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CHINA SURGES AHEAD OF THE U.S. IN APPLE APP STORE iOS DOWNLOADS FOR THE FIRST TIME

 

China has been #2 in iOS downloads for a while, but just last quarter, it took the top spot. In our recent Q1 2015 Market Index, we noted this landmark event. However, we feel the news is big enough to deserve its own report. This deep-dive investigates the numerous dynamics related to China’s rise to the top.

 

Just in time for GMIC Beijing (taking place April 28-30, 2015), we’re excited to announce our latest free report, China Surges Ahead of the United States in iOS App Store Downloads. Inside you can find the market forces, categories, apps and publishers that played a role in this major shift. And you can bet we’ll be on the expo floor at GMIC ready to answer your questions about how this can impact your mobile app business in this fast-growing country.

1. China Snags the Top Spot

China’s iOS Quarterly Downloads Grew 30% Between Q1 2014 and Q1 2015

Apple has been clear about China’s importance in its overall strategy. At various events, including its Q1 2015 earnings call and March 2015 "Spring Forward" event , the company has specifically noted China’s importance.

In terms of app downloads, China had been the iOS App Store’s second largest market behind the United States since Q1 2011. Four years later, China’s quarterly iOS downloads grew by approximately 30% year-over-year in Q1 2015, while remaining relatively flat in the United States. This allowed China to overtake the United States as the largest country in terms of quarterly iOS downloads.

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2. China Overtakes the United States in Downloads With Faster Growth in iOS Installed Base

China's move past the United States for iOS downloads in Q1 2015 was possible thanks to large growth in the adoption of iOS devices, rather than an increase in downloads per device.  According to IDC, the installed base for iPhone and iPad combined grew 40% in China during 2014, compared to 13% growth in the United States.

As we discussed in our Q1 2015 Market Index , the launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus may have played an important role in the rise of iOS App Store downloads in China. These devices are significantly larger than previous versions and deliver increased screen size and battery life. This is particularly important in China, a mobile first country where smartphone adoption exceeds PC adoption and many consumers carry out more tasks on mobile devices rather than desktop devices. This leads to higher demand for large screen smartphones with longer battery life, even if portability is sacrificed.

Expanded distribution also played a role in the success of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.  A pple has invested heavily in growing its retail presence and, as of April 2015, mainland China has 19 Apple Stores across 10 cities, up from just 8 in only Beijing and Shanghai in October 2013. During its Q1 2015 earnings call, Apple said it is on track to reach 40 stores in Greater China by mid2016.
Moreover, the iPhone 6 launch was the first time that Apple released a new iPhone on all three of China’s major mobile carriers at the same time, increasing its distribution network by thousands of stores.

3. Entertainment, Photo & Video and Lifestyle Apps Rode the Wave

In China, Games continues to be the largest category on the iOS App Store by both downloads and revenue by a large margin. However, three other categories experienced even higher yearoveryear
absolute download gains in Q1 2015: Entertainment, Photo & Video and Lifestyle. This aligns with three of the most popular activities for Chinese consumers on their smartphones: enjoying entertaining apps, capturing memorable life moments and shopping.

Entertainment Apps Get a Boost From Increased Content

Some of the Entertainment category’s impressive growth can be attributed to the proactive content strategies of China’s key video streaming providers, including internet giants like Tencent ( Tencent Video ), Baidu ( iQIYI ) and Sohu ( Sohu TV ), as well as online video services like Youku Tudou ( Youku , Tudou ) and LeTV ( LeTV ). Over the past few years, these services evolved from YouTube like usergenerated content video platforms to Netflix like providers of professional shows. They have successfully attracted audiences from traditional broadcasting TVs by offering the content on omniplatforms including desktop, mobile, settop boxes and digital TV. They have also enticed users to their platforms by securing rights to a broad range of foreign and domestic premium content including drama series like House of Cards and The Wife’s Lies , hit TV shows like Voice of China and Happy Camp, recent movies like Interstellar and Gone With the Bullets and live broadcasting of premium sports like the English Premier League and the NBA, as well as making their own exclusive content. Mobile video streaming delivers significant value to consumers by enabling them to consume content anytime and anywhere on devices that are more affordable than TVs and PCs. Recognizing this huge opportunity, traditional TV networks in China like Hunan Broadcasting System have also joined the competition for mobile audiences by launching their own apps like ImgoTV. 

iOS 8’s ‘App Extensions’ Help Photo & Video Apps Go Viral

Photo & Video’s explosive growth in Q1 2015 was helped by Apple’s own iMovie , which it has
offered for free since September 2014. The category also received a boost from newly released camera and photo editing apps like FotoPlace and Pitu . The upward trajectories of these new apps have outpaced previous leaders in this category. This is partially due to iOS 8’s new App Extensions feature which allows onetap photo and video sharing from camera and photo editing apps to any social platform. In previous iOS versions, consumers could only do one click sharing with a few social networks selected by Apple. The launch of iOS 8 in September 2014 extended this functionality to WeChat,  China’s largest social network, and the seamless sharing experience helped new camera and photo editing apps go viral.

MCommerce Hits New Heights

In the Lifestyle category, mcommerce apps — which include apps for online shopping, shopping guides, service ordering, daily deals, local business reviews and classifieds — experienced massive growth in 2014. Among the China iOS App Store’s top 20 Lifestyle apps by downloads, 17 are mcommercerelated.  From Q1 2014 to Q1 2015, total downloads of these 17 apps grew by 85%, showing that mcommerce is booming from an app perspective.  According to Alipay, China’s largest online payment platform and the backbone of ecommerce in China, mobile payments accounted for 54% of all of its transactions in the first 10 months of 2014, up from 22% for all of 2013. It will be interesting to see how mcommerce further develops as the potential of one billion customers is unleashed.

4. iOS’ Bright Future in China

Download Growth Paves the Way for Monetization

In mature markets, such as United States and Japan, we have seen explosive download growth lay the foundation for significant revenue growth that follows. We expect to see this repeated in China in the near future. Furthermore, the iOS App Store's potential size in China may be even higher than it initially appears since downloads per active iOS device is significantly higher in China than in the United States.

As we mentioned in our 2014 Retrospective , China is appealing for its monetization potential as well as its expansive smartphone user base. In Q1 2015, it was the #3 country (behind only the United States and Japan) by total quarterly revenue on the iOS App Store. From Q1 2014 to Q1 2015, revenue in China grew 90% compared to roughly 30% in the United States and approximately 50% in Japan. Although the United States leads China in terms of revenue per iOS device, China grew even more quickly to narrow that gap from Q1 2014 to Q1 2015.

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One category that demonstrates the future revenue potential for iOS in China is the Entertainment category. In Q1 2015, it experienced 385% year-over-year revenue growth.  Video streaming apps aided this revenue leap to a major extent. All the video apps mentioned in the previous section were among the top 30 apps outside of games by revenue in the China iOS App Store, 3 of them among top 5. By steadily adding new premium content to their easy to access libraries, Chinese video streaming services have increased their perceived value and helped expand Chinese consumers’ willingness to pay for content, even on a smaller screen. In addition to advertising, these services are gradually increasing their monetization via premium memberships, program subscriptions and pay-per-view models, which are partially collected through the app store channels.

5. Recap

The iOS App Store has experienced phenomenal growth in China. In Q1 2015, quarterly iOS
app downloads increased approximately 30% year-over-year resulting in China surpassing
United States to become the largest market by iOS app downloads. Some key insights related
to this impressive growth:

• IDC figures show that the installed base for iOS devices in China experienced higher growth than that in the United States over the span of 2014. This was the key driver that helped China surpass the United States by iOS App Store downloads.
• The launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus may have played an important role aswell. In addition to addressing China’s particularly high demand for smartphones with larger screens, it also benefitted from Apple’s expanded retail presence and broader carrier support.
• The Entertainment, Photo & Video and Lifestyle categories especially benefitted from the increase in iOS App Store downloads in China. Entertainment was helped by key video streaming providers’ content strategies, Photo & Video was assisted by enhanced sharing capabilities from iOS 8’s new App Extensions feature and Lifestyle was aided by mcommerce and related apps.

