009 The State of Small Business Technology, September 2018 Edition

This is the first episode of our new monthly series, The State of Small Business Technology, September 2018 Edition. During the last week of each month, I’m dedicating a whole episode to news and happenings in small business technologies. This will lend heavily on the side of Web, Mobile and Social Media marketing content for Small Business, but I’ll also touch on other small business management technologies, such as IT and cybersecurity, as well economic development news and more, when appropriate.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/009 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments.

Next week, I have a great conversation with Sharon Sobel of Picture This Video, a video production expert, to talk about video marketing and production for Small Business. This is going to be a great rundown for you to understand how to actually get the videos made that are so popular on the Web, Mobile and Social Media today. I can’t wait to hear back from you on this topic once you get a chance to listen to it.
In this Cast
Ray Sidney-Smith, Host
Show Notes
Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Facebook and Instagram News
Facebook Blueprint courses

Learn How to Master Marketing on Instagram with These Blueprint Elearning Courses

Making Digital Skills More Accessible to Everyone | Facebook Newsroom

Facebook Will Now Allow Pages to Join Facebook Groups | Social Media Today

Instagram's Testing an Option to Add Hashtags Without Having to Include Them in the Caption | Social Media Today

Instagram Adds Private Polls to Direct Messages | Social Media Today
What's New at Google, September 2018 Edition
Google is revamping search on its 20th anniversary - here are the most exciting new features

G Suite Updates Blog: New G Suite adoption and productivity insights tool launching in Beta

G Suite Updates Blog: Real-time presence in Microsoft Office to become available October 17th

Google Home Hub might cost $149 according to a report - 9to5Google

Podcasting for Small Business (sign up via this link for notifications for my forthcoming book with Steve Orr of Steve Orr Media!)

Google Podcasts adds support for Chromecast - 9to5Google

YouTube will soon start showing vertical video ads - 9to5Google

Google retiring 'Gmail Offline' Chrome app - 9to5Google

Google unsurprisingly killing Inbox by Gmail next year - 9to5Google

Google Announces That its Data Studio Tool is Now Available to All Users | Social Media Today
Other News and Resources
[2018 Update] The Best Time to Post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. | Falcon.io

5 Things You Should Be Doing Right Now to Prepare for Giving Tuesday | Social Media Today  and Be a neighborhood champion - Shop Small® - American Express (Black Friday is November 23, 2018; Small Business Saturday, November 24, 2018; Cyber Monday, November 26, 2018; and, Giving Tuesday, November 27, 2018)

Meet the new Wave

The 16 Best Video Editing Apps You Must Use In 2018

Amazon Woos Small Sellers
Raw Text Transcript
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases.

Read More

Voiceover Artist 0:00

Welcome to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host Ray Sidney-Smith.

 

Ray Sidney-Smith 0:15

Hello their small business owners entrepreneurs economic development agents and community Welcome to season one episode 9009 of weapon beyond ...

This is the first episode of our new monthly series, The State of Small Business Technology, September 2018 Edition. During the last week of each month, I’m dedicating a whole episode to news and happenings in small business technologies. This will lend heavily on the side of Web, Mobile and Social Media marketing content for Small Business, but I’ll also touch on other small business management technologies, such as IT and cybersecurity, as well economic development news and more, when appropriate.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit http://webandbeyondcast.com/009 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

If you’d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments.

Next week, I have a great conversation with Sharon Sobel of Picture This Video, a video production expert, to talk about video marketing and production for Small Business. This is going to be a great rundown for you to understand how to actually get the videos made that are so popular on the Web, Mobile and Social Media today. I can’t wait to hear back from you on this topic once you get a chance to listen to it.

In this Cast

Ray Sidney-Smith, Host

Show Notes

Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Facebook and Instagram News

Facebook Blueprint courses

Learn How to Master Marketing on Instagram with These Blueprint Elearning Courses

Making Digital Skills More Accessible to Everyone | Facebook Newsroom

Facebook Will Now Allow Pages to Join Facebook Groups | Social Media Today

Instagram’s Testing an Option to Add Hashtags Without Having to Include Them in the Caption | Social Media Today

Instagram Adds Private Polls to Direct Messages | Social Media Today

What’s New at Google, September 2018 Edition

Google is revamping search on its 20th anniversary – here are the most exciting new features

G Suite Updates Blog: New G Suite adoption and productivity insights tool launching in Beta

G Suite Updates Blog: Real-time presence in Microsoft Office to become available October 17th

Google Home Hub might cost $149 according to a report – 9to5Google

Podcasting for Small Business (sign up via this link for notifications for my forthcoming book with Steve Orr of Steve Orr Media!)

