Social media marketing has grown tremendously in the last decade. It has evolved from being a tool for friends to keep in touch to a powerful marketing opportunity for businesses of all sizes. Today, companies can’t hope to stay competitive if they’re not putting some effort into social media. As far back as 2014, 92% of marketers believed that social media was important for their company’s marketing success.

Social media marketing can be confusing. It can also be time-consuming and ultimately not very successful without knowing the best practices and keeping a consistent posting schedule. If you’re struggling with how to establish brand awareness and loyalty on social media, here are 4 tips to help you improve your social media marketing efforts.

Target Generation Z

Generation Z is becoming a powerful part of the economy. They’ve grown up with technology as a driving force in their lives. They’re social media savvy, and 70% of them buy products and services on these sites. If Generation Z is part of your audience, you need understand their behavior and to speak directly to them.

What does Generation Z want? They want brands to get to the point. Attention is a premium. It’s important to start off with powerful storytelling as a hook. They like to be engaged with the marketing process through interactive content, and they’re big advocates for social and environmental responsibility. Brands need to embody these values and create a consistent message across channels to engage with Generation Z.

Content Diversification

Getting enough content out into the world is a challenge for businesses without big marketing teams and bigger budgets.

Blogging can bring in traffic and play a key role in content marketing. But content diversification can help you keep things fresh and interesting. It will also keep you from running out of ideas and providing readers with more engaging content.

Making sure your content stays fresh and interesting will be essential for optimizing your digital marketing efforts, yet the landscape will be competitive.

“Companies will really need to adapt to this trend to stay in the game,” said Daniel Kempe, CEO of Quuu, in a recent expert round-up on the future of digital marketing.

Because of this competition, Kempe predicts that marketing firms will merge with creative firms. “We’ll see larger companies hiring video producers and graphic designers to collaborate with their marketing teams.”

Adding visual components can break up large amounts of text and create a more mobile-friendly experience. Video, screenshots, lists, and how-tos—your format can change from post to post. You can also use social media content to ask questions. Other options include prompting engagement and create engaging short-form posts that instantly get to the point.

Having a range of content will appeal to more potential customers and help keep you from getting stuck in a marketing rut.

Ask for Feedback to Improve Customer Support

You can’t improve your products or service and customer support without knowing what you need to work on. The first step in improving your customer support is to monitor what people are saying about your company on different platforms. After your initial audit, you can set up alerts for when people mention your brand in a specific way.

Social media has become an important channel for providing customer service. You need to have someone responding to both positive feedback and criticism, and use that feedback to improve your service and amplify what you’re doing well. Social media can be a powerful tool for gaining real-time feedback from your customers—both good and bad.

Remain Informed on Privacy Updates

Ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to consumer privacy. After Facebook’s recent scandals, people are more wary than ever about what is done with their personal data. Many sites have updated their privacy policies, and companies need to stay up to date with this information to avoid violating each platforms’ policies and terms of service. Now that Europe’s sweeping new data privacy policy is in effect, companies need to be extra diligent about handling data responsibly.

Companies that don’t adhere to applicable policies and regulation can expect negative consequences, whether from the sites themselves or unhappy consumers who feel violated. First and foremost, however, your reputation shouldn’t affect how you approach the ethics of the situation—your consumers deserve the respect you’d give your own personal data. Ethics in big data is still a topic that is being explored, but that doesn’t give marketers an excuse to exploit consumers’ data. Most people know what crosses the line and what doesn’t.

Trends are Always Shifting

When you’re trying to create better content and improve your social media marketing, it’s important to realize that things can change almost overnight. It’s key to keep up with shifting trends in the industry and constantly aim to adhere to best practices.

With that said, there are a few principles that never change in social media marketing. Using storytelling techniques to engage your audience and creating consistent, quality content on a regular basis never go out of style. Social media marketing is a marathon, not a sprint, but by implementing the latest best practices, it can become an important part of your marketing strategy.

