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Author: Franz Malten Buemann

  • How to Grow Your TikTok Following [Expert Insights + Data]

    Growing followers on TikTok can seem like slow process. And if you’re putting in the hard work to create amazing content, it can feel extra frustrating.
    To help speed things up, we’ve compiled a list of the best strategies to gain followers on TikTok — fast. Of course, nothing can replace good content, but there are a few tricks you can try to explode your engagement, visibility, and, most importantly, your follower count.
    Let’s dive into the best tips and tricks to grow your TikTok.
    1. Stop appealing to everyone.
    When you try to appeal to everyone on TikTok, the opposite happens: you end up resonating with no one.
    This may sound counterintuitive. After all, to get more followers, shouldn’t you appeal to more people? In reality, targeting a niche gives you a greater chance to be seen by a pool of engaged users.
    For example, fashion is a popular category on TikTok. So much so, the hashtag #fashion has over 188 billion views on the platform. If you want to post fashion-related content, you might get lost in this competitive vertical. Instead, you could focus on a sub-niche like street style or mid-sized fashion, which has a fraction of the views but a more engaged audience.
    The easiest way to niche down is by knowing your audience and what they want to see. Be specific. If you’re unsure, take a look at your competition. What do they do well? What videos get the most engagement? And, of course, use your buyer personas as a compass when brainstorming video ideas.
    2. Post at the right time.
    Sometimes, it’s not just what you post but when you post. This is especially true on TikTok.
    A recent HubSpot Blogs survey of 300+ marketers identified the best and worst times to post on TikTok. Here are the results:

    The best time of day: 3-6 PM and 6-9 PM
    The best days of the week: Friday and Saturday
    The worst time of day: 6-9 AM and 9-12 AM
    The worst days of the week: Monday and Tuesday

    Since TikTok is popular with the Gen Z crowd  — and they’re in school for a good part of the day — the morning and early afternoon “dead zone” makes sense.
    When posting content on TikTok, stay clear of these slow hours, and try posting towards the end of the week or during the weekend.
    3. Duet or Stitch top-performing videos.
    TikTok offers a number of features to collaborate with others — which is key to getting more eyeballs on your content. Let’s talk about two features in particular: Duet and Stitch.
    The Duet feature lets you play your video next to another user’s video. This is ideal if you want to add commentary or a funny reaction to the original video.
    The Stitch feature enables you to play up to 5 seconds of someone else’s video as an intro to your own. 
    The best way to leverage these features is by engaging with top-performing videos in your niche. You can do this by using the search bar and typing keywords relating to your brand. Then, once you’ve zeroed in on a video you like, tap the Stitch or Duet button and let your creativity fly.
    But there’s more — you can also encourage others to Duet or Stitch your videos.
    For example, Tesco, a British grocery chain, asks users to Duet the following video for a chance to become the new voice of their checkout machine:

    @tesco Audition to become the new voice of Tesco checkouts by duetting with me & including
    #TescoVoiceOfCheckout.
    ♬ original sound – Tesco

    The result? Tesco’s original video scored 22 million views and thousands of Duet submissions.
    4. Participate in a challenge (or create your own).
    Challenges are infamous on TikTok, and they have the power to explode your follower count. The trick is finding the right one for your brand. After all, some challenges fizzle out before they hit the ground, while others spread like wildfire.
    Once you find a challenge you can work with, it’s important to put your own spin on it. That’s how you’ll really stand out.
    You can also create your own challenge — just make sure it’s relatively simple to do. For example, Chipotle started the #LidFlip challenge, which encouraged users to flip the lid of their burrito bowl with style:

    @chipotle
    #lidflip
    ♬ original sound – Chipotle

    In the first six days, the challenge generated over 100,000 video responses. Even more impressive, it created a record-breaking sales day for Chipotle.
     
    5. Jump on trending sounds and songs.
    88% of TikTok users say sound is essential to the TikTok experience. Thanks to the algorithm, it’s also critical for driving more engagement.
    TikTok has an extensive library of sounds — but you should prioritize the ones that get a lot of love from the community. This is because the TikTok algorithm tends to favor videos that leverage trending sounds. Plus, 67% of TikTok users prefer branded videos that feature popular or trending songs.

