#jurevicius studios

[scheduledfacebookposts-blog]

Four Things You Need to Know about Scheduled Facebook Posts

If you manage your company’s Facebook page, you’ve probably faced the dilemma of being able to predict an appropriate Facebook post for a future date, and then being forced to keep it in mind when the date finally approaches. For example, if you have an upcoming event, sale or special occasion, you’ll want to make a Facebook post about it. Now, Facebook offers scheduled posts to help page owners better plan their overall strategy. When you create a scheduled post, you won’t have to worry about making a post at the time of the upcoming event, because the post will be uploaded automatically.

  The new feature was introduced in May of 2012, so many business owners have already taken advantage of it. Scheduled posts actually allow Facebook page admins to spend more time engaging with their fans. When they don’t have to spend most of their day making posts, they can connect with fans by responding to comments and making comments of their own. Especially for people hired as social media managers, scheduled posts offer a way to plan the day more effectively and free up time to interact on social media sites.

  Creating a scheduled post is easy, and it only requires a few extra steps beyond your usual post updates. After you’ve added the status or photo you’re looking to schedule, click on the clock icon in the lower left-hand corner of the post window. From there, you can choose the time, day, month, and year you’d like the post to show up on your timeline and in the newsfeed of your fans. Posts can be scheduled as far as six months into the future. As with your regular posts, you can also add language and location targeting to scheduled posts to reach fans more effectively.

  There are many benefits to scheduled posts, and they can be a vital part of your Facebook strategy if used correctly. You can post more regularly by planning ahead, which will make your company page seem more valuable to existing and potential fans. In fact, you can even schedule a weekly post to appear at the exact same time on the same day of every week so that fans can expect your clever posts weekly. By using scheduled posts, your social media manager will spend less time each day writing out the content and more time interacting with fans and getting more attention for your social media pages. More attention on these pages will translate to more sales and more web traffic on your site.

  Scheduled Posts are Not Linked to Twitter

If your Facebook is set up to automatically share every post on Twitter, this is especially important. When you create a scheduled post, it will not be posted to Twitter. Companies that take advantage of scheduled Facebook posts but don’t realize they aren’t linked to Twitter could get into trouble with this one when their Twitter feed suddenly becomes inactive. It’s important to stay relevant both on your Facebook and Twitter pages, so make sure you add supplemental Tweets to make up for the scheduled posts. Otherwise, your Twitter followers might soon lose interest.

  Backdated Posts will Show Up in Your Fans’ Newsfeed

When you use scheduled posts on Facebook, you’ll have the option to backdate your post. In other words, you can create a new post that will have a time stamp from the past so it will look like you had posted it then. This is helpful if you want certain information on your Timeline from before you were active on Facebook. For example, you could make a post about a time you were featured in the local paper in 2009 before your company page was established. However, you need to remember that this post will still show up in the news feed of each fan. Though it will appear in the correct place on your Timeline, it will also show up as news as soon as it’s posted. Therefore, you should be careful about what you post. Fans might find it strange that you’re promoting past events.

  Not Every Post Can be Scheduled

When you start planning your scheduled posts on Facebook, you might accidentally include a post that cannot actually be scheduled. It’s important to know which types of posts can be scheduled and which cannot. Links, photos, videos and regular status updates can all be posted automatically at a specified date and time. Photo albums, events, offers, questions and milestones cannot be scheduled. The feature is still relatively new on Facebook, so there’s a good chance these types of posts might have a scheduling option eventually, but for now they can only be posted in real time.

  You Can’t Edit the Content of a Scheduled Post

Once you have created your status update and scheduled it to be posted in the future, you cannot edit the actual content of the post. You can change the date and time of upload, but the entire post will need to be deleted and remade if there is an error in the content. For that reason, you should be especially careful when creating scheduled posts so that you don’t waste time cancelling every one that has an error in the information or even grammatical errors. Be diligent in proofreading each scheduled post before it’s posted, and make sure each is double checked if you have a social media manager working on the Facebook page.

  Scheduled posts are an excellent way to keep fans updated while also building a successful and effective social media strategy. Instead of waiting for things to happen, you can be organized and diligent in getting posts in order ahead of time and having them updated automatically. Your existing fans will be impressed by your Facebook diligence, and you could easily get more Facebook fans when others realize how valuable your social media content is. As long as you’re careful about scheduled posts and avoid mishaps such as predicting future events incorrectly, the feature can be a vital tool to your overall Facebook strategy.

[socialmediarights-blog]

Is Your Company’s Social Media Policy Illegal?

