YOUR New Social Media Platform Tools?

20 New tools from social media platforms..

By following the launches and updates of social media platforms, merchants can discover new ways to reach customers and prospects.

Related Article: The Future Of YOUR Social Media Platform?

Facebook

AI and merchant deals in Marketplace. Facebook has introduced new features that use artificial intelligence for price range suggestions and auto-categorization. Facebook is testing camera features for using AI to suggest items users could be interested in. Also, Facebook has added a variety of content from businesses, including cars, home rentals, and home services, as well as shopping and deals from ecommerce merchants.

Premieres for interactive video. Facebook has launched Premieres, a new interactive video format that lets publishers and creators release a pre-recorded video as a live moment so that fans can interact and experience new videos together. Users can schedule a Premiere a week in advance. This creates a post about an upcoming video and a place you can point fans to. Facebook has also launched video polls to all pages. Polls are now available on live videos and videos on demand through the Live API and publishing tools.

Related Article: The Best Social Platform For YOUR Business?

Facebook Groups and 250-person chat rooms.Facebook is rolling out the ability for Facebook Groups members to launch group chats that up to 250 members can join. Members can also start audio or video calls with up to 50 members.

Apps for Analytics. For iOS and Android, the Facebook Analytics app enables you and your team to stay on top of your growth, engagement, and monetization efforts on the go. This is a companion app to your Facebook Analytics web product.

New features for Facebook Workplace. At its Flow 2018 conference, Facebook announced several new features for its Workplace platform for businesses, including the ability for people who are in multi-company groups to work together using Workplace Chat. Also, Facebook Workplace has added algorithmic sorting and Safety Check to monitor the security of employees.

Related Article: Social Media Tips For EVERY Platform?

Instagram

Shopping in Instagram Stories and Explore. In early 2018, Instagram began to expand its shopping features. Now, all business approved for shopping on Instagram have access to shopping in Stories. Businesses can add product stickers in stories, so they can easily integrate products into their Stories' content. Instagram is also testing a topic channel for shopping in Explore. The shopping channel will be based on each user's shopping interests and will display shopping posts from a variety of businesses that users may like, giving them the opportunity to discover new businesses.

Related Article: Everything YOU Need To Know About IGTV?

Instagram's Shopping in Stories

Instagram Analytics. Facebook Analytics has now added Instagram account analytics, as well as advanced page analytics, to see how content and channel strategies are driving business results.

Discover whether people who comment on or like Instagram posts have higher retention rates. Compare the lifetime value of people who interact with your Instagram account to those who don't.

Nametag. To make connecting and sharing with friends even easier, Instagram has launched "nametag," an easy way to add friends in person. A nametag is a customizable identification card that allows people to find your Instagram profile when it’s scanned.

Related Article: How YOU Can Beat Instagram's Alghorithm?

Pinterest

New ways to shop. Pinterest has debuted several new commerce solutions, such as its Lens camera for product search. In October, Pinterest launched new shoppable product pins with up-to-date pricing and stock information, with links to the checkout page on the retailer’s site. Also, a new shopping recommendations section can now be found beneath style and home pins to browse similar items across multiple brands.

Promoted Carousel. With this new ad format, businesses and brands can use up to five images within one ad to tell stories on Pinterest. Present a product’s numerous features, drive additional purchases by showing multiple items in a pin, or increase awareness with a multi-image brand story.

Related Article: Brand Awareness With Unexpected Platforms?

New measurement solutions. Pinterest has announced new partnerships with Oracle Data Cloud’s Moat Measurement for viewability and NinthDecimal for foot traffic. Moat Measurement will help marketers see the impact of a visual-first platform, and Ninth Decimal analyzes ad impressions and corresponding foot traffic.

Google

New features in Google My Business app. Google has revamped its My Business app. It now features a new "customers" tab for businesses to see followers, reviews, and messages in one place. A new "for you" tab displays posts from businesses a user follows. Users can also use the message button on Google Maps and Google Search to reach out directly to businesses, which in turn can respond directly via the app.

Related Article: YOUR Crucial Social Media Video Advertising?

New follow features in Maps. Users can now follow places right from the app. Once you’ve followed a place, news from it — events, offers, other updates — will appear in the "for you" tab. If users prefer to find out about new businesses, they’ll start seeing profiles for places before they even open on Google Maps for Android and mobile search.

AMP Project opens model. Google is changing to an open governance model for the Accelerated Mobile Pages project. The open-source change will encourage a wider variety of voices at all levels of participation, including code contributions. It should also increase the pace of development and adoption of AMP for businesses.

Snap

Snap rolls out visual search. Snap has launched visual search, to search for products on Amazon right from the Snapchat camera. Point the camera at a physical product or barcode, and press and hold on the camera screen. When the item or barcode is recognized, an Amazon card will appear on-screen, surfacing a link for that product or similar ones available on Amazon.