The continued growth of iOS device installed base and iOS App Store downloads in China may be laying the the foundation for significant revenue opportunities in the near future. We are excited to watch the mobile app market develop in this key market for Apple.

COMMENTARY:   As reported in an article dated April 27, 2015 appearing in TechCrunch, Apple is tearing it up in China. During its second quarter 2015, the company saw 71 percent revenue growth in the locale, and the company is widely thought to have sold more iPhones there than in the United States.

Notably, the company’s Chinese revenue came in second place to Europe’s during the first quarter, losing $17.2 billion to $16.1 billion. In the most recent quarter, the second of 2015, Apple’s Chinese revenue grew to $16.8 billion, while its European top line, measured on a sequential-quarter basis for now, fell to $12.2 billion. The company’s European revenue grew on a yearly basis, further underscoring how important China is to Apple.

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The technology company posted revenue gains in the Americas, Europe, Greater China and the ‘rest of Asia Pacific.’ Japan declined for Apple, something that should not surprise after Microsoft unloaded on the country as a slipping zone of demand. 

The Apple Watch, with its high-end options, has been discussed as a potential play for the Chinese luxury market. That aside, it seems that the company has no issues selling its products in the location. As such, Watch aside, it seems that Apple has a winning formula in place.

Courtesy of an article dated April 28, 2015 appearing in App Annie and an article dated April 27, 2015 appearing in TechCrunch

INSTAGRAM ADDS HASHTAG EMOJIS TO ITS APP AND WHY TEENS ❤ INSTAGRAM

It’s no secret that teens love to document their lives and consume others’ on Instagram. Drawing from a survey in spring 2015, teens identified Instagram as the “most important” social network out there. To prove just how important teens find this medium, take a look at these eye-opening stats from Instagram users, ages 13 to 24:

• 53% say Instagram helped “define who they were”

• 33% say they check Instagram first thing in the morning

• 39% say it’s the last thing they do before falling asleep at night

• 68% admit to engaging with brands regularly on this medium

Back up – that last statistic should have really caught your attention. Since Instagram’s launch in 2010, users have evolved to fully accepting and welcoming brands into their feeds. This makes sense specifically for brands that are creating a lifestyle surrounding fashion/beauty, food, television/films, hobbies and music.

Here's some more stats about what teens post on social networks between 2006 and 2012 according to PEW:

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But, why? 

I enlisted my 17-year-old, Instagram-loving cousin, Abby, to generate these three reasons why teens love Instagram and in turn, why brands should love the medium to connect with this audience.

1. It’s Mobile Friendly

Teens live on their smartphones. In 2015, 94% of teens with these phones were found to go online daily or more often. Wow. Considering Instagram was built as a mobile app and even still to this day, has a very limited platform access via desktop, this medium is a marketing no-brainer. Especially for e-commerce brands who are looking to increase mobile sales; which leads us to the next reason…

2. You Can Turn Users Directly into Customers

First and foremost: Abby follows brands on Instagram to get fashion and lifestyle inspiration. In fact, she claims that she has frequently purchased items from the brands she follows solely because she liked the picture they posted featuring the product. 

Since Instagram encourages brands to communicate a lifestyle, it’s easier for customers to visualize products on themselves, or in their lives. Instagram gives context and life to products that may sit flat on a website product page and encourages customers to make the purchase. 

Some may argue that this is not true because (for now) brands can’t put clickable links within Instagram posts to drive conversions. However, third-party apps, like Like2Buy have solved this issue by allowing brands to pull their Instagram photos onto one landing page that links users to corresponding product pages. See the example below from Old Navy.

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3. It’s Constantly Updating and Adding Cool New Features

This is actually a pretty important reason for brands trying to reach teens because being able to keep up with them shows you are one of them. In order to successfully market to teens on Instagram, brands need to become publishers.  Marketing tactics such as using popular blogger influencers, lifestyle photography and hashtags are important, but mean nothing if you can’t deliver content the same way their friends are in their feeds. 

Instagram hashtag emojis (Click Image To Enlarge)

The latest update on Instagram this week? The ability to hashtag emojis. More and more, people are communicating on Instagram solely via emoji. Abby says that using emojis are important because they help people understand the photo better than text; everyone reads the tone of a written message differently, but an emoji is universally understood. Combining the search ability and visibility hashtags provide with the popularity of emojis among teen users, this new update is genius. Check out the example below from Refinery29.

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See why teens love Instagram so much? The most important takeaway for marketers is to understand that this generation actually wants you to become a part of their every day lives. The best way to do that is by creating a brand presence that blends in as one of their own peers.

COMMENTARY:  Selfies and teenagers go together like milk and cereal.  Adding hashtag emojis to the Instagram app is a no-brainer and natural fit.  

24% of teens go online “almost constantly,” facilitated by the widespread availability of smartphones.

Aided by the convenience and constant access provided by mobile devices, especially smartphones, 92% of teens report going online daily — including 24% who say they go online “almost constantly,” according to a new study from Pew Research Center. More than half (56%) of teens — defined in this report as those ages 13 to 17 — go online several times a day, and 12% report once-a-day use. Just 6% of teens report going online weekly, and 2% go online less often.

Much of this frenzy of access is facilitated by mobile devices. Nearly three-quarters of teens have or have access1 to a smartphone and 30% have a basic phone, while just 12% of teens 13 to 17 say they have no cell phone of any type. African-American teens are the most likely of any group of teens to have a smartphone, with 85% having access to one, compared with 71% of both white and Hispanic teens. These phones and other mobile devices have become a primary driver of teen internet use: Fully 91% of teens go online from mobile devices at least occasionally. Among these “mobile teens,” 94% go online daily or more often. By comparison, teens who don’t access the internet via mobile devices tend to go online less frequently. Some 68% go online at least daily.

African-American and Hispanic youth report more frequent internet use than white teens. Among African-American teens, 34% report going online “almost constantly” as do 32% of Hispanic teens, while 19% of white teens go online that often.

Facebook is the most popular and frequently used social media platform among teens; half of teens use Instagram, and nearly as many use Snapchat.

Facebook remains the most used social media site among American teens ages 13 to 17 with 71% of all teens using the site, even as half of teens use Instagram and four-in-ten use Snapchat.

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71% of teens use more than one social network site

Teens are diversifying their social network site use. A majority of teens — 71% — report using more than one social network site out of the seven platform options they were asked about. Among the 22% of teens who only use one site, 66% use Facebook, 13% use Google+, 13% use Instagram and 3% use Snapchat.

This study uses a somewhat different method than Pew Research Center’s previous reports on teens. While both are probability-based, nationally representative samples of American teens, the current survey was administered online, while our previous work involved surveying teens by phone. A great deal of previous research has found that the mode of interview — telephone vs. online self-administration — can affect the results. The magnitude and direction of these effects are difficult to predict, though for most kinds of questions, the fundamental conclusions one would draw from the data will be similar regardless of mode. Accordingly, we will not compare specific percentages from previous research with results from the current survey. But we believe that the broad contours and patterns evident in this web-based survey are comparable to those seen in previous telephone surveys.

Facebook remains a dominant force in teens’ social media ecosystems, even as Instagram and Snapchat have risen into a prominent role in teens’ online lives.  Asked which platforms they used most often, the overall population of teens in this sample (ages 13 to 17) reported that Facebook was the site they used most frequently (41% said that), followed by Instagram (20%) and Snapchat (11%).

