Archive for the ‘Social Networking’ Category

5 Social Media Marketing Tips to Improve Branding Relations – Influencive

Relationships are everywhere, and not just in our personal love lives. They are present throughout the social media and business world as well.

An instance of social media marketing involves marketing products or services using social media sites and social networks. Businesses can use social media to reach out to their existing customers and reach new ones while promoting their businesss culture, mission, or tone.

An example of social media marketing is using social media platforms and websites to advertise a product or service. Researchers and practitioners are becoming increasingly interested in social media marketing, even though e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant terms in academia.

Social media marketing is a growing career opportunity. Because of these working social media marketing methods, the industry is continuously growing at a super fast pace.

Relationship marketing allows businesses to keep in touch with their customers. Customers use brands products and services in different ways, and brands observe additional unmet needs, enabling them to develop new features and offerings to fulfill those needs, strengthening relationships.

Lets look at some social media marketing strategies for promoting your relationship blog or relationship marketing.

It is possible to leverage relationship marketing through networking, both online and offline. You dont have to be a job seeker to apply! Business owners should think about their interests and join groups that share those interests.

As a result, you increase your brand awareness and take advantage of new opportunities. Its a win-win situation.

Besides, all you need is your brain to accomplish this goal. Consider what people like you might enjoy as well as what you enjoy.

The way every company says they do it is not enough. Make sure you show your customers you value them every time you interact with them.

You can reap great benefits from the spontaneous recognition of current customers. A person who feels valued tells others about it.

Keep your customers happy by surprising them (in a good way) and being there for them no matter what. Monitor your impact through social monitoring tools, such as Brandwatch. This is particularly true when tying physical campaigns to digital gains.

Customer service is key! Not all businesses follow through or apply what they say. You can benefit from listening to compliments and responding to them too. People love hearing that theyve been heard. You can even use complaints to your advantage.

Many people are simply looking for someone to share their concerns with. Listening to these concerns ensures your customers feel valued. Additionally, your business can benefit from learning what people love and dislike about you.

The PowerSurvey and PowerSurveyPlus tools in Dynamics CRM allow you to obtain information like this. You can also respond anonymously.

Your brand must be memorable, so you and your product are easy to find. What customers find memorable will attract them.

They will remember your brand if it resonates, and you can develop the relationship further.

When you have a strong brand identity on social media, the people who want to become your fans know who you are and why they should care.

Free is the best thing, isnt it? A little bit. It is your customers who are interested in your product. Questions are being asked. Answer their questions! Identify your customers topics and interests.

Give them free access to something creative that relates to those topics. You are just trying to get their contact information if you gate it. Leads can be generated in this way, but youll also want to give away something of value. Answer the peoples questions!

The importance of social media in relationship marketing cant be overstated. Social media reflects the closeness of marketer and consumer, as it acts as an indication of closeness.

Marketers and consumers should form friendly ties using this method. The brand message can thus be embraced and promoted among peers and friends.

We hope you enjoyed this article, and if you did, you will probably enjoy some of our other popular reference guides as well. We recommend you take a moment to look through our Fintech and Affiliate Marketing guide, and also how to run an audit on your IG account.

The more resources and tools you add into your day to day operations, the more likely you are to see improved results across the board.

Published August 9th, 2021

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5 Social Media Marketing Tips to Improve Branding Relations - Influencive

Global Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) Markets 2021-2026 by Technology, Infrastructure, Solution, Applications, Sector and Industry…

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "Unified Communications and Collaboration Market by Technology, Infrastructure, Solution, and Applications, Sector (SMB, Enterprise, Government) and Industry Verticals 2021 - 2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

This unified communication and collaboration (UCC) market report evaluates the evolution of silo communications and collaboration solutions into uniform platforms.

The report also analyzes each aspect of UCC technologies such as voice-based technology, video-based technology, messaging technology, collaboration technology, and mobility technology.

The report addresses important enterprise ROI areas such as application productivity improvements within industry verticals. The report also provides global and regional forecasts for each market segment within the UCC ecosystem through 2026.

UCC combines enterprise communication and collaboration tools into a single interface and management system, removing the siloed and fragmented challenges of previous solutions that otherwise caused many inefficiencies. Communications and collaboration tools assembled together emphasize real-time communication and include voice telephony, instant messaging, audio and video conferencing, content sharing, and social networking. These are combined in a manner in which they are seamless to existing systems such as email, voicemail, calendars, and scheduling.

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the adoption of remote work on a wide scale, causing virtually the entire employee base of many companies to embrace an employee work-at-home operational framework. We see this impacting the long-term remote work policies of many companies, precipitating further adoption of UCC platforms and services.

