How to Retarget Your Audience

How to Retarget Your Audience 

Are you getting a different type of audience to your Instagram or Facebook pages than you actually want? Has your brand has changed a bit, and you need to readjust your target audience? No matter the reason, there’s a way to retarget your audience by using a tool called Facebook Custom Audiences.

This is something that Facebook rolled out early in 2017 to test out Instagram retargeting. It’s now being used worldwide. If you haven’t tried this tool yet, Virtual Market Advantage will now go over the basics and show you how to get started.

What are Facebook Custom Audiences?

Facebook Custom Audiences include a few different groups, including people:

• you already know.
• who have visited or engaged with your app or website.
• who have engaged with either your Facebook or Instagram pages and/or ads.
• who have interacted with your business or store through offline channels.

Once you have created and established these lists of people, you can then start targeting then with your Facebook and Instagram ads. This lets you spend your advertising money more wisely!

What is Retargeting?

Retargeting is the process of targeting your online ads to reach the people who have already visited your website or engaged with your social media posts. They are already in your database as a potential lead or as a customer, rather than a completely random person.

There are a few simple ways that you can retarget your Instagram audience by creating these Custom Audiences through Facebook:

Retarget the people who watched your Instagram videos. You can create a list of people who have:

• viewed at least 3 seconds of your Instagram videos.
• viewed at least 10 seconds of your Instagram videos.
• watched 25% of your Instagram videos.
• watched 50% of your Instagram videos.
• watched 75% to 90% of your Instagram videos.

To create these custom audiences, just login to your Business Manager or Facebook Ads Manager account. Look for the audiences tab and click on ‘Create New Custom Audience.’ You will then want to click on the 'Engagement’ option at the bottom.

After this step, the video retargeting option is the first thing you’ll see. Once you select this, you need to pick your preferred watched/viewed time to target the particular Instagram videos whose viewers you will want to retarget towards.

Retarget Instagram users who engaged with your lead generation ads. You can also target and retarget users who have:

• opened your Instagram lead generation forms.
• opened and submitted an Instagram lead generation form.
• opened but did not submit your lead form on Instagram.

This process is similar to how you create the Instagram video retargeting list, just remember that if you want to retarget only Instagram leads, you do need to select the lead forms that you have used in Instagram ads.

Retarget users who engaged with your Instagram profile, posts, or ads. These are all the other types of retargeting lists you can create under your business profile section, including:

• everyone who has engaged with your Instagram pages, posts and ads.
• people who visited your Instagram business profile.
• people who engaged with your posts or ads on Instagram.
• people who sent you an Instagram message.
• people who have saved any of your Instagram posts or ads.

What’s the Next Step?

Once you have gone through and created all your Instagram retargeted audiences and lists, you can then access them in your 'Assets’ library under the 'Audiences’ tab.

If you want to also target people similar to those who engaged with your page, posts, and ads, you can create a 'Lookalike Audience’ as well. If you want to use these retargeted audiences in future advertisements, you can find and select them in the 'Audiences’ section whenever you create a new set of ads.

Get Insights about People Who Engage with your Instagram

While the limitations of the Instagram audience insights can get frustrating, the use of the Facebook Audience Insights tool can help with that. This tool is often overlooked but can give you a wealth of information, from demographic to behavioral data of your custom audience. If you want more information on Facebook Insights, check out VMA’s blog here!

Once you’ve created this target audience, you can use it to gain information on who exactly the people are who are engaging with your Instagram and Facebook profiles. You can see where they are located, their online behavior, and even their interests.

There’s so much potential in the Facebook Custom Audience tool for both retargeting traffic and analytics. If you haven’t yet jumped in to see what it’s all about, you should take the time to do so! This tool can help your business grow by helping you better understand your audience and what exactly they are looking for from your product.

How to Teach Kids to Code

How to Teach Kids to Code 

In a world that’s headed towards being run more by computers and technology than people, it’s time to make sure that our children are learning the necessary skills to succeed in that future. This includes teaching them to code from an earlier age. Coding creates computer software, allows electronics to function, and is a trade that all kids should learn a bit about, even if they don’t end up becoming software engineers. Software programmers are in high demand, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Learning to code is similar to learning a spoken language. As such, kids can really benefit from starting to learn to code as early as possible. Below, Virtual Market Advantage will show you some great resources you can use to help your child engage in learning code. These programs make learning into a game while helping kids understand how to make those computers work!