    To get started, check out TikTok’s Creative Center which ranks the most popular sounds each day. You can also filter by region, which is helpful if your audience lives in a different location from you.
    6. Cross-promote your TikTok.
    Odds are, your audience is active on other social media besides TikTok. For this reason, it’s important to cross-promote your videos to other channels, such as Instagram or YouTube.
    Remember that Instagram’s algorithm will not promote videos with a TikTok watermark, so you’ll need to upload the original video. YouTube, on the other hand, doesn’t have the same restriction.
    It’s also worth noting that Reels cannot exceed 60 seconds, while TikTok videos can go for 10 minutes. So, you may need to trim your videos to adhere to Instagram’s time constraints.
    Back to You
    Ultimately, you’re only as good as the content you create. Although these tips can boost your visibility in the short run, it’s the quality of your content that influences people to hit “follow.” As a marketer, this means putting your audience at the heart of your strategy and creating content that speaks to them.

  • 5 Networking Tips for Entrepreneurs with Disabilities

    Running your own business can be a great career choice for people living with long-term disability or health condition.
    This may relate, in part, to the increased flexibility around working hours that self-employment brings. Working for oneself can also promote a sense of being a master of one’s destiny and not having to contend with misconceptions and discriminatory attitudes from others that are often encountered while job hunting.
    For entrepreneurs of any background, business networking, be this receiving the support and advice of others, identifying collaborative opportunities, or expanding the customer base, remains an essential undertaking.
    Unfortunately, as in almost every other walk of life, networking is not without barriers for disabled entrepreneurs. In this post, we’ll discuss why networking can be a challenge and best practice approaches to networking that disabled entrepreneurs can put in place to stay on top of both the competition and their own health.

    Why can networking be a challenge for disabled entrepreneurs?
    As Bill Sahlman, a professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School explained in the online course Entrepreneurship Essentials: “All great companies — even those with iconic entrepreneurs — had many other people who were involved and, without whom, the company might not have made it so big.”
    Networking can be a challenge for disabled entrepreneurs for various reasons, ranging from needing to expend a great deal of time and effort performing in social scenarios when one’s energy is already compromised to facing unpredictable building access issues at venues.
    At the same time, a legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic remains an increased openness within the mainstream business community to conducting meetings and events remotely – allowing disabled networkers to engage with new people from the comfort of home and extend well beyond the limits of their immediate geographic location.
    So, within this new post-pandemic reality of hybrid online and in-person networking opportunities, what are some excellent networking tips? Below we’ll discuss them.
    5 Networking Tips for Disabled Entrepreneurs
    1. Research disability-entrepreneurship organizations that can help you.
    As explained previously, entrepreneurship is a popular and well-trodden path for many people living with a disability. With this in mind, there are numerous organizations out there dedicated to providing support to disabled business owners.
    One such organization is the American Association of People with Disabilities which provides entrepreneurial advice, scholarships, and internships to its members.
    Disability:IN is another national body offering support and advice to disabled business owners. It offers an accreditation plan called Disability-Owned Business Enterprise (DOBE) certification, and it’s meant for businesses that are at least 51% owned, managed, and controlled by an individual with a disability.
    Additionally, there are local and state-run resources available to disabled business owners, as well as those catering to specific groups such as veterans.
    Thoroughly researching and identifying all such organizations should be part of the early-stage due diligence of any disabled entrepreneur, as this type of highly tailored resource is low-hanging fruit for disabled business owners looking to grow their network.
    2. Be realistic about the impact of your disability.
    Running your own business can be physically and mentally exhausting, regardless of whether someone has a disability or not.
    As the meeting and greeting that accompanies in-person networking events can be particularly draining – it’s vital that disabled entrepreneurs set realistic goals around what they can manage and understand exactly how their disability might impact them in different situations.
    Going to networking events can be a great way of meeting new business contacts, but if the price of attendance is having to spend the following day in bed, entrepreneurs must weigh these considerations carefully.
    Diego Mariscal, who has cerebral palsy, is the founder and CEO of 2Gether-International – a community for disabled founders offering peer support and expert mentoring. “A lot of people will go to an in-person networking event and there’ll be this frenetic competition to see how many business cards everyone can collect,” remarks Mariscal.
    “That just does a disservice to both yourself and the people you’re trying to meet because, realistically, you just can’t follow up with 20 different people in any kind of meaningful way,” he continues.
    “Particularly for somebody living with an energy-limiting condition – a better approach would be to pick one or two people that are going to be in attendance that you want to connect with. Once you’ve met those people – just stop. Chill, relax, and decompress because it’s going to be much easier to follow up with two or three people and build meaningful relationships than trying to do that with twenty.”
    3. Be confident enough to use your disability and personality as a positive differentiator.
    People with disabilities can often feel self-conscious about standing out, particularly at public events common with in-person networking. Nonetheless, at events where everyone is competing for eyeballs and attention, standing out from the crowd is potentially no bad thing, especially if it is augmented by an engaging, self-confident introduction and a display of strong interpersonal skills.
    Networkers with disabilities should not be ashamed of their impairments and seek to conceal them but instead explore ways in which their disability could be viewed by others as a positive differentiator.
    Heather Lawver is the founder and CEO of Perfectly Pitched, which helps early-stage social entrepreneurs develop compelling pitch decks and advanced marketing strategies. She also lives with two rare genetic conditions that cause her to experience significant levels of pain throughout the day.
    Recounting her experiences working in an incubator program in 2014, Lawver says, “It has to start with you as the entrepreneur and being comfortable enough with your disabilities and who you are to ask for accommodations.”
    She continues, “When I was in the incubator program, I got it into my head that, if you were pitching, it had to be done standing up because, if you were sitting down, you weren’t commanding the room. This was a problem for me with my pain issues and someone from the program offered me a chair but, at the time, I didn’t feel comfortable accepting this accommodation because I didn’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons.”
    She says doing so was a mistake, that she ended up in so much pain she couldn’t speak and had to force her way through the pitch. Looking back, she recounts that she should have spotted the opportunity that sitting down to pitch could be a differentiator in storytelling style.
    “It’s all about being comfortable in who you are and working out how you can turn it into an advantage rather than a disadvantage,” she adds.
    4. Fine-tune and personalize your communication strategy.
    If you’ve concluded that in-person events pose too many obstacles and you might be better off with online networking – be sure to take the time to hone your online communications and make them stand out.
    Platforms like LinkedIn provide a great system for growing your network of like-minded professionals, but it’s vital to ensure that your online communications are polished and personalized.
    Business leaders receive multiple emails and social media introductions daily.
    To make yours stand out, avoid spamming generic introductory message templates in the hope of gaining someone’s attention. Instead, focus on personalizing messages and honing in on how you think a business relationship might benefit both parties.
    Take the time to read the person’s profile and background to identify where their expert knowledge lies. That way, you can demonstrate a genuine appreciation of their thought leadership and how it might relate to your particular area of business.
    5. If your differences make you feel awkward about approaching people, practice makes perfect.
    Whether online or in-person networking, one way to ease the nerves or any awkwardness about appearing different might be to practice introductions with friends, family, and colleagues before taking the plunge into higher-stakes official networking events.
    This might be particularly useful if adaptive technologies, equipment, or other accommodations are used. For someone with hearing loss, this might be trying out Zoom calls with and without an interpreter.
    Someone with mixed mobility needs, who may alternate between using a wheelchair and other walking supports, might consider experimenting with both and doing some trial runs to establish what feels most comfortable when interacting with others.
    Over to You
    Like most activities in business, effective networking is as much an art as it is a science.
    To maximize opportunities, entrepreneurs with disabilities have to begin with an honest appraisal of their health condition.
    Rather than just trying to slide into a preconceived profile of what a successful business networker looks like, embrace your uniqueness and diversity, as that will be the quickest shortcut to getting to grips with your strengths and weaknesses both in business and in life.

