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If in this period of social distancing you’ve grown tired of typing, Twitter has some good news. In a new update, you can record your voice and share that audio as a tweet to your followers. A perk? These can also be listened to as you multi-task such as checking email or working on a document — comparable to a micro podcast.

For those keeping tabs, this isn’t Twitter’s first foray into the audio space. In 2018 it launched audio-only live streams in its native platform as well as Periscope and just last month, its design team shared a mock-up of audio tweet display options that they called “Hear and Now.”

Adding a human touch to conversations

“Over the years, photos, videos, gifs, and extra characters have allowed you to add your own flair and personality to your conversations. But sometimes 280 characters aren’t enough and some conversational nuances are lost in translation,” explained Maya Patterson, Staff Product Designer, and Rémy Bourgoin, Senior Software Engineer in the blog announcement. Put simply, sometimes you just want to say what you have to say versus trying to get the tone exactly right in a written out tweet. There’s a lot that can go unsaid or uninterpreted via text, so the platform’s goal with the newest offering is to bring a more human experience to conversations.

Adding 140-second audio clips to tweets

To start, ensure you have the latest version of Twitter installed on your iPhone then open the app. If you’re included in the platform’s beta group, you’ll be able to see a purple wavelength icon next to your camera icon when you begin a new tweet. Once you select the wavelength icon, you’ll then be able to tap a red microphone icon — over a photo of your profile picture — where you can begin to record your voice. Each audio tweet can last up to 140 seconds — or two minutes, 20 seconds. If you exceed the time limit, the app will create a new recording, stringing together a thread of voice tweets.

When you’re finished, hit “Done” in the top right corner. For some added flair, add any contextual words, photos, or GIFs before sending out your tweet to your timeline. To listen to your tweet or someone else’s, just tap the image in your timeline. The audio will appear like an embedded video with a start and pause option with your profile image as the visual. If you’re using an iPhone, the video will be displayed in a new window so you can listen while you scroll through other tweets. The process, as described in the official announcement, really is not all that different from tweeting with text.

A couple of caveats to note: audio tweets will keep playing in the background if you happen to switch to another app and you can’t include audio tweets in replies or retweets with a comment — only original tweets.

Moerdation hurdles

In a recent tweet thread in conversation with accessibility advocates, Twitter software engineer Andrew Hayward revealed the company doesn’t have a team dedicated to accessibility, instead they rely on employees who volunteer their time above and beyond their usual duties. A separate spokesperson for the platform, in a statement to The Verge reiterated that the concerns are heard and that Twitter is committed to building out its advocacy resources across all products including a more stringent accessibility review and establishing a more “more dedicated group” to focus on the problem.

“We missed around voice Tweets, and we are committed to doing better — making this feature more accessible and also all features in the future. We’re constantly reviewing both the functionality of our products and the internal processes that inform them; we’ll share progress in this area.” the company shared. With the influx of audio content online driven by podcasting, this won’t be the last time accessibility comes to the forefront of decisions and it’s critical that they listen to their audiences with empathy so they can ensure an equitable and meaningful experience for all.

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The post How Twitter is Creating a More Human Experience Through Audio appeared first on Social Media Week.

Amid years of controversy and scrutiny surrounding political content, Facebook is approaching the upcoming 2020 election with a new, multi-faceted approach, what it’s labeling, “another line of defense” against interference and a mechanism to avoid amplifying disinformation. Core to the solution is shifting responsibility to the public at large by equipping them with the details they need to vote and have their voices heard and enabling them to “turn off” political ads they don’t wish to see.

A new voter information hub

“Voting is voice. It’s the single most powerful expression of democracy, the best way to hold our leaders accountable and how we address many of the issues our country is grappling with….but accountability only works if we can see what those seeking our votes are saying, even if we viscerally dislike what they say,” Zuckerberg said in a recent op-ed for USA Today. Put simply, rather than remove misinformation, the emphasis will be on lifting voter participation.

