#SocialSkim: Apple's Social Video App, Facebook's Offers Upgrade, Plus 10 More Stories This Week

Apple grabbed headlines with chatter about its impending social video app. Also: Twitter attracts YouTuber-like influencers, Facebook makes a big update to Offers, and Snapchat works on behavioral targeting. Skim to stay in the know! Read the full article at MarketingProfs

#SocialSkim: Apple's Social Video App, Facebook's Offers Upgrade, Plus 10 More Stories This Week

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The #1 Thing You Should Be Doing on Facebook EVERY Day

Are you a bit sick and tired of Facebook curtailing our reach to our fan base? The good news…I have the answer! The #1 thing you should be doing on Facebook every day to solve this HUGE problem! It's VIDEO! But first, the news that Facebook is changing things up once again probably doesn't surprise you. The […]

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The #1 Thing You Should Be Doing on Facebook EVERY Day

How Facebook Chatbots Can Revolutionize Your Social Media Strategy

The artificial intelligence era… It's all about embedding human smarts in machines.

Facebook chatbots are one application of this revolution, as they rapidly gain popularity and provide a new tool for marketers to leverage. These chatbots are the incorporation of automatic chatbots within Facebook Messenger.

Chatbots offer flexibility in order to automate tasks, and assist in retrieving data. They are becoming a vital way to enhance the consumer experience for the purpose of better customer service and growing interaction.

In April 2016, Mark Zuckerberg announced that third parties could use the messenger platform to create their own personal chatbot. Since then, the popularity of chatbots has rapidly grown all over the world.

In social media marketing chatbots have evolved, but their prime functionality remains the same, and that is to improve real-time engagement. Customers are always searching for prompt and ready replies to their comments and queries. The chatbots are designed in such a manner that they are able to answer most of the queries placed by customers, without human intervention. And this helps in bonding a strong relationship with your customers and potential crowds, without paying for high overheads on staff.

Two chatbots that have gained immense popularity in no-time are Apple's Siri and Chotu Bot.

Chatbots: Why such a buzz at present?

Modern advancement in the field of artificial intelligence, which includes neural networking and deep learning, have permitted chatbots to acquire data sets exactly the way the human brain works. This is revolutionary.

Chatbots are instigating a stir in the present world of consumer services. Facebook created a revolution for technology by launching Facebook messenger chatbots which permit businesses to generate an interactive experience, content, e-commerce guides and automate customer service. Messenger has reached more than 900 million users, plus it offers the most striking platform to implement your desired bots.

Maybe the most renowned example  of a chatbot is Apple's Siri. Like all chatbots, Siri is a perfect combination of pre-defined scripts and neural systems to anticipate a precise reaction to an offered conversation starter or explanation, permitting clients to skip steps while speaking. Siri is a masterpiece that took years for such a huge organization with loads of assets to develop.

The second example is a chatbot from an organization that is not as famous as Apple. But still the chatbot is so efficient that it has been able to create a lot of buzz for itself in the market.

The Chotu Bot helps you replace various software and get detailed information on various topics such as wiki search, PNR status, Vehicle registration number etc. inside your messenger. And the developers behind the Chotu Bot are preparing to update it so that it can reply to most of the queries asked from all around the planet.

How can a Facebook chatbot assist your marketing?

Facebook allows brands to connect their potential customers independently through these messenger bots which leads to a new era in advertising.

The basic idea behind launching the messenger bots is to connect all the people directly to the business in order to automate customer engagement and interactions. Now there are more than 11,500 bots that have been developed on messenger and nearly 23,500 developers signed up in order to build their own bots using tools offered by Facebook. This means it assists you to automate informal interactions between businesses and users.

Recently Facebook announced new features for bots which can easily respond with video, audio, GIFs, and such files that make you build your own bots with ease.

How do chatbots help e-commerce platforms?

Chatbots assist the e-commerce industry by providing functionality in areas such as security, management, monitoring, and customer engagement which are key elements of e-commerce businesses.

Self-service and automation are the ideal way to go ahead in e-commerce, this the ultimate reason why businesses are using chatbots.

Here are just some ideas for how chatbots can make customer engagement easier:

Convenient, contextual and in control

Facebook messenger for chatbots is focused on generating the greatest customer engagement experience. They offer automated updates about traffic, weather, automated messages and much more.