  • 4 Key Contributors to Call Center Absenteeism and How to Address Them

    Call centers need all their parts in order to run smoothly. But what happens when you’re missing members of the team? It won’t be long before you encounter some serious problems.
    Absenteeism, otherwise known as absence rate, is arguably one of the most overlooked call center metrics. This percentage figure reveals the amount of unapproved or unplanned time agents spend away from their work. This may include sick days, unapproved personal days, and extended breaks at the office.
    What’s more, absenteeism is known to impact call center KPIs — in other words, this could be the root cause of performance issues for your team. If frequent agent absences are getting the best of your call center, it’s time to remedy the issue. Let’s explore the most common causes of call center absenteeism and how to fix them.
    How to Foster Agent Engagement in Today’s Contact Center
    Why Attendance Matters in the Call Center
    Good attendance and punctuality are essential to running a successful call center. It’s not just about instilling discipline in your agents; it’s about ensuring your team is fully staffed and equipped to handle the day’s call volumes.
    If your team struggles with attendance, logging absences won’t be enough to turn things around. You’ll want to track absence rates over an extended period and use those figures to find patterns and trends in your agents’ activity.
    How to Calculate Absence Rate in the Call Center
    The impact of high absence rates is similar to short-staffing. If you don’t have enough agents working, your call center won’t have the resources to deal with high call volumes and caller demand. This can cause the following call center metrics to suffer:

    Cost of operation
    Customer satisfaction (CSat)
    First call resolution (FCR)
    Abandonment rate
    Agent satisfaction and attrition

    The Main Factors Impacting Call Center Absenteeism
    Now that we’ve established the importance of managing call center absenteeism, it’s time for the next topic: how to manage its root causes.
    Keep in mind that some of these factors will be outside of management’s control — here are a few examples:

    Sick days and personal days
    Home or family emergencies
    Illness or injury
    Running late for a shift
    Medical appointments

    You can’t control everything. But the list below still holds plenty of opportunities to bring about a positive change in your team’s attendance rates.
    1. Workplace atmosphere
    Have you assessed your agents’ workspace lately? If your work environment isn’t appealing to your employees, they may be reluctant to return to their workstations.
    Consider things like lighting and noise. Would a fresh coat of paint or increased natural light improve your work setting? Do the noise levels allow agents to properly support your callers? While these may be small adjustments in the grand scheme of things, they can go a long way towards encouraging productivity.
    2. Work stress and disengagement
    When managing agents, it’s important to ensure they enjoy their daily work. But if they’re constantly overwhelmed by call volumes and struggling with their tasks, they’ll be less motivated to attend work on time.
    Part of addressing this challenge is making sure you hire the right agents to fit your call center culture. There’s a lot you can do around training and managing operations to ensure they have the skills and the know-how to succeed in their work.
    Word to the wise: don’t wait until you have cases of agent burnout on your hands. By this point, it’ll be much more difficult to keep them engaged, and you may find yourself facing high agent attrition and turnover.
    3. Lack of tools and technology
    It doesn’t matter how talented your agents are — if they don’t have the right tools and equipment to do their work, they will begin to flounder.
    Take the time to ask your agents where they have experienced problems and gaps in their daily work. By automating the challenging or monotonous parts, you allow them to focus on the most important part of their role: supporting your callers.
    When it comes to modern call center software, there are incredible solutions in the marketplace. For instance, call-back technology offers your callers a call-back as an alternative to waiting on hold. This keeps call volumes under control and removes the need for hold time, creating a positive experience for both your callers and your agents.
    4. Poor leadership and training
    If your agents aren’t confident in their daily work, they may choose to avoid their workstations whenever possible. Often, this is due to lack of leadership and training in the call center.
    Consider hosting one-on-one meetings with your agents to explore any challenges they may be facing in their daily work and come up with individual plans to help support each of them. This may involve more training sessions to sharpen their skills, or pairing them with a more seasoned agent for extra support.
    Your 5-Step Action Plan for Improving Call Center Attendance
    If you are committed to improving your call center attendance and absence rate, there is plenty you can do. Here are five things you can do today to get started:
    1. Track your absence rate.
    When it comes to call center strategy, it’s always best to make decisions informed by historical performance data. If you haven’t started tracking absence rate, you should begin doing so on a monthly basis. Here’s a complete guide on how to calculate absence rates and interpret your data.
    Of course, this figure alone won’t tell you the full story of your call center’s absenteeism. You’ll need to collect additional information to fill in the gaps, which brings us to our next step…

    DID YOU KNOW?
    Quantitative data—such as absence rate—offer hard facts and figures, while qualitative data—such as agent feedback—give context to those metrics. You’ll need both types of information to get a full picture of where your contact center stands.

    2. Gather feedback from your agents.
    Once you have a strong set of historical data to work from, it’s time to get the story behind the figures. The best way to do this is to ask your call center agents about their experiences and gain insights from them.
    There are many ways to do this, including employee surveys, one-on-one meetings, and return-to-work interviews for agents returning from extended leave. Take care to log the official reasons behind each absence and take the opportunity to offer more support to agents who need it.
    3. Address gaps in your call center operation.
    Once you’ve spoken to your call center employees, you may notice patterns emerging from your data. Consider everything from the work environment to the tools they use in their daily work and think of ways to make their work lives easier and more enjoyable.
    For instance, call center agents might avoid work if they know they’ll have to deal with frustrated customers who have been forced to wait on hold. Adopting a call-back solution is one of the best ways to support a positive work experience while keeping call volumes manageable.
    Aside from automating the less pleasant parts of agent work, consider upgrading the work environment itself. A pleasant workspace can encourage your agents to spend more time at their desks. This can involve anything from improved lighting, noise-cancelling equipment, to a fresh coat of wall paint.
    4. Review and update your attendance policy.
    When was the last time you reviewed your call center’s attendance policy? Your contact center is constantly evolving, and these policies should evolve along with it.
    If your call center is one that has recently shifted to a remote or hybrid model, this is especially important. It’s also good practice to review your attendance policy with your agents, so there’s no confusion around expectations.

    TIP:
    If you notice an employee who is not observing your call center’s absenteeism policy, it’s best to address it at once. A gentle but firm reminder can prevent them, and other agents, from building bad attendance habits.

