Got something to say? Make sure your friends actually see it.
Images stand out on sites like Facebook and Twitter, which is why many people put their text into images when they have something big to say. But breaking out Microsoft Word and taking a screenshot is boring – it’s better to make things visual.
Which is why we’ve got some great tools for you to check out today.
Whether you want to leave a birthday message on Facebook that will stand out from the crowd, or just want to lose a few minutes making something for the fun of it, the following sites give you ways to make text look fun. Let’s get started.
Type To Design (Web): Your Text, in Instagram Photos
It’s a growing trend offline: framed photos of letters alongside each other, together spelling a name or word. If you like that look, and want to make something similar online, Type To Design is the site you’re looking for. Using the Instagram photos from #36daysoftype, this simple site will turn anything you type into a series of photos. Just start typing to see your collage, instantly.
If you don’t like any of the letters you see, just click it and it will change. If you’re wondering where any particular letter came from, hover over it; a link to the original image on Instagram will pop up on right. Once you’ve happy with everything, you can download the image for sharing on social networks or anywhere else
NekoFont (Web): Your Text, in Cat Form
Like the above idea, but wish it included more cat pictures? Or only cat pictures? Me too.
Good news: NekoFont is exactly what we’re looking for. Just type anything you want, pick a size, and get your text back in kitten form.
If you want the Internet to pay attention to something, cats never hurt, so give this a try next time you need to leave a short note somewhere. You can download the resulting image when you’re done, for uploading anywhere.
Font Face Ninja (Chrome, Safari): Find Out What Fonts Sites Are Using
Sites that make images quickly are fun, but for something truly personal you need to get to work and design something yourself. Finding the right font is an important step.
Have you ever, while browsing the web, wondered what font you’re looking at? If so, you’re my kind of people. As a reward, here’s a browser extension you might like: Font Face Ninja. This plugin makes it easy to find out the name of any font on a web site. Just click the button and voila:
You not only discover the name of the font, but the size and spacing as well. Whether you want to replicate a look on your own site, or just add another font to your collection, this one is worth keeping in your virtual toolbox.
Get The Font: Search for, and Download Any Font
Found a font you like, but don’t know how to get it? We’ve outlined sites for downloading fonts, and tools for managing your font collection, but it’s always worth knowing about another tool for the job. Get The Font is a simple search tool that scans Github for fonts.
Github might not be the first place you’d think of finding fonts, but many open source projects make use of free fonts for their user interfaces. The result: if a front is available for use on the web, it’s probably hosted on Github somewhere. Get The Font lets you search everything quickly, so if there’s a free font you’ve been looking for check it out.
Remember: just because you’ve downloaded a font from this site doesn’t mean you have the right to use it. Make sure a font is free to use before you put it in a commercial project.
Fake Handwriting (Web): Type Anything; See It Written by Hand
We’ve shown you how to turn your handwriting into a font, but maybe you want something just a little more covert — and easy. Fake Handwriting is a fascinating project that uses machine learning algorithms to actually replicate handwriting. We’re not talking about something as simple as turning handwriting into a font; we’re talking about machines actually kind of learning to write in messy ways, making the sorts of mistakes that humans make.
It’s fascinating to play with.
You can actually read the study behind the project, if you’re really interested. My take: teaching kids to learn cursive is stupid, but teaching machines that same skill is surprisingly awesome.
What Did We Miss?
Do you know of any other sites that make boring text look downright fascinating? Let’s compile some more sites like this in the comments below, then! I’m really looking forward to learning more from you.
I go on Twitter to update the world on the kind of coffee I am drinking, and I am hit with a deluge of:
Top 11 XX
You Won’t Believe What Happens When XX
15 Stats that XX
Top that with Trends, Moments, and whatever other item Twitter is shoving down my throat this month and the information stream is overwhelming.
Twitter is a singular platform in the tapestry that makes up my online life. I find the same thick cloud of information on Facebook, I am getting sent articles on Slack from co-workers, and then someone will still sneak in with a recommended link via email.
This generation of internet users sits down at their computers like they’re pulling up to an all-you-can-eat buffet, and the consumption of information is off any chart we ever thought of creating.
Infobesity is a real issue that content creators and marketers face. So what is the value of going “viral” in this environment?
Take it one step further.
How do we create content that people remember in this all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of online information?
Breaking down complex data and concepts in this environment of quick consumption can make this issue even stickier.
Infographics were originally created to give visual explanations for data points, but as the format has grown, so has its use outside of simple data visualizations. As more infographics have come online, the unique nature of these data breakdowns has dampened.
Complex data sets give marketers a strong and compelling story around sometimes less than compelling topics. Our job is to figure out how to break that story down quickly, in a way that can be remembered and inspires the emotions that can cause actions.
Why and How People Digest Complex Content
We know that from a content creator’s perspective, complex data can help create a compelling story, but it is important to understand why readers will take in complex data and utilize it in order to shape an appropriate strategy to get the information out.
Readers are looking to:
Acquire facts or procedures
Understand reality
Make sense of the world
Just as people have many different reasons they want to digest complex data, they have many different ways they learn and retain the data they digest.
There are seven general ways people learn and digest information:
Visual: Using sight
Auditory: Using songs or rhythms
Verbal: Speaking the information out loud
Kinesthetic: Using touch and taste to explore the information
Logical: A more mathematical approach to concepts
Interpersonal: Learning in groups
Intrapersonal: Learning alone
These learning types are called modalities.
Research has shown that because most educational content is stored in terms of meaning, there is not a true value in teaching an individual based on their own, individualized modality. However, modality when it comes to content is incredibly important.
For example, if you want to get someone to remember the bones in the human skeleton, a teacher may use a faux skeleton that the class can see and touch. They wouldn’t only kinesthetic learners go down this path, even though the content and context of the lesson is overall better suited for this modality.
Different Ways to Integrate Modalities
Chunking
Chunking is a way of learning that does what it says; it takes larger concepts and breaks them into smaller digestible concepts. This can be done most effectively through the auditory and visual modalities.
