How to efficiently set up your content planning for 2019

10 super productive ways to use Pinterest for business

Here’s why low-credibility news seems to dominate Twitter

With the entire world seemingly up in arms over “fake news,” you’d think it would have been wiped out by now. Yet low-credibility content continues to thrive on social media thanks to the disproportionately influential effect that social media bots have on humans. A team of researchers from Indiana University at Bloomington recently conducted a ground-breaking study to determine how low-quality news sites manage to reach so many people with dubious articles. And, as you might guess, the answer is bots. The problem TNW spoke with Filippo Menczer, the professor who led the research. He told us that despite the…

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Twitter finally banned misgendering transgender people

Last month, Twitter banned misgendering transgender people as a part of a wider update to its hateful conduct policy. The previous policy banned “repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone.” The new rewording is far more protective in what it considers to be a threat, and now encompasses “media that depicts victims of the Holocaust,” “media that depicts lynchings,” and “images depicting others as less than human, or altered to include hateful symbols, e.g., altering images of individuals to include animalistic features.” The update is a far more conscious recognition of the fact that certain…

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10 Social Media Marketing Basics for Budding Businesses

The Checklist Every Email Marketer Needs This Holiday Season

There’s a simple way to launch a flawless email campaign this holiday season: Check your list and check it twice. Your holiday email marketing campaign checklist, that is! We researched what the best holiday email campaigns have in common. Then, we created a checklist you can follow to ensure you have a merry and successful holiday season.

1. Create a holiday email calendar.

Keeping track of all the holidays (like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Hanukkah, the New Year) can quickly become overwhelming. Creating an email editorial calendar can really help organize the mayhem. A calendar can also help you accommodate for the rest of your team’s time, which comes in handy if they’re helping with tasks like design, writing, or scheduling the message. (If you need a little help with planning your editorial calendar, check out this blog post!) If you already have a calendar, make sure it’s up to date with your holiday campaigns. You’ll be sending a lot of emails this time of year, so planning everything out in advance will help you meet your deadlines and create content your subscribers will love.

2. Offer exclusive holiday promotions.

To keep up with the competition, you’ll want to make sure you’re sending holiday emails with content your subscribers want this time of year, like great deals on your products. Don’t have a physical product to offer? This is the perfect time to provide discounts on digital gifts like online courses, ebooks, checklists, templates, and more. Related: Your Holiday GIF Guide: Festive GIFs to Spice Up Your Holiday Emails

3. Write descriptive subject lines.

According to a report pulled by our team of data analysts, emails get higher open rates when their subjects lines align with the content inside the email. You can apply this to your holiday email campaigns by directly mentioning special offers and details about those offers in your subject lines. If you plan on featuring a 50% discount on an online course, make sure you mention the course and the discount in your subject line. Check out this holiday-themed subject line and email from home goods store West Elm: “😀 UP TO 70% OFF—there’s still time! Plus, our staff’s must-haves” They reference that there's still time left and the discount (percentage off). Related: Your Guide to Writing the World's Best Email Subject Lines

4. Create a sense of urgency by referencing dates and times.

The more you can emphasize the urgency or importance of buying now, the more you can influence subscribers to take action. So how can you get your audience to feel this way? By referencing dates, times, or seasons. In the report mentioned above, our data analysts also found that subject lines with the highest open rates mentioned time (e.g., Week 1, December newsletter). By emphasizing that the holidays are quickly approaching or a specific sale is ending, you can motivate your subscribers to take action. Clothing company Banana Republic sent out an email promoting a Christmas sale, which included the following subject line: “Today! 50% off EVERYTHING (we mean EVERYTHING)”

5. Get festive with your email design

To pump up the holiday energy in your message, consider using a holiday email template or including design elements that convey a festive vibe. Check out this merry message from the clothing company Talbots: By bringing in holiday-themed colors and images (Can’t get enough of those rainbow string lights!), Talbots is able to add a festive flair that accompanies the content. The best part of all? They do so in a way that doesn’t feel like a complete departure from their brand – both the header and footer in the email maintain the standard Talbots look and feel. To replicate this for your own emails, consider using color schemes (e.g., red, green, white, gray), templates, and images (e.g., snow, holiday lights and decor) that convey a seasonal spirit. Related: 5 Holiday Email Templates Your Readers Will Love to Open

