Amfas Tech | Technology, Blogging & Internet Marketing: Social Media Growth

Top 5 Internet Trends That Are Helping Businesses Acquire More Customers in 2018

From the popularity of digital wallets to the curiosity around blockchain, SMEs and big businesses alike, have leveraged social media trends especially at the break of 2018. Perhaps there has never been a time as urgent as now to adapt and keep up with the trends that are percolating the internet to remain relevant.

Digital Wallets

To understand the growing adoption of digital wallets as means of payment, AmericanExpress has carried out a survey about digital payments trends and online shopping habits. Some interesting outputs include:

20% consumers claimed they were not carrying any cash in their wallet
46% said they rarely or never rely on cash transactions to make purchases
70% of shoppers said they used digital payment methods such as mobile wallets, one0click checkout buttons and P2P payment apps
41% said sometimes or always rely on digital payment channels

To take a closer look at the role of digital wallets in the current Indian market, while its popularity has been on the rise since 2014, demonetization forced a rather reluctant portion of the consumers to adapt too. UPI based transactions noted a 89 times growth in the month before ( 1,03,060 transactions) and the month following ( 91,67,277 transactions) demonetization. A general growth in number of mobile users, internet access and app downloads in India add to the popularity.

Experts believe that although digital wallets offer to speed up the checkout process, avoid wastage on processing fees and are fairly easy to implement, its magic hasn’t reached it potential reach due to security issues. With the introduction of Blockchain that will bring security issues to a minimum, Digital wallets usage is bound to make a giant leapfrog in the coming year. To stay ahead of the curve in an industry, it is now almost essential to be an early adopter of digital wallets.

UGC

It doesn't come as a surprise that businesses are increasingly using social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or even Snapchat to reach out to a wider set of audience. With an additional 121 million users joining social media channels within a single quarter in 2017, it’s a smart choice too. However, since 2018 there has been a major change in trends of social media channels churning out algorithms that prioritize posts from family, friends or acquaintances over content from brand pages, which has been resulting in a steep dive in the organic reach and referral traffic for businesses.

The silver lining to this gray cloud comes in the form of user generated content that is garnering increasing popularity among marketers of small businesses to reputed brands alike. Popular such campaigns include BMW’s #BMWRepost, Starbucks’ #RedCupContest, and Adobe’s #AdobePerspective. A recent survey with a sample size of 4500 people, yielded some interesting results to support this shift.

Engagement on UGC promoting a brand was 7 times higher than that of brand generated content.
A positive customer generated post resulted in 56% of the respondents being more likely to purchase this product/service.
An image posted by consumers is considered 7 times more trustworthy by customers compared to brand ads.

Social Media Advertising

Businesses have also learnt to combat the falling organic reach and referral traffic using Social Media Advertising, with a million new businesses choosing to advertise on Instagram in just the last 6 months. Currently, there are 6 million brands using Facebook as an advertising channel and 2 million employing Instagram. Social media ads allow businesses to target specific sections of the audience based on interests, demographic, behavioral patterns, locations and more, contributing to its escalating marketability and resulting in spending on social media ads growing by 20% annually. A survey by Animoto suggests that greater than 50% of the surveyed marketers intended to increase their spending on advertising, bolstering advertising agency Zenith Optimedia’s prediction that ‘social media ad spending will overtake newspaper ad spending by 2020.’

Additionally, seeing that video continues to be the most preferred form of media in 2018, and the number of channels supporting the media format in the form of ‘stories’ continue to strengthen their reach, a large percentage of advertisers plan to concentrate their marketing investments on Video ads on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram.

Social Media Messaging

Facebook studied the behavior of 12,500 people across 14 markets and recognised consumers’ growing preference towards messaging businesses to ask questions regarding the product, make purchases, appointments and provide feedback. The survey also found that

61% would respond more positively to a personalised message from a business.
50% are more likely to purchase from a business that they can communicate through message.
56% prefer engaging with customer service on messages in comparison to calls.

This shift is not entirely unexpected considering how costumers’ favored means of communicating with a business has been constantly changing from phone, email, social media and has currently settled on social messaging. In a time when messaging is found to be helping brands communicate with their consumers or audience more than ever, it is increasingly important to be ready to receive messages, address the customer personally and take advantage of newer marketing means such as Facebook’s Click-to-messenger ads to be a successful business. The preferce for messaging has also resulted in a sub trend of the rising tide of chat bots. Combined with the estimated savings of $8 billion every year by 2020, and consumers’ increased exposure to and appeal towards chatbots, large number of channels like Wechat, Slack, Viber, iMessage and Facebook have bots.

