In response to Periscope and Facebook Live, YouTube now lets you livestream from your mobile device. Just push a button on your YouTube app and start connecting with your followers.

YouTube has been livestreaming major events since 2011. It offered viewers a look at the Royal Wedding in 2011. Felix Baumgartner did his space leap on YouTube in 2012. Music lovers could watch Coachella in 360-degree glory this year.

But it wasn’t until February that it opened the ability up to people with at least 10,000 followers. And in April, it reduced that number to just 1,000 subscribers.

How Do You Do It?

The mobile app for YouTube has a red button for livestreaming. The capture button is in the right corner of the app. Just select a thumbnail and start your live broadcast.

Your fans can chat as they watch you. The chat bubble appears over the video so you can connect directly with your viewers. To make it easier for the presenter, chat messages are paced. This handy feature keeps you from getting overwhelmed with messages all at once.

You can actually make some money out of this. With Super Chat, your viewers pay to have their comment pinned at the top of the window. It stays in place for up to 5 hours. For big fans, it’s an excellent way to make a splash. For presenters, it’s an easy way to make some extra cash.

Just like other YouTube videos, you can search for interesting streams. Check other people’s reviews and playlists to find those most suitable.

Why Can’t Everyone LiveStream?

Some users are disgruntled that the service isn’t open to everyone with a YouTube account. But the company is worried about boring content clogging up their bandwidth. They figure that anyone who has managed to attract at least 1,000 followers has experience keeping people interested and entertained.

The company is also late to the table with this capability. That means they are still getting the glitches out. Limiting the number now lets them clean it up without getting everyone angry.

Another concern for any online platform is illegal content. YouTube is protecting its flanks by limiting livestreaming to people with an established channel and following. Account holders are much less likely to try something illegal if they can end up losing their channel.

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#blastcreative, what’s all about? If you’ve spent any amount of time on social media, you probably know what a hashtag is. Sadly, you may not know how to use one properly. Just about everyone has seen a tweet or Facebook status update in which #every other #word has a #hashtag attached to it. You might have also noticed hashtags on very long phrases (#kindoflikewhatisbeingwrittenhere). While hashtags do make it easier for others to find your content or to get a certain topic trending, they only really work if they are used properly. Here are a few tips for doing exactly that.

Keep It Simple

First of all, hashtags should never go on long phrases or anything that is too unique. Yes, some writers are good at using this exactly strategy for comedic effect, but they aren’t trying to start a conversation across social media. If you want to grab everyone’s attention with a hashtag, put it on a short phrase that can be easily repeated, preferably one that is a single word. Keep in mind that putting a space in a hashtagged phrase will only result in the first word being tagged, so any phrase you want to get trending should be easy to read without any spacing.

Do Not Hashtag Every Word on Your Post

Putting a hashtag on every word on a tweet or a post not only looks unprofessional, but it will fail to get anybody’s attention. You are essentially trying to start a conversation about every individual word you write. That makes your post read more like spam than anything that is supposed to advertise your services or start a trending topic.

Look for Trending Hashtags

If you’re using hashtags and social media for marketing purposes, it always helps to search Facebook or Twitter for trending topics. By borrowing certain hashtags, you can generate traffic to your website or social media accounts. Just make sure you know what a hashtag really means before you use it. You don’t want to borrow a hashtag that turns out to have nothing to do with what you want to talk about or sell. Using an unrelated hashtag looks desperate at best and offensive at worst. Always know what a conversation is about before you jump in.

For all of your Social Media Marketing needs, please contact us today!

The post Here’s How You Should Actually Use Hashtags appeared first on Website Design and Marketing.

