November is almost coming to an end and Black Friday is approaching very fast. every marketer should be buckled up with different and unique marketing strategies. The end of November is the beginning of the holiday season as it all starts from Thanksgiving and ends up at Christmas. It is a perfect opportunity for the business person’s to complete the year in a good note and increased sales during this festive season. However, start the new year with a new zeal and positive vibes is a great idea. To promote your business one of the easiest and reliable place is the digital media. These days people are more into the internet and digital marketing than going personal. Upon that social media has become a major part of everybody’s life. So, it becomes very important to target social media for any kind of business to drive the customers.
(Source: Pinterest Sephora)
While we move towards social media there are a lot of trending social media sites which also give access to do business in their site like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc upon all these nowadays Instagram marketing has increased a lot and people are more relying on the Instagram marketing or Instagram Ads. In all these things we can clearly say that Instagram has raised its levels towards branding and included a lot of features which helps in easy branding and driving lots of views.
In this article, we are going to mention the best Black Friday marketing strategies for Instagram that will help you in all the ways to improve your market presence and grab the attention of a lot of people towards your brand.
PLAN A CAMPAIGN
Though Black Friday is around the corner you will find huge spendings and transaction in this period of time. You can get immense sales and success only in this period of time. Doing a promotion in this season of the year is very advantageous because you will get to know your active customers who will look for various deals this holiday season.
(Source: Instagram)
So, it is the time to stop worrying about what has gone and what sales you made earlier and start thinking what you are going to gain now and centralize your complete concentration on only one thing that is gaining the customers’ attention. Whereas it is just the type of campaigns that vary, which usually depends on business types, but the only thing that remains same everywhere is making the profit and dragging the customer’s attention towards your business.
(Source: Instagram walmart)
You should have a very good planning and strategy which will bring you the preferred customers. It should contain every single aspect that defines about you and the product that you are selling. Prepare an eye-catching poster with all the offers, discounts and exclusive gifts that you want to give your customer.
Offers & discounts are the first things that a customer looks for during holiday shopping. It may be an age-old tactic to drive the customers but, Yes! it works. Eventually, it is you who has to make it according to this time period or generation, and make people attracted by doing something for which people crave for and will buy for sure. Promote all these things in the digital media and do digital marketing because these days digital media is the most watched place and it is a place where people most of the time stay active in. So, a proper strategy and tactics for this very much important.
START SOON AND END LATE
Festive holidays just come once a year so concentrating on it, weeks before the holidays start always adds up as an advantage. To make it work for you it becomes very much important to take it seriously, and look it as more than just a day event. It is the time to concentrate on the whole holiday season.
For the best results start planning a few days before or you can say some days just ahead of Black Friday. This planning stays with you a longer period of time, and daily you get a certain amount of customers and the customers will keep on increasing gradually every other day. The plan should be like start posting about the offers, discounts, gifts etc. a week or a two before and increase the excitement level in the people day by day. However, also give the people a sneak peek about all those items that are discounted or have the exclusive offers.
(Source: kidly)
The motive is to create a lot of hype and buzz about the brand, offers, discounts etc. then extend it till Black Friday just by showing your hit products, biggest sales and then the discounts upon these items if any. So, that when exactly the Black Friday is arriving the viewers will be ready with their wishlist to buy it immediately.
According to the surveys, it is revealed that 62% of the shopper’s shop post the holiday. So, at this time let your brain do a brainstorming and start thinking about the offers that you can give the customers, however, which starts before the holiday days and continue till some days even after holidays.
FOLLOW-UP YOUR CUSTOMERS
Send all your customers the exclusive offers that you are planning to have. Whereas, keep in mind always send exclusive coupons to your loyal customers and the followers who buy from your website frequently and start following them. One important tactic to hold on these people is to give them some extra coupons or discounts or you can increase their sales day option or you can ask them to use certain coupon code so that they can avail the required discount. While creating a bit of scarcity marketing or FOMO and making the period very urgent or making it as a period of urgency.
(Source: Instagram chictreasure)
However, it is not necessary that everyone whom you share the promotional advertisement will turn up and make a purchase, but yes you can expect that a lot of people will turn up may be through your promotional ads or maybe from some other channel. For all these things to happen following your trusted customers is important.
These days the ADs on Instagram can be more personalized for a specific customer by using his/ her place that person is residing and using their linguistic factors in the ADs according to the region where they live. This way it helps to connect to the customers from all the background and this increases the chances of the purchase.
Warm up, and start planning according to the region, customer’s language, place, habits likes etc. and start showcasing your potential advertisements to the customers.
