Social snafus can happen to any company, regardless of size, ad budget, or even number of fans. All it takes is one post to go viral–good or bad.
Brand identity is the torch that lights the way for your company. It provides messaging, voice, and direction, becoming the umbrella under which all other elements will be shaped. If your brand identity was created using a flawed process, it could be damaging your business’s chance at success.
Facebook recently rolled out some changes to its business pages that should make a lot of companies and page owners quite happy. While it’s common practice for the social site to introduce updates to its algorithms on occasion, it is usually done to make pages or feeds more navigable according to user preferences. And this update seems to be no different, so far.
There’s no official word from Facebook for when these changes will apply to every user. Right now, some are seeing the new business page while others are still looking at the previous layout, so this could just be a preview of changes to come. Whether or not it’s the final version is yet to be seen, but if it’s anything close to this then we’re all ready to hit that “Like” button.
Here is what Google’s business page looks like with the new layout:
The new business page is like a breath of fresh air in a previously text-heavy, claustrophobic world. The difference between the two versions is nearly night and day.
One of the first changes—perhaps the most noticeable—is how digestible the new format is. It loses a lot of the sidebar text in favor of a clean column of links, giving each business page more of a mini website feel. The important text such as the about information, number of likes, etcetera, are relocated to the right side for an equally scannable navigation. Other important page tabs are appearing underneath the page logo, improving the navigation by leaps and bounds.
A clean, easy to navigate sidebar (lefthand side) that lists all of the important tabs for this business.
Visibility is a huge part of the update. Just look at the improved location of the Call-to-Action button (Call Now, Contact Us, Book Now, etc.), which is now located beneath your cover photo, with a more prominent design. Likewise, the “Like,” “Share,” and “Message” buttons have all been moved from the bottom of the page to below the cover photo.
Now these buttons are at the top where they’re more visible.
The best way describe the impact of these changes is “cleaner look.” From the clearer cover photo and the relocation of the page’s profile logo to the left column, to the slight increase of the profile’s size, the new design offers fans and users a clearer glimpse at these important pages.
On the right side you can see the business category (website), a search bar, engagement stats (likes, response rate), and the important “About” information.
Businesses can now choose from one of 27 different business categories, and the category is featured under the CTA button, making it clearer to all users. You can also prioritize and list important tabs and apps on the right, giving businesses the chance to keep the vital ones front of mind for their users. A helpful search bar was placed beneath the category to let you search for posts on your page.
Here you can see the important CTA button (Contact Us) is visible at the top of the page, above the business category and search bar.
Photos and videos show up beneath the “About” section on the right sidebar now, making them stand out more.
Photos and Videos can be seen on the right sidebar where they can be easily viewed.We’re pretty excited about these changes and if anything new develops, we’ll be sure to keep you updated. In the meantime, feel free to let us know what you think of the new Facebook business pages in the comments section below.
Social media fails can happen to the best of us.
In fact, social media fails are around us all the time. Just take a look at your Facebook feed, Twitter posts, or the comments on any YouTube video. Who doesn’t sometimes slip up online and say something like this?
Or this?
Or even this?
The great democratic state of the internet is home to all types, and we all have gaps in our knowledge, and everyone occasionally says something kooky… We’re only human, after all. And the way social media works, it’s incredibly easy to dash off a few words without really thinking them through – and have those thoughts instantly distributed to the far reaches of the web.
In an age where social media is ubiquitous, people often don’t think through the things they share with the rest of the world. Frankly, it’s easy to say something silly or foolish online – most of us have at some point.
But one would expect that large, international brands, sports teams, and celebrities would police themselves on social media so as not to cause a public relations uproar, right? Not so!
In fact, they’re just as guilty of social media fails as the rest of us, and sometimes the fallout is huge. Here are just a few examples between 2015 and 2016 of brands who royally screwed up on social media, and how they responded when the public fired back.