Boys are more likely than girls to report that they visit Facebook most often (45% of boys vs. 36% of girls). Girls are more likely than boys to say they use Instagram (23% of girls vs. 17% of boys) and Tumblr (6% of girls compared with less than 1% of boys). Older teens ages 15 to 17 are more likely than younger teens to cite Facebook (44% vs. 35% of younger teens), Snapchat (13% vs. 8%) and Twitter (8% vs. 3%) as a most often used platform, while younger teens ages 13 to 14 are more likely than their older compatriots to list Instagram (25% vs. 17% of older teens) as a platform they visit most often.

Middle and upper income teens lean toward Instagram and Snapchat

The survey data reveals a distinct pattern in social media use by socio-economic status. Teens from less well-off households (those earning less than $50,000) are more likely than others to say they use Facebook the most: 49% of these teens say they use it most often, compared with 37% of teens from somewhat wealthier families (those earning $50,000 or more).

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Teens from more affluent households are somewhat more likely than those from the least affluent homes to say they visit Snapchat most often, with 14% of those from families earning more than $75,000 saying Snapchat is their top site, compared with 7% of those whose families earn less than $30,000 annually. Twitter shows a similar pattern by income, with the wealthiest teens using Twitter more than their least well-to-do peers. It should be noted that some of these differences may be artifacts of differences in use of these sites by these different subgroups of teens.

Smartphones facilitate shifts in teens’ communication and information landscape

As American teens adopt smartphones, they have a variety of methods for communication and sharing at their disposal. Texting is an especially important mode of communication for many teens. Some 88% of teens have or have access to cell phones or smartphones and 90% of those teens with phones exchange texts. A typical teen sends and receives 30 texts per day2

And teens are not simply sending messages through the texting system that telephone companies offer. Some 73% of teens have access to smartphones and among them messaging apps like Kik or WhatsApp have caught on. Fully 33% of teens with phones have such apps. And Hispanic and African-American youth with phones are substantially more likely to use messaging apps, with 46% of Hispanic and 47% of African-American teens using a messaging app compared with 24% of white teens.

Girls dominate social media; boys are more likely to play video games

Teenage girls use social media sites and platforms — particularly visually-oriented ones — for sharing more than their male counterparts do. For their part, boys are more likely than girls to own gaming consoles and play video games.

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Data for this report was collected for Pew Research Center. The survey was administered online by the GfK Group using its KnowledgePanel, in English and Spanish, to a nationally representative sample of over 1,060 teens ages 13 to 17 and a parent or guardian from September 25 to October 9, 2014 and February 10 to March 16, 2015. In the fall, 1016 parent-teen pairs were interviewed. The survey was re-opened in the spring and 44 pairs were added to the sample. For more on the methods for this study, please visit the Methods section at the end of this report.

Courtesy of an article dated April 30, 2015 appearing in MediaPost Engage:Teens and an article dated April 9, 2015 appearing in PEW Research Center

MEET GUI DESIGNER ROB MASON, THE RECENT COLLEGE GRAD BEHIND FACEBOOK'S MINIMALIST VIDEO CALL DESIGN

Many things were written about the new video calling feature Facebook launched Wednesday, April 22—that it couldn’t compare to the new Google+ Hangouts, for example, because it didn’t have a group feature, or that it should be admired for its drop-dead simplicity.

But one thing that wasn’t written about was that the new feature that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg  trumpeted as being "awesome" was dreamt up almost entirely by a single baby-faced product designer, a recent hire who was tossed onto the project less than a month after stepping onto the company’s Mountain View campus last fall.

That designer, Rob Mason, pictured below, spoke with Fast Company about how he went about envisioning Facebook’s entrant into the video communication space—and along the way gave us insight both into why Facebook made some of the design choices it did (No mute button? What’s up with that?) and into Facebook’s overall process for designing new features.

Facebook's Rob Mason is the designer of the new Messenger Video Call app (Click Image To Enlarge)

Mason, 22, a recent graduate from England, arrived at Facebook last October. Before that, his employment history consisted mainly of doing contract design work on third-party Facebook apps.

Despite that seeming paucity of experience, Facebook leaders apparently didn’t hesitate to dump the important new feature into Mason’s virgin hands.

Soleio Cuervo, one of Facebook’s design veterans tells Fast Company.

"We have a pretty rigorous process for hiring new designers." 

Design at Facebook is a leadership role, he says. The company looks for people with strong vision, strong soup-to-nuts technical and design skills, and strong abilities to drive consensus.

Cuervo says.  

"When we looked at Rob’s portfolio and the projects he had created on his own, we saw they were highly focused, dirt simple, and very clean.  That high level of focus was something we thought was appropriate for this product."

Whereas design teams at other companies are inundated with marketing and product requirement documents, the only guidance Mason was given was the fact that the company would be implementing Skype’s video capabilities and that it was up to him to figure out what the new feature should do.

Screenshots of Facebook Messenger Video Calling Add-on (Click Image To Enlarge)

Mason then buckled down to the project, putting existing video chat products through the paces, sketching out new ideas, and building rough prototypes.

A month later, Mason sat down with Zuckerberg and vice president of product Chris Cox for his first design review. (Unlike at other companies where designers are separated by oodles of bureaucracy from the top dogs, at Facebook, designers work directly with Zuckerberg and Cox to hammer out new features.)

Mason pitched his idea:  

"A really minimal experience with none of the clutter or legacy of any other product on the market."

Mason says.  

"Making a video call today is very complex.  You have to make sure you and the other person are using the same software. If you’re not, you have to install that software on your computer. You have to create an account. And you have to get your friend’s user name and enter that into your software. There’s a huge untapped market of people who would get lots of value out of video calling, but it’s too complicated. They don’t even know where to start."

Which is why Facebook went in the completely opposite direction.

Mason says.  

"If you want to send a message to someone in Facebook, you just click on them and type in your message.  Video calling should be the same."

Over the following months, working in concert with Zuckerberg and Cox, and Philip Su, the engineer who built the feature, Mason refined the idea and nailed down its essential elements, including:

No Controls

Once you’re inside the video calling window (you’ve called another person and they’ve accepted your call), the window in which you’re speaking to each other has no controls, other than the standard ones (full screen, minimize, and close).

If the goal is simply to enable two people to communicate, Mason says, bells and whistles risk getting in the way—even a mute button, which you’d think would be a core control for a calling service.

Mason says.  

"It seems like such a simple feature, but if you accidentally mute a call, you can end up in a state where you have video but no sound.  It adds a lot of confusion."

Placing The Call Window At The Top

Although you can move the call window around, when it first appears, Facebook positions it at the top of the screen, right below your camera. That way, when you’re looking at the person you’re talking with, your eyes are looking in the same general place as the camera, which increases the chance that it captures some measure of eye contact.

Similarly, the picture of you that’s embedded in the call window also appears at the top. That, says Mason, is so that if you check out your own picture during the call, you don’t lose eye contact with the person you’re speaking with.

Making Your Picture Tiny

The picture of you that gets embedded in the call window is noticeably small, thumbprint-sized, rather than profile-photo-size, or larger.

Mason says.  

"That’s so that you’re not self-conscious.  You can see that you’re in the frame, but you can’t see any imperfections."

Keeping The Video Window In The Foreground

Try bringing another window to the forefront of your screen when you’re on a Facebook video call, and you’ll quickly find that you can’t. That’s entirely intentional, Mason says, and again harks back to the idea of making video calls simple and easy even for the most novice users.

Mason says.  

"It’s really important for our members to be confident that they know when they’re being seen and heard.  With the video window always on top, you never forget you’re in a call.  Cuervo says that, in an increasingly real-time world, making video calls—to chat with family and friends—is going to become increasingly commonplace. Requiring people to install software and click through setup wizards is "an archaic way of thinking about how people want to interact with their friends."

Facebook’s new service, on the other hand, is the kind of typical low-end disruption that Clayton Christensen pinpoints in his business classic The Innovator’s Dilemma—a product that can seem underwhelming at first when compared with legacy products but that strikes a chord with an emerging class of customer.

Cuervo says.  

"My parents can now call me.  All those years of frustration with video chat clients will finally be gone."

