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An entire digital marketing group is taken down by Facebook!
As reported by Facebook, Twinmark Media Enterprises, a digital marketing group from the Philippines was banned from the platform because:
“This organization has repeatedly violated our misrepresentation and spam policies — including through coordinated inauthentic behaviour, the use of fake accounts, leading people to ad farms, and selling access to Facebook Pages to artificially increase distribution and generate profit.”
The marketing group had a huge presence on the social network with around 220 Facebook Pages, 73 Facebook accounts and 29 Instagram accounts. All taken down in one shot.
With such a huge presence, the group had an organic reach of around 43M people.
Facebook got suspicious about this company when it discovered that Twinmark was selling admin rights of its Facebook Pages. All this to increase content distribution and generate revenue, which violated FB’s spam policies.
FB went even deeper into the investigation and showed a few examples of the misleading posts the group had made.
The times when you could play without respecting the rules are further and further away. Facebook wants to clean up its social environment!
Also, did any of you ladies and gents work with these pages? Their ads look oddly like affiliate angles…
E-COMMERCE
Google’s UX Playbook for e-commerce – leaked!
The user experience plays an important role in how users perceive your websites.
Slow loading times, uncompressed images, lack of brand message, complex navigation – all these UX issues decrease the user’s intent for buying and affect your sales negatively.
Google created an eBook for e-commerce stores with some case studies and insights to help you improve conversions and sales.
The retail playbook addresses 6 core website components and their areas of improvement:
1. Home/Landing Page: Does it provide all the necessary information?
2. Menu & Navigation: Is it easy to navigate around the site and find what they are looking for?
3. Site Search: Can they quickly search for what they want?
4. Category/Product: Are products relevantly categorized and keep the users interested?
5. Conversions: Is the buying process easy?
6. Payment Form Optimization: Can forms be submitted and payments be made easily from any device?
Here’s what makes up for a powerful home/landing page:
- Clear and descriptive CTA buttons.
- A benefit-oriented value proposition above the fold.
- Remove automatic image sliders or carousels.
- Display top categories on the homepage.
- Use a prominent search bar.
- Use legible font sizes.
- Use social proof.
Menu & Navigation:
- Use a consolidated menu at the top of the page but keep it less than 1/5 of the page.
- Include post-sales actions to the menu: size guides, customer service, item exchange, refunds, delivery.
- Use dynamic menu or expanders.
Site Search:
- Make it clearly visible and easy to find.
- Replace the search icon with a search bar.
- Implement spelling corrections and auto-suggestions.
- Show the next set of relevant results in case there are no exact match results for users search term. Don’t go with an empty “Sorry, we did not find anything that matches your search”.
According to Google, “Users that search are 200% more likely to convert on average.”
Category/Product:
- Appealing and easy to navigate products.
- Adding a clear value proposition to each product page. It decreases the cart abandonment rate and increases the CVR.
- Enable easy filtering for a large number of products.
- Perform A/B testing to find the best filters for your store.
- Create time, quantity and contextual limitation.
Conversions:
- Make the checkout process smooth and easy.
- After they add an item to a cart, do not redirect them. Instead, offer them options to continue shopping, proceed to checkout, or view the bag.
- Allow guest checkout. 35% of the users will abandon their carts because of the obligatory registration process.
- Limit exit points. Do not show the menu once the user is at the point of conversion.
- Use a progress bar or pagination during the checkout process.
- Enable sign-up via social media platforms.
Payment Form Optimization:
- Minimize the number of steps and actions that the user has to take to make the payment.
- Automate the payment process by using inline validation, autofill.
- Don’t use dropdowns if there are less than 4 options.
- Set billing same as shipping address by default.
- Automatically determine the credit card type.
These are just breadcrumbs, the playbook provides further industry examples with images that explain why something works. You can download and read the whole retail playbook here. And, don’t forget about testing the features you haven’t already and get your store ready for the skyrocketing 2019 sales!
New ways to post!
