Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Even though LinkedIn has been around since 2003, the platform didn’t allow the use of clickable hashtags until 2016.
Social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram have encouraged hashtag use for years as a way for users to connect with their communities. They even offer analytics, allowing content creators and influencers to gauge their impact.

Now that LinkedIn has fully embraced the use of hashtags, brands can too.
Let’s get into the basics of using hashtags on the platform and dive into how to find the top trending ones in your industry.
Do hashtags work on LinkedIn?
Yes, hashtags do work on LinkedIn. You can add them to your status update, your published article, and your business page to reach an audience beyond your network. You can also browse through hashtag feeds to see what conversations are happening surrounding those topics.
How To Use Hashtags on Your LinkedIn Status Update
There are a few ways to add hashtags to your status update.

As the GIF illustrates, you can add a hashtag by:

Typing out the pound sign followed by the word or phrase. As you type out your hashtag, LinkedIn will auto-generate hashtag suggestions based on what’s trending and popular.
Clicking on the “Add Hashtag” button located on the bottom left of the box.
Selecting one of the related hashtags next to the “Add Hashtag” button.

Pro-tip: Don’t add spaces or symbols in your hashtags, as they will no longer be clickable.
How To Use Hashtags on Your LinkedIn Article
As it currently stands, users cannot add clickable hashtags in the body of their articles published on LinkedIn. However, they can make it discoverable by adding hashtags to the article description box.

How To Use Hashtags on Your Business Page
If you have a business page on LinkedIn, you can associate it with relevant hashtags. This will put you right in the center of conversations surrounding those hashtags and allow you to connect with relevant audiences. Here are the steps to add them:

Start on your business page’s homepage.

Click on the “Add” button on the bottom right under “Hashtags.” A smaller page will open up.

Click “Add a hashtag” and select up to three hashtags. You’re all set.

Should I use hashtags on LinkedIn?
The short answer is yes, hashtags are a great way to reach audiences beyond your direct connections on LinkedIn.
Let’s say you only have 200 connections on LinkedIn. You publish an article on SEO and don’t use any hashtags. For it to make a substantial impact, you’ll need a lot of post engagement from second- and third-degree connections.
Why place such limits on your content? By using hashtags, you maximize your post’s reach potential. If the SEO hashtag has 100,000K followers and you use it, your post engagement can easily triple what it was without hashtags.
With that said, here are a few things to keep in mind when using them:

Don’t go overboard – LinkedIn’s former senior director of product management, Pete Davies, recommends sticking to three hashtags. That should be enough to target the main keywords without looking spammy.

Hashtags don’t replace copy – Hashtags don’t provide context, they should only be used to improve your discoverability. You should still have descriptions in everything you post.

Mix the popular with the niche – When you only use popular hashtags, your content can get lost. If you go too niche, you may not reach enough people. Using a little bit of both strikes the perfect balance.

Once you get comfortable with the use of hashtags, you can start identifying which ones are performing the best. You may find that some lead to higher engagement rates than others. If so, those are worth reusing.
How to Find Top LinkedIn Hashtags
There are three types of hashtags that LinkedIn recommends to its users based on their network and industry: recommended, popular, trending. LinkedIn’s ‘Discover More’ page is the first – and best – place to look when considering which hashtags to use in your posts.
To access this page, follow these steps:

Click on the “Discover More” button.

On the mobile app, this will appear when you click on your profile picture on the top left corner of the page.
On desktop view, it will be at the bottom of the left sidebar.

On this page, you’ll see trending pages, recommended connections and pages, and hashtags toward the bottom of the page.

As a marketer, LinkedIn recommends me many marketing-related hashtags, such as #digitalmarketing, #seo, and #contentwriter. However, this list will vary from one user to the next.
LinkedIn Trending Hashtags
In 2020, LinkedIn released data on the top trending hashtags for Q1 in 2020.

Image Source
In January and February, the list was virtually identical. However, conversations shifted in March when the pandemic started. Searches for topics on remote working tripled and the #remotework hashtag also started trending.
The best way to optimize your hashtag use is by referring to your recommended hashtags and analyzing their performance on your posts.
How To Follow Hashtags on LinkedIn
Following hashtags will allow you to see what other content creators are posting, how users are responding, and get ideas for future posts.