With the emergence of more and more social sites, each must come up with ways to remain competitive and more so those that are already established. Facebook is not to be left behind as it has already made new tweaks to its layout. The page layout will henceforth enable brands to concentrate on the brand while all ads that have previously been a major feature have been excluded. The new design is fresh, clean and gives the Facebook brand somewhat a more unmistakable quality. During its testing, a representative from Facebook said, “We have introduced a new outline for pages on desktop to make it less demanding for individuals to find out about and interact with businesses on Facebook, including another segment for tab navigation and a more unmistakable Call-To-Action tab.” Below is a list of the most prominent changes:-

1. The profile picture which is no longer integrated with the cover photo, but which now appears at the top left corner of the page. The size remains the same, which is 180×180 pixels.
2. The Call-To-Action buttons are now more prominent a factor attributed to the fact that more and more brands are paying to play. Such buttons include, ‘Call Now’, ‘Shop Now’, ‘Watch Now’, ‘Send e-mail’, and many more. They have also moved and can now be located just below the tab links.
3. Cover images have now been moved to the right, a plus factor for brands as they can now effectively display their products without worrying about overlapping issues as other buttons such as the page name have been moved too. A new Messenger icon can also now be found just below your cover photo. This also creates a broad area within which administrators can display a great brand message.
4. New navigation tab which is now located just below the profile picture. Users can now easily navigate to sections such as Videos, Photos, Events, etc. Brands can now showcase their content by linking other social sites such as YouTube and Twitter to their Facebook pages. These social sites will be displayed on the navigation bar.
5. The about section which is essentially the same as the page set up previously used with the only tweak being that now it is on the right side the screen. A couple of more details such as phone number numbers and so on will appear below it. Ensure your about section is updated with precise data and currently you could consider including highlighted video which appears in this space too.
6. Absence of ads which enables businesses and individuals have a dedicated display space without having to worry about the appearance of ads from competitors. Ads absence is sure to rack up some more users for the social media giant.
7. Tabs and apps have also been moved to the left of the screen.

More and more Facebook users claim to like the new layout, especially those that have been users of previous versions. Apart from a refined look, it gives brands an opportunity to display their brands and communicate effectively.

Contact Blast Creative today for all of your social media marketing needs!

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The simplest way to understand why Instagram is such a popular platform is to refer to the old adage “a picture is worth 1000 words.” There is a reason that the social media giant Facebook bought them out; it is an excellent platform for image-oriented social promotion.

Using Instagram’s photo and video format, you can create visual stories that resonate with your audience, and people who are following you will see a signal on your profile that a new story is ready to be viewed.

Instagram Story Success: Order of Business

After you’ve decided on the story you wish to tell, the next thing to do is to download the integral Instagram story app onto your Tablet or Smartphone. As a way to introduce you to what your viewers will see when you release your first tale, the app will now display the latest stories from the personalities you follow.

Next up is the personalization of your story settings – just head to your profile and alter the settings to reflect your privacy wishes. Remember; people will be able to send you messages regarding your story if you so choose.

Creating Your Instagram Vision

Now that you’re ready to create your vision, you should familiarize yourself with the ready-made icons on the Instagram story page; use the camera on your mobile device to capture what you will and edit what you get. When finished, choose the option “add it to your story” to have your profile appear at the top of the screen. Add a high-resolution cover photo to give it a brush of professionalism.

You can choose to have your Instagram story be an ongoing process, of course; just look for the circle icon on the upper part of your screen to automatically add any new camera shots. A host of other story-alteration options are also present for full editing abilities.

Want to know how successful your story is, or how well it’s resonating with your audience? Good – Instagram has a built-in Analytics platform that keeps a tally of views and tells how many people read portions of your story (and what portions) as well as who watched the whole thing. After that, the only thing left to do is to sit back and wait for the feedback to come in. When you’re ready to make another story, let the analytics help you deliver the kind of content your audience is searching for.

Contact Blast Creative for all of your Social Media Needs!

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, then you’re quite aware of the rising social giants Instagram and Snapchat. These photo-sharing apps have managed to successfully differentiate themselves to the consumer by delivering photos and video in attractive formats that don’t exchange market share.

