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What is The Buyer’s Journey

by Brandon Lee
written by Brandon Lee

As the global trend of e-commerce continues to rise, more marketers are beginning to face the pertinent challenge of converting prospective consumers that are seemingly invisible. In order to understand the motives behind consumer action, most modern marketers follow a conceptualized marketing theory, known as the Buyer’s Journey.

Essentially, the Buyer’s Journey is somewhat of a voyage a prospective customer takes before they make a decision to purchase a product or service. The Buyer’s Journey is generally effective in understanding the mindset of the consumer while allowing marketers to methodically generate sales based on this approach. In this article, you will learn all about The Buyer’s Journey and how this approach can positively impact your business.

How Does the Buyer’s Journey Work?

To understand how the Buyer Journey works, you must first realize that there are different brands of “buyers” in particular sectors. For example, the Buyer’s Journey model may appear to be considerably different for B2C companies than for B2B companies. At any rate, here are the stages of the Buyer’s Journey as it relates to B2C companies.

conductor - What is The Buyer's Journey

Source: Conductor

  • Develop Interest – In this stage, the prospective buyer realizes that they have a unique problem or desire.
  • Information Gathering – During this stage, the buyer begins to gather more extensive information about their particular problem or desire.
  • Seek Options – Next, the buyer begins to explore their options for addressing their problem or desire.
  • Make a Purchase Decision – Finally, the buyer is ready to make a purchase and selects the appropriate vendor.

How Can I Use The Buyer’s Journey For My Business?

In theory, the Buyer’s Journey is a practical and effective solution to converting prospective customers into sales. However, in practice, this method will only yield positive results if you are using implementing it to your content strategy. In short, you’ll have to create content similar to the Buyer’s Journey’s framework to see any tangible growth.

To give you a better understanding of how this is done, let’s apply the Buyer’s Journey to a typical, real-world example.

Malcolm is a construction worker that is attempting to repaint the interior of his home. Let’s venture with him on his Buyer’s Journey to ultimately purchase Acme Premier Gloss Paint.

  • Develop Interest – Make Malcolm aware that buying traditional paint is ineffective and won’t improve the appearance of his home.
  • Information Gathering – Give Malcolm more information about the problem, such as the difference between traditional paint and your particular paint.
  • Seek Options – Make Malcolm aware of potential solutions and alternatives, such as hiring a professional painter or purchasing high-quality paint.
  • Make a Purchase Decision – Allow Malcolm to realize the value in choosing your premium paint over other brands and vendors.

This model should essentially give you a clear picture of how you can structure your content around the Buyer’s Journey. However, there is still a process you must go through to adequately create content that speaks directly to your audience.

You Must Create a Buyer Persona

Before you can create effective content that resembles the Buyer’s Journey, you must first identify who your audience is. To do so, you’ll have to create a Buyer Persona for your business.

A Buyer Persona is basically your ideal customer, based on market research and data from your existing customers.  Once you understand who your typical customers are, you can design your Buyer Persona to aid you on your mission to produce rich content that relates to the Buyer Journey.

To learn more about how you can create the perfect buyer persona for your business, click here to read this guide.

Conclusion

The Buyer’s Journey is an empirical marketing principle that allows marketers to create content that aligns with consumer interests. To learn more about how you can implement this strategy for your business, click here to learn more about how you can receive a website and digital content that follows the Buyer’s Journey today!

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Social Media

Do you Want to Boost Your Social Media Results? Here are 7 Simple Steps to Creating a Social Media Strategy

by Brandon Lee
written by Brandon Lee

Are you lacking a viable social media strategy? If so, you aren’t alone. 50% of businesses claim that they lack a tangible social media strategy, according to a recent survey. Accordingly, many businesses feel that having a documented social media strategy is unnecessary and takes a lot of time to create. Unfortunately, both of these points are utterly untrue. In order to properly analyze your social media growth and take a strategic approach to conquering social media in your niche, developing a social media strategy that outlines your objectives is definitely in order.

Read on to learn about 9 easy steps you can take to craft a social media strategy for your business.

Step 1: Craft an Executive Summary

All social media strategies begin with an executive summary, or simply a summary that describes your overall objective and how it relates to your business goals. The executive summary should be about one-page long and succinctly identify your purpose for using social media. Furthermore, this summary should include specific goals you are trying to achieve on a particular social media channel.

