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Social publisher LittleThings shuts down, citing Facebook algorithm changes

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February 28, 2018 at 10:10PM

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All the social media opt-outs you need to activate right now

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February 28, 2018 at 04:48PM

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Disconnect with this minimalist phone

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'Light Phone 2' is an updated version of 'Light Phone,' a smartphone that only gives you the necessities. It has no apps, no camera, and no frills — allowing you to live in the moment. Read more...

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February 28, 2018 at 02:30PM

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Twitter's new Bookmarks feature saves you from embarrassing likes

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February 28, 2018 at 01:50PM

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Facebook Watch to live-stream ‘The Oscars: All Access’

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February 28, 2018 at 01:32PM

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Twitter launches Bookmarks, a private way to save tweets

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February 28, 2018 at 12:19PM

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Black Lives Matter co-founder explains what people get wrong about Black History Month

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Patrisse Cullors has had a major influence on the Black Lives Matter movement ever since it began in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting. Here she explains what many people get wrong when it comes to how they think about Black History Month and where the focus should be.  Read more...

More about Mashable Video, Gender, Social Good, Black Lives Matter, and Black History Month



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February 28, 2018 at 10:38AM

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How to Get Your Customers to Recommend Your Brand to Others

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Marketing your business is expensive. Coming up with customer acquisition strategies that won’t break the bank can be a challenge.

Acquiring a new customer can cost you six or seven times more money than retaining your current customers.

But you can get new customers without having to spend much money.

Using your existing customers to help bring in new business is one of my favorite ways to do this. It may sound complex, but it’s much easier than you might think.

It’s all about getting creative. Coming up with an acquisition strategy that also promotes retention is a win-win scenario for everyone involved.

Don’t underestimate the power of a recommendation. Research shows 83% of consumers say they trust recommendations from family and friends. When your brand gets recommended to someone, they are likely to give it a shot.

But the key here is getting that initial recommendation. How do you do it?

If you’ve never tried to incorporate this strategy into your marketing plan before, don’t worry. I’ll give you some insight into how you can proceed.

Here’s what you need to know.

Provide friendly customer service

Before you launch any new marketing campaigns, analyze your company’s culture. Start with your customer service.

Optimizing the customer experience can help you to not only boost revenue but also acquire new customers. Check out these statistics about friendly customer service:

Recent studies showed that customers who had a friendly interaction with a company were likely to recommend that company to others. The majority of people who experienced unfriendly service would not recommend a brand.

Being friendly costs you nothing.

Just make sure your managers and customer service representatives are all on the same page. If you’re dealing with customers face-to-face, you need to train your staff to smile.

Be genuine. Ask the customer how their day is going. Try to have real connections with your customers.

Even if you’re talking to people over the phone or online, the tone of your voice will convey your attitude.

Don’t sigh or take deep breaths of frustration. Don’t be monotone or standoffish. Speak in a friendly voice that’s welcoming and energetic.

Even smiling when you’re talking on the phone can help make the tone of your voice sound more positive.

Employing this strategy is a no-brainer. This isn’t something you can measure, but when your existing customers have a positive experience with your company, they’ll be happy to tell their friends and family about it.

Before you know it, new customers will be walking through your doors. If you treat them the same way, they’ll recommend your brand to others as well.

Respond to customer inquiries as fast as possible

Let’s continue talking about customer service. In addition to providing friendly care during daily interactions, your support team needs to go the extra mile when customers have questions or problems.

It’s easy to get frustrated with a disgruntled customer. Even if you think they are in the wrong, treat them with respect, and make them feel as though they are right.

Don’t make customers wait to hear back from a customer service representative. This is something you need to keep in mind no matter where you’re conducting business.

If you have a brick-and-mortar location, don’t make your customers wait to speak to a manager. Get someone right away. When taking calls over the phone, don’t put your customers on hold for too long.

Even if you’re taking customer inquiries online through your website’s platform or via email, put emphasis on responding right away.

