Facebook has nearly two billion users.

Practically everyone on the internet with a valid email address is on Facebook. The popular social media network does not only function to connect friends where they share statuses and photos, but it also has features which has made Facebook become a cost efficient and time efficient marketing and advertising vehicle.

Facebook for Business Promotion

If you are a business owner, you can take advantage of this popularity and these Facebook business promotion features to endorse your brand name and enhance your online and digital visibility and searchability.

Facebook is a digital platform where you can share information about your company and the products or services which it has to offer. It is very efficient in that it is very easy to navigate, making interaction with your audience as well as prospective and existing clients, convenient.

Your Facebook business page can be an effective tool to drive more traffic to your company web pages.

Presented here are some social media marketing and advertising tips which you can use on your Facebook fan page.

How to Use Facebook for Business Effectively

Be Sure to Complete Your Company Profile and Information on Your Facebook Fan Page.

Take advantage of the most basic feature of Facebook where you can introduce your brand name and tell all about your company.

Complete your company profile and information on your Facebook fan page using the “About” section of the website. Put in the most important details about your company, especially the contact numbers and email addresses, through which you can easily be reached. Key in your office’s physical address too. Do not forget to include your company website, for this will definitely spike traffic toward your web pages. Link your Facebook fan page to your other social media accounts too.

Never frustrate an interested client with little to no contact information about your business. Make sure your contact details are always updated.

On this section of Facebook, you can also key in your company objectives. List your products or services with their corresponding descriptions. You can highlight your bestselling products with convincing and enticing captions. In this way, you will encourage your audience to want to learn more about what your company has to offer.

It is recommended to break down this information into an easy to read layout such as using bullet points. This can make reading your basic details more inviting and less taxing relative to putting them all in an overwhelming long block of text.

This is the start of how to use Facebook for business effectively.

Make Use of a Catchy Cover Photo and an Appealing Profile Picture for Your Facebook Business Page.

Take advantage of the cover photo feature of Facebook. You can use it as an advertising board. Update it frequently according to the latest developments in your business promotion such as new product offerings, discounted items, or schedule of ongoing sale.

With regards to the profile picture, you may choose to stick to displaying your company logo for better recognition and retention. On the other hand, it may also be a good strategy to switch profile photos from time to time to intrigue your followers as your updates crop up on their newsfeed. This may be a way to encourage them to check out your page.

A catchy cover photo and an appealing profile picture for your Facebook business page are definitely a must.

Take Advantage of The “Pinned Post” Facebook Feature and Make It Interesting.

This will be an effective way to keep your latest and most important business information and updates in the prime position on your Facebook timeline.

You can pin a status that contains updates or you can instead use the feature to retell your company’s previous achievements such as awards won and other milestones in the business. The latter can be a way of saying your business has always been doing and delivering well to deserve recognition.

Your URL Username on Facebook Should Be Easy to Recall.

Never try and be overly creative to the point that you end up complicating your username.

It is best that your URL username on Facebook should be easy to recall. Keep it simple and just use your brand name. This will prove to be useful when your company is searched for on the web by users. Your Facebook page should easily make it to the top search engine results pages.

Encourage Your Regular Customers to Leave Reviews About Their Experience with Transacting with You.

Feedback is very important. It can help you reflect on where and how else you can grow your company.

In addition, it will be great free promotion too if your existing clients put in positive comments for you on your Facebook fan page.

Despite the proliferation of social media platforms as one of the leading marketing and advertising online and digital tools, the more traditional and older method of internet communications in the form of emails still makes for a great marketing and advertising vehicle.

While some may consider email a little outdated relative to the new online and digital strategies of today, it is not true that email is running behind the trend. In fact, it still remains one of the most powerful and most utilized means of communication and promotion for businesses.

After all, could you even sign up for social media network accounts without a valid email address? No, you cannot, right?

Why Using Email Marketing the Right Way Works Efficiently

Some of the advantages of email marketing are its cost and time efficiency, the ease of writing and creating its contents, the tracking of its effectiveness and the convenience of sharing and forwarding messages.

Therefore, email marketing is just as far-reaching and extensive as other digital marketing tools, if not even better.

With these factors set forth and established, using email marketing the right way can contribute a great deal to the promotion of your business and the influx of actual profits.

This is why using email marketing the right way works efficiently.

Presented here are some of simple ways which using email marketing the right way can be great advantage for your business. So take advantage of email to disseminate what your business or company has to offer.

What You Need to Include in Your Email for Marketing Purposes

Make Certain That Subscribing to Your Emails and Newsletters Is Easy and Convenient.