CREATE HASHTAGS
At present, there are 6.7 million hashtags comments being used until now under the #blackfriday hashtag and it is expected to rise till the end of the holiday. To avoid your posts and advertisement from getting faded in the crowd in between all the post. It becomes crucial to have a great Black Friday Marketing strategy is mandatory with your customized hashtag.
(Source: Instagram)
A customized hashtag for black Friday will make your unique and stand out in the crowd and ask your customers and the followers to use this hashtag. While keeping all your attention centralized on Black Friday and the upcoming events. Hashtags play an important role in drawing you loyal customers and you also get a clarity about your customers.
FREQUENT POST
The holiday season gives you more customers and produces you a lot of engagement in Instagram people before buying anything online believe in the updates of the Instagram. Create a lot of posts, and make the people engage to your page on the Instagram page this is one of the best Black Friday Instagram marketing tactics. Schedule everything beforehand and flood your social media site with Black Friday posts as soon as the holiday arrives.
(Source: Instagram walmart)
Maximize the posts per day and create more events to drag the attention of a lot more people and it will initially increase the followers. At the end of the holiday, you will find that your followers will increase so as your sales.
STRONG CAPTIONS
Have a killer and the stronger caption aways while including the call-to-action which was not so important earlier for the Instagram caption however it is considered to be the most important thing these days. There are different kinds of shoppers out there first one who shops a lot during the Black Friday and the other are those who may not even cross your shop fence or check your website before and will think a lot before making a purchase.
So, it is you who have to make sure that your posts convert these type and normal viewers to the customers and they buy things from you. The captions you mention on the image should be the strongest which will drive the more customers.
(Source: Instagram me3store)
The CTA that is present asks your customers to view all your products and shop the collection, then comment on the post and give them a promo code which the customers can use while checkout etc. All these little efforts will drive you a lot of customers for sure and increase your sales.
EXTRA EFFORT TO REPLY COMMENTS AND DM
In the year 2017, a whopping 13 billion sales happened in the Black Friday day. So, you can even find out that your Instagram account may be flooded with a lot of comments and DM messages which may include a lot of things like people enquiring about a product, about any discount, any query etc. all these may be the possibilities that a customer may require a reply for.
(Source: Instagram walmart)
Make sure you and your team are fully ready with all the expected question and answers for it. Especially, when you are releasing your sale, discount, promo code in the Black Friday holiday time. If you will make the work of the customers easy and smooth then the possibility of the purchases will increase. People always liked to be answered quickly and in a polite manner which makes them feel good and 70% of the time they will make a purchase.
TAKEAWAY
These are some of the major and important Instagram Black Friday marketing ideas, which not only fits in for the Black Friday it can be incorporated for all the holidays and festivals. Similarly, it can be incorporated for some other social media sites like Facebook, Twitter etc, these tactics are considered to be top tried methods to increase the sales and viewers and then convert them to the customers.
If facing any problem in incorporating these tactics feel free to contact us!
WebP is the new image format that is being used these days widely and it incorporates both lossless and lossy image compression in the web. This is a very good alternative to JPEG, PNG images. We can create the very small, clear, high definition richer images which will help you make your web work faster with help of WebP, webmasters and web developers. It is presently being developed by Google, it bought the technology from the On2 Technologies. It is a subordinate of VP8 video format, while it is a similar task to that of WebM multimedia container format. The WebP software is being released under the BSD license.
The lossless images in WebP are 26% smaller in the size with compared to the PNG images. However, the WebP lossy images are 25%-34% smaller with compared with the JPEG images with having the similar SSIM image quality. WebP is supporting both Lossless and translucent images giving a tough competition and a better option than PNG images. However, JPEG is a lossy type but in the WebP, the difference is the size of the image in WebP the size of the size is less than that of JPEG but the image quality is same and great.
How does WebP works?
In VP8 video codec use the method to compress all the mainframes of the images in a video similarly lossy WebP compression use the predictive coding to encode the images. The predictive coding uses the values that are present in the adjacent block pixels to forecast the values present in this block. Later just the difference between both of them is encoded.
Source: Google Developers
While moving towards the lossless WebP compression use the already checked fragments of the image so that it can exactly rebuild the brand new pixels. However, if no ideal match is being found it has the full rights and can use the local palette.
The WebP file contains a container based on the Riff and the file in it consists of VP8 and VP8L data of the image. For providing the specification in the WebP the reference implementation is the standalone library and it is available in the git respiratory or in the tarball.