Teaching Older Kids to Code

There are a lot of programs out there that aim to help make computer coding fun for kids to learn. Some are good for kids of all ages, but many are better for older kids. Let’s look over a few programs that may help your older child gain an interest and understanding in code:

Scratch

Scratch is a free programming language developed by MIT. It has great learning resources and tools such as getting-started tutorials, a large user community that’s willing to help, and even instructions for parents.

This program uses a building block visual interface to create an easier user experience for kids. You can stack together programming components like actions, operators, and events. Each block has a shape that will only allow it to be combined with a compatible object. This program can be used to make real animations and games and can even be used with or without Internet access. Suggested age for Scratch is 8 to 16 years old.

Alice

Alice is a free 3-D programming tool that’s designed to teach the concepts of object-oriented programming languages like C++. It uses the familiarity of building blocks to allow children to create games and animations by programming camera motions, 3-D models, and scenes. The website may not look as inviting as Scratch, and the program is still being developed and researched, but it’s still a great free resource for older kids. The suggested age for this program is 10+ years.

Swift Playgrounds

Swift Playgrounds is a programming language used to build iOS apps. It is an iPad game that’s designed to teach kids how to program in Swift. It’s a free download and doesn’t require prior coding knowledge.

This app contains many tutorials on different commands that are designed to move a character named Byte along a 3-D world. While no programming knowledge is required, your child will need to know how to read the tutorials and have some drive to problem-solve. The drag-and-drop code helps eliminate typos, but Swift Playgrounds does not use the interlocking block interface that some of the other resources use. Suggested age for this program is 10+ years.

Teaching Younger Kids to Code

There are some great apps out there to help younger kids get in on learning the basics of coding, all while making it fun. Many of the better apps are centered on graphics and simple animations rather than the actual code. While most of these games, like educational apps, are geared at kids ages 8+, if your child can read and has a basic understanding of cause and effect, some of these apps can be introduced as early as pre-k. VMA will take a closer look at a couple of the better apps below:

Daisy the Dinosaur

Daisy the Dinosaur is an app that prompts kids to manipulate a character, Daisy, through challenges that involve loops, events, and other programming basics. It’s a very simple and basic program, which is a big plus for younger kids.

There’s also a free-play version inside the app, so the kids are able make Daisy jump or walk backwards at will. Suggested ages for this app are 8+ years, but can easily be used by younger kids who have a longer attention span.

Move the Turtle

Move the Turtle is an app that’s similar to Daisy the Dinosaur. Move the Turtle teaches the basics of programming concepts by manipulating one graphical object (the Turtle) through a certain set of challenges.

Both of these apps are based on single-task bases, but they both teach a great deal of logical programming concepts. Again, this app is suggested for ages 8+ years, but could easily be used by younger kids who have a longer attention span.

Hands-On Coding

First of all, you should always encourage hands-on play. There are more and more toys hitting the market that teach the building blocks of coding. A couple of good examples of these types of toys are the robot called Dot and building blocks called Little Bits.

You can also create more real-life coding experiences for you kids. Many cities host Maker Faires where all eyes are on robotics and computer engineering. It’s basically a science fair with hands-on exhibits and activities.

Make sure you check out the online resources, games, and apps listed above. These plus many others are great tools for both you and your child to learn the basics of computer programming and coding. This could easily become something you learn together! There are so many websites that offer help with coding other than what we talked about above, such as Code.org and Made with Code. Take the time to find out what’s best for your child to start learning code!

If your kids become more interested in coding than you are able to help with, you can always seek out a coding mentor. There are many STEM mentors out there on the internet. Women@NASA and Engineer Girl help all kids, but with a focus on girls, which is a great way to get girls more interested in STEM careers early. They help you and your kid create a personal connection with engineers, giving kids the ability to ask questions and make connections that can be beneficial for years.

With technology at the forefront of many appealing jobs that are available these days, it’s important to introduce the world of computer programming and coding to your child early and help foster the interest in it if they show some. There are many resources out there to help you start the journey with your child. So dive in and start coding!

Is Your Social Media Strategy Working?

Is Your Social Media Strategy Working? 

If you have your own business, social media is no longer just a fun thing to be a part of and use to keep up with your friends. Business owners should take social media strategy very seriously. Many brands have found a great deal of success using social media by building communities and finding leads.

However, it’s difficult for up-and-coming businesses to gain success from the use of social media, because it’s hard for a business to accurately measure the results. This leads them not investing in social media, because they feel like they’re taking a gamble on their return on investment. (For more information on how to track RoI, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s blog here.)

