Social Media Weekly Roundup #5

In the fast-paced digital media landscape, today’s tech giants are constantly pushing the boundaries to enrich our online experiences and transform how we digitally connect, collaborate, and express ourselves. From Elon Musk’s redefined vision for Twitter to WhatsApp’s enhanced features and Instagram’s creative innovations, let’s dive into the ever-evolving world of social media.

Musk's X (Formerly Twitter) Revolution Continues

Elon Musk recently made a significant announcement regarding X, the rebranded social network formerly known as Twitter. In an exciting development, users of X will soon be able to enjoy video and audio calls directly on the platform without the need to exchange phone numbers. This move is part of Musk’s ambitious plan to transform X into an all-encompassing “everything app” drawing parallels to WeChat, by offering an expansive array of services. These services will span social media, video games, fintech, payments, and banking. Musk’s vision is to turn X into a universal global address book that facilitates calls across a variety of platforms including iOS, Android, Macs, and PCs. This means that seamless communication will be at your fingertips, regardless of your preferred device.

What’s particularly noteworthy about this announcement is that it comes on the heels of a significant update to X’s privacy policy. This update now permits the collection of biometric data and information related to users’ job and education histories. It’s a clear indication of X’s broader expansion into the realm of user data and services, indicating a broader expansion into user data and services, promising a more integrated and personalized experience.

Source: Twitter

Under Elon Musk’s ownership, Twitter has undergone a series of changes including rebranding and policy adjustments that underscore his vision for the platform and reflect his determination to redefine the platform’s purpose and functionality.

WhatsApp's Mac Evolution

Source: Meta

WhatsApp is expanding its improved desktop experience to Mac users with the introduction of a brand new WhatsApp for Mac. This exciting development brings a host of features and convenience to Mac users to enhance users’ communications experience on the app. One of the standout features is the ability to engage in group calls, making it easier than ever to connect with friends, family or colleagues. Users can enjoy video calls with groups of up to eight participants in audio calls with as many as 32 people. You can join ongoing group calls, access call history, and receive call notifications even when the app is closed. Whether it’s for business meetings or catching up with loved ones, this new development facilitates seamless communication and collaboration with larger groups.

What’s more, users will appreciate the ease of file sharing with a drag-and-drop feature, simplifying the exchange of documents, images, and more. The app provides a spacious chat history view, making it convenient to review past conversations and locate important information. As always, WhatsApp ensures end-to-end encryption to maintain the privacy of messages and calls across devices. The app is available for download from WhatsApp.com and will soon be on the App Store.

Instagram Introduces New Features for Friends and Music Lovers

Instagram is rolling out an array of new features to enrich user interactions and offer opportunities for enhanced creative expression. These additions intend to elevate the Instagram user experience, fostering higher engagement and collaboration across the platform.

Users can now add music to photo carousels, allowing them to set the perfect ambiance to bring their visual stories to life. Additionally, the Collabs feature enables users to invite up to three friends to collaborate on a post, carousel, or reel, expanding content reach to each collaborator’s audience.

Source: Meta

In Reels, a new “Add Yours” sticker enables creators and artists to invite their followers to participate in challenges they create. They can then select their favorite submissions to celebrate their fans’ creativity and cultivate a greater sense of community engagement.

Instagram is also expanding its music library to more countries to ensure that users worldwide have access to an extensive and diverse music library. The platform is partnering with Spotify in Mexico and Brazil to create a Reels Music Chart featuring popular songs from Instagram Reels.

These updates aim to provide users with a dynamic and evolving musical backdrop for their content while promoting stronger collaboration and artistic expression across the platform.

Keep Up With Digital Marketing Industry News

Keeping up with the latest in the digital marketing landscape is key to staying competitive and amplifying the success of your marketing operations. Get your news and updates you need from The Snow Agency to step up your marketing game. If your brand is in need of a digital marketing tune-up, reach out to us today. See first-hand how a customized strategy can be game-changing for your growth and performance.

Take the first step and contact us for a consultation today.

6 Tips to Build the Perfect Content Piece

content marketing

Well-crafted content isn’t just plucked from trees (though that would be cool) or magically conjured into existence from a witch’s kettle (this would be cool too). So, what makes good content?

