DIGITAL - Twitter Shifts Focus, Kills Vine

Twitter is struggling.

The platform had close to 1 billion inactive users in August of last year, and users have continued to flock to rival platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram.

Some users find Twitter confusing or overwhelming, and issues with poor response to harassment are long-standing.

Twitter has finally begun to address the harassment issue and this may make the platform more welcoming to a wider variety of users, but it might be too little, too late when compounded with their other issues.

Although they committed in their 2015 Q4 earnings announcement to, “fix the broken windows and confusing parts… that we know inhibit usage and drive people away,” they still struggle with a disengaged and distrustful user base.

This may be exacerbated by the company’s decision to kill Vine, a service that was never able to bring in revenue but was incredibly popular with a wide range of users.

The decision to eliminate Vine is part of their move towards more focus on the news, and on live events, with more live streaming of current events such as the presidential debates.

While reviews of the platform’s new live streaming experience and the Periscope app have mostly been positive, that won’t entirely offset the disappointment of Vine users.

Vine users, primarily creatives and artists, will move to platforms like YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram, and Twitter risks losing their engagement entirely.

Vine, and Twitter itself, was not able to keep up with other platforms in terms of management stability, responsiveness to customer demands, or profitability.

In an effort to stay afloat, Twitter has laid off 9% of its workforce, or about 350 jobs. And it’s taken steps to shift focus and become more welcoming to users.

Will it be enough?

Unless Twitter finds a way to generate further revenue through advertising or other means, probably not.

However, Twitter hopes to gain stable profitability moving forward, and it is possible that airing live streaming events on the Apple TV app will provide the ad revenue opportunities that have been missing so far.

By Tiffany Sostar

Tiffany is a writer, editor, academic, and animal lover who came late to her appreciation of pets. At 18, a rescue pup named Tasha saved her from a depression and she hasn't looked back. She has worked as the canine behaviour program coordinator for the Calgary Humane Society, and was a dog trainer specializing in working with fearful and reactive dogs for many years. She doesn't have any pets right now, but makes up for it by giving her petsitting clients (and any dogs she comes across on her frequent coffee shop adventures) extra snuggles.

BUSINESS - Taking & Marketing Great Photos of Animals

Nothing sells like a great photograph.

Photos show personality, evoke emotions and prompt action - like adoption or a purchase.

The American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) Professional  recently published a four part blog - Hit ‘Em With Your Best Shot: Taking Great Photos of Shelter Animals.

Their tips and tricks will not only help animal rescues and shelters, but can also be used by businesses who want to create photos to promote their products or services, and even by pet owners who are hoping for an amazing shot of their best friend.

Part One focuses on getting to know the animal before pulling out the camera.

Some pets are shy of people, some are shy of cameras and it’s important for them to be comfortable and relaxed.

Noises, toys and treats are all part of getting the pet’s attention, but they shouldn’t be used all at once.

Get technical in Part Two with tips about lighting, flash, background, composition and editing - don’t worry, even the most simple of cameras works wonders if the shooter knows about strong composition.

Dogs have more predictable responses to people, don’t mind a change in location and often know some basic obedience which is great for the photographer.

Cats? Not so much, which is why Part Three is all about taking photos of felines.

Patience is what working with cats is all about. Tips include the importance of forward ear positions, waiting for the perfect cat stretch, playing with toys and getting action shots.

After creating all these wonderful pictures, the next step is to post them and get lots of traffic to a website and/or social media page.

The tips in Part Four can “help get 'em from your homepage to their new home.”

Learn about what photos generate interest online, optimal sizing for different social media channels, which image works best for thumbnails and the type of information that should be included right on the photo. 

One relevant addition to the tips provided by the ASPCA: for some advertising campaigns, it's necessary to leave space in the photo for written information about the product or service. This is not usually the case when showcasing a pet for adoption.

Why are photos so important?

Hubspot’s blog post, 37 Visual Content Marketing Statistics You Should Know in 2016, touches on just how vital visuals are to any successful marketing campaign.

A few of their stats:

• Researchers found that colored visuals increase people's willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.
• When people hear information, they're likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.
• Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.

People are influenced by visuals, adopters are moved by visuals, purchasers are motivated by visuals.

So get out that camera and start shooting - if you can't do it yourself recruit a volunteer or hire a pro - in today's digital world, it's worth it.

DIGITAL - Complete Guide to Instagram Advertising

Instagram is fast becoming a top platform for advertising with users two and half times more likely to click on ads than other social media channels.

As of last week, monthly active users jumped up to 500 million with 300 million active every day.

With this massive potential audience in mind, businesses are looking for ways to create meaningful, quality experiences through Instagram's ad solutions.

To help businesses succeed, HubSpot teamed up with Iconosquare to bring you The Essential Guide to Instagram Advertising.