Snapchat vs Instagram

Snapchat, for example, is predicated on the how fleeting human interaction can be. You take video of yourself doing something and send it to followers and friends; however, analytics show that videos longer than about 10 seconds didn’t resonate as well with audiences as well as shorter videos. You can certainly send stand-alone images on Snapchat; the running “gimmick” of the site is that once the content you send out to friends and followers is viewed, it is deleted forever. The duration of the experience is just ten seconds, and successful marketers and self-promoters are the ones who use this time limit as a guideline to fashioning the content they want to deliver.

It gives you an opportunity to maximize a message by keeping it short and sweet, and benefitting your brand from the engagement. Snapchat is the definition of rapid media consumption – it takes advantage of short attention span in a world where there’s so much to see and do.

Instagram, on the other hand, is considerably more photo-friendly. Although you can post short videos on your Instagram page; the huge array of in-built camera filters and photo editing tools makes it clear that the site is image-driven. As a subsidiary of the king of all social media, Facebook, success is predicated on the highest-quality pictures – and of course, on content. People find you via the hashtags you put on the photos you take, which increases engagement beyond your circle of followers.

Telling Stories on Social Platforms

The above suggest to you how either platform can be best utilized for storytelling. On Instagram, because of the large photo-space available, storytelling can arguably be more dynamic. You can splice video in; and day-by-day or week-by-week add content to a new grid and use similar hashtags to help newcomers find your ongoing Instagram story. It’s a little more amenable to chapter format than Snapchat – just make sure you also use tags that include a link to pervious chapters. Your followers will be notified every time you post, so they don’t need the link-backs, but any new readers will need direction.

Snapchat, on the other hand, quickly deletes content that has been viewed, so stories have to be constructed with a ten-second time limit in mind. Viewers cannot go back and view previous chapters, which means you have to be creative – perhaps provide a link to a separate personal website where they can view past episodes. Alternatively, you could also tell a rapid-fire short story by making several videos and firing them of one after the other during a time of peak engagement. Both Instagram and Snapchat have their benefits for social media; leveraging both would be a boon to your business.

Contact Blast Creative for all of your Social Media needs!

The post What are the differences between Instagram Stories and Snapchat? appeared first on Website Design and Marketing.

Facebook Live debuted about mid-year, and is already ratcheting up interest from business owners. The fact is, if you use it correctly, you can extend your influence on the world’s largest social media network. Given that it’s video, you can clearly see that it will reduce the amount of time you previously invested in providing content – blog posts, webinars, articles, etc.
With that said, are there some best practices to fully leveraging Facebook Live in your marketing schemes? Of course – and here they are:
1.Open Up You Digital Doors
Use this opportunity to allow your loyal crew inside the inner workings of your business. You’d be surprised how many of them actually want to start a similar business, but don’t know how, nor know what to expect. This reality opens up the way for a Facebook Live video session; in it, you show them how you’re getting it done, and field questions as to what their passions are and how they relate to business.

2. Question and Answer Format
Facebook Live is also highly-amenable to the question and answer format, during which you gather common questions for a week or so, and then open up the airwaves – so to speak – and answer them live. This also allows you to field requests for new content, and combine these with analytics to see what your next posts/videos should talk about. Furthermore, this provides you with content that you can late put on your business blog, or use for a Facebook Wall Post when inviting people in for the next Live stream.

3. Notify Your Network of Giveaways and Events
What better way to create engagement with a Facebook Live video announcing company plans that will benefit users? Whether you’re heading to a convention or a trade show, this helps you notify users as to the date and time of your whereabouts, and perhaps even get some of them to come out to see you and your company booth. Facebook is huge; so, they can pass the information to friends and family that may be interested in your services and your message could spread like wildfire.
Always include a link to your webpage elaborating on the details of this event or giveaway; then, make a trackable channel url using Google Analytics – or other reliable analytics platform – so you can understand where the engagement is coming from for future Live broadcasts. One very useful action is to have your Live stream running while you’re at a conference, giving a truly intimate look to your social network as to where the company is headed.

