social media advertising Tag

Online Video Advertising Can Help Your Small Business Grow

When businesses first began using videos to market themselves on the internet, it wasn’t clear where this would go in the future. Now that much of internet time is spent watching videos, it is understandable why more and more businesses are beginning to target their customers through online video advertising.

Using video as a marketing tool can be as substantial or limited as you want it to be. A small online business might want to start out by just putting a video on the landing page of their website. This is beneficial since people coming to your site will be able to watch a short video and learn what your company is about in a way that makes them more likely to absorb the information. Eventually, you can expand this marketing out adding more videos to your website and perhaps sharing them on YouTube and other social media platforms.

Many small business owners find that video is a great way to connect to their customers and make contact with them on a regular basis. In addition to videos on their own website, they can share videos on their Facebook page or even on Snapchat and Twitter that can help them connect to customers. For example, a person with a website selling RC drones might post a video of them flying one of their drones and doing certain tricks with it. This entertaining video will likely be shared by potential customers on social media allowing the business owner to get this product seen by many more people.

When you are marketing your business this way, you’ll be able to connect to customers and especially younger customers far more easily than if you are trying to pursue these customers through other avenues. Since each social media platform is different, make sure that you tailor these videos to the platform you’re displaying them on. For any video you use to market your business, try to grab people’s attention in the first few seconds as this makes it more likely for people to watch the videos all the way through.

Twitter Announces Change to Character Limit

While there have been many changes to Twitter in recent years, the character limit that they started with has stayed the same. Until now. Twitter just announced that they are currently testing a change that will double the character rate for a select group of Twitter users. This change is intended to make it easier for users to enjoy Tweeting.

Twitter’s test of this new character limit is because of how difficult the 140 character limit can be to users. After doing some research, Twitter discovered that in languages like Japanese and Chinese tweets were on average a lot shorter. A big part of this is that in languages like these a single character may represent a noun. Since the English language and others like it typically require at least five letters a word, more tweets in these languages hit the 140 character limit.

While Twitter seems focused on providing English speakers with less frustrations while tweeting, many users are outraged that Twitter has chosen to focus on changes to the character limits to tweets rather than focusing on more important issues within the social media platform such as abusive accounts. Twitter users seem to feel that its time would be better spent trying to change the toxic environment of Twitter. The character limit change may be welcome to some, but it isn’t the change that many users feel will make Twitter easier to use.

One good thing that could come out of this character limit change might be allowing business owners more room to express themselves when connecting with customers. If you’ve ever tried tweeting about a certain product or sale and felt limited by the number of characters, you can see how this might be beneficial. It is possible that 280 words could help make social media advertising a bit easier in some cases.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls of Social Media Advertising

While most business owners can agree that social media is a great way of marketing a website and connecting to customers, many aren’t doing their social media in a way that is beneficial to them. A lot of business owners simply join Facebook and Twitter and then expect that these pages will get people coming to their website. Social media requires a greater level of commitment than this.

There are many pitfalls to social media that business owners fall into from the start. One of the main ones is that people get impatient. They expect that once they create social media pages they’ll immediately be connecting to customers who will want to purchase products and services. Very little with marketing happens overnight, so starting a social media campaign requires some patience. Don’t be disappointed if you don’t see sales coming from social media connections right away.

Another big problem with the way that people use social media to market their website is that they are very inconsistent. When people visit a Facebook or Twitter page for an active business, they expect to see posts that have appeared within the last month. Too many business owners using social media will post a few times and then not again for a long while. It isn’t enough to just post about your current sales and then wait months to post again. Take some time to create posts or link to blogs that you have written. This will make it clear to anyone visiting your social media that you are still in business.

Since social media advertising is a powerful way to promote your business, it is important to set up social media pages that can help you interact with customers. If you don’t have the time to devote to posting on social media and setting up different pages, be willing to look for help. You can hire companies or individuals that will help you to get social media pages set up and to make sure that there are regular posts showing up on these pages.

Twitter Tests a Tweet Storm Feature to Help Users Break Character Limits

It appears that Twitter is currently working on early testing for a feature that would allow users to draft out long threads of Tweets before posting all of them at once. One Twitter user recently tweeted out some screen shots taken of himself composing three tweets and posting them all at the same time. While the feature doesn’t appear to be testing publically just yet, Twitter users were able to get a first look at what the feature might look like if implemented.

Right now, the only way for a user to link their tweets together is to go through the often tedious process of replying to their individual tweets with another tweet continuing their point. This kind of tweeting is often referred to as a Tweet Storm. The new feature, if it is ever implemented, would eliminate the current difficulty of creating these threads, allowing users to easily link tweets together while editing them and posting them simultaneously.

Tweet Storms have been growing in popularity, becoming far more common on Twitter in the past few years. Twitter has talked about the possibility of extending Tweets beyond their 140 character limit in the past, but mostly they have continued to uphold the limit, making only small updates that allowed users to utilize all 140 characters fully. The new feature would be something that would likely encourage Tweet Storms and allow them to find new prevalence on the site, a clear compromise between extending the 140 character limit and making it easier for these Tweet Storms to take place.

While some users are sure to object to this new feature if it is ever implemented, it is easy to see why Twitter would like to have a feature like this one. There are many influential and well followed Twitter users who commonly embark on these so called Tweet Storms. As these are users that Twitter would want to encourage, it makes sense for them to make it easier for people to link several tweets together and post them for the world to see.

There are some definite benefits to linking tweets that could be used by those in the business world. By using a feature like this one, a business would be able to easily talk about a sale and then link this announcement to specific tweets about various products that were available at discounted prices. Allowing editing of these tweets all at the same time would make it easier for business representatives to maintain professional standards.

