Tag: responsive

Social Media Marketing

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Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Most social media platforms have their own built-in data analytics tools, which enable companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of their ad campaigns. Companies can address a range of stakeholders through social media marketing, including: current and potential customers, current and potential employees, journalists, bloggers, and the general public.

Social networking websites are based on building virtual communities that allow consumers to express their needs, wants, and values, online. Social media marketing then connects these consumers and audiences to businesses that share the same needs, wants, and values. Through social networking sites, companies can keep in touch with individual followers.

To this end, companies make use of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram to reach a much wider audience than they can through the use of traditional print, TV, and radio advertisements alone, and at a fraction of the cost. In return, customers can now post reviews of products and services, rate customer service, and ask questions or voice concerns directly to companies through the same platforms. This has changed the ways that companies interact with customers, as a substantial percentage of consumer interactions are now being carried out over online platforms with much higher visibility.

In fact, today, over 80 percent of business executives define social media as important, and over 97 percent of all consumers search for local businesses, online. 25 percent of all mobile phone usage is dedicated to social networks, 75 percent of consumers say they rely on social media to influence their buying decisions, and 47 percent of Americans say that Facebook is their number one influencer of purchases.

Other commonly-used social media platforms include: Google+, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, Yelp, Foursquare, and YouTube. However, there are dozens of new social media platforms popping up all the time, as the use of social media marketing becomes more ubiquitous and sophisticated. Below are a few, lesser known platforms:

• Engagor – a comprehensive platform that helps businesses better engage with their customers in real time, by monitoring conversations about a brand or product across all major social networks, news websites, blogs, and forums.
• SocialCentiv – This self-serve platform lets users comb Twitter for potential customers using highly targeted metrics, such as those in their neighborhood or those seeking their specific product and services.
• HashAtIt.com – Dubbed as “The Social Search Engine,” HashAtIt.com collects status updates, tweets and other posts, allowing users to search for the most popular hashtags on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest — all in one place.
• Sparksfly – Sparksfly offers meaningful, targeted consumer engagement based on user-generated data.
• Sociota – Sociota is a social network management and monitoring platform offering the ability to integrate multiple Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+ accounts.
• Pushup Social – Pushup Social is a plug-in that lets businesses easily integrate a social network into their existing websites.
• HootSuite – With HootSuite, users can manage multiple social networks, schedule messages and tweets, analyze social media traffic, track conversions, and measure campaign results — all in one user-friendly dashboard.
• LeadSift – LeadSift mines millions of social media conversations, cutting through the noise to deliver relevant, quality leads based on metrics set by users, such as geographic information and keywords.
• SnapRetail – SnapRetail turns the average small business owner into a social media marketing powerhouse with ready-to-use social media content. The service offers a library with thousands of customizable, prewritten social media posts to choose from, eliminating the difficulty of crafting attention-grabbing updates.

Does My Company Need a Mobile App?

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There is only one way to answer the question: Does my company need a mobile app? And that is: It depends. It depends on a lot of things going on in your company and the type of business you’re in, so in order to answer the big question, you’re going to need to ask yourself a lot of lesser questions and keep probing until you have enough answers to get past the doubt.

Let’s start with some basic questions: Do you think that your business will benefit from having an app? Will the benefits outweigh the costs? What are your competitors doing and how will that impact your decision? These are not easy things to figure out, but perhaps using an analogy will help. Not too long ago, businesses didn’t have websites. If someone wanted to find your business they had the Yellow Pages and, if you could afford it, paid advertising in various media.

Today, you’d have a hard time finding a business that didn’t have a website. They’re just too valuable a tool for connecting with customers. Your business has a website and your competition does, too. Well, mobile activity is proceeding at a pace similar to the desktop/laptop activity of only a few years ago, and it may overtake it in the very near future. If you believe that most of your consumers will be on their smart phones most of the time, then you may well want to engage with them in that manner. And if your competition is already there, then you definitely need to consider having your own app, as well.

Today, the sectors that are most aggressively producing apps are restaurant and retail. Restaurant apps make it easy for users to find locations, review menus, place orders, and make reservations. Retail apps are very convenient when looking for a specific product or comparing prices. They are also used to find offer codes and coupons. And, of course, some companies, such as Uber, are totally dependent on their app. All these apps have specific purposes. So another crucial question you need to have a good answer to is: “What will your app do?” If you can’t readily explain your app’s purpose, you need to go back to square one.