4. Blog Comment Elaboration
Of course, you should already be answering blog comments daily. Not necessarily as they come in; but certainly before more than a few days have passed. The Facebook Live video option gives you the opportunity to really elaborate on some of these questions – in fact, this could be an entire series, and could provide weeks of content as you put up new posts.

People are always looking for a connection to the company in which they’re investing time and resources, and Facebook Live lets the savvy business owner take full advantage of that.

Please contact Blast Creative for all of your Social Media needs.

The post 4 Tips to Master Facebook Live for your Business appeared first on Website Design and Marketing.

You’ve seen the minimal, graphical representations known as emojis everywhere – even if you don’t send emails or text frequently. Popular as addendums to notes; or sometimes used as messages all by themselves, emojis are now forging a new niche in advertising, where their capacity for communication has already been employed by industry giants such as Domino’s Pizza and the World Wildlife Federation.

First of All: What Is an Emoji?

An emoji isn’t merely a picture – it’s a character of text in the form of an image. Your browser actually treats it like a language, and the images are uniform in this way. For example, Domino’s might tweet pizza emojis to followers; if you wanted to send a pizza emoji to a friend, you could use the same one as Domino’s. There are, of course, multiple different kinds of pizza emojis; the point is that the same ones available to the pizza giant are also available to you. The word emoji, itself, comes from the Japanese and means “picture, writing, character.”

The verdict is in: people love emojis. They’re a succinct and visually-appealing way to convey a quick message, as well as to immediately identify the company in the breakneck pace of mobile advertising. If your local zoo, for example, tweets out a message with 5 lions as emojis, this could quickly suggest that they just got an import of five new lions – and now would be a great time for that zoo visit you’ve been putting off.

Making Sure Emojis Work for Your Brand

While it’s true that brands can make and use their own emojis, these won’t be considered a part of the official emoji language supported universally by mobile applications and browser. And since the whole point of a company sending out such messages is for public consumption, sending one out that browsers can’t recognize defeats the purpose of advertising.

As is clear, the best way to utilize emojis is on social media platforms. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, right? The right combination of the two energizes your message, and gives it priority over all the other businesses out there that send out the same entirely word-based tweets and Facebook Wall message week after week.

Businesses That Have Seen Success with Emoji Advertising

There’s a general rule of business: if you want to know what’s successful, watch what the giants are doing. After all, they’ve got expensive and robust analytics at their disposal, and rarely do anything without tons of market research strongly suggesting success. Dove – the soap-maker – uses emojis liberally; in fact, the company made its own, and then made these available for download so that others could use them. Here are a few others:

• Burger King made chicken fries emojis as part of a campaign to announce the return of this food item upon customer request.
• NBA 2016 champions the Cleveland Cavaliers made a string of emojis featuring their current roster of players
• Celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and rapper Wiz Khalifa have made emojis bearing their likeness
• Auto giant Ford Motor Company has also gotten into the emoji spirit

By all accounts, then, it seems as though emoji advertising is beneficial. They make it easier to convey a message in the limited space available for getting your message across on a Smartphone or tablet, and some say that they could form a big part of the future of mobile advertising.

The post Does Emoji Advertising Work? appeared first on Website Design and Marketing.

Although it might not seem so at first glance, beauty is one of the more dynamic properties throughout history. From thin to plus-size, you can see different representations of what men and women find desirable in different eras. There was a time when “extra” size was especially attractive, because it suggested wealth and prosperity, for example. Today, in a time when social media and the ubiquity of internet access has made multiple forms of beauty very apparent, the people are responding positively to many of the unique results that are emerging.

Hashtag HonorCurves

Let’s face it: up until the last few years, during which social media has exploded as a primary means of business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer communications, you were inundated with images of super-skinny models as the overriding standard of beauty. Although both men and women have to deal with looking at models, and then looking at their own body and feeling subpar; most would agree that this is an issue that especially affects women.