COMMENTARY:   Facebook’s introduction of free mobile video calling as part of its mobile Messenger app, puts it in direct competition with Skype, Google Chat and Hangouts and Apple’s FaceTime.  Previously, Messenger allowed users to make voice calls; the new feature comes as other social media platforms have unveiled new capabilities including video calling.

To use the Messenger video call function, Facebook members just have to tap a video icon within the app and choose the contact they want to call. They can also open up a video call from within a text or voice call if they feel the need.

In one major difference from its competitors, Messenger allows users to make video calls between different operating systems -- for example, with one user calling from an Android device and the other user receiving the call on iOS. cThat’s an important distinction from Facetime, which like most other Apple products is exclusive of other operating systems.

Video calling on Facebook Messenger works through a mobile data connection and WiFi. This means that someone with a strong LTE signal on their iPhone in the U.S. can still have a video chat with someone in a third-world country that has a weaker 3G signal on their Android device. Facebook is also currently experimenting with group video calling and video stabilization, according to TechCrunch.

The video calling feature for Facebook Messenger is currently available for iOS and Android users in Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Laos, Lithuania, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, the U.K., the U.S. and Uruguay. It will gradually roll out to other countries over the next several weeks.

Here is a video that demonstrates how video calling on Facebook Messenger works:

 

According to Facebook, over 600 million people use Messenger every month. The social media juggernaut recently introduced Messenger Platform, giving app developers the capability to integrate their products with Messenger, as well as Business on Messenger for business-to-consumer communications.

In March 2015, Facebook announced that users can send money to friends via Messenger, pitting it against other peer-to-peer payment services like Square, Venmo, and Snapcash, introduced last year by Snapchat and powered by Square.

The service will become available over the next few months for Android, iOS, and desktop users. Facebook is offering the service free, with no transaction fees, and currently says it doesn’t plan to monetize it. It also emphasized that the service only allows payments between individual Facebook users, not payments to businesses.

Courtesy of an article dated April 28, 2015 appearing in Fast Company Design and an article dated April 28, 2015 appearing in MediaPost The Social Graf and an article dated April 28, 2015 appearing in Forbes

28 SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT TOOLS RATED, SCORED, AND REVIEWED (STUDY)

Global hotel chain Hyatt tweets 1,600 times a week. Chevrolet tweets 4,300 times each week. But American Airlines makes that little blue bird sing loudest, tweeting an astonishing 6,400 times every single week.

How do they do it? And why?

To answer those questions and find the best social media management tools for big, medium, and growing brands, we surveyed 1,133 social media managers who build their companies’ brands on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and emerging mobile social networks. With help from Texifter’s DiscoverText technology, we analyzed over 250,000 tweets. We tracked the 1,600 brands with the most followers and the most engagement in their use of social media.

And we talked to dozens of vendors. Everyone, apparently, has a social media management tool. Small wonder, when social has become critical to almost every company’s marketing strategy.

But which one is the best for you?

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The answers are now in.

For enterprise, Oracle is surprisingly good, as are Sprinklr and Komfo. For smaller companies, Meshfire, Sendible, and Hootsuite lead the pack. And for the midsize company, Sendible, Meshfire (again), and Oktopost are leaders. Other tools you can’t ignore? TweetDeck, Buffer, SocialFlow, Spredfast, and Crowdbooster.

Those are just a few of the results from VB’s social media management report, released today.

But it’s not just about the tools. Even more important than tool is technique, and as our analysis of brands clearly shows, those who truly engage are much more successful than those who simply broadcast.

VB analyst Stewart Rogers said.

“Most surprising for me when it came to how big brands use Twitter was the big difference between the ‘high message volume’ users and the rest,  The vast majority of those sending hundreds of tweets per day are engaging with their audience: answering questions, solving problems, and ‘being social.’ But when you look at the rest of the list, the majority use Twitter as a broadcast channel.”

In fact, nearly 70 percent of big brands use Twitter in broadcast mode. The ones who don’t, however, use the right social media management software to “fully engage even with the highest volume of tweets,” Rogers said. That speaks to brands who tweet hundreds or thousands of times a week: they’re not sharing their second-by-second status, but engaging with customers who have questions, concerns, complaints … and, hopefully, kudos.

A strong social media management plan, therefore, consists of not just posting to social networks, but also following the right accounts, listening for both brand mentions and sentiment, and engaging in the right conversations at the right time.

Accomplishing that at scale is a challenging endeavor.

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The right tools, of course, can help. And they can vary by social network as well company size and type.

In fact, many companies use multiple tools, both because some tools are better at listening or engaging or other aspects of social media management, and because some tools work best with specific networks. For example, Royal Dutch Airlines largely relies on Radian6 to listen to both followers and those that mention the brand online, and will typically use that tool to respond directly. It also uses Hootsuite and the Twitter web client to deliver messages, in addition to Twitter Ads for promoted content.

I asked Rogers what tool works best with Facebook, for instance.  Rogers said.

“Sendible scores highest, according to the opinions of our survey respondents, and supports a wide range of networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more.  For Twitter, however, it is hard to look past Meshfire for SMEs and mid-sized companies alike.”

While brands do use Hootsuite frequently, individual social media managers for smaller companies use it more than twice as much as the next contender:

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Interestingly, while 22 percent of the over 1,100 social media marketing professionals we surveyed are using marketing clouds, many are not using the social tools in their clouds.

For instance, within Adobe Marketing Cloud users, 19 percent use Adobe Social, but 27 percent use Hootsuite. And when we asked Oracle Marketing Cloud customers, 25 percent of them use the included Oracle Social Relationship Management product, but an equal 25 percent use Hootsuite.

The entire report on 28 major social media management tools, and the most successful social techniques, is available now on VB Insight.

COMMENTARY:   The criteria used by social media managers for selecting SMM software depends on a number of different factors including costs, features and capabilities, accessibility, platforms supported, scalability, ease-of-use and customer support.

It is very important that your firm be ready to make the transition to SMM software before you have too many social media accounts and too much social media activity to track.  How many accounts are too many?  In my personal opinion you should not have more than four social media accounts to track.  Any more than this, creates a a social media environment that is unwieldly or even chaotic to manage without a good SMM system.

Buyers Guide To SMMS Platforms

Technological change and innovation has hit social media at a speed that makes it very difficult for social media managers and marketers to keep up.  In most instances that change and innovation is good, especially when it helps us do our jobs more efficiently and offers value to our respective communities.

Consider for a moment how far social media monitoring platforms have come just over the last two or three years. Back in 2009 social media marketing professionals were happy with a tool that helped them monitor mentions of their brand for the purposes of crisis mitigation. Now these same professionals have the ability to create sophisticated dashboards and raise the collective intelligence of their organizations by listening to the online chatter of the consumer.

Social media management software tools have undergone a similar evolution as brands have looked for ways to more effectively scale social media efforts.  

Over the last few weeks Oracle and Salesforce.com have jumped into the ring to take advantage of the obvious CRM applications of these tools. Time will tell how these tools evolve after being purchased by much larger enterprises, but in the meantime marketers are looking at and evaluating them to help their companies.

