Social Tech Animal

With the rapid development of technology in our country in the recent years and the improvement of data services by service providers, we can now enjoy internet access at the palms of our hands without necessarily milking our pockets dry. The mobile phone industries are the front-runners in this revolution to make the Kenyan youth a part of the global village as they continue to churn out amazing gadgets tailor-made for them at affordable prices. Well, a phone is no longer considered worthy if it does not have internet access, you might as well be using a calculator! No one cares for such anymore.

In as much as this revolution has proven to be very useful especially to the average college-going Kenyan youth, one cannot fail to notice its downsides; the first being that every Tom, Dick and Harry can now access the internet, the social media to be specific, and get away with virtually anything. These are the people who make life in the social media (Twitter and Facebook ) a pain the backside. Well, I am not as bold and brutal as Blogger Y but I will make subtle pointers and Subaru’s your way. If the shoe fits, wear it.

1.     The Braggarts

These are by far the most annoying tweeps IMO, their tweets and posts all reek of flossing. All they ever tweet about is how tweet about how their Kenyan Airways flight got delayed and how they got crappy services. They will banter endlessly about how they have gotten tired of their iPhones and need to get a galaxy SIII. They will dutifully inform us about the meal they just had at the Norfolk or any other high ended joint and attach evidence in the form of Instagram pics. These folks will not stop there, they have to make the whole world aware of the new iPad they just purchased and will go on and on, even to the extent of making known to us the amount of cash they pay for a haircut. Well, dear Braggarts, we simply don’t care! So what if we ain’t as privileged as you are? So what if the only encounter we’ve had with a plane is the field trip to the airport we had in primary school… so what if we know Serena hotel because we happen to pass there on our way to Uhuru Park? That definitely does not give you the license to torture the rest of us with your childish antiques. I most definitely did not hustle for bundles and free Wi-Fi to be subjected to nonsense. If you must make the world know about your status, then by all means outshine the Middle-Eastern royal families in terms of flamboyance then we shall all start giving you some credit.

 2.     The Political psychos and wannabe analysts.

Boy, am I glad that the election period is over. These tweeps can make you hurl your phone at the wall in utter frustration. Their poison-laced opinions about politicians and their predictions will fill your timeline. These tweeps assume that their opinions are the only true ones and everyone must abide by them. Woe unto the person who dares to oppose them, they will be subjected to insults that have no relation whatsoever to the subject at hand. Their bile seems to boil over when one mentions anything conflicting about the political allegiances they pledge to. They will unleash their wrath on innocent tweeps who find escape and refuge in the social media. Dear wannabe TL analysts, if you want respect, get paid for airing your opinion, let us see you write credible articles on the papers and see you get invited to do the same on talk shows. For now, chill out; don’t shove your opinions down our throats.

 3.     The Avi-Critics cum Bullies

I tend to think that tweeps in this category tend to have LSE syndrome and issues that can only be salvaged if they seek help from counselors. They are by far the idlest and a major characteristic is that they possess cartoon avis, quite ironic, huh? One must not confuse tweeps in this category with those who point out features in a person in a light hearted manner and are just out to have innocent fun. These bullies derive pleasure in calling other tweeps ugly and in taunting people based on their looks. They will rant and rave about how person X is ugly AF and how person Y needs plastic surgery. Well, last time I checked, none of us created ourselves. We have no option but to be happy and content with what we have. And if at all you were to judge others on the basis of their looks, let us see you crowned as the next Mr. /Miss Universe(if that exists i.e)

 4.     The Foul Mouths

‘’Childish” is what I would use to describe tweeps in this category. Someone needs to do us all a favour and take them all back to kindergarten. They will insult people over petty issues and are known for causing drama all over. These tweeps are usually the main characters in most tweefs and their signature sign is name-calling with ‘whore’ and ‘kihii’ being on the top-ten of their insult list. I honestly think this tweeps need to develop their cognitive skills and do a little bit of growing up before we can waste time talking about them

 5.     The Druggies

So you enjoy a few drinks now and then, so you take a joint of your favorite stash once in a while. Well and good, but pray please we don’t want to know about your escapades, neither do we want our eyes to be subjected to pictures of drunk females nor want to see the drink you are poisoning your beloved  liver(RIP) with. There are far important issues in our lives like LOLing to Droid’s memes. Please do not air your dirty linen in public, we don’t want to know just how messed up your life is. The least we can do is pray for you, and pity the people you will marry or get married to. For now we can only hope that one day the Jehovah witnesses will finally make you see the light. And FYI drugs are not good for you, unless of course you’re on auto-pilot to the grave and you simply don’t care.