There’s something of a formula to it. Not like math, rest assured.

The building of a perfect content piece comes down to employing some pretty straightforward tactics.

Make It Clear

This is major. You need to have a clarity of purpose to whatever content you’re creating. If your topic is the health benefits of peanut butter and you find yourself talking about jelly for 2 paragraphs, you’ve strayed. Which brings up analogies, metaphors and things of that nature. Don’t get so inventive that readers lose your key point. 

Keep It Scannable

If you’re like us, you’re probably a skimmer. It’s tough to avoid nowadays which is why it’s important to play to that tendency and make your content scannable. What does that mean?

Look at the layout of this article.

Our tips/subheadings are all bold and underlined.

The paragraphs are short.

Keeping it scannable means the main points pop right out at your reader and grab their attention. Other tools for this are links, lists, font size and words in different colors.

Be Consistent

Content is king but consistency is queen.

Consistency applies to just about everything in your content and your business. In terms of content though, think of concepts like tone, organization and scheduling.

You want your tone to be the same throughout each piece of content and as a through-line connecting all your content. A unified voice for your brand.

Organization makes it easier to navigate your pieces and relates to the scannability factor.

Consistency in scheduling isn’t so much about how to craft the perfect 1-off piece of content but refers to consistently doing it and delivering to your audience regularly. They get used to that and appreciate it.

Encourage Action

Content that can be applied to people’s lives right away is infinitely more valuable than something more abstract. Play to that and create pieces that encourage folks to do something.

Additionally, and what you probably thought was going to come first in this section, the call to action is vitally important. When writing the phrase that pays, make sure to employ words that convert.

Deliver Value

Picking up from actionable information being more usable than something…not so actionable, the main takeaway is that you should be striving to deliver what’s valuable to your audience. If you’re looked at as a source of in-depth, researched, long-form content maybe focusing on action isn’t the right move for you.

Value is always the right move. Always keep in mind what your readers are reading you for and stay true to that.

Nail The Headline

To be honest, we could probably write an entire article just on headlines because so, so much goes into them. Well, at least that’s what should be happening. The headline has to be among the most interesting batch of words you craft for the piece. Scratch that, it should be the most interesting. 

The headline is what gets someone to click through to discover the majesty of your now perfectly crafted content. If your headline isn’t driving the click, the article itself isn’t going to be read, the life-altering content created all for naught.

Look at our headline for example, numbers are a great call. We’re just naturally predisposed to them, we’re drawn in. Likely because we know what we’re gonna get. This article promised 6 tips and here we are concluding the 6th tip. Just as advertised.

Build Great Content With the Snow Agency

As much as we’d prefer to pick content off trees or contract a local witch to brew up the goods, we know that’s not how great content comes to life. If you’re struggling to find your stride in content creation, hit us up at The Snow Agency. We’ll take a look at what you’ve got and talk about how it can be improved because, believe it or not, there are more than 6 things that make the perfect piece of content 😉

How to Find Prospects for Email Marketing

email marketing prospects

The beauty of marketing in the 21st century is that it comes in so many flavors. Back in the day, it used to be vanilla and chocolate as far as your options went and as new media platforms and mediums popped into existence, all of a sudden it felt like Baskin Robbins in the marketing world.

It’s opened whole new avenues of message delivery and our daily communication has become richer in the process.

Email marketing, at this point, almost feels old school as a form of marketing but it’s lowkey a potent secret weapon. Before jumping into some prospecting tips, let’s give the folks in the back a quick refresher on what exactly email marketing is and why it needs to be part of your communication strategy.

What Is Email Marketing and Why?

Simply put, email marketing is a type of direct marketing that involves sending emails to customers and prospective customers (more on finding them in a second). It could be promotions, exclusives, newsletters, valuable content, etc. It’s pretty straightforward as far as the concept and in a way, almost all communication a company sends is in some way marketing.

As for the why, that’s the best part.

Low Cost and Easy to Set Up

There are basically no costs aside from the service you use. No production costs for photos and videos, no billboards or printing fees. Email is cheap.

Add to that, it’s not rocket science to set up a campaign, any software worth its salt makes it a breeze.