How to convert images into WebP?
The easiest way to know what is the actual taste of WebP is from then it is best to download the WebP Photoshop Plugin if you are well versed with the PhotoShop and its working. Then it is best to opt for this version. First, you have to install it and you will get an option “Save As” if you select it you will get the WebP or WebP Lossless format in the drop-down. However, there is a major difference in JPEG and PNG images because the JPEG images are lossy images while PNG images are the lossless images. On the contrast, you can use WebP lossy for converting the JPEG images and also you can use the WebP lossless for converting the PNG images. This means WebP is doing the dual work you can convert the normal images to lossy images and lossless images which prior we had to do using JPEG for lossy and PNG for lossless.
While you are saving the images using the WebP lossless format in the Photoshop plugin you will not receive any prompts as it takes cares of everything by itself. If you want to get the old format of the images the WebP lossless images then you will get a prompt for sure which is shown below.
Source: WebP Photoshop
You get more option and settings in the WebP dialog which helps in getting the flexibility to configure the output. You can easily adjust the image quality from 0-100 a bit similar to JPEG. One can even set the strength at which the profile can be filtered to get the lower sizes of the images however you have to compromise somewhat in the visual quality. You can also see the normal settings like filtering the noise and sharpness.
These are some of the things which I personally feel are good enough with addition you get two formats just in one. So, my choice is to opt for WebP in place of JPEG and PNG because both the task can be done in a single format which occupies less size and gives a similar result as they both give. This is one of the major marketing trends going on the digital media you can download this for every medium Linux and for Microsoft & Mac OS from here.
You can download it easily even you search the keyword WebP in the browser and you can get all the information about it. However, it even contains some of the tools which are mentioned below:
cwebp- Encoder tool for WebP
dwebp- Decoder tool for WebP
vwebp- File Viewer in WebP
webmux- Muxing tool in WebP
gif2webp- This is the tool in WebP that converts the Gif images.
Still now WebP only supports some devices, not for every device. At present, it is supporting just the Chrome, Opera and Android all those things that are being developed by Google. It will take some time so that it gets updated in every type of browsers available. So, it is better to have patience and wait for the further updates because as Google has promised this will soon be updated and will support every type of browser available.
Below is the chart where you can verify about the browsers which support WebP and which doesn’t:
Techniques involved
Google always tries to make good user experience and want that the users should get the best out of it. That is when he has come up with this WebP concept well off course it bought from other company On2 Experience, however, Google has made every effort to make it easy and fast for the users. The only way to make this happen is by reducing the size of the images. Images usually comprise 60%- 65% of the bytes on most of the web pages and the page sizes and is said to be the main factor in providing the total time. The page size is very crucial for the mobile phones because here the small images will have both bandwidth and battery life.
WebP is invented by Google so that it supports the Opera, Chrome, and Android which is optimized so that in mobiles and tablets we can get the smaller size and clear images. As the image size in WebP is 30% smaller than the JPEG and PNG images whereas maintaining the same quality of the images. Inclusive to all these things, the WebP images have another feature that is the image parity with other formats also.
It supports the below given formats and features:
Lossy Compression: VP8 main frame encoding upon this the Lossy compression is based or supported on. VP8 is a successor of VP7 and VP6 all these three things are created by only one company that is On2 technologies.
Lossless compression: Later, this version is developed by the WebP team to make it easy and simple for the people.
Animation: It supports all the animated and real colors of the images and embeds them similarly for the user’s images.
Color Profile: It has embedded ICC profile inside it.
Transparency: For all the graphical images the 8-bit alpha channel is being used. The Alpha channel can be simply used alongside the lossy RGB, a unique feature that you can never find it in any other format of the images.
Metadata: It is used mainly by the cameras whereas it may contain the EXIF and XMP metadata files.
Due to the presence of so many all these features which bring out the best of the images and the best compressed images WebP is the best replacement for all the other images formats like the JPEG, PNG or GIF. With the better features like the transparency, it includes all the new image optimization opportunities.
In total, we can say that it is the best image format introduced providing the best results in a tiny package. It is the best format that should be used while compared with all other.
WhatsApp has moved a lot of steps forward from being just an application to chat with others, to present supporting different types of files in various formats and then introducing the WhatsApp Ads and WhatsApp stickers for business. WhatsApp has become a part and parcel of everybody’s life. these days people are using this medium to connect with each other. It has turned out to be world’s most used and loved online media to communicate. As a mostly engaging digital media channel, it has made the area vast and increased the features from just being a channel for communicating and chatting to a channel for the business that is when we all know about the WhatsApp for business. WhatsApp earlier this day made a huge reveal by adding WhatsApp stickers as a new feature.