Overall, keep your executive summary clear and concise to ensure that your team defines growth and success in the same way as you.

Example: Grow my Facebook followers by 25%

Step 2: Conduct a Social Media Audit

As the old saying goes, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” The same maxim applies to your social media strategy. As such, conduct a social media audit of your primary social channels compared to two or three of your competitors. You may also elect to compare your social channels to a large non-competitor, such as Starbucks or Cisco, to use for inspiration.

When you are striking comparisons, be mindful to look at factors such as content, frequency, engagement, video use, visuals, customer service messaging, and tone, and audience size. You can also consult any additional factors that include,

  • Reviews
  • Third-Party Content
  • Keywords
  • Hashtags and Emoji Use

Measurements of engagement, which include all of these factors, encourages both small and large businesses that their social media strategy is either working or failing. To keep tabs on your engagement measurements, use Google Analytics to check your social media statistics, such as page views and click-through rates (CTR).

Step 3: Focus on Your Objectives

Now that you have studied the metrics of your competitors, it’s time to begin outlining your objectives. To give you the full run-down on how you should format this section, here is a complete breakdown of the categories that should be added in your social media strategy.

  • Goals: These are the outcomes you want to happen.
  • Strategy: This is the committed approach you will use to accomplish your goal.
  • Objectives: These are measurable steps you will take to ensure that the strategy is duly carried out.
  • Tactics: These are simply the tasks or tools required to complete an objective related to the strategy.

As you can see, these factors are conjoined throughout your social media strategy. Here is a perfect example of how you should include these factors in your own documented strategy.

  • Goal: Obtain a large Facebook audience for our business.
  • Strategy: Increase the amount of publishable content, interact with the audience, and share user-generated content.
  • Objective: Increase Facebook followers by 25%.
  • Tactics: Through interaction with influencers, leverage the exposure through visual and creative content, adjustable advertising budgets for boosted posts, and Facebook Stories.

Step 4: Create a Buyer Persona

It’s no secret that brands need personas to relate to consumers. Buyer personas should relate to the audience you strive to sell your products or services to. For example, Apple continually develops brilliant advertisements that depict how their products are ideal for professionals, business people, and millennial. By understanding who their target audience is, Apple creates commercials showing why these individuals need their products.

Creating your own buyer persona is essential to creating valuable content for your target audience. To get started, use products such as Xtensio Persona Maker and Hubspot’s Make My Persona to develop your ideal Buyer Persona.

Step 5: Adjust Your Buyer Persona

Once you have developed your buyer persona, you have to adjust it to your social media profiles. Simply, who are you? How do you want your audience to view your brand? Are you coy, playful, or fun? Maybe your brand is more serious and hates emojis. Whatever the case may be, adjust your buyer persona to your audience and be prepared to stick with it for a long time.

Step 6: Take Advantage of Your Resources

In this step, you will finally be able to put your strategy into action. To properly put your strategy into an initiative, implement the use of the paid, earned, and owned strategy. Are you confused on where to start? Here’s a great example.

  • Paid: Increase the engagements of your content by boosting a post every week. Ideally, publish your post first and wait a few days before giving it a boost.
  • Owned: Introduce your very own branded hashtag and begin promoting it on other social media channels, your posts, and even encourage popular influencers to use it.
  • Earned: Social media is loaded with members of the media, bloggers, and influencers. Find conversations you are interested in, and take part in it. Doing so will increase your exposure and convince others that you are important and popular in your niche.

Step 7: Measure Your Growth

It’s often easy to get lost in a variety of growth metrics, reports, and audits, while you are trying to find out how your brand is growing on social media. Instead of worrying about this fluctuating data, here are two ways to measure your social media growth.

  • Quantitative: This is simply data that you can measure quantitatively with numbers. Impressions, followers, and website sessions are examples of quantitative data.
  • Qualitative: This data is intangible, but nonetheless important for your business. Positive comments and reviews can indicate that you are providing exceptional products and services.

