social media Archives - Florida Strategic Consulting

Social Media is Growing as a News Source

Posted on May 18, 2018May 17, 2018 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

Despite the Plethora of #FakeNews, social media is growing as a news source. Even more shocking, its rapidly growing in the over 50 set, while younger Americans seems to have peaked, albeit at 78%.

Thanks to Pew Research for the breakdown, Key trends in social and digital news media. I hope that they’ll update this, because it’s a few months old already, but the trends are clear.

Social Media is Catching Up with Television

In 2016, Television beat Online News by 19 Points. In 2017, Television beat Online News by 7 Points. We’ll expect that 2018 numbers will show that Online is overtaking Television. The shift is rapidly, with explosion is those getting their news on mobile devices.

It’s NOT the Young Driving these Trends

Kristen Bialik and Katerina Matsa Report:

More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults (85%) now get news on a mobile device, up from 72% in 2016. The recent surge has mainly come from growth among older Americans. Roughly two-thirds (67%) of those ages 65 and older now get news on a mobile device, a 24-percentage-point jump from 2016 and about three times the share in 2013. Mobile news use also grew among those ages 50 to 64, with about eight-in-ten (79%) now getting news on mobile, about double the share from 2013. Large increases in mobile news use also occurred among those in lower-income households.

If you think that this is a trend among the younger demographic, it’s not. Younger people embraced mobile years ago, the growth is in the senior demographic.

Two out of Three “Senior Citizens” (65+) get their news on a mobile device. Contrary to the image of elderly voters staring at Fox News for hours on end, the growth is among older Americans and lower-income Americans.

Online News Matters. Mobile News Matters.

Do They Believe The Online News

They say that they don’t, they see lots of fake and misleading news, but they keep consuming it. How does a plethora of fake news being consumed impact your perceptions of reality? Is your brain capable of filtering out the misinformation?

Only 5% of people have a lot of trust in the news that they are consuming. People only recognize the source of the news 50% of the time, which creates tremendous opportunities for purveyors of questionable news to impact people that may or may not realize that it is coming from a questionable news source.

The efforts at “Fact Checking” are largely limited to national sources and campaigns. At local levels, there is little to no attempts to filter out fake news. We saw a plethora of nonsense news explode nationally in 2016, but how many local sources are we seeing explode now, pushing nonsensical stories to a willing audience.

How Does This Opinion Leaders

You need to be online, you need to engage with online news, and you need to be promoting in Social Media. Even the people you think aren’t paying attention online, are. The vast majority of Americans now get some or all of their news online, predominately on a mobile device. This shift has happened rapidly, with rapid increases in the last two years.

If you reach out to people the same way in 2018 that you did in 2016 or 2014, you will be shocked at how much the electorate has changed.

2018 Social Media Strategy Overview

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

There is no one side fits all strategy to Social Media, but ignore it at your risk. There are several major platforms and a plethora of minor platforms, but for small business brands and political brands, there are a few to focus on. Thank you to Pew Research for putting these facts together.

YouTube

YouTube, by reputation, is that of a video streaming service, but the YouTube.com site is a much broader social platform. Comments, discussions, sharing, and thumb up/thumb down scores all contribute to the YouTube experience. Sure you can embed a YouTube video on your website without using those functions, but YouTube.com is now the second largest search engine (after Google.com), and Google Video searches rely heavily on YouTube. A strong YouTube presence, including the social components of commenting on related videos and replying to comments, is very important. As of January 2018, 73% of Adults use YouTube.

Facebook

The largest of the pure Social Platforms, 68% of Americans have Facebook Accounts. Only Facebook knows what percentage of them are regular and active users, but Pew pegs it at 74% of American Facebook users use it at least once a day. That’s self reported, so take it with a grain of salt, but Facebook may be the easiest and most direct way to reach people. It is not sufficient to have a Page that you share content to. Links to your website, with proper boosts, and audience building campaigns are critical to brands having the ability to engage with people that interest them.

Instagram

Instagram, the Facebook property, is in third place with 35% of Americans having accounts, 60% of whom use it at least daily. That makes Instagram an important, but not as critical, part of your social media strategy. A simple Instagram account, with a regular picture and caption being added, with good hashtags, can go a long way towards building your brand. A serious effort to build followers and engage can have more serious results, but it depends on your brand. If your goal is to build deep relationships with users (premium luxury brands), Instagram should be front and center. If you need a more casual relationship with the bulk of the population (think politicians, Instagram can be more perfunctory).