Easy setup and cost savings

Bots help you save time and reduce the cost of hiring staff.

Unprecedented customer reach

The new receive/send API allows you to connect with more than 950 million people in and around the world. That's the reason bots are growing as the key tool for businesses to gain wonderful networking and commercial opportunities.

How can you use chatbots?

Chatbots make it possible to offer a more proactive, personal, and efficient consumer experience.

• Chotu, one of the leading chatbot technologies, is an AI robot on Facebook messenger that assists in accelerating customer information acquisition through Facebook messages. It provides all the needed information from your messages itself, rather than relying on several different apps working together. Chotu performs multiple tasks at a single time and offers 24×7 customer service.

• Pizza Hut announced that Facebook messenger chatbots assist their customers in asking questions, viewing their current deals and much more. This helps Pizza Hut interact with their customers more easily at any time and from any place.

• 36LoveQuestions is a wonderful Facebook messenger chatbot that asks you 36 exact questions in order to determine whether you are in love with someone or not.

Chatbots: From the “simple” customer to enterprises

At present, chatbots are very prevalent in the customer space. From a business point of view, transportation businesses and e-commerce delivery enhance their chances by allowing their customer to purchase products more efficiently.

But bots are rapidly moving across to the enterprise space as most companies are now building their own chatbots in order to generate better engagement with their customers and create additional value for their brand.

How chatbots are minimizing the gap between customers and brands

Public vs. Private

One of the major problems that various organizations had to face while promoting on social media was to provide a primary customer service to their potential clients. The best thing about [messaging bot] is that you can have a 'Message Us' option and truly use this as a one-on-one, private channel.

Consistency

Messaging is a continuous and real-time process between a customer and a brand. You can have a real-time chat with a specialist from the brand, then you can leave and return a day later and see the history… That is truly energizing since that begins to effect customer behavior.

Accessing an audience of over a billion people

Facebook commenced this entire chatbot furor in April by permitting outside bots on its messenger. So even in the worst case, this is the potential crowd you can reach.

Include different systems (WhatsApp has not joined the chatbot fleeting trend yet) and the aggregate gathering of people on messaging platforms is well in an abundance of 1.2 billion. This is the crowd that you can target directly and provide each one special attention.

Who does not like a personal exclusive service?

Chatbots are poised to reform the customer-brand interaction. Facebook knows the potential of personal messaging and they know this idea can be really useful for brands to retain their audiences for a longer period of time.

Any organization today with a chatbot has the capacity to gain customer insights. The more insights they gain, the better the brand messaging will become, which ultimately indicates better targeting and more sales. The best part is that these chatbots are relatively cheap compared to other applications.

A business which takes time to understand chatbots and execute them have a better chance of offering things to their customer and this will really help them build a nice strong relationship over time.

Chatbots are the perfect fit for the modern e-commerce company looking to ramp up customer service.

Companies which are using chatbots are likely to experience better results and acquire the ability to advertise and market new products which ultimately generate customer engagement.

Guest Author: Hello mates!! I am Sumit Ghosh, a huge social media fan, a nerd, a geeky programmer and owns a digital marketing firm, successfully running for over 9 years. I also started the SocioBoard Blog to provide knowledge to new startups and entrepreneurs whose social marketing campaigns failed to generate ROI.

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How to Market Your Business With Instagram Stories

Photo-sharing social network Instagram recently launched its most significant and talked-about feature to date, Instagram Stories. Here are five ways you can use Stories as a creative marketing tool. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

How to Market Your Business With Instagram Stories

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My 2nd Triathlon – Where Fear Shows Up

So I did my 2nd triathlon.  Which is kind of shocking since my first triathlon was so horrible that I had to blog about it.  But I couldn't let the story end there.

I signed up for my 2nd one after my friend Sandra sent me an e-mail.  Peer pressure in Boulder is weird.  Come on, do a triathlon – everyone's doing it.

But the real reason I signed up for the triathlon was I still had this cute outfit.  That I couldn't really wear around doing errands.

So this time I was a little smarter. I signed up for the Sprint distance rather than the Olympic distance and I planned on training in the open water more.  Plus the course was much flatter – no “rolling hills”.