Learn the latest trends, insights and best practices from the brightest minds in media and technology. Sign up for SMW Insider to watch full-length sessions from official Social Media Week conferences live and on-demand.

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4 Quick Ways To Improve Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

By Kurt Nimmo

Both the Free Thought Project and The Anti-Media lost their social media accounts in a coordinated attack today by Facebook and Twitter.

Antiwar critics of establishment politics @AntiMedia and @TFTPROJECT just had their pages with millions of followers deleted by Facebook, along with hundreds of other alternative media outlets. Latest escalation of corporate censorship used as state censorship in the west. pic.twitter.com/Fdk9Yd13jI

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 11, 2018

Facebook alone removed 559 pages and 251 accounts.

Facebook has unpublished our page

After 5 years of building fans Facebook has officially unpublished our page (3.1 million fans) so we can’t post on it anymore. This is truly an outrage and we are devastated. We will do everything we can to recover our page and fight back. pic.twitter.com/H3AmHTT8Qo

— Free Thought Project (@TFTPROJECT) October 11, 2018

Dan Dicks is another victim.

“The Press For Truth FaceBook Page with 350k followers has just been memory holed form the internet! 350k followers gone in the blink of an eye as we are right before our eyes witnessing the results of what happens when these big tech companies appoint themselves as the gatekeepers of political thought and opinion,” a headline story at Press For Truth reports today.

First they came for Alex Jones and now @facebook has taken down @DanDicksPFT Press For Truth page! This is insanity, Dan has been one of the most inspirational and rational independent journalists of our era! @DewsNewz@PrisonPlanet@LeighStewy@PressForTruthpic.twitter.com/EA5WatAHUI

— Jason Bermas (@JasonBermas) October 11, 2018

Facebook just shut down, Free Thought Project, Press For Truth, Anti-Media and dozens of other VERY IMPORTANT alternative media pages that we, of course, have a very close relationship with.

Download Your First Issue Free!

Do You Want to Learn How to Become Financially Independent, Make a Living Without a Traditional Job & Finally Live Free?

Download Your Free Copy of Counter Markets

EVERYONE b4 we get totally erased please sign up here https://t.co/TjukqdhBwl

— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) October 11, 2018

The midterm election is being used as an excuse to purge social media accounts and thus reduce traffic to websites on the target list.

First it was alt-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich who had their accounts pulled for behavior that is an everyday occurrence by others on social media.

Then Alex Jones was taken down. This was a landmark event that served notice on other websites diverging from the establishment narrative and spreading dangerous “alternative facts.”

Now the effort has moved on the the next level of targets, those with moderate to high social media traffic and successful websites with growing viewership. Not millions like Jones, but a couple hundred thousand all the way down to tens of thousands.

Numbers are way down for sites banished from the corporate social media kingdom. Traffic is drying up and thus support.

Source

Social Media Censorship Intensifies

By Kurt Nimmo

Both the Free Thought Project and The Anti-Media lost their social media accounts in a coordinated attack today by Facebook and Twitter.

Antiwar critics of establishment politics @AntiMedia and @TFTPROJECT just had their pages with millions of followers deleted by Facebook, along with hundreds of other alternative media outlets. Latest escalation of corporate censorship used as state censorship in the west. pic.twitter.com/Fdk9Yd13jI

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 11, 2018

Facebook alone removed 559 pages and 251 accounts.

Facebook has unpublished our page

After 5 years of building fans Facebook has officially unpublished our page (3.1 million fans) so we can’t post on it anymore. This is truly an outrage and we are devastated. We will do everything we can to recover our page and fight back. pic.twitter.com/H3AmHTT8Qo

— Free Thought Project (@TFTPROJECT) October 11, 2018

Dan Dicks is another victim.

“The Press For Truth FaceBook Page with 350k followers has just been memory holed form the internet! 350k followers gone in the blink of an eye as we are right before our eyes witnessing the results of what happens when these big tech companies appoint themselves as the gatekeepers of political thought and opinion,” a headline story at Press For Truth reports today.