I will not include those tweeps who say NKT, LOL, OMG and LMAO out loud in this list because I believe they need a special reservation in Mathare Hospital. Such behavior can only be exhibited by a person who is on their path to complete mental retardation… and thus I rest my case.

Social media may be in the midst of its heyday, and content marketing has been hailed as king more times than I can count, but it’s email that still remains one of the best communication methods for buyers and consumers. Yet despite the perceived ease with which emails land in your inbox, many marketers have yet to master the art of email marketing. From send times to subject lines, there are quite a few variables to consider before hitting that “send” button, and it’s not uncommon for steps to get overlooked during the email campaign creation process.

To make things easier for the time-strapped marketer, I've broken email creation into six essential steps. Take a look at the list below to make sure you’re always on the right track.

1. Segment Your Audience
Before you craft your content or decide on a send time, you need to have a clear idea of your audience. The more targeted your communications, the better the likelihood that your emails will be opened and engaged with. Are you trying to reach a certain geographic region? A specific product segment or job title? Have your target audience in mind from the very start.

2. Create Your Content
No email is complete without content, and once you’ve picked your next crop of recipients, you’re ready to start creating targeted, relevant messages for them. Tailor your content to their known interests and needs, and make sure you include both a compelling subject line and call to action.

3. Build Your Email
Once you've written your email copy, you’re ready to create your email template. If you have an email marketing service, you should be able to use a WYSIWYG editor or HTML interface to build your template. If possible, try including images and call to action buttons to break up text. Many platforms will let you preview your work as you build it, which makes it much easier to see how your changes will impact the overall design.

4. Conduct Deliverability Tests
It’s important to test for email deliverability before sending out your email blast. You don’t want to waste time creating an email that won’t ever make it into your recipients’ inboxes. Many email platforms let you conduct deliverability and SPAM tests to show you where your emails could be improved, and where there might be red flags that could impact your deliverability rates.

5. Choose Your Send Time
Send times are tricky, and they often depend on your audience. As a general rule of thumb, send emails during business hours in the morning or in the early afternoon, right after lunch. If you have any email data to look through from previous email sends, sift through it to see how your various send times might have impacted open rates. It might take some trial and error, but you should be able to find a time that works for your audience.

6. Track and Analyze
There’s no way to build on your email marketing efforts without constant evaluation. Make sure you’re tracking open rates, click-through rates, and email bounces to see what content is resonating with your audience, which subject lines work best, and which areas could use improvement.  Click on the link above to get a better understanding on how to do this.

And there you have it! Working through the six steps above will have you well on your way to developing successful email campaigns.

Facebook today announced that it is bringing hashtags to its service, letting users add context to a post, indicate that it is part of a larger discussion, as well as discover shared interests. The company says hashtags have become “a vital part of popular culture” and since it has seen users using them on the social network organically, it has decided to actually implement the feature.

While you could always technically create a hashtag on Facebook (just put a # before any word), they will now be clickable, taking you to a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic. On hashtag pages, you will naturally only be able to see the posts that you would normally see elsewhere on the social network: those that your friends have shared with you as well as those shared as Public.

The new feature means Facebook users can now:

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the hashtag is a word or a phrase prefixed with the symbol #. Facebook mentions other services that use hashtags, putting Instagram first on its list, and then noting competitors Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest, but notably excluding Google+. Although Twitter does not own the concept of the hashtag, the company has popularized it to the point most people associate the phrase with the social network – nowadays it’s difficult to find a Twitter feed without multiple hashtags, and many tweets have arguably too many.