The chat app is being owned by the Social Media giant Facebook. In the market, there is a tough competition for everything these days and to survive in the market it requires a lot. That’s why WhatsApp kept on adding new things to be in the market and keep all the people engaging in the platform. One of the recent and most trending updates in WhatsApp is the WhatsApp stickers. First in Hike, SnapChat, Instagram, Facebook Messengers and now in WhatsApp. It started rolling out from past one week in both iOS and Android platform.
Let us dive deep into WhatsApp and the WhatsApp stickers the new feature and learn about how it is benefitting the business persons
Why should we use WhatsApp?
In the late 90’s and early 20’s SMS were introduced and it was the big deal back in time and a lot of people used SMS, it became so huge that it was used for the business purposes also. For various advertisement purpose in WhatsApp, sending bank statements and bills for various purposed SMS or normal text messages were used.
While coming to WhatsApp it is also one of the huge sites which people use like anything. It is having a total of 1.2 billion active users. From the total world population of 7.6 billion, 1.2 billion people are using WhatsApp. In these 1.2 Billion people 70% of people which is estimated to be 84 million people are using WhatsApp Daily on a regular basis. It is world Second mostly used application of the world. Everyday 55 billion messages are being sent and received in WhatsApp messenger. Daily 175 Billion people are watching the WhatsApp Status. More than 100 million voice calls take place in WhatsApp on a regular basis. At last, it is considered to be as the top social media site, 55.6% of the world use this online media for connecting with each other.
These all statistics show clearly that how WhatsApp is important and why one person should incorporate the WhatsApp Business for all the business work. If this is incorporated in the business then it will give immense results to your Business and for sure your Business will excel like anything.
What are new features added to WhatsApp?
WhatsApp Sticker
Last week WhatsApp introduced a very new and advanced feature to the World’s popular messaging site WhatsApp that is the WhatsApp Stickers. It is available for both the iOS and Android users. To receive this feature you just have to update the WhatsApp using the Google Play Store or Apple App store.
Steps to use the stickers:
First is to update the Application to get the new feature.
For every conversation you do in WhatsApp you will find the emoji symbol which you have to click it.
After clicking on the emoji symbol you will get an extra option beside the GIF that is the “sticker”.
You can choose any of the stickers from the total gallery of the stickers.
Steps to add more stickers:
You will get a “+” plus icon in the stickers section click on it.
Tap on the download button which is present below all the stickers.
To get a number of stickers or custom stickers to get down and click on “Get more stickers”.
Or you can download directly from WASticker app directly for your choice of stickers.
The important thing to keep in mind is that:
First, you have to update your WhatsApp to enjoy this feature. Some of the WhatsApp versions are not supporting these stickers feature wait for sometime till the new improved version comes up. The mobiles having 2.18.329 version and more can access the stickers while lower than this version will not support the WhatsApp stickers. After you update your OS version you can use it easily.
WhatsApp Ads
WhatsApp has released another feature just some days before WhatsApp stickers, that is the WhatsApp Ads for the business. As a way of connecting to a lot of people and the Advertisement can be added to the WhatsApp status. WhatsApp story was actually the copied version of the Instagram stories and Snapchat. The WhatsApp status is just for a limited period of time that is 24 hours. This function was from past 2 years for the users but recently it gave the access to the business people to use it for the branding or advertising of their business.
(source: news4c)
The vice president of WhatsApp has earlier said that “it is a very innovative and new way to connect the users and the target customers”. It has quickly become a vast place for not only the normal people but also the business person’s and the number of users in this platform have increased enormously. Facebook the owner of WhatsApp got benefitted a lot in a short period of time.
Group Calling and Video
(source: digital trends)
Earlier this year WhatsApp introduced this feature in which you can have a group call or a group video chat with your friend, family, acquaintances. It was in the testing period for one month later the idea of Group calling and video chat was succeeded. It is allowing the users to gather together and perform the formal and informal calls with ease, making it convenient of the users to talk, those are widely spread all over the world.
Link Detector
It is most popular in the WhatsApp beta, this Android version was released in the mid of the year July 2018. It detects all the suspicious links that are being shared in the online platform. The motive is to cut down the spam, spoofing and phishing rates in the social media platform and generating more security to the people using WhatsApp. Android 2.18.221 includes this feature and identifies the suspicious links if anyone sends it and whenever it is located by the app. It usually warns the people whenever they are going to open the malicious website from the link.
