Make It With Michael

By Nate Oulman When any business starts this adventure we call “marketing”, they have to cover the basics before doing anything else. They need to define: Who is my target audience? What is their pain? How do I solve that pain? But once you’ve established who your audience is and how you can help, you then need to determine how to effectively deliver your messaging to that target audience. And then to optimize that messaging so it’s found in search . Fast forward to today, and you have a business website that you’re proud of. It does everything you need it to – and more. Your analytics tell you that you’re receiving a healthy dose of visitors daily and that you’re also successfully converting a good portion of them. But then you dig a little deeper… Your mobile search results aren’t that great, right? You notice that the people who find your site via mobile search seem to be more interested in your brand (since they spend more time on it), but there’s a whole lot less of t...

By Christina Newberry If you aren’t already incorporating social video into your marketing strategy, it may well be the technical side of things that’s holding you back. After all, while 84 percent of professional marketers have recently used video marketing, according to Animoto , only 55 percent of small and medium-sized business owners have done so. While professional marketers have access to larger budgets and high-end video tools, it can be harder for smaller operations to get a social video marketing plan off the ground. Fortunately, there are plenty of free and inexpensive social video apps and tools that businesses of any size can use to create compelling videos for use on all social media channels. From quick text animations to photo-based video slideshows to movie-like video storytelling, here are eight social video tools that can help you create your first marketing video before the end of the day. 8 social media video apps for marketers 1. Animoto The promise: “Turn...

By Kendall Walters In March, social media companies took the idea of spring forward to the next level, with tons of new updates that represent forward leaps in innovation. Twitter rolled out new replies, Facebook introduced disappearing content in both Messenger and the main app, Instagram announced geostickers, Snapchat introduced search functionality for Stories, and more. With so much news, it can be hard to keep up. Never fear, we’ve rounded up all the updates—big and small—from the major social platforms to ensure that you don’t miss a thing. Table of contents Twitter Facebook Instagram Pinterest LinkedIn Hootsuite Snapchat Twitter Safety update On March 1, Twitter announced new updates to reduce abusive content on the platform. The changes include: Using algorithms to identify accounts that are engaging in abusive behavior (whether or not it’s been reported), in order to limit account functionality for a set amount of time Introducing new filters for notificati...