SPARKS! and the Better Business Bureau of Greater Maryland will be teaming up on Thursday, April 20th at 8.30 AM to present “Search Engine Optimization: Simple Strategies to Improve Web Performance“. The event is part of BBB’s Trusted Advisor Series designed to provide business owners and their employees with current information about a variety of topics.
To register and learn more visit the BBB’s website.
So, to answer a question we often get at SPARKS! – “what exactly is digital marketing?” – here’s a quick-and-dirty summary of the key elements.Businesses and organizations must rely on some type of marketing in order to grow. Traditional tactics – advertising and trade shows, for example – are stalwarts and an important part of the overall recipe. But a key element that many small businesses overlook is to optimize what is perhaps the easiest gateway to their audience: their digital assets.
Digital marketing refers to the use of online (aka digital) channels, such as search engines, social media, email, mobile apps, and websites, to promote a product or service. It is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of techniques and strategies, all of which are designed to reach and engage with a target audience in a digital environment.
For most organizations, an informative, engaging, mobile/user-friendly website lives at the center of the digital universe. But what about the other spokes in the wheel? Digital marketing can be broken down into several different elements, including:
Discover Marketing Strategies That Work
Ready to take a deep dive into the world of marketing? Join experts from all areas of digital marketing and our own SPARKS! President Greg Pierce on Thursday, September 26 at the Loyola Graduate Center in Lutherville-Timonium, MD. Greg will share insights on social media marketing advertising strategies that will help grow network and your business.
Presented by The Strategies That Work, LLC, Resonate: A Marketing Colloquium is a behind the scenes look at how to build marketing platforms that will take your brand to the next level.
SPECIAL DISCOUNT AVAILABLE FOR SPARKS! CLIENTS!
We have a SPECIAL DISCOUNT for SPARKS! clients so please call our office at 410-244-5111 or CONTACT US for the discount code. This event includes breakfast and networking opportunities and takes place from 7:30 A.M until 11:45 A.M. Only 75 spots are available, use your discount code and register online today!
Are you one of the 1 in 4 Americans who have deleted the Facebook app from your phone? Are privacy concerns the reason you pulled the trigger? If so, the social media platform is taking steps to try and win you back.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to make the most popular social media site in the world more appealing to users who are concerned about the cavalier attitude the company has had when it comes to sharing users data and personal information. Recently, Facebook has been at the center of multiple scandals involving user privacy and breaches.
Zuckerberg’s goal is to give users more ways to communicate privately, encrypting sensitive data in a way that can’t be read by Facebook. In a post, Zuckerberg acknowledged that “people increasingly also want to connect privately in the digital equivalent of the living room”. Details are sparse, however, when it comes to laying out what changes the company actually plans to make.
“I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform,” wrote Zuckerberg, “But we’ve repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that people really want, including in private messaging and stories.”
Despite the proclamation, most users remain skeptical of the platform’s intentions. “This does nothing to address the ad targeting and information collection about individuals,” Jen King, director of consumer privacy at Sanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, was quoted as saying. “It’s great for your relationship with other people. It doesn’t do anything for your relationship with Facebook itself.”
Some advertisers are even dropping the platform all together, citing the company’s “despicable business model”. Mozilla, Basecamp, LegalAdvice.com, and Approyo are among the companies that have stopped advertising on Facebook. Despite the withdrawal of advertisers, Facebook’s earnings continue to increase and have not been impacted.
This isn’t the first time that Facebook has made a promise that they haven’t been able to keep, and only time will tell if this go around is any different. Until Zuckerberg and company announce more concrete steps, the public can only speculate on what this will do for user privacy going forward.
More seniors than ever are using platforms like Facebook for a variety of reasons, and that number is only going to rise in the coming years. Love it or hate it, social media has never been more essential to daily life. Want to keep in touch with your kids, grandkids, and old friends? Stay up to date on world events and relevant cultural touchstones? Without social media, that can be tough to do. But how are today’s social media savvy seniors using these tools, and how are advertisers taking advantage of their online presence?
Talk to someone in their teens or early 20s and they’ll say that while they probably still have a Facebook account, Instagram and Snapchat are their preferred apps. Facebook is a place they go to keep in touch with family, like the many baby boomers who are gravitating towards the site. In fact, a recent Gallup poll found that 52 percent of people ages 50 to 64 and 32 percent of those 65 or older use Facebook.