Start spreading holiday cheer

While you may already have a holiday email campaign in motion, it’s never too late to make tweaks along the way. The more you can make your emails stand out from the rest this time of year, the merrier the season will be for you and your business. Ready to send your own holiday emails? Get a 30-day free trial of AWeber and use one of our festive email templates today. Additional reporting done by Liz Willits

The post The Checklist Every Email Marketer Needs This Holiday Season appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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Here’s how to find your old embarrassing tweets

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, tricks, guides, and advice on how to get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Have you ever wondered what you tweeted to your 28 followers back in 2009? Was it something along the lines of “Is this thing on?” or “Twitter sucks.” No matter what it was, I guarantee you did a lot of growing-up before becoming the well adjusted adult you are on Twitter today. As Twitter has become one of the most popular social networking sites, the majority of users have tweeted thousands of tweets since…

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Snap, share, eat: The decidedly human reasons we’re obsessed with amateur food photography

As millions sit down to a turkey dinner this week, it’s inevitable that one of you, perhaps even more than one, will break out your smartphone and start snapping pictures of your plate, the turkey, and if they’re lucky, maybe even those who are sharing it with you. You’ll agonize over filters, tap out a clever caption, and hit the share button only to realize you forgot the hashtags. You’ll find the edit button, add a handful of related terms, and save the post, hoping nobody noticed the oversight. Then, and only then, will you pick up a fork. And…

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Hate speech is still too easy to find on social media

Shortly after the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, I noticed that the word “Jews” was trending on Twitter. As a social media researcher and educator, I became concerned that the violence would spread online, as it has in the past. The alleged synagogue shooter’s activity on the Gab social media site has drawn attention to that site’s role as a hate-filled alternative to more mainstream options like Facebook and Twitter. Those are among the social media platforms that have promised to fight hate speech and online abuse on their sites. However, as I explored online activity in the wake of the shooting, it quickly…

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The 3 Email Rules You Must Follow This Holiday Marketing Season

Plan to send emails this holiday marketing season? Stay off your subscribers' naughty list by following these 3 email rules. They'll help you reduce unsubscribes, increase your sales, and get the right message into the right person's hands. This post was based on our popular holiday marketing webinar! Click this link and register to watch it on-demand.

Let your subscribers mute your emails

Problem: Promotional email volume increases significantly during the holiday season. And what do most people do when the volume is high? They hit the “unsubscribe” link. Sending just one too many emails in a given time period might push your average reader to reconsider their subscription. Solution: Include a “mute” button or link in your emails. This will  reduce your unsubscribes during periods of increased sending. Your audience might want to stay on your list and hear from you . . . just not right now, or not about this particular topic/promotion. Give your audience the freedom to choose. Plus, this allows you to send messages to a segment of subscribers that actually WANTS to receive them. You’ll likely see higher conversion rates, higher opens and clicks, and higher revenue generated from this targeted audience. Related: 11 Festive GIFs for Your Holiday Marketing Emails Here's an example of how to incorporate a "mute" option. Using AWeber’s click automations, you can apply a tag to any subscriber that clicks the mute link or button. Below, I named the tag "muted-2019." Now, whenever you send an email that shouldn’t include the subscribers that explicitly said “mute me,” you can easily remove them from the send list. After this tag is applied, you can create a dynamic segment (a fancy word for group) of subscribers that do not have the mute tag. This is the audience who still wants to hear from you. See the example below. I created the segment by choosing anyone who "is not" tagged with muted-2019. This pulls all other subscribers in your list who do not have the muted-2019 tag, and makes them their own segment. When the promotional period is over, or you are back to your regular send frequency, start sending to everyone again!

Discover your best offer with split testing

Problem: How do you know what product or service offer will yield the most sales during Black Friday or Cyber Monday? How do you know what subject line will stand out in an already crowded inbox? The truth is . . .  you don’t. Solution: Split testing (or A/B testing) an email to a small percentage of your email list will give you an opportunity to discover what works! If you sell physical products, you might test different percentage discounts, or a buy one, get one free offer. If you sell services, like coaching or consulting, you might consider testing a free hour of coaching v. a percentage off your normal rate. Using AWeber’s split testing feature, I can test two offers (below): 20% off v. 30% off. I'll send two emails. Each one will go to a small, random segment of my list — say, 10% of my list. In AWeber, I can track the success of the emails to see which offer was most popular and drove more sales. Then, I can send the winning promotional email to the remaining 80% of my list. An email promoting a 30% discount will likely perform better than an email promoting a 20% discount, but by how much? Testing helps us confirm our suspicions and gain insights before we send a promotion to the whole list. (Many email marketing platforms limit what you can split test. Take Constant Contact and ConvertKit. They only allow you to split test subject lines. With AWeber, you can split test nearly every aspect of your emails: subject lines, send times, copy, templates, buttons, and more! This gives you the power to optimize your email strategy. Try it today! Start your 30-day FREE account with AWeber!) Related: 6 Email Split Tests You Can Set Up in Under 1 Minute

