Archive for June, 2017

Don’t Overlook Voice Search in Your Online Marketing Campaign – WebProNews

The popularity of voice-activated smart assistants is gaining traction, especially with Apple hopping on the bandwagon with its Siri speaker due to be released soon. This is why businesses should include voice search in their online marketing campaign, rather than focus solely on text-based searches.

In fact, voice search marketing is described as the new norm, which would have been unheard of just five years ago. One major factor is the increasing efficiency of machine-learning technology in finding user patterns to anticipate their needs.

For instance, Amazons Alexa is billed to be capable of performing over 12,000 tasks, which is why its still the undisputed king in this increasingly competitive industry.

A Different Beast

In the past six months, 40% of users have tried voice commands in asking questions or searching for products and services. Analysts believe this number will only continue to rise until such time when people wont even be able to imagine how they survived without voice-activated apps in the first place, similar to how they feel about mobile phones.

When it reaches this critical mass, Google will surely introduce an update to its algorithm that will take into account voice search in order to rank your page.

For marketers, this would be an entirely different beast altogether. Whereas text-related keyword searches are much easier to document, recording how many people are looking for best pulled pork sandwiches, Lexington, KY using voice search will be a tall feat.

This will really turn the search engine optimization dynamicwhich is the direct result of years of honing and polishingup on its head.

Better Results

Unlike text queries, voice search will yield more accurate results. It basically pulls down the curtains, allowing internet users to skip one step. Instead of searching for pulled pork sandwiches, they can just go ahead and order the food from the best restaurant based on customer and critic reviews.

Instead of searching for a particular song you cant get out of your head, it may be possible in the future to hum the lyrics and the smart speaker will play the whole song for you. This brings convenience to a whole new level, unlike in text searches where you have to choose and phrase your words in a specific manner to get the most relevant resultsand still having to go to that particular website to order food.

Here are some quick tips to cope with the changes from text to voice search marketing:

Mobile Optimization As voice search apps are gradually perfected, mobile optimization will become even more crucial. Website built with Flash will need to be redesigned and all websites will need to be responsive. Marketers will need to advise their clients of this major shift from traditional search to voice search. Another way to optimize the mobile experience is to make sure that their sites load fast. Theres no faster way to lose customers than a website that takes forever to display.

Snippets In voice searches, snippets are short descriptions about the company or the brand. This gives the users a little bit of information before they move along or move forward. Using traditional SEO techniques, you will need to optimize so you end up high on the search engine results page for snippets.

Long-Tail Keywords Voice search is different from text search in the sense that internet users will often talk normally as they would in a conversation, as opposed to using key phrases or keywords when they type on Google. This is where long-tail keywords are crucial because you can still reach your target market even with this major shift in the way people do their search.

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Don't Overlook Voice Search in Your Online Marketing Campaign - WebProNews

Shopify’s social marketing bot now free for all merchants – BetaKit

Shopify has announced that Kit, its platform that manages social marketing through SMS, will now be available to all Shopify merchants for free.

Shopify currently has 400,000 merchants on its platform. Kit, which Shopify calls a virtual employee, connects to a merchants associated Facebook account and other social media. It proactively notifies merchants to run Facebook ads, market products, update customers, run reports, and send emails to new customers.

To date, Kit has had over 3 million conversations with merchants since joining Shopify in April 2016, when the San Francisco-based company was acquired.

Kit can also be upgraded with the Kit Skills Library for other integrations, such as assisting merchants with inventory, SEO, Facebook dynamic product ads, and product photos.

Shopify has been making a push to boost its all-around services for users on the platform. It recently announced the launch of Shopify Pay to tackle cart abandonment, and launched its own POS card reader for ecommerce merchants that do festivals and pop-up shops.

The company has been bullish on its mobile focus; in its last financial report, mobile traffic to its merchants stores reached 69 percent, and made up 55 percent of orders.

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Shopify's social marketing bot now free for all merchants - BetaKit

Scope of Social Marketing in Miami | Good Herald – Good Herald

If youre thinking about whether social marketing is ideal for your business, the verdict is in social networking is an extraordinary approach to drive rehash business and to pull in new client. Social networking gives advertisers a voice and an approach to correspond with associates, clients and potential shoppers. It customizes the brand and helps you to spread your message in a loose and conversational way.

The genuine force of online networking originates from the capability to make a group around your organization and make advanced discussions with your clients and customers. Social marketing in Miami experts esteem uprightness, genuineness, and transparency. M3 promises to function as hard as could reasonably be expected for our customers to verify they are effective in the social networking world. The professionals are glad for the way that they take the time to educate the customers about how to effectively utilize social locales like Facebook, Twitter, and others.

Social marketing in Miami services include:

If there are many SEO instruments, there are thousands more online networking apparatuses because of the blast of open source programming and a bigger gathering of people. Discovering apparatuses to track execution, open doors, administration and progressively could be overwhelming, however M3 experts can help contract your decisions focused around plan, assets and situations.

This is an in-profundity dissection of your sites vicinity over the different informal organizations and a system for approaches to enhance it. Not every site has a spot on Digg or MySpace, so the experts give recommendations to practical choices including corner open doors and significant standard strategies.

Is your rival making an amazing showing with features, web journals, link bait, gadgets or group building? Social marketing in Miami specialists recognize their strategies, potential administration suppliers and activity cautions that you can begin executing to shake their hang on your industry.

The experts will recognize the informal communities where you ought to be taking an interest and where individuals are discussing you. They will additionally help you make and deal with your online networking profiles to pull in guests and influence the two-way discussion. Want to spread bliss to your clients by providing for them something that is helpful or important to them? The professionals can make intelligent brands that will position you as a dominant presence in the business and have clear third party referencing profits.