Conclusion:

Once you are done following these steps, what are you supposed to do next? In actuality, the answer should be different for everyone. Nevertheless, you should obtain a general (and documented) understanding of your social media objectives. Now that you have a social media strategy, it’s simply up to you to put it into effect for your brand.

Did you find this article to be helpful? If so, feel free to share this article on Twitter, Facebook, and any other social media channels.

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Great News: Global Facebook Use is Increasing Despite Privacy Concerns

by Brandon Lee
written by Brandon Lee

Facebook is the largest social media network in the world, with over one billion active users across the globe. As such, Facebook has become an exceptional marketing tool that allows businesses to place their ads where virtually millions of prospects can view them.

This strategy has been effective, to say the least. There are over 3 million advertisers on Facebook, and more businesses are beginning to invest in Facebook as a viable online marketing tool. However, there has been some concern that Facebook’s worldwide use would dwindle because of their catastrophic data breach in April.

Interestingly, the reality has been otherwise in favor that Facebook’s worldwide use is not actually falling, but is instead increasing at a steady rate, according to The Next Web.

Facebook’s Usage Rate Has Increased

Notwithstanding growing privacy concerns, global Facebook use is actually accelerating. From 2017 to the end of March, 390 million people signed up on Facebook. That’s an 8% increase than the same trend just three months ago. In addition, Facebook has reported a steady 3.2% growth in monthly active users since the beginning of 2018.

Facebook’s advertising platform also posted some remarkable statistics, averaging a total of over 2 billion users by the end of March. More importantly, Facebook has gained approximately 67 million new users since March, a key indicator that Facebook’s usage rate has only increased since its massive data breach.

What Does This Mean for Marketers?

There was an increasingly growing concern that Facebook’s data breach would affect their usage rate on both their social media and advertising platform. After the data breach, Pep Boys suspended their advertising campaigns on Facebook indefinitely and many pundits believed that other companies would follow in suit.

Moreover, there was also a particular fear of how Facebook users would treat the data breach of the social media giant. According to the aforementioned statistics, it appears that Facebook is still a beloved tool for people across the world, and that fact doesn’t look to change any time soon.

Can Businesses Still Advertise on Facebook?

Facebook’s advertising platform has only increased in previous months. Therefore, businesses can resume using the platform to create their own advertising campaigns. With billions of global adherents, Facebook is still the most effective social media marketing tool by leaps and bounds.

Facebook also gives businesses the opportunity to reach their target audience with a sizable marketing budget. Hence, both small businesses and worldwide corporations can use Facebook, even with limited budgets.

What’s in Store for Facebook Now

Now that Facebook has seemingly recovered from their cataclysmic data breach, it appears that their usage numbers are steadily increasing. This has to be good news for both Facebook and businesses that use the platform as a marketing tool.

Since Facebook is still the most efficient social media marketing tool, it should be a relief to marketers that Facebook users haven’t been swayed by March’s data breach. That still hasn’t stopped Facebook from ushering in new changes to both their social media and advertising platforms, assuring businesses and users that their recent data breach is far away behind them.

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Influencer MarketingInternetSocial Media

5 Reasons Why You Should Try Influencer Marketing

by Brandon Lee
written by Brandon Lee

Since the dawn of the advertising age, brands have used celebrities to market their products to consumers. This concept has changed drastically since the beginning of social media, primarily because of the rise of influencers. Influencers may not be world-renowned celebrities, but these individuals possess a substantial follower that listens to their every word.

As a result, large businesses are starting to gravitate towards influencer marketing or the practice of employing influencers to market consumer products or services to a wider audience. However, is influencer marketing sustainable and is it worth the investment? In this article, you’ll learn about the five primary reasons why you should try influencer marketing for your business.

1. There is a Low Barrier of Entry

There are many levels of marketing that either requires extensive knowledge in the area, a large investment or are otherwise just difficult to break into. Social media marketing requires a business to understand who their target audience is, how to create effective ads, and distinguish the data behind their ads to make necessary improvement.

The same facts are true about other aspects of online marketing, such as SEO and link-building. Influencer marketing, on the other hand, is relatively simple to master. All you have to do is contact an influencer, express your interest, and begin a partnership. Afterward, you can let the results spring forth.