Take a look at these numbers, and just let that sink in for a moment.

Customers who received a fast but ineffective response were more likely to recommend a brand than customers who received a slow but adequate solution.

Just because you solve a customer’s problem doesn’t mean they’ll recommend you to other people if you took too long to do it.

But if you provide a speedy response, customers are still willing to recommend your brand even if you didn’t provide a solution.

Come up with a referral program

Some people will be willing to recommend your brand only if they can get something in return. Can you blame them?

Customers love getting discounts and free stuff. Come up with a customer referral program that rewards your current customers for spreading the word about your company.

One of the best customer referral programs I’ve seen is from Uber.

Here’s how their program works. The customer who sends the referral gets a credit, and the new customer also gets a credit.

The rewards vary depending on the city and time, but here’s an example of a $20 program:

It’s a major success.

With this example, the customer acquisition cost is $40. Uber is paying $20 to two customers.

Customers who use the service at least once per week spend about $95 per month on this platform. Uber keeps 25% of that.

So in less than two months, the customer acquisition cost already pays for itself. It’s a great strategy and increases the lifetime value of a customer.

Once a new customer joins, they are likely to refer their own friends as well to try to keep getting discounts. It may seem like a lot of money, but as you can see from the numbers I just went through, it’s well worth it.

If your referral program is worth only a few bucks, it won’t get your customers excited. How much effort do you expect them to put into a referral if you’re just giving them something like $5 or maybe 10% in return?

Same goes for the new customer who is receiving the recommendation. But offering a $20 credit could be enough to get a free product or, in the case with Uber, a free ride.

Find a way to apply this concept to your company. Based on Uber’s rapid growth since inception, I’m sure it will work for you as well.

Celebrate milestones with your customers

It’s important to get to know your customers. Don’t treat them as nameless and faceless people.

Talk to them. Find out why they are spending money at your store. For example, let’s say you own a restaurant. When a customer comes in and places a huge order, ask them if it’s for a special occasion.

Go the extra mile to make them feel like you really care. Maybe they’re celebrating a birthday party or an anniversary. If the order is big enough, you could try to offer a free delivery or give them a discount.

Half of the customers who talk about brands on social media when posting about a life milestone do so to recommend the brand to others.

I realize it’s not always easy to find out information about milestones in a customer’s life, especially if you’re operating an ecommerce business.

But whenever it’s applicable, try your best to get as much information about the purchase as possible. This also relates back to the discussion about friendly customer service.

The importance and relevance of this marketing aspect will depend on the industry, of course. But you can still come up with clever ways to incorporate this marketing strategy into your business.

For example, let’s say you sell clothing. A group of women comes into your store and starts trying on expensive dresses. Train your sales team to ask,

“Is this for a special occasion?”

If you discover one of the women just got engaged, do whatever you can to make them feel special without compromising your profit margins.

Based on the data I just showed you, this will increase the chances of those customers recommending your brand to people on social media.

Even if they don’t officially recommend your business, look at some of the other top responses on that list:

• thank the brand
• show brand preference
• receive discounts.

All these posts are still positive exposure for your company. As a result, their friends will be more likely to try your products or services.

Here are some of the most popular life milestones that cause customers to recommend a brand on social media:

Be aware of this if you’re in an industry where these types of events are relevant to your business.

Promote user-generated content (UGC)

Now, it’s time to think outside the box and get creative.

Running promotions that encourage user-generated content is a great way to grow your business.

Why?

It won’t cost you much money to achieve this. UGC won’t take too much time on your end, and it requires very minimal effort.

But the results can be very rewarding.

With UGC, your customers won’t officially be recommending your business. However, the brand exposure you’ll be generating is just as effective as a recommendation.

Take a look at how UGC influences online shoppers:

There are lots of ways you can approach this. One of my favorites is running contests on social media.

Use Instagram or Facebook as a marketing channel to run one of these contests. Have your customers upload photos and videos that promote your products or services.