When any type of new technology is available to the general public, new ethical standards and laws must be made to suit the opportunities it presents. For example, body scanners in airports caused uproar as travelers felt that they were being violated. The scanners produced a frighteningly accurate picture of the body under clothing, so standards had to be set regarding how the images would be used. Even an invention as far back as the radio caused a stir for a while as advertisers, broadcasters, and the FCC worked together to create laws about what could and couldn’t be said. Social media, which is used by many companies as a way to reach out to customers around the world, is causing a similar stir, and people are unsure about what’s wrong and right on the sites.

  In its basic form, social media is easy for anyone to use. Even octogenarians are learning how to comment on their grandkid’s photos and upload some of their own. Companies—especially those with in-house social media gurus—are really getting into the swing of things and using sites such as Facebook and Twitter to connect with their audience. It gives them a sense of power that they’ve never had before. Instead of communicating with customers in a one-way channel such as print or TV advertising, they can start a conversation and learn more about their consumers than they’d never have known otherwise. However, with great power comes great responsibility, and every company should be careful about how they use any social media site.

  Access to so much information can be dangerous, and many companies are accidentally abusing the laws of social media. There is certainly a lack of clarity in digital advertising law as it relates to social media. These vague guidelines become a major problem when companies try creating their policy handbook and feel stumped at the section about social media. While they might have ideas about what will and will not get you fired, these ideas are sometimes utterly illegal. Employer-employee relationships can be touchy. A company could get in serious trouble if it implied that women who cut their hair short could be fired, for example. While its obvious why that scenario would be a problem, discrimination and policies based on social media can be just as bad, but more difficult to define.

  As we all try determining what should be legal on social media sites, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been working towards making the laws clear. There are hundreds of ways that you could potentially break labor laws with your social media policy and not even realize it. Instead of guessing whether or not something is illegal, always work with a professional legal consultant when creating or adjusting your company policies. If you’re already working under a set of guidelines for your company, take great care to heed the following legal warnings. 

  Employees Cannot be Fired for Criticizing the Company

Technically, the NLRB states that employers cannot create policies that prohibit employees from posting negative things on Facebook or any other social media site. Employees are allowed to rant and rave about the company all they’d like. They’re even allowed to discuss any legal claims openly with their social media friends. However, if you did get fired over bashing your company online, you might not win in the court case. Your company or supervisor specifically could charge you with libel, and the evidence would be all too easy to find. If your company policy is that employees could speak negatively about your business over social media sites, the NLRB might rule against it. However, if you fired a rude employee over harsh negative statements, you’d likely win in the court of law. This one is complicated, so just hope that none of your employees would do such a thing, and don’t hire ones that might. This was most recently an issue with national chain Costco, and the employee won in the end.

  Employers Cannot Ask for the Passwords to their Employees Social Profiles

Recently, a trend has started in which employers ask for the password to their potential employee’s social media sites as part of the interview process. It seems outrageous, but when people are desperate for a job, they’ll often hand it over. This is a major privacy breech, and the NRLB deems it a violation of the laws of the digital world.  The government is also working on a bill to stop this request permanently. It’s perfectly legal to look at the Facebook and Twitter profiles of your potential and current employees. Tech companies use LinkedIn and Twitter profiles to find out how savvy their applicants are. However, you should never ask for access to their personal accounts.

  Employees Cannot be Fired for Friending Coworkers

Connecting on social media sites is a fun way for people to stay in touch. Social media friendships don’t always indicate any romantic involvement, and sometimes they aren’t even signs of a friendship in real life. Much like a policy against inter-office dating, some companies are taking it upon themselves to prevent their employees from becoming friends or followers of their coworkers. The NLRB has approached companies regarding statements about friending coworkers and has deemed each one illegal.

  Employers Cannot Tell Employees that They Can’t Use Social Media Sites at Work

This one is surprising, considering all of the employers in the United States that block sites such as Facebook and Reddit from their company servers. Technically, the NLRB states that employers are not allowed to tell their employees that social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter cannot be accessed with company resources or on company time. This is because doing so would rule out the possibility of using the sites off-hours at the office or during lunch breaks, which is illegal. The sites are harmless in nature, so preventing employees from doing what they’d like to do is the bigger issue.

Many of these laws might seem surprising, which is why your company needs to be extra careful when putting together the social media section of the policy handbook. For businesses, learning social media isn’t all about getting more Facebook friends or more Twitter followers. It’s also about learning how to treat the sites in a business setting and staying within the bounds of legality.

[sitestrategies-blog]

Get Traffic by Marketing to the Emotional Side of Consumers

We like to pride ourselves on what careful shoppers we are, what great buying decisions we make, and how carefully we spend our hard-earned money. We like to think that our product-buying decisions are based on how useful or practical the product is, and we convince ourselves that we have bought a particular brand because it is the best value, when what really influenced our buying decisions were the emotional connotations the product had for us.