We expect that the ongoing impact of pandemic planning will shift businesses strategy to long-term policies that involve remote employee productivity as a core human capital management requirement. This shift will push the UCC market to grow dramatically over the next five to ten years.

Select Report Findings:

Key Topics Covered:

1.0 Executive Summary

2.0 Introduction

2.1 Unified Communication and Collaboration

2.1.1 UCC Architecture

2.1.2 Ambient Communications

2.2 Workplace Communication

2.2.1 Work from Home and Productivity Suite

2.3 UCC Taxonomy

2.3.1 Voice Based Communications

2.3.2 Video Based Communications

2.3.3 Messaging Based Communications

2.3.4 Content Collaboration Technology Platforms

2.3.5 Team Collaboration and Communications

2.4 Enterprise Cost and Benefit Analysis

2.4.1 Determine Critical Elements

2.4.2 Analyse Challenges and Benefits

2.4.3 Develop TCO Models

2.4.4 Vendor Selection Considerations

2.5 Business Model Analysis

2.5.1 Unified Communication as a Service

2.5.2 Communication and Collaboration as a Service

2.5.3 Communication Platform as a Service

2.5.4 Managed UC Services

2.6 Regulatory Landscape

2.6.1 MiFID II

2.6.2 PECR

2.6.3 GDPR

2.6.4 Dodd-Frank

2.6.5 HIPAA

2.6.6 POPIA

2.6.7 ECT Act

2.6.8 NCA 2003

2.7 COVID 19 Pandemic Impacts

2.8 Market Drivers and Challenges

2.9 Value Chain Analysis

2.9.1 Platform and Infrastructure Providers

2.9.2 Software Solution Providers

2.9.3 Hardware Solution Providers

2.9.4 Service Providers

2.9.5 Technology Providers

3.0 Technology and Application Analysis

3.1 UCC Technology Evolution

3.2 UCC Technology Analysis

3.2.1 Voice Based Technology

3.2.1.1 Teleconferencing

3.2.1.2 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

3.2.1.3 Audio Conferencing

3.2.1.4 Contact Centre

3.2.2 Video Based Technology

3.2.2.1 Video Conferencing

3.2.2.2 Web Conferencing

3.2.3 Messaging Technology

3.2.3.1 Unified Messaging System

3.2.3.2 Instant Messaging and Presence

3.2.4 Content Collaboration Technology

3.2.4.1 Social Network

3.2.4.2 Video/Picture Sharing Platform

3.2.4.3 Code Hosting Platform

3.2.4.4 Project Management Platform

3.2.5 Team Collaboration Technology

3.3 Analysis of Supporting Technologies

3.3.1 Mobility and Mobile First Technology

3.3.2 IoT Technology

3.3.3 AI and Machine Learning

3.3.4 Augmented Reality

3.3.5 WebRTC

3.3.6 VoLTE and Vo5G

3.3.7 SD-WAN

3.3.8 VoIP Access and SIP Trunking

3.3.9 SBC and VDI

3.3.10 Fixed Mobile Convergence

3.4 UCC Application in Industry Verticals

3.4.1 Financial Industry

3.4.2 Office Buildings

3.4.3 Government and Public Sector

3.4.4 Telecom and IT/ITES

3.4.5 Media and Entertainment

3.4.6 Healthcare and Hospitality

3.4.7 Retail and Consumer Electronics

3.4.8 Transportation and Logistics

3.4.9 Education and Research

3.4.10 Energy and Utilities

3.4.11 Manufacturing

3.4.12 Defense and Aerospace

4.0 Company Analysis

4.1 8x8 Inc

4.2 Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

4.3 Apple

4.4 AT&T

4.5 ATLASSIAN

4.6 Avaya Inc.

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Global Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) Markets 2021-2026 by Technology, Infrastructure, Solution, Applications, Sector and Industry...

Facebook shuts down COVID vaccine disinformation effort that targeted AstraZeneca and Pfizer jabs – Euronews

Facebook has taken down hundreds of fake accounts that formed part of a Russia-based disinformation operation seeking to discredit the AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines.

A network of 65 Facebook and 243 Instagram accounts responsible for spreading misleading information about the jabs was traced to Fazze, a subsidiary of a UK-registered communications firm that mainly operated in Russia.

Using fake profiles and occasionally influencers, the content was spread as widely as possible on various platforms, including Reddit, Medium and Change.org.

One falsehood spread by the campaign was that the AstraZeneca jab was "turning vaccine recipients into chimpanzees".