At a specified deadline, pick the post with the most likes or comments, and award them a prize. If you make the prize worth it, you’ll get a high participation rate from your followers.

As a result, your brand will be exposed to people who follow the customers participating in the contest. This indirectly recommends your brand to a new audience.

You can even dedicate a section of your website to UGC.

Let customers upload videos or share stories about their experiences with your company. It will help you get new customers in the door without crippling your marketing budget.

Encourage customers to review your business

You can promote your company in many different ways, including writing about your product or service. But nothing is viewed as trustworthy as an online review from a customer.

Obviously, you’ll tell people your business is great. Consumers know you won’t willingly reveal bad information about your brand.

Information on your website may not be enough for you to acquire a new customer. But customer reviews increase the chances of a new customer buying from your brand:

Make sure your company has a profile set up on as many review websites as possible. In addition to allowing reviews directly on your website, let your customers review your business on platforms like:

• Yelp
• Facebook
• Google Reviews
• Trip Advisor

The more platforms you’re on, the greater your exposure will be. Some customers trust reviews on some websites more than others.

Research shows the two most trusted review websites are Google and the Better Business Bureau. Just having an account on Yelp isn’t enough.

Now you need to find ways to get your existing customers to write reviews.

Ask them directly. After they complete a transaction, nicely ask them to write a review online.

Or you could go another route and give them an incentive. You can offer a discount or some kind of promotion if they write a review for your brand online.

Just make sure you’re not soliciting good reviews. Make it clear you’re just asking for a review, and hope it’s a good one.

Conclusion

To keep customer acquisition costs low, you need to come up with some creative marketing tactics.

Making subtle changes to the ways your business operates can get your existing customers to recommend your brand to others.

Start with simple things like customer service. Always be friendly, and respond to customer inquiries as fast as possible.

Create a customer referral program that rewards your current customers for recommending you as well as your new customers for trying your brand out.

Help your customers celebrate important milestones and events in their lives.

Encourage user-generated content, and make it easy for your customers to review your business online.

If you follow these tips, your current customers will be recommending your business to new ones, expanding your customer base.

How are you leveraging recommendations from your existing customers to keep your customer acquisition costs low?

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February 28, 2018 at 10:00AM

How a World-Class Museum Inspires Millions of Followers on Social Media

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Every year the British Museum welcomes millions of people through its doors. And on social media they attract equally large crowds—nearly 4 million followers between their Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter handles.

In this episode of our Hootcast podcast, the British Museum’s senior digital marketing manager Kate Carter tells us how they keep their millions of fans engaged on social media.

In this podcast you’ll learn:

• Storytelling strategies for social media
• Ways you can challenge and educate your audience
• How to engage a large following

Press play to hear the show in its entirety, or if you don’t have a set of earbuds handy, read the transcription of our conversation below.

Q&A with the British Museum’s senior digital marketing manager Kate Carter

When you think of a museum you don’t immediately think of social media. So, what is the British Museum’s mission and main goal on social media?

It’s essentially interpreting the museum’s mission, which is we are a museum of the world, for the world. We have over two million years of human history brought together under one roof here in London, which includes some of the greatest cultural achievements of every culture that has ever existed across two million years. We’ve got over eight million objects, a repository of human achievement from across the world.

And so, social is kind of the perfect space really for us to be trying to tell that story. The audience we have across Twitter and Instagram is in the millions. We hope that that will continue to grow. And it’s hugely international; it’s between 80 to 90 percent overseas. So, what we believe we’re doing with social is really fulfilling our mission, which is to bring this world collection to the world.

How do you measure your success on social, what are your KPIs?

It’s something we’re constantly re-evaluating. We started off with the usual metrics around how many followers we have and then trying to make that grow, which is still important.

Increasingly, we’re looking at the number of interactions that we’re generating and the rate of engagement for different platforms. How fast is the growth, how engaged is a percentage of our followers with the content that we’re posting.