Think about how you learned your phone number. We break it into several groups of smaller numbers in an auditory fashion rather than a long series of 10.
This infographic takes the concept of cooking rice, and breaks down the function through several independent sequences.
Interacting Images
An item is much more likely to be remembered if it can be shown interacting with another item. In this case, we are compiling items together to create a whole memory. In this infographic, the artist uses a simple use case of cows to explain complex government and economic models.
Because we understand what cows are, that they produce milk, and their general use in agriculture, the infographic is able to utilize them to symbolize resource ownership. We utilize information we already have to learn new information.
Dual Coding
Dual coding assumes that there are two cognitive sub-systems. One is specialized for dealing with processing imagery, and the other for dealing with language. A good example of dual coding is the utilization of graphs to represent numeric data. People can relate two different fractions more quickly in graph form.
Basic visualizations of data utilize dual coding concepts, as they allow for content to be quickly digested. Below, see an excerpt from an infographic showing a comparison of Fed Ex and UPS. You can quickly see that while Fed Ex leads in number of jets, UPS has almost five times the ground fleet.
Kinesthetic Learning
This modality is action based. Learners retain information by interacting with the item. Take our skeleton analogy above for example.
Movement and interaction is key. In terms of complex data digestion, interactive content hits on this learning style. Interactive content, designed largely through HTML 5 or Flash, allows content consumers to interact with data and information.
Below is an interactive piece of content we created that is loaded with data on British travelers. The content scrolls to unveil a story that coincides with the data. The content consumer must interact with the content for more data to be consumed.
Bottom-up and Top-down Processing
In bottom-up processing, stimulus influences our perception. So if we are looking at a red sphere on the ground, you allow the cognitive response to define the object.
Top-down, in contrast, uses your background knowledge to influence your perception. Our brains take information surrounding certain data, and use the entire bulk of information, including background knowledge, to fill in the missing information.
A good example top-down processing is this ambiguous image of a saxophone player and a woman.
From a bottom-up perspective, these are just some black blobs. Most people however inform the image from their background and see a face. Looking further, or being told to do so, a person will see a sax player formed in the black blob. Context and information helps to form what you see.
That is top-down processing.
This word cloud is a great example of top-down processing. It uses the Gettysburg Address to build an image of Lincoln.
Here is an image of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke made from data related to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
Using Cognitive Science
Understanding cognitive science can allow you to create content that is more effective by matching the right modalities with the right message and data. However, understanding modalities and learning techniques can also allow us to optimize content we are already creating for it to reach maximum effectiveness.
Make it Concise and Scannable
By making your content concise and scannable, you are not only making the content visually appealing to intrapersonal learners, but you are also battling the infobesity issue. This is the reason really strong white papers should be presented via abstracts with the actual white paper being a downloadable or in some other format. Give consumers the gist and structure with concise data in a way that entices them to read more.
Learn to Tell Stories
By creating a story for readers around your complex data concept, you are utilizing multiple modalities and cognitive concepts.
Do you remember Aesop’s Fable about sour grapes? It taught us how easy it is for us to grow to despise what we cannot have. Fables were a way to utilize storytelling to teach complex moral concepts to children. These stories use a mixture of interacting images and top-down processing to help consumers use existing information to fill in the gaps of their understanding about a topic.
Visual Metaphors and Analogies
Similar to storytelling, adding metaphors and analogies to your content can help clear blind spots in your consumers’ understanding. “The Tale of Two Cows” infographic above did a tremendous job of using this concept to help make complex economic concepts easy to digest.
Make It Personal
People understand concepts better when the concepts relate to them directly. “How does this concept affect me?” is always a question you should look to answer. Taking the neuro-science one step further, you should look to influence the emotional reaction of the consumer.
In Conclusion
Going viral is a great thing, there is no debating that. However, as marketers, we need to think about not only how our content gets shared, but how it is digested. We need to plan around our consumers and think about how our minds work in relation to the information we are trying to get out there.
Complex data and concepts are simply something marketers will need to learn to work with as they develop their content strategies. Not all content can be quick hit, buffet-style content. The key is learning to shape the content so it doesn’t get passed by in the buffet line, and make it good enough that people want to eat as much as they can get their hands on.
It’s easy to feel like you can grow a loyal audience in no time using the latest growth hacks or Twitter and Facebook tricks. But the truth is, it’s not that simple.
Growing an audience is hard.
You have to have talent. You have to put in a lot of work. And there’s no 1–2–3 solution.
In this post, I’m happy to share some of our experiences from building an audience at Buffer alongside six key ingredients to successfully building an audience.
Let’s get started!
Why it’s Difficult to Build an Audience (And Why There’s No Shortcut)
“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” ― Theodore Roosevelt
It is no secret that we live in an age of information overload. Yet many of us are in search of a larger audience. More readers on our blog. A bigger following across social media. A group of people who read, engage with and amplify everything we share.
The problem is, we live in an attention economy. Everyone is vying for consumer attention, and there’s only so much to go around.
Attention is Limited
We all have 24 hours in a day. There’s nothing we can do to change that.
Each day on Facebook alone we are potentially exposed to 1,500 pieces of content. When you add in Tweets, Snapchats, Instagram posts and all the other content we’re exposed to daily, it’s easy to see why it can be so hard to break through as a content creator.
This graphic from Moz shows how content fatigue could start happening very soon.
It Takes a Lot of Swings
Each day we have a tiny window to grab people’s attention and make an impact with our content. And many of us are in search of that one, elusive thing that’ll get us rolling on the path to success. But that’s not how it works.
Think of yourself as a Major League Baseball player, for every home run, for every cheer from the crowd, there are thousands of practice swings and plenty of strikeouts. Content is no different. You need to step up to the plate and bring your best every day if you want to be a success.
There’s no shortcut to building an audience. It’s a long, winding road. And it takes a number of elements to succeed. Below I’d love to share some of the key ingredients to building at audience.