2. Your Options are Limitless

There are thousands of influencers on social media and the Internet, giving your business a limitless amount of options to choose from. For example, if you are running a custom clothing store, there are a wide array of YouTube personalities and social media celebrities that can market your products to their audience.

Influencers exist in a myriad of business sectors, so it should never be difficult finding an influencer that identifies with your particular brand.

3. Influencers Improve Brand Sentiment

It’s possible that you have witnessed an advertisement where an actor or celebrity has genuinely expressed their sincere love for a particular product or service. With influencer marketing, this scenario becomes more possible. Let’s take into account the previous example of a business selling clothing products.

If this business somehow comes into a business agreement with a influencer to create custom merchandise and the influencer is satisfied with their purchase, pursuing an influencer marketing relationship will become more effective.

The reason why is because the influencer can genuinely inform their audience about your products, which increases your brand sentiment and allows others to see that your business actually provided quality products.

4. Influencer Marketing Drives Brand Awareness

In online marketing, brand awareness is an important aspect that helps businesses understand how popular they are online. Since influencers contain a large following on social media or other Internet communities, your brand can possibly been seen by millions of people who will take notice to your business.

Increasing your brand awareness in this way can substantially increase your return on investment as well, since you are purchasing an sure-fire and effective method of boosting your brand’s online exposure.

Conclusion:

Overall, influencer marketing is an important online marketing venture that many businesses are beginning to particpate in. By finding the right influencer, you can excel your brand into new heights of exposure and revenue opportunities.

Did you find this article to be helpful? If so, feel free to share this article on Twitter, Facebook, and any other social media channels.

 

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What’s Up with WhatsApp?

by Nishad Jiwa
written by Nishad Jiwa

WhatsApp recently expanded its capabilities with a myriad of new features. In fact, the popular audio – video – chat platform now offers group calling for up to four people. With WhatsApp joining Instagram under the Facebook umbrella, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new features at the recent F8 Developer Conference in May. This is an annual event that highlights the current and burgeoning trends in the social media universe.

Starting a Group Call

Android and iOS app users can download the new updates for WhatsApp. In fact, here are the essentials of taking advantage of this new multi-person call platform:

  • To start a group call, simply start a usual one-on-one video call.
  • Tap the “add participant” button in the top right of the screen.
  • This allows you to add up to 4 contacts for a social, business or personal A/V conference call.
  • Group calls are encrypted with end-to-end encryption for optimal and secure communications.

While video calling is already available on WhatsApp, the newest feature eliminates the need of having multiple windows open for individual calls. Similarly, it rivals existing video chat apps like Facetime, while creating new ways for people to connect privately with close friends and business associates. With group calling, you can even create video-call groups for your clubs, sports teams, and social rosters.

WhatsApp Continues to Expand

Like Facebook and Twitter, WhatsApp has morphed into one of the largest social media networks in the world. With the recent announcement about the group calling feature, Mark Zuckerberg stated that people had already used about 2 billion minutes of video calling on the app alone. This is an indication that WhatsApp is rapidly becoming the go-to-video calling source for millions of users across the world. However, the main reason why people prefer the app is due to is privacy and encryption protocols. The app also continues to challenge Facebook, which has seen its share of recent privacy scandals.

Here are some more reasons why WhatsApp is slated to become the premier online and mobile communications platform in the months and years ahead:

  • WhatsApp is now the world’s largest fully-encrypted communications network.
  • The app features a convenient online version for users that prefer desktop and laptop access.
  • WhatsApp has enhanced its support for Instagram and Facebook video playback.
  • The app continues to allow YouTube videos to play natively – without forwarding users to the YouTube app on their mobile, wireless and digital devices.

Other Features

In addition to the group calling, the app will also be offering support for stickers in the coming months. This will allow third-party developers to offer more creative ways to enjoy the app. Similarly, WhatsApp will also roll out new group administrator functions. This allows existing group admins to revoke rights from other participants if needed. You will simply access the user in “Group Info”, while selecting the “Dismiss As Admin” features. However, you can use the same portal to make users admins in your private group chats.

With WhatsApp continuing to grow at alarming rates, it’s imperative to add this crucial program to your social media networks. While social in nature, the app is proving to be an effective tool for business and client communications as well. So much so that more people downloaded WhatsApp in the last six months than Skype and other popular audio-video-chat interfaces.