Facebook Tests New Colored Comments, Users Disapprove

Many users have started to talk about a new feature that they have been testing on the Facebook app. Facebook appears to be testing a feature that will allow users to post comments in the colors and color gradients that can be used on text posts already. While the test appears to still be in its early phases some are already reacting to the change comparing it to the bold color choices that were common on the MySpace platform.

This new feature would be one to follow the addition of color and color gradients to text posts which came out back in December. When Facebook was asked about testing the colored comments, they said that they are currently working on finding new ways for people to communicate within the platform. The colors are just one way to add creativity and variety to conversations going on within Facebook.

Since the feature is still in testing only a few select users are currently able to work with this feature right now. If the colored comments are deemed to be a success, Facebook may eventually roll them out to all users as they did with the colored text posts several months ago. So far the new feature only seems to be accessible to mobile users, so the test hasn’t yet reached other types of users.

While this feature is only being tested right now, users already have a lot to say about it. Many users are in uproar about this potential feature, stating that the colors will make Facebook look garish and ruin the look of the news feed. With the mismatch of colors on both posts and their comments, the news feed has the potential to become much bolder and more colorful. The question is whether this will actually be something that helps to add to the interactions currently available on Facebook or something that will turn users away.

Facebook Further Updates News Feed to Prioritize Certain Articles

For the last few months, Facebook has been working on improvements to their news feed to make it easier for them to restrict access to fake and click-bait type articles while providing a better user experience for those who use Facebook as a place to obtain news and information. Their newest update is one that focuses on eliminating website links that are to sites with slow loading web pages.

Facebook’s new update to the News Feed algorithm will be looking at how fast links from different sources load and ranking the ones that are faster loading further up on the page. They hope that with this change, they’ll be able to make the user experience a lot better for their users. The change should allow users to spend a lot more time reading the stories that they find rather than waiting for pages to load.

Adding this new change came about since people looking for interesting articles to read and share online are often annoyed by stories that load up slowly. By implementing this change, Facebook will be able to decrease the reach of stories that load too slowly pressuring the sites to change the way that their pages load or to resolve to live without spreading on Facebook in a way that allows them to reach the highest number of users.

The changes to the News Feed will roll out slowly over the months to come, allowing different publishers to make any adjustments that will be needed to ensure that their links continue to come up on the News Feed in the future. The change may also benefit Facebook’s Instant Articles as these will be ones that will load up quickly meaning that publishers may choose to use this program instead of fixing problems with load times on their normal platforms.

Twitter Claims the New Anti Abuse Features are Helping

With the year half over, Twitter is claiming that the anti abuse features that they have put into place are getting results. At the beginning of the year, Twitter said it would be focusing more on preventing a lot of the abuse that was taking place on the platform. Twitter has since implemented a range of different features to stop abuse and to hide it from view. They are happy with the results that they are seeing so far.

Over the years, Twitter has often been criticized for focusing on small cosmetic issues on their site and similar features, while letting abuse on their platform go unchecked. The new features have shown that Twitter is willing to step up and take the abuse on the platform a lot more seriously. As a result of their new features, they have been able to catch abuse more often and to prevent further incidents of abuse by letting users know why their accounts are suspended or limited after an incident.

Twitter announced that due to its new anti abuse features, they have been seeing significantly less abuse than at the beginning of the year. The new policies and features have resulted in a lot more warnings being sent out to different accounts, as well as more users being temporarily limited. In some cases, Twitter has even managed to suspend accounts that were particularly abusive. They are hopeful that by taking this firmer stance on abuse they’ll be able to limit the abuse users are experiencing.

While Twitter feels that they have made significant changes to the platform, many users are not satisfied with the changes. Many people feel that Twitter is still not doing enough to limit the abuse on their platform. Some even see these new changes as mostly cosmetic in nature, hiding abuse rather than removing it from the platform entirely. Twitter has acknowledged the fact that there is a lot still to do when it comes to preventing abuse on their platform.

Instagram Releases New Functions to Block Offensive Comments and Spam

Instagram recently released its plans to crack down on the offensive comments and spam that often fills the comment sections of videos and pictures shared on this social media site. Their new filters for comments will work to block certain types of offensive comments and to prevent spam. Of these filters, the spam filter is one that is going to take effect most widely as it can weed out spam in nine languages rather than just English.

The new feature that Instagram is now using for blocking spam and offensive comments is one that is built using new AI programming. The program is designed with recent advances in machine learning which are meant to help the filter better understand the context within a comment. The goal is to eventually have this program trained to block offensive comments without having a lot of false positives. There are still certain phrases that are creating false positives, but the new filter has been implemented on Instagram since it has proven to be effective.

Now that this feature is available, Instagram has made it so this is something that users have to opt out of rather than opting in. The filter is set to be on by default, but can be turned off manually if users wish to view comments that it would otherwise be filtered out. By adding this filter and making it so the filter is automatically on, even those who aren’t very tech savvy or those new to Instagram will be able to benefit from the new filter. Filtering out offensive comments automatically will help to protect self-expression on Instagram.

The new steps that Instagram is taking are in hopes that they will be able to make Instagram more welcoming to all people. Their filter strikes back against body shaming, racism, and other types of hateful language that can often be seen in the comments of Instagram. Many users are already praising Instagram for taking steps to prevent these hateful comments. Even with this filter enabled, Instagram users will be able to continue reporting any comments that may get through the filter while this program continues to expand. The offensive comment filter will be updated to work in other languages in the future.