Blockchain & IOT

The Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain are two topics which are causing a great deal of hype and excitement, not just in the technology circle but in the wider business world, too. A blockchain without getting into the intricacies is essentially ‘a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography.’ IOT is the networked interconnection of devices in daily use, equipped with ubiquitous intelligence. It is based on processing of large quantities from multiple devices of data in order to provide useful information/service. While they can stir up enough change individually, together, they hold the power to bring about adverse lifestyle changes in consumers through out the world.

In-spite of all the advantages IOT offers and the limelight it received through 2017, it’s biggest critiques and fans alike had no choice but to acknowledge the challenges it brought about in the security of consumer data before blockchain. However, in 2018, IOT is predicted to be a lot more secure and hence, have a more widespread acceptance. For businesses looking to innovate, products that cater and compliment IOT will be essential. For every business though, it is important to be equipped to collect large amounts of consumer data from multiple devices accessible and to know how to use it.

Consumers’ dwindling size of attention span and loyalty combined with the flourishing innovation results in a market place that is consistently going through metamorphosis. While adapting to social media messaging or pushing user generated content can provide a nudge in the right direction, it is essential for businesses to dissect current and upcoming internet trends to understand how your business can best benefit from it.

About Author: Afshan is an inquisitive writer and an active listener who loves to bake in her free time. When she is not doing all that, she is sleeping.

Guest Author 2:10:00 PM

How To Make Social Networks and Blogs Help Your Business Development

The modern-day marketing scene is nothing like what it used to be just a stone’ throw of years back. Nowadays, it’s all about SEO, keywords, backlinks, and content marketing. More so than these aspects, it’s also about social networks and blogging.

However, many businesses are struggling to see how these social networks, and blogs, are able to help their business develop and, therefore, expand, helping them to become increasingly successful. Today, we’re going to explore several ways these platforms can help you transform your business into something amazing.

Drive Traffic

Let’s start simple. Utilising social networks and blogging platforms within your business is going to help you drive traffic to your business’s website. To achieve this, you need to consider how people go about actually finding your business. More often than not, users will use a search engine, such as Google.

If you’ve got good SEO practices in play, you’ll hopefully come up near the top of the page. However, if you’re not, you need to think of other ways to attract an audience. By posting content marketing blogs onto your blog, and then sharing these blogs on your social media profiles, you can dramatically boost your incoming traffic rates.

Ruth Wright, a business developer for Best Australian Writers, explains;

“Posting on a blog will also help you to boost your SEO ranking since each blog is an indexed page. This will, again, boost your website traffic through both the search engines and through your social media profiles. The more traffic you have, the more leads you’ll have. The concept is that simple.”

People Trust Social Networks

I’m not saying that you’re about to go off and lie to your customers and they’ll trust you because you’re on a social network. However, internet users don’t tend to see social networks as marketing tools, but as social networks.

This means when you’re posting to your feeds for your followers to see, they are much more likely to engage and respond to your content, rather than dismissing it as an advertisement. Again, this helps to boost your website traffic tenfold.

A New Kind of Targeted Advertising

One of the best features of social networks is the fact you can customise your advertising campaigns to suit your needs. For example, are you trying to sell yoga classes to 19-25-year-old females in the downtown areas of LA? This is all very achievable through social networks and can save you a tonne of time and money when it comes to advertising.

James Perry, a professional writer and journalist for Revieweal, continues;

“Targeted advertising is your best friend and one of the best ways to get your content, your posts and your business in front of your potential customers that will care about what you’ve got to offer. Master how to use this system and your business will begin to develop beyond belief.”

Becoming the Authoritative Brand

As you’re developing your business and expanding, it’s your aim to become the leading brand in your industry. To do this, you need to be the hub of information for all your clients and customers. This means answering all of your customer’s most common questions about your industry so they know if they ever have a question or query, they can come straight to you.

This is why a blog is so important as this will be your platform for answering these questions. You need to ensure that your blogs are the highest quality, have no errors or grammatical mistakes and shine out from the rest of your competition.