The 6 Essential Ingredients to Build an Audience Successfully
1. Look for What’s Next
The world is moving fast, and opportunities are arising everywhere. New platforms and new trends breed new opportunity. And for early adopters a unique chance to build an audience as Gary Vaynerchuk explains on Medium:
If you play close attention to the people who popped on Vine, or the people who popped in the early days of Snapchat, or Instagram, they all happened to be the Christopher Columbus of their platforms. They were early. So as those platforms took off, they developed disproportionate amounts of followers as new users joined and found them.
First Mover Advantage
A study from Harvard Business Review found that companies identified as believing strongly in the benefits of adopting new technologies receive a “first-mover advantage” — and are more likely to lead in both revenue growth and market position than their peers.
The same theory applies to new social platforms too. As an early adopter, you can gain first mover advantage and, as Gary Vaynerchuk said, you have the chance to become “the Christopher Columbus” of that platform.
By focusing on what’s next and experimenting with new platforms and technologies, you have an opportunity to jump ahead of the competition and build an audience before the platform is too crowded.
Hone Your Skills
Shaun McBride, better known as Shonduras online, is one of Snapchat’s first homegrown celebrities, and brands are spending upwards of $30,000 for advertising deals with him and other Snapchat stars.
Before Snapchat, Shonduras honed his skills as an artist. Snapchat merely provided a platform for him to share his skills with the world.
The biggest opportunities ahead probably aren’t on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube but on platforms we don’t even know about yet. That doesn’t mean you can’t start preparing for these opportunities, though:
If you want to be an influential writer, practice writing: on your blog, on Medium, on Twitter, or anywhere you can scribble down a few words.
If you love to create video, experiment with Vine, YouTube, Snapchat, and Beme.
Whatever your skill set, find new ways to be creative. Hone your talents. And then when the next big platform launches, jump on it and set the trends there.
2. Have a Voice
Everything has been said before, but it’s never been said by you. Your point of view is what makes you interesting. — Jory MacKay
For periods in my writing life, I’ve relied on content that is ‘good enough’, content that gets a point across. That ticks a box. But doesn’t reflect me or my personal beliefs.
On reflection, this doesn’t feel the way to break through and build an audience. Great content should make you feel vulnerable and a little discomfort upon publishing.
As Jory MacKay points out over at Crew, when you approach a new subject, ask yourself ‘how can I cover this in a way that only I can?’ Your voice is what will make you stand out from the crowd.
Saying the same things as everyone else, in the same style will only add to the noise. And you’ll get lost in the endless sea of content published every day.
This graphic from Sean McCabe illustrates how to find your unique voice perfectly.
3. Do Things Differently
At Buffer, we’re super lucky to be well-known for our content. But our rise wasn’t an overnight success — and certainly didn’t come easy.
It took some trial and error. And a few years back we found a recipe that started to pay off.
From day 1, we have invested in content marketing at Buffer. Leo kicked things off on the blog back in 2011 and since then we’ve been through quite a few evolutions and tried many different tactics to build our audience.
Here’s a quick at the development of our content over time:
Twitter tips: January 2011 – October 2011
Pivot to social media tips: November 2011 – June 2012
Pivot to lifehacks, writing, customer happiness, and business: June 2012 — March 2014
Pivot to social media marketing and content tips: March 2014 to now
And a fun gif showing how the blog design has changed:
If you check back through our first posts, they contain great content but they weren’t distinguishable from other social media blogs out there.
At this stage – when we weren’t getting hundreds of thousands or millions of views per month – we could’ve decided to focus elsewhere. Instead, we tried to do things differently and create our Buffer style of content.
We pivoted from Twitter tips to broader social media tips. And in June 2012 we pivoted again. We began focusing on in-depth, well-researched posts that broke down potentially complex subjects into clear, understandable, and highly shareable content. Things started to take off after this pivot.
Here’s an early example of one of these posts:
After some success with this style of post, the biggest jump in traffic came when Belle Beth Cooper joined the Buffer team, and we doubled down on producing unique content.
If it wasn’t for our early experiments, we may never have discovered the potential of this type of content and may never have unlocked all of the traffic (and conversions!) we see today.
You Need to Keep Evolving
Leo and Belle were so great at discovering the potential of in-depth content. Another shift for us occurred a year or so ago when we came to focus social media marketing and content tips – paying particular attention to the visuals and images within our articles.
More recently, Kevan shared that our social referral traffic has nearly halved over the past year. This post sparked a ton of discussion about our content both internally and externally.
The below Tweets from Rand Fishkin especially resonated with our team:
This debate gave us a chance to reflect and re-evaluate our content. It also inspired Leo to share our marketing manifesto. Since then, we’ve re-focused and started experimenting again. As Kevan explains: our blog is our greatest marketing asset. And we just keep changing it.
Only time will tell if our new experiments will pay off. However, one thing is for sure – the hard work from the past years will go to waste if we don’t continue to push ourselves and figure out how to continually keep evolving our content.
4. Hard Work
I’ve learned from experience that if you work harder at it, and apply more energy and time to it, and more consistency, you get a better result. It comes from the work. — Louis C.K.
Success comes from the work that noone sees.
If you want to build an audience you need to put in a lot of hard work.
Let’s take Seth Godin, for example.
Before he was a best-selling author and marketing thought leader he was Seth Godin, just another blogger.
Godin’s blog has posts going back to 2002. But, as Ailian Gan points out on her blog, it’s around 2006 where Seth Godin hits his stride and starts to sound like the Seth of today. That’s four years of finding his voice and honing his skills.
Another example is Nils Wagner, the man behind Hoopmixtape. Hoopmixtape’s website and YouTube channel receive millions and millions of views each month. What’s not clear is the work that goes on to ensure it stays that way.
Sam Laird explains over at The Classical:
To stay on top, Wagner travels tens of thousands of miles yearly to gather footage of elite prospects, sometimes driving thirty hours straight and living out of his car for weeks at a stretch.
Building an audience is hard work. And you’ll need to put in the hours if you want to succeed.
5. Focus on Quality
In our Buffer marketing manifesto Leo explains:
Sometimes we think that just putting out a consistent number of things will just create some outliers that’ll help us win. Heck, I even believed this for a long time and advised people to just focus on quantity. I don’t think that’s true anymore. Yes, we need to output things at high quantity, but we need to treat every single piece of output as the one that’ll be a breakout hit.