The guide includes:

• Integrating Instagram ads into your current advertising strategy
• Setting clear campaign objectives focused on improving your business
• Creating an optimized Instagram ad with our step by step guide
• Monitoring performance metrics and moderating engagement with your Ads
• Insights and takeaways from exclusive experimentation
• Bonus: Cheat sheet “The Perfect Instagram Ad.”

Start your Instagram advertising campaign - Download your free ebook.

DIGITAL - Instagram Announces New Business Tools

With more businesses using Instagram, the company saw a demand for tools to make the platform more effective for businesses.

After surveying users about business needs, they announced new Instagram Business Tools that will be rolled out in 2016.

Business Profiles

With a business profile, companies can choose how they want their customers to get in touch with them: call, text or email with a tap of the contact button as well as get directions. Business profiles also unlock access to insights and the ability to promote.

Insights

Insights give businesses demographic and behaviour information about who their followers are and which posts resonate better than others - all from within the mobile app.

Promote

A business can turn well-performing posts into ads right within the app—helping to connect with even more customers. Simply pick a post already shared on Instagram and add a button encouraging people to take action. Options include selecting a target audience or allowing Instagram to suggest targeting, and choosing the length of time for the promotion.

Business profiles, insights and the ability to promote will be rolling out in the US, Australia and New Zealand in the coming months, and will be available in all regions globally by the end of the year.

DIGITAL - 17 Things People Hate About Your Website

You created a website for your business so people can find you, but also to market your services, make sales, develop relationships and build your business.

Did you know that poor user experience can do the opposite? It can cause high page abandonment, low visitor-to-lead conversion and poor organic search positions.

Hubspot Marketing has created a list of 17 things people hate about your website. This list can help when developing a site, but also is a guideline for existing websites to determine how they can be improved.

It takes forever to load

According to a KISSmetrics report, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, and 40% abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

It isn’t optimized for mobile

Scrolling from side to side or having to pinch and zoom to read content just frustrates users.

Google announced it would strengthen the ranking of mobile friendly sites so if a site isn’t mobile friendly, it will lose out in organic search rankings.

It offers poor navigation

It’s important for users to easily know where to go and what to do on your site.

It uses excessive pop-ups

How annoying is it to have your reading interrupted by constant pop-up boxes? Many sites are now using slide-in call to action boxes that are less obtrusive.

It contains multimedia content that autoplays

The user is enjoying reading your site when suddenly music starts playing or someone starts talking and they can’t find the button to stop it. It’s likely they will simply close your page.

It’s littered with generic or cheesy stock photography

It's much better to show real pictures of customers, employees, your company, product, and location.

It doesn’t clearly explain what your company does

Steven Krugg sums it up best in his best-selling book, Don't Make Me Think: If visitors can't identify what it is you do within seconds, they won't stick around long.

It contains keyword stuffed copy

Keyword-stuffed copy makes for a bad reader experience. So instead of cramming a keyword in every chance you get, read this blog post to learn the five parts of your website where you should optimize for keywords.

It’s missing social sharing buttons on content

Buttons make it easy for your readers to share your content on social networks because they don't have to manually copy and paste your URL and compose a tweet.

It employs title and headlines that are incongruous with the content

Also known as click-bait. It's important to capture people’s attention in titles, but make sure it isn't misleading and the content can actually live up to what you promised to deliver.

For the rest of the tips along with links to how you can address them and make your website better, visit Hubspot Marketing.

DIGITAL - How to do SEO: The Ultimate Guide

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become one of the most important marketing tools.

Why? Because it can bring your business qualified leads and customers, is good for business visibility and branding, provides credibility to your business and insight into your customers, and has one of the best ROI’s in advertising.

But how do you do it well and on a budget?

Alexa has created a free e-book with everything you need to know for a complete search engine optimization plan.

It’s easy to get distracted by articles that underscore the importance of all 200 ranking factors. This guide will review SEO basics, and provide you with a structured game plan for how to start SEO.

It covers the four most common problems that get in the way of SEO results and connects to even more tools like how to find the best keywords.

Download How to do SEO: The Ultimate Guide.

DIGITAL - Measure Social Media Using Google Analytics

If you’re using Google Analytics and looking for a way to measure your social media, look no further.

Social Media Examiner has come up with four ways to use Google to determine how digital media affects your business.

Verify Social as a Traffic Driver

Google Analytics will provide a look at the overall traffic sources that deliver visitors to your site or blog. Included in this report is traffic from social media.

When you see traffic from social media alongside the traffic from other channels, it’s easy to see the impact social has on your site’s traffic.

(Social Media Examiner)

This information can be broken down even further - into specific social media channels.

These reports can be found under Acquisition.

Attribute Revenue to Specific Social Media Posts

When you’re creating posts for social media, you can include links back to your site that Google Analytics can track, sort, and analyze.

When you combine these links with UTM tracking and goals, you get insight into how social media is impacting revenue. Depending on how detailed you’d like to get with it, you can set unique UTMs for all of your social media, per channel, or even per update.