When internet users and prospective clients come across your web pages, your website must have an automated feature that invites a call to action, particularly for the web user, to sign-up and subscribe to your email updates.

Do not chase them off with the daunting task of filling out impossibly long forms just to sign up for your email newsletters. Keep things simple and basic. Ask for the complete name, email address and birthday. Do not tire them with too many fields to fill in.

As well, take advantage of tools that allow for them to instantly sign up by linking their other social media network accounts to their email subscription from your company.

Include in Your Email for Marketing Purposes an Introduction of Your Brand Name.

Establish the identity of your brand name using email marketing.

Create an identity and character that truly and uniquely represent your brand in such a way that set you apart from competition. Be sure when your recipients, meaning your prospective clients and even the existing ones, will know it is your company sending them an email newsletter. They have to identify your brand in an instant when they see the sender and subject line.

Make use of a catchy opening line, while on other occasions, you may want to include in the email contents a reminder of who you are and what brand you are representing. In this way, your recipient will recall, amid his or her pile of email subscriptions, it is your company that is reaching out.

As well, consistency is key. Constantly emailing updates to your subscribers will even result to better retention. Keep them updated. This is a great way of letting them know they are of value to your business.

This is one way of using email marketing the right way.

Let us discuss the contents to include in your email for marketing purposes in the next sections.

Keep Your Email Exciting, Appealing and Inviting by Keeping It Brief yet Complete.

Be sure to not bore and tire your audience with long blocks of text in your email, instead make them want to read the contents and even ask for more in the process.

Creativity is another key in using email marketing the right way. Express concisely what you want to convey to your audience but make sure the message is still encompassing of the necessary information to keep them interested and engaged.

Use quotes and short stories which are relatable to many and convincing enough for your subscribers to share and forward your email. However, ensure all contents are still pertinent to your brand name and what your business has to offer.

Earn the Trust of Your Email Subscribers by Being Honest and Straightforward in Your Contents.

Sincerity is another key to using email marketing the right way.

For instance, you noted your readers’ birthdays upon signing up to your updates. This opens the opportunity for you to be more personal in your way of reaching out to them. You can offer them an added perk or a freebie, say, a downloaded informative ebook because it is their special day.

You have to find ways to include in your email for marketing purposes the opportunities to build a professional relationship with your audience. This is what an email marketing campaign is all about.

Using email marketing the right way can make a huge difference in properly positioning your brand name in the market and in your business industry. Your branding can benefit a great deal from adequate email marketing campaigns.

Invest time and effort in using email marketing to further extend your influence and witness the conversion of your audience into actual clients.

The global business landscape is being transformed by the Internet of Things. In the emerging Connected Economy every business will have to become an IoT business, and enterprises that don’t adapt, innovate, and transform their models will risk falling behind. However, the reality is that IoT monetization is going to be difficult, especially IoT data monetization. In fact, I believe that more that 80 percent of companies that begin IoT implementations will squander their transformational opportunities.

For any company that has customers, suppliers, employees or assets, IoT monetization can be transformational. But success in IoT monetization comes down to more than just technology; it requires careful strategic planning and shifting your entire corporate mindset to treating data as the valuable asset that it is. To learn more, I encourage you to check out the article I wrote for BetaNews, where I detail my top three strategies for ensuring that your IoT initiative is part of the 20 percent that actually succeed.

Oh, and one last thing; as 2016 draws to a close, I want to take this opportunity to wish you Happy Holidays and a fantastic 2017 from all of us here at GoodData!

– Roman Stanek

We are living in the Rise of the Machines. No, Skynet and its hordes of Terminators haven’t materialized just yet, but there are many that fear that advances in automation and Artificial Intelligence are a serious threat to humanity in at least one aspect: jobs. In America, more jobs are already lost to robots and automation than to China, Mexico or any other country. But the global impact of the these systems will be felt even more strongly. I believe that the proliferation of ‘virtual talent’ will have a profound effect on intellectual offshoring and business process outsourcing, one that will be especially pronounced for emerging countries.

Traditionally, outsourcing and offshoring has primarily been conducted as a cost reduction measure. After all, why spend more on an expensive local worker sitting at a computer when the same tasks can be performed at a dramatically lower cost by an overseas worker sitting at the same computer, all while maintaining the same level of quality? In the pre-AI world, that thinking made perfect sense. But what if you could make the computer do that same job, without a human operator? The cost savings would be massive, and the business decision obvious.