Head to the search bar and type the hashtag you want to follow.
Select an option from the dropdown menu.
That will take you to the hashtag’s feed where you can see all content published with this hashtag. Click “Follow” at the top of the page.

See the GIF below to see the steps in action.

Now that you’re following the hashtag, you’ll see it on the left sidebar under “Followed Hashtags” when navigating on a computer. When using the LinkedIn mobile app, you can access the hashtags you’re following by clicking on your profile picture on the top left of the window and scrolling down to the “Followed Hashtags” dropdown menu.
Hashtags are integral to the success of your content. By relying on LinkedIn’s hashtag recommendations and your analytics, you can ensure your posts are reaching the right audience.

To consider the importance of visual search in 2021, let’s start with an example.
The other day, I Googled “how to conduct a vlookup in Excel”. I skimmed a few articles but still felt dissatisfied — I didn’t want to read about vlookups, I wanted to see it.
Enter: The power of images.
Once I clicked on “Images”, I found what I needed quickly:

I know I’m not alone. In fact, nowadays, half of all Google searches end on the search results page, without the user clicking through to any results.
In 2021 and beyond, it’s critical marketers begin paying attention to the importance of visual images as a powerful opportunity to reach new audiences on the SERPs.
Plus, as HubSpot’s Marketing Manager Kristen Baker told me, “After running an image experiment on the HubSpot Blog, I discovered that ranking in Google’s image packs increases impressions and clicks to our content.”
But … easier said than done, right?
Here, let’s explore what image SEO is, and the best practices you’ll want to follow to make your webpages more discoverable in image search results.

Image SEO Best Practices
1. Use relevant, accurate alt text for user accessibility and SEO.
As a quick refresher: Alt text is written copy that describes an image. For instance, if you click on Pipcorn’s popcorn product and inspect the page, you’ll see the alt text describes the product image accurately as “Popcorn Family Pack Popcorn Pipsnacks LLC”:

Alt-text plays two critical roles in SEO.
First, alt text — also known as alt tags, or alt descriptions — helps search engine crawlers index your website more effectively, which has a positive effect on search results.

In fact, Google states on its Developers page, “You can aid in the discovery process by making sure that your images and your site are optimized for Google Images … [and] increase the likelihood that your content will appear in Google Images search results.”

Second, alt text improves the user experience. Alt text can describe an image to a visually impaired reader, and also helps if a reader can’t load or see the image correctly on their device.
To get a full run-down of how to write high-quality alt text, take a look at Image Alt Text: What It Is, How to Write It, and Why It Matters to SEO.
2. Consider using captions to describe an image.
Captions aren’t typically necessary if the context of the page can help readers understand what the image is depicting — for instance, in this blog post I haven’t used any captions because I’ve used text to introduce each image I’ve shown.
However, if you have a visual-heavy website, consider using captions to help readers understand an image in context. For instance, on Tom Hull’s photography portfolio, he captions his images so viewers can contextualize where, or what, the image represents:

Use good judgment when it comes to adding captions, but if you feel it can help readers (and bots) better discern an image, then it might be a worthwhile addition to a page.
3. Compress images for faster load time.
Compressing images is a vital component of any good website optimization strategy.
Why?
Because, simply put, it helps your web pages load faster, which provides a better user experience and also helps boost your website’s search engine rankings.
To compress your images effectively, try a tool like Compress JPEG or Squoosh.
Typically, less than 100 KB is ideal in terms of good file size.
However, it’s important to note — Google doesn’t look at each individual image size. Instead, it looks at total page size.
So, if you have a small image where quality differences are less substantial, then you might try compressing that image to 30-50 KB … which gives you extra room to keep another image 30 KB bigger, particularly if that image loses quality after compression.
If you’re still worried about image quality after compression, take a look at How to Ensure Your Images are High Resolution.
4. Post original images — not just stock photos.
Ultimately, Google (and readers) prioritize original content — which means, if you’re hoping your images will rank on image results pages, it’s vital you use original, unique images. 
This is particularly important if you work for an ecommerce website and you’re posting visuals of your product. Many shoppers use images to shop for consumer goods. In fact, 50% of online shoppers say images helped them decide what to buy.
If your image doesn’t accurately demonstrate your product, it will get buried under better, higher-quality images from competitors. 
Consider using products like Canva to design in-house infographics, graphs, or animated images to help your brand stand out on search results pages and make your images more shareable.
5. Name your file images before uploading them.
Your file name can impact how easy it is for search engine crawlers to interpret your image, so it’s helpful to rename your file before uploading it onto your webpage.
Rather than keeping the name a generic “IMG_0883″, try using relevant keywords to describe what’s in the image, similar to your alt text. This can also help ensure your image appears on the image search results page, which will increase traffic to your site.
6. Use responsive images.
Responsive images are critical for ensuring your readers can see your images on any type of device. Nowadays, it’s vital your pages are optimized for mobile to impact search engine rankings, as well as user experience.
If your images aren’t responsive, the page won’t appear as clean on mobile as it does on desktop — which negatively affects SEO, as well as your reader’s perception of your brand.
Fortunately, some website hosting services, including HubSpot, automatically ensure your images are responsive.
However, if need be, you can make your images responsive by using quick code. For instance, you can add this code to your HTML:
<img src=”nature.jpg” alt=”Nature” class=”responsive”>
Or this code to your CSS:
.responsive {
  width: 100%;
  height: auto;
}
7. Leverage images as a backlinking opportunity.
Creating high-quality, unique, original images isn’t just great for your own website — it’s also a fantastic opportunity to earn backlinks when other websites use your image for their own pages.
For instance, consider the following graph created by Broadband Search:

The image currently ranks in the first spot on the image search results page for the keywords, “how many people use mobile to search”.
Additionally, according to Ahrefs, this blog post has over 3,000 backlinks. I’m willing to bet that those backlinks are, in part, due to other companies wanting to use Broadband Search’s unique graphs for their own content.

If you create high-quality images, other companies may want to showcase those images on their own sites — with links back to your business. This means, ultimately, images can have a direct impact on the amount of traffic, leads, and customers you get for your business through your marketing efforts.

8. Add images to an existing sitemap.
Google suggests adding images to an existing sitemap — or creating a separate sitemap just for images — to help search engines discover your images. In particular, this is helpful for images Google can’t find through crawling, such as those accessed via JavaScript forms.
Here’s a sample sitemap, with two images included:

Fortunately, if you don’t want to add images to a sitemap manually, you’re in luck — there are tools, such as Angeldigital.Marketing (one of the only free ones available!), that will automatically generate an image sitemap once you input a URL.
Hopefully, you can use these best practices to level up and earn new traffic through search image results pages. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words … so just imagine the value of an SEO-optimized picture. 

Influencer marketing is an extremely effective tactic. Even if seeing tons of influencer ads in your social media feed has turned you into a curmudgeon, you cannot deny the effectiveness of having influential people drive your brand’s message. Take Caraway, for example. Their non-toxic, non-stick pots and pans are blowing up because they’ve enacted a…
The post 4 Tips for Mastering Your Influencer Marketing appeared first on Benchmarkemail.

With more than 2 billion active users — or nearly one-third of the global internet audience — YouTube has become a vital platform used within most video marketing strategies.
But, as one of the biggest online platforms, YouTube is also one of the most competitive for brands. For every YouTube channel related to a specific industry, there are a handful of others churning out similar content.
To rise above YouTube’s fierce competition, you’ll need to regularly create content that grabs your viewers’ attention and keeps them engaged.
Ultimately, if viewers disengage with your YouTube videos, they’ll click out of them before they end and find better content from another channel.
Before you begin producing content, it’s important to ask yourself, “Why do consumers click out of YouTube videos?”
To help video marketers answer the question above, I used Lucid software to ask nearly 300 consumers why they disengage from YouTube videos.