Because of this, it’s important to accurately track your social media strategies and results. That way, you can see whether or not your social media strategy is working, and have something to show to those picky investors!

Ways Social Media Can Work for You

Before you get into all the ways your social media strategy can work, you must first understand that not every strategy works for every business. Just because one strategy works for one business, it does not mean that it will work for you. This is something that you must test out for your business, look at the results, and work it out from there.

Success comes in all shapes and sizes when it comes to social media strategies, but usually comes down to one of the keys ideas listed below:

Traffic. Having a site that’s capable of generating revenue means that any traffic you get is valuable. This idea makes good sense, and in general, you can tie your social media success to just how much traffic it generates for your website.

Revenue. Not all traffic you generate will make you money. If social media traffic comes to your site but does not take action once there, this will not return money to your brand. If this seems to be happening to you, consider measuring conversions that start with your social media site, try to see where they fall off, and use that information to gauge your next step.

Visibility. While revenue is the ultimate bottom line for most businesses, it’s not the only indicator of success. Using social media helps for building a brand and increasing its visibility. This can lead to more loyal customer relationships that will ultimately increase your revenue, doing more than just creating short-term conversions.

Followers. The larger your list of followers, the larger and more active of a base you have for distributing your content and business promotions. This is an important step for startups that need help gaining that initial audience and customer base.

Common Traps with Social Media Strategy

While some strategies work on social media, some are just a trap that waste your time when used incorrectly. This can happen if you start to spend too much time focusing on one specific social media strategy. Remember to always step back and take a look at every aspect of your social media marketing to make sure you do not miss something that could ultimately be a big help to your business.

Followers. Having a long list of followers is great and indicates that you have a wider range of eyes on your product. Having more followers increases the potential reach of all of your content. A large follower count can also look great to potential investors into your business, who may use your follower count to seek popularity or influence. What the count does not tell you is how active those followers actually are and whether or not they are genuinely interested in your brand.

Traffic. While traffic is a valuable way to measure success, it does not mean anything by itself. You need something to measure it against to see just how valuable those visitors are. Not everyone who comes across your site will buy something, and not every visitor will return to buy something later.

Impressions. Social media platforms will sometimes give you insight as to how many impressions each of your posts have received. This is helpful, yes, but it doesn’t give you the entire picture, since it can’t tell you what those people are doing after they see your content.

Better Metrics to Use to Measure Social Media Strategy

Now that you’ve seen some ways to help your social media presence and you’ve seen some ways to fall into traps, what you need to look at are ways to better gauge the effectiveness of your campaign.

Conversions. You can measure conversions by setting up goals on Google Analytics to help you determine how many social media users are taking meaningful action on your website. Meaningful is defined by you and your business’s needs, and you can even assign a value to it on the site. This is important, because it allows you to actually see what percentage of your social media traffic is actually spending time on your website and taking action while there, along with what kind of value that action will create.

Engagements. Don’t always just look at how many followers you have, take a look at how many engagements you are getting from those followers. This includes things like shares, likes, and comments. This shows that people are not just glancing over your post, they are actively interested in what you are sharing and posting about.

On-Site Behavior. Go in and take a look at your social specific traffic inside Google Analytics. This will tell you how traffic is flowing on your page. Which pages are they visiting? How interested are they in the content on that page? If you notice those visitors are leaving quickly after visiting a single page, it may tell you that you are targeting the wrong audience.

Using any social media strategy can be tricky and stressful. If you just take the time for trial and error and find what works best for you and your business, you will eventually find your target audience and the best social media strategy!

What is Reddit, and How Can it be Used for SEO and Marketing?

What is Reddit, and How Can it be Used for SEO and Marketing? 

If you browse the Internet enough, you’re sure to come across the website Reddit. But what is Reddit, exactly? What can you learn from it? Is it useful for SEO? How can it help drive traffic to your website? How can it be used for online marketing? Virtual Market Advantage will attempt to answer all of these questions below!

What is Reddit?

Like many other social media sites, Reddit’s content is provided by its users. One person creates a post, which can be text only or include photos, videos, and links, and other people upvote or downvote the content, depending on how much they like it. The highest rated content is pushed up to the front pages, while the downvoted content will be seen by very few people. This content only lasts on the front page for a short amount of time, however, allowing the site to rotate through new content constantly. Other users can further comment on a post, and those comments are also upvoted and downvoted towards the top or bottom of the list contained within the post.