Re-engage your sleepy subscribers

Problem: Many people sign up for email lists and then slowly stop engaging with the messages. It’s unlikely these subscribers will ever click through and take advantage of your holiday offer, no matter how enticing it is. Solution: Wake up your sleepy subscribers with a smart re-engagement campaign. This is your chance to have your brand become top of mind before your holiday promotional emails are delivered. Inside AWeber, you can easily search for subscribers that have not engaged with your emails over a period of time. Here's an example of a search for "no opens" over the past 90 days. Then, you can save this as a segment to target with a re-engagement or winback email. (You can also search for subscribers who haven't clicked a link inside your email over a certain time period. Here’s more info on how to do it in AWeber.) Now that you have your unengaged segment, send a message to invite them to stay on the list. This might include an incentive to stick around, or some extra useful content. Here's an example the AWeber team has sent before: If they still don't engage (open or click)? It's in your best interest to unsubscribe these subscribers. Unengaged subscribers can negatively impact your open rates and deliverability, or they may even hit the SPAM button when your content arrives in their inbox. Related: Why You Should Delete a Bunch of Subscribers Right Now Want more expert tips on how to write a subscriber winback or re-engagement campaign? Here’s an entire post full of them.

Want to learn more?

Check out the webinar! Watch it on-demand. AWeber provides the best suite of email marketing tools to help you conquer the holiday marketing season and beyond. Try AWeber for 30 days (FREE!). You can even chat with our Customer Solutions team to get your account set up. (Our team is available 24/7 at our Pennsylvania headquarters!)

The post The 3 Email Rules You Must Follow This Holiday Marketing Season appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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‘Tis the season: Retailers can expect 32% more social messages this holiday season

This is why women’s panties are trending on social media

A women-led protest that began in Ireland has gone global. After a rape trial ended last week in a controversial acquittal, women took to the streets in a protest that’s now going viral with the hashtag #ThisIsNotConsent, and images of women’s underwear. Trigger warning: please be advised the following article contains frank discussion of rape and has embedded media with imagery and terminology that discusses rape and consent. An Irish man was acquitted of rape charges last week during a trial that centered on whether his 17-year-old accuser consented to their sexual encounter. The accused alleged the girl was a willing participant…

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Mark Zuckerberg really wants you to know he reads the New York Times

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today held a press call to talk about the company’s 2nd Community Standards Enforcement report. It was supposed to last 45 minutes, but it ended up nearly 2 hours long thanks to an extended – and very entertaining – interactive session with the national news media. The part about that “Community Standards” stuff — more blah-blah-blah about how Facebook’s algorithms and newly-hired team of crack human hate-speech finders are going to make Facebook great again– was boring and predictable. Facebook is sorry. It’s going to do better. Perhaps the only interesting part there was when the CEO…

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Your Holiday GIF Guide: Festive GIFs to Spice Up Your Holiday Emails

Congratulations! Santa told us that you landed on the nice list this year — not the naughty email spammers list. So here's AWeber's gift to you: 11 animated GIFs for your holiday email marketing campaign. The AWeber design elves whipped up these festive options, shown below. Place them in a Black Friday or Cyber Monday email, a holiday newsletter, or a New Year's sale message to your subscribers.   Plus, these holiday GIFs aren't just eye-catching. Data has shown that GIFs in emails can increase click-through rates, conversions rates, and revenue rates. Talk about the GIF — er, gift — that keeps on giving! Not an AWeber customer yet? Join us! Create your FREE account right now, and see how easy it is to use one of these GIFs in our Drag-and-Drop message editor.