To achieve this the platform is unveiling a Voter Information Hub modeled off of the COVID-19 information center launched earlier this spring. At a high-level, it will provide essential guidance to U.S. voters including how to register to vote, request a mail-in or absentee ballot, and, most importantly, when to vote, where to vote, and whether there are ID requirements. The info center will also supply local alerts from election officials outlining any adjustments to voting methods in light of the pandemic.

With this push, Facebook’s goal is to register 4 million voters using Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger — double what it estimates it helped people register in 2016 and 2018. Further, the platform expects more than 160 million to see this authoritative information between July and November according to Naomi Gleit, Facebook’s Vice President of Product Management and Social Impact.

Opting out of political ads on Facebook and Instagram

Back in January Facebook introduced more options to limit how a user could be targeted by political advertisers by opting-out of Custom Audience targeting. Alternatively, if an advertiser had used a list to exclude them, they could make themselves eligible to see the ads. Looking ahead, Facebook is taking an even bigger step in this direction by enabling people to opt-out of political ads entirely.

Specifically, “all social issues, electoral or political ads from candidates, Super PACs or other organizations that have the “Paid for by” political disclaimer on them.” The same options will also be available on Instagram. There are two ways to turn off political ads — either through each platform’s ad settings or directly for any political or social issue ad that pops on your feed.

In the Facebook app,

1. Tap the “Menu” button then navigate to your settings (three horizontal lines in the bottom right corner)
2. Next, tap “Ad Preferences” then “Ad Topics”
3. In the pop-up menu, select “see fewer ads about this topic”

In the Instagram app, the process is similar and beings by:

1. Pressing the “Menu” button within your main profile (three horizontal lines in the upper right corner)
2. Under “Settings,” select “Ads” then “Topic Preferences”
3. Finally, tap “Social Issues, Elections or Politics,” and then “Save“

To opt-out directly through a political ad, find any post marked as “Paid by” a political campaign, candidate, or group, then “Confirmed Organization.” For Instagram, this will show in a button labeled “Paid for by.” A pop-up message will then appear allowing you to select to see fewer ads that are similar.

Enhancing transparency around ad spend

Another key part of Facebook’s latest initiative is bringing greater transparency around advertising spend. In this vein, the company is introducing a new update to its Ad Library whereby the amount of ad spending can be traced for US House and Senate races as well as Presidential candidates. In addition, a custom tracker will compare the spending of advertisers running political or issue ads allowing voters to gather a breakdown as to the finances behind the different messages they’re being served.

Collectively, this is a significant step for the platform — one that will continue to evolve as the weeks and months go on and that will be interesting to observe as people take political content into their own hands through these manual options.

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The post How Facebook is Looking to Support Democracy in 2020 and Beyond appeared first on Social Media Week.

Change is all around us and an overarching goal in our industry is to find the silver lining in the context of the uncertain. This especially holds for smaller businesses — chances are you are looking to the platform and other digital tools to manage and market your business. By focusing on the basics, you can not only stay true to your goals and the reasons behind why you exist, but you can also dedicate more energy and efforts towards staying inspired, innovating, and growth.

Here are five free tools you should consider to help you achieve your objectives:

Vimeo Create

Marketers are turning to alternative ways to stay connected in an age of social distancing, including video, yet small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t have the tools, time or budgets to make videos at the volume and quality needed to compete. New tools allow businesses to focus on creative insight and communicate meaningfully at scale and eases some of the challenges presented by the modern video format.

With Vimeo Create, available on desktop and as an app, businesses can create videos in minutes by tapping into pre-made, professionally curated video templates customizable to their specific needs and millions of stock photos, videos, and royalty-free music. They can also opt to roll up their sleeves further by starting from scratch integrating their own video footage shot from a mobile device. After the video is finalized, marketers can automatically tailor the content for each of their social channels including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Vimeo is expanding on its goal to level the playing field of video creation through a new campaign: Get Business Moving. From now until July 17 Vimeo is offering free three-month subscriptions to users who register through the Vimeo Create mobile app. This includes unlimited access to all Create video templates, millions of stock images and videos, custom branding tools, distribution, and analytics to promote your business during this challenging time. As part of this launch, Vimeo is also releasing new Create templates and debuting an educational guide on how to get back up and running.

