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Facebook will combine Groups and Messenger. Without spamming you to death.
Starting today Facebook Groups can launch group chats about specific sub-topics with up to 250 members. They can also start audio or video calls with up to 50 members.
You won’t get alerted right away about every message in every chat, you will first get a Facebook Groups notification inviting you to each new group chat you have to voluntarily join to receive further notifications.
If a chat gets overwhelming you can turn off notifications and opt to only be notified if you’re mentioned with @yourname in the thread.
It is another move to get people back to interacting on Facebook with each other. Group Chats got very popular recently. But people weren’t using Messenger, there was an explosion of group chat activity on competitors like Telegram.
3D Photos roll out on Facebook
Facebook is now rolling out 3D photos to add depth to your iPhone portrait mode shots. It’s another attempt to get your News Feed more interesting.
Portrait mode fires off both of a phone’s cameras simultaneously, parallax differences can be used to recreate what’s behind the subject. Facebook uses AI to calculate real layers of the photo to show you what should be there if you tilted your perspective.
To create 3D photos you need an iPhone 7+, 8+, X or XS, more phones will work with the feature in the future.
Facebook recommends you keep your subject three to four feet away. Having things in the foreground and background, ideally with distinct colours, will make the layers separate better.
We’re curious if this new feature will lead to people sharing significantly more information and photos on Facebook. If they do so and it becomes a success it probably won’t take long to also have an option to run ads with the 3D photo format.
Kanye meets Trump while Facebook removes Pages with misleading political content
OK, did Kanye and Trump in the headline bait you to read? We’re thinking about giving you our clickbait guide, let us know if you want it – just reply to this newsletter. The real topic though…
Usually, topics like natural disasters or celebrity gossip have been popular ways to generate clickbait, but there was a shift towards sensational political content over the last months.
Since some actions of political actors make you doublecheck if you ended up on a satire newspaper or a legitimate one, it’s even harder to distinguish real news from some made up clickbait story.
Given the timing ahead of the US midterm elections Facebook is cleaning up and removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken their rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behaviour.
According to Facebook, these deletions ranged from Pages that “used techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was” to “ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate”.
Sometimes Twitter ads look like Facebook before it had any rules…
Especially when it comes to crypto ads these days, Twitter seems to be pretty darn “lenient”. Not intentionally, just bad at policing their content.
Accounts impersonating business people and celebrities are verified and have their Promoted tweets reach hundreds of thousands of people.
Given how long this has been happening, and how Twitter was also under pressure when it comes to political discourse, misleading advertising and the likes, you’d think they’d be able to remove accounts impersonating big names.
Nope. Whatever Twitter tried so far didn’t work…
E-COMMERCE
Here’s a handy-dandy Black Friday + Cyber Monday Checklist
Black Friday is a trend started by the US, referring to the day after Thanksgiving. That day in November people regard as the first day of “Christmas Shopping Season”. Since many stores offer great discounts and increase their opening hours during that weekend, it’s a good time to make sales.
But, since its growth to a worldwide shopping event, it can be a very hectic time. Thus, there are some things you can do to prepare your online store to make things run a bit more smoothly.
- Tell customers about your sales as early as possible. Lots of people start doing their shopping research well before Black Friday, so it’s good to prepare early.
- Plan and organize your sales. Create a list of products and prices you are putting on sale. You can refer to those when the time comes rather than having to rush and mess up.
- Create backup plans. Think about what could go wrong (such as selling out and not being able to restock fast enough) and try to plan accordingly.
- Make sure your store can handle increased demand, both traffic and inventory-wise.
- Plan and create your advertising content. Make catchy banners for your website or ads and also plan for a potential increase in ad costs during the holiday season.
This is far from everything, of course. You should check out this 27 items checklist to prepare your store for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It comes straight from Shopify.
It goes through the whole period. From getting customers ready weeks in advance, to getting them engaged on the day, to following up with them afterwards too!
And if you are preparing, you might wanna check out today’s sponsor below…
SPONSORED
Here’s how a seller made an EXTRA $2 million on $17 million in sales by eliminating 100% of his duty costs!
If you’re buying products from overseas and selling to US customers, you’re likely not only paying duty but also watching your current duty rates skyrocket with the current trade wars. What you may not realize is that you don’t have to pay any duty at all.
There’s a program called the Duty Drawback Program. It’s a Trade Incentive program offered by the Canada Border Services Agency and STALCO Inc. has designed their services to allow you to easily take advantage of this.
Here’s what happens on the surface – you ship your inventory directly from your manufacturer to Stalco in Canada. Stalco then fulfills your daily US (Canada & Global) orders.
No duty or tax is paid by the consumer on orders that are below the US Customs De Minimis ( $800 USD) when Stalco ships them under Section 321 of the Informal Entry customs clearance process.
Your customers get the products just as fast, your shipping costs don’t change at all and everything is fully tracked. You also then recoup most, if not all, import duty, and perhaps even save your customers from paying sales tax.
STALCO Inc. has had this program running for years, most of us had just never heard about it before – the question is now only if you want to have a chat with them and see if this is something your business can benefit from too.
That’s not the only thing they do – they offer a bunch of standard fulfilment services too. So you might find a very interesting partner in them from another perspective too!
What do you have to lose? Probably 15-30 mins.
What do you have to gain if your products are a fit for the program? ~10% in profit from revenue on all US orders. Just email [email protected] to set up a call and see how they can start saving you money now.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
The Stay Sane Social Media Recipe
Seeing how the weekend is getting underway, we thought we’d share a slightly longer read. But one that can help you enjoy your days better. With less social media.
We haven’t met anyone yet who hasn’t said they’d like to cut down on social media use. Or, at least structure it better so it’s not a distraction.
We manage to do a decent job at that… We’re very picky about when we check social media and we have clear goals there. We don’t go to endlessly scroll through our FB newsfeed. We have 9gag for that!
That said, we could do better. And that’s where this article comes into play. It’s nicely titled “The Stay Sane Social Media Recipe”.
It does 2 things.
First, it explains why you should take control over your phone and social media instead of letting it control you.
In case you didn’t know, social apps are designed to be addictive. They enable all the notifications by default and they don’t send them at random times. If you are not aware of this, they could take you on a slippery slope.
The second thing the article does is go through how you can cut on your social media use.
Step 1? Delete the apps from your phone. The temptation is too big to use them, and you also get those pesky notifications.
What if you disable notifications? Well, how often do you check your phone on a daily basis, even when you didn’t get a notification? Yep, that’s what we thought!
If you feel like you could use less Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, check out the article. If you have a friend who might need it, share it with them… They’ll probably thank you!
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