Going back to the baseball analogy from earlier on, every time a batsman faces a pitch, they’ll see it as a home run. Everything they have will go into the next swing. And to build an audience you need to feel that same way about every piece of content you share.
You need to feel that everything you put out is excellent. Every post, every video, every image has the chance to be a hit. Without this feeling, you’re not going to break through the noise.
Quality shouldn’t be confused with perfectionism. Perfect sits in your drafts for too long. Perfect causes delays. Quality is published consistently, without lingering.
On quality vs. perfection, James Clear explains an excerpt from Art & Fear on his blog:
The ceramics teacher announced that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.
Well, grading time came and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity!
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat around theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
6. Be Consistent
It takes patience to build an audience, and it takes courage to keep putting yourself out there time and again.
Consistency is key, and it doesn’t come easy as Sean McCabe explains:
I think people believe that those who show up consistently have some sort of magic power or inherent ability. “It must come easy for him,” they say. “For others like me, it’s hard.”
Here’s the reality: it’s not easy for anyone — even the people who make it look easy. In fact, if someone is making it look easy, they’re probably working all the harder.
When Unbounce launched, consistency played a big role in the growth of their audience as Co-founder, Oli Gardner, penned 300 posts for the Unbounce blog over a six month period.
Consistently creating content was also critical to our early growth here at Buffer. Within Buffer’s first nine months, Leo wrote around 150 guest posts, which were vital in helping us acquire our first 100,000 sign ups.
Leo explained the importance of consistency over at Search Engine Watch: “Of course the early ones barely drove any traffic and only very gradually did things improve, I think that’s very important to understand. It will take a while until you can find the right frequency of posting.”
Another great example of the power of consistency is Youtuber, Casey Neistat.
When Neistat started daily vlogging he had around 520,000 subscribers on his YouTube Channel. Now he has over 1,500,000 subscribers.
You can see the impact his consistent, daily posts had on his subscriber growth from March — July 2015 below:
One of the best ways to achieve consistency is to set a schedule for yourself and stick to it. Most of us only create content when we’re hit by a moment of inspiration. But if you’re looking to build an audience, you need to be putting yourself out there regularly.
I’ve always struggled with this one myself. But now, knowing I have to create content on a regular basis, means I can’t skip writing. Instead of sitting down and wondering which days I’ll write, I now have a schedule in place.
Over to You
Building an audience is something I’m continuously working on both personally and at Buffer. The rewards make it feel worthwhile – seeing people share your content and enjoy your work is priceless.
In a way, this post serves as a public reminder to myself that I need to be dedicated and focused every day if I want to succeed and continue to build an audience.
To summarize, here are six action points to keep in mind when it comes to building an audience:
Hone your skills and keep an eye on what’s next
Find your voice and create content in a way that only you can
Discover what makes you different
Work hard
Strive for quality and avoid seeking perfection
Be consistent and put yourself out there every day
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this too. What are your feelings about growing an audience? What have you tried? What’s worked?
Drop a note below in the comments and I’ll be excited to join the conversation.
This post originally appeared on Buffer, and is re-published with permission.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Ash Read All screenshots by Ash Read. Taken December 2015.
You don’t need Internet access for your phone to be useful. With the right amount of planning, you’ll have something to read, something to listen to, tools for getting around, and even access to Wikipedia and Twitter. All without a data plan.
Don’t believe me? Check out these apps.
We’ve talked about how you can ditch your mobile data plan to save money, but even if you’re not planning to do that, there’s a chance you’ll end up away from a connection at some point. Fear not — with the right apps installed, you’ll be able to get all sorts of use out of your phone without Internet access.
I didn’t have a smartphone until this year, and even now that I’ve got one, I’ve yet to pay for a data plan. The motivation is partially economic: I don’t like adding ongoing expensese to my life. But the other reason is most of the things I use my phone for work perfectly well offline.
Here are the apps that let me do that. They might not cover all of your uses, but hopefully it’ll be a starting point to get you thinking about whether you really need a data plan or not.
Read The News Offline: FeedMe
I spend a lot of time reading about tech and the world, and I’ve built up a massive collection of RSS feeds to let me do that. It’s basically my morning paper, just pulled in from a wide variety of sources. You should set one up too, if you haven’t.
My preferred way to read is on my Macbook, with a cup of coffee, at my kitchen table. When I’m on the road, though, I turn to the amazing FeedMe app.
This is a streamlined version of the official Feedly app, with one key additional feature I like best: full offline syncing. Set this up to sync, and you won’t even have to think about it: all text and images are synced to your phone, meaning you can go through your feeds without Internet access.
The app syncs with Feedly, InoReader, Bazqux, and The Old Reader, so if you have an account at any of those sites, you should grab this app.
Listening To Podcasts Offline: PlayerFM
There’s no better way to make a long trip short than to turn on a podcast you love, but way too many podcast players for Android require an active Internet connection to play back your shows. PlayerFM is an attractive free podcast app with no ads and an extensive catalogue of shows to browse.
Even better: it gives you online access to the latest episode of all your subscriptions, and you can optionally configure it to download even more.
We’ve talk about the best Android podcast managers before, but to me, none of them worked quite as well as this one. Give it a spin.
Travel Offline: Google Maps
It’s maybe the single biggest change smartphones have made in our lives: we’re never lost anymore. You might think living without a data plan would change things, but it really doesn’t if you’ve prepped enough. I’ve shown you how to download offline maps in Google Maps for Android, and you should absolutely use this feature.
Things have only gotten better since that article, with support for looking up locations within your offline maps and support for directions. There are some kinks to work out, and many prefer other apps for just that reason, but to me, this is all the offline map functionality I need. It might be for you too.
Bus and Train Schedules: Transit App
Of course, if you’re trying to get around in the city, directions aren’t enough: you need to know when the bus or train is going to come. Offline Google Maps won’t give that to you, but Transit App will. We’ve explained why this app is aweome before, and a big part of that is ease of use — just open the app, and you’ll see when public transit will arrive at stops near you.