Quality is Essential

Hand in hand with the consideration above, the quality of your content posts is essential. You’ll need to invest real time and effort into creating the best blog posts you possibly can. If your readers are reading your posts, and they’re not up to scratch, they’ll simply dismiss your content, and you’ll have lost a potential lead.

Many businesses nowadays are turning to academic writing services since they can create high-quality articles on your behalf. The services are becoming so popular that they were recently featured on the Huffington Post in Write My Paper.

Play the Long Ball

Blog posts are equally important to your business’s development to your social networks. For example, if you upload a blog post today, you might share it on your social media profile and get, say, 100 views. That’s great, you might have generated 20 leads, and everything is looking great.

However, that blog post is now an indexed page on your website and will continue to gain traffic for as long as it’s on the internet. Over the course of a year, this blog post might have amassed over 10,000 views and generated over 2,000 leads, a figure that can’t be easily dismissed.

Author Bio: Rachel Summers is a freelance writer whose passion is helping students get the most out of their learning journey. She started out as a writer and journalist in the newspaper industry, including Revieweal, before breaking out to go freelance and follow her own passions. Her writing is designed to help you get the most out of college.

Guest Author 11:40:00 AM

10 Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes You Should Avoid

Social media marketing can be a minefield. When done right, it can drive traffic towards your business, yield unprecedented conversion rates, and boost your SEO and audience engagement. However, when done wrong, social media is a huge drain on time and resources, and is not at all fruitful. While having social media profiles is a good start, the following mistakes are easily made, and can be a huge hindrance to your business.

These are the top 10 social media marketing mistakes to avoid:

1. Failing to Engage with Your Audience

Whenever your customers comment or post on your page, it is essential to respond. Even if they are writing something negative, there should always be a polite professional response to show that you do in fact care about your customers.

2. Not Hiring Qualified Professionals

For a relatively low cost you can engage the services of an expert and professional editor for your content writing and proof reading. This can massively boost the quality of your posts, which in turn will drive engagement and SEO. There’s no doubt that search engine crawlers check for spelling and grammar mistakes, so by hiring an editor, you erase any chance of that, and free up time to concentrate on strategy and campaigns.

You can place an ad and interview potential candidates with Upwork or Freelancer, where you post the task that you need doing, and then potential candidates apply. This is a great way to create a long term working relationship with the same writer, so the same voice is present across your business. However, some businesses prefer a more automated service, which is fast and efficient, such as Paper Fellows or Big Assignments.

You simply fill in an order form and then your work is assigned to an available expert. A similar approach is followed by Contently, though rather than specializing in writers, this source specializes in content marketing, which ever platform you choose depends on what you are really looking for for your business.

3. Over Selling Yourself

Social media isn’t the place to be too pushy – you can’t just describe how great your business or your product is. Instead, describe how you understand your audience, and how your business can help them.

4. Not Utilizing Online Content Marketing Tools

The key ingredient to social media marketing is high quality content. There’s no escaping the fact that every post needs to be well-written and original if it’s going to be successful. Fortunately, for content marketers that are not especially gifted at writing there are several free and easy to use tools available online that can drastically improve your content. The following are essential:

Hemingway App – this is a comprehensive spelling and grammar checker that goes into much more detail than anything offered by a word processor. You’ll be advised when your sentences are too long, your structure could be better, and we you’re using too many adverbs or unnecessarily complex vocabulary. This really makes your writing stronger.

Easy Word Count - it’s now a well-acknowledged fact that posts of 1000-1500 words are the best for engagement, and no landing page should ever be less than 300 words. You can use this tool to make sure you stick to your targets, even if you’re writing on a mobile device.

Headline Analyzer - as there are millions of new websites and pages of content posted online every day, it’s not surprising that you need a catchy headline to make sure yours stands out and is appealing to your audience. This tool helps make sure that every title attracts the maximum number of clicks.

5. Posting Too Little or Too Often

There’s a fine balance that you will need to find – you can’t post sporadically or you’ll be overlooked, but you can also lose followers by posting constant meaningless updates.

6. Not Monitoring Your Posts

You should be regularly monitoring analytics to check the successes and failures of your posts, so you can learn from mistakes and continue to grow.