Why Consumers Click Out of YouTube Videos
After taking time to film, edit, upload, and optimize videos, it can be frustrating to see a heavy viewer dropoff before the content ends. Not only can this trend hurt your YouTube engagement metrics, but it’s also a sign that you’re wasting valuable time and money making content that people aren’t even going to finish.
But, while higher dropoff rates are often a sign of content disengagement, it’s important to note that — sometimes — video exits aren’t a creator’s fault.
When I asked consumers, “Why do you most commonly click out of YouTube videos before they end?”, more than one-third of respondents, or 36%, said they drop out because “too many ads” play before or in the middle of videos.

Data Source
Below, we’ll dive into the top response, like the one noted above, to help you create the most engaging YouTube video viewing experience.
1. Too many ads appear before or during videos.
While there’s not much some creators can do about ad placement at the very beginning and end of their YouTube videos, mid-roll ads — which appear by default in videos that are eight minutes or longer — can be turned off in your YouTube settings.
If you’re trying to monetize your content by enabling more mid-roll YouTube ads, you’ll want to weigh the pros and cons of this type of ad. While you might earn more money for your content, this ad placement could also be a major friction point that causes your viewers to click out of your video.
Additionally, if you do opt to include mid-roll ads, you should take steps to make sure your video is intriguing, valuable, or exciting enough to keep the viewer watching — even with a short ad break.
To create engaging videos that will be less vulnerable to ad-related dropoff, keep reading to see the content-related reasons people click out of YouTube content.
2. Videos aren’t entertaining or attention-grabbing
While 18% of respondents tune out of videos that “don’t entertain” them, 17% click out of content that fails to “get and keep” their attention. While the respondents’ need for entertainment lines up with YouTube’s research showing consumers watch videos to relax or “escape” from their daily lives, the need for attention-grabbing content lines up with countless video and social media data.
While most audience’s don’t expect B2C or B2B brand content to be as entertaining as videos from musicians, television studios, or influencers, you should still test out video storytelling approaches that place your viewers into an action-packed, intriguing, or funny scene to get them to invest their attention. Then, once you hook them, you can continue to include interesting information or scenes in your content to keep them watching.
But how can you entertain and intrigue your audience while still highlighting the selling points of your brand, product, or service? Here’s a great example of a brand that does this incredibly well.
In this episode of Purple’s video series, “The Purple Boys,” two mock talk-show hosts, played by comedians Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, tell an over-dramatic story about the “Sunday Scaries.”

The video begins with Heidecker waking up in his host chair. He then abruptly starts screaming due to the Sunday Scaries — or the stresses felt on Sundays before a workweek begins.
As the video continues, viewers learn what the Sunday Scaries are, hear one man tell his story of them, and learn how the Purple mattress helped him sleep even when dealing with the stresses of the upcoming week. To prevent any dull moments, the editors also added strange sound and visual effects to represent what the Sunday Scaries feel like.
This is a great example of how a brand used video to tell an intriguing, dramatic, yet still relatable, story related to a common consumer pain point. At the same time, Purple’s video also explains how its product could help. Not only will this content keep viewers watching, but it might also cause them to remember the Purple brand next time they need a sleep accessory or mattress.
3. Videos are too long.
Sometimes, even if you have great content, viewers can only pay attention for so long — especially on a fast-paced platform like YouTube. That’s why nearly 10% of respondents cited length for tuning out of a YouTube video.
While some people might be watching videos during a break at work, others might watch on their smartphones during a daily commute. Aside from this, research shows that each new generation has seen a slightly shorter attention span when it comes to online content.
If you feel like you’re creating genuinely compelling content, but see viewer dropoff, take note of when the biggest chunks of viewers tune out of your videos.
If viewers regularly drop off at around the same minute-mark for each video, consider adjusting your strategy to create shorter, more concise videos. You can also find some helpful guidelines in this blog post.
Creating Engaging Long-Form YouTube Videos
While length can be the culprit of video dropoff, the small segment of consumers that cited it shouldn’t scare you away from testing long-form content. Although the data above hints that some consumers dislike long video content, data directly from YouTube shows that certain age groups, such as Gen-Z, are watching more long-form content on the platform than they did in previous years.
Additionally, a number of successful brands, Including HubSpot, regularly embraces long-form content on platforms like YouTube,
If you want to leverage long-form content, but still worry about video dropoff, consider placing the most valuable information towards the beginning of the video — or give viewers a tease of what they’ll see if they continue watching. This way, if viewers don’t have time to watch your whole video, they’ll get to see your expertise in action and they’ll have a motive to come back later if they need to pause.
One example of a brand that knows how to draw viewers into the action of a long-form video and then keep their attention is Patagonia.
For example, the 27-minute Patagonia documentary below opens with clips of a mountain climber in action and a brief narration from him saying, “As a veteran, you feel like ‘I’ve really narrowed that gap and I can perceive what nature’s telling me. I can read the signs around me.’”
Suddenly, after the hiker’s initial narration, you see an intense clip — shot from his perspective — of him yelling as he gets caught in an avalanche.