    5. Create incentives for good attendance.
    There’s no reason why you can’t give your agents some extra motivation. Reward employees who have glowing attendance records with a meaningful prize. For instance, you could offer a cash bonus or an extra paid vacation day. Letting your staff select from a small assortment of incentives — a spa day or tickets to a professional sporting event — can help them choose a prize they find personally rewarding.The post 4 Key Contributors to Call Center Absenteeism and How to Address Them first appeared on Fonolo.

  • Perfect might be the enemy of good in group dynamics and choice making

    When one person needs to fix a wall, adjust a cabinet or choose what to serve for dinner, they can optimize their choice. Make appropriate trade-offs. Take responsibility for the path chosen.

    But when a group of people are asked to do the same thing, it’s easy to err on the side of the pursuit of perfect, or to choose to average things out.

    And so the legal team weighs in, and consultants are hired. And so, “but what if?” is always considered, regardless of how rare that outcome might actually be. Entire industries are built around creating deniable, average products and services that are sure to delight no one, cost more than they might and insulate the committee from backlash.

    When you find yourself creeping in this direction, it might be worth asking what the risk is of simply suspending the committee and putting someone in charge instead.

  • Webex’s guide to conversational messaging can enhance brand interaction

    Our world is becoming increasingly digitised by the minute. Organisations that aren’t embarking upon digital transformation will be left behind by consumers. The way we interact with consumers has progressed massively.  Conversational messaging through digital communication channels is on the rise. Are you on board with it? What is conversational messaging? According to Webex research, over…
    The post Webex’s guide to conversational messaging can enhance brand interaction appeared first on Customer Experience Magazine.

  • Some termws you need to know

    There are multiple terms in digital marketing which have different meanings. People related to digital marketing know all of those terms as they are pro marketers. But people who are not much aware of digital marketing or the ones who are new in this field don’t know much about it. But no worries I’ll be telling you a few terms related to Digital Marketing you need to know: Here are some basic digital marketing terms you certainly need to know: Bounce Rate: It is the term used to find out the number of visitors who left without visiting the second page of your website. It helps you to keep better track of your website’s efficiency. CTA: call-to-action is a link or pop-up that encourages the visitors of your website to take the desired action. CTR: Click-through rate determines the rate of clicks you have received on your ad. Conversion Rate: it is the number of people who converted to as a client through your website. CPM: CPM in digital marketing means Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions. The meaning of CPM is very much clear with its full-form but still, we can define CPM as the price that you are willing to pay for every thousand views you get on your ad. It is a really effective factor if you want to increase your brand awareness, but to be true it does not guarantee an increase in sales. CPC: Cost-Per-Click we can define CPC as the price that you are willing to pay for every click you get on your ad. PPC: Pay-Per-Click is a bid per click on different keywords in paid ads above or beside free search engine listings. ROI: It is Return-on-Investment or we can say the percentage of profit you receive from your digital marketing activity. Impressions: It is the number of times your ad is shown on a search result page. Inbound Link: this is a link on your website from some other website. It is also called Backlink. Organic traffic: The amount of traffic you receive on your website via any unpaid medium. Do upvote if you find shared information useful and comment if you need more information regarding some similar terms of digital marketing. submitted by /u/zacedwardss [link] [comments]

  • 30 Successful Examples of Email Marketing Campaign Templates

    Much like advertising and branding itself, email marketing campaigns are more of an art than a science.  It takes a compelling idea, great visual design, and excellent copywriting to increase the chances of your email marketing campaign being successful, maximizing clicks, and converting readers into buyers. Email marketing campaign templates can help, but it’s hard…
    The post 30 Successful Examples of Email Marketing Campaign Templates appeared first on Benchmark Email.

  • How much do you currently spend on Instagram marketing?

    Hello! I was curious to know how much you generally spend on Instagram because I own a small business in Texas. I am aware that factors like market segmentation, company earnings, etc. frequently change this. However, I’m thinking about working with a marketing agency and am unsure if I can make some commercials. I do need to know what the going pricing is right now, though. I really thank you. submitted by /u/Low_Finish_7329 [link] [comments]

  • Achieve Consistency for Release Quality, Security, and Compliance with CodeScan Shield

    Multi-developer teams are better equipped to quickly produce applications and updates compared to the efforts of a single developer. These teams can often be spread across various geographic locations and time zones. While this may allow a company to hire the most talented developers, it… Read More

  • Salesforce Business Analyst Certification Guide & Tips

    The Salesforce Business Analyst Certification is tailored for individuals who already have hands-on experience and are comfortable following Salesforce best practices – all while using their skills to facilitate project discovery, do process mapping, and write clear and complete user stories.   This guide will focus… Read More