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Small Business Checklist – Three Ways to Improve Rankings

by Nishad Jiwa
written by Nishad Jiwa

Search engine optimization (SEO) is never easy for any company. With so many metrics involved, it can be truly challenging to secure measurable results for any new or existing brand. Similarly, digital marketing can be complicated for clients with limited time, money and resources. This is why it’s pivotal to have a seasoned and reputable company handle all your online advertising needs.  For small to medium-sized businesses, there are several ways to improve your visibility and Google rankings. In fact, here are some key points to address on any business SEO checklist:

  • What to address in your online SEO marketing campaign?
  • Why is SEO important for any new or existing company?
  • Which tools will help you secure higher visibility, page rankings, and client – customer patronage?
  • How much time commitment is involved for improving my business rankings and industry ratings?

If these are some of the questions you have, it’s important to know that great organic (natural) rankings do not happen overnight. In fact, it’s a comprehensive, cohesive and ongoing process that requires you to have patience across the board. Similarly, a sound and effective SEO package reflect all the current and burgeoning trends. This includes mobile optimization for pages, along with social media integration and captivating and compelling content. With this in mind, here are three ways that have been proven to improve rankings for small and mid-sized businesses across the nation.

1. Understand What your Customers are Looking For

Before you venture into SEO, you need to know what your customers are looking for. For example specific products, tailor-made services, or quick responses to customer questions and concerns. Analyzing and assessing your small business needs is a specialty of any seasoned and reputable SEO agency. In fact, they can provide timely solutions for the following:

  • Optimizing your websites and blogs to reflect the latest changes in Google algorithms. Creating gripping websites that attract and engage your geo-specific or core customer bases.
  • Incorporating mobile optimization to secure higher visibility on Google Maps, local search results, and business listings. This is a crucial way to build a strong mobile presence while promoting your brands to new clients and consumers.
  • Ensuring your sites, blogs and online stores are fully compatible with desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. SEO experts take into account page loading times, which is important in reducing bounce rates and keeping potential customers on your pages longer.
  • Making sure your content is easy to scan and digest with industry-specific keywords, relevant text, and social media links (embedded and visible).
  • Promoting your business on Google, Yahoo, Yelp, Bing, and all social – mobile – and business platforms and directories.

2. Fix your Technical Issues

Another important aspect of small business SEO is fixing technical issues. While you may a great looking website, an SEO audit is the only way to ensure complete optimization across your pages. In fact, the way you present your pages are just as important as your business offerings and content. With this in mind, here are some of the technical issues SEO professionals address and resolve:

  • Speed and page download times. Long gone are the days of lengthy content and flash intros that would take forever to load.
  • Checking for duplicate content on the Web. This is important since duplicate content can seriously impact your rankings, ratings, and web-traffic.
  • Repairing broken links to ensure customers link back to the products, services, and information they seek. Broken links can prompt users and visitors to leave your sites and go elsewhere. Similarly, Google can penalize your pages for promoting misleading, false, or incorrect content and links.
  • Making sure all your pages are fully optimized for SEO. This allows search engines to properly crawl and index you web-pages on their listings and user searches.
  • Enhancing the strong areas of your pages, while improving the weaker and non-optimized areas of your website.

3. Optimizing your Pages

SEO on-page optimization is much more than just placing strategic keywords on pages. In fact, your content must also be streamlined, centralized and properly structured across your pages. Similarly, you must have keywords (preferably long-tailed) that effectively target your specific customer and client bases. With SEO content specialists, you are able to tap into important ranking signals and non-spammy keywords and links. Local experts will also optimize the following for optimal results:

  • Website, blog and online store titles and sub-titles.
  • Meta descriptions with back-links to your sites and pages. The correct form of preview content that can be accessed by users – by simply hovering their computer mouses over the content and links.
  • Body content – easy to scan content that is precise, concise and gets your messages across to users.

These are some of the ways to improve your small-business visibility on Google. However, you need a dedicated SEO company to cover all bases and take your brands to new heights in any industry.

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How To Become Credible Online, Quickly!

by Sahail Ashraf
written by Sahail Ashraf

It’s never been harder to be credible online. The landscape is changing so much, and so fast, that many brands and individuals are simply being left behind.

