Hangouts Circle @hangoutscircle - Tumblr Blog

I am testing out tumblr capabilities.

I see that you cannot include embed code from Google+ Posts like the one I am linking to here.

Instead, the workaround answer is to post a Link on tumblr to direct people to read your posts in their original locations.

Am I wrong?

#embedding #embed #embedded #testingtumblr #testing #tumblr

So I decided to Submit something to my tumblr as a test.

How will this show up in my tumblr?

Let's see.

videocreators

How to Best Include Keywords in your Video’s Description Text

Here’s some great advice from Mark Robertson of ReelSEO and Ronnie Bincer about how to best optimize your video descriptions for video SEO.

videocreators

How To Fix your High Subscriber/Low View Ratio

There’s clearly a disconnect happening between your subscribers and your videos if you have a high number of subscribers and a relatively low number of views per video. What’s happening there and how do you fix it?

videocreators

Why You Need To Diversify and Get Off YouTube

YouTube can be unpredictable, sometimes in our favor, but sometimes not. It may be important to get off YouTube.

videocreators

The #1 Best Thing You Can Do for your Video SEO

If you want your videos to rank in both Google and YouTube search results, there’s one thing you must do that is of utmost importance.

videocreators

How To Optimize your Videos to Make the Most Money Possible

There’s several factors that determine how much money your YouTube videos will make from Adsense revenue. Here’s a tip to ensure you make the most amount of money possible from your YouTube videos.

fleurjardin

videocreators

YouTube Revenue will Change in 2014

How creators make money on YouTube will change significantly in 2014.

videocreators

How Creators can Save Money on Taxes

I interviewed my CPA about how creators can save money on their taxes. Here’s his advice and some tips.

10 Creative (and Sneaky) Ways To Use Facebook Custom Audiences

By Aaron Zakowski - Follow him on Twitter and Google +

Looking for creative new ways to grow your success with Facebook Ads?

Today I want to share some new ideas for how you can use Facebook’s new Customer Audience feature to refine your ad targeting and get more bang for your marketing buck.

For those of you who still haven’t tried it, Custom Audiences is a powerful new tool which allows you to create lists of people you want to target Facebook ads at based on a list of email addresses, unique Facebook IDs or phone numbers.

Important Disclaimer: This article is intended to help you get your creative juices flowing and start thinking about what is now possible using Facebook ads. Some of these ideas might be against the terms of service for using Custom Audiences.

I’m not recommending that you try all these techniques (but if you did, you’d probably get an awesome ROI. Just sayin.)

Recently, the team at Zammo Digital sat down to brainstorm creative ways to use Facebook’s Custom Audiences.

Here’s what we came up with…

1) Target Journalists and Bloggers

(This one is probably against Facebook’s rules) Start of by creating a list of all the influential journalists and bloggers that you want to target. Then locate each of these people’s individual Facebook profiles (you can pay somebody at Fiverr.com to do this work for you).

Once you have a list of all their profile URLs, you can get their Facebook ID numbers by going to findmyfacebookid.com.

Or you can also find anybody’s ID by adding the word “graph” to their profile URL, like this http://graph.facebook.com/aaronzakowski

Add all these IDs to a list and you can now target all the influencers in your marketing.

2) Target Employees of a Specific Company or Organization.

Trying to grow your B2B leads?

Gather a list of emails, phone numbers or Facebook IDs of people that you want to do business with (yes, I know this is against Facebook’s rules. But this is just theoretical). You can often find emails or phone numbers on a company’s website.

Throw this data into a new custom audience and hit them up with ads sending them to a targeted landing page.

3) Retargeting

For a larger company with the right resources, you can find customers who visited specific pages on your site (assuming they were signed in to your site and you have their emails) and hit them up with ads about the products they viewed.

You can also use this technique to target people who abandon your shopping cart.

You can also use Facebook Exchange for retargeting.

As far as I can see, this technique is kosher.

4) Target Existing Customers To Get Them To Be Facebook Fans

Generally, I don’t recommend this technique for smaller business because you should probably be using Facebook to grow your email list (not the other way around). However, if you think this is a good strategy for you, you can easily upload your email subscriber list into a custom audience and target your subscriber with Facebook ads.

5) Exclude Your Current Customer and/or Subscribers

You can also use custom audience to exclude people from seeing your ads. So, for example, if you are doing an email lead generation campaign, you can upload your current email list and use it as a negative list so that you don’t waste money advertising to people who are already subscribed to your list.

6) Target Prospects Who Never Open Your Emails

Do you have people on your list who don’t open your emails? Try uploading the unopened segment of your list as a custom audience to make sure that they are not missing your message.

7) Target Audiences With The Same First Name

I haven’t tried this one yet, but it’s really slick and you can probably get it to conform with Facebook’s rules if you have a large enough email list.