Swipe Right to reply
In WhatsApp, you can swipe right to reply you don’t have to use the usual long way in which you earlier used to connect or chat with the people. This feature allows you to respond to a specific message individually or whether in a group by just swiping right.
For the Android mobiles, you have to tap and hold the message to which you want to reply and then have to swipe to right at the chat top. Then you directly enter the conversation, later type and send the text as you normally do.
While, coming for the iOS mobile, you have to tap and hold the message or the conversation you want to have and tap on the reply button, that’s it. Then you are directed to the conversation where you can chat freely.
If you want to cancel the conversation you can click the X on the top right. That’s where you end up.
These are some of the top new features that have been added to WhatsApp to increase the opportunities of the Business in the WhatsApp channel.
How to use the new WhatsApp Stickers for business?
This can be said as one of the most awaited and unexpected updates in WhatsApp. Unexpected because WhatsApp being a platform were only people used to chat with each other who are in their contacts so embedding this update in the WhatsApp is pity unexpected. Most Awaited because till now there were only minor updates in WhatsApp except the WhatsApp ADs and WhatsApp Business. So, it was believed that WhatsApp will include something good and engaging. Facebook has taken a troll and introduced the WhatsApp stickers. Most importantly the youngsters believe in sending the messages in an easier way rather than typing it all, that is where the stickers came for the rescue. Until we are into a serious conversation people like to use the stickers.
These stickers are available in the online platform. You just have to update the application in Google Play store for the Android users and Apple App store for the iOS users. It contains the featured characters which include Cuppy, Salty, Komo, Bibimbap Friends, Unchi & Rollie, Shiba Inu, The Maladroits, Koko, Hatch, Fearless and Fabulous, Banana, and Biscuit. From all these types of WhatsApp stickers, you can download the one which you like most.
you can also create your own stickers and ask people to use them. You can create amazing stickers for different festive occasions like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas. It is a brilliant idea to grab the attention of the users. Just imagine the stickers which you created are being used by people in WhatsApp to communicate with each other.
Similar to this we have also tried to create the WhatsApp stickers for one of our Indian Festival Diwali and created a lot of stickers that are related to this festival. We made different stickers using different languages present in India. The application which we created is named as Diwali WhatsApp stickers. It supports both Android and iOS. It is very simple to design but gains the attention of a lot of people towards your business.
For those who want to use our app and add different stickers to their WhatsApp conversation should follow the below steps:
Download the stickers application.
For Android, you can download and whereas on the other side you can also download it for iOS also.
Tap on the ‘+’ or the Add to WhatsApp option.
Confirm the action and then it will be added to your WhatsApp.
Follow all the mentioned points on the top the steps to use stickers.
Voila! that’s it you can find all the stickers in your WhatsApp.
The most crucial thing that should be noted is that
First, you have to update your WhatsApp to enjoy this feature. Some of the WhatsApp version is not supporting these stickers feature wait for sometime till the new improved version comes up for every mobile version.
The WhatsApp stickers are very cool and new to use so people are very excited to use it. Eventually, this is the time when you can make your mark in the market and drag the attention of a lot of people towards your business. Moreover, people, them-self are very excited to use this new feature in WhatsApp.
Maybe this your time, grab the chance and gain the attention of customers while making your mark simultaneously, so, don’t let it go!
This is the time which will help make your business to a brand.
If you face any difficulty feel free to contact us or your comment below about the problem you are facing we will revert back you. We are always there to help you!
Twitter hashtags are one the crucial and omnipresent thing used in social media platforms nowadays. These had their humble beginnings from Twitter, but have now become quite trending. People, these days even talk using these hashtags. Every tweet, every post in the current scenario, contains hashtags in it. Hashtags render people more active in social media. These hashtags, may, at times, result in providing the required engagements, but not at all the times.
By using Hashtags, you can organise everything in social media. You will also get an opportunity to know who is talking about similar things as the ones you are talking about. A person should know: when to use hashtags, where to use hashtags, and also the hashtags one should use? Most importantly, how will these hashtags help you leverage your brand and company in the social media.
What are Hashtags?
On Social media, mainly Twitter, when you use “#” and continue writing the words without any spaces, then the phrase is a “hashtag”. When we write a hashtag for a tweet, it gets linked to all the other people who use the same hashtag. One more advantage is that these hashtags also increase the visibility in the masses. It can even increase the conversation to last for a longer period of time.
