Social Media Training for Marketers

It is a rare privilege to observe the rise of a new language. Instagram has always supported emoji, but they did not see wide adoption until the introduction of the emoji keyboard on iOS (October 2011) and on most Android platforms (July 2013). The graph below shows the percentage of text (comments and captions) containing emoji characters graphed over time

In the month following the introduction of the iOS emoji keyboard, 10% of text on Instagram contained emoji.

Usage continued to grow and in March of this year, nearly half of text contained emoji

Problem number one: Building a relevant and engaged audience on Snapchat is difficult, compared to other social networks.

Issue number two: Snapchat has its own vibe. It may be difficult for many companies to achieve Snapchat credibility without some help from the cool kids.

the third issue is, the challenge of creating continuous, credible, snap-worthy content that disappears can be significant.

First, you may already be using data from customer relationship management (CRM) tools and market research to inform campaigns. But a wider array of data signals is available, from analytics on your brand's website (that could tell you your most popular products, for instance), to audience data (that could give a glimpse of age, gender, or interests), to contextual insights about which device, location, or media type delivered the most success for a campaign. The trick is to know all the sources of data available, and figure out which can fuel smarter creative.

Too often, the creative agency and production shop are brought into the campaign process after the media strategy has been decided. By informing the creative agency of all the data from the outset of the project, you can work with the agency to build more relevant creative strategies for your target audience.

ne day I spent a full 10 minutes obsessing over the perfect way to say “I’m a writer. I don’t do math” in a message to my accountant: [Girl symbol] (meaning me) + [Pen and paper] (writer) + [calculator] (math) = “?!?!?” Right, it doesn’t sound so complicated. But by finding said emoji, putting them in sequence and spacing them out, I could have typed the statement 17 times.

It wasn’t until 2008 that a uniform emoji alphabet was created (the idea was to minimize inconsistency across platforms), and Apple adopted it in 2011, adding it to its iOS5 operating system.

Snapchat smartly lets you both browse through stickers, or instantly shows you ones related to words you’ve typed in the text compose window. For example, typing “Love you” or “Hungry” brings up all the stickers matching those sentiments, and even highlights the text after you choose a sticker so you can instantly delete or type over the words.

When I work with start-ups, I almost always consider some influencer component. The reason is simple. When you don’t have a relevant audience, you can borrow one.

Working with influencers can create a powerful feedback loop as you develop new products and features

Do these influencers have powerful social media platforms? You bet they do. Will a link from them to your website enhance your SEO, and ultimately your site authority? You bet it does.

BuzzSumo can help with assessing “most shared” content and related trends. SocialRank can help you figure out patterns among your followers on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.

4. QuintlyQuintly is a social media benchmarking and analytics solution that tracks and compares the performance of your social media marketing activities. Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, or all of them, their tool visualizes and checks your social marketing success, benchmarking your numbers against your competitors or best practices.

Bitmojis could add a way to express how users feel when they aren't taking a selfie. Snapchat allows people to place standard emojis on photos and videos, but bitmojis purport to do a better job of showing emotion because there's a face -- albeit a cartoonish one -- attached. Snapchat could even generate revenue here, by charging users for special-edition bitmojis just as Bitstrips has done.

The bitmoji also could come into play in Snapchat's text chat feature, which is tucked away behind the image-sharing elements. Snapchat is said to be working on a major overhaul of texting that would bring audio chat and more. It's easy to see bitmojis being a part of that too, giving people a way to communicate visually without having to take photos themselves.