We’re benchmarking more and more against our peers as well, so we compare ourselves not just against other museums in London or the U.K., but across the world. We look at who is doing that really well and make sure that we’re constantly trying to be up there amongst the best.

So you’ve gone from measuring social following to also looking at engagement and diving a little bit into competitor analysis as well.

And also looking at our responsiveness, so the customer service part has become an increasingly important, too. We’re now looking at how many people have tweets, you know, when they have questions, how many of those are we replying to, how quickly are we replying, how much added value are we bringing to people by being able to respond to feedback or being able to answer those questions to be able to navigate our website etc.

So, like you said, you’re a museum of the world, for the world, and your social following definitely reflects that. You have over a million followers on Twitter and Facebook and almost a million on Instagram.

We were thinking you likely have two separate audiences, people who come into the museum and they follow you and are fans, and then people who are also fans who may never come and may want to learn about the history you share. How do you balance that experience on social?

It’s really interesting that you define it like that because I guess the way I like to think about it is that everyone in the world is someone who has maybe visited the British Museum once in their lives or potentially will one day visit. And maybe that visit becomes something that we can provide through a virtual reality experience. I don’t believe there’s anyone out there who might be choosing to follow us or engage with us on social who has no intention of ever stepping through our doors in some form.

I like to think of it more as a continuous lifetime relationship that we have with people, that they’re either hoping one day to come or they’re physically here right now, they’re planning their visit onsite. We still get comments from people on Facebook saying I came to that exhibition in 1972 and I had the most amazing time and there’s a lot of nostalgia for that. It can be a really special visit for people.

Yeah for sure. So even the people who may have not come yet you would still consider like an aspirational audience rather than defining that bucket as people who may never come.

Exactly. Because that’s reading into the sentiment that we see in the comments on our content. People talk about how much they’d like to come or how much they loved coming in the past. And so, that’s really informed my way of thinking about that audience. And rather than putting them into a box of assuming that they’ll only have this relationship with us through interacting with our Facebook posts, I like to think that there could be potentially something more substantial that we can offer them.

And like you said even offering like a virtual tour, that in and of itself is a form of visiting the museum.

Exactly.

Do you find since you’ve really ramped up your social, that it’s been an important way for you to reach out to young people to discover the British Museum and learn about historical collections that they might not otherwise see?

Absolutely, we obviously see the trends and audiences that are engaging with us on social that might be different to the ones that we’re picking up through other more traditional methods like surveys.

And by channel there are big differences. So our Instagram audience is, you know, on average much younger than our Facebook audience, which doesn’t mean that we necessarily think about the content differently because we think about people more in terms of their areas of interest rather than grouping them by age. But certainly looking at the youngest end of the spectrum and thinking about how we engage kids and young people; we do a lot of programming around that.

We have an amazing schools and families program. We have the Samsung Digital Discovery Centre in the museum, which has this incredible program of digital-based activities for young people. Increasingly, we’re looking at how we integrate social media into those experiences but also how we use social to better promote them as well.

That’s something that a lot of brands can learn from. I think we get hyperfocused on targeting millennials or a certain age demographic and making assumptions about what they would want to see. So you’ve actually noticed through sharing content that you see a wide range of interest across age groups based on different types of content.

Yeah, exactly. And you receive different audiences for exhibitions we might be putting on, for example a live broadcast we’re doing. You can bring together a community of people who might seem demographically quite diverse by those sort of traditional categories but have a really shared interest, something like history or art is something that does connect across those different segments. There are people here who are real history buffs, who read a lot in their spare time or people who are specialists working in the field, they can all have that shared interest even though they’re in kind of very different places in their lives.

Do you have any channel-specific strategies or tips that you could share?

I think we realized that by becoming more channel-specific, that in itself has made us more successful across the board. A couple of years ago we were in a situation where we were cross-posting a lot. We were thinking about what are we going to share on social media on Wednesday and would adapt that message, like we would edit the characters down to fit it on Twitter. We might think of the image differently for Instagram but essentially we were sharing the same kind of stuff.