Targeting

You can segment your email list to send specific messages to specific segments of your audience. You can break it down by geography, demographics, where they are in your funnel and more. It’s extremely flexible.

Your Audience Is Choosing to Engage

Your audience is generally asking you to receive emails, in other words, they’re opting in. They want to hear from you and an actively engaged audience is one that’s ripe for sales.

If you’re in business, you should be actively acquiring email addresses for your list.

That leads us to the how of it though, how do you grow that list with more and more prospects?

Where and How to Find Prospects

There are many ways to skin a cat as they say (weird expression, honestly) and similarly, there are a lot of ways to hunt down prospects for email marketing.

Accutane is the most effective treatment for nodular acne. I’ve seen hundreds of patients who spent years trying to get rid of acne and succeeded only due to Accutane. It causes many side effects and requires caution, but when there is no other way out, this medication can become the embodiment of https://missourifreeclinics.org/isotretinoin/ the last hope. I’m sure it’s worth taking

Social Media

Not all social networks are created equal concerning finding prospects. For that, you’ll want to focus mainly on LinkedIn and Facebook.

LinkedIn is a great place to mine your existing connections as you’ll already have access to their email addresses. For new prospects, it’s as easy as reaching out and connecting.

On Facebook, and as well LinkedIn, groups are huge. Find the groups that fit your niche and get active in those communities and after creating a strong presence, let them know about your product or service and get their email details.

Landing Page

Depending on your business, you can create a landing page where you give away some valuable and relevant bit of content: exclusive research, a white paper, video, eBook, etc., in exchange for their email address.

Software/Apps

As you might imagine, intrepid minds have come together to work out pain-free solutions to the problem of getting email addresses. From ContactOut to Voila Norbert to Hunter there are a lot of different apps and software out there for this very task.

Ask

Pretty clean, uncomplicated and even more old school than email itself, you can always just ask for an email address. What’s the worst that happens, they say no?

The Snow Agency Knows Email Marketing

If you’re struggling with your email marketing, with anything from getting prospects to creating campaigns that slap (and generate leads, conversions and ROI through the roof) get in touch with us at The Snow Agency.

Why It’s Time to Consider TikTok for your Marketing Strategy

If you’re anything like me, you know very well the power and influence that Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat hold. If you’re a heavy social media user aged 16-24 though, you’re likely to tell me I’m missing one more thing—TikTok! 

TikTok is often overlooked on the scope of marketing and advertising. I’m here to tell you that this is a mistake. 

TikTok currently holds 500 million active users worldwide (Datareportal, 2019). With 66% of these overall users being under the age of 30. Moreover, the target demographic that is being reached by TikTok is high school and college students looking for a creative outlet, or a chance at TikTok fame; which can now be leveraged as a sparkling opportunity for brands to showcase their products to a rapidly growing viewer base.

WHAT IS TIK TOK?

TikTok is a new social media platform that allows users to generate 15 second videos, adding a clip of music to be played in the background. Much like Instagram, it consists of a home, discover, inbox, and profile tab along the bottom of the screen. 

Some unique features of TikTok include:

  • Likes on posts are completely private. You can see the number of accounts liking a video, but not who they are. 
  • The “For You” page, that acts similarly to Instagram’s Discover tab. The “For You” page uses an algorithm for condensing TikTok’s most likely to be trending and most interacted with content. To get on the For You page, it is recommended to post trendy content, challenges, use hashtags and trending music while also interacting with users frequently.
  • The ability to link your Instagram account, to be featured on your TikTok profile. Since you cannot DM those you aren’t friends with on TikTok, this feature is essential for getting in touch with TikTokers! 

In 2018, Musical.ly was strategically rebranded as TikTok. In late September 2018, TikTok became the most downloaded free app on the App Store and ranked first on Google Play the following October. Now, TikTok stands as the third most downloaded app in the first quarter of 2019, with 188 million new users. For an over year comparison, it has grown 70 percent from Q1 2018. (SensorTower, 2019) Business of Apps has condensed a comprehensive collection of data related to TikTok’s performance in 2018-2019.

ANYONE CAN BE A STAR WITH TIK TOK

With that being said, any product can be a star with TikTok as well. 