7. Trying to Use Every Social Media Platform

Facebook and Twitter are important, and potentially LinkedIn for a HR Manager. Outside of that is quite industry specific, but there is definitely no need for a business to try and keep up profiles across every social media platform.

8. Being Inconsistent

All of your social media campaigns should have one goal in mind, and every post should contribute to the goal. They shouldn’t be random.

9. Not Optimizing Your Content

On Twitter you should use hashtags, on Facebook make sure your location and up to date details are available. Posting generically to each site is not as effective as taking the time to optimize your content.

10. Not Being Original

While recycling content every now and again can be a good thing, it should only be your own content, as plagiarism is a huge turn off to many on social media.

Avoiding the ten mistakes listed above is simple, and by doing so you can multiply the effects of your future social media marketing.

About author: Sharon Conwell is a freelance writer, specializing at digital marketing and content optimization; blogger at MyWritingWay.com

ROHAN CHAUBEY 5:20:00 PM

How To Drive Massive Traffic With Instagram Marketing

This article is sponsored by GetRiver.com

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Instagram seems to be a relaxed social media network to share cool photos and videos. With the introduction of stories, it brought in another feature to showcase your work in a new way.

Beside those image sharing capabilities, Instagram holds an amazing potential to bring traffic to your website.

Profile Management

Your profile is your home on the social media channels. It shows who you are. A neatly maintained profile shows your authority and credibility.

Proper username: Choose a username that best describes you or your business. It should be brandable, memorable and shareable. Also make sure it is compatible with your other social media handles. The best policy is to have a common username across all the social media.

Website link in the bio: Being an image sharing platform Instagram doesn’t allow sharing of links everywhere. The only place you can put a link is in the bio. Never make the mistake of keeping a bio without a website URL.

Proper utilization of bio: Bio is the place where you can introduce yourself to your audience. A proper Instagram bio tells how you can help the readers and includes a call to action and/or an irresistible offer.

Link in the Instagram Bio

Proper Strategy and Goals

Without a proper strategy and goals all the efforts, energy and money will be spent without any focus towards any specific outcome. The worst part is you won’t be able to measure your success.

Set a time frame: A specific timeframe will keep you in check and you will be able to finish your tasks. Goals without a timeframe never get completed.

Set goals about Followers & Reach: Your ultimate target is to increase your followers & reach and convert that traffic into website visits. Start with small achievable goals and expand from them.

Analysis: Instagram business account gives you access to analytics. Take advantage of it and keep a track on your growth rate and followers count.

Leverage Influencers

Influencers already have a huge follower number. It would be a wise move to collaborate with them. They are credible and trustable.

Use proper call to action when leveraging influencers as you wouldn’t want to waste a valuable chance to convert the incoming traffic as into your own.

Brandable Hashtags

Instagram is all about hashtags. It is the soul of this platform. Using proper brandable & unique hashtags strategically will help others to discover your content.

Find some popular hashtags and mix them with your brand hashtags to tag them with your content.

Your goal is to help your ideal followers to find your content through hashtags. Never make the mistake of hashtag abuse. More hashtags doesn’t mean more discoverability. It looks like spam.

Instagram Ads

Instagram provided a new opportunity to publishers to promote their content through ads.

With sponsored posts you get the ability to reach more audience irrespective of your follower count. You can target audience based on interest, demographics, age and other parameters. With a proper d strategy you can maximize your web traffic.

Exclusive Instagram Only Images

What’s the point of sharing all the images from other social media profiles to Instagram. Why would anyone want to look at the same images everywhere. Give some effort to create exclusive Instagram image only. This will keep your followers refreshed.

Be Active and Engaged

An inactive profile looks dull and is a major factor why visitors won’t follow your. The more you engage with others, more you are seen as valuable & reliable.

If you don’t have time to engage with other accounts, experts at GetRiver.com can help by engaging on your behalf.

The Manage Package is the best one they offer, it can engage you with around 40k new people every month. Once properly set up, you do not have to anything and River will perform actions on your behalf 24/7.

Reply and answer as soon as possible whenever someone comments on your posts. Not only that but you have to interact with the content of other Instagrammers on their posts. This activity increases your exposure to other audience and builds your authority.

Each social media has its own benefits. Advantage of Instagram is it allows you to build your brand.

It’s true that driving traffic from Instagram is tougher than other social media platforms but with proper planning it is possible to drive traffic to your website.