Niche Platforms: Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter

These platforms, are relatively popular, all having a decent population, with dominance in their area, but lack a universal presence. The usage gap between these platforms and Instagram is only a few percentage points, but Instagram is rapidly growing and these niche platforms are relatively static in their user base. For completeness, Pinterest has 29% of Americans, Snapchat 27% of Americans, LinkedIn has 25%, and Twitter 24%. These aren’t small audiences, with large segments of the population in their niche.

Pinterest is very popular, but is demographic specific, being 81% female, and a median age of 40. The active pinners are younger and even more female, and among Millenials it equals Instagram. It has a strong advertising platform, and is very strong around lifestyle, hobbies, and brands. If you market your brands towards women under 50, Pinterest is a great addition to your platform. (OmniCore’s Pinterest Statistics)

Snapchat is popular, but niche. The advertising platform is immature, and it is challenging for non-celebrities to build a following here. Unless you are in fashion, music, or other youth targeted segments, it is probably more worthwhile to focus on other platforms. But if you are targeting college students and younger, SnapChat is essentials. (OmniCore’s Snapchat Statistics)

LinkedIn is a valuable, and expensive to market on. If your target audience are business professionals, it’s a critical platform. Sales Professionals live and die by LinkedIn. Gainfully employed people may only look at Linkedin when job hunting. If you are selling into corporate markets, LinkedIn needs to fit your platform. If you are marketing to consumers, LinkedIn is probably not going to generate an ROI.

Twitter is a super strange platform. It’s relatively small, but sometimes has an out-sized influence. It is popularly credited by the media with dominating the 2016 election, but there are so few people on it. It is more popular overseas, where the lower data needs and more free-flowing conversations avoid censors. Twitter is extremely possible with journalists, public relations firms, and celebrities. The ability to run the messaging from a cell phone makes it much flexible for those in the business of communicating with those industries. While Twitter shows Videos and Images, pure text messaging still works. If your business is looking to reach journalists, generate publicity, or communicate with customers in a free-wheeling fashion, Twitter should be part of your communications strategy. Twitter’s advertising tools are shockingly primitive, but it’s very powerful if you are trying to reach the demographics active there.

Semantic Web in SEO: Theory and Practice

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

Almost since the beginning of the web’s commercial birth, the limitations of HTML have been glaring. The “good enough” technology, the epitome of Worse is Better has been apparent with the web. HTML was never a great language for describing documents, XHTML was a disaster, and HTML5 is slow to come alive and clearly designed for committee… but it was good enough, worked well enough, and let business prosper. CSS took over a decade to come into wide-spread use, but the combination and simple-to-use Javascript has made it work.

Google’s “snippets,” and “break-out boxes” and “menu links” have all been efforts to figure out website and make it more useful for searchers. The growth of Schema.org and structured data and it’s role in web search has been both fun and fascinating.

For small businesses looking to promote themselves, the important area to pursue is Local Search. While Local Search does involve “Map Search” and “dropping pins,” providing regional content with appropriate markup can also yield big dividends. Creating a page targeting a city you work in, combined with a Review, a job/event you’ve done, and other aspects, all marked up with Metadata, can create a relevant piece of content to promote your business in that city.

Breadcrumbs have been a mainstay of navigating websites since Yahoo pioneered the practice, but their usage has fallen by the wayside. Single page sites, focus on shallow content (keeping all content at root level), and designers general aversion to breadcrumbs has been challenging them for years. Alternatively, sites that organize their content in an intelligent hierarchy, supply breadcrumbs, and tag those breadcrumbs with metadata might find their search results having an extra row with the breadcrumbs.

The return of deep content for long tail searches and breadcrumbs to manage them will help promote proper site design, information architecture, and deep content. If Google can promote this change by including an extra line in the search results, that’s a great use of using their power for good.

Social Search – Critical for Time Sensitive Programs

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

Bing and Google announced deals with Twitter to access and utilize their data, and Search Insider is discussing the first impacts of this. What’s most interesting is that this might be the first major change since “FreshBot” was added to Google (and later became the primary crawler). Old hand SEOs remember the crazy update schedules of the early engines, but Google’s monthly “Google Dance” as their crawler finished and about a week later the PageRank was computed and the new index went up across their data centers. Google started crawling and updating with “fresh” data (tagged with the data) with a guestimated PageRank for placement, and as they got faster at computing changes across the Internet, these Fresh results were no longer being inserted, they were the results.