"Disinformation is not always subtle," Ben Nimmo, head of Facebook's influence operations cybersecurity team, said at a press conference on Tuesday.

"This campaign was working like a laundromat," the social networking giant said, noting in its report on the operation that the Instagram portion of the disinformation effort was "crude and spammy".

The campaign came to light in May when several French and German influencers active in the fields of health and science spoke out about offers they had received to publicly criticise the Pfizer vaccine in return for payment.

"Unbelievable. The address of the London agency that contacted me is bogus. They never had premises there, it's a cosmetic laser centre! All the employees have weird LinkedIn profiles... which disappeared this morning. Everyone worked in Russia before," Lo Grasset, a science YouTuber with over a million subscribers, said on Twitter.

In the end, most of the content posted on Instagram - mainly targeting India and Latin America - received "no likes", Facebook said.

"It fell flat," Nimmo said.

Along with deleting the accounts involved, the Fazze agency is now banned from the platform, Facebook said.

"It was a sloppy campaign, but the process was sophisticated," said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's director of security policy.

"There was spam, influencers, document hacking... So, it's harder for one platform to catch this kind of campaign in its entirety," he added, calling on all civil society - including academics and journalists - to mobilise alongside the networks on the front line".

The California-based social media giant is regularly accused of helping push a massive amount of disinformation online.

Last month, US President Joe Biden said Facebook and other social media platforms were "killing" people by spreading false information about COVID-19 vaccinations. Biden was subsequently forced to U-turn on his comments.

"Facebook does not kill people," he said, clarifying that he had been referring to the disinformation spread by some social media users which could "harm those who listen to them" and ultimately "kill people".

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Facebook shuts down COVID vaccine disinformation effort that targeted AstraZeneca and Pfizer jabs - Euronews

Techies think were on the cusp of a virtual world called the metaverse. Im skeptical – The Guardian

Maybe this will be my Paul Krugman moment. The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist was famously the winner of a study to establish which op-ed commentator was most consistently correct. In 1998, he also famously claimed, By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internets impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machines. I am not nearly so storied in accomplishments as Krugman. But I do make my living offering predictions and forecasts. So I might as well say it: I predict that the metaverse wont happen.

The metaverse, for those who dont know, is a still-mostly-hypothetical virtual world accessed by special virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology. The idea is to create a sort of next-level Internet overlaid on our physical world. People plugged into the metaverse exist in our physical world like everyone else but can see and interact with things that others cant. Think The Matrix or the Star Trek Holodeck or the Fortnite-esque brandscapes of Ready Player One.

The concept of the metaverse isnt new. The phrase was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash, which was set in a near future in which the virtual world and the physical world are inextricably interconnected. Silicon Valleys tech billionaires seem increasingly convinced that an actual metaverse is just over the horizon; the previously niche concept has been mentioned on earnings calls for Microsoft and Facebook. In a recent interview with The Verge, an enthusiastic Zuckerberg described the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet, and a kind of embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content you are in it.

At the same time as the metaverse discourse has been heating up, its been a breakout year for the crypto community. The non-fungible token (NFT) took the art worlds imagination by storm this winter. Elon Musk stoked and then popped a truly wild Bitcoin bubble. Now, neither Zuckerberg nor Bill Gates tethered their concept of the metaverse to crypto. But I find it interesting that both the centralizers tech giants whose power and influence rival nation states and the decentralizers crypto innovators who remain something of an influential subculture see the new chapter in technological progress in roughly the same terms: to escape reality.

Its important to throw some cold water on this by remembering that the concept of virtual reality which is really what the metaverse is dates back a long time. Virtual reality was popularized by computer scientist and tech contrarian Jaron Lanier in the 1980s; his company VPL Research, short for Virtual Programming Languages, achieved such success that the toymaker Mattel licensed their DataGlove device a kind of wired glove to create a Nintendo game controller.

Yet its been more than three decades. Virtual and augmented reality of any kind hasnt exactly taken off. Despite all the chatter about Oculus the VR headset company that Facebook acquired, to much fanfare, in 2014 few of even my most technophilic friends have hopped on the Oculus train. Ive only encountered the Oculus VR gear as a forlorn gadget in startup HQs a novelty unceremoniously dumped next to the WiFi router. As tech analyst Benedict Evans recently tweeted, My son is approximately 1000x more interested in Roblox an online game platform on which users can create their own games for other users to try than in getting my VR headset out of the cupboard. Different models of the future. VR was the techno-utopian future that Generation X was promised. But as the Substack writer Paul Skallas recently noted: Back in 1999/2000 people would tell you VR was right on the cusp of taking over. That it would change everything. Its 2020. Where is it.