August 11, 2015 was a special day in South Africa. In fact, it was National Women’s Day, and loads of companies flocked to their favorite platforms to thank the women who offer so much to their families and society at large. The outpouring was mostly positive.
The Bic company (famous for its lighters and pens), however, decided that the most appropriate response would be this ill-advised post:
While any of the above sentiments could be construed as offensive, it’s the “think like a man” that had people in a bit of an uproar. Of course, it’s not the first time Bic has had some trouble understanding its female target market, as evidenced by their “just for her” pens.
When Microsoft released its artificial intelligence chatbot, Tay, to the world in March of 2016, she was meant to mimic the speech and thoughts patterns of a teenage girl. The problem was, Tay learned in real-time from people across social media, and as we all know, people on social media can be, well, not very nice.
It wasn’t long before Tay went from a sweet AI girl who exclaimed, “Humans are super cool!” to being crude, racist, and all-around inappropriate. Microsoft was forced to take her offline less than 24 hours after she was released.
Better luck next time, Microsoft.
It stands to reason that those who work for a company, especially a tech company, are likely to use its products. Facebook users probably spend time on Facebook. Apple employees likely all have MacBooks and iPhones. It’s the latter device – a smartphone – that leads us to our next fail.
You see, Blackberry wanted to remind fans to follow them on Twitter, with an image of a pretty-cool looking smartphone. However, there was one small problem.
BlackBerry is tweeting from an iPhone http://t.co/TAlDTazdsX pic.twitter.com/DUI3Nwuy6A
— The Verge (@verge) January 13, 2015
That’s right – for at least one employee, Blackberry wasn’t good enough. Not even when tweeting about things related to their employer. Blackberry deleted the tweet, but by that time, the damage had been done, and the company was being ridiculed by tech reporters and social media users alike.
Some social media fails are minor. Some social media fails are absolutely disastrous. And then there are the ones that make you cringe and wonder, “What could they possibly have been thinking?”
The day after the Seattle Seahawk’s huge victory over the Green Bay Packers happened to be Martin Luther King Jr. day. Of course, #MLKDay was a trending hashtag, and the Seahawks decided to join in, tweeting “We shall overcome” along with the hashtag.
As if the comparison between a football game and the civil rights movement weren’t bad enough, the tweet was accompanied with this image:
The accompanying outrage was near-instant, causing the Seattle Seahawks to step into damage control mode and apologize for its “poor judgment.”
We apologize for poor judgment shown in a tweet sent earlier. We did not intend to compare football to the civil rights legacy of Dr. King.
— Seattle Seahawks (@Seahawks) January 19, 2015
It’s not like celebrity endorsements are a secret. We all know when a supermodel or basketball star gives a shout out to a company over social media, it’s most probably because they’re being paid by the business to do so. However, it’s probably best to do so discreetly.
In June of 2016, model Naomi Campbell revealed her very special relationship with Adidas in this Instagram post:
Yes, she copy-pasted the entire email from Gary Aspden, Adidas’s entertainment marketing specialist and brand evangelist for the company’s new Spezial line. She corrected her mistake quickly, posting only the portion that she was asked:
Now, this really isn’t the fault of Adidas – but it certainly hurts the public perception of their sneaky marketing tactics. Next time, perhaps, send instructions.
So the next time you post something like this:
Remember that celebrities, sports teams, and sneaker companies make their share of mistakes, too. At least your social media fails probably won’t be noticed by the whole internet.
Did we miss any of your favorite social media fails between 2015 and 2016? If so, we’d love to see them. Simply leave us a comment below!
The first part of the Tools for Marketers series begins with productivity tools. Productivity is everything for marketing. Any way we can optimize and hack our time for campaigns to achieve the best results is something any marketer strives for. This is why tools for marketers are an imperative part of our daily work for tracking our production.