The Sprint distance is 1/2 mile swim, 17 mile bike, and 3 mile run.  Piece of cake.  But 2 weeks before the race, fear shows up.

I almost quit before I start

I was at the Boulder Reservoir doing an open water swim and about to do a lap around the buoys.  This is an organized swim from the BAM swim group – Boulder Aquatics Masters – and they have lifeguards and kayaks available around the route.

As I was about to head around into the more open water away from the shore, I start panicking.  I can't breathe and I had to doggy paddle back to shore.

I picture the lifeguards on their radios saying – what's up with the newbie?  Clearly out of her league.  Which they weren't – but the voice in my head was convincing as she always is – she's a jerk.

I think about pulling out of the race and my rationale SOUNDS believable.  Well, it's not a big deal.  I am kind of busy anyway.  The race entrance wasn't too expensive, I just can't do it.

The problem with getting older is that we know too much.  We know what it's like to fail.  We know pain and frustration.  And it stops us.  We stay safer.

We take things that happened to us in the past and apply them to the future.  Which doesn't work.

Ask for help

One thing that I'm really bad at is asking for help. But this time I did.  I went back to the Boulder Reservoir and asked for some pointers to help with the swim.

The woman on the shore told me not to kick – just use your arms.  Which I thought was wild.  But she said kicking during a long distance uses more energy and you get tired faster.  So just do a little kicking for balance.

Then the other thing is to sing to distract yourself.  Not out loud.  Because that would be hard.  But in your head.

The only song I could think of was Frère Jacques. For some reason I always sing it in French but I don't really know the 3rd line.  It's something like Sombay lana tina.  Dammit I can't even sing the song right.  But it was enough to distract me.

With my new-found tips, I approached the swim again and easily swam around the buoys during my practice swim singing my own version of Frère Jacques the whole way.  I was back in the race.

You don't know what a small tweak in your strategy will bring.  You are so close to success.

Race Day

Race day brought a new set of fears and some of the same ones.  So a nice potpourri

.

 

I was in the beginner wave which was last and the largest of the waves.  There were somewhere around 1200 people registered for the race.

The people beginner wave were all excited and whooping it up before starting the swim.  Sure, I thought, go ahead and be all excited – you don't know how bad this can be.

Approaching things you've done before with a Beginner's Mind is so challenging.  And I realized that I was carrying fears in my business too.  When I first approached my business I was all excited and cranking things out left and right.  But after being in business for over 8 years, I've had some failures.  Some that were really painful.  A course didn't sell as well as I thought.  I see others succeeding where I think I should be.  And so I'm hesitant to release a new course or take on a challenge that I might not be able to handle.

I don't want to be disappointed.

But then where does that leave me?  Sitting at home watching re-runs of Murder She Wrote?  No, safety is over-rated.  Plus there are way better shows than that.

Surprised

What did happen for me when I moved past the fear was surprise.  I jumped in the water with the other beginners and did just fine in the swim.  I was amazed when the first buoy came and I had to turn, then before I knew it I was over half-way through and then done.

Sure there was a few moments in the swim where I thought – Outfit be damned, I'm not doing this again.  But then it was done.  I came out, got on my bike and rode the 17 miles and actually had a LOT of fun on the bike portion.  I went faster than I thought and I passed people.  The bike portion was over before I knew it.

Then the running was hot but they had plenty of aid stations and I was shocked when I came on the turn-around spot.  And it then was all over.

 

I looked at my results and I came in 15th in my age group – and there were MORE THAN 15 people in it!  Woohoo!

So now I'm looking to move past fear in other areas and into surprise.  Into the joy of pushing yourself and accomplishing something.  Even if you are last or 15th or 363rd.  It's always a race with ourselves.

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My 2nd Triathlon – Where Fear Shows Up

How Haters Inspire Powerful Content

Keep Customers Coming Back For More (Content)

We all know the power of content to acquire new customers. But what about keeping the ones we already have?

A whopping 40% of B2B business is from existing customers, yet only 2% of budget is allocated to keeping those customers through customer service. By only focusing content on acquisition, you are ignoring nearly half of your revenue generating business.

