to the importance of the subject. We will continue to do everything we can to ensure safety for the people on our platform," the company said, noting that it is hiring 3,000 additional staff on top of 4,500 already working to review posts.

Aside from the hefty fine for companies, the law also provides for fines of up to 5 million euros for the person each company designates to deal with the complaints procedure if it doesn't meet requirements.

Social networks also have to publish a report every six months detailing how many complaints they received and how they dealt with them.

Among those cheering the law was Germany's main Jewish organization, which called it a "strong instrument against hate speech in social networks."

Germany has long had a law criminalizing Holocaust denial a response to the country's Nazi-era history of allowing racist ideas to become genocidal policy.

"Jews are exposed to anti-Semitic hatred in social networks on a daily basis," the Central Council of Jews said. "Since all voluntary agreements with platform operators produced almost no result, this law is the logical consequence to effectively limit hate speech."

The nationalist Alternative for Germany party, which has frequently been accused of whipping up sentiments against immigrants and minorities, said it is considering challenging the law in Germany's highest court.

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Germany passes censorship law to fight online hate speech - Christian Science Monitor

If you tried to search for Emma Watsons Wikpedia page in Iran in 2013, you wouldnt have been able to find it; the article was one of 963 blocked by the government. This tidbit about the Harry Potter actress is found in a 2013 University of Pennsylvaniareport on Irans censorship of Wikipedia. Researchers at Harvards Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society recently built on this publication by analyzing censorship of the site in 15 countries since 2014. In a report published in May, they found that censorship of Wikipedia has declined since then due to the sites new security measures.

In fact, they discovered that only three countries blocked access to parts of Wikipedia during the duration of the study: China and Uzbekistan were blocking the Chinese- and Uzbek-language versions of Wikipedia (read more coverage of censorship in China, and its use of fake social media posts to influence public opinion). Thailand had once blocked the Yiddish versionmost likely a weird misconfiguration, says Justin Clark, a software developer at the center and the principal author of the report. They derived their results partly by analyzing data from the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedias parent organization) that showed when people load Wikipedia articles, and partly from 41 servers located in different countries around the world that tried to load Wikipedia and could determine if the website was blocked.

Clark says there are multiple reasons for the changing levels of censorship. The first is Wikipedias transition from HTTP to HTTPS. HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) guides the way a websites data is sent to a browser. Because the connection is unencrypted, however, other people can intercept that connection and see the data being sent. In HTTPS, the s stands for secure; the major difference between the two protocols is that HTTPS encrypts the data being communicated.

Wikipedias transition affected the way countries could block access, Clark explains. With HTTP, a country could block an individual Wikipedia article. But with HTTPS, the country needs to choose between blocking every article or none. Countries are choosing the latter. As the report states: Russia once again blacklisted Wikipedia over a single cannabis-related article, but the ban was reversed less than 24 hours later.

Monitoring censorship of Wikipedia matters because Wikipedia is one of the most prominent, and most important, sites out there, says Rob Faris, the research director at the center, who also worked on the report. How countries treat Wikipedia, he continues, is indicative of how important Internet freedom is not only to them, but also to the rest of the world. Clark adds that understanding the information controls imposed on the Internet is important for allowing an informed citizenry to emerge.

As the first complete empirical deep dive into incidents of the blocking of Wikipedia projects around the world, Faris says, the report will inform future research as other investigators follow its methods. He also notes that accessing Wikipedia server data is novel. Such research paves the way for examining global Internet outages, Clark says, especially those deliberately caused by countries during elections or protests. He adds that after the study concluded, China blocked access to Wikipedia in additional languages spoken there, and Turkey in all languages, so the Berkman Klein Center will continue to monitor Wikipedia around the world.

Originally posted here:
Wikipedia Against Censorship - Harvard Magazine

Donald Trumps revolting tweets about Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski Thursday make me think we might be witnessing a new version of a very old story about someone using the power of the gods to destroy his enemies, only to be figuratively destroyed by that same power because of his sins.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, I wrote often about Donald Trumps media mastery and the way he used it to shred his opponents. I marveled at the way he thrived in this transitional media era, which baffled so many other politicians and media operatives.

Just as American society is moving from a TV culture to a social media one, so was Trump able to skillfully use both media to his political ends. He could shift in a commercial minute from owning a cable TV interview with his improvisational talk skills, to blasting away on Twitter in the snarky tone of the dominant discourse there. How could a 70-year-old find such a pitch-perfect social media voice?

I believe those media skills not only played a huge role getting him elected, but also in revolutionizing political media at least for the short term.

I wondered, though, once he was in office, if those media skills could be used for governing.

After seeing Thursdays revolting tweets and the widespread outrage in response to them, I am certain Trump has lost control of the fire, and it is only a matter of time before his presidency is consumed by it.

Tweets like the ones he wrote about MSNBCs Brzezinski, coupled with a dozen or so he has written about other women in media and politics, offer an unfiltered look at the darkness and misogyny in his heart. Who could possibly want a man who tweets such things as the nations leader? These are well beyond mean. These are tweets intended to inflict real pain. Is this the person we want representing us to the world?

I have read all the psycho-histories of Richard Nixon. I thought they were pretty dark and sick. But they are not even a warm-up for what these tweets seem to be saying about the mind of the man holding all that power in the White House today.

What might be even more astounding is that Trump is taking the time to watch and tweet such things about a cable TV show and its hosts when millions of Americans are holding their breath wondering if they are about to lose their health care thanks to events taking place in Washington.

Id call it a Greek tragedy if there was any depth of character to the man playing with the fire of social media in this story. But it is still an archetypal tale.

I have to admit I felt some some empathy for Nixon after his fall. I think I understand the toll being a self-made man took on his psyche.

But I promise you this: After tweets like the ones today from Trump, I will feel no pity, weep no tears as the fire of social media that he once harnessed turns on him and takes its toll on his presidency.

david.zurawik@baltsun.com

twitter.com/davidzurawik

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Mika tweets show Trump has lost control of the social media fire - Baltimore Sun (blog)