Reddit is a website that is well known to Internet marketers. The site calls itself “The Front Page of the Internet.” It’s a mix of news, interesting links, social commentary, and just downright nerdiness. Sounds like a great place to promote a website, right? The site drives headlines, traffic, and new ideas further and much more quickly than any other social network out there right now. This site can have massive promotion, reach, and influence if used right by Internet marketers.

Using Reddit for Research

Marketers can use Reddit to find a large selection of resources to develop new content marketing strategies. This sets it apart from other social networks, since it allows marketers to more easily find a constant stream of fresh and new content and conversations surrounding it. Using Reddit, you will find resources to launch your marketing with new ideas.

Marketers on this site can also use subreddits in their updates and research. This is an easy way to get more content marketing ideas from additional audiences and also get traffic for the official website. A subreddit is a way to further organize posts on the main site. For example, the subreddit r/aww is a place to peruse pics and videos of cats, dogs, and other adorable animals. As with the main site, the recent posts that are most upvoted rise to the top of the list of the subreddit.

Utilizing Subreddits

Because of how the voting system works, Reddit pushes hot new content to the forefront, making research for marketers even easier. The main challenge for you, the marketer, is finding the subreddits that are relevant to your website and audience. The best way for you to seek out information is to do a search related to what you are marketing for and then follow all the related subreddit links.

This tool also allows you to find the most popular subreddits, then follow the sidebar link to related, more specific subreddits. This will get the information flowing directly to you! You can even try to create a subreddit yourself for a niche topic, but unless it draws in and becomes visible to many other people, you won’t get much of a response.

If you take the time to combine these methods, you will find good, relevant subreddits to help you research content and beef up your marketing campaign!

Choosing Keywords

One of the hardest but most necessary parts of SEO is choosing the right keywords. It’s crucial to make sure that the language you use on your website matches the language your audience actually uses while searching for your products in the search engines such as Google. This concept is at the core of search engine optimization.

While the specialized research tools that are out there are great, they can sometimes blindly lead you into keywords that sound good but lack reach, because your audience does not actually search for terms like those.

To use Reddit for keyword searches, you must first figure out the best subreddits to use. These subreddits will allow you to watch your audience interact and talk about related products and problems in normal way, through both the posts themselves and the underlying comments. This will take some research on your end, but taking the time to go through and read subreddit threads can give you a goldmine of relevant keywords that simply don’t pop up anywhere else.

Get Involved

If you join Reddit to simply use it for self-promotion, the community will notice and react negatively. Join some subreddits that you want to be involved in as well as subreddits that can help you promote and grow your business.

Be active in discussions as a member, not just a marketer. Being an active member of Reddit allows you to study your market for free. There are always tons of conversations going on, and there are always questions that need answered. If you know an answer or have blog post that can answer the question, join the conversation. The more active and trusted you are in the Reddit community, the more likely you are to gain success in your SEO and marketing down the road with this platform.

Reddit Overview

Reddit is a wonderful website that is full of untapped resources. Most marketers who use Reddit do so with a focus on promotional potential and without putting in time or effort to do it well. Do not ignore the full research potential of using Reddit for your SEO and content marketing.

Remember that Reddit will act more favorably towards you if you participate with honesty and enthusiasm. Become an active member as you do your research and before you start in on your promotion. Blend in with other members by posting interesting and relevant content. All the while, use the ongoing conversations to help you develop new ideas, keywords, and other content for your SEO campaign. Properly using Reddit will help you as an Internet marketer if you go about it correctly!

If you want more information on SEO, coding, website development, and recent Internet news, check out Virtual Market Advantage’s other blogs, such as this one that goes over the problem of fake news and how it’s not a new issue.

The Problem of Fake News

The Problem of Fake News 

Fake News. We’ve heard that phrase a lot over the last year, but it’s not a new concept. In fact, the problem of fake news is something that we’ve been struggling with for decades, and misinformation and propaganda seem to have been a problem as long as human society has existed. In the more recent past, fake news was known as ‘yellow journalism,’ but with the ability to easily spread information across the world with the Internet, it seems to be a growing problem with no end in sight.

So just who is this fake news affecting and why? Virtual Market Advantage will take a closer look at the issue and try to determine if it’s a problem that can be solved or one that can merely just be managed.

The History of Fake News

Known in the past as Yellow Journalism, fake news was and still is a style of newspaper reporting that pushes sensationalism over the facts. An example of this is the tabloids sitting at the grocery store checkout stands.