Because social media tools have evolved at such a rapid pace there is quite a lot of confusion at the point of purchase. What should you be looking for in one of these tools if you are purchasing one for your brand? A few things come to mind:

• Easy to navigate user interface - These are the absolute minimum requirements:
• Scheduling content - keeps us from having to be at the computer 24/7/365. Most of the current tools on the market have this functionality, but check before buying.
• Ability to post to all major social channels – Again, a core functionality of most tools, but you should be able to post to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube without much difficulty. 
• Uploading multimedia content – Can you easily attach photos and videos to posts in your current SMMS? We know how important visual content can be for brands so if you can’t upload multimedia with your posts it might be time to start looking elsewhere.
• Geo-targeting – A feature of some tools, but not all. If you are posting information about an event in Chicago chances are good that your fans or followers in Dallas, for example, do not care. The more relevant the content to a particular audience, the more engagement it is likely to receive. Check to see if your current tool allows for geo-targeting.
• Post tagging – This is critical for reporting down the line, but you should be able to assign tags to individual posts. Properly tagging posts will save you from having to go through every single post at the end of the month.
• Robust analytics dashboard - This is the biggest source of frustration because some of the SMMS tools that are thought to be best in class have what we would categorize as awful analytics dashboards.  What data should your SMMS tool be offering?
  • Everything you can get through Facebook or YouTube Insights – Listen, this isn’t a technical problem anymore. Both Facebook and YouTube have made their Insights platforms available via API. Wouldn’t you like to access that data from the same platform you are using to post? Yeah, so would we. Does your platform offer this currently?
  • Twitter data – We realize gathering Twitter data is a little more complex, but your platform should be offering up impressions, clicks, retweets and replies.  
  • Competitive data – There are tools currently on the market that offer Facebook data on competitors within the publishing platform. That’s invaluable competitive intelligence as you evaluate your own performance. We wouldn’t categorize the lack of competitor data to be a deal breaker, but it is certainly helpful.
• Avoid SMMS with arbitrary black box algorithms - We could spend a lot of time on this point, but we are not a fan of algorithms within SMMS tools that place an arbitrary value metric on your content. The threshold should be that if you cannot stand in front of the CMO and defend what you are presenting, do not use it.  In almost every instance, that describes these algorithms.
• Reliability - This would appear to be a “no duh” point, but you would be surprised how unstable some of these platforms can be. Double posting, inability to upload multimedia at random times, broken links and out of date data are all frequent issues with these tools. We totally understand the occasional outage, but if you are having constant technological challenges it is time to look at another tool.
• Scalability - The SMMS platform you select should have the ability to grow as you add more social media accounts and keep up with the volume of activity.  The SMMS tool should be modular so that you can add additional module to handle the demands of increased volume as you need it.
• Mobility - The SMMS platform should offer the ability to now or in the near future access your publishing engine or data via mobile devices.  If you are on your computer 24/7/365 access to your SMMS publishing engine or data via mobile devices is a must. 
• CRM connectivity -  A big plus would be for your SMMS platform to be social CRM capable or  having customer data merged with social content data. 
• Monitoring platform integration – We feel strongly that the winning combination will be some form of listening tool and SMMS platform. Imagine the power of being able to monitor for mentions of your brand, post from your brand page and then gather the data all from one platform. Very powerful combination that has yet to truly come to fruition.

19 Questions to Determine Corporate Social Media Readiness

In order for companies to realize the maximum benefit from social media marketing, there must be a certain level of understanding about the nature of online communities, social media sharing web sites and applications. One of the most effective ways TopRank Online Marketing has found to assess a company’s awareness, capabilities and resources for social media marketing is to conduct an external audit and an internal survey.

Identifying a company’s current state of social media readiness helps determine benchmarks and sets a baseline from where to build from. This is part of developing a social media strategy and helps avoid the random testing many companies are calling their “social media strategy”.

There are a number of free or low cost tools that one can use to identify a brand’s current social web participation, ranging from social media monitoring software to profile checking tools like KnowEm to social search tools like How Socialable, 48ers or socialmention.

With many companies, there are often a mix of official and unsanctioned social media accounts setup. It’s important to get a handle on such participation, who’s managing the accounts, whether they are run by employees or fans and what the company can learn from them. Getting a handle on the difference between how social the company is and will need to become is essential for planning, training and strategy development.

As part of the evaluation process, here are a few questions companies might ask themselves and answer as they embark on a social media marketing journey:

1. What goals do you hope to achieve from a social media marketing effort?
2. What measures of success will be used to evaluate a social media marketing program?
3. What are your current social media channels and destination web sites/pages?:
4. Do you employ a full-time community manager?
5. If not, do multiple staff share the role of community manager?
6. Are you conducting a formal effort at monitoring social channels using a social media monitoring/analysis software application? (Ex: Techrigy SM2, ScoutLabs, SocialRadar, Radian6)
7. Is there a particular business unit, division or product that can serve as a test case?
8. If active, how long has the company participated with social media sites and which? Blogging, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Wikis, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc
9. Are current social media participation on different sites coordinated?
10. Is a dashboard and campaign management tool used for social media content promotion?
11. Have you noticed any particular preferences within the target audience in their social web participation?
12. Do they prefer particular sites? (Twitter vs Facebook – blogs vs forums)
13. Do they comment, do they contribute content, do they tend to observe, do they not participate at all?
14. Have you identified and engaged and/or networked with influentials in your target industry on social web sites?
15. What unique value do current social media efforts offer clients/prospective clients? What need do they satisfy better than the competition?
16. Are text content or media regularly shared on other social media sharing sites?
17. Is there a user generated content component of your web site? Profiles, comments, reviews, content sharing: text, image, video or audio?
18. What departments, business units, cost centers and approval entities would be involved with the Social Media program? Is there an internal social media council?
19. What internal human resources are available within the company for support and implementation of social media marketing initiatives? (Content creation, network development, promotion, monitoring & analytics, community engagement)

Obviously each situation is as unique as the company and its objectives, but the list above can provide valuable insight into a company’s state of social media marketing readiness as well as provoking new thoughts and concepts. The more informed companies are about the social web, the more successful they will be at qualifying and managing social media marketing agency engagements.

Comparing Social Media Management Software

If you are seriously considering implementing an SMMS platform at your company, I would highly recommend this valuable online tool by G2 Crowd for comparing different social media management software platforms.

G2 Crowd helps you compare the best Social Media Mgmt Software products. You can compare products on a Grid similar to the Boston Consulting Group Matrixx, or by selecting any of the products for a side-by-side comparison. In addition, you can download the full report for more detailed information about Social Media Mgmt Software products. Only products with 10 or more reviews are included in the Grid. For a full list of products, click on the Products tab.

Courtesy of an article dated April 21, 2015 appearing in VentureBeat, an article dated September 2009 appearing in TopRank Online Marketing Blog, an article dated June 21, 2012 appearing in SocialMediaExplorer, and the Social Media Management Software comparison grid by G2 Crowd

 

 

https://www.g2crowd.com/categories/social-media-management

 

                    

FOURSQUARE'S SWARM APP NEARLY A YEAR AFTER LAUNCH, AND WHY SWARM WON'T SAVE FOURSQUARE

Foursquare's Swarm app automatically shares your location with your Facebook and foursquare fans, but the honeymoon is over 

The first thing ReadWrite's Selena Larson did after downloading Foursquare’s new Swarm app when it launched back in May 2014 was to distill her friends list on Foursquare from over 100 people down to just 19. 

When Selena joined Foursquare a years earlier, she was living in Arizona, still in college—a completely different lifestyle.  As the years went by, things changed but her friends list kept growing.  She stopped using Foursquare for checking in, and started using it as a location recommendation service, similar to Yelp.  It was her opinion that foursquare wasn’t really a social network anymore—in fact, she started keeping it among the travel apps on her iPhone.

This was the concept Foursquare wanted to build: to move beyond the check-in business model. The company split the original foursquare check-in app into two separate apps—Swarm by foursquare, the social network; and the new foursquare, a discovery app that helps users figure out what to do next.

Foursquare isn’t the first social network to experiment with splitting up its services. Facebook, most notably, has been trying to unbundle itself for years, sometimes failing along the way. Its move—forcing Facebook users into Messenger if they want to chat on mobile devices—was largely criticized, for example.

Foursquare took a huge gamble by dividing its original foursquare app into two distinctly different services seemingly working in opposite directions. Foursquare's location discovery application will use your check-in data from Swarm, but Swarm also wanted to create a different social experience entirely.

Swarm—Creepy Or Convenient? 

Swarm was Foursquare's way of ripping the check-in from its flagship app. The new social app uses your phone's GPS function to broadcast where you are at all times, and view others' locations, too. 

