How to Use SnapChat for your Business

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It's important to remember that content on Snapchat only lasts for a short period of time after a 24 hour period of time they disappear, so it's not like other platforms where you can repurpose the content on an ongoing basis, now with that being said I think that's also the attraction of Snapchat.  Users know that the content on Snapchat is fresh and not dated, this is a big part of its appeal. 

If you think Snapchat is something that will work for you, here are some ideas you can use to get started in producing content: 

Use Snapchat for Behind the Scenes Footage

This is a great way to give your customers/prospect and insider's view of your company.  Sharing your company culture can really help to engage your following with interesting content.

Media Influencer Outreach

Like all social media platforms, Snapchat also has its share of influencers. Partnering with influencers can help in sharing your brand and conducting an awareness campaign.  It's a great way to share your brand's voice and personality, not to mention Snapchatis able to reach a demographic that's hard to reach throughout more traditional channels. 

Share Promotions, Coupons or Contests

Everyone loves a deal, so Snapchat is a great way reward your followers with promotional codes, coupons, contests, and giveaways. Be creative, it will keep your customers/prospects interested. 

Deliver Exclusive Content

Because of the uniqueness of Snapchat, it's a great way to deliver exclusive content to your followers.  We all love to be the first "in the know."

Report from Live Events

Share your live events with your followers using Snapchat. It's a perfect app to give the insiders view of what's going on. 

Evaluating the Value the Marketing Value it Brings to You

It's clear that Snapchat has the ability to create engagement with your customers as well as awareness with your prospective customers through the use of daily stories.  It has the potential to get you in front of a new audience that is perhaps being missed by other social media platforms.  However, with it come a few downfalls that you have to be ok with. 

• Your marketing message can't be recalled, this means it's one and done.  
• You currently can't drive traffic from the Snapchat app. This means it is nearly impossible to convert them through the purchase or lead process.
• In marketing departments that are already tapped for time and resources, it's one more social media platform you will have to activate, feed and monitor. 

Only you can make the determination of whether Snapchat is a good channel for you.  Like any other social media platform, I believe Snapchat will work well for some businesses and not for others. I would also say that I believe Snapchat will continue to evolve, grow and increase their marketing opportunities. The only way to know if it's right for you is to try it. Evaluate it, try to develop a content plan that is Snapchat specific and see how difficult it is.  If you find the content plan comes naturally, why not give it a try?  If you struggle you should take that as a hint that perhaps this is not the right platform for you.

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Snapchat Marketing: Is it Right for Your Business?

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What's the fascination with Snapchat, especially from the marketing perspective? Good question. I have to admit the "youngins" picked up Snapchat long before we started considering it as a marketing tool.  

You may be sitting there wondering what Snapchat is?  No worries, you aren't the only one, let me give you a brief introduction before we start talking about its marketing value.  

Snapchat launched in 2011.  It is a mobile messaging application.  In the beginning, it was a great way to send photos and videos without bogging down your phone's storage.  The younger kids picked up on it first. They could add captions, drawings, and even filters to their photos and videos before sending them to friend and family, thus the term "snap."   The element that attracted most users was the fact that you could only view the "snap" for 10 seconds before it disappeared.

 Poof – gone for good!  Now, you can probably see the attraction for tweens and teens.   Today Snapchat has over 100 million active users and over 7 billion daily video views.  Now, you understand the attraction to marketers.  

Snapchat closely resembles how we communicate face-to-face than any other social network. when we talk to each other, passing in the halls or just living out our lives, those moments disappear. Snapchat emulates that behavior and psychology.  Moments are temporary and that's exactly the feeling and behavior that Snapchat matched to." 

In 2013, Snapchat introduced a new feature called Snapchat Stories.  This enabled users to string together photos and videos  taken throughout the day creating narratives.   Think of it as a Twitter feed or Facebook timeline.  The stories last for 24 hours.  This new feature took hold and users continued to grow, according to Business Insider over 40% of 18-year-olds were using Snapchat.  

In 2015, they launched a new feature called Discover.  Discover took Snapchat to an entirely new level. Discover connected SnapChat users with top media companies and media companies started publishing content to the app users.  The companies they launched with included ESPN, Cosmopolitan, National Geographic and CNN.  This feature has pushed the platform into a prime position for monetization.  

Ok, so that's a brief history on SnapChat, now let's talk about why marketers are bringing it to the attention of business owners.  

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Snapchat users have centered around the millennial generation that's one attraction, but other generations are adapting to it daily and active users continue to increase in volume.  Facebook as continually been losing the younger audience to applications like Snapchat, ComScore reports that three out of every  five 18-24-year-olds use Snapchat. The numbers are attractive and the application carries more value than just snapping photos and videos that disappear.  

There is a lot of buzz about Snapchat lately, but you are really the only one who can determine if it's the right social platform for you and your business.  It is growing in popularity and users on a daily basis, so let's explore some of the ways that Snapchat can be used so that you are able to make the educated decision on whether or not it fits into your marketing strategy.  

The challenge with Snapchat is that the marketing options are not as advanced as those available on social platforms like Facebook.   You need to have a clear understanding of the objective you want to achieve with Snapchat and how it adds value to your overall social marketing strategy.  Snapchat does take a considerable amount of time to create a presence that is continuous and strong.   

In my next blog I’ll talk about how you can get started with SnapChat

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This Muslim Family Were Just Thrown Off of a Plane Because of their Religion

This Muslim Family Were Just Thrown Off of a Plane Because of their Religion

Not long ago, there used to be a world where airplanes were ordinary vehicles meant to take you from one corner of the world to another discreetly. Thanks to the Egypt Air guy, a bunch of racism mixed with a dash of terrorism and topped with a garnish of Islamophobia has made air travel so much more happening, in all the wrong ways.