This sensational style of ‘news’ writing went so far as to start wars in the late 19th century. The Spanish-American War of 1898 is sometimes called “the Journal’s war,” since yellow journalism played a large part in how it began. Many historians consider this war to be the first one so heavily affected by the media.

In modern times, fake news has the potential to sway how people think and vote. Over time, sensational writing has carried on, never disappearing completely. It was bad enough when it was published in competing circulations, but the rise of the Internet is making it easier to spread a huge amount of sensationalized content instantly anywhere in the world.

The Problem with Fake News

As amazing as the Internet is, it has its share of problems, especially when it comes to false information. Anyone at any time can put any headline out there, and someone is bound to jump on board and believe it, no matter how outrageous the claims. A key example of how fake news can affect a large group of people or even businesses is the story of a headline and short story that Dow Jones Newswire published as a technology test.

The article stated that Google planned to buy out Apple for $9 billion. That’s a crazy statement, since Apple is worth an estimated $800 billion. However, the short story went on to say that Google CEO Larry Page had secret talks with now-deceased Steve Jobs back in 2010 to settle the deal. Dow Jones quickly deleted the story after a few minutes, explaining it away as part of a technology test, but at Wall Street, the effect of the headline had already started. The stock traders barely had time to digest the crazy news before Apple stock prices jumped to $158 from $155.

Who is Affected by Fake News?

So who was really tricked here? The stock traders, the general readers, or Internet bots? A growing number of stock trades are controlled by computer algorithms (bots), which scan twitter feeds, news headlines, and other forms of social media to get a lead on information that can move the markets. With most stock trading being done by these bots, it’s clear that the jump in stock in this case was due to these bots scanning that headlines.

On a smaller scale, fake news affects everyone who browses the Internet. I’m sure we can all can think of a time when we saw a sensational headline and thought, “Wow, that’s crazy!” before later realizing that the correct response was probably, “Is this true?” Most of the time, these stories aren’t particularly harmful, and just serve to provide entertainment. However, when they start to affect how people see the world around them based on incorrect assumptions, problems begin to form.

With the times changing, whether stories are true or fake news, they are being released faster than they can be processed. So what can actually be done to combat the release of fake news?

Can the Fake News Problem be Solved?

With the likes of Facebook and Google fighting to combat fake news with little success, it seems that the flow of fake news and false content is something that cannot be completely stopped. If these huge content pushers can’t get a handle on the problem, who can? A survey done by Pew of over 1,100 tech expertsfound that 51% of these experts believe that the fake new problem will only continue to get worse over the next 10 years.

For the majority of experts, the situation does not look good. There’s a strong human desire to see pleasing or entertaining content, whether it’s true or not, and no tech company will ever be able to compete with that. This desire will just feed the fake news flow, and it’s likely that no technological advances will beat our human desire to control it.

However, there is faith in our tech ability from the other 49% of experts who see fake news getting back under some sort of control. They think that with tech fixes and our ability to recognize a threat to truth, we can all collectively find a solution.

For now though, the tech giants are still struggling to produce a system fix to slow the tide of fake news. Facebook is introducing possible fixes to its algorithms to supply fact checking in the background, and Google is trying to combat its fact checking problem with honest answers and articles. But until these systems are put into place, perfected, and begin to work, fake news headlines will still affect us daily.

The Internet and Fake News

With the invention of the Internet, the initial idea was to have a library type of database so that everyone everywhere could have access to information. This also included misinformation. With no one there to fact check what was being put on the Internet, the onslaught of fake news instantly grew. The tech giants had no way of knowing just how bad it could get with the fake headlines or that other countries could possibly sway a large population of our own by posting all sorts of false facts.

Now that they do know, they are scrambling to find a fix. So far, the new algorithms to fact check ads and news stories are not being built fast enough and are losing ground to the fake news headlines that pop up daily. Will these fact-checking tools be good enough to squash the fake news in the end? Only time will tell.

Social Media’s Role in Fake News

Social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter were not invented to be journalism sites. They were made to connect people with others online from around the world. So it doesn’t seem fair to make them the leading force to regulate fake news, when they were not designed to be a part of the journalism world.

However, you are given the option on these sites to share news stories no matter where they come from, and it does fall on them to make sure what their users are sharing is accurate news. This is a vicious cycle that can seemingly not be stopped by any one company or person. It’s going to take the cooperation of individuals and companies around the world to slow down the tide that is fake news.

If you want more information on Google algorithms, check out VMA’s blog that goes over some factors that don’t affect Google rankings.