Google Podcasts adds support for Chromecast – 9to5Google

YouTube will soon start showing vertical video ads – 9to5Google

Google retiring ‘Gmail Offline’ Chrome app – 9to5Google

Google unsurprisingly killing Inbox by Gmail next year – 9to5Google

Google Announces That its Data Studio Tool is Now Available to All Users | Social Media Today

Other News and Resources

[2018 Update] The Best Time to Post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. | Falcon.io

5 Things You Should Be Doing Right Now to Prepare for Giving Tuesday | Social Media Today  and Be a neighborhood champion – Shop Small® – American Express (Black Friday is November 23, 2018; Small Business Saturday, November 24, 2018; Cyber Monday, November 26, 2018; and, Giving Tuesday, November 27, 2018)

Meet the new Wave

The 16 Best Video Editing Apps You Must Use In 2018

Amazon Woos Small Sellers

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases.

Read More

Voiceover Artist 0:00

Welcome to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond with your host Ray Sidney-Smith.

 

Ray Sidney-Smith 0:15

Hello their small business owners entrepreneurs economic development agents and community Welcome to season one episode 9009 of weapon beyond cast today is the first episode of the state of Small Business Technology September 2018 edition during the last week of the month I’m dedicating a whole episode to news and happenings in small business technology this will lend heavily on the marketing content obviously but I’ll also touch on other business and economic development news when appropriate. Links to all the news sources are provided in the show notes at web and beyond cast.com forward slash 009 which is the episode number episodes typically go out on Tuesdays. But this last episode of the month will be a little bit more variable as breaking news happens. And so just something to take note of if you don’t see

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:00

Episode drop on a Tuesday it’s likely because it’s the last week of the month okay on with state of Small Business Technology sep tember 2018 edition of weapon beyond cast to preface this episode will be broken up into three different segments segment one will cover social media marketing and other technology news and this month we’re going to talk about primarily Facebook and Instagram segment two will be a regular segment called what’s new at Google I used to put out a quarterly blog post and I may actually start doing this again called what’s new at Google and so we’re going to talk about all the various things that are happening at Google I am the Google Small Business advisor for productivity and so that really means that I talk a lot about g sweet Google’s productivity suite for small business owners so if you have interest in learning more about g sweet Feel free to touch base and I’m always happy to help you with figuring out how to get g sweet implemented into your business will do what’s new at Google segment and then we will segue into kind of miscellaneous right miscellaneous

news events listener questions. Maybe there’s been some Marotta and so I will correct anything that I’ve said in past episodes in this episode during this final segment so let’s kick into Facebook news and what they have to talk about regarding their platform and Instagram this month. First and foremost if you don’t know Facebook has a platform called Facebook blueprint and Facebook blueprint allows you to be able to login with your Facebook credentials and you’re taking into a course learning platform that gives you access to all kinds of information on how to use Facebook and its various products. So Facebook owns Instagram, they own WhatsApp, they own messenger, the Facebook Messenger application and many other applications and all of those that are appropriate to business. They have expanded their course platform to include as of Friday September 21, 2018, they’ve included new Instagram courses so they have an Instagram for business course they’ve they’ve

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Have one about Instagram stories and of course, Instagram buying objectives, how to use the Instagram ads platform for greater effect. And so I would highly recommend that you check that out. And again like I said links to all of these are in the show notes but you can go to Facebook blueprint. com and access all of the courses and they’re all free. So they want you to obviously create pages, they want you to start ad campaigns and they are facilitating your ability to do so through giving this information away for free. So really cool stuff. Continuing on with the education side of Facebook. Facebook is actually partnered with the National Urban League to train small businesses across the United States. And they launched with a with a program in Columbus, Ohio, and they’re doing all kinds of wonderful investment in Columbus. However, since that event is over, I wanted to tell you that starting in 2019, they have put out a press release that says there’ll be offering trainings and social media strategy and

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Digital Marketing at 13 different National Urban League locations in the following cities and that was quoting from their news release and continuing to quote these are the cities that they will be in Atlanta, Georgia, Baltimore, Maryland, Chicago, Illinois, Cincinnati, Ohio, Cleveland, Ohio, Houston, Texas, Jacksonville, Florida, Kansas City, Missouri, Las Vegas, Nevada, Los Angeles, California, New Orleans or Nolan’s, Louisiana, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Washington DC and the District of Columbia. If you happen to be in one of those cities or nearby to travel to them. I will be paying attention to this so that when they do announce the actual dates in 2019, I will notify you in one of these podcasts. Okay, but I think it’s really great that they’re giving free training away on social media strategy and digital marketing. Take advantage of it if you are near one of those cities, and the date works for you.