When you add “#” with any phrase, then the resultant hashtag will act as a link. Whenever someone clicks the hashtag, that person is redirected to the place or people who use the same hashtag. You can see and know the range or people who use the hashtag.
Hashtags are tags that anyone can create. In fact, anyone can use these, but one can’t restrict people from using them. Sometimes, the hashtags can trend organically without including any popular brand. Hashtags grab people’s attention and encourage them to read the content. In this way, you can increase the engagements and viewers for your page in Social media.
Keeping all these things aside one more crucial thing that comes up on everyone’s mind is:
Would I be able to enroll my hashtag?
The answer to this is “YES”. Anyone who has created his/her hashtag can enroll it. The only thing they can’t stop people from using it, unless the hashtag is promoting a brand.
It clearly means, you can register a hashtag as yours but you can’t own it as you do in case of websites created by you.
Why should we use Hashtags?
Hashtags usually ease the process and make your brand visible to the audience. When people search for the hashtag, each and every post which contains the hashtag will pop up all the results. Using the hashtags, you can reach the audience who are the target customers for your business. This makes things easy for you, because people themselves will search for your business, using the hashtags and will find you. Hashtags are also used to create an action because people use it and automatically get attracted towards it.
If your hashtag is relevant enough, then people will be automatically get enticed and spend more time on your social media page. After some time, you can redirect them to your official website. In this way, you can increase the number of engagements. Hashtags are also used by various social media platforms except Twitter. This somehow affects the use of hashtags in social media. It also impacts the use of Hashtags as the amount of information given increases and puts everything on the front page, while you search in the social media.
The Hashtags created give only the distinctive results. For people, who are active in social media, it becomes easy to find all the information for the users in the social media platform. If a hashtag is unique and you combine it with the content, then it makes the whole content unique and makes your post stand out amongst the social media users. The users can also find it useful and valuable and will also copy your hashtag.
How to use Hashtags on Twitter?
The series of hashtags started from Twitter only. Hashtagging has a major impact on your Twitter account, when you start considering the follower count. Using the general and non-specific hashtags doesn’t drive the required traffic. If you use some of the hashtags which are trending and most of the people are using it, then such hashtags will attract a lot of people. Below are a few similar kinds of hashtags:
Hashtagging in twitter encourages people to take part in various activities taking place in the social media platform. Always make sure that all the hashtags that you create and the tweets you tweet in the twitter aim at grabbing more audience, or you can say, followers. This is useful, even if people don’t follow you.
If you have a good content with unique and grabbing hashtags, people will automatically start engaging in your posts. From the next time, people will automatically consider you to be effective and your work to be amazing and they will start following you.
How to do Campaign in Twitter using effective Hashtags?
For any digital marketing company or organisations who are selling their products on the digital platform:
All those companies for whom the digital platform is a business, have to make their presence felt on the online platform. Grabbing the attention of the people is the main motto of any company. The audience, most of the time, gather in social networking because many people stay active on the social media platform and people communicate with each other here. Social media has become a part and parcel of everyone’s everyday life these days.
Coming to the Twitter, it is one if such platform where people are always active. There are a lot of biggies, companies, celebrities, social activists who use this platform, almost incessantly. Most of the people all over the world follow these people. Not only the people, but celebrities are also interested in various activities that go on in the social media platform.
To promote your brand amidst all these is a major challenge and grabbing the attention of the people becomes a bit difficult. To overcome this challenge, companies do campaigns on different occasions. Being a digital marketing agency, we also embarked on digital campaigns. Having a sound knowledge of Twitter and its use, we too started campaigning.
CAMPAIGNS
Independence Day
Our first campaign on Twitter was the Independence day campaign, in which we made a video about giving up plastic flags and use flags made of fabric or paper. Indirectly, we were requesting our viewers to stop using plastic and turn to use biodegradable materials. This was to highlight the adverse effects of our addiction to plastic, resulting in pollution and killing of land animals and marine mammals, the resultant plastic pollution and the interminable loss to the environment.
This was our very first campaign in Twitter. A maiden attempt by us, we just used trending and relevant hashtags. We didn’t use or make our own hashtag. Our main motto was to reach the masses by hook or by crook, and create awareness. It truly was a boon in disguise, and proved a boost for using social media as a viable platform for sharing our ideas.
Our second campaign was on Raksha Bandhan, a festival signifying the bond between a brother and a sister. The festival is characterised by the sister tying a Rakhi or the sacred thread on her brother’s wrist. The brother then takes a vow to protect her lifelong. On this day, we planned a campaign and made a contest with hashtag #IamwithYouSister. The campaign ran like this – the brother and sister had to take a selfie, with the rakhi tied on the brother’s wrist. People had to take the picture and use the hashtags #IamwithYouSister and #RakhiAtSoftscripts. Gift vouchers were given away to randomly selected participants.