Here’s how it works…

First, segment your email list in small sub-lists of people who all have the same first name (you probably only want to do this with people who have popular first names). Then, you can create small Facebook audiences of targets who all have the same name. Now, you can hit these people up with ads that call your audience by name. Can you imagine the CTR you would get on an ad like that?

Bonus: Send the traffic to a custom landing page that also welcomes them by their first name.

8) Target Your LinkedIn Connections

Most people don’t know this, but you can download a list of all your LinkedIn connections as well as their email addresses. You can use this list to create a custom audience for your Facebook ads. This is a great, non-intrusive way to send your LinkedIn connections to your website or to grow your email list.

9) Target Your Top Customers

Every company or organization has a small number of brand evangelists or brand ambassadors (hopefully it’s not just your mother) and you should pay close attention to these people and treat them well. These are the people who share your content with their friends the most and really help spread the word about your company.

Once you identify who your ambassadors are, it could be a great idea to create target ad campaigns to make sure that these people are seeing all your best content. You can even use ads to target special offers just for them.

10) Buy An Email List

OK, yes, this is definitely against Facebook’s rules. But I still wanted to throw this idea out there and let you decide for yourself if you want to risk it.

Normally, I would never suggest buying a list and sending them unsolicited emails. However, in the case of Facebook ads, your targets won’t know how they are being targeted. So, as long as your ads are relevant to them, there’s no reason that anybody should complain. This is a great way to build a very targeted audience.

One Extra Idea For Non-Profits…

Here’s one last idea for my non-profit readers out there…

You can target all your past donors with ads to encourage them to come back and donate again. You can also compile a list of top donors to other similar organizations, find their Facebook profile IDs and target them for these big donors for donations.

Bonus Tip:

If you’ve got a large email list, try using RapLeaf.com to segment your list to use in small custom audiences for more targeted Facebook ad campaigns. RapLeaf can give you all types of data about your subscribers such as home owner status, baby product buyers, high-end brand buyers, travelers, and much more. This data can really be helpful when trying to micro target your Facebook ads at niche audiences.

Here’s What To Do Next…

Hopefully, this list has stimulated your imagination about the limitless possibilities of Custom Audiences.

Do you know somebody who is running a Facebook campaign who might be able to benefit from some of these ideas? Send them this article and help them start making more money from their Facebook marketing.

Have you tried using custom audiences yet? Tell us what methods are working best for you in the comments below.

Even President Obama Thinks That Facebook Isn’t Cool Anymore

Ask anyone under the age of 30 if they love Facebook. Chances are, the answer will be no.

The once dominant social network has most certainly fallen from its hyper-exclusive, hyper-popular beginnings to become the place where moms and uncles post their political opinions and baby pictures. (At least, I think. I haven’t been on Facebook in forever.)

In fact, Facebook has lost so much of its cool factor that even President Obama knows it.

As it turns out, the Atlantic’s associate editor covering tech Robinson Meyer happened to be sitting near Obama at a coffee shop, of all places, during a meeting the President was having to learn more about 18-34 year olds. The goal was to get more people in this demographic to sign up for coverage under the Affordable Care Act. For Meyer, the goal was to overhear the president say something relevant to his beat and — as it so happens — President Obama gave him a gem.

“It seems like they don’t use Facebook anymore,” said President Obama.

Meyer tries to get to the bottom of the President’s use of “they.” Perhaps it was the age group he was researching, between 18 and 34, or maybe it was the all-encompassing, third-person singular, gender-neutral pronoun, muses Meyer.

But we know who “they” is. It’s the cool crowd of teenagers and twenty-somethings that make social services popular to begin with.

Meyer’s eavesdropped interview also revealed that the president knows what Snapchat and Instagram are, though his interest and/or enthusiasm toward the up-and-coming social powerhouses is unclear.

What is clear is that Facebook has lost its swagger.

Since Facebook bought Onavo, which was one of very few services that could provide empirical data into this downward spiral, there is only one other service that can offer insight into the competitive landscape of Facebook and other social players.

According to App Annie, Facebook was ranked in the 50′s in downloads on the U.S. iTunes store. Meanwhile, Snapchat was ranked in the teens and even single digits. In August, some sort of algorithm change suddenly bumped Facebook into the teens as well. (App Annie told TechCrunch that it had “observed changes in the iOS App Store rankings around August” but refused to clarify whether Apple was the sole source of this shift for Facebook.)

Even at the current rank of 14th overall and 3rd in social, Facebook is still ranked lower than Snapchat (6th) and Instagram (11th). Instagram (arguably the coolest part of Facebook) is still ranked lower than Snapchat in Photo and Video categories.

Of course, this doesn’t necessarily paint a picture of a Facebook in trouble. The company is home to over 1 billion users, with the third most popular website on the internet behind Google and YouTube. Plus, this data actually proves that Facebook and Facebook Messenger are often downloaded by people when they buy new phones, showing the apps are still necessities.