Find Out How Visitors From Social Media Consume Your Content

Google Analytics will allow you to track three other types of goals: duration (how long social media visitors stay on your site); pages/screens per session goals and event goals (how many times visitors from social media play video on your site).

See How Social Media Impacts the Conversion Path

If your business or brand wants to learn how social contributes to something like acquisition or to know how effective social media is at driving email subscriptions, there are conversion funnel reports that can show you just how influential social media is in making these conversions happen.

Don’t worry if some of this sounds complicated. Social Media Examiner provides step by step, simple instructions.

Read the full article here.

DIGITAL - 24 Ways to Test Your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Content

If social media marketers don’t test the effectiveness of their posts, they won’t know what works, what doesn’t and what could work better.

Simply Measured has created a free guide with 24 social media tests specific to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

On Instragram you can measure the best time of day to post to your specific audience, if posts are more effective if a product is featured or no product, and tags versus followers.

With over 1.44 billion users worldwide, nearly one million of whom log in each day, Facebook has an unprecedented audience. The number of brands you have to compete with on Facebook is almost as staggering as the opportunity.

The guide includes Facebook tests to measure the effectiveness of custom calls to action, posts with offers as opposed to posts without, serious versus not serious, video views versus views to 95% and more.

If you want your Tweets to have more impact, test the time of day, frequency and number of posts and rate of decay.

Clear guidelines for every test keeps things simple and straightforward for marketers to use and improve their marketing strategy.

Download your free guide here.

DIGITAL - Email Personalization: How to lower unsubscribes, increase revenue and stay out of the spam folder

The Chinese calendar may say 2016 is the year of the monkey, but according to VentureBeat, for marketers 2016 is the year of personalization.

When it comes to personalized emails, 257 of the email marketers surveyed for VentureBeat Insight Report showed increased open rates and click-through rates by employing some form of personalization.

In some cases, average customer email click-through rate is 2.5 times higher using personalization, when compared with non-personalized emails. Not only that, revenue is an average 5.7 times higher.

Personalization can be difficult because of resource, technology and data integrity challenges but it can be done.

Learn how to use personalization to its full advantage in a free webinar from VentureBeat.

In this webinar you will learn how to:

• Narrow down customer interests and respond with content that is actionable and useful
• Target the right data to appeal to customers’ needs and desires
• Manage email frequency the right way
• Identify warning signs that you may have gotten a little too personal.

DIGITAL - 2016 Social Media Planning Toolkit

Deciding how to invest time and resources for better results on social media?

Hootsuite put together a toolkit of resources with all the social media trends you need to know.

Their 2016 Social Media Planning Toolkit includes:

How to Create a Social Media Strategy - a guide that provides you with five fundamental steps for creating a social media strategy.

2016 Social Media Trends - an infographic providing an overview of what Hootsuite predicts will happen this year.

The State of Social 2016 - a deck providing an overview of the current state of social media, and a deeper dive into the social trends that will be impacting your business.

Hootsuite is the most widely used platform for managing social media, used by over 10 million people around the globe and by more than 800 of the Fortune 1000. Their platform brings together social networks and integrates with hundreds of business applications.

DIGITAL - A Comprehensive Guide to the Perfect LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is the digital media channel to build your business, share content with other professionals, connect with colleagues, business partners, and even potential employers, and showcase your skills and achievements.

Do you wonder how to get more recommendations and how to get your profile to stand out amongst the thousands out there?

Learn how to maximize LinkedIn for your business with some of the following resources.

The folks at LeisureJobs created an in-depth infographic that covers everything from the do’s and don’ts of a LinkedIn profile to search engine optimization tips to help your profile show up in search results.

To take your business to the next level, Hubspot has a free three-part kit full of great information - How to Use LinkedIn for Your Business, How to Use LinkedIn for Professional Networking and How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile.

Click infographic link above for full-size image

DIGITAL - Digital Marketing Must-Have Skills

Looking to hire someone to take your digital media to the next level?

As the digital media world continues to evolve and grow at a rapid rate, it can be challenging to determine the best skill set when hiring a digital marketing specialist.

Do you focus on general marketing experience, a strong grasp of available media channels, critical or creative thinking skills? The answer is all of the above. Digital marketers need a very diverse skill set.

Mashable asked 15 members of Young Entrepreneur Council what they look for when hiring and came up with 15 essential skills.

1. Paid social media advertising expertise
2. Sales skills
3. Specific marketing channel expertise
4. The ability to think critically

5. The ability to execute and analyze drip marketing campaigns

6. A mix of creativity and analytical abilities

7. Good copy and visual storytelling abilities
8. A likeable personality
9. An understanding of Wordpress
10. Self-promotion savvy
11. An understanding of brevity
12. The ability to analyze quantifiable metrics
13. Listening skills
14. Agility
15. Basic design skills

For a more in depth look at these skills visit: Mashable: 15 Essential Skills all Digital Marketing Hires Should Have.