The outreach of this campaign was moderate. Here also, we neither created our own hashtags, nor used or framed our own hashtags. The response was not very encouraging.
Our learnings:
It is not necessary that every campaign will grab the audience’s attention. Some campaigns might be a huge success and grab a lot of response, and yet a few might not be upto the expected level. This is a fact that must be accepted with grace. We should never give up and stop, but should move on.
Ganesh Chaturthi
Ganesh Chaturthi or Ganapati Puja, as it is more popularly known, is one of India’s famous festivals, celebrating the birth of Lord Ganesha – the elephant-headed God. Every house is adorned with Ganesha idols made of different materials – Tumeric, mud, or the idols made from metal. We collaborated with another company that produced eco-friendly idols of Lord Ganesha, which could easily dissolve, and started our campaign.
We shot a 30 second video that displayed the idea of stopping usage of Idols made up of POP or Plaster of Paris. Instead, it showcased the usage of Green Ganesha or biodegradable idols. For this video, we received 1,146 organic views and the people not only viewed the video but gave positive response and engaged themselves actively. Hence, we need to upload good and relevant content such that viewers can be easily attracted.
Collaborating and doing campaigns also saves a lot of time. This is always a win-win situation, you can increase the number of users by attracting and retaining your own viewers, and also by gain the users of the collaborated company.
MORE ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN
On the same occasion, we also ran another campaign – selfie with eco-friendly Ganesha. That was when we started using our own hashtag, that is #SelfiewithEcoGanesha. People participated enthusiastically and came up with their unique selfies with biodegradable and environment-friendly idols of Lord Ganesha and posted them, using the #SelfiewithEcoGanesha. It was mandatory to have the selfies only with Eco-friendly Ganesha. Selfies with other forms of idols were not considered. The top 5 contestants were awarded gift vouchers.
The campaign was live on all the 10 days of Ganesh Chaturthi and a lot of people participated with their amazing selfies. They also came up with different ideas on celebrating the eco-friendly Ganesh Chaturthi. The response was overwhelming and we had, by this time, gathered a group of loyal followers and people who follow us regularly. They are still with us!
World Tourism Day
We not only concentrated on the local or national events. In fact, we tried to cover almost everything that was going on in the whole world. We mostly concentrated our campaigns on trending topics. For instance, we conducted a campaign on World Tourism Day too. However, here also, we didn’t create any hashtag of ours. Yet the campaign was successful with a huge crowd of people who visited the campaign. The people who had participated in our earlier campaigns, now became our trusted audience. The campaign was all about sharing their travel pictures.
In this campaign, we gathered a decent number of comments and retweets, where people posted their travel pictures in India with the hashtag #WorldTourismDay.
Our motto was not only to promote our brand. We had the vision of promoting our brand along with the concept of improving the Indian Tourism on a worldwide spectrum. Our efforts bore fruit and we landed up getting thousands of lovely pictures with nature at the backdrop.
Indonesia
We did not restrict our campaigns exclusively to promotion of our brand, instead, we also focussed on the current scenario and the present world conditions. For example, we created awareness, empathy and sympathy in the minds and hearts of people when Tsunami struck Indonesia. This was for a social cause and with the noble idea of helping people in distress.
Gandhi Jayanti
Considered to be a national festival in India, Gandhi Jayanti is celebrated to mark the birth of the father of our nation – Mahatma Gandhi – our great leader who freed India from the shackles of British supremacy. We created a campaign to accomplish his vision of keeping India clean and green. We also supported the Honourable Prime Minister’s vision of #SwacchBharat. Here, we created a Hashtag #WeSupportBapusdream. In the campaign, people had to post their images supporting the #SwaachBharat campaign and how they are contributing their bit in keeping the country clean.
The top participants got away with alluring Gift Coupons, sponsored by us.
Most of our campaigns are aimed towards social causes and also make people aware of the present day scenario in our country.
Indian Air Force Day
We created a campaign on the Indian Air Force Day to support our Sky Warriors and make people realise the fact that it is because of them we are safe and sound inside the comfort of our home and have a happy sleep. After this, we asked people to write 2-3 lines about these real heroes whom they know. We created our own hashtag #HumVayuSenakeSaath, which means “we are with the air force” We also promised to give Gift hampers at the end of the campaign. A huge number of people participated in it, and came up with a lot many stories – told and untold of these real heroes.
