Real news about fake followers
Director David Fernando sounds off about fake followers on Twitter (in other words, cheats). He writes:
News this week claims that up to 50% of Donald Trump’s Twitter followers are probably fake. That’s genuine ‘fake news’ I guess. But how do we know?
When Trump announced his candidacy for President, his Twitter account had just over 8 million followers. Today that number has swelled to 31 million. Perhaps not surprising for POTUS but according to a wide variety of sources including The Metro, Newsweek and others – 14,776,939 of these are not real people, they are most likely to be automated “bots” – paid for by the account owner.
Why? Simple. Vanity and power. A high number of fake followers can artificially boost the perceived popularity of social media accounts thus positioning the owners as influencers. You don’t have to look far to find other examples of this dubious practice, in even your local neighbourhood (and, yes, we all know who you are in Wimbledon).
Fake followers can be bought online for around $90 per 10,000. True, not all fake followers are bought, and every account will probably have a small number. But an account that has a significant number of them has probably acquired them illegitimately in an attempt to dupe people.
Accounts that have (seemingly) popular social media accounts can help win business and influence people. They can also inflate the social media assets of their company and therefore apparent value (although any decent due diligence would quickly uncover the truth).
And how do you find out the truth? Well, there are many ways. You can even try it yourself for any Twitter username here: Twitter Audit or here: Fakers.
It’s not a fake fact that when it comes to social media, sadly many businesses are still convinced that a large number of followers is more important than good levels of engagement. But, as a sensible business knows, the real value is not the number of followers you have but the levels of engagement you achieve via your social media activities.
“Why does any of this matter?”, I hear you ask. Well, in the grand scheme of things when famine is about to claim millions of lives in Yemen, the honest answer is, “It doesn’t”.
However, in a world where the social media giants are under increasing pressure to root out deception in their channels, it still resonates and should be addressed.
Digital businesses boom in London
London is open.
Facebook, Google and Apple have announced major expansions in London, proving the capital is open to the world’s biggest brands and is the leading city for trade and investment.
Facebook announced they will be doubling their presence in the UK by opening new headquarters in London’s Fitzrovia. The new hub will open in 2017, creating 500 additional jobs including engineers, marketers, project managers and sales staff.
Google, who already has a London HQ, is moving 2,500 staff into brand new digs in King’s Cross. The new 371,000 sq ft building consists of 11 floors and even includes a 90m running track for employees to let off some steam. Rumour has it the tech giant has snapped up a number of nearby properties, suggesting further developments in the future.
Rumour has it Google has snapped up nearby properties for future developments.
Earlier in the year Apple revealed that they will be making Battersea Power Station their new headquarters, spending an eye-watering £9 billion on the project. Apple will be moving 1,400 staff from multiple sites around the capital into their new campus, expected to be open in 2021. Apple will occupy six floors (500,000 sq ft) of the Grade II listed former electricity generator.
London’s position as a global technology hub isn’t showing any signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Facebook launches Workplace
Workplace by Facebook is a new way to communicate with your colleagues.
When was the last time you communicated with your friends by email? Ages ago, we bet. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage and FaceTime provide us with a simple way to talk and share images and videos with our friends and family. Workplace by Facebook combines all of these features but is designed for communicating with our colleagues. Instead of using Facebook before and after work, Facebook wants us to use the platform during working hours too.
Here’s how it works: Workplace by Facebook has the same look, feel and features as Facebook. Colleagues can create groups (e.g. “Advertising” or “A/W 2016 Ideas”), invite other colleagues and use the platform to brainstorm, share photos, arrange and hold meetings online, and much more. Think of it as a Facebook page just for your office.
Importantly, and quite rightly so, your personal Facebook and Workplace Facebook pages are completely separate. No more worrying that your latest drunken escapade will be on show to your bosses.
Workplace could replace all emails within your company.
Admittedly, similar services have been around for years. The difference is everyone is familiar with Facebook, making Workplace much easier to navigate and for newbies to hop on the bandwagon seamlessly. It involves very little training, meaning fewer costs for businesses.
We now have an excuse to spend all day on Facebook.
What about security? You’re probably hesitant to discuss business critical, highly sensitive information on a social network, right? The good news is that Facebook is serious about security. Companies control all of their data, meaning you can modify, delete or export your data at any time. You can read more about Workplace by Facebook’s security here.
We expect companies with a large workforce will benefit the most from Workplace. It seems like a great place to collectively brainstorm and communicate, which can be tricky and confusing when you have to factor in 50 members of a team via email.
If you’re still a bit confused about how Workplace by Facebook works, watch this video.
PDF email newsletters don't work – here’s why
Create a PDF, attach it to an email, and send it to your entire database. Easy, right? Right. Effective, right? Wrong.