Facebook user Sara Sofia Almeida grew tired of always having to compare her body to the popular mass media images. Using the hashtag #honorcurves#, she sought to have all the people out there appreciate their bodies and realize all the amazing things it can do – swim, run, hug people, love, laugh, and enjoy life. Basically, her body positivity contribution was that you should manage your perception of yourself, and don’t let the media define you. Her post received thousands of likes and dozens of comments; the hashtag itself was created by a young lady name Honorine, and has been used nearly 300,000 times to date.

Hashtag BigFinesBreakTheInternet

Yet another movement that celebrates larger women; the Big Fines Break the Internet hashtag was started to help women feel more positive about their bodies; particularly to help combat the results of studies showing that 54% of women between 18-40 feel dissatisfaction with their bodies. The 2014 survey done by Glamour showed that body negativity was actually growing worse, since back in 1984, a similar poll showed that just 42% of women in this age-range felt unhappy. The cause? Big magazines and social media – which proliferate the message that one kind of body is attractive. #BigFinesBreakTheInternet# is seeking to help change that perception.

Dove Gets Into It

Soap and body care company Dove jumped into the body positivity fray and launched a campaign that may be the largest yet. The #ChooseBeautiful# hashtag caught on like wildfire, when it was revealed in a study that 96% of women don’t choose the word “beautiful” to describe their bodies. This social media campaign has springboarded off the success of the Choose Beautiful hashtag to launch the Speak Beautiful variant, which encourages women to talk positively about their bodies with each other, to help realize their gains in self-esteem and self-perception.

A Celebration of Culture and Modesty

Melanie Elturk is Muslim, and despite that religions staunchly conservative appearance requirements for women, she’s taken to social media to show that girls can be attractive even in conservative garb. Her Haute Hijab movement is big on Instagram, where she showcases herself and other Muslim women wearing fashionable headscarves and other accouterments.

To celebrate your business on Social Media, please contact Blast Creative today.

The post Social Media is Changing Beauty Standards appeared first on Website Design and Marketing.

Pinterest is an image-dominant website that exploded on the scene just a few years ago. Want to know how effective it is? Well, recent valuations put the online company’s worth at close to $4 billion. The demographics breakdown shows that mostly young women with an average home income of around $100,000 dominates Pinterest; this income bracket, not surprisingly, makes a lot of purchases – which is precisely the kind of demographic that your business needs.

Pinterest’s success makes perfect sense, in retrospect – people like to look at pictures more than they like to read, and watch videos more than they like pictures. YouTube already has the video market cornered for the foreseeable future, so the images and scrapbooking theme of Pinterest is tailor-made to slide comfortably right into the picture niche. The point is – your business can benefit tremendously from using it properly.

First Things First – Build a Board
This is the fun part. After you sign up, you establish a board or two; this is done by uploading your own business-related images to your board, or scanning the web for eye-catching visual content and “pinning” it using Pinterest’s easy-to-use Google Chrome or Firefox app. Pin to your boards regularly, so that you maintain and grow interest; the boards with more high-resolution, pleasant-to-look-at images naturally gather more followers.

Speaking of followers; this is how Pinterest works for marketers. The most obvious way to get them is to pin good images – your crew will grow steadily. Another, more proactive method is to follow boards that you like, and that are at least somewhat related to your content. It’s a sort of unspoken “rule” of etiquette that people will follow you back if you follow them. Pinterest makes it easy to follow people – a list of recommended boards greets you each morning when you log on, with a “follow” button right next to each suggestion.

Pinterest for Business
After you set up your boards, it’s time to look into the business option: Pinterest offers analytics and insights into how your top few boards are performing – all you have to do is convert (currently free) to Pinterest for Business. This helps you understand how people are interacting with your content, and where to go from there.