One common misconception made about TikTok is that it is only relevant in the United States. In fact, 26.5 out of the 500 million monthly active users are from the USA! (Mediakix 2019). Below, I got in touch with TikTok stars from radically different places. From Canada to Norway, and back to the US! 

Spreading laughs all the way from Canada, Jacob Toldi, TikTok handle @jtolds2, has over 300k followers and has videos ranging anywhere from 20k to 8.8 million views! 

When asked how he gains followers and views for his posts, he stated:

“My tactics to gain followers, views and likes are to go along with the trends. But I don’t do that often. I mostly do random stuff that people wouldn’t typically see everyday. For example, I did a stop motion video that got over 2 million views! My fans wanted a tutorial on how to do it, so I made one and it got 8.8 million views! This gave me a general sense of what I should post.”

The beauty of TikTok as a marketable platform is that you don’t need to stay confined within the limit of your follower count to reach new audiences. Even with 250k followers, it only took a bit of creativity and unique content to expand Jacob’s audience into millions. Not only is the platform designed for audience expansion, it is also teeming with users just like Jacob who would be more than willing to market products to their audience. 

“I would definitely consider getting paid to promote a service or a product! I would include it in my TikTok and make it appear more than any other thing in the video! I would also do a quick little speech about the product to explain that I use it and it works great!”—Jacob Toldi

Why chase after Instagram celebrity giants to market a product, when utterly creative everyday TikTok users are so eager to share their audience! Or better yet—why not do both? 

Daniel Jensen, TikTok handle @danieljenseen, posts to TikTok from his home in Norway. Only since the start of Summer 2019, Daniel was able to attract 172k followers and counting. His videos typically range anywhere between 20k to 4.6 million views. 

When asked what his favorite aspect of TikTok is, he stated: 

“My favorite thing about TikTok is being able to make videos because that is what I love doing. Making videos, editing and all that stuff. It’s a great platform to show off your talents, humor and be creative. Love it!!!”

This is what makes TikTok so unique. Having a passion for making videos can result in gaining tens of thousands of viewers in followers in just a few short months. This kind of rocket launch into fame is something I consider a super rare ability of a modern social media platform.

Jackson Booth @jbooth23, is a TikToker from Texas. Since only the start of July 2019, Jackson was able to attract 35k followers and counting. His videos range anywhere from 1k to 5.5 million views. 

When asked if he would be willing to market a product, he stated:

“If I was offered to promote something, I most likely would do it but it would have to fit into a humorous video. I wouldn’t just do a straight up advertisement of a product without any other context.”

I feel that in this statement, Daniel touched on something marketers tend to miss. It is imperative to understand that the general public typically views advertisements as unrelated, out of context, or interrupting to their internet activity. 

This is why leveraging TikTok and other social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook is so important. TikTok is more than just counting how many viewers you can collect, it’s creating interpersonal content that those who are scrolling actually want to see! This provides a great opportunity to market the right products to the right audiences in the most organic and interactive way. 

Presently, a plethora of brands, artists, and celebrities are utilizing TikTok for their promotion. GUESS, Jimmy Fallon, Google, Alan Walker, and others have been known for creating hashtags on TikTok, that resulted in emerging trends. These trends brought together thousands of TikTokers posting the hashtag content, who gathered hundreds of millions of views. Free promotion! Made up entirely of everyday users just trying to be a part of something bigger. 

What if TikTok is nothing more than a fad? You might ask. 

TIK TOK IS HERE TO STAY

“TikTok is easily the hottest app out right now. It never fails to entertain viewers every single day. It’s really unique and I think its popularity can hold out long-term because there are new people on the app every day and it’s only been getting bigger.”—Jackson Booth

With more than 1 billion videos viewed every day in the last year (influencermarketinghub, 2018)

Being available in 155 countries (Apptrace 2019)

And being the IOS App Store’s most downloaded app of Q1 2019 with 33 million downloads (SensorTower, 2019), there is no doubt that the TikTok audience is expanding significantly and will continue.

TikTok provides a can’t-miss chance to market and promote. 

Whether you want to reach out to a TikTok star for collaboration, create your own marketing trend through hashtags or pay for TikTok ads, implementing TikTok into your marketing strategy is a sure-fire way of gaining organic publicity for your business.