Canva

Since its launch in 2012, Canva has found steady growth for its consistent delivery on a mission to enable the whole world to design. With Canva, you can create everything from invites and posters to website ads and landing pages. A big use case for the platform is its slideshow-maker Presentations, which now lets users edit slide decks on mobile devices and easily optimize them for smaller screens, embed them with video, social posts, and other visuals, and push them live with shareable URLs.

As of 2019 Canva was valued at $3.2 billion and boasts over 20 million users, including over 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies, across 190 countries. Collectively, the community is responsible for more than 1 million presentations created each week and it hasn’t shown signs of growth during COVID-19. In response to the pandemic, Canva released a feature allowing users access to a library of easily editable Zoom background templates. With this, people can bring a little fun to the table when they can’t be in a conference room with their colleagues paired with a touch of personalization, allowing people to either use designer-made backgrounds or their own designs.

Separately, with the launch of Facebook “Shops,” Canva introduced a collection of optimized design templates for free in addition to a range of resources tailored to support small businesses across a variety of industries including retail and restaurant who are especially confronted with hardship. Finally, FedEx and Cava announced a partnership centered around a digital design-to-print marketplace for struggling businesses to create the professionally printed materials needed to get back to business

Unsplash

Unsplash entered the scene in 2013 as a Tumblr blog and since evolved into one of the leading stock photo libraries. Currently, over 10 billion Unsplash images are seen every month with an average single photo featured on the site garnering more views than the front page of The New York Times. They also have more image downloads a month than Shutterstock, Getty Images, and Adobe Stock combined and more contributors than Wikipedia.

To participate, you can simply upload an image to the site and artificial intelligence will analyze the image and add keywords and then promote it across Unsplash feeds and under relevant searches. What’s especially unique is that reach doesn’t require massive amounts of personal data hyper-targeting — the photo’s utility and message put them in front of the right audience. Unsplash is not restricted to any geographic region allowing principles of diversity, inspiration, connection, and sharing to dominate its community in lieu of strict copyright and legal red tape.

Beyond PowerPoints and business plans, images are increasingly being used to tell stories in today’s world when we either fortunately or unfortunately, are dependent on the screen to understand human stories during this global pandemic. In this vein, Unsplash recently leveraged its platform and distribution power to create a coronavirus response library for the UN, which served as a visual Public Service Announcement system for the cause.

You can learn more about Unsplash in this recap of a session featuring its CEO Mikael CEO that took place during #SMWONE.

HubSpot CRM

Customer relationship management is essential to any and every business but solutions are not one-size-fits-all and finding the right mix for your marketing stack can be daunting. If you’re unsure where to start or if you’re a smaller business tight on resources, HubSpot CRM is a solid contender for its intuitive interface, flexibility, and widespread set of features to meet a variety of needs across email tracking and notifications prospect tracking, meeting, and scheduling.

Specifically, free CRM features offered by HubSpot include a built-in activity stream with notifications delivered immediately after a lead opens an email, clicks on a link, or downloads an important document, a real-time email metrics including open rates and click-through rates, a library of email templates designed for every step of your customer’s journey and the option to create your own, and storage of up to 1 million contact and company records using their email addresses, inbox, or form submissions.

With business growth comes the need to organize critical information and a CRM is an essential tool in informing both long-term strategies and on-the-fly decisions — a balance marketers are grappling with now more than ever.

Feedly

Information overload is not a new term yet we continue to be plagued by its effects, uncertain which sources to trust and not having the time to trace down the insights we need across a multitude of sources.