If This Then That is a great way to automate recurring tasks. You setup recipes that connect two of the ever-growing list of apps that triggers a logic for “if this” happens “then that” should happen. For example, you can create a recipe that connects Facebook and Twitter so that whenever you do something specific on Facebook, like share a link, it will also tweet that on Twitter. If you manage a bunch of Facebook pages, IFTTT allows you to choose the specific page you want the actions to trigger for.
There are a lot of other ways you can sync social media platforms, like keeping your social profiles consistent by creating a recipe for when you change a Facebook profile picture to also change it on Twitter.
Pocket is a plugin and app that you can easily save an online article to read for later on any device you have Pocket on. So when you are in the middle of something but get an e-mail with blog posts that you know you need to read, you can Pocket them for later. But the real power of Pocket is that it is another app that you can integrate into an IFTTT recipe.
You can connect Pocket to social media platforms to share online, but an even better way is to create a recipe that will take your favorite content from Pocket and add it to your Buffer queue.
With the content overload and social media era that we live in, sometimes you can lose your focus online. StayFocusd is a Chrome extension (and they have similar for Firefox users), that you can set to only allow you to be on certain sites that you choose, like social media or shopping sites, for a limited time every day.
If you really need to finish a project that doesn’t require any research or browsing, they also have a nuclear option that really lets you focus on the project at hand for the length of time you set.
Toggl is a desktop application available for Mac, PC and mobile that allows you to track your time more efficiently as you switch between tasks. They also have a Chrome extension that makes it even more easier for you to track tasks on the go, which also works with dozens of apps and sites like Salesforce, Evernote, Asana, Basecamp, Trello, Google Drive, Wunderlist and many more.
You can assign and track tasks for team members, associate costs to time spent, and get a great overview of how you are spending your time on projects and meetings.
There is a plethora of get-things-done applications out there, but Wunderlist is great for its seamless integration across all of your devices, interacts with other applications like your calendar, and is a great way to brain dump tasks and get them organized and prioritized efficiently.
As humans we are drawn to visuals. As marketers we all need to have the basic capitality of design, whether it’s creating a quick design for a social media post, or it’s adding text overlay to an image.
Canva helps by making it easy to find the right resolution for every image for whatever platform you are creating. You can upload images, choose from their library, or buy a stock image, overlay your text, and load it up for social media.
Being able to access your accounts across the internet quickly is important so you aren’t wasting time trying to figure out or recover your passwords. This is especially true if you have a lot of client logins on social media sites. LastPass, while it was breached in 2015, is still one of the best password managers available. With different settings and configurations, you can get into your accounts with ease, or setup new logins with their password generator.
If you’re keeping notes in notepads or textpads, whether in physical form or on your computer, you’re behind the times. Not just a note taker, Evernote helps to organize thoughts, clip ideas from the internet, automatically save and organize e-mail attachments like receipts, and so much more. It works smoothly across all of your devices for when you have that campaign idea on the go that you need to write down, and also integrates with IFTTT recipes and other apps. This video shows how easy it is to use their Evernote Web Clipper.
Owned by LinkedIn and with addons for Chrome and Firefox, Rapportive allows you to dig up information on a contact right from Gmail. It will find any mutual LinkedIn connections you have with them, as well as their Twitter, Skype, website, and other contact information so you don’t have to do any digging.
Let’s say you don’t know the person’s email you are trying to reach out to. By putting in different combinations of their email (first initial, last name, full name, first name, last initial, etc.), Rapportive will display their information in the sidebar once you have found the correct email.
Not knowing someone’s email address that you want to contact can be a daunting research task if it isn’t readily available with a simple Google search. And if the Rapportive trick doesn’t work, or even before you try that method, you should give Voila Norbert a try. All you need to know is the person’s first and last name as well as there domain address. Norbert does the rest and in most cases will bring back their email address. Just run it through mailtester.com first to verify the email is legit.
From automating recurring tasks, forcing your focus on projects, organizing, prioritizing, and tracking tasks to creating images in a breeze, compiling your ideas and finds from the web, and conducting more efficient outreach, these tools can really help you become a more proficient marketer.