But the cool kids are gone.

Facebook is no longer where we flirt with college classmates and spend hours posting photos. That use-case became nearly impossible when Facebook stopped being exclusively for college students and opened up to everyone. Inevitably, younger cousins and aunts and uncles and parents got on the platform. It started feeling more like a family reunion photo site than a hot social network.

And then, the generation that was chomping at the bit to get on Facebook realized that their parents were chomping at the bit, too. Instead of being a network full of 14- to 22-year olds, it became a network of 12- to 50-year olds.

Nowadays to the cool young kids, it’s an address book, with an email function, and perhaps the option to stalk if the person of interest doesn’t have Instagram. It’s a skeleton for all the other social apps we use, so signing up is easier and finding friends isn’t a repetitive process each time you download a new app.

Will Oremus hits the nail on the head. You can either have “everyone” or the cool kids, but you can’t have both.

Facebook has chosen everyone, and it makes sense — their business model depends on ubiquity. If you have everyone’s social data, you can sell ads about anything and convert. And up until recently, Facebook’s been wildly successful with this.

When Instagram posed a threat with 30 million super engaged and young users, Facebook instantly neutralized that threat with a cool $1 billion. After a shaky IPO, Facebook’s ad business is killing it.

But now up-and-comer Snapchat is posing a threat. Facebook first tried to fight it with a clone called Poke, which flopped, and then offered $3 billion to buy the app.

Snapchat, unlike other social competitors, is not reliant on Facebook at all, instead opting to use the Address Book for friend finding. Meanwhile, we’re seeing Instagram users rain down hellfire on Instagram ads as the once hip and cool photo-sharing app gets swallowed up, now a cog in the Facebook corporate machine.

With every day that passes, Facebook starts to look less and less like an Apple and more and more like a Dell. Luckily, there’s still no Apple on the horizon. While younger, hotter social networks spring up and solve problems, no one but Google has tried to make an all-encompassing social network to compete with Facebook. And we all know how that worked out.

Zuck is aware of all this. Zuckerberg Admitted on an earnings call that Facebook is losing steam with teens, but that he’s more concerned with Facebook being useful than cool. And it still is useful.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/15/even-president-obama-thinks-that-facebook-isnt-cool-anymore/

The company will continue to see downloads, as it’s now necessary to have Facebook if you want to use other social apps. Facebook will continue to make money on ads (now that it knows everything about us) and Messenger will remain a truly popular tool among text-obsessed teens.

But things have changed. Obama even said so.

The cool kids are officially on the hunt for something else, and it’s only a matter of time before another Evan Spiegel pops up, too stubborn to take cash from Zuck, but this time with an all-purpose social network. And being young and VC-funded, this social network won’t show ads for years.

And, being different from the incumbent, it will become wildly attractive to teenagers and twenty-somethings.

But that’s way in the future. Right?

@JordanCrook

http://techcrunch.com/author/jordan-crook/

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Auto Awesome Photo Movies and Effects

Create Auto Awesome photos with effects

Create Auto Awesome movies with effects

Auto Awesome creates fun new versions of both your photos and videos and allows you to do some awesome effects too.

Your photos will be combined into short animations, wide panoramas, or merged into group shots where everyone looks good.

You'll know when an Auto Awesome photo or movie has been created by the 3 star icon.

You can create Auto Awesome movies from the Google Photos app for Android, which are short films created automatically by editing together the videos and photos you capture around an experience.

Choose the photos and videos you wish to make into an Auto Awesome movie, and let Google do the rest.

Edit Auto Awesome photos in the lightbox view

Edit Auto Awesome photos in the photo editor

You can change the theme, style, background music, or even remove, shorten, or re-order scenes.

After your movie is created, you can choose to share or save it.

Auto Awesome movies are currently only available for some devices running Android 4.3 and up, including the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 (2013), Nexus 10, HTC One, Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Moto X, and Moto DVX.

Have you created any Auto Awesome Photo Movies of your own yet? Care to share?

+MoniqueCloutier

#Auto Awesome Photo Movies #Auto Awesome Photos #Auto Awesome Movies #How to edit auto awesome photos #How to edit auto awesome movies #How to create auto awesome photos #How to create auto awesome movies #Google #Auto Awesome

new YouTube comment system uses the Google Plus notification system

Google Update ...

The Comments section of your YouTube Inbox will no longer update when new comments are left on your videos.

The new YouTube comment system uses the Google+ notification system to let you know when someone has commented on your YouTube videos or in your YouTube discussions instead.

Now you will receive notifications via your Gmail, on your mobile device, and in the Google bar.

You can adjust the notification settings for the Google+ profile or Google+ page you connected to your YouTube channel to manage the notifications you receive when someone shares or comments on your content across the entire internet.

+MoniqueCloutier