Feedly is an app with the goal of sharing information and connecting marketers with the topics they’re most passionate about without the hassle and headaches. Across Twitter feeds, research journals, business and tech publications, YouTube channels, leading newspapers, or niche publications, the app leverages AI to organize information so you can skim by topic and extract the headlines you need to advance your career whether just by following the latest updates or developing a new skill or area of expertise.

Along the educational vein, major platforms are stepping up in recent months to offer courses and resources catered to what is going on in the world including LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, and Snapchat. These cover top-of-mind topics such as productivity and mindfulness and ways to boost your advertising efforts.

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The post 5 Free Tools to Grow Your Small Business appeared first on Social Media Week.

Content marketing is driven by the needs of rising above the noise, fueling engagement, and creating affinity and loyalty around your mission. This has never been more true and with consumer focus changing more frequently due to recent events, understanding what your business should be communicating and how is harder than ever.

To offer some support in this regard, LinkedIn has published a new guide that outlines a range of key points related to a changing environment, including how brands have found success in other moments of crisis. Here are some of the larger themes as well as insights into evolving conversation topics taking hold as of late.

Reevaluate: go back to the “why”

Above all brands need to re-assess their content approach, and what they’re aiming to achieve.
“Just because your products and solutions might see a drop in demand, that doesn’t mean your audience has dropped their expectations of you as a brand — they’ve just changed,” the guide explains. In this vein, going back to your core business mission will help you identify and justify expectations and how you can best meet them. A best practice as you do this is to be consistent with the conversations you engage with — demonstrate you are eager to listen and address concerns and questions along the journey. From these insights, you can navigate questions, big or small, such as whether your ads will still resonate or whether you need to devise a new campaign that uproots your strategy.

Avoid the ‘hard sell’ ad; lean into empathy

The guide also underscores the importance of not overlooking humility when trying to interact with your audience during this time. This may go without saying but in some cases is easily swept aside when looking to chase the next big shiny object. When faced with hardship, and in an age of social distancing, people expect self-awareness, generosity and agility. What this entails is going beyond the hard-sell tactics or vanity messages that emphasize content performance and instead, leaning more on the underlying message. To achieve this, start with integrating a few simple features into your ads as your guidepost:

• Established brand characters
• Repeated or familiar scenarios
• Ads set in the past
• Ads celebrating human connections and showing self-awareness
• Ads with strong connection to place and community

The big takeaway: Take a beat and dedicate quality time to brand awareness and trust. This will continue to pay-off as the world adjusts over the coming months and years ahead while also allowing you to prepare for unanticipated road bumps along the way.

How the Conversation Has Shifted

Overall message volume seeing significant upticks, and will most likely continue to do so in the coming weeks. But, what’s even more interesting is how the conversation within those messages has changed. Holler recently dug into certain topics that are relevant in the current moment and some interesting trends were revealed.

On its own app itself, it’s seen spikes of 26 percent since early March as people experiment with creative ways to stay connected whether Zoom, FaceTime or group messaging chats. Chat around words like “healthy” “home” and “family” in addition to more empathetic topics such as “thinking of you” and “safe” are used increasingly. In just a two-week span the word “bored” grew 127.6 percent while “thinking of you” is experiencing a 35.52 percent share rate. Aside from empathy, humor is at the forefront of interactions with a separate report finding that 73 percent use humor to help loved ones overcome difficulties, and 82 percent use it as a means to cope with the current state of the world.

Concern, care, levity, and support are themes that translate into visuals that help people meaningfully stay connected even when afar and alleviate stress and anxiety. Beyond this, visual communications and messaging have also played an increasing role in driving social impact. In the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, a dedicated sticker launched earlier this month now has been shared more than 76,000 times, and is the top sticker shared on Venmo.

Listening to the trends in conversations during this time and what your consumers need will continue to be integral long after the pandemic. By applying these insights to your approach, your brand can become a more valuable contributor to the conversation.

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The post How to Market Your Business During Times of Uncertainty appeared first on Social Media Week.