As customer service moves to the very public realm of social media, Jay Baer knows there is a huge opportunity for businesses to both acquire and retain customers by showing you care for them publicly and privately. Embracing public feedback, both good and bad, allows you to create motivating content that caters to both new and existing customers.

Not only that, but many marketers labor under the often incorrect assumption that they know exactly what their customers want and need. The only way to be sure of that fact is to speak directly with your customers and use that information to fuel your content creation.

Ultimately, none of this is possible without allocating the resources that focus on listening to and caring for your customers.

In This Episode

• Why thinking through to customer retention means creating content that embraces feedback


• How creating content solely for customer acquisition leads to a decrease in revenue


• Why cultivating current customers means built-in advocacy between sales and marketing


• The power and relevance of customer service to content creation


• Why the public forum of social media griping means a huge opportunity for businesses

 

Quotes From This Episode

“People don't care about customer service as much as they should.” -@jaybaer (highlight to tweet)

“For a long time, customer service has been a necessary evil and mostly in private. Now customer service is often in public-whether it's social media, discussion boards and forums, ratings and review sites, whether it's B2B or B2C-and so it is increasingly a spectator sport.” -@jaybaer

“Creating content only for acquisition is crazy.” -@jaybaer

“People who create content don't actually know what customers want.” -@jaybaer (highlight to tweet)

“You will never be great at customer service unless it's part of your corporate culture; unless your culture is aligned at some level around customer retention and keeping the customers that your content has helped you get the first time.” -@jaybaer

“There are two totally different types of people who complain, and the differentiation is not really so much in demographics…It's where people complain.” -@jaybaer

“We assume, as marketers, that we know what questions customers have.” -@jaybaer

“Topline growth with bottom-line churn isn't really topline growth. You're just running in place.” -@jaybaer (highlight to tweet)

“Being better at customer service than people expect is actually pretty easy because people don't expect very much.” -@jaybaer

Resources

• Stat of the Week: 40% of B2B revenue comes from existing customers, yet they're only spending about 2% of their budget on customer service.


• Jay Baer on Twitter: @jaybaer


• Hug Your Haters


• Growth Hacker Marketing


• KLM Lost & Found Service


• Social Pros Podcast

 

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Jay dreamed of being a reporter for the Washington Post. Dedicated to his craft, he was a self-professed “super-big newspaper nerd” in high school and initially majored in journalism before switching over to political science.

       

How Haters Inspire Powerful Content

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Why Your Content Marketing Needs to Be Data-Driven

Image via Unsplash

When people think content, they often think creative. But in reality, great content marketing is a blend of both creativity and data.

On the data side of the equation, our industry is still learning. That's not particularly surprising. After all, the name of the game is, quite literally, content. Many content marketers, some of whom came up in complementary professions like journalism, are so deeply immersed in the content creation process that it can be hard to turn their attention to the data side of things.

However, the value of data in the context of content marketing cannot be overstated. So how can marketers best incorporate data into their content strategies? It can help to frame up your thinking on the matter by lumping your data analysis needs into two buckets: post-distribution content effectiveness metrics and data that informs content creation itself. In other words, you must not only consider how data will help you determine whether, and to what degree, your content is connecting with its audience, but also how data can help guide your content creation process up front.

Evaluating the ROI of Content

Most content marketers, even those who are seemingly laser-focused on the content creation process itself, have some understanding of the need for post-campaign metrics. While creative content executions focus on telling a compelling story, data can inform marketers as to whether the content is actually resonating with people. However, according to the latest data from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), only 43 percent of B2C content marketers say they have clarity on their content marketing success.

The overall goal of your content should be to provide value to your audience and build a relationship. As such, you need to choose key performance indicators for your campaigns that help measure this value and engagement, and ultimately tie these metrics into business results. While many B2C marketers are rightfully focused on tracking sales, the most effective among them place more importance on brand awareness (91 percent), followed by customer retention and loyalty (86 percent), and engagement (86 percent), reports CMI. Your most valuable post-campaign metrics will include measurements around the following:

• Traffic: How large of an audience is your content reaching, and who are those people? Are they truly your target audience?


• Engagement rates: Are people interacting with your content? If so, how?


• Conversions: Here's where the rubber meets the road. What did your audience do after they saw your content? Did they go to your site? Sign up for a newsletter? Download a piece of content? Conversions in content marketing are a cumulative effort. Your content should focus on converting visitors into leads and, ultimately, leads into customers.