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Right now on to some of the kind of new features and so forth that are coming to the Facebook platform and the Instagram platform. One is that Facebook is now going to allow pages to join Facebook groups. This is fantastic. I have long felt that you should be able to as a Facebook page, join a group and engaging conversations as your brand if you don’t want to expose your personal self on behalf of the business. You know, there are lots of businesses where the brand is more important than the individual especially in a small business environment where so much of your brand can sometimes be consumed by the persona of the owner. So now you can go into a Facebook group if the Facebook group allows it join as the Facebook page and therefore be able to interact and engage in the Facebook group which means that social listening you want to be listening on social media commenting and engaging with content as your Facebook

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Page not as yourself so that people learn about you and want to follow your Facebook page and want to follow your content and engage with it. So this is one next level step for you to be able to do social listening on a much more brand focused level. So I really like that and thanks to Facebook for finally bringing that feature to us. Next up is Instagram is actually starting to test an option This is not available yet but I think it’s something that you need to start considering as you plan for next year social media strategy which is that they’re planning to add hashtags automatically without you having to add them into the into the post description so this is obviously a huge change. It’s something that Google Plus did several years ago where they automatically started tagging things on your behalf by looking at the keywords and looking at the the social graph and deciding what tags became become hashtags within the system. And so keep a lookout this this will hopefully save

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bunch of time for you to when you’re adding things. So in the interface, it’ll just say, okay, add these hashtags, and then you’ll be able to add them automatically. And that won’t take up your hashtag limit. Most likely right now you’re kept at 30 tags per post. But this hashtag platform seems to be not limited so far. Maybe they will limited at some point. But the in the tests that I’ve seen, and from the reporting that I’ve seen, there is no hashtag limits so far, so not sure when it will come to pass, but I will certainly keep you updated as they they roll out this feature to two business profiles. And last but not least, on the Instagram side of the Facebook Instagram side, Instagram has added private polls to direct messages. So from a small business perspective, the ability to be able to send private messages to select groups of your audience is really powerful. Now you can

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send these polls and say what’s your favorite color? What are what are some products that you’d like to see us develop in the current fiscal year or in next year’s product development cycle you can start asking people about which holidays meet mean more to them are they are they a particular demographic are not a particular demographic. If that information is not being presented to you by virtue of reviewing the insights within Instagram, so now you’re capable of starting to get

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engagement with your best audience members and also start to collect some marketing research with these light touch point tools. And so just like with Twitter polls, and all the others, you’re now capable of asking marketing questions directly to audience members. So this is going to be a really powerful tool if you choose to use it and so I highly recommend it. I think that’s that it’s a fantastic new feature it’s it’s definitely an indicator that Instagram wants to have these kinds

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of private or exclusive engagement opportunities for influencers, but also small business owners. So keep that in mind. With that. Let’s move on to what’s new at Google September 2018. So Google owned by alphabet, the holding company of the search engine juggernaut is 20 years old. This week, they turned 20 years old. And so 20 years ago, in September, this small company called back rub, became Google and launched one of the largest companies in the world, they’re now valued. I think it’s $668 billion, just behind apple and head of Microsoft. And they are in the process of launching a whole bunch of new features that I think will be really useful for your consumers for the people who are trying to buy from you. And I think that this is really important for you to understand how Google is trying to connect the dots to be able to give you information. So let’s start off with

Ray Sidney-Smith 10:00

Google and the activity cards feature that they launched at their 20th anniversary event. So activity cards is for a consumer say, I am searching for buying some new shoes. And I go online, and I do a search for shoes. You know, maybe I’m trying to figure out what the most comfortable type of shoes are for my feet, and figuring how to get the right size and style and so on, so forth. So I do a couple Searches related to that. Well, Google is now going to know when I’ve done those searches. And they’re going to bundle them together and what they call an activity card so that I’m able to see these all as an aggregated view to come back to later. So say, two weeks from now, three weeks from now I come back and I do another search about shoes, but I haven’t bought shoes. Now I can see all of those searches together so that I can make a more informed decision. So for you as a business owner, you want to think about how you’re optimizing your website so that the various different pages you have and the products you have and say your ecommerce solution is