Now we plan totally differently. We plan every channel separately as well as thinking about what’s coming up this week, next week, next month etc. We’re also thinking about what does that trajectory look like on Facebook and on Instagram and we do different climatic series of content on the different channels and they really kind of standalone now in a way that I think has helped them all grow and become more engaging.

You do a lot of cool stuff on Facebook and with Facebook Live as well, do you think you could tell us a little bit about that?

Facebook Live has definitely become really important to our strategy. We’re trying to do a lot more live broadcasts. We find that they do something quite special that other video formats don’t do, which is that sense of bringing people together around a moment. And just for that kind of maybe half an hour or something that you’re broadcasting, you know, you manage to bring together thousands of people who are all over the world.

We did a few live events recently where we had comments from people in over 90 countries, which is phenomenal to see. And what we always do is get people to tell us where they’re watching from so you can see comments flooding in from all these different cities and states and countries. I think the audience get a kick out of that as much as we do because it feels exciting to have that sense that somehow these people are collectively experiencing something even though they are in completely different environments.

Would you say that one of your goals is to connect people from around the world, around one central experience or one learning experience?

Yeah, I mean I don’t want to start sounding like we’re Facebook connecting every human on the planet. But yeah, I think there is something about that. And I guess for us it’s that we have such a range of experiences to offer, you know, the content, the collection, from contemporary art to ancient sculpture and everything in between.

We feel like we are in this really privileged position of being able to offer this series of unique experiences that people can choose to come together and be a part of if they follow us and choose to tune in.

What are some ways that you’re using Instagram? Do you do anything with the stories, is it just images? What are your strategies around that?

Yeah I think we’d like to do more with Instagram stories, we’re definitely ramping it up. It’s sort of similar to that realization we had a couple of years ago around being more channel specific. I think that Instagram news feed and Instagram stories are two different channels. Now that we’ve separated them a bit more in our minds that’s really helped with loosening up and being a bit more creative with Instagram Stories. We try to use them to be a bit more playful, a bit more spontaneous. It changes things knowing that it’s only going to last 24 hours and that it’s ephemeral. Whereas, with our feed, there’s a lot more thought that goes into that in terms of the image selection and the length of information we share.

We try and make sure that each post has a really quality story to tell and a visual that’s strong and enduring and that they sit together. We tend to post things in threes so that they have the sense of this automatic journeys, which is quite a considered approach I guess, whereas Instagram stories is, as I say, something that feels much more ephemeral.

I really like the 360 virtual tour that you guys have on your Facebook. Would you mind dabbing a little bit more into that?

Yeah, sure. This has been a collaborative pilot that we’ve done with Oculus. So, we’ve kind of worked with them directly and it’s you can say it’s on our Facebook page at the moment but it’s the first of its kind experience where you’ve got an interactive 360 virtual reality experience directly with a newsfeed. You don’t have to go outside of your newsfeed to experience it.

So, it works if you’re using a Facebook app on your phone but if you want to go all the way into immersing yourself then you can put that phone into a Samsung Gear VR headset and then you feel like you’re walking around the galleries.

We were really getting a kick out of trying it out. And I think it’s such a cool way to offer that experience to people who haven’t been to the British Museum or who would love to come but haven’t had that in-person experience.

Yes. What was exciting for us about it is that VR still feels like something that a lot of people don’t have the devices yet and it still feels like people are in the early stages of exploring that. And what’s nice is this really puts it straight into people’s phones and puts the museum at your fingertips.

We notice that you use long captions to describe a scene or provide a lot of context for what people are seeing. How does that fit into your digital strategy around storytelling or education or both?

We are the custodians of this amazing collection and lots of the objects are visually stunning in their own right and maybe it would be enough to look at them. But with every object there’s a story behind it, there’s a reason why it has this particular status that it’s now part of the British Museum collection.