Email marketing is a such a powerful tool, yet so many businesses aren't using it to their advantage.
By sending a PDF attachment to your contacts, you're bypassing the huge potential effective email marketing has to offer. In fact, if you're not careful, you may damage client relationships - not to mention your emails will probably end up in people's junk or spam inboxes.
Here's 5 reasons why PDF email newsletters aren't effective:
1. Spam issues
Using an email server such as Outlook? You could be in for a shock. Every time a reader marks one of your PDF email newsletters as spam, you lose credibility with ISPs (Internet Service Providers). If this happens too frequently, an ISP may well block emails from your domain name, which means your customers won't receive anything from you. What's worse is you won't know a thing until error messages take over your inbox.
2. Corrupted files
Annoyingly, some email servers modify your email as it passes through their system. Whilst not your fault, this can result in a corrupted PDF file, meaning you've just sent your database a PDF that no one can read.
3. Blocked attachments
Your PDF email may make it past an email server, but you're not out of the woods yet. Spam filters in all major email hosting such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and Outlook may well block your attachment (the PDF) entirely. Attachment-based email viruses are growing rapidly, so to the likes of Gmail, any attachment is a potential security threat.
4. Missing forwards
Your customers may love the content within your PDF, but what happens when they want to share your email? This is a great and invaluable way to spread the word, but PDF attachments have a tendency to go missing once an email is forwarded.
5. Large databases VS PDFs
You've probably spent time and possibly money creating a database of your customers, clients and potential leads. The thing is, sending out a PDF attachment to hundreds, or even thousands, of emails in one go is a no-no. It's a sure-fire way of telling email servers that you're sending spam, plus, it's likely that the program you use to store your database doesn't get on with email attachments.
OK, maybe PDF email newsletters are a bad idea. So now what do I do?
Simple! HTML email newsletters.
These may sound scary, but there are programs that do all the coding behind the scenes, so you don't have to. By sending email newsletters through these programs, which are secure and email server-friendly, you free yourself from spam issues and are able to track the activity of your email campaign.
It's also a lot easier to manage your database in these programs, most of which automatically remove dud emails.
We use multiple programs and software to create and send email newsletters, but our favourites are MailChimp and Infusionsoft. We are able to design branded email templates to match our clients' business, arrange content and images in a stylish, functional way, and can easily manage multiple databases at a time.
We’re here to help if you need it.
7 Social media marketing fails guaranteed to make you laugh (or cry)
Social media has many benefits for businesses big and small, but sometimes companies get it so wrong. Here are our top 7 social media marketing fails.
1. #SusanAlbumParty
A classic hashtag gone horribly wrong.
Susan Boyle, Britain’s Got Talent 2009 contestant (was it really that long ago?) innocently released an album and was holding an online launch party.
Unfortunately her social media marketing team seemingly overlooked the hashtag, which, when Twitter users typed without the capital letters, spelled Su’s Anal Bum Party. Got anything to tell us, Su?
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2. Gourmet Burger Kitchen
Here’s a lesson in how to alienate a large group of people (in this case, 4 million vegetarians and vegans) – stick loads of posters up around London and all over social media about how GREAT meat is and how vegetarians and vegans are missing out.
Way to p*ss off 11% of the UK population, GBK!
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3. Robert Dyas Christmas Advert
Good social media marketing campaigns usually leave customers with a feeling, wanting to take action, or start a conversation. But this? Nope. We STILL don’t know how to react.
Robert Dyas released this advert on Facebook as a present for us all at Christmas 2015. Apparently it’s a parody of American retailer Red House Furniture's commercial.
There's no such thing as bad publicity, right...?
https://youtu.be/_YS2dSa-Ud0
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4. Boaty McBoatface
Us Brits are great, aren’t we? When faced with the task of naming a brand new, state-of-the-art, multi-million pound investment polar research ship via online poll, which do we choose? Boaty McBoatface.
The name gained tens of thousands of votes, pushing it to the number one spot in the poll, and creating a massive wave of excitement on Twitter.
I guess the lesson of this marketing fail is… Don’t trust the Internet to name a boat?
NB: T&Cs stated that the Chief Exec got final say, who clearly didn’t think Boaty McBoatface was a good enough name (what?!). So they picked “RSS David Attenborough” – a worthy alternative, we say. But don't worry, Boaty McBoatface lives on via Twitter.
https://twitter.com/DoubleEmMartin/status/711796991903174656
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5. #AskSeaWorld
Oh dear. Who’s coming up with these awful ideas?
If you're not in the picture, SeaWorld has had a MAJOR backlash ever since the documentary, Blackfish, exposed the lives of the captured killer whales in their care.