Facebook and Twitter regularly grab features from each other as use cases for the two social networks continue to overlap. Many users nowadays have both Facebook and Twitter accounts, although the former service is still significantly larger than the latter.

Recently, Facebook changed the name of its “Subscribe” button to “Follow” and also renamed subscribers to followers. This tweak came after Facebook built its own button similar to Twitter’s Follow button.

A rumor suggesting Facebook could soon be adding hashtag support first surfaced in March. Given that Facebook last year acquired Instagram, which uses hashtags mainly to let users sort through photos, we noted at the time that hashtags could be a way for the company to bring the two services closer together, but right now that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Facebook is presumably adopting the hashtag for the same reasons as Twitter: to let its users organize and filter messages around a single topic or theme. This offers yet another way to browse the social network, in addition to manually going to people’s Timeline profiles and of course visiting the News Feed.

In fact, the company hints that hashtags “are just the first step” in a series of features that will bring conversations about public events, people, and topics on the social network to “the forefront of people’s Facebook experience.” Some of these include trending hashtags and deeper insights, slated to arrive “in the coming weeks and months,” but Facebook wouldn’t share more.

Whether you're convinced that Google+ is a virtual ghost town or not, it can be difficult to refute the social network's stable of unique tools and features for business users. One of the most valuable is Google Hangouts, the tool that allows you to host video chats online.

With Google+ Hangouts, up to nine people can chat face-to-face for free on the network. Participants can watch a YouTube video together, doodle and collaborate using Google Docs.

Business owners can take the chat tool a step further with Google Hangouts on Air, which allows you to host video discussions and broadcast them live to the public. All a viewer needs to do is have a Google+ account and connect with a business of interest by adding it to his or her Circles. The video is broadcasted on the admin of that Page's personal YouTube channel and on the business's Google+ page.

Google+ Hangouts on Air can be helpful for internal and public use, but broadcasting them allows for deeper, face-to-face interaction with your customers that you might not be able to achieve with other channels online. 

Here are some ideas for effective Google+ Hangouts on Air:

Related: Surprising Ways to Use Google+ for Business

1. Offer free product demos and webinars to your customers. 
Providing value to your customers for free can be a rewarding way to encourage them to pay for your services in the future. Whether you're giving a sneak peek into the cooking classes you offer or teaching your audience about the newest changes to Facebook's algorithm, using this feature can be ideal for turning viewers into customers.

2. Host customer service sessions.
Set times with your audience where you're open to question and answers sessions about your products or services. Hangouts allow viewers to take their turn and easily ask questions as they have them.

Try hosting one of these sessions to see if your audience is interested. If they are, be sure to remain consistent about when you hold the sessions and for how long.

3. Interview experts and leaders. 
Grow your audience on Google+ and the variety of the information your company provides by inviting industry experts and leaders to do a Hangout on Air. Interview them from your company's perspective and allow for questions from viewers. It's important to leverage the expert's audience to increase viewers of the Hangout and the circlers to your Google+ Page.

Related: 4 Tools for High-Def Video Conferencing

4. Hold regular giveaways and contests. 
Reward your audience by hosting Hangouts with the sole purpose of stirring face-to-face interactions through giveaways and contests. A live giveaway can encourage increased visits to your Google+ Page and increased viewership to your other Hangouts on Air.

Provide prizes that are valuable to your audience not just in price but relevant to their interests and the focus of your business. The cost of the items given away as prizes can be worth the circlers, viewers and increased brand awareness your business receives.

Snapchat, the application which allows you send photos and videos that automatically erase themselves has had a major update today which gives users a whole new GUI and some new features.

The most noticeable changes of this latest version, dubbed ”Banquo” includes:

Whilst many speculate Snapchat is mainly used for ‘sexting’, the service is now sending over 150 million snaps a day - making this interface refresh useful for the growing user-base.

What I have also noticed, which I am not sure if a bug or a new design – the Snapchat icon now has a blank white face.

However the official Snapchat website still has the full faced logo and no mention of a change. Sometimes app developers have icon issues when uploading a new update to the App Store (which may be corrected with a subsequent update).