What does the 60+ generation use sites like Facebook for other than commenting on family photos? Sharing inaccurate news, of course! Older Americans are more likely to share “fake news” online regardless of education, sex, race, income, and even party affiliation. So, while people who grew up on the internet have honed their ability to verify what is and isn’t a credible source, the baby boomer generation still struggles with discerning fact from fiction online.
Aside from using Facebook to proliferate the rising trend of false news, most older people are using it for the same reasons that we all do. They want to keep up to date with friends, family, and loved ones throughout the year.
Old and young users aren’t just using social media for different reasons, they also have separate concerns. According to AARP, seniors are much more anxious about protecting their privacy online, with 52 percent of Facebook users over the age of 50 concerned about how their data is getting used. Just 39 percent of 18-to-49-year-olds share the same worry.
With baby boomers now making up such a large portion of the Facebook and social media community, it makes sense that advertisers are trying to find ways to appeal to them and grab their attention on those platforms. According to Bloom, a Senior Living Marketing Solutions company, Boomers on social media sites are 58 percent more likely to visit a company website, 57 percent more likely to continue searching for that company’s service on a search engine, and 42 percent more likely to visit a retailer or store.
So, how do you target seniors online in a way that entices them? Women in this age group are 26 percent more likely to share content online than men of the same age, so gearing your advertisements towards them is one place to start. Boomers also want to share content that’s meaningful and worthwhile with like-minded boomers, so focus more on substance rather than the snappy and clever slang that might appeal to younger users. Like most people, they also prefer messages and graphics that elicit a positive emotional response.
According to Adweek, older users are much more likely to be influenced by online advertising than their younger counterparts. Although they make up just a small percentage of Instagram’s user base, those who are on the app between the ages of 65 and 74 are most likely to search for the advertised product after seeing a promoted post. Common sense suggests that this holds true against all the social media platforms, Facebook included.
As social media becomes a more imperative part of the human experience with each passing year, the number of seniors who not only use the platforms but are comfortable and competent navigating them will only increase. Like with every demographic, it will be up to advertisers to stay afloat among ever-changing trends and user behavior to create content that grabs their attention.
On April 2, users of the consumer version of the platform will lose access to their accounts and pages. Starting February 4, users will no longer be able to create new Google+ profiles, pages, communities, or events.
Users who wish to save their content will have to download it before that date arrives. Applications like Takeout and Google+ Exporter will come in handy for those who wish to go that route. Downloaders will be given additional data starting in early March 2019.
The complete shutdown timeline includes the Google+ feature for website comments being removed from all sites by March 7, with Google+ comments disappearing from view on April 2. Google+ sign-in buttons will stop working in the next few weeks, but many will be replaced by a Google sign-in button.
The news of a shutdown date comes in the aftermath of a report from The Wall Street Journal that detailed the company’s decision to stay silent despite data from 500,000 Google+ users getting exposed over a three year period. Then, Google made it public that a bug had exposed the personal information of more than 52 million Google+ users. This sped up the platform’s demise, moving the shutdown date up from August 2019 to April 2019.
When Google+ initially announced a tentative April shutdown last December, they recognized “challenges involved in maintaining a successful product” and “the platform’s low usage” as the primary reasons behind its dismantling.
This doesn’t signal the complete disappearance of Google+ from the technological space, however. It’s only the consumer version of the platform that’s being put to rest, not the business version. “While we bring consumer Google+ to a close, we are continuing our investment in Google+ for the enterprise,” wrote David Conway, a product manager at Google. “This means that for those of you who use Google+ as part of G Suite, your accounts will remain active.
The death of Google+ has been imminent for a while, but that doesn’t make it any less inconvenient for frequent users who relied heavily on the platform. Unfortunately, the only avenue that exists for them now is to download their data and take it someplace else.
Social media is about a relationship with your customer.
Social media is a vital part of every company’s marketing campaign. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, and many other social media platforms must be considered when a company wants to reach its target audience. These are necessary and to ignore them, you do so at your company’s peril.
However, social media isn’t, or shouldn’t be about social media. It’s about having a relationship with your customers.