First they came for Alex Jones and now @facebook has taken down @DanDicksPFT Press For Truth page! This is insanity, Dan has been one of the most inspirational and rational independent journalists of our era! @DewsNewz@PrisonPlanet@LeighStewy@PressForTruthpic.twitter.com/EA5WatAHUI

— Jason Bermas (@JasonBermas) October 11, 2018

Facebook just shut down, Free Thought Project, Press For Truth, Anti-Media and dozens of other VERY IMPORTANT alternative media pages that we, of course, have a very close relationship with.

Download Your First Issue Free!

Do You Want to Learn How to Become Financially Independent, Make a Living Without a Traditional Job & Finally Live Free?

Download Your Free Copy of Counter Markets

EVERYONE b4 we get totally erased please sign up here https://t.co/TjukqdhBwl

— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) October 11, 2018

The midterm election is being used as an excuse to purge social media accounts and thus reduce traffic to websites on the target list.

First it was alt-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich who had their accounts pulled for behavior that is an everyday occurrence by others on social media.

Then Alex Jones was taken down. This was a landmark event that served notice on other websites diverging from the establishment narrative and spreading dangerous “alternative facts.”

Now the effort has moved on the the next level of targets, those with moderate to high social media traffic and successful websites with growing viewership. Not millions like Jones, but a couple hundred thousand all the way down to tens of thousands.

Numbers are way down for sites banished from the corporate social media kingdom. Traffic is drying up and thus support.

Source

Social Media Censorship Intensifies

The internet might well be the innovation that liberated access to ideas, but the social media it spawned are swiftly evolving into the jackboot that suppresses them.

To put what’s happening today to an increasing number of editors into perspective – Ian Buruma of the New York Review of Books is just the latest victim – one has to go back to the pre-internet days, when those of us within newsrooms were pretty much the only ones who knew what was and wasn’t in the paper or on the TV.

We spent our days scanning news wires for the information we thought was important and/or useful to our readers. We controlled the flow of information and people trusted us to do so in a responsible manner.

There were all kinds of interesting little decisions made every day that, in general, people didn’t know about. We never reported on suicides, for instance, because they inspired others to do the same. The editorial pages of one newspaper I worked for had, as many still likely do, banned commentary from anti-abortion perspectives. Others declared that the debate on global warming was over and skeptical perspectives would no longer be presented.

This ensured that ideas within the “contentious social issues” category didn’t inflame or divide public opinion, as if, provided they didn’t appear in the paper, they didn’t exist.

We kept the gates. We did our best, or so we said, to ensure the mob was not inflamed. When it was and we were at fault, we would beg and usually be granted forgiveness. But when we were right, we and our advertisers would defend our principles, chief among them freedom of speech.

And then the internet came along, and everyone we had excluded got a voice again. Many of us saw it as the dawn of a new age – one that would leave little room for prejudicial behaviours and would apply more pressure on professional media to behave even more professionally. This, surely, was a chance for people from all perspectives to become exposed to alternative and fresh points of view, inspiring a richer intellectual tapestry within the public square. The world would be a better place.

Well, not so much.

No one expected that people would attempt to express complex ideas within 140 characters and that others would be willing to respond without even a millisecond set aside for pondering and politeness.

Yes, liberty flourished, but the Eden-like public square many envisioned was swiftly overrun by a collection of cacophonic rabble dedicated to crushing ideas to which they’re opposed. This post-modern neo-puritanism is far more threatening to the polity than the soft paternalism practised in most “back in the day” newsrooms.

Social media are now fully weaponized. What happened in New York is similar to what happened to former editors Hal Niedzviecki at Write (the Writers’ Union of Canada magazine) and Jonathan Kay at The Walrus.

Buruma resigned under pressure after publishing a personal essay by Jian Ghomeshi, the once wildly popular CBC host accused of sexual assault only to be found not guilty in March 2016. According to the Canadian Press, “critics swiftly denounced the piece as a self-serving bid for public rehabilitation” – as if people found not guilty in the courts are forbidden to do so.