Twitter has a disproportionate presence in media circles and other influential areas. Twitter data, including trends, what people are talking about, etc., provides a view into what is new and what is going on. While news feeds capture the mainstream coverage, Twitter will know what is news to the Internet. This powerful medium helps determine if you are dealing with a “Google Bomb” or a bona fide story. While Google originally assumed if people linked to you, like a citation in Academia, that made you authoritative, but only a select subset of the population had websites. Blogs were more common than a full site, but Twitter is even more available to anyone. Link and information trading on Twitter happens faster than someone writing a blog post, let along researching a news story, so Twitter gives a view into what is happening now.

This is an exciting time in search. Twitter data will make it even more exciting.

Launch a business with Social Media and SEO in 5 Steps

Posted on September 10, 2009September 10, 2009 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

So I routinely get asked by friends for advice on how to get a web business launched with no money. As I politely steer them away from the idea that I should do it for them, I thought that I should work on a basic guide for getting started.

Step 1: Pick a Good Domain Name

A domain name is your address, what you will hand out, and what you will advertise. Your goals are short, easy to spell, nothing to trip people up, and keyword friendly. If you are dealing with cars in Florida, and your name is Jake, then CarsByJake.com would be friendly, start with your keyword, and be easy to spell. FloridaCarsByJake.com would also be good, but JakesFloridaCars.com gets tricky because without the appostrophy, it sounds like your name is Jakes. Avoid double consonants (two words, one that ends in a letter and the next work begins with it), and definitely do no “merge” it being clever, people will get confused. I find dot-com extensions better than alternatives, but it may depend on your industry. It’s been over 10 years since dot-net was the premium TLD and dot-com a negative one, but dot-net still has cachet in technology sectors.

Step 2: Register with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

You don’t get to play if you aren’t there. Twitter is important for the ability to move information out there. Facebook has a tremendous number of users and viral power, and LinkedIn is where the professionals hang out. While you may not use all these mediums terribly effectively on Day 1, the sooner you open an account, the sooner you are ready to use it. If you aren’t going to optimize for all platforms, also register with Ping.fm or HelloTXT for content syndication, that will let you move your messages to all platforms at once. I would recommend picking a URL shortener for social media (I use Bit.ly) and creating an account with stats, this way you can keep your collection of short links and start to see what drives traffic. For Facebook, you should also setup a Page for your business so people that like your business can Fan your Page, even if they don’t know you personally.

Step 3: Setup the Website and add Content

If you aren’t ready for a serious commitment, using a free CMS system like WordPress.com, or other environment that let’s you publish and bring your own domain name is important. Make certain that you can export content later if you move. Despite my historically building my own CMS platforms for SEO reasons, I’ve been finding WordPress.com a great platform for self-publishing, and I can always export to a WordPress.org (self hosted) system later and work from there into whatever I want. Good content is key to success. Learning to write 5+ blog posts a week plus updating the core of the site (Pages in WordPress speak, the static content part of any CMS) of information, adding images, etc., is time consuming.

Step 4: Get in the Social Media World and Blogosphere

You need to participate to get involved. For Facebook, setup the appropriate privacy policies and participate in comments, Wall Posts and pictures. Wish people well on their birthday, tell them when they put up cute pictures of children/grandchildren, be friends with your friends. For Twitter, grab TweetDeck, start finding the appropriate Hashtags for your discussions and start sharing information. With your blog, find bloggers posting questions that you can answer, and either leave a comment (if short), or answer with a link to their entry with software that will ping them with the answer. Like any form of networking, participate. Retweet good posts, share your expertise, and build up an online reputation.

Step 5: Using Content and Social Media, Promote your Site which Promotes your Business

This final step is how you pull it all together. Write good content for your site on the blog, promote it through your new Social Media channels. The better the content, the more likely you are to get Retweeted or linked to from other blogs. The more links you get to your site, the better you will do in search engines. The more you get Retweeted in Twitter, the more likely you are to get Followers. The more you get mentions and links on Facebook on news feed, the more likely you are to reconnect with friends or come to the attention of customers. SEO = keywords + good content + links… the more advanced part of SEO, you can get to that later, when you get traction. If you need to hire an SEO expert, you will already have new customers from your web site plus a great starting point for the SEO who can see your keyword success to get started. As you add content and social connections, your traffic will build and build, and if your site’s core information is good, you will successfully launch your business.

This is my first draft of this 5 Step Process. I expect to come back and revise over time. Comments, suggestions, etc. are all appreciated. Feel free to Follow me on Twitter and Tweet this Post!