How to download your holiday GIFs

Step 1: Find the animated holiday GIF below that you want to use in your email. Step 2: Save it to your computer by either right clicking the GIF and selecting “Save Image,” or by dragging the GIF to your desktop. Step 3: Upload the GIF into your email template. Related: Everything You Need to Know about Using GIFs in Email

Holiday GIFs

Happy New Year GIFs

Black Friday and Cyber Monday GIFs

How can I use these GIFs in my emails?

Try one of these three GIF placements.

Place the GIF above the headline

Add a holiday GIF above your email headline to catch subscribers' attention and draw them in right away.

Place the GIF the body of the email

Break up sections of content by adding a holiday GIF into the body of your email. It'll keep your readers moving down the page toward your call-to-action button.

Place the GIF at the end of the email

Want your subscribers to read your entire message first? Place a holiday GIF after the call-to-action button.

Best practices for using holiday GIFs in email

1. Don't overdo it: Use only one GIF per email. 2. Actually, only use a GIF when you think it'll help your email perform better. If it distracts your subscriber from reading your message or clicking on your call-to-action, then skip the GIF. 3. Consider removing all other images besides your GIF so that subscribers aren’t overwhelmed with visuals. 4. Hyperlink your GIF to the landing page you’d like people to visit. (Many people will click on the GIF itself.) 5. Creating your own GIF? Include your call to action in the first frame. That way, your subscribers can click through even if the animation doesn’t work. 6. Always test your emails. Most email clients will display GIFs, but there are a some exceptions like Outlook 2007-2013 and Windows Phone 7. In these clients, the GIFs will display as static images. Related: 3 Ways to Test Your Emails before You Hit 'Send' 7. Keep your GIF’s file size small (aim for less than 40KB). You can use Photoshop to decrease the file size if need be. 8. Your GIF should be relevant to the rest of the content in your email. Make sure it supplements your subject line, call to action, and message text. 9. No matter what GIF you use, make your call to action loud and clear. (Here are 8 Powerful Email Copywriting Techniques to use in your next email.) 10. Test a GIF in different locations within your email to see where it performs best. (AWeber's powerful split testing feature allows you to test GIF placement, subject lines, send times, copy, templates, buttons, and more! Try it out today for FREE.) If you like this post and want to receive more free GIFs, email marketing tips, and educational courses, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, FWD: Thinking.

The post Your Holiday GIF Guide: Festive GIFs to Spice Up Your Holiday Emails appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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Tinder adds more gender identity options for Indian users

Tinder has introduced a new gender option for its app users in India. This feature brings a wider array of options for individuals to identify themselves as. Prior to this update, users could only identify themselves as either a “Man” or “Woman.” In a blogpost published by Tinder yesterday, the company announced how users can adjust their gender information on the app: “To edit or add more information about your gender on Tinder, simply edit your profile. When you tap “I Am” and select “More” you can type a word that describes your gender identity. You can also select to…

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White House pushes ridiculous ‘assault’ video to defend reporter ban

Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday accused CNN’s Jim Acosta of “inappropriate behavior” towards a White House intern, citing this as the reason his press pass was revoked. The Press Secretary did this in a 194-word screed posted from an official White House account on Twitter. She then punctuated her point by sharing a video of the incident edited by Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson. The incident in question occurred yesterday during President Donald Trump’s press conference in the West Wing. Throughout the presser, the President took questions from a number of reporters including Acosta. As the event wore on, Acosta elicited Trump’s…

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This tool is like Buffer for Instagram stories

Stories are short, ephemeral blobs of content — videos and pictures, mostly — which Snapchat popularized in 2013, followed by Instagram, Facebook, and… er… Skype. But for all their popularity, there aren’t that many good ways to create and manage them at scale. One option is Mish Guru, which today launched a tool to plan, create, and manage Instagram stories. Think of it as a bit like Buffer (or Klout, remember Klout?) for stories. The tool handles every part of the story-making process, beginning with storyboarding and scheduling. Social media managers can create the content they want to send out…

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TikTok’s military users shine a light on the everyday realities of enlisted life

For most people, playing Call of Duty‘s campaign mode is as close as they’ll get to joining the military. For them, the everyday realities of uniformed service are unknown. But shining a light on this world are ordinary servicemen and women, and they’re using an unusual tool to do it. For reasons I’ve yet to discern, the Chinese video sharing app (and bonafide teen sensation) TikTok is immensely popular with members of the military, who use it to share viral memes, perform “duets” with other users, take part in challenges, and share snippets of their day-to-day duties. These videos tend…

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