Facebook video threatens to overtake YouTube.
One of the biggest trends in content marketing this year is video. For years, YouTube has been the undisputed king of video and marketers have always automatically navigated to posting videos on its website.
And while YouTube is still the number one for video viewing and sharing, Facebook is slowly coming up behind, a development that marketers will not ignore.
According to new data released by Ampere Analysis, Facebook video is gaining ground on YouTube in terms of video views. Of Facebook’s video growth, in a Reuters report, Ampere Analysis’ Research Director Richard Broughton said, “If the social network’s own video ambitions are to be realized, and if it is to convince content owners it is a viable alternative to YouTube, it must deliver comparable returns.”
One of the advantages for Facebook video viewers is that, unlike on YouTube, there aren’t (as yet) pre-roll ads like there are on YouTube. Will this change? For content marketers, the other advantage of using Facebook video is that viewers have to be logged in to be able to see videos, unlike on YouTube. Thus, Facebook is able to gather more data on potential consumers for marketers.
Ampere’s infographic below breaks down the numbers more concisely.
Social media the best way for presidential candidates to announce their campaigns?
In today’s social media saturated age, as more politicians announce their presidential candidacies to officially begin their campaigns, it would be easy to think that platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and others would replace the traditional speeches. However, speeches are still the preferred way, so far, for most of the declared candidates.
2016, though, has seen Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz go online first to make their announcements. Hillary Clinton used an online video on her website, as well as Twitter, while Ted Cruz tweeted “I’m running for president and I hope to earn your support!” (Remember, online video for marketing is expected be a trend this year). Of course, every candidate has a Facebook page.
Social media announcements have still to catch up. According to Pew, “Since the 2004 election cycle, 27 of the 41 candidates who appeared in the Republican or Democratic presidential primary debates (or have announced for 2016) included a public address in their formal announcement, according to our calculations”
When it comes to sharing political content, although Facebook rules in amount of users, the politically engaged see political content on Twitter. “Four-in-ten (41%) Twitter users who are very interested in politics say that at least half of the posts that they see are political. This compares with about a quarter (26%) of highly politically-interested Facebook users who say the same.”
Will 2016 be the election cycle when candidates use newer platforms to get in front of their audience and ahead of their opponents?
Almost three-quarters of teens still use Facebook
Each day, another new survey comes out about teens’ use of social media. Recently, conventional wisdom thought that teenagers were abandoning Facebook and switching to other social media platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram and others on which their parents were not present. However, according to a new survey by Pew Research, over 71% of teens still use Facebook.
Today’s teenagers are the social media generation. They have not grown up without the presence of Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and all of the other social media platforms that are out there. Hence, they use daily, with 56% saying they use it several times a day, with a further breakdown as follows: “three-quarters (76%) of teens use social media, and 81% of older teens use the sites, compared with 68% of teens 13 to 14.”
Pew found that “Among the 18% of teens who only use one site, 66% use Facebook, 13% use Google+ and 13% use Instagram. Just 3% of the single site users use Snapchat, and another 2% say they use a site we didn’t ask about in the list, including Wattpad (a reading site), Youtube, Oovoo and ifunny, among others. Less than 2% (each) report using Twitter, Vine or Tumblr as their sole social media platform . . . Facebook is the most popular of all the social media platforms included in the survey, with 71% of all teens saying they use Facebook. Boys and girls are equally likely to report using the platform, but older users ages 15 to 17 are more likely to use it than younger users 13 to 14. Much of the difference is located within the youngest age group — the 13-year-olds — of whom less than half (44%) say they use Facebook, while of 77% of 14- to 17-year-olds report use.”
Pew also showed the use of Facebook among teens across income, racial and ethnic groups. “Teens from somewhat less well-off households are more likely to report using Facebook than teens from wealthier homes; 77% of teens from families earning less than $50,000 annually use Facebook, while 68% of teens from households earning more say they use the platform. Use of Facebook is relatively consistent across racial and ethnic groups. Urban teens report more use of Facebook than teens from the suburbs, with 77% of urban teens on the site, compared with two-thirds (67%) of suburban teens.”
Clearly, Facebook should still figure highly in your marketing campaign.