Dusshera
This was our latest campaign which ended with the culmination of Dussehra – a 10-day long festival or Navratri, where people worship Goddess Durga. The festival signifies the victory of good over evil. Our idea was to support women and the concept of women empowerment. We created a hashtag #HumNaarikeSaath which means “We support women”.
In this campaign, we encouraged people to tag their friends and family, whomever they wanted to gift this festive season. For this, they had to use the hashtag #UtsavKaMausam which was created by us. At the end of the festival, some randomly chosen participants were given Gift Coupons.
KEY THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND
Always giveaway the prizes and gifts which were promised in the campaign. Never ever try to bluff people, because if you do so, people will not only feel cheated but would lose their trust in you and eventually leave. Your campaigns will be considered fake and you will lose your integrity.
Conduct the campaigns according to your budget and limit yourself till the point your budget permits you. It will only be stupidity if you promise something and struggle hard to fulfil it.
Have some guidelines for each and every campaign. Ask the contestants to follow the guidelines and make everything fair for the audience. This will reduce your stress levels, while selecting the deserving persons as winners of the campaigns.
These are some of the things that, if meticulously followed, will yield good results and positive outcomes, in the twitter campaigns.
This article throws light on how hashtags help promote twitter campaigns.
Hope this gives you a good idea about campaigning on social media.
Is Youtube down? Or is it one of those intermittent attacks on Global Breaching that surface and raise their ugly heads, one after the other on social media platforms?
Do you remember? Earlier, in the month of September, Facebook accounts were hacked – almost 50 Million accounts and 90 million people were sent the password reset email. This occurred because of a technical glitch at Facebook’s end. This made the hackers get access to the accounts 50 of million users. Now, isn’t that scary? Yes, it does raise an alarm.
After Facebook, it was Google+, wherein data related to 500,000 users were exposed. This was due to the vulnerability of the application, which allowed the app developers to have an easy access to the personal data of the users. When Alphabet found out about this and cross-checked the data exposure, it couldn’t find any substantial cause behind the accounts being hacked. Alphabet is now ready to close down Google+.
Such mishaps point towards Global Outage. Today morning, YouTube down was down. It can be even said that:
“Our social media sites are now not secure and we should be even more vigilant about it, taking utmost care of our data and personal information with the social media, and ensure proper protection against data leak.
On Wednesday morning around 6:40 a.m EDT, Google-owned Youtube – the world’s popular video sharing and video watching website by majority of net-savvy users, experienced a sudden outage. Not only YouTube, but also all the three YouTube channels-YouTube TV, YouTube Music, YouTube Kids – faced similar issues. This was not specific to a single device, in fact, it occurred on every device- Mobile, Tablet, Desktop – any and every device, in which YouTube could be accessed, was down or rather had a YouTube outage.
Morning at 6:40 a.m EDT, people started facing issues while browsing YouTube. Immediately, people started complaining about the issue with the YouTube application and started tweeting about the issue on Twitter and other social media sites, to which YouTube promptly responded:
Source: Twitter
YouTube was almost down for 2 hours due to Global Outage. People took to social media platform and informed about the issue. For this, after 2 hours YouTube came with a reply on Twitter.
Source: Twitter
The reason for this is still not known and YouTube also has not disclosed the reason that might have caused this YouTube down and sudden Global Outage. The number of reports lodged by the viewers increased at 6:40 EDT and the reports were close to about 2,224. Post this, it gradually decreased to 890 reports.
It was not limited to a particular area or country. The outage was felt all across the world. A lot of people witnessed this Global Outage and went berserk because of these uncalled for glitches in Youtube, feeling sorry for not being able to spend their time on YouTube.
All the people who accessed the YouTube in the morning, saw an error message popping up stating “Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys have been dispatched to check the issue”
Source: fix.com
As soon as the Youtube Outage occurred, people took to other social media sites – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc., in a humorous way and started creating memes, portraying people getting worried about the YouTube content or the Videos, about the YouTubers,, and the chaotic outcome when Youtube shuts down, even temporarily. YouTube is a site that people throng to amuse and entertain themselves. People just go bonkers when it is down,YouTube is still a trending topic on Twitter and people are talking a lot about it.
Hope this issue is resolved permanently by YouTube. Also hope that the people who love YouTube with a madness and spend a lot of time browsing, and also people whose bread and butter is Youtube, don’t face such glitches in future and continue enjoying using and viewing Youtube, as happily as ever.