For us it’s about bringing the people to life that are a part of the object’s story. So, who made it, who was it made for, who’s worn it, who’s used it, how is it used? How might that relate to something that’s happening today? And we try to kind of bring the objects to life with that human aspect. And that does require a few words to sort of tell that story.

I can imagine too that providing that context for people also helps them to appreciate what they’re seeing more as well.

I think so. I just personally I feel that it’s when the curators start describing an object to me that I get excited about it. That’s the stuff we want to capture in a bottle and share with our followers on social. Not everyone finds world history instantly accessible. If something is not really familiar to you in your culture it sometimes takes a little more of an explanation to relate to an object and kind of get inside the heads of the people that made it thousands of years ago.

Yeah for sure. I mean I definitely have the same experience when I have a better understanding of what I’m seeing. I have so much more of an appreciation for what it is and where it’s come from. So how do you feature exhibits on social? What makes certain exhibits social media friendly or do you not divide out exhibitions that way or do you have certain ones that you choose?

I think every object that’s in the collection has a story to tell and therefore has its place on social media. And over the years hopefully you’ll get around all eight million of them.

Our selection criteria in terms of what are we posting now, is about trying to find balance. We’re always making sure that we’re being representative and sharing a range of objects that come from different parts of the world, different cultures, and different religions. We try to have a balance in terms of things that maybe were made or are about men and women, so the diversity of the collection is something that’s really important.

It would be easy for us to default to sharing the things that we know are super popular. You know, we could look at our analytics on social and see okay, people love Egyptian stuff and we could just only talk about that and it would go really well. But it would be neglecting our duty to actually share some of the lesser known parts of the collection. And there are some amazing objects that are far less famous that have incredible stories to tell. Part of the job is unearthing some of those and bringing them into the spotlight as much as the ones that we know have huge appeal and that people want to see and we’ll always continue to share on a regular basis.

In that way you are really important educators and using social to educate as well, not just get the highest engagement on every single post but also to inform your audience.

Exactly. We want to take the audience on a bit of a journey with us. Something that’s really important to us is that sense that people trust the British Museum and that they trust us to take them to places that they might not have gone themselves. So, whether that’s a culture they’ve never heard of or an aspect of the past that might surprise them or the fact that the museum is continuingly making new acquisitions from around the world to carry on telling that story of humanity. And that’s one of our challenges as well as one of the real joys is trying to get that across, there’s so much to share.

I think that’s something any business or brand can learn from the British Museum is that if you’re telling stories and you’re actually generating interest and educating and sharing things that are genuinely engaging then it resonates with people instead of just being talked at or told things to.

Do you have any stories of a strategy or campaign that really worked well, something that you did that you saw a huge engagement or really good results from?

Something that really worked really well for us was based on the Rugby World Cup and the Football World Cup. We did some really cool object pairings where every time a match was played we took an object from each of the countries that was playing and paired them up. So we’d have two different necklaces or two different helmets, something like that. And you can see visually the fact that these two countries have this kind of shared history, they have things in common, but also that they have distinct styles.

That worked really well. People really responded to that and we got a lot of interest not just from the public but some of the football teams themselves. The official World Cup account shared one of our posts and some embassies around the world who were supporting their teams. And that was a really nice way of us bringing something into a much bigger conversation that perhaps no one else could do.

I think that’s the tricky thing about getting a campaign right is working out what you can bring that’s unique—and sometimes the answer to the question is nothing and therefore you have to step away and let other people take the stage. That’s been a big learning for us as well is trying to figure out what we can bring that will add something really special as opposed to just jumping on the bandwagon for the sake of it.

Yeah, I think that’s really good advice for brands out there to make sure that any campaign that you build is relevant and that, as you said, you are adding unique value to people’s experience. Thank you so much for joining us today. You’ve given us so many good insights.

Thanks for having me.

Listen to the Full Episode

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February 28, 2018 at 08:37AM

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Repurposing What Works: The Journey, Episode 19

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February 28, 2018 at 06:02AM