A big part of the appeal is the live tracking, which requires an Internet connection. But if you’re not online at the moment, Transit is still a useful way to see the official schedules of transit lines near you, since it still shows you these when you’re offline. It’s even better if you’ve already set Google Maps to download your current city — Transit uses Google’s service for its built-in map, and offline content is supported.
I live near Portland, Oregon and use this every time I head into the city for work. If this app supports the transit system near you, you can expect the same functionality without anything in the way of setup.
Read Wikipedia Offline: Kiwix
Ever since The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, it’s been every geek’s dream: a handheld guide to all human knowledge. Internet access gives you that, but when you’re away from a tower, Kiwix is the next best thing. It downloads all of Wikipedia for you.
We’ve talked about tools for downloading Wikipedia before, but none that fit in the palm of your hand. Give this one a shot.
Internet via Text Messages: SMSmart
Imagine if you could check out recent tweets or even read current headlines, all without a data connection. SMSmart makes this possible by using text messages to request and receive data. If you have an unlimited texting plan but no data, this app is perfect for you.
I suggest setting this up while online, and only using it when all else fails. But it’s a great way to access just a few pieces of the web while on the road without a data plan. You’ll have quick access to directions, Wikipedia excerpts, Yelp, and even Twitter.
We talked about a few other tools while exploring ways to use the Internet without a data plan, but this was by far the most complete option. It’s probably not a good idea to use outside the US, though, unless you have an unlimited texting plan for contacting that country.
How Do You Use Your Phone Offline?
We’ve outlined more than a few clever ways to reduce mobile data usage over the years, but we always love to learn more. What apps do you use to make your Android phone more useful offline? Let’s talk about more such apps and tips in the comments below.
Oh, and remember: when all else fails, try to find free WiFi. I personally like to stand outside a Starbucks for a while as all my offline apps refresh — let me know any other tips you might have.
As you may have already found out or experienced on your site, Twitter share counts are no longer updating on the share buttons starting with the 20th of November this year. This means that all share buttons out there that relied on the Twitter share count endpoint are no longer providing share counts. This includes Twitter’s own official tweet button. Basically, Twitter seems to be de-emphasizing one of its defining metrics: the share counts. The impact the big social network’s decision has on the digital marketing world and therefore the consequences that reflects on all our websites cannot be overlooked.
And as the saying goes ” get mad and then get over it” (and start do something about it, we may add), we at cognitiveSEO began looking for an efficient solution to this matter. We believe that Twitter’s share counts are highly important for every webmaster or digital marketer who wants to know what happens to his/her website and therefore the business is working for. As a result, we started to do what we know best: put or minds, determination and cups of coffee together in order to find the best solution to get the Twitter share counts back.
We launched TwitCount.com the Twitter Share Counts Alternative!
Why Did Twitter Decide to Get Rid of the Share Counts?
The real reasons why Twitter decided to give up offering share counts info may not be accessible to us. What we do have access to is their official announcement where they are giving some explanation for the deprecation of the Tweet count feature and also the announcement of a new design for the Tweet and follow buttons. As Twitter’s blog post title says, this is a hard decisions for a sustainable platform, letting us the impression that the online social network took this decision based on some technical and financial reasons.
The explanation given by Twitter was that the shares they are offering rely on a different database that the one they are going to use from now on.
The choices were to deprecate the feature, or rebuild it on a more modern tech stack.
And, as rebuilding has its own costs, (including work on other features, “more impactful” as Twitter says), the well-known social network decided to drop the feature altogether.
After having offered this kind of data for years now, Twitter tried to downplay the importance of share counts, saying that the count does not reflect the impact of conversation about content as it doesn’t count replies, quote Tweets, variants of URLs. Nor does it reflect the fact that some people tweeting these URLs might have many more followers than others. It’s true indeed that this kind of info is not shown directly, yet a lot of precious info about all this can be drawn based on the share counts.
Nonetheless, Twitter says that they will not let us ride our bicycles with no handlebars and they offer us a recommendation to get our share counts back: Gnip’s full archive counts. Great so far, yet, you need to know that Gnip is a paid social media API aggregation company. Long story short, the alternative they are offering is a paid one. After offering the share counts for free for all these years, switching to a paid and a bit complicated service in order to get what we are used to get free of charge is kind of unwelcome. Of course, for larger publishers it’s very likely that nothing will change. Those companies and publishers will continue to be able to publish and glean share counts from share buttons and article links in real-time. Yet, it’s smaller publishers and individual sites that will be affected.
How Is Twitter’s Decision Impacting the Digital Marketing World
Reactions to Twitter’s decisions were immediate and, as you would expect, there were mostly negative ones. Ironically or not, Twitter was the main playground for manifesting the discontent against the social network’s decision of not showing counts anymore. Under #saveoursharecounts articles, complains and even petitions were submitted. You don’t have to linger too long on the content posted here to understand that the overall atmosphere is not the most cheerful.
However, you might say that this is just the crowd’s reaction to the change and is not to be taken into consideration when thinking of the long-term consequences. Let’s take a look at a study to see whether this change would lead to a decline in sharing activity and share of voice for Twitter. In the mentioned study there were pulled together and analyzed sharing activity data generated across 300,000+ sites that are powered by Shareaholic’s Content Amplification Platform. These sites collectively reach over 450 million unique visitors each month.
As you can see in the screenshot below, it seems that sharing activity to Twitter has declined by 11.28% since November 20th until the beginning of December, when the study was conducted.
Taken from blog.shareaholic.com
Not only the sharing activity overall will be affected by the lack of counts. Let’s take our case; we are a third-party app developer that offers within the cognitiveSEO tool the Content Visibility module, where users can take an in-depth look at their market’s social media activity, effortlessly revealing their content strategy as well as their competitors’. Without having access to the share counts, we cannot offer our subscribers a lot of data and statistics regarding their Twitter’s social footprint.
And since social media is one of the most important distribution channels in any online marketing strategy, tracking and analyzing which strategy provides the best results is of paramount importance.