• As an example, let’s say that Pinterest Analytics shows that one of your pins has the most views each day; it might be a good idea to add a link from this pin to a sales page on your website.

• Another option is to let that high-traffic pin guide you to producing the kind of content and images that your audience likes. It’s easy – find more HD images similar to the one garnering so much interest, and watch the overall interaction with your board skyrocket.

It should be clear by now that the image quality is tops when it comes to Pinterest marketing. People won’t even bother if your pictures aren’t high-resolution; only then, does the actual content you’re displaying matter. Be creative; humanize your brand and integrate every few pictures directly with the product you’re pitching somehow. Inspirational quotes attached also works well – but only if they make sense for your service. To keep you going forward – just remember the hundreds-of-millions of consumers passing by; if nothing else, that ought to get you in gear managing your online presence on Pinterest.

Contact Blast Creative if you are interested in our Social Media Marketing Services.

If you are a business owner in any of these genres, financial, photographers, dentists, hotels, restaurants, construction, HVAC, hardware stores, real estate, or any business owner and want more information on Internet Marketing, please contact Blast Creative today!

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The first thing you need to know about Instagram is that, well, Facebook owns it. Yep; Zuckerberg and crew bought it for a cool $1 billion back in 2012; which tells you that the photo-sharing website was as promising then, as it is successful today.  It has over 33 million active monthly users, and many more moderately-active accounts – which represents a healthy stream of potential business, if you play your cards right.  Instagram’s 400 million-strong user-base (and growing) beats out even Twitter, which is why you need to pay close attention to the marketing tips to follow.

Start Out with Attractive Images
These don’t need to be directly related to your business; the point here is to gain some traction. Instagram is quite aware that it’s a great platform for businesses, and so there are tools on the website that can have you up-and-running quickly and smoothly. Post images of puppies, attractive fitness models – obviously, if you can find a way to tie these into your business, then that’s a good thing.

1. Soon, you’ll start to cultivate a following. How big this becomes is up to your investment of time; it’s always a good idea to take advantage of your other social accounts – especially your Facebook – by linking it to Instagram, so that you can tap into several different streams of traffic. It turns out that Instagram users are looking for something different from Facebook, and you can leverage this for business by following a couple of best practices: Use hashtags. On Instagram (and Twitter, for that matter), these are the equivalent of keywords for Google Search. Hashtags allow people to find your images, and this is, of course, the very first step towards interaction. The content/quality of the image is the next determinant.
2. Feel free to scan Instagram after you sign up, find people to follow, and then peruse and like their photographs. Heck; take it one step further and leave comments – in our experience, the more insightful the comment, the more likely that people engage you and then follow your username back to your profile to find out more about the wizard (that would be you).
3. As mentioned, leave links to your other social networks on your profile page, so that you connect the other important aspects of your online persona together in one spot, and traffic trickles from one to the other.

More than most other sites, Instagram is one in which you need to follow back whoever follows you; because there’s not a lot of copy associated with the website, Instagram posts don’t easily show up in the search engines without very specific keywords that contain the name of the site, itself. Thus, the community grows mostly from within, and your liaisons there take on an extra bit of importance.

The Little Things Matter On The ‘Gram
We live in an age of apps; in fact, many would say they’ve become more important than websites, in a sense. Turns out that there are many image-related apps that can enhance your photo-sharing escapades on the ‘Gram; use them. You want it to be as easy as possible for your growing stable of followers to share your images and help you spread the love.

Other than the above, there’s not much left to do besides remaining engaged on the platform. Find a way to post regularly, because once you get to a certain size, your small efforts make big waves in terms of increasing your popularity. Instagram isn’t going anywhere – so rush to it and get started.

Contact Blast Creative if you are interested in our Social Media Marketing Services.

If you are a business owner in any of these genres, financial, photographers, dentists, hotels, restaurants, construction, HVAC, hardware stores, real estate, or any business owner and want more information on Internet Marketing, please contact Blast Creative today!

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