How active are you on the ‘Gram? We are not talking about sharing pictures of your sushi or trips to tropical countries…We are talking about biz!
Well, if you use Instagram to generate those sales, there have been some cool updates to simplify your life.
One is about the ability of scheduling video post through third-party apps. Something that wasn’t possible so far.
And if you manage more than one account, there is another good piece of news for you:
You can now re-post your feed posts to multiple accounts at once.
Instagram is adding the ability to publish your feed posts to multiple accounts of yours in one go. How? By toggling them on within the composer screen. The feature was released only for iOS users for now.
While this upgrade simplifies the life of many, on the other hand, it will reduce the originality of the ‘Gram. Different audiences of different accounts will see the same shots and captions, leaving little scope for originality and content uniqueness.
And it’s only up to the algorithm to catch generic content that doesn’t resonate with people.
Plus, if you want to have everything scheduled, and take some free time for that sushi… This new upgrade will definitely help you, especially if you use videos among your content.
Businesses can schedule videos directly to Instagram.
Previously, the Instagram API was limited to scheduling single-image posts. It wasn’t possible with third-party tools to schedule videos or multi-image posts.
Now, with this update, you can use social-media management apps to schedule videos and multi-pictures posts.
Well, just normal updates to simplify our lives. And make it a better place to spend your time and efforts in!
Hoping that those updates will give you more free time to take care of your personal profile pictures. Have a very Instagram-able weekend ahead!
QUORA
Create your own communities on Quora.
After rolling out the “Question Retargeting” feature yesterday, Quora is back with another feature rollout called “Spaces”.
Helping you create more tailored content and communities around the topics you are passionate about. Which in turn could allow you to use its targeting and retargeting features more efficiently
Here’s how you can use the Spaces feature:
- A group of people with common interests can curate the most interesting answers and links about a particular area of interest.
- Individuals can use spaces to organize their own writing into different sections. Very much like Facebook’s not-so-successful Notes feature.
- Similar to Facebook groups, a community of people can create a space to have shared conversations with each other.
While this feature is still being rolled out, the ability to create new spaces is currently limited to a handful of writers and publishing partners.
Considering the targeting options now available, it is something content curators should definitely check out. Why? It seems to offer a cool way to create engaged communities.
Especially if you think you are a bit late in creating your own Groups around topics that are already saturated on Facebook.
SPONSORED
Making waves in the New Year!
Now that you are probably back to work and focusing on launching those campaigns, we thought we’d let you know about TopOffers, named Best CPA Network by 2 different publications! Business of Apps and YNOT Awards both considered TopOffers the best network of 2018.
You’ve probably seen them around conferences and meetups… Or maybe you haven’t. Let’s fix that.
They are not just a CPA network. They started with laser-focus on dating because they have real, in-house offers. How? Well, when Together Network closed their affiliate program, TopOffers got the exclusive on it and essentially runs their program now.
So, point 1: truly exclusive dating offers (not just adult) that you could once find on Together Network. On PPL (SOI and DOI), PPS, RevShare…
Point 2: There’s no shortage of offers. Boasting a database of over 1.5k offers,you will find almost any country you wish. More than 50 countries on a PPL model actually! And it’s not just dating. They’ve launched sweeps, crypto and games.
Point 3: Some of the biggest bonuses for new affiliates. A $1k welcome bonus about which you can read here. Then you get a $500 on top of your first withdrawal.
AND… If you send Italian or German traffic, make at least $1k in revenue, you get $500 on top.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
This is what Google should tell Apple…
Yesterday we talked about Apple taking a dig at Google’s privacy woes. And we were hoping for Google to respond in kind.
Well, the answer did arrive. However, this answer didn’t come from Google, but from one of our readers. It simply said, “Hey Apple, yeah right!”
Who could have said it better?!
Hey Google, if you were looking for people to add to your PR team, we have an idea. Hire our reader! If you want the contact details… well, we can’t provide them. Privacy, ya’ know! But we can tell our reader you are interested. Deal?
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