You may also be a blogger and since your Tweet button won’t show visitors how many times your posts have been shared, that will lead to less interaction and therefore fewer tweets, as shown in the study above. Not to say how hard it will be to decide which type of content works better and on what type of public. It is true that you have other social platforms available but there are niches, like the SEO niche for instance, where Twitter is the main “yard”.
Moreover, if you’re a digital marketing specialist who offers consultancy for emerging brands, you will need the Social Proof that Twitter offered. You will need to show how popular you or other sources/content/people are with the online masses. Further, from the social proof’s point of view, it will be even harder for you to identify your client’s main competitors, their most successful content or get an idea of their online marketing strategy.
TwitCount- The Free Fix That Gives your Twitter Counts Back
Being intrigued by Twitter’s decision, as announced at the beginning at the article, we’ve spent our last weeks working on a solution for Twitter’s decision to eliminate counts.
We are happy to share with you our latest work, TwitCount, Twitter share counts alternative or, simply stated, the free fix for Twitter’s decision to deactivate share counts.
That’s right, it’s free and available for anyone. Although we’ve invested a lot of time and work in developing this solution, we were motivated by our users’ feedback concerning this matter but also by our own frustration and this is why we decided to offer a free service that anyone could benefit from.
TwitCount is easy to use and gives you exactly what you need: your Tweet counts back. It works like a widget that you need to place on your website in order to get the counter displayed near your Tweet button. After you add the TwitCount widget on your site we will start doing API calls to the official API in order to count the URL mentions on the fly. Leave the geeky stuff to us; all you need to do is connect your Twitter account to allow us to do the calls.
What you will need to do in order to see your counts on your pages is to place a button code to your website. You will be given a code that you will need to copy/paste, replacing the twitter button code. Counts will start appearing in maximum 1 hour. Starting the day you add the new button, all new pages will have complete counts data. Yet, old pages may show incomplete counts due to API limitation that allow us to show information for the tweets in the last week or so. The code that you will need to place on your website will be similar to the one below.
We don’t want to burden you with too many technical details so the important thing is that we’ve found a fix so you can easily get you twitter counts back. We’ve tested the widget on our own blog and it seem to be working just fine. Below you have a preview on how the TwitCount button will be appearing on your pages.
All you need to do is log in with your Twitter account, access: http://twitcount.com and and the shares will follow.
Not only will you get the share counts for any page you wish for but you will also get extra benefits. TwitCount will provide you with info about your most shared pages, it will let you identify the most active Twitter fans and track Twitter shares statistics about your site. All these benefits along with the main functionality: showing the share counts.
With no further introduction, we invite you to add TwitCount to your website and share with us your opinions on it. This app is not owned, associated or partnered with Twitter and the service is still in beta. Therefore, we would be more than glad if you shared your thoughts with us or if you sent your feedback.
Twitter warns users about spies, Internet Explorer shrinks to nothing, Microsoft has 10 free albums waiting for you, Apple desperately wants you to upgrade, and Saturday Night Live mocks toy collectors.
Twitter Warns of State Sponsored Attacks
Twitter has started warning users that their accounts may have been hacked by “state-sponsored actors […] possibly associated with a government.” The number of users notified that they have been targeted is unclear, but a handful have now published the warning they received on Friday (December 11).
We received a warning from @twitter today stating we may be "targeted by state-sponsored actors" pic.twitter.com/oZm83eVFC5
— coldhak (@coldhakca) December 11, 2015
Those affected have been warned that their username, IP address, email address, and phone number may have been obtained. However, according to Motherboard, there seems little to connect those targeted apart from an interest in security, activism, or free speech. Some have loose connections to the Tor Project.
Twitter is just the latest company to notify users when they’re targeted in this way. Google has had such a policy since 2012, and in October 2015 Facebook publicly announced it was following suit. However, the notices are the first indication Twitter has changed its policy in this way, with no previous public pronouncement.
Watch Chrome Eat Internet Explorer
It may be a difficult concept to grasp now, but at one time in our very recent past Internet Explorer was THE Web browser of choice. Microsoft owned in terms of market share for many years, remaining popular despite the challenges offered by Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
However, everything changed in 2008 when Google released Chrome. It quickly gained a foothold, and then grew to become the most popular Web browser around. A position it retains to this day. The video above, as discovered by The Next Web, gracefully shows how Chrome ate away at the dominance of Internet Explorer.
It’s a beautifully made video which truly brings home the impact Chrome had on the browser market. Internet Explorer still isn’t dead, but with Microsoft switching focus to Edge, its days are very much numbered. Predictions for the date of its ultimate demise on a postcard please.
Microsoft Rewards Windows 10 Users
Microsoft is currently giving away 10 of the most popular albums released in 2015 for free to Windows 10 users. As announced on the Windows Blog, the company is extending the offer to “Windows 10 fans as a gift from us for the holidays, and to say thank you for the support!”
Albums on offer completely for free for a limited time only include Chaos and The Calm by James Bay, Sound and Color by Alabama Shakes, Revival by Selena Gomez, and Delirium by Ellie Goulding. The free downloads are available by following the individual links on the Windows Blog post.
Unfortunately, the offer only applies to people using Windows 10 devices in the United States. Because Microsoft hates the rest of the world. Probably.
Apple Is Desperate for You to Upgrade
Apple appears to be pushing its fans to upgrade to newer devices in a much more aggressive manner than before, employing popup ads on the Apple Store for the first time. Anyone using an iPhone 5s or older device is being hit with a popup advertising the iPhone 6s, which Apple describes as “Ridiculously Powerful.”
I open up the app store on my iPhone 5 and I get this… Are you fucking kidding me? https://t.co/BjTDTSm7L3
— Samantha (@Dirk_Gently) December 10, 2015
According to 9to5Mac, Apple has always used the Apple Store to advertise new products to existing users, but this represents a change in strategy. The popup hides the page users are viewing, and they have to click Skip to acknowledge they have seen it.