Here’s another good question: “Is your current website ‘responsive,’ meaning does its layout adjust according to what device is being used to access it?” In the very recent past, most website interfaces were designed to work with a keyboard and a mouse on a large screen only; they didn’t work well on mobile platforms. But a responsive site can be accessed on a desktop or a smart phone and the interface will be optimized for each different device. If your business already has a website that’s mobile-friendly, an app might be superfluous; especially when you consider that apps have to be written and maintained for different platforms (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, etc.), but responsive websites are all-inclusive.

Finally, here are a few more questions that you should consider that relate directly to the consumers you would be trying to engage with your mobile app: 1) “Will your app make life easier for them?” 2) “Will your app make life less expensive for them?” 3) “Will your app make life more fun for them?” Remember, there are already thousands and thousands of apps out there. The world is not screaming for another one – unless of course, it can answer all of the above questions, positively. Then there’s always enough room for one more good one.

This list of questions is by no means exhaustive. But they are the kind of business questions you need to start asking yourself before going to the expense of creating and maintaining an app that might not amount to much more than an icon on page five on someone’s smart phone. If, when all is said and done, you can undeniably ascertain that an app will benefit your company because you believe it will make more than it costs in the long run, and that if you don’t have one you will lose ground to your competition, than you can pretty much conclude that you need it. But ask the questions, first.

Apple’s iPhone 6 Release Highlights the Need for Responsive Design

The Apple iPhone 6 and 6+ have launched, and demand is so high users who order are facing order fulfillment delays reaching into October. The delays don’t seem to dampening sales, however. “Response to iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus has been incredible, with a record number of preorders overnight,” Apple told the Financial Times.

To avoid these delays, users are waiting in long lines at the brick-and-mortar stores of major retailers and wireless carriers who sell the phone. “There are going to be ridiculously huge lines,” Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, tells USA Today. “Demand for iPhone 6 is so high.”

Reports indicate many of those waiting in line may be app developers or their proxies. This is because developers are anxious to immediately update their apps to run on the new phone and new operating system. Apps for both Apple and Android products have skyrocketed, after all, following the general trend toward greater smartphone use.

What does this mean for businesses? To put it simply, increased. Just as the surge in internet use a decade ago drove companies online, forcing them to build an online presence in order to reach customers, the new wave of increased smartphone use demands that companies now field online sites that can be easily viewed and used on smartphones. When possible, companies are also developing apps to make connecting with customers even easier.

In the past, websites were designed solely for use on computers with relatively large monitors. As mobile internet was developed, users found these sites difficult to view and use on the smaller screens offered by portable devices. The original answer to this question was the development of separate, similar mobile sites designed to be easier to view and use on smaller screens.

The technology has advanced, however, and now websites can be built that automatically query the users device when they access the site in order to determine the size of the screen. Based on the answer, the site then chooses from one of several ready-made format options designed to best different ranges of screen sizes. This is called “responsive website design.”

40 percent of users will abandon a site that takes just three seconds to load.
40 percent of users will abandon a site that takes just three seconds to load.

Determining the right format for the user’s device isn’t the only key to responsive design, however. A properly designed website can also load faster on mobile devices. Even a good 4G connection loads slower than most wired or wireless broadband internet connections, and some flashy features like sliders and large-format graphics that look great on a large screen and load easily through a broadband connection can load dramatically slower on mobile connections. Responsive websites determine the user’s speed and delay or eliminate the loading of these bandwidths hog as necessary. Remember, as we have discussed in another blog article, 40 percent of users will abandon a site that takes as little as three seconds to load, and 79 percent won’t return to a site they previously had trouble loading. In this business, time is quite literally money.

How do you know if your site is responsive? Odds are, if your site wasn’t built in the last year or tow or hasn’t been extensively updated or overhauled in that time, it isn’t – or at the least isn’t using the current full capabilities of responsive design. Here’s a good way to check: Pull out your smartphone. Open your web browser. Enter your site address. If you can’t view or use the site easily, odds are your customers also can’t…or won’t.

If you need a responsive web site designed, or an existing website overhauled to be responsive, at The Click Experts, we can help. We know responsive coding inside and out, and have the knowledge and experience to put it to work for you and your business. This means we can build responsive designs into both template and custom sites. We also build custom apps for both Android and iPhone, so if your company wants there to be “an app for that”, we can help. We offer free quotes, so there’s no excuse to check and see how custom apps and/or a website featuring responsive design can benefit your business. Don’t lose customers due to bad design. Contact The Click Experts today!

Apple introduces the new iPhone 6:

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