On March 31, 2016 Eaman-Amy Saad Shebley, her husband and three children decided to fly for their kids Spring break holidays.

Their mistake? They flew United Airlines and were Muslims.

Here’s how people have been standing up for the family:

    

   

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The reason such stories keep popping up is because each and everyone of us needs to practice tolerance in our daily lives(and over social media

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13 Times Pakistanis Owned English

English plays a very important part of any Pakistani’s life. Whether it’s at school, at work, advertising or hitting on a girl, English plays a vital role. We may not always make the best use of it but we don’t hesitate to own it either.Here they don’t just take care of your appetite, they take care of your feelings as well

1- Here they don’t just take care of your appetite, they take care of your feelings as well

2- The irony of this might kill some of us.

3- Seems like they aren’t either.

4- That’s right.

5- There couldn’t have been a better name for this salon. Definitely need of some good luck here.

6- Because blasting your bum is haram.

7- Hardees? More like hard D’s

8- This frandship is wayyy too over!

9- We promise they don’t give two shits.

10- Because sughar trumps all.

11- They still managed to get the message across

12- In case your cell phone is ever “turned on.”

13- The “safest” protest ever.

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Which are the most important e-commerce traffic sources?

Data from 65 million ecommerce orders shows the crucial sources of traffic for ecommerce websites

Ecommerce and online retail is a booming sector, but because the latest marketing techniques change so rapidly it can be tricky to keep up with the latest trends whilst also keeping your feet on the ground.

In a new report, Yotpo collated data from 65 million ecommerce orders representing $2 billion dollars in transactions over 120,000 ecommerce stores, and established what the industry average is for digital media.

The results make for slightly surprising reading. On the face of things, Social makes up a healthy 6%, but this is still a relatively small slice over the overall pie. Paid makes up 5%, which leaves considerable room for growth, whilst email makes up a rather small 3%. It would be interesting to see the conversion rates by traffic, as it may be that referrals from emails are on the site because they’ve decided to purchase, whilst those from other sources may be more likely to be there to browse or research. I was slightly surprised search didn’t make up a larger share, since it is how most customers generally start their buying journey. Investing in better content marketing efforts could be more than worth it for many ecommerce stores, as if done well it will attract quality links and boost SEO.

Relying too much one source of traffic leaves you exposed to risks, as just because a channel is fantastic for generating traffic today doesn’t mean it will continue to be. Some sites lost out when Panda put penalties on certain SEO linking practices. Others lost out when Facebook decided to massively restrict organic reach. If your site had relied exclusively one of these sources of traffic then the changes may have put you in some serious trouble.

The best way to avoid these risks is by hedging your bets by acquiring your traffic from a considerable variety of sources. But what is a good variety? That’s where the data comes in.

Direct

The big surprise in many ways is how large a proportion of traffic comes from direct. Fully 40% of traffic came from direct, which accounts for more ecommerce traffic than any other single source. Direct in theory is the people who have typed in the URL directly to their browser, but in reality it means anyone who arrives at the site from a source that cannot be tracked. The source of this traffic is generally links that have been sent to friends/colleagues and then copied and pasted into web browsers. Traffic of this kind is generally referred to as ‘dark social’, as it is comprised of links that are shared socially, but cannot be tracked. This means ‘dark social’ actually accounts for a considerable percentage of direct traffic.

Dark Social

By its very nature, it is difficult to accurately account for what percentage of your direct traffic is actually ‘dark social’. However with direct accounting for 40% of of ecommerce traffic it seems likely dark social is making up a large proportion of the total. A general rule of thumb is that for every three people reaching your site via social, a further 7 will be arriving from ‘dark social’, which will appear as direct. If this is true for ecommerce traffic then dark social accounts for half of all the direct traffic, which is 20% of the total traffic. This makes dark social the 3rd largest source of ecommerce traffic by a considerable margin. Bear that mind when designing you’re landing pages and crafting the copy for your social shares. Social is probably more important to your bottom line than you think.

Other statistics on the most popular traffic sources and media channels for retailers?

If you're not aware of it the xcellent Custora Ecommerce Pulse showing orders by channel is also of interest for retailers to benchmark against. This is the latest data in 2016 from the end of 2015.

It's a compilation of traffic or media sources from some of the top US retail sites which drive sales.

What channels draw the most engaged traffic?

Not all clicks are equal, and some visits are more valuable than others. Some channels bring traffic that is more likely to spend plenty of time reviewing the site, whilst others are more likely to bounce back relatively quickly. Email, Instagram and referral are the stars here. Conversely, Pinterest and Facebook bring traffic likely to spend only half as much time on site as the top performers. It is important to tie this information into budget allocation models, as a click from an email may be worth considerably more than one form Pinterest for example.

How important is mobile?

Mobile has been a buzz word in digital for several years now, to the point where it seems almost out-dated to talk about how important it is as everyone should know by now. Mobile now makes up the majority of visits across the web, but this is not the case for ecommerce. Because of the fiddly nature of payment forms, mobile accounts for slightly over 1/3rd of all ecommerce visits. If your rate of mobile traffic is lower than this it might be worth seeing if your site needs further optimisation for mobile. Responsive design should be your first priority, and if this is already in place then it may be worth a bit of user testing to see if the customer journey is as smooth on mobile as it is on desktop.

We hope this ecommerce traffic data has been helpful for benchmarking where you currently are against the industry average.