Ready to work smarter when it comes to social media involvement in 2015? There’s no shortage of research on making the best use of your “social” time online. For this post, we’ve pulled statistics from reputable sites such as FastCompany.com, SocialMediaExaminer.com, Mashable.com and Facebook to help you plan for making the greatest impact.
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Work Smarter on Social Media
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How Accessible is Your Website?
Is your site fully accessible to individuals with disabilities?
In March 2014, the U.S. Justice Department ordered subsidiaries of H&R Block to take specific actions to ensure individuals with disabilities have full access to its online information and services. The department acted in the interest of a lawsuit filed against the company in Massachusetts by the National Federation of the Blind, alleging violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
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New Year Brings Tax Changes for Digital Business with EU Customers
Beginning January 1, online business with consumers in the European Union (EU) is subject to new Value-Added Tax (VAT) rules. If EU-based customers purchase digital goods from your business, this tax change affects you — regardless of where your company is based.
Examples of digital goods are downloadable or electronically transmitted e-books, stock images, music files, software, video footage and training manuals.
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How the Latest Facebook Changes Can Help Your Business
- 50% of news feed content today is photo and visual content.
- 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual text.
- Photos generate 53% more “likes” than the average post and 104% more comments than the average post.
- 40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text.
- Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text.
Because of numbers like these, Facebook recently made its greatest change to date – a visual news feed design. These changes are three fold in design: rich visually engaging stories, choices of news feed(s) and mobile consistency and experience. Each of these is important to understand and use in a way that benefits your business, especially when you consider how many people are active users on Facebook! Not only will you want to use this Facebook update to help your business, but you will also want to be sure your business Facebook page is fully optimized to make the changes beneficial to you.
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Don’t Miss Out! Get Results with Video on Your Website
Online video is a hit! It’s popularity has some sources calling YouTube the web’s “second search engine.” Then there are stats like these from a study by Animoto (described in this Search Engine Watch post):
- 94 percent of consumers watched an online video in the previous week
- 76 percent of smartphone owners watch videos at least once a week from their phones
- 73 percent of consumers indicated being more likely to buy a product or service after watching an explanatory video
In addition, using video on websites is frequently cited for sales conversion impacts of 80 percent on up. (Here’s a link to one such a source. )
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Content Marketing: From Curious to Customer
Did you know …
- 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. (Source: YouTube)
- 51 million websites were added during 2012. (Source: pingdom.com)
- 64.8 million new WordPress posts are published each month. (Source: WordPress)
- 800 new English-language articles are added each day to Wikipedia. (Source:Wikipedia)
- Five new Facebook profiles are created every second. (Source:Facebook)
Is your message getting lost in this vast and quickly expanding sea of content?
In our previous post on content marketing, we addressed the importance of having a documented plan. In this post, we will address how content marketing can provide a virtual pathway for prospective customers – leading them from “curious” to “customer.” Understanding how the various channels work together to build interest in your business can be helpful for planning — and keep you from getting lost in the crowded online sphere.
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WooCommerce & Stamps.com: Simplify Your Shipping
Save time and money on shipping this holiday season with the new WooCommerce Stamps.com extension — an option worth considering by anyone operating an online store.
Here’s what you can do with this new extension:
- Print U.S. Postal Service labels at your home or office
- Offer more affordable shipping and insurance rates to customers. (Get postage discounts with no minimum volume.)
- Automate much more of the postage/shipping process
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Content Marketing: Making It Work for You
Think “blog post” when you hear the term content marketing? Blogging was one of the earliest content forms and can be a significant element of content marketing — but it’s rarely the only one. Potential elements are numerous and can include email campaigns, an active social media presence, downloadable white papers or e-books, even in-person events.
Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “the strategic approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” Key aspects of the approach are providing information (content) that educates, entertains and engages members of the target audience, establishing the content provider as an accessible authority on the matter at hand, and developing a relationship of trust and loyalty with audience members.