In attempt to rehabilitate their image, they came up with the hashtag #AskSeaWorld to encourage Twitter users to ask questions about their park. Cringe.
https://twitter.com/BringtheFlag/status/581198861533908992
https://twitter.com/Vagabionda1/status/731167868738539520
https://twitter.com/KellisKupcakes/status/581137858666229760
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6. Microsoft's AI Twitter Bot
Science is GREAT, but when Microsoft combined science with Twitter, things went a bit wrong. And by a bit, we mean a lot. Car crash, if you will.
Microsoft launched an AI Twitter account, which is basically a robot account that learns what to say via its users through conversation.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, Tay (the AI) turned into a right knob, spewing racist tweets to the world. Safe to say Microsoft swiftly deleted these tweets and put the project on pause. See you later, Tay.
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7. South West Trains #SWT20
This is the icing on the marketing fails cake. South West Trains celebrated their 20th anniversary by asking commuters to share their favourite memories with the hashtag #SWT20.
They were asking for it really, weren’t they? Here are our favourite responses.
https://twitter.com/Jamescarragher/status/685074012544851968
https://twitter.com/Woody_woodo/status/685115063162789888
https://twitter.com/ol_king_col/status/685042269901209600
https://twitter.com/easterlauren1/status/685115024222875649
Congratulations! It all happened at The Lindo Wing...
Exciting times this Bank Holiday weekend as The Duchess of Cambridge gave birth in London's Lindo Wing to her second child, a daughter, Princess Charlotte.
Exciting times too here at Terra Ferma Media towers because we developed and built the website for Imperial Private Healthcare that includes the official Lindo Wing pages and we waited in anticipation to see how website traffic soared over the weekend on announcement of the news. And soar it did - all safely and securely managed by our dedicated WordPress hosting solution.
You can see the website we developed for The Lindo Wing here:
https://www.imperialprivatehealthcare.co.uk/our-hospitals/lindo-maternity
LinkedIn - Are You In The Business Loop?
Did you know that LinkedIn has over 277 million members worldwide? There's definitely no denying that LinkedIn is the world's largest B2B professional network, but are you part of it?
LinkedIn is all about establishing connections. When you connect with other professionals in your field, you're gaining additional knowledge and valuable insight. Networking is one of the most important skills that you could learn in order to make your business a success story. In other words, your connections on LinkedIn can help grow your business or accelerate your career.
If you're already a member of LinkedIn, are you using it to your best advantage by maximising its value? Or, if you're a newbie to the social media channel, how can you make the most of LinkedIn to benefit you and your company?
There are many ways you and your business can benefit from using LinkedIn. It's imperative to know how to create effective personal profiles, company pages and showcase pages, develop your LinkedIn network and promote your business through LinkedIn to maximise your company's success.
We understand that it can be tricky to navigate yourself around a huge business network that you're not yet familiar with. If you've fallen out of love with LinkedIn and need some friendly encouragement to get your business back on track with the social network, a LinkedIn workshop could answer all your niggles.
We like to think that we're social media experts and all-round marketing geniuses here at Terra Ferma Media. We therefore decided to hold a one-off LinkedIn workshop in Wimbledon on Wednesday 10th December, where you'll be encouraged to ask any LinkedIn-related questions and will learn a great deal about the benefits of LinkedIn for your business.
For further information about our LinkedIn workshop and to purchase tickets, please click here.
You're not still using Internet Explorer are you?
Latest stats show that Google Chrome continues to make huge inroads into the once seemingly unassailable lead that Microsoft's Internet Explorer had in the world's web browser market share.
And not before time we say! By specialising in building WordPress websites, we run tests on all types of web browser to ensure that everything we create works well however you look at it browser-wise. The one browser that is slowest and gives us the most compatibility issues - you've guessed it - good old Internet Explorer, bless 'im.
Now, we're not saying this is necessarily Microsoft's fault, but it's funny that all the other browsers seem to be able to cope with the demands put on them by WordPress.
Here at Terra Ferma Towers, our browser of choice is Google Chrome (we're fully paid up members of the Android Freedom Fighters Army anyway). If you haven't made the switch yet, you really should.
Just Google it and you're away...
Why is WordPress taking over the web?
These days we meet a lot of SMEs that are looking for a new solution for their website. Normally, they've had their existing site for five or six years and it's beginning to show its age and cannot meet the demands of the way business needs to market itself. See here for our web design services...
What worries you most about social media?
What follows is no major piece of market research – just genuine feedback from some businesses we've spoken to over the last few months. We've picked up recurring themes (or fears?) that are troubling small business owners about making the social media leap. Read more