Named after the Foursquare “Swarm Badge” that signifies a busy location, Swarm is the latest “ambient location” app to launch this year. "Ambient location" apps rely on mobile phones' location services to display your general area to your friends in a passive way, without the need to check into any specific location. That's how Swarm works. 

 

Swarm by foursquare screenshots (Click Image To Enlarge)

If you decide you want to share your exact location with friends, Swarm's check-in feature is basically the same, but now you can also share your future plans with friends and invite them to join in. Ambient location sharing can be turned off, but it’s on by default.

Selena is skeptical of location sharing in general.   She rarely checked-in to places until she was ready to leave, and even then, she didn’t see the benefit. And with Swarm, her general location is visible to anyone at any time. There are only a handful of people she would be okay with knowing that information, and it's not anyone on the friends list she had amassed since joining Foursquare four years earlier. 

Selena is probably not alone here. Ambient location apps haven’t taken off, and even Facebook’s attempt to get friends to share their general locations has fallen flat. Most people don’t mind telling their friends where they are, as long as they’re okay with those friends joining them. I bet most people don’t have 100 or more friends they’d enjoy meeting up with randomly on the street. 

Foursquare doesn’t disclose monthly active user numbers, but the company boasts over 50 million app downloads. Still, one would imagine users stay in contact with friends over Twitter and Facebook more often than they do with Foursquare, and moving check-ins to Swarm may not help Foursquare in that regard. 

Foursquare is simply not as popular as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, even though the company is technically in the same category as those companies. In 2010, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley was even dubbed "The New King Of Social Media"—but four years later, Foursquare may be doing more rebuilding than refining.

Swarm, Foursquare's new social arm, will more or less need to build its community from the ground up; Crowley says the company is building tools to make it easier to bounce between Foursquare's apps, but I doubt users like Selena, who primarily use Foursquare as a recommendation tool, will find Swarm appealing. 

A New Direction For Foursquare

As Swarm tries to popularize proximity apps, Foursquare will have its own hurdles to jump.

The new Foursquare app which was released in August 2014 offered suggestions on where to go and what to order, based on users' unique location histories. On the plus side, Foursquare’s directory of places consists of over six billion check-ins, which is more than any other service—arguably enviable by Google or Yelp. 

Foursquare will learn your behavior based on your previous check-ins and ambient location data—such as where you like to eat, or when you like to go to the movies—and tailor suggestions for where you should go next. The Foursquare app delivers push notifications when you are at a new location, and serve up suggestions for what to do there. 

Many places have “tips,” or small reviews written by Foursquare after they check in. Unlike Yelp, these Foursquare reviews tend to be short and concise. As Foursquare moves away from the check-in, these reviews will be the focal point of the new application.

The only way for Foursquare to collect your location data once check-ins are removed is to use location services running in the background to track where you’ve been, which is concerning for privacy-conscious folks. In order to receive tailored push notifications, you’ll have to let Foursquare track you.

Foursquare’s collection of places is likely robust enough on its own to succeed as a competitor to Yelp. But will users be comfortable giving up their location information to both Foursquare and casual contacts on a regular basis?  Selena is not convinced.

COMMENTARY:  If you have been following my blog posts about foursquare, you must know by now that I, along with other social media researchers, predicted the demise of location-based social networks (LBSNs) like foursquare, and often quipped about the amount of venture capital (now $100 million) thrown at foursquare.  

It has now become obvious that foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley's effort to re-invent foursquare requires a lot more than splitting up the original app into two separate apps,   For the new foursquare app to feed you "tips" on where to go next (based on the historical data about where you have been, it needs your Swarm check-in data.  It really wasn't necessary to breakup the original app, but eliminate the check-in and badges and add the location discovery capability. 

In August 2014, Foursquare’s relaunch reversed a startling downward trend in the Apple App Store charts. But after relaunch hype subsided, interest in the new Foursquare and its check-in companion app Swarm dropped. Data from comScore that depicts the rise and fall of Foursquare’s unique app visitors makes this trend painfully clear.

Foursquare iOS App Rankings - 2010 through October 2014

App download rankings from app tracking site App Annie back up comScore’s figures. Here’s a closer look at Foursquare’s download rate rankings overall in the U.S. Apple App Store, from Foursquare’s 2010 launch to today.

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As of October 22, Foursquare ranked #923 overall in the U.S. App Store — #25 among travel apps in the U.S. At its peak, Foursquare ranked #44 overall in 2011 — #2 among social networking apps.

Foursquare Android App Rankings - 2012 through October 2014

The results are similar in the Google Play store, where Google estimates Foursquare has been installed on somewhere between 10 million and 50 million devices.

Click Image To Enlarge

For its part, Swarm saw an immediate rise in Swarm usage and number of users when it was launched in mid-May 2014, often rising into the Top 10 and Top 100 apps list, but this has all changed and Swam now ranks about 150th for both iOS and Android versions.  I looked at the historical ranking data from App Annie for Swarm, and the numbers show this quite clearly.

Swam Rank History - Android Version (Since Launch)

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Swarm Rank History - iOS Version (Since Launch)

 

Courtesy of an article dated May 16, 2014 appearing in ReadWrite and an article dated August 6, 2014 appearing in TechCrunch and an article dated October 23, 2014 appearing in VentureBeat 

HOW TO DEVELOP RAPPORT WITH INFLUENCERS VIA SOCIAL MEDIA

The influencers in your niche are probably receiving hundreds of friendly requests a day. Hence, the trick behind successful outreach is to stand out among your peers and catch the intended party's attention.

The success probability may be bleak, but influencer engagement is not exactly rocket science. And it can drive significant results with the right strategy and social media practices.

Set Proper Goals And Maintain Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

An ideal outreach campaign must begin with a clear set of objectives. Without them, it is impossible to measure success and define a consistent key performance indicator (KPI).

The purpose of your influencer outreach program might be to get influencers to write for your blog, become brand advocates, or vouch for your content or brand credibility. Start by defining clear targets.  

Have different KPIs for different social media channels. After all, those channels are different from each other; your approach to each will be different, as will which objective is best suited for each.

Identify Top Influencers Relevant To Your Purpose

The logical second step is identifying your niche influencers active on social media. Also, if you want to conveniently measure your outreach efforts and follow a KPI model, then it is a great idea to organize your targeted people into separate tiers, based on their social authority and influence.

There are many social tools to help you find brand advocates, industry experts, opinion leaders, and key decision-makers, including Followerwonk, Klout, Topsy, Commun.it, and Group High, among others.

Click Image To Enlarge

Get A Step Closer To Your Influencers On Social Media

Influencer outreach can begin via different means, and it is important that you choose the way that has a high success probability and decent conversion rate.

Social media is my favorite medium for getting in touch with key influencers and learning from their valuable insights and predictions. Many influencers are active on Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn, which is why those social channels make ideal communication channels for outreach.

Become socially active on those channels, and you'll be a step closer to your influential audience.

Keep in mind that outreach thrives on both patience and perseverance at each of these three stages: recruit, initialize and grow the relationship, and nurture.

The following infographic by MSL Group and Social Chorus offers this three-step guide how to activate untapped influencers:

Click Image To Enlarge

Abide By Good Social Ethics And Practices

Just because your influencers follow you back on Twitter that doesn't mean they are your friends now and you can get all personal with them; resist that urge. Another important thing to note: There is a difference between being polite and being obsequious; your target influencers are probably subjected to a lot of brown-nosing, so you likely won't get far with that approach.

It is, however, a good practice to acknowledge social mentions, including retweets, with a simple "Thanks"; sometimes, if you can improvise a clever way of expressing that appreciation, then it can be a decent way of gaining attention.