However, if your business is not ‘credible’ or ‘authoritative’ online it will struggle. From Google reviews to blog posts that are shared, it’s a big playing field. And you have to win.

There is a way to get this right, and you won’t be surprised to find it isn’t a quick fix.

Blog and publish a lot, but keep the quality control

If you’re a business, you need to be creating content. This is best served by great blog content. We’re not talking throwaway pieces that are read in two minutes and then instantly forgotten. We’re talking content like this.

Content like the kind Copyblogger creates regularly is trusted and it’s engaging. But that didn’t happen overnight. The team behind Copyblogger took a long while to get their stuff to where it is today. And if you’re not convinced, check out their catalog of posts. It’s huge.

It’s really big. But even while it’s big, it’s all incredibly well written. So they’ve mastered the key lesson regarding publishing content (whether it’s a blog post, a podcast or a course). That lesson tells us that a body of content has to be significant in size, but also damn good.

Use social, a lot

Social media is still very relevant, but again it takes time and attention. Once you’re on a social media network that is actually relevant to your audience, spend a daily amount of time there. Consistency is key.

More importantly, engage with people. The biggest social accounts are untouchable, they’re movie stars and models. Don’t try and compete. But be real, tweet and post a lot (and I mean a lot) and engage with anyone who gets involved with what you’re saying.

It’s tough to get somewhere on Twitter for example, but you can make it on that platform as long as you work hard. This article from way back in 2009 is absolutely 100% relevant today. It gives you all you need to know.

The endgame

There is a final stage to gaining credibility. Once you have developed a significant body of work online you go for the big guys. These outlets are sites like Entrepreneur.com and Inc.com. The sites are huge and they hold considerable weight in the world of business.

Getting an article on these sites (and any other sites like them) is by no means easy. But if you have gained credibility, they’ll be only too happy to look at what you’re offering, and consider publication.

However, that long road is ahead of you. That’s why gaining credibility and authority are so highly prized by brands. That’s why they pay content creators to write really good articles and blog posts, in the hope that they’ll build credibility.

So while my title mentions the word ‘quickly’, it’s all relative. In fact, with the Web being the way it is, with Fake News and spam everywhere, the longer and harder you work on your content, the more credible you’re going to be.

Just follow the three-step process outlined here. Don’t be tempted by shortcuts. And stay focused. Your brand deserves credibility.

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Coming Soon- Twitter Integration into Google Desktop Search Results

by Rolando Herrera
written by Rolando Herrera

People with keen eyes might’ve noticed that Google mobile search results have been showing related content from Twitter. The integration started in May, with Tweets containing the searched keywords appearing in the SERPs.

However, this was limited to the United States and only to mobile results. Recently, there are indications that not only will Google include Twitter outside the country, but the company would also expand to desktop search.

Where and When?

Some observant users in the U.K spotted Twitter results appearing in their SERPs for the past few days. The results appear naturally at the bottom of the page in desktop searches. This was initially spotted by Conductor and they notified Search Engine Land.

According to them, the Twitter integration is only visible in relation to big-name companies and celebrities who were recently active on the social network. The integration doesn’t seem to appear in lesser known keywords or people without much Twitter following.

Twitter integration in desktop results hasn’t happened in the U.S yet. People have tried searching various keywords to get the social network on their SERPs here, but there’s no trace of it. A spokesperson from Google did confirm that they have been experimenting with the integration into desktop since mid-July. However, they had nothing more to say on the matter.

Possible Benefits of the Integration

The deal between Twitter and Google would most likely prove to be beneficial to both companies. The integration would be a cool new feature for Google that might benefit the users. The increased visibility in search engines might bring more traffic towards Twitter, possibly increasing its user population and activity.

To the marketers, this might just prove to be a boon. They can use Twitter to make their content more visible in SERPs. This might just add a new dimension to SEO and SMM through Twitter.

Naturally, not all your Tweets will appear on SERPs. Google search is still content based. The text in your Tweets should contain the high volume keywords. The tweets must be optimized to gain visibility. For example, if you tweet “Product Z delivers optimal performance” it won’t appear in search results with keywords “engines” or “cars”.