We gather emotional tags from such things as where we were or what we were doing when we last used a product. If we were drinking a particular brand of orange juice on a recent, beautiful morning after which something wonderful happened to us, we form a happy association with that brand even though, rationally, there’s no reason to connect the Tropicana brand with the $5,000 lottery ticket we bought that day. We associate the emotion with the product, though, and that’s enough. Marketers of all types of products have realized this for years: they show their products being enjoyed, not being used.

What People Want to Gain

In an emotional world full of emotional people, there are constant wants and desires. Human beings have many general emotional needs, and these can be (and are) catered to in marketing campaigns:

·        Health. People want to be healthy, and any product that is consumed or used in the context of games or exercise can be touted as healthy, even if it’s not: for example, fast food chains that pick out one menu item that’s only sort of bad for you and then show smiling people riding bikes, holding tennis rackets, and happily munching on the product.

·        Praise from others. So many marketing campaigns focus not on the merits of the product but on how other people will react to the person who uses it. Beer commercials that imply that the guy who consumes a particular brand will become an irresistible sex magnet are one example.

·        Time. The appeal to the consumer on the basis of time-saving will always be a common strategy. This used to be targeted primarily at (busy) housewives but is now aimed at just about everyone, particularly in electronics and internet applications.

·        Improved appearance. This, as you know, isn’t confined by any means to products that are actually intended to improve one’s appearance, such as cosmetics or clothes. This approach is also used to sell everything from cars to vacations to chewing gum. Merely showing the product being enjoyed by attractive people in an attractive setting sends the message—which doesn’t need to be explicitly stated—that “hey, if I use this product, maybe I’ll be more like those people.” Most of us, subconsciously or not, want to be like attractive people and view their actions as more “valid” than those of others; if we see an attractive person drinking a can of diet soda, we’re more inclined to buy that brand simply for that reason. It sounds crazy, but it works.

·        Comfort. We have an emotional need for comfort even if we don’t have a practical need for it; we have an abiding urge to make things warmer, colder, drier, wetter, cozier, more spacious, noisier, quieter—whatever will change the status quo for the better. We want that positive emotion that comes from feeling comfortable and secure; being comfortable implies to us that we are being cared for and loved. This is why kitchen, bathroom, or household care products are often shown being used inside a homey, even old-fashioned house.

·        Money. This refers not to our practical need for money but rather, for the emotional comfort that money brings. For some people, money=security; for others, money=success. It always has more meaning than just numbers.

What We Want to Avoid

Many of the things we want to avoid are not only unpleasant, but beyond our control to some extent. A product that promises to help us avoid something undesirable or unpleasant is thus promising to give us power. This is a very important concept in marketing as the product that promises to let a person end his powerlessness over his situation is the one that he will choose.

·        Doubt. It’s an uncertain world out there. We are all servants of fate; we can only dimly guess at the future, which will no doubt be full of surprises, not all of them pleasant. How can we combat this helplessness? Well, let’s take the common cold—something that just happens to us (though we often can guess where we’ve picked it up). We buy Airborne cold remedy, even though there’s no proof whatsoever that it works, because we want to control the possibility of catching a cold on the plane. Mothers rub Vick’s on their children’s chests because they want to feel that they can control the duration and severity of their colds.

·        Risk. This is a component of doubt, in that we hate uncertainty. We want to feel that we are in control, that to plan matters; that we will be able to determine our own destinies. This is behind the sale of every kind of insurance, which no one would ever buy if they understood how it works. Buying life insurance, for example, is an attempt to control the possibility of death.

·        Embarrassment. This includes not only embarrassment as such but also peer pressure, social norms, and fashion. We don’t like to feel that we stand out or don’t conform (at least, most of us don’t).  Feeling like the oddball in the crowd is something that many people want to avoid at all costs, and advertising that seeks to exploit this will say that “everyone’s using” a given product.

·        Loss. We want to keep and hold what we have. We are generally what is called “risk-averse,” a loss of a given size or amount hurts more than an equal-sized gain feels good. This leads to the marketing and sale of products that tout the avoidance of some material catastrophe, such as home security systems or car alarms.

  The most successful ad campaigns are those that zero in on an emotional appeal of a product and then keep hammering away at that. The actual worth or usefulness of a product is almost irrelevant; we don’t make decisions that way. Our emotions have much more influence than our intellects on our decision-making processes, though we like to pretend that the opposite is true.  The same holds true when marketers try to attract website visitors and convert them to customers.  It’s all about appealing to their emotions and getting them to click.