When the screen fades to black, and viewers see the film’s title, along with “Full Film Starts Now,” they realize they’ve only gotten a glimpse of the action they’ll see later on.
Patagonia’s branded documentaries and video teasers are a great example of how a brand can persuade viewers to stick through even the longest types of YouTube videos. When the video reopens, viewers will likely want to continue watching so they can hear the full story and get the context behind the intense scene they just saw.
4. Videos don’t provide helpful information.
Although only 7% of respondents primarily click out of videos that aren’t providing helpful information, this is still important to call out.
While consumers might use YouTube to learn how to do something, study up on a hobby or interest, or learn more about their favorite influencers, others use it to get more information about companies or industries. In fact, YouTube research shows that consumers increasingly use YouTube to learn about products, services, and brands.
Regardless of what kind of content you make, consider providing valuable or educational information in it so users feel like they’re learning something new. If you do this, viewers might continue watching your videos until the end with the assumption that they’ll continue to gain valuable insight from you. Additionally, your viewers might also identify your brand as a thought leader they can go to for more helpful videos in the future.
Need an example of how to offer viewers valuable or educational information in a video?
Check out the HubSpot video below which highlights Instagram hacks for businesses. While the video serves as a detailed list of tips related to the trendy social platform, it also naturally mentions one of HubSpot’s free Instagram templates:

5. Other reasons people click out of YouTube videos.
While 8% of consumers said, “Other,” 3% said “The videos felt over-promotional,” and 2% said, “The content isn’t consistent with video headlines or descriptions.”
Keep YouTube Viewers Watching
While you might not have been shocked by some of the responses above, they reaffirm that video marketers need to take extra steps to engage their viewers while also promoting their brand. Although you might like to think that commercials or heavily promotional videos might be the best way to sell products, they might not yield high engagement or YouTube audience growth.
As you create your next video, keep these tips in mind to help prevent high dropoff:

Hook your viewers: Start with intriguing information or an attention-grabbing scene, or tease viewers about what’s to come.

Provide value: Be sure to provide interesting information, educational dialogue, or points of action throughout the video as well as at the beginning to keep viewers engaged.

Don’t draw things out: If you can concisely get your point across in a short amount of time, opt for a shorter rather than longer video.

To learn more about how to succeed on YouTube, check out this recent research, or this ultimate guide. You can also click below to download a helpful free resource.

 

 

 

Tablets, e-books, smartphones, or even the Internet – are these inventions of the modern world, or were they predicted by a sci-fi genius in the middle of the last century? Here is how Stanislaw Lem saw the future in which we now live.

 

Who Lem was?

 

The year 2021 is the year of Stanislaw Lem’s 100th birthday, hence it has been named the Year of Lem. We have decided to celebrate his memory by writing a series of short texts referring to his works, as the technology he was writing about is deep in the roots of our company. Firstly, let’s describe who Stanisław Lem actually was. 

 

To make a brief introduction to the dates and metrics necessary for the reader to understand the circumstances of his works, Stanislaw Lem was born almost a century ago, on September 12 or 13, in Lviv, interwar Poland. Lem himself claimed to have been born on the 13th, but his family changed the date to the 12th on his birth certificate because of superstition. He learned how to write when he was only 4, and the first letter he wrote, was to his father and reported on pooping himself in a real country toilet with a hole in the board.