We use these (and a lot more) to make sure we are making the most out of our time for ourselves and our clients. So if you feel like your marketing efforts are too daunting, or just need some more digital marketing tips, then sign-up for our weekly emails featuring the latest tips and trending industry news. And if you’re looking for a marketing agency near you, give us a call. Our marketing company has helped small businesses throughout Lancaster, Harrisburg, and York.
When it comes to your business’s web presence, you probably think about how people interact with your website. You may even consider how you show up in Google since they dominate the search engines, but even Google’s search engine market share is declining year after year. In reality, your web presence is so much more than either of these.
Your website presence is the one place where your consumers can come to learn information about you and connect with you. This includes your website design and your blog.
Your web presence is the collection of all of the places online where consumers are able to research information about your brand and engage with you. These include social media profiles, review sites, directory listings, microsites, and anywhere else online where your brand is mentioned or profiled.
As of February of 2016, comScore reports that Google holds 64% of the market and NetMarketShare claims 67% market share when it comes to desktop searches.
comScore
NetMarketShareIt’s always important to have an organic SEO marketing and content marketing strategy so that your content, products, and services are showing up to solve people’s search queries.
When it comes to mobile, more and more people are performing mobile and tablet searches than desktop. This is why it’s more important than ever, and always will be, that your website is mobile-friendly.
Just like you should track Bing and Yahoo along with Google, you should also track mobile rankings for these search engines – which we do for our clients.
In the big picture of the Internet, search engines aren’t everything – there is still something missing.
YouTube, Facebook, Twitter – all of these sites are beginning to account for the decline of Google’s search engine market share. Instead of focusing all of your attention on just your Google search engine rankings, maybe it’s time to see how your business and content is displaying on these search engines.
When it comes to Facebook, you can search right inside the mobile app to find content, never having to leave the app to view the content. This trend will continue, which will hurt website analytics because you are getting visitors from “dark social” that you aren’t able to track on your website.
In terms of displaying ads, you might think that Google is the place to be for mobile ad displays. But you’d be wrong.
According to IHS, Facebook has about 47% ownership of mobile display ad revenue worldwide, while Google comes in at under 24%.
YouTube is considered to be the second biggest search engine there is, with over three billion searches a month and growing.
Created by Mushroom Networks
With YouTube videos showing up on the first page of almost every search result, it’s about time you start creating high quality videos and using them in your marketing strategy.
A lot of people like to engage with brands through social media, whether they are praising the brand, have a question, or want to make a complaint. Yet about 70% of customer complaints on Twitter are ignored by brands. Because of this, consumers are trying to find a different way to get in touch with businesses.
So, how do brands get more conversational and personal with their customers to handle any questions, comments, and complaints they have quickly and easily?
Social media messaging.
According to a study done by Business Insider, the big four messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Viber) have taken over the big four social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram) in terms of active users. With the growing popularity of Snapchat, social messaging activity is sure to continue to outpace active users on social networks unless they figure out a way to engage just as quickly, easily, and privately with their consumers.
Not only should you have an active presence on social media sites, but brands need to also be active on these social messaging apps as their customers are clearly favoring them when trying to converse with companies.
When performing a Google search about a restaurant, hotel, or other business, you will notice that review sites pop up near the top. Consumers are doing more and more research before buying because of all the content that they can review. Multiple studies have shown that 70-90% of consumers are doing online research before making a buying decision.
Consumers are researching on sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, Foursquare, Amazon, and Google Business for reviews before determining where they should give you their money.
When you have a good presence on all of these sites and you’re getting good reviews from the most loyal brand evangelists, sometimes your customers still need to be gently nudged or asked to leave a review.