VR and AR after it have run into a continual problem: people mostly like reality. People have liked visual entertainment for as long as there have been screens, for as long as there have been theaters. But, like all entertainment, visual entertainment has its time and its place. Remember Google Glass? I had a pair. It was abominable to use. Who wants email notifications obscuring their field of vision all day? My phone is distraction enough. The synthesis of wearable tech and augmented reality pretty quickly parted ways. Augmented reality became fun Snapchat filters that make you look like a Pixar character. Wearable tech became Apple watches to count your steps and alert you if youre having a heart attack.

Two factors determine whether new technology catches on: capacity and incentive. Not all things that tech can do (capacity), people want (incentive). Think back to the mid-2000s, or rewatch David Finchers 2010 classic The Social Network. The building blocks of social networking existed long before Zuckerberg created Facebook. In fact, several social networks already existed. Remember Friendster and MySpace? The capacity was there. But what was the incentive? To get people to join his network in droves, Zuckerberg added two ingredients that the earlier social networks lacked: exclusivity and status.

When Facebook first launched, only those who attended a small group of prestigious colleges could join. I graduated high school in 2005, and Im ashamed to say that Facebook influenced my school choice. Facebook in the early days was additive. It was where you found friends before you arrived on campus, solidified nascent relationships, shared boozy and embarrassing memories. My question for metaverse boosters is this: what does the metaverse add to everyday life?

Ive used Oculus goggles before. I found they had a weird time distortion effect. When I took them off, I felt vaguely tired. Coming out of the pandemic, which has reminded everyone that a Zoom call is very much not the same thing as hugging your mom, Im skeptical that Zoom-fatigued workers will be interested in leveling up to working in the metaverse whatever that may mean. A new youth survey by Dazed reports that just 9% of Gen Zers want to stay on social media; fatigue with digital substitutes for real life may be even broader than just the Zoom-fatigued legions working from home.

Tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg, with his Sauron-like ambition to own the One Ring to rule them all, seem like the worst choice to put in charge of building a new world. Im more sympathetic to the crypto communitys nascent interest in the metaverse. The promise of crypto, it seems to me, is its potential to spark decentralization in an already overly centralized world, to play Gutenberg to the next generations Martin Luthers. The metaverse proposes a smoothed-out and rationalized version of our messy and chaotic world. The question that crypto seems to face most pressingly is: Why should crypto matter to everyone? If crypto is to be truly revolutionary, then it will have to give an answer that formats digital life down to a human scale, not up to a megalomaniacs.

Sean Monahan is a writer and trend forecaster based in Los Angeles. He co-founded K-Hole, the trend forecasting group best-known for coining the term normcore. He releases a weekly trends newsletter at 8ball.substack.com

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Techies think were on the cusp of a virtual world called the metaverse. Im skeptical - The Guardian

3 Nasdaq 100 Stocks to Buy Hand Over Fist in August – The Motley Fool

For the past 12 years, growth stocks have ruled the roost on Wall Street. This isn't a huge surprise given that historically low lending rates and abundant access to capital have allowed fast-paced companies to borrow in order to hire, acquire, and innovate.

The striking outperformance of growth stocks has been readily on display via the Nasdaq 100 -- an index comprised of the 100 largest nonfinancial companies listed on the Nasdaqexchange. Since the trough of the Great Recession on March 9, 2009, the benchmark S&P 500 has gained 556%, whereas the Nasdaq 100 has galloped higher by 1,350%!

Yet, in spite of the Nasdaq 100's clear outperformance over the S&P 500, investors can still find value within the index. The following trio of Nasdaq 100 stocks can be confidently bought hand over fist by investors in August.

Image source: Getty Images.

Historically speaking, when there's any weakness in the FAANG stocks, it's an opportunity for long-term investors to go shopping. That's why social media behemoth Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) stands out as a stock investors can buy hand over fist in August.

Two weeks ago, Facebook lifted the hood on its second-quarter operating results and cautioned that revenue growth could slow in the second half of the year. It's a common message we've heard from a number of online and mobile-based companies that benefited immensely from the coronavirus pandemic. However, a quick peek at Facebook's operating data shows no true cause for concern.

When the June quarter came to a close, Facebook recorded 2.9 billion people visiting its namesake site on a monthly basis, as well as 610 million additional unique visitors to WhatsApp and/or Instagram, which Facebook also owns. That's 3.51 billion people (44% of the world's population) visiting a Facebook-owned asset monthly. Advertisers are well aware that there's no social media company on the planet that offers access to more eyeballs than Facebook. This gives the company exceptional ad pricing power.