Don't Think You Can #HASHTAG Your Way To Success

Hashtags have become a social custom, but don't use them too much—lest you come across as reckless and inexperienced. Learn hashtags the smart way; turn to your influencers for inspiration:

• Don't write a status (or a Tweet) beginning with a hashtag unless it is absolutely necessary.
• Focus more on quality rather than quantity: Two or three hashtags, at most, should be enough to maintain relevancy.
• Keep a close watch on trending topics within your targeted community and apply hashtags accordingly.
• Don't use long versions of hashtags: e.g., #StarbucksSeattleCafeLatteRrocks, #Iknowwhatyoudidlastsummer and the like. Stick to short and simple.

Follow-Ups Are Crucial, But Don't Stalk

There is no doubt that follow-ups are important, and how you do them is even more important. Top influencers may not acknowledge your every mention or tweet, but you must respond when they do.

It's good practice to make first contact on social networks, as I noted earlier; after successively deeper levels of interaction over time, you can take the next level of conversation to email.

When making contact via email, be clear how you obtained the email address (if it's not readily available to everyone) and also remind the person of your social media relationship. If you hear back, great. If you don't hear back after a couple of attempts, absolutely do not keep sending emails. Continue your outreach via social media instead.

Explain Yourself Clearly And Directly

When reaching out, be clear about what you want and what you're offering. Explain your objective in a lucid manner, without undertones of things left unsaid; influencers will appreciate your directness and will answer "yes" or "no," or maybe connect you with someone else who can help you.

Their reaction will depend in large part on how you've conducted yourself up until that point and what sort of relationship you're looking for.

Post-Outreach, Work On Building Social Networks

Influencers can connect you to their own well-established networks and social connections, which is why after a successful influencer outreach campaign one must focus on developing longer-term relationships.

Don't stop once your outreach objectives have met with success. Follow the approach that has helped me in staying in touch with reputed bloggers and others and maintaining long-term relationships:

• Ask for simple opinions. It can be about anything from a new concept shared by another influencer to a new website or product.
• Share your own content and ask for feedback. Some influencers appreciate sharing their technical or business insights, especially when asked to critique a peer's work.
• Talk about things other than work. Doing so makes it easier for other people to join the conversation. You might talk about the recent Grand Slam final or a humanitarian issue receiving global attention. Stay in touch—that's the point.
• Share freebies like you'd share them with a friend. This approach may not always be helpful for your influencers, but people love such gestures. Make them feel special.

COMMENTARY:    

Finding Influencers 

Locating people who can help you reach the masses isn’t easy, but social media tools can help you identify influencers suited for your purposes.  Traackr helps you locate top influencers in specific niches based on their reach, resonance, and relevance to your specific topic. Once you’ve located appropriate people, the tool will help you make contact and build a working relationship.

Whether you’re using a tool or locating an influencer through your existing network of contacts, it’s important to carefully research a person before making contact. Your message should only be entrusted to a credible, respected source to help strengthen your reputation. Pay close attention not only to the number of followers the person has, but the number of responses and conversations each of his posts initiates. Those key indicators provide better insight into how many active users the influencer has.

Calculating An Influencer's Influence Score

There are tools that try to calculate a person’s influence and quantify it in a number, or score.  The higher the score, the more influential  you are meant to be.  These systems are not perfect and should never be used in isolation, but they do have smart algorithms that analyze your activity online and give you an idea of potential influence.

Klout – Klout gives you a score out of 100 and assesses which niches you are influential in.  You connect each of your social networks through the site and it analyzes all your activity. Klout notes who is sharing your content, the likes, comments, shares etc you get, and then a score is calculated.  This score can go up or down over time.

Kred –  Kred offers 2 scores, calculated by your Twitter activity over the last 1,000 days.  If you connect your Facebook account too, this can also contribute to your score.    The two scores are:

• Influence – This is how much you get retweeted, replied to, mentioned or followed.  If you connect your Facebook account it will measure posts, mentions, likes, shares and event notifications.
• Outreach – This is how much you are engaging or sharing with other people.  You could be retweeting, replying or mentioning others.

Kred provides you with details of how it is measuring your score.  For example, you can view which of your tweets were shared by other people, and tweets where you were mentioned, and then view points that are awarded towards your score for those tweets (in the very right hand column).

The scoring systems do have some value and take away some of your groundwork.  It’s not something to use on its own but it can be one indicator that helps you to build a broader picture.

How Much Influence Do Influencers Have In A Specific Field?

Twtrland categorizes people on Twitter into 60,000 categories.  You can view somebody’s influence based on each category, so you can filter the most. Having so many categories is great, because it can really help identify the most appropriate people in your niche.

When you search based on category, you can then view people’s amplification, reach and relevance based on that topic.

Courtesy of an article dated August 18, 2014 appearing in MarketingProfs and an article appearing in RazorSocial

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE APP-ADICTED TEEN [INFOGRAPHIC]

Rise and shine—and check your smartphone? That would have sounded foreign to most people 10 years ago, but it's now the natural course of action after shutting off your alarm.

Moreover, it's not just adults who can't start their day without first checking their phone. It's teenagers, too.

Of the 95% of teens in the United States who have Internet access, 78% have smartphones. Those smartphones are jam-packed with apps, including for Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Spotify. Even texting, the most basic use for a smartphone, is being replaced by messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and Kik Messenger.

These days, for teenagers, using their smartphones in any and all situations is deemed acceptable. Whether they are sitting in class or hanging out at home in front of the TV, teens are constantly running apps.

Does any of that surprise you? If you have kids, the answer is probably no.

Click Image To Enlarge

Courtesy of an article dated August 9, 2014 appearing in MarketingProfs

TWO EX-GOOGLER'S DEVELOP ABACUS, AN APP THAT COULD KILL EXPENSE REPORTS AS WE KNOW THEM ONCE AND FOR ALL

ABACUS LETS YOU FILE YOUR EXPENSES--AND GET PAID BACK--IN REAL TIME FROM YOUR PHONE.

Ted Power had just gotten his dream job at Google, but the first thing he experienced with the company was more like something out of the movie Office Space.  Power says.  

"I was based in the New York office, but my manager was in California and she asked me to spend a month out there for orientation.   I had to pay for the flight and the hotel out of pocket, which I couldn’t really afford considering I was fresh out of college.  It was a couple months before I got reimbursed through their nightmare system.  Considering how much companies like Google focus on employee happiness and tech, it was amazing how backwards the process was."

Click Image To Enlarge

Now Power wants to kill expense reports for good so no one else has to suffer. His new mobile app, called Abacus, lets employees ping a la carte expenses to their employers in real time, right from their phones.  Managers can approve the reimbursements quickly, and then Abacus directly deposits the funds to the employee’s bank account.  Power says.  

"The money is usually in your account within one to two business days.  People love not having to wait weeks or months to get paid back."

Click Image To Enlarge

From an employee’s perspective, it sounds too good to be true.  No saving receipts or filling out paperwork.  Need to take a business trip? As soon as you buy the ticket or book the hotel, just ping the dollar amount to your boss and wait to get paid back. But what about the other side of this user experience--the boss "on the other end" of Abacus? Won’t he or she be getting spammed every other minute with piecemeal charges to approve?

Click Image To Enlarge

Power says.  

"Sometimes managers new to Abacus worry that these notifications will get annoying--we worried about that, too.  What we’ve found is that managers usually like the transparency of knowing what their team is up to, and it’s a great opportunity to send a little love to your employees by getting back to them quickly.  You can turn off the notifications, and only do it once a week or once a month, but most people do it daily or every couple days."

Turning an irritating administrative chore into something more like personal messaging sounds like a brilliant mind hack indeed. But for giant companies like Google with a lot of existing accounting infrastructure, Abacus probably won’t be able to come to the rescue.  Powers who cofounded Abacus with Josh Halickman and Omar Qari says.  

"Right now we’re really focused on smaller companies, ~5-100 employees. This seems to be where the biggest need is--these companies need something better than a spreadsheet, but they don’t yet have super complicated Oracle-type accounting tools."