Related Article: Why Advertisers Prefer Instagram Over Snapchat?

Snap Camera for Lenses. Snap has launched Snap Camera, a free desktop application that invites users to experience the fun of Lenses while using their computer. Choose from thousands of Lenses, including classics made by Snapchat as well as new designs created daily by the Lens Creator community through Lens Studio.

Related Article: Social Media Platform News And Updates?

Other

Periscope introduces chat moderators. Periscope, the live streaming app, now allows users to assign chat moderators to monitor comments and mute audience members. When one of your moderators mutes someone in your audience, they will not be able to chat for the remainder of your broadcast. At the end of the broadcast, see a list of the muted viewers, and choose to block them from joining future broadcasts.

Weebly updates ecommerce tools. Ecommerce and marketing website platform Weebly has released an updated suite of ecommerce tools with expanded social features. With Facebook Messenger now embedded into Weebly sites, you can rapidly reply from any device to inbound questions about products and approve customer reviews from mobile the moment they are submitted.

Skype adds call recording. Skype has introduced call recording to record meetings with your colleagues or capture special moments with friends and family. As soon as you start recording, everyone in the call is notified that the call is being recorded. If you are on a video call, Skype will record everyone’s video as well as any screens shared during the call. After the call, you can save and share the recorded call for the next 30 days.

Related Article: The Future Of YOUR Social Media Marketing?

Guest Authored By Sig Ueland. Sig is a contributing editor for Practical Ecommerce. He lives in Minneapolis. He has written for In These Times, Third Word Magazine, and Utne Reader. Sig holds an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television. Also he is an alumnus of The Second City Conservatory in Chicago. Follow Sig on Twitter.

Related Article: Social Media Marketing Trends YOU Should Use NOW?

"By following the launches and updates of social media platforms, merchants can discover new ways to reach customers and prospects.." -SigUeland

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR Social Media Troll Communications?

How to handle trolls in social media..

Conventional wisdom says that companies should respond to everyone on social media. When people take the time to compliment a company, they want to be acknowledged; when they have a complaint, they want empathy and a resolution; and when they have a question, they just want the answer.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Troll Repellent?

But some people who tag companies on Twitter or post on a company’s Facebook page aren’t looking for any of those things. Instead, they are just looking for attention. These odious beasts are often referred to as trolls.

Trolls are nasty creatures that cause sleepless nights for social media marketers and customer service agents alike. Trolls are typically in search of an audience through incessantly negative banter about a brand. This can often be confusing for social customer care agents because they are used to people having problems that they try to solve. But trolls don’t really want resolution; they want attention. Often their “complaint” is so amorphous that it isn’t solvable anyway, and sometimes it has nothing to do with the company (in which case it also qualifies as spam).

The best way to deal with a troll is to respectfully answer the first post by offering to help. It’s also a good idea to offer to take the discussion offline so the person can rant privately instead of publicly. But here’s the interesting part: Because trolls generally aren’t looking for resolution, they are often surprised that the brand has engaged them at all. Many times, this will cause them to leave and go pick on another company.

Related Article: The Costliest Social Media Mistakes?

If, however, the person remains persistent after a couple of back-and-forths, it’s okay to ignore and/or block the person from future communications.

According to marketing and customer service consultant Jay Baer, author of Hug Your Haters, companies should follow the “Rule of Reply Only Twice,” which implores customer service agents to “Never, ever, ever, ever, EVER respond to someone more than twice.”

In the case of trolls, this is a good rule to follow, as there is no benefit in continuing the dialogue.

Baer suggests that even with compliments, there is a quickly diminishing return in answering multiple back-and-forth messages. The tricky part comes when there is a real problem being addressed that may require more than two responses, and the customer seems willing to engage further. In that case, continuing the conversation until the customer is satisfied is appropriate.

Related Article: Feed The Social Media Trolls?

Trolls are also the exception to other social media etiquette questions, such as whether it is okay to delete customer posts on a company’s Facebook page and whether it’s okay to just ignore a post and not respond at all.

The answer in these cases is yes for trolls but generally no for any other post. This also goes for spam posts and any posts that are purely based on hate or filled with profanity.

Guest Authored By Dan Gingiss. Dan is a marketing and customer experience executive who has consistently focused on delighting customers. He is a keynote speaker, the author of “Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences On Social Media” and the co-host of the Experience This! Podcast. His career has spanned multiple disciplines including marketing, customer experience, social media, and customer service. He is currently Vice President of Marketing at Persado, an AI-powered marketing language startup. Previously, he held leadership roles at several major brands: McDonald’s, Humana, and Discover. Follow Dan on Twitter.