[jureviciousstudios-blog]

YouTube to Expand Channel Offerings for Popular Niches

YouTube was once a place for silly videos of babies laughing, cats playing instruments, and flash mob dances. While hundreds of these videos can still be found on the site, YouTube is slowly becoming more serious in its efforts to provide quality entertainment for its users. Yes, it’s easy to spend hours online browsing videos of dogs doing funny things on YouTube. However, YouTube wants to change the way we spend our time on the site. Instead of acting as a time-waster, the site wants to become a go-to resource for actual, planned entertainment that provides value to its viewers.

Since Google bought YouTube in 2006, the search engine giant has been trying to make it a more polished and organized site for videos. Last year, YouTube started featuring original channels. These channels feature highly produced and high quality videos sponsored by YouTube itself. The strategy was meant to attract TV viewers in the hopes that they’d visit YouTube instead of turning on their television. It’s not a completely outrageous vision, as many people do connect to Netflix or DVR systems instead of flipping through the channels. However, the folks at YouTube do understand that the older generation will be less likely to get rid of their TV’s any time soon. For that reason, they are aiming their efforts at viewers under the age of 35.

YouTube is investing in quality by creating channels for companies with serious major media experience. These videos are not your run-of-the-mill shaky cameras filming a thunderstorm YouTube clips. They will be of equal quality to the major shows currently on television, and they will carry advertisements. Some of the major channels include Grantland by ESPN, a comedy channel called Jash by Sarah Silverman and Michael Cera, and Daily Glow by Everday Health.

Already, YouTube has seen quantifiable success since its introduction of channels last year. Its top 25 channels average one million views per week. For content that is not released at such a high level of quality, one million views in total is outrageous. The site has also successfully increased the number of time users spend on it by one billion hours.

Since there is so much viewership on YouTube’s new channels and so many advertising dollars being poured into the new strategy, you might be wondering how you can use them to your company’s advantage. Right now, the YouTube channels are reserved for media companies with a lot of clout. Unless you’re a media giant like ESPN or even Sarah Silverman, a YouTube channel might not be in the cards just yet. In the meantime, you can try thinking about which channels you’d like to buy advertising on. Each channel is highly targeted, so it’s easy to find one with the niche audience that you might be looking for. Global head of content at YouTube, Robert Kyncl, explained that he thinks every interest will soon have a dedicated YouTube channel.

While you might not be ready to create a YouTube channel for your company now, we can assume that someday YouTube might reach out and offer high quality production services for smaller companies. You might be able to pay for the production to be featured on YouTube with your own channel. There is no telling if and when that time will come, but should it happen, it’s good to be prepared. Thinking about how you might design your own YouTube channel can get you in the right mindset for other sites as well.

If you have the opportunity to create your own high-quality YouTube channel someday, consider the following:

Think about Your Advertisers

If you create a YouTube channel, you could get a large amount of revenue from advertisers. Advertising on YouTube is becoming more popular. Digital advertising companies are increasing their spending by almost 50% to $2.9 billion this year, so advertisements should be a factor in your decision on content. Without letting it get in the way of your creative vision, try considering what topics advertisers would like to be associated with. Creating your videos accordingly could seriously pay off in the long run.

Think about Your Audience

Of course, you should consider the likes and interests of the people who will be watching your YouTube channel as well. Think outside the box to appeal to them without simply producing a lengthy advertisement. Whether you produce how-to videos about outdoor living as a camping gear retailer or a comedy series that is only loosely related to the product or service your company provides, each video needs to be valuable and related. To make sure your channel becomes popular, you need to ensure that every video ties in to the previous as if it were featured on a real TV channel. Without continuity, you might as well be uploading videos individually without the help of the channel, because users won’t come back for more.

Create Content that Ties Into to Other Media Channels 

Your YouTube channel cannot bring you success if it stands alone. Without any indication that it is tied to your company, you’ll only build revenue from ads without actually building your brand. For example, ESPN makes it clear that Grantland is affiliated. Whether you declare it right in the video or direct users to each video from your own site, you need to make sure your channel is sufficiently branded. Otherwise, you’re missing out on a major opportunity to advertise on a whole new level.

Unless you work for a company that currently has a show on TV or has appeared in the public eye many times over major media outlets, you probably won’t be offered a YouTube channel any time soon. However, thinking about how you’ll approach the task should the opportunity arise will make you feel prepared, and it will also help you brainstorm your brand in new and interesting ways. Thinking about your audience and which advertisers might want to work with you could put your company in a new light and help you develop strategies outside of a YouTube channel. With or without channels, YouTube is still a valuable resource for strengthening your social media presence and increasing your popularity with social media users.