We can only assume that the next step will be Apple sending someone around to your house to beg you to upgrade from your crappy, two-year-old device. Because the new one is so much shinier. OK, so the battery life sucks so much you have to buy an ugly battery case, but that’s surely a small price to pay.
SNL Mocks Adult Toy Collectors
And finally, the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, which opens on December 17th, has brought with it a host of new toys. These toys are primarily aimed at children, who will take them out of the packets and play with them. However, there is another set of toy collectors keen to get their hands on the new releases.
Adult toy collectors generally buy toys to keep them for the longterm. They won’t remove them from the packets, instead keeping them safely stored away for the future. These people aren’t harming anyone, and their hobby is about as inoffensive as hobbies get. However, that hasn’t stopped Saturday Night Live from mocking them.
Is it just me or did SNL used to be so much better?
Your Views on Today’s Tech News
Is Twitter right to warn its users they’re being spied on? When will Internet Explorer die completely? Is Microsoft right to reward Windows 10 users? Are Apple’s nagging popup ads a step too far? What do you think of adults who collect Star Wars toys?
Let us know your thoughts on the Tech News of the day by posting to the comments section below. Because a healthy discussion is always welcome.
Have you ever found yourself messing around with your iPhone, only to have it start to feel a little sluggish? It feels like everything you want to do takes longer than it should. Launching Twitter should happen in an instant, but it doesn’t!
Maybe you need to flush your iPhone’s RAM. I’m not talking about manually quitting all of the apps running. Rather, I’m talking about a lesser-known technique that will get everything out of RAM and let you feel like the phone just turned on.
The first thing you need to do is hold the power button until “Slide to Power Off” appears on the screen. Don’t slide it though! Instead, press and hold the Home button for a few seconds, and you will be placed back on the Home screen with a fresh slate as far as your RAM is concerned.
Don’t believe me? Double-tap the Home button. You’ll see that the apps you were running are still there, but if you click one, it will need to relaunch as if you were launching it from its icon.
Also, it should be noted that iOS generally does a good job of managing memory, and you shouldn’t need to do this often. But if something goes wrong, it’s a nice trick to have in your back pocket!
Have you tried using this technique when your iPhone is running slowly? Did it solve your problem? Let us know!
Each second, five new Facebook accounts are created.
Each day, more than 100 million people log into Twitter.
That is a massive audience that your brand could be reaching. However, many brands struggle to create real, human connections on social media. They confuse social media with a commercial platform where they can push their products 24-7. They take bad reviews personally, or they are so busy being ‘professional’ that they forget to be human.
The internet is a big place, and your content can easily get lost in the noise. Which is why more brands are using social media as a place to create real connections with their customer base. Here are a few brands who are succeeding at keeping it real on social media and creating solid, human connections in the process.
1. Humans of New York
What started as a photo project by a recently fired photographer named Brandon Stanton has become a brand to be reckoned with. Originally, Brandon planned to photography 10,000 New Yorkers and plot their photos on a map. Somewhere along the way he started telling their stories, and the project has since evolved into three books, a meeting with President Obama, and several prestigious awards.
HONY seeks to tell the extraordinary stories of regular people in a way that is easily accessible. By seeking to create a connection first and foremost, Brandon has been able to keep his first book on the top of the New York Times Best Seller’s List for 26 weeks.
Each post receives thousands of likes, shares, and comments.
(2/3) “He’d been married before and had three children. I think he doubted that he’d ever meet someone who’d look past…
Posted by Humans of New York on Monday, November 30, 2015
Lesson to Learn: Focus on connecting with your audience first. Remember: Social media is, above all, social.
2. Red Bull
Think Red Bull just sells energy drinks? Think again.
The brand has leveraged social media to become a media and publishing giant. For all the high energy content they post, you will almost never see a can of Red Bull. Why? Because they don’t have to.
What you will see is lots of content about sports and adrenaline pumping activities like skiing, racing, and surfing.
Lesson to Learn: Don’t treat Facebook like one big ad. Instead, share interesting content your audience wants to see.
3. Dewars
Most of the pictures this whiskey company posts on Facebook are obviously staged photos of models mid-laugh or clinking glasses. Which seems pretty mainstream.
Where the brand excels is interacting with users and keeping their page light and fun.
Lesson to Learn: You don’t have to be a straight-laced professional all the time. Inject humor if it works for your brand.
4. Oreo
Ever since their iconic “You can still dunk in the dark.” Super Bowl tweet, the cookie brand has been killing it on social media. Unlike Red Bull, they mention their product in nearly every post.
But, because they have an avid fan base who loves their products, it works. By harnesses the power of brand love, Oreo is able to create social media campaigns that blatantly promote their products – without being annoying or overly promotional.
Lesson To Learn: Use social media to turn loyal customers into your brand advocates.
5. Taco Bell
Another brand that has managed to keep it real is this fast food giant. Unlike other fast food brands, Taco Bell has made being trendy part of their brand, which has likely helped them avoid the declining sales many other fast-food places like McDonald’s are facing.
Their Twitter feed is filled with trendy images of young people and their products. They even went on a crusade to have a taco emoticon created. And they succeeded.
Like Oreo, this brand is keeping it real by tapping into the love affair people have with their tacos and other food.
Lesson to Learn: You can use social media as a brand building, or even rebranding, tool.
6. Aerie
Probably best know for using unretouched photographs in their ads, Aerie also does a great job of using Facebook as a customer service platform. They don’t try to be tongue in cheek or funny, but they do promote their own sales and have a team monitoring to respond to customer complaints.
Lesson to Learn: Use social media the way your customers do. If they are reaching out on social for customer service, answer them!
7. Barbie
In the last decade, the iconic doll has gotten a lot of flak for promoting unrealistic body standards, traditional gender roles, and body issues in young girls.
Instead of trying to defend the doll, they use social media as a platform to share gender equality messages and tell girls they can be anything they want.
Lesson To Learn: When used well, social media can help you tell your brand’s story or repair your reputation.
Want to Learn More About How Your Brand Can Succeed on Facebook & Twitter?