Related Article: Fake News, Hoaxes and Hate-Monger Social Media?

"Remember that people with legitimate complaints about your business are not trolls, and should always be treated respectfully with the goal of finding a resolution to the customer’s specific issue and identifying and correcting the root cause of the problem within the company. -DanGingess

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Salt Lake City, UT. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR Social Media Era Customer Service?

Customer service in the social media era: Complain publicly or get nothing..

It is remarkable how many stories about companies behaving badly these days begin with a wronged customer trying to solve the situation directly with the company and only after the company refuses to make things right, airing their grievances on social media, wherein the story goes viral and the company immediately apologizes and fixes things.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Customer Service Strategy?

I was reminded of this simple fact recently in my own attempts to have a company address a major series of errors it made regarding my account, to no avail.

More than a year of emails, phone calls and even good old-fashioned letters got me absolutely nowhere. Then I learned from a colleague that she too had had the same problem but had bypassed all my hardship by simply telling the company that it had 48 hours to resolve things or she would be airing all of her grievances on social media.

Within hours the company had not only made everything right for her but had given her major concessions in return for her troubles. She was even given the direct phone number of a senior executive and told to call direct in future with any problems. The company’s only request was to beg her not to talk publicly on social media about the errors it had made. What does this tell us about customer service in the social media era?

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Empathy Technology?

As someone who grew up in the pre-social media era, I learned that in conflicts with companies, as in Vegas, the house usually wins.

Even in cases rising to criminal fraud or clear civil violations, companies can usually escape fairly scot-free or keep the case in court for years until the customer simply gives up. Arguing with the manager or escalating to corporate headquarters could on occasion win a few concessions, but only if the company thought the customer had a mediagenic story that might yield negative press.

In the social media era all of that has been upended. An aggrieved customer can now reach a quarter of the population of the planet with a single post, transforming what would formerly have been a minor nuisance into a major public relations catastrophe that could damage its stock price and even lead to forced executive resignations.

Related Article: A Customer Experience Solution For YOUR Brand?

The bidirectional nature of social media means that in contrast to the broadcast monologues of traditional media, a viral post on social can turn into a global dialog with others across the world chiming in with their own stories and rapidly organizing protests and boycotts against the offending company.

In the past a company could rest confident that even the most viral of negative press would rapidly fizzle out as the news agenda grew bored and moved on to other topics. Social media has no such inorganic pressures, meaning the story can continue to snowball and repeatedly reenter the news cycle until the company takes action.

Related Article: Robots Fix YOUR Social Media Reputation?

This means that a single negative story can, in the space of a few hours, yield millions of similar stories and leap to the headlines of traditional media and in turn to the attention of lawmakers.

Companies have reacted to this by elevating social media monitoring into a central component of their customer relations strategies. Comcast famously was an early company to make social media a first-class customer contact channel, rapidly responding to complaints and taking action to resolve them, such as escalating to local offices.

Speaking with colleagues and neighbors, I was amazed just how many situations each had experienced with companies large and small where complaining to a manager or writing an email yielded nothing, but a brief tweet generated an immediate apology and correction of the problem.

Related Article: Social Media And YOUR Legal Proceeding?

The end result is that companies have trained an entire generation of society that if you want a company to apologize, just threaten to blackmail it on social media and most likely you’ll get your way.

Attempt to resolve things amicably offline and you’re likely to be either ignored or receive far less compensation. Of course, this is no different than the past, in which companies based their responses on how much media attention they thought a disgruntled customer could garner.

However, in the past the news media acted as gatekeeper and largely covered only the most egregious violations of trust. In contrast, the social era’s lack of gatekeeper means that anyone anywhere, no matter how small their grievance, can wreak public relations devastation, forcing companies to forcefully respond to even the most minor of concerns.

Related Article: Your Social Media Legal Issues?

In the end, perhaps if companies offered those who reached out the old-fashioned way the same treatment as those who publicly blackmail them on social media, more people would choose to just resolve things the simple and quiet way.

Instead, by teaching us that public blackmail is the only way to get them to respond, companies are encouraging the very behavior they hope to discourage.

Guest Authored By Kalev Leetaru. Kalev is based in Washington, DC, he founded his first internet startup the year after the Mosaic web browser debuted, while still in eighth grade, he's spent the last 20 years working to re-imagine how we use data to understand the world around us at scales and in ways never before. Follow Kalev on Twitter.

Related Article: Leveraging YOUR Social Media Reviews?

"In the end, perhaps if companies offered those who reached out the old-fashioned way the same treatment as those who publicly blackmail them on social media, more people would choose to just resolve things the simple and quiet way.

Instead, by teaching us that public blackmail is the only way to get them to respond, companies are encouraging the very behavior they hope to discourage.." -KalevLeetaru

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Scottsdale, Arizona where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)