Click Image To Enlarge

Still, Power says that "a few big companies" are test driving Abacus with internal teams, and Pinterest is using Abacus specifically to reimburse prospective employees’ travel expenses when they’re flown out for job interviews. That’s exactly the pain point that inspired Abacus’s creation in the first place, so Power and his team must be on the right track.

[Read more about Abacus]

COMMENTARY:   I like the idea for Abacus, but I wonder, given the formal accounting and payables procedures of big companies, who detest cutting checks on the fly, but usually schedule payments once a week, whether they will subscribe to an app like Abacus.  On the other hand, smaller companies (less than 100 employees), like the ones Abacus is targeting, have a bit more flexibility, and a whole lot easier to sell to.

I chatted with Omar Qari one of the Abacus co-founders via the Abacus website, and I quizzed him about the response from customers so far, the number of clients they had signed up, and size of those clients, and he told me:  

"Admittedly biased, but thus far, we've had a positive response from our customers. They range in size from small founding teams all the way up to 200 employee companies. I'd say the biggest pluses for them are the fact that there literally is no more 'expense report', so employees and manages can do everything in realtime and we do next day direct deposit reimbursements for employees. The biggest complaint thus far from administrators has been that they want more accounting integrations - we've already launched QuickBooks and Xero, but working on Netsuite now."

I am glad to see that Abacus is working rapidly to make their expense report app integrate with small business accounting software like QuickBooks.  This is a must have.   

But, why stop with expense reports?  Abacus should consider adopting their app for paying independent contractors/consultants and temporary workers employed by temp agencies.  It shouldn't be too difficult to process weekly timesheets in real-time by having contractors, consultants and temps submit their timesheets via the app.  If the app could allow employers to signoff the timesheets using a digital signature input, the timesheet could be downloaded to the agency or employer for approval and payment, just like expense reports.       

High-tech companies would embrace contractor payments because they are the largest employers of contractors like programmers, software engineers, systems designers, IT professionals, accountants, etc..  If Abacus could integrate their app with corporate enterprise accounting systems (SAP, Oracle, etc.), this would open a huge opportunity to take the Abacus app to the next level.

Having worked on both sides of the corporate fence -- small and large corporations -- expense reports and contractor payments are an accounting nighmare.  Businesses spend countless hours auditing, approving, coding and processing expense reports and contractor timesheets.    I believe that Abacus has a huge upside potential.  With sufficient capital, adequate staffing, and the right type of sales and marketing push, Abacus should be able to signup thousands of clients.  

If I were Abacus, I would signup as many clients as possible.  To make it easy, I would offer the app for free for 30-to-90 days before I started charging.  The company also needs to get client reviews on their website.  Nothing works better than to have your clients advertise on your behalf.  Having said this, my greatest fear is that a large payroll processor like ADP or accounting software maker like QuickBooks will compete with Abacus by develop similar software to expand their business.   A buyout is also not too far-fetched.    

Courtesy of an article dated April 1, 2014 appearing in Fast Company Design   

FIFTYTHREE'S 'PENCIL', A WOODEN STYLUS MADE FOR THE IPAD'S SKETCHING APP 'PAPER', JUST MADE DRAWING ON THE IPAD BETTER

The Pencil, a stylus by Fiftythree, the makers of the app Paper, is going to receive a big update. (Click Image To Enlarge)

THANKS TO APPLE UNLOCKING THE IPAD'S POTENTIAL, FIFTYTHREE'S PENCIL WILL SOON GET EVEN BETTER

Today, the iPad stylus takes another step away from stupid stick and closer to expressive artistic tool. FiftyThree's Pencil--a wooden stylus made for the impressive iPad sketching app Paper--will soon allow you to vary the width of your line as naturally as drawing with a real pencil or marker.

 

As the video shows, you simply tilt the tip of the Pencil to go from fine point to thick line while sketching on screen--just as you would with the real thing. In other words, digital drawing on the iPad can feel a step more intuitive than it has.

By tilting the tip, you'll be able to draw a line of varying thickness. You know, just like a real pencil. (Click Image To Enlarge)

The update actually comes largely of Apple. (Click Image To Enlarge)

In iOS8, the company unlocked the capacity for the screen to recognize objects of various width. (Click Image To Enlarge)

While the Paper app--also developed by FiftyThree--has some incredible algorithms inside that enable intuitive color mixing and for you to rest the palm of your hand on the screen as you draw, this update actually comes largely as courtesy of Apple. Amongst countless updates in iOS 8 is a powerful feature that most of us missed: The iPad’s touch screen can now recognize objects of various size. So instead of treating a thumb or pinky as the same sized orb, it can accommodate the precision necessary for the Pencil’s tip to begin simulating the multitude of subtle thicknesses we’d find in any natural drawing tool.

For these analog-digital hybrid drawing tools, this could lead to a wave of more naturalistic sketching experiences. (Click Image To Enlarge)

Eventually, these tools could get so good that we won't be able to distinguish Paper from paper. (Click Image To Enlarge)

If you already own a Pencil, there’s no need to buy anything new. Free software will update the feel of the hardware. Timing will coincide with the public release of iOS 8 in the fall.

Courtesy of an article dated June 17, 2014 appearing in Fast Company Design

EYEVERIFY'S EYE SCANNING SECURITY SOFTWARE USES YOUR EYES INSTEAD OF A PASSWORD, COULD BE THE ONLY PASSWORD YOU WILL EVER NEED

With biometric security like EyeVerify's Eyeprint scanner, you may never need to remember another password again.

EyeVerify is a start-up company in the Kansas City Startup Village, working on innovative biometric security for smartphones and tablets. The software scans the eyes of the user in place of a password, and if it's not the right person, the software won't open.

 

Biometric security means a physical characteristic is used to identify the right person. This could be something like a fingerprint, handprint, voice analysis, or eye scan.

Chris Barnett, the EVP of Sales and Marketing for EyeVerify, said.

"It actually is equal to a 50-character complicated password - which obviously no human would ever use or remember."

Barnett said many security issues come from people using simple passwords that are easy to guess, or forgetting longer passwords and constantly needing to reset.

EyeVerify hopes its software can fix some of what it calls "password pain."

The software uses the camera already in the smartphone to snap a picture. It looks for vein patterns in the whites of the eyes, which are unique just like fingerprints. Barnett said there is a two-in-one-hundred-thousand chance of someone being able to fake their way into the software.

Click Image To Enlarge

People with bloodshot eyes can still use the software without problem.

Toby Rush, the CEO of EyeVerify, said. 

"You can have allergies, you can have hay fever, you could be out late the night before, drinking the night before, you could live in California and use medicinal marijuana, all those things don't change the pattern of blood vessels, they simply make them bigger." 

Although bloodshot eyes won't affect the software's ability to read eye vein patterns, physical damage, like a swollen shut eye, will.

The software stores the unique "Eyeprint" to the user's smartphone so not only do you need the right device, but also the right person to get access.

Rush said.  

"We use the phone as a token and your biometrics as a second token and take passwords out of the picture all together."

EyeVerify says it could make mobile banking more secure and protect companies with employees who use phones to access sensitive information.

 

Barnett said that more employees use their smartphones to access company information than ever before. That opens up security problems for companies and also can cause frustration in IT departments when employees continually lose or forget their passwords.

Barnett said.  

"With our technology, big companies can just eliminate all that password pain for themselves and their employees and be absolutely sure this really is an employee."

One of the first U.S. companies to feature EyeVerify software on their app is mobile security provider Good Technology. Employees in finance, healthcare, military and government groups use their technology to access email, calendars, project schedules and contact information. 

EyeVerify said it hopes to sell its software to banks, which would use the eye scanner in their mobile apps. EyeVerify believes this would make mobile banking much more secure and ensure that the apps are not easy to break into if the phone is stolen.

COMMENTARY:  The EyeVerify app is available for FREE downloading from the Apple iTunes Store and Google Play (4.7 stars) for iOS and Android devices respectively.     

Courtesy of an article dated June 9, 2014 appearing in Fox Business