The specialists will take a gander at your Web webpage and see whether you would profit from an intelligent gadget battle. This incorporates distinguishing what kind of gadget may work for your site, its likelihood for achievement, and what your rivals are (or are not) improve and how you can that.

Social marketing in Miami services are to put your organization in a position to take advantage of the two-way discussion commonly happening in the middle of you and your clients. M3 services are intended to demonstrate to you where individuals are discussing you, the ranges where you can best get included, and the strategies you ought to use to help expand brand mindfulness.

Photo By maxamillion32 from Pixabay

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Scope of Social Marketing in Miami | Good Herald - Good Herald

How Social Media Marketing Improves Your Google Rank – WebProNews

In boosting your search engine ranking, it's almost criminal to exclude social media marketing, especially given its pervasive presence online.

Last year, nearly 70% of people worldwide used social media in one form or another. Also in 2016, 2.34 billion people had a social media presence, and stats predict that this will increase to 2.67 billion by next year.

It's not clear how Google really gauges social media when it comes to ranking websites. That's understandable, considering the search engine has always been very secretive about its algorithms. What's clear at this point, however, is that social media does help in driving traffic to your site, albeit indirectly.

The correlation can be found in the top ranking websites, which also have very strong social media signals. So even if Google says that social media shares don't really count as one link, a large volume should account for something.

Below are just some of the ways social media marketing can boost rankings:

Cultivates Relationships With Customers

Social media provides an easy platform where businesses can directly interact with their customers. More than superficial interaction, it actually allows you to develop a relationship with your clientele. Successful use of social media even gives the power to the consumers to dictate how product value is offered. It's not just about numbers, but rather making them feel that they have a stake in the company. Cultivating your customers through social media will drive more traffic to your site, resulting in a better ranking on Google.

Links to Your Website

The main purpose of social media is to raise awareness of your product or service. The main goal of Google, meanwhile, is to give the most relevant result when users submit a query. Posting your web address on your social media pageand asking your customers to share itwill also drive traffic to your website.

Businesses are always trying to figure out where their customers are, especially if their websites fail to get traffic even when they have existed for quite some time. Social media offers a ready customer base, with its almost three billion population. The trick is how to harness it.

Means to an End

You should keep in mind that social media is just a means to an end, as Google doesn't really recognize any of it in its search engine results page (SERP). Knowing this, it's important for you to make great content that can possibly go viral. YouTube, in fact, has become the battleground for marketers to create the next viral video. It may not directly lead traffic to your website, but it does make for perfect brand recall. Of course, knowing the attention span of Millennials, you'll need to routinely churn out great content to be effective.

In sum, just remember thesesimplesteps to boost your Google rank with social media.

Customers, however, are not as keen to forgive on social media, as compared to websites, when the company fails to respond immediately. As such, it's best to appoint an administrator tasked to respond to queries or complaints on your social media page so your customers walk away happy. This increases the chances of visitors recommending your business to their families and friends.

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How Social Media Marketing Improves Your Google Rank - WebProNews

A teachable moment, but not censorship, at Harvard – The Boston Globe

CRAIG F. WALKER / GLOBE STAFF

The Johnston Gate at Harvard Yard.

An Ivy League course on the consequences of dumb and offensive behavior on the Internet just played out at Harvard. And for at least 10 kids who had already been admitted to the university, the fallout of sharing offensive images among themselves were profound and potentially life-changing.

By now, the story is well known: The teens were part of a larger Facebook group chat where they posted the vile images as Internet memes. When the university discovered the content, it rescinded their admission.

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A debate about free speech has ensued, pitting Harvard as the ruthless censor clamping down on kids goofing off. But thats the wrong way to look at the controversy. Like all universities, Harvard has wide discretion in its admissions process. Had the school discovered the memes before the students were accepted at the school, its safe to guess that Harvard would have denied them admission, period, without triggering a free-speech brouhaha. The college admissions process is inherently subjective. There are many considerations, including that of judgment, character, and ethics, and sharing puerile and offensive posts is generally not the path to the Ivy League.

Needless to say, Harvard reserves the right to rescind admission at any time before enrollment, for many reasons, including whether the prospective student engages in behavior that brings into question their honesty, maturity, or moral character. Its tough luck for the admitted applicants, perhaps, that they werent yet officially Harvard students when the images were discovered. If they were, the universitys response might have been different; student-athletes who were recently caught writing offensive, sexually charged lists about classmates were not expelled from the school.

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Its likely the meme-sharing students, who had been admitted to the class of 2021, were trying to impress each other, engaging in the type of silly, provocative one-upmanship that teens gravitate toward. Its not likely that the students, who included the daughter of a major Harvard donor, were going to start committing hate crimes when they arrived in Cambridge. But they did show a marked lack of judgment. Among the posts: a suggestion that child abuse was sexually arousing; sexual jokes about the Holocaust; and an image that poked fun at suicide and Mexicans with a piata.

Did the school miss an opportunity to educate those students about their foolish actions? Perhaps, although the incident remains a teachable moment for the kids nonetheless. And Harvards swift response sends a reassuring message of the importance of principles, civility, and standards for the rest of the university community.

For many young people, memes the wild variety of funny captions over memorable images are a second language.

Censorship, this is not. The students remain free to express themselves with any offensive or provocative memes they choose. And should the students choose to reapply to the college someday, they should be able to write quite an essay about learning lessons the hard way.

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A teachable moment, but not censorship, at Harvard - The Boston Globe