If you want to join the ranks of successful brands on Facebook and Twitter, get yourself registered for our next sponsored SEJ ThinkTank webinar on December 9th, 2015 at 1 pm Eastern.
Hosted by SEJ Founder Loren Baker and presented by WordStream Founder Larry Kim, this free hour-long webinar titled “The Ridiculously Smart Guide to Facebook & Twitter Advertising” will show you how to get much, much more out of your paid campaigns – using budgets of $50 or less.
Instagram is my social media soul mate. I’ve been on the platform for over three years, and it’s hard to imagine a day without it. It takes all of the clutter of Twitter and the “I really don’t care about your life” updates from Facebook, and simplifies your experience into a visually engaging feed of highly filtered photographs, ahhh. It’s everything I’m looking for when waking up in the morning, killing time on the train, or drinking wine post-work.
Mindless, visually engaging updates from friends, brands, and celebrities; yes I’m in full-blown Insta-love. And clearly, I’m not alone. With over 400 million users, Instagram is the fastest-growing social network amongst adults in the U.S., according to Pew Research Center.
Now that the majority of consumers are Insta-obsessed, marketers have been scrambling to keep up. For many the territory feels unknown and intimidating. You’ve mastered the art of the 140-character tweet and you’ve devised a strategy to reach customers through the cluttered Facebook news feed, but Instagram is like starting from scratch. Marketers are ashamed to see their follower count at 10 people after 4 weeks of posting updates.
Here’s a few tips to get your act together and start generating a much higher, less-embarrassing follower base free of charge.
#1: Use Trending Hashtags
#DUH. You know what hashtags are unless you’ve been living under a rock. You probably use them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Google+ (if you’re into that). Nowadays, most wedding events are even branded with a couple’s hashtag. Why? Because of Instagram. People post pictures and rather than stalking unknown attendees, you can see all of the Instagrams through the common hashtag page.
But, which hashtags should you use for your business? Popular ones. Shockingly enough, the hashtag #ourcompanyisthebestandyoushophere isn’t going to get a lot of traction. Instead, use the search icon to see which hashtags are currently trending.
Check out the brand below that did just that with the trending hashtag #veteransday (this was on Veterans Day, of course). Not only did they take a powerful topic and hashtag, but they made it relevant to their brand offerings:
If you’re not sold on the day’s trending hashtags, check out which tags your competitors are having success with. If you have a hashtag in mind, but are unsure of the volume, search for it yourself to see how often users are utilizing it.
Time and time again we’ve heard that how over hashtagging can be harmful, so how many hashtags is too many hashtags? An interesting study from Buffer, which analyzed a set of users with 1,000 or fewer followers, found that interactions are highest on Instagram posts that use 11 or more hashtags. “Don’t sweat your amount of Instagram hashtags,” says Buffer’s Kevan Lee. “They could be your best bet for growing a fast following on Instagram.”
With that said, use common sense. You don’t want your 50+ hashtagged post eating up a follower’s entire mobile screen.
#2: Tag People in Your Posts
I’m not talking about your mom or some rando on the street. Tag people you either want to connect with for partnership reasons or people who you believe fall into your target buyer persona(s).
Someone who does this really well is oats enthusiast (who I happened to study abroad with in college), Rachel Mansfield. I literally watched Rachel grow her Instagram following from the ground up, and with almost 20K followers and a beautiful blog, the brand she’s built is really impressive. One thing I’ve noticed about almost every one of her mouth-watering posts is that she tags other bloggers or food brands in her Instagram posts.
I’ve even seen this result in other bloggers re-posting her content to their large Instagram audiences or sharing her recipes on their sites. Partnerships can evolve from the simple tag of a photo, which will often greatly increase your reach and follower base. It’s pretty remarkable!
Do some research to determine who to tag and then start including these brands or individuals in your relevant posts from time to time. Make sure you mix up who you’re tagging to not annoy potential connections.
#3: Like & Comment on Others’ Feeds
This one’s pretty self-explanatory and shouldn’t be understated. It’s worked on myself multiple times. For instance, my boyfriend and I often truck up to his family’s house in Camden, Maine for summer weekends, and when a new restaurant in town liked one of my Instagram photos from a weekend excursion we decided to dine there after browsing through their Instagram profile and checking out their menu online.
Moral of the story? Interact with your target audience and followers will ensue!
#4: Include Your Location
Speaking from the example above, without including the location “Camden, ME” in my post, the chances of the restaurant finding me, liking my photo, and making us aware of them were likely nonexistent. Using geo-tagging when creating a new post will help people find your brand. People often search for photos by location, myself included, so ensuring you’re tagging the location of the photo, especially for high-popularity locations (think Central Park or popular downtown hang outs), is a simple way to expand your reach.
#5: Promote Your Instagram Everywhere
You’ve likely built up a presence on other social networks, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Vine, or Periscope. Think about the strategy you used when growing those channels. Did you promote them on your website with social share icons? Did you include links on your blog to your social channels? You should be doing the same with Instagram to grow awareness.
Start off by connecting your Instagram account with Facebook to upload the fan base you’ve already built. Run Instagram campaigns across your most popular social channels to build more exposure. Encourage your employees, partners, and brand followers to get involved by sending out reminders that you’re on Instagram. Send a company-wide reminder to add a link to your company Instagram in employee email signatures (this is especially important for customer service, sales, and whoever else is interacting with leads and customers). Include your Instagram handle of your business card and LinkedIn profile.
Also, create your own unique business hashtags and unique hashtags for specific campaigns, and ask your employees, customers, and partners to use them. “KitKat uses the tag #haveabreak to incorporate their fan’s photos under a tag that praises their catch phrase. The nearly 12,000 posts are right on target,” says MadeFreshly content manager, Rachel Daley.
Be aggressive about exposing everyone who touches your brand to your account. If you fail to get your account in front of people, growth can’t happen.
Now that you have all the secret tips and tricks at your fingertips there’s no excuse to not grow your following. Before you know it you’ll have a larger fan base than Kim Kardashian, so get to work!
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Margot da Cunha All screenshots by Margot da Cunha. Taken November 2015.