High Organic Reach

You might also need to start treating your tweets like small ads and mind the content. With integration into Google searches, Twitter will have a high rate of organic reach. Having a call to action in your tweets would become very important. Only time will tell just how massive an impact Twitter marketing would have on the marketing world, but it always pays to be prepared.

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Is Facebook Favoring Native Videos over Embeds?

by Rolando Herrera
written by Rolando Herrera

Discerning people might’ve noticed the increasing number of native videos on Facebook. There’s also a marked decline in the number of YouTube videos and other third-party video embeds. Most of this content that lands organically in Facebook feeds are native video uploads. Speculation is rife whether Facebook is starting to favor these embeds.

This change comes on the heels of Facebook’s announcement that the company decisively intended to limit third-party images on its network. That, along with Facebook’s current uncertain relationship with Google, brings YouTube’s future on the social network into question. Is this a decisive step against Google or just promotion of native video as opposed to all third party embeds?

The Study

Recently, Search Engine Journal conducted a study to see if the speculations were correct and if Facebook was clearly favoring native video. They experimented by uploading seven videos for each page that they were targeting, which amounted to twenty-one uploads. They made sure that they would get results that weren’t influenced by outside factors by taking several precautions. The study lasted for two weeks but the results delivered showed a decisive winner.

Native or YouTube?

According to the study, native videos had been liked 814 times, shared 168 times, commented on by 104 viewers and reached a total of 181,760 people. YouTube videos, on the other hand, were liked 342 times, shared 63 times, commented on by 14 viewers and reached a total of 88,950 people.

This is an unexpectedly clear result. There’s a difference of 472 likes, 105 shares, 90 comments and 92,810 people.

In all, it’s obvious that Facebook was favoring native video to third-party embeds, especially YouTube embeds. The study concluded decisively that native videos reach twice as many people. Because of that, they get twice as many likes, three times the shares and seven times the comments.

Two Approaches to Marketing

This data becomes invaluable for an online marketer. They’ll have to take two different approaches to marketing their video content. Since native videos have a broader reach on Facebook, it is advisable to market that way on Facebook. However, most marketers actually intend to draw the attention of the viewers to their YouTube channel, which would contain more videos. The best strategy would be to invest a little content on all platforms, allowing a marketer to get maximum reach.

For now, it’s unclear whether this partiality is intentional or not. Perhaps native videos simply perform better on Facebook compared to embeds. It is best to err on the side of caution and go the native video way.

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Tagging and the Importance of Hashtags

by Rolando Herrera
written by Rolando Herrera

Social Media Marketing is billowing and there are a number of things that can be done to make it work wonders for your business- hashtags are one of them. It is one of the best ways of promoting a service or product via social media sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Google+. For hashtag novices who can’t seem to figure out what function the “#” sign has when its added to a tweet or a video post-read on…

What is #?

On Twitter, the # sign (hashtag) turns a word/group of words that are suffixed to it, into a searchable-link. This helps you track discussion topics and organize content, based on those specific words. For Instance, if you wanted to post something about a current Wimbledon match, you would then include #Wimbledon in your tweet & join that particular conversation. Hashtags should ideally be short & contain natural keywords/phrases to improve their visibility in online rankings.

Why Hashtags Matter

When you click on a hashtag, you are able to view all posts which mention that particular subject- all in real-time!! Take a look at why they are important:

  • Hashtags are a very powerful research tool & website developers who are interested in SEO can easily view trending news on social networking websites
  • They are also very important when any breaking news has to be spread and are commonly used to get people talking and discussing major global events
  • A hashtag can also be used to promote an event for your business and helps attract more potential customers to your website. It’s a great way of promoting a new product launch or when you want to announce a sale, offer or discount
  • Many websites also give you the functionality to track the performance of the hashtags you have added. It helps you analyze which keywords/phrases attracted traffic to your site and upped your sales

Aspects to Focus On

As you can see, for any online marketer or small business owner, hashtags can be the magic wand you wave over the Internet to magnetize customers to your business. But there are some things you must remember while using them- when you add a hashtag to a post on any social networking site, try to incorporate an external web-link into the content, to your site/blog. This helps people link to more information about your brand or company. Incorporate short, simple, impactful and trending phrases and use hashtags to create a strong customer base.

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