“It is rather ironic: as editor of the New York Review of Books I published a theme issue about #MeToo offenders who had not been convicted in a court of law but by social media,” Buruma told the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland. “And now I myself am publicly pilloried.”

This is certainly not a defence of Ghomeshi or, for that matter, any other particular point of view.

It’s merely a plea for civility and liberal order – a world in which people who wish to influence opinion should shoulder the responsibility to, at the very least, engage in an argument before winning it.

— Peter Menzies is a former newspaper publisher and Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission vice-chair.

Source

http://princegeorgecitizen.com/opinion/columnists/social-media-fully-weaponized-1.23445496

The internet might well be the innovation that liberated access to ideas, but the social media it spawned are swiftly evolving into the jackboot that suppresses them.

To put what’s happening today to an increasing number of editors into perspective – Ian Buruma of the New York Review of Books is just the latest victim – one has to go back to the pre-internet days, when those of us within newsrooms were pretty much the only ones who knew what was and wasn’t in the paper or on the TV.

We spent our days scanning news wires for the information we thought was important and/or useful to our readers. We controlled the flow of information and people trusted us to do so in a responsible manner.

There were all kinds of interesting little decisions made every day that, in general, people didn’t know about. We never reported on suicides, for instance, because they inspired others to do the same. The editorial pages of one newspaper I worked for had, as many still likely do, banned commentary from anti-abortion perspectives. Others declared that the debate on global warming was over and skeptical perspectives would no longer be presented.

This ensured that ideas within the “contentious social issues” category didn’t inflame or divide public opinion, as if, provided they didn’t appear in the paper, they didn’t exist.

We kept the gates. We did our best, or so we said, to ensure the mob was not inflamed. When it was and we were at fault, we would beg and usually be granted forgiveness. But when we were right, we and our advertisers would defend our principles, chief among them freedom of speech.

And then the internet came along, and everyone we had excluded got a voice again. Many of us saw it as the dawn of a new age – one that would leave little room for prejudicial behaviours and would apply more pressure on professional media to behave even more professionally. This, surely, was a chance for people from all perspectives to become exposed to alternative and fresh points of view, inspiring a richer intellectual tapestry within the public square. The world would be a better place.

Well, not so much.

No one expected that people would attempt to express complex ideas within 140 characters and that others would be willing to respond without even a millisecond set aside for pondering and politeness.

Yes, liberty flourished, but the Eden-like public square many envisioned was swiftly overrun by a collection of cacophonic rabble dedicated to crushing ideas to which they’re opposed. This post-modern neo-puritanism is far more threatening to the polity than the soft paternalism practised in most “back in the day” newsrooms.

Social media are now fully weaponized. What happened in New York is similar to what happened to former editors Hal Niedzviecki at Write (the Writers’ Union of Canada magazine) and Jonathan Kay at The Walrus.

Buruma resigned under pressure after publishing a personal essay by Jian Ghomeshi, the once wildly popular CBC host accused of sexual assault only to be found not guilty in March 2016. According to the Canadian Press, “critics swiftly denounced the piece as a self-serving bid for public rehabilitation” – as if people found not guilty in the courts are forbidden to do so.

“It is rather ironic: as editor of the New York Review of Books I published a theme issue about #MeToo offenders who had not been convicted in a court of law but by social media,” Buruma told the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland. “And now I myself am publicly pilloried.”

This is certainly not a defence of Ghomeshi or, for that matter, any other particular point of view.

It’s merely a plea for civility and liberal order – a world in which people who wish to influence opinion should shoulder the responsibility to, at the very least, engage in an argument before winning it.

— Peter Menzies is a former newspaper publisher and Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission vice-chair.

Source

http://princegeorgecitizen.com/opinion/columnists/social-media-fully-weaponized-1.23445496

Source

Social Media Updates October 11