How Data Can Guide Your Content Creation Strategy

Beyond tracking the success of content efforts, data can help guide marketers through the creative process itself. B2C marketers have made great strides over the past year in terms of basic documentation around their content marketing strategies. In 2016, 37 percent of content marketers report having a documented content marketing strategy versus 27 percent last year, according to CMI.

Yet, this planning and documentation stage is where most marketers fail to leverage valuable analytics. Instead, they “go with their gut” and generate content that they think will resonate. Sometimes they do so with a target audience in mind, but many times, they do so with the intent of reaching the largest audience possible. This approach is folly, and ultimately a waste of resources.

A proper data-driven approach to a content strategy can help brands avoid wasting resources by trying to connect with the wrong audiences in the wrong places. Data can help identify target audiences and their trending topics, channel-specific preferences of potential customers, and the influencers most relevant to those groups. Be sure to incorporate data-driven analysis into the following areas of your content strategy.

Know Your Audience

A content strategy is wasted if not developed with the appropriate audience in mind. You need to understand your audience and what type of content and channels are most appropriate for them. Who are you selling to? What topics resonate with them, and how do your competitors communicate with them?

Mapping Channels and Content

The channels you use to communicate will have a big impact on the format of your content. As such, tap into data to uncover the channels that your target customers are using. What time of day are they most active and where? Your content strategy must be led by a strong narrative, but the form and tone of the content will change depending on the channel. It's no secret that different demographics prefer different content types. Consider this breakdown of favorite content by age, uncovered by a recent ScribbleLive survey, when considering how best to reach your target: 

Leverage Influencers

It's important to know what your target audience is talking about, but it's also important to understand who they're listening to. To achieve the greatest success with your content marketing, you should seek to partner with other people, and companies in your space, that have a broader reach to produce joint content. Co-producing content and sharing it across each other's channels will help you leverage new networks, and data will point you to the right partners.

Brands that do this right credit their influencer strategies with huge overall gains in social media followers. GNC, for instance, credited more than 380,000 new Facebook fans to its social influencer targeting over the course of just a single year.

Companies need to be using real data around the above three points to guide their content creation efforts. Too often, the cart goes before the horse, with marketers focusing their discussions around the hottest topics, channels, and celebrities. For example, a blue-skies content discussion today might naturally lead marketers to consider how Pokemon Go, SnapChat and the latest YouTube star can be leveraged in their creation efforts. Why? Because the audience around that topic, on that channel, and following that person right now is massive and engaged-and frankly, it's fun to think about being a part of that.

But pump the brakes for a second, and think about your brand. If you're McDonald's or Coca-Cola, focusing your efforts on “hottest” might make sense. But for most brands, your content efforts need to be guided much more by “relevant,” not hottest. (highlight to tweet) For example, maybe you represent an insurance brand looking to make in-roads with mid-sized business owners. You could create the most hilariously compelling series of Pokemon Go Snaps ever, promoted by Smosh itself, and receive views and social shares unlike anything you've ever seen-and be absolutely no closer to your achieving your KPIs than when you started out.

Ultimately, having fewer of the right people viewing content is much more effective than thousands of the wrong people. A data-driven approach would more than likely point your content efforts down a much more practical path. When you discover that your target audience of mid-sized business owners are far more engaged on desktop than mobile, via email and whitepaper content from other successful entrepreneurs, and around topics like the most-coveted employee perks, you're working with content insights that can actually help you deliver on-brand value to your desired audience.

Structuring Teams for Success

I know what you're thinking: This is all well and good, but how can marketing organizations structure their teams for the optimal blend of content and data expertise? Here, too, you must strive for a blend of art and science.

When it comes to tracking the success of content marketing, those teams tasked with content creation should also bear the brunt of the responsibility as it relates to understanding its effectiveness. Content teams must have direct access to basic metrics related to traffic, engagement, and conversions. However, when it comes to leveraging data for content strategy development, you might find a need for some deeper analytical expertise.

Your team must be equipped with either content marketing tools or data scientists-or both-in order to uncover the audience, topic, and influencer insights that will ultimately inform a successful content strategy.

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