Your web presence on review sites is a big part of reputation management, which we recently discussed here.
https://www.ezmarketing.com/blog/things-to-know-reputation-management/
Organic search results have changed and will continue to change, so we must adapt. Fewer products and services are showing up, with more articles and blog posts taking their place. Years ago, an SEO marketing mindset would want to rank their product pages for search terms like best smartwatch, affordable car, best headphones, and more. What’s showing up now aren’t products – it’s articles and blog posts that provide helpful content to the user in their research phase (after you get passed the paid search results, of course).
Notice that Apple does not rank at the top for “best smartwatch” (but it does show up as the top paid result).
If you are searching for a restaurant or hotel, Google returns maps, reviews, and travel sites. You have to get to the second or third page until you find a site owned by the restaurant or hotel.
Are you getting your business listed on these review sites? Your competition is, and so should you.
Whether you’ve moved business locations or your directory listings have never been in sync, having a consistent Name, Address and Phone Number (also known as NAP) is very important for your online business. If you have inconsistencies, even just spelling out “West” versus “W.” in some cases, can mean you won’t be showing up in map results that Google is pulling from directory listing sites.
There are many benefits of claiming your directory listings, so it’s extremely important to have a consistent NAP across all of your listings. It’s also important to be listed in listings relevant to your industry and niche as well.
If you are a local business then you need to have a presence on Yelp, Foursquare, and Thumbtack.
For lawyers, you need to be on FindLaw, Avvo, and Lawyers.com. When you look at just about any city search for lawyers, they are on the first page.
Finally, if you sell eCommerce products, look into selling on Etsy, Amazon, and eBay. The chances of beating out competitors for buyer keywords is slim without having to pay for it.
Getting more and more organic traffic from relevant keywords to your business is great. Getting more and more organic traffic from branded relevant keywords is even better.
Do you think it is more important for a travel site to rank for vacation rental keywords and locations, or would they prefer people to search for their travel site and the location? Which ends up converting better?
Take this example: fewer and fewer people are searching for vacation or vacation rentals, while Airbnb gets more and more searches.
This proves that as your web presence grows, so will your brand and the searches for your business. Do you think that Airbnb wants to rank more for keywords or have more people searching their brand and locations?
This chart from SEMrush clearly shows that the bulk of their organic traffic is coming from branded searched terms, which definitely have a higher conversion rate.
So do you want consumers to search for your products and services and find you among your competitors? Or do you want consumers to search for your brand and your products and services because they’ve done their research on your company – and you provided what they needed with a strong web presence? Need help? Talk with our website design company in Lancaster. We can help with SEO marketing, email marketing, as well as website design.
Getting a like, share, or fan on Facebook is fairly straightforward, and the way to get those three things is rather easy, too. With its simple user interface and hordes of users, Facebook is now a must-have marketing tool for entrepreneurs and companies. Because there is so much competing content on the social media website, only the savviest of marketing minds succeed on Facebook. Or is it all just a lot of smoke and mirrors?
Every local business needs to have an online presence – now more than ever. No longer can you just rely on word of mouth, the Yellowbook, or even just having a social media account for your customers to find you.
You not only need to have a website design that is mobile friendly, but you also need to be everywhere your target customers are looking online for you. Whether it is Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google My Business, or whatever platform fits your business, you need to be on there with as much information and pictures as you possibly can provide.
So where do you start for your local SEO marketing?
So, you started a new website design – now what? You may have paid a lot of money for it, and you want it to be seen, right? You wouldn’t buy a luxury car and never take it out of your garage, so don’t do the same with your website. You have to market your new website design after launching it to get the best results.
By now it’s a foregone conclusion that your business should have a presence on social media – which means moving from the “why” to the “how.” You probably already know many of the things you should be doing, like posting regularly, sharing relevant information, interacting with others, and so on.
However, there are definitely faux pas that could cost you in terms of authority, brand loyalty, and even followers. What makes these especially dangerous is that it’s very easy to cross the line from healthy activity to activity that could end up damaging your business on social media. Here are the Seven Deadly Social Media Sins to avoid on all of your social accounts.