Advances in AI technology are rapidly making this hypothetical a reality. Recent research from Gartner found that by 2018, 40% of outsourced services will leverage smart machines, “rendering the offshore model obsolete for competitive advantage.” And this market is only going to grow. The same report states that over $10 billion worth of these systems have already been purchased from the more than 2,500 companies providing this technology, while more than 35 major service providers are investing in the development of “virtual labor” options that leverage AI-driven service offerings.

All of this means that the intellectual offshoring we’ve seen since the 90s will no longer be needed or even viable, as there won’t be any business requirement for these services or economic incentive to move these tasks overseas. AI and advanced analytics allow for the automation of many tasks that are currently outsourced. That’s an extremely attractive option; automating tasks that are currently performed by hundreds of overseas employees will enable businesses to hire more expensive local talent who can focus on the difficult tasks and strategic decisions that make bigger business impacts.

AI not only softens the incentive of cheap foreign labor, it also negates the advantages of lower offshore operational costs. If you can locate the machines that are performing these tasks anywhere on earth for basically the same cost, why not keep them close to your home base of operations and save a bundle on travel, audit and compliance costs?

These shifts might take a few years as technology develops, but they are coming, and they will fundamentally change the way the world does business. Intelligent machines are here, and companies that continue to rely solely on outdated offshoring models out of fear of the risks and challenges of being early adopters of these systems do so at their peril. Virtual labor technology can offer potential cost savings of between %10-%70, so business leaders must begin planning now for how to adopt this technology and adapt their organizations to maximize its potential in order to survive and remain competitive.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I define Business Intelligence and where I see the industry heading. More and more, this connects back to embedded AI, machine learning, predictive analytics, data enrichment and other AI methods, but at the end of the day we all need to be on the same page.

At its core, BI is all about demonstrating profitable activity with analytics and enabling businesses to use their data to drive actions and outcomes. The popular thinking is that self-service BI tools are easy to use and good for the business, and business users like the idea of having their own data analysis tools. But what organizations are failing to realize is that they will be far more productive and profitable if they use AI and machine learning to automate the mundane decisions that most people use current BI tools to make and allow their employees to focus on more strategic problems.

I don’t believe that the concept of self-service analytics is a scaleable one. Employees should be spending their time on their core job functions, instead of slicing and dicing data. Embedding analytics at the point of work and automating mundane decisions with machine learning and AI enables business users to take immediate actions to improve business outcomes. Employees can focus on their day-to-day responsibilities, while letting machine learning take care of automating tasks that don’t require the expertise, experience and context that only a human can provide.

I’ve been inspired by JP Morgan’s COIN program, it’s an outstanding example to showcase how a business can leverage machine learning to automate decisions, and in the process save themselves millions of dollars a year. COIN is a learning machine that automates in seconds the mundane task of interpreting commercial-loan agreements that, until the project went online in June, consumed 360,000 hours of work each year by lawyers and loan officers. This perfectly illustrates the business value that machine learning can have.

Both startups and some of the world’s leading technology companies alike are pouring investment into AI technologies and machine learning capabilities, and those that aren’t are behind the curve. Tractica predicts the market for enterprise applications of AI to surpass $30 billion by 2025, with a focus on better, faster, and more accurate ways to analyze big data for a variety of purposes. Those investing in advanced AI and machine learning capabilities will lead the BI industry as it moves more and more towards automation.

Right now, the BI industry remains focused on self-service capabilities, but I think there should be less emphasis on self-service flexibility and more on automation and AI. At GoodData, we are focused on creating solutions that support embedding AI at scale to automate the basic business decisions that people mostly use BI tools for, which is why we will keep investing in predictive analytics, machine learning, data enrichment, and other AI methods.

GoodData wants to be part of the production environment, and we believe that the best way of doing that is deploying Smart Business Applications that harness the above technologies to make organizations more productive by allowing employees to spend less time analyzing data and more time focusing on daily tasks. Smart Business Applications involve the seamless integration of BI tools with day-to-day business applications and workflows. They work by delivering relevant, timely, and actionable insights within the business applications where work is already being done, so decision makers no longer have to stop what they’re doing and open another app to get the insights they need. By putting these intelligent insights right in front of them the moment they need them, GoodData is ushering in the next generation of BI.

Intelligence has been defined in many different ways including as one’s capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, planning, creativity and problem solving. It can be more generally described as the ability to perceive information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.

MicroCharts offer you an excellent solution if you want to make dashboards and reports in Excel. These dashboards and reports will be more concise and richer with MicroCharts. As MicroCharts uses the latest developments of dashboard reporting with its help, you can create graphs that are as small as the words and tables that are rich in data.