As a shareholder, what I continue to find most impressive about Facebook is the revenue and profit growth it's achieved while only meaningfully monetizing half of its assets. The roughly $54 billion in ad revenue generated on a year-to-date basis comes almost entirely from Facebook and Instagram. Despite being top social destinations, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp haven't been substantively monetized, as of yet. This gives Facebook another growth gear it can eventually shift into.

It would be wise not to overlook Facebook's opportunity in virtual and augmented reality, either. Although the company doesn't break out sales of its Oculus devices, "Other" category revenue, which encompasses Oculus, has been soaring this year. Ultimately, Oculus could represent one of the many ways Facebook keeps users within its ecosystem of products and services.

The bottom line is that a dominant company with a 20%-plus growth rate shouldn't be valued at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of less than 23. Despite its trillion-dollar market cap, Facebook remains a bargain.

Image source: Getty Images.

Another Nasdaq 100 stock just begging to be bought in August is semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions provider Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO).

The single biggest growth driver for Broadcom looks to be the shift to 5G wireless infrastructure. It's been a decade since wireless carriers last made significant upgrades to download speeds. With carriers spending big bucks to update their infrastructure, we're liable to see consumers and businesses undertake a multiyear tech replacement cycle to take advantage of faster download speeds.

The reason this is such a positive for Broadcom is that the company generates a majority of its revenue from smartphone components. It develops and supplies original equipment manufacturers with wireless LAN/Bluetooth combination solutions, as well as proximity sensors, amplifiers, and global navigation satellite system receivers, to name a few core solutions. This multiyear upgrade cycle should lead to steady demand and highly predictable cash flow for Broadcom's biggest operating segment.

The big data push in the wake of the pandemic is also going to be a major boost to Broadcom's growth potential. Prior to March 2020, we were witnessing a steady shift by businesses to move data into the cloud. But once the pandemic struck, businesses had little choice but to create an online presence and ensure that data was accessible in the cloud, especially with remote workforces. This has substantially boosted data center storage demand.

While Broadcom has industrial and networking applications, it's the role it can play as a provider of connectivity and access chips to data centers that's most intriguing (beyond its smartphone sales). With cloud infrastructure still, arguably, in its early innings of growth, demand for data center infrastructure solutions should remain robust for a long time to come.

And don't overlook Broadcom's exceptional dividend growth. Whereas most tech stocks reinvest a lot of their cash flow back into innovation, Broadcom is so profitable that it can afford to parse out a base annual payout of $14.40 annually to its shareholders -- good enough for a 3% yield. Since the company began paying a dividend a little over 10 years ago, its quarterly payout has grown by more than 5,000%!

Image source: Getty Images.

The third Nasdaq 100 stock that growth investors can confidently buy hand over fist in August is China-based e-commerce company JD.com (NASDAQ:JD).

For the past couple of months, China-based tech stocks have come under pressure from the Chinese government for a variety of reasons, including data security and allegations of antitrust violations. Since it's unclear which Chinese tech stocks could fall into the crosshairs of the government's watchful eye, pretty much all China-based growth stocks, including JD.com, have been hammered. But in JD's case, this discount looks like an opportunity.

Currently, JD slots in as China's second-largest online retailer, behind Alibaba (NYSE:BABA). For those who might recall, Alibaba was hit with a record $2.8 billion antitrust fine by Chinese regulators four months ago. But even though these two are China's largest online retailers, their operating models are very different.

Alibaba operates as a third-party marketplace, where it essentially acts as the middleman. Meanwhile, JD generates its online revenue almost exclusively as a direct retailer. This means JD handles inventory and logistics, just like Amazon. This added autonomy makes it far less likely that JD will become a target of Chinese regulators.

And it's not just the rapid growth of online retail in China that should excite investors. JD has been investing in a number of higher-margin ancillary operations that should help lift its profitability and operating cash flow. This includes advertising, healthcare services, and cloud services. The latter is especially exciting, with Cloudflareand JD partnering up in late April. This deal, which will see Cloudflare utilize JD's cloud infrastructure, will create a steady stream of revenue for this high-margin operating segment.

Although I'd dub JD as the riskiest of the three stocks here, primarily due to geopolitical uncertainty, it's tough to overlook this company's growth potential in the second-largest economy in the world. Paying 30 times forward earnings for a company with a sustainable 20%-plus growth rate is a solid deal for investors.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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3 Nasdaq 100 Stocks to Buy Hand Over Fist in August - The Motley Fool