 

He started his writing career at the age of 25, when, inspired by Wisława Szymborska (and not the best financial situation), he sent his poems to local magazines such as, among others, “Kocynder Śląski” or “Tygodnik Powszechny”. In 1948, he began writing his first novel, Hospital of the Transfiguration, which for censorship reasons was not published until eight years later. In 1951, he wrote his first sci-fi novel, which brought him unexpected success and prompted the writer to write more futuristic books, earning him a position as one of the greatest writers in science fiction history.

 

Lem’s predictions that actually came true

 

Hearing the words like optons, trions, lectons and phantomatons we can imagine… absolutely nothing when not knowing Lem’s literature. However, these seem very science fiction-ish, and indeed they are. In fact, reading this text, you are using at least one of them. Part of the magic behind Lem is how he was able to predict some of the devices we now use in our daily lives. So what’s on the list of the writer’s literary inventions that now actually exist?

 

E-books and audiobooks

 

“Books were crystals with fixed content. They could be read with an opton. It was even similar to a book, but with one and only one page between the covers. When touched, more pages of text appeared on it. […] The audience preferred lectans – they read out loud, and could be set to any type of voice, tempo and modulation.”

 

After reading this description for the first time, the reader is at least shocked and thinks “I know this device”, and yes – if you’re thinking e-book, this is exactly the thought most of us had. Because if you think about it a little deeper, a book in the form of a small crystal would simply be a memory card as we understand it, and an opton, in this case, would be an e-book reader like a Kindle, or maybe even a tablet. As for a lectan, I would venture to say an audiobook, with adjustable voice and pace. The above quote is from the novel “Return from the Stars,” written 40 years before the first attempts to invent e-books.

 

Smartphones

 

When reading The Magellanic Cloud, we can come across the fragment that makes us raise our eyebrows in shock. 

 

“We use it nowadays without thinking at all about the efficiency and power of this huge, invisible network encircling the globe; whether in our Australian studio, in a lunar observatory, or on an airplane – how many times have we reached for our pocket receiver, called up the Trion Library switchboard, named the desired work, and within a second had it in front of us on our TV screen.”

 

If you are nervously glancing at your phone right now – it’s a jackpot. The pocket receiver inevitably brings to mind cellphones, but the fact that it is connected to this mysterious network, that circles around Earth, makes us readjust the definition to today’s smartphones, that in fact are connected to the network and are able to cast the screen on TV. Crazy, right?

 

Internet

 

In the same novel as above, Lem described a future in which people would have access to a huge virtual database called the “Trion Library.” From this library, its users would be able to access any kind of information, as well as open it on pocket receivers, i.e., access the Internet with a smartphone. 

 

Trion can store not only luminescent images, reduced to a change in their crystal structure, that is images of book pages, but all kinds of photographs, maps, images, graphs and tables – in other words, anything that can be observed by sight. Just as easily, Trion can store sounds, the human voice as well as music, there is also a way to record scents.

 

Alright, scent recording may be something we didn’t invent… yet! Just wait for it. 

 

As Lem died in 2006, he had time to see some of his predictions come true, including the Internet. Although he seemed very excited about the idea, his first thought upon encountering the new media were his words “Until I used the Internet, I didn’t know there were so many idiots in the world.”

 

So, was he a clairvoyant or a genius?

 

Clairvoyant, time traveler or owner of hidden truth – we can call him all these names if we want to, but the fact is he was just hell-of-a genius writer, listening to his audience needs, with his head filled with all those crazy, marvelous ideas, which after all wasn’t that crazy. 

 

That skill that allowed him to make a name for himself as a great writer is undoubtedly the attitude of being a careful observer of his surroundings and adjusting them in his head to suit his readers’ needs, making them feel like they were in fact in another world. He simply saw the direction in which the rapidly changing world was going. Let’s not forget that Lem lived through the interwar period and World War II, seeing how the entire machinery changed in the blink of an eye to fit the cruel needs of war. Under the circumstances, his artistry and intelligence combined, were constantly creating an alternate reality, building devices unknown at the time but conceivable given the changing world. 

 

The things he characterizes in books are so universal that they will excite readers around the world for the next hundred years and beyond, inspiring future generations of sci-fi passionates.

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