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Presented allows for this kind of whole body approach. Because Google is starting to look at things not from just a keyword perspective, but from a topical perspective. So you need to have multiple pages that talk about the various things that I, as a consumer going to be interested in, right. So I’m going to be interested in shoes style, if you own a shoe store, you’re going to want to have pages on your on your website. Even if it’s just an e commerce site, you’re going to have pages on the site that help discuss style size fitting all those kinds of topics. Because as an aggregate, they become the thing that I come back to, to be able to decide do I buy from you are do I buy from one of your competitors or go to big business and and and buy from a large aggregated site like Amazon or Walmart or Target or otherwise you want them to come to your site. So the more often they get a touch point Google is basically giving you the opportunity for them to circle back around to you if they’ve searched and seeing your pages before that brings us to search collections. So search collections are away from

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Google to be able to take all the various search results that you’ve done from your activity cards, and then to put them into a collection. And so again, this is me as a consumer, I’m now able to save a collection of all of the various cards that I have put together into a particular topic. So say that I want to go buy those shoes now. Now I can I can create a men’s shoes collection, or I can save all those things. And then what Google will do is recommend some related items that I might want to add to that collection because I haven’t seen it before. So now instead of having to plan a shoot shopping trip without knowledge, I’m being in empowered with that information so that I can go ahead and look at that information together. So it’s going to be really powerful tool, I think for small business owners who take advantage of the various ways in which Google has encouraging its users. To do that. What you need to do is you need to encourage your buyers when you come into contact with them in a retail environment.

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or anywhere else say, make sure to create a collection. And here it goes some pages we have on our website about these materials, they’ll look them up when you find them, add them to collection, and you will then have that available to you for future resources. So it’s just a little bit of view, educating people about how Google can help you bring business into your door, right? A little bit meta, but you can do it. Next up is app stories. So very similar to snap inks, Snapchat stories to Facebook’s Instagram stories and Pinterest stories feature. We now have amp stories. Amp stands for accelerated mobile pages, and Google couldn’t help themselves. But to bring the AMP stories to fruition. What this does is Google’s using machine learning to create accelerated mobile pages stories and they will be focusing right now on particular verticals, but presumably they’ll adopt this as a standard for showing stories on mobile, so

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Stories are vertical stories in the sense that they take up the full screen of a phone or tablet. And they display it that way. So that it’s a rich, immersive experience for people as they’re taking in the content. So you need to start thinking about how you’re going to start displaying content. So that app stories display your website content in the same way. Okay, so I’ll be talking about this again in future episodes. But right now just start to think about how vertical screen content can be displayed for your web content. Next up is Google is starting to feature videos in their searches so that there are actually going to be looking at snippets not the whole video so they’re able to look at frame by frame and all of the audio within a video today that is posted to YouTube or otherwise. And they are actually selecting specific sections of video that might answer questions that users type into the Google search engine, so

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Now you need to think about your videos, not just from the whole video perspective, but are there sections within your video that actually answer questions? And can you optimize those for Google’s search engine algorithm. So this is a whole new paradigm of search engine optimization. And I think it’s really powerful. Because what it will do is will get more people aware of getting their questions answered, and bringing your brand in front of them. Google’s also instituted several other features and other cool stuff not particularly relevant to small business yet, so I’m not going to talk about it. But I just wanted you to know that in their in their 20th anniversary event, they did launch these few new features that I think are really important and powerful for you a couple of G sweet updates that I wanted to let you know. One is that G Suite is now launching a productivity insights tool. And what will happen is you can apply for the beta and so this isn’t a beta test.

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mode. And what you can do is it’s called work insights. If you’re the G sweet administrator, you can go and apply. And again, the link is in the show notes to the Google blog where they have the link to apply for the beta. And what it does is it it looks at the impact of G Suite in your organization on three different perspectives. So adoption, what team members are actually using G Suite and the apps they use most frequently collaboration, how our teams working together, that is, how they’re how they’re handling meetings, so that it’s looking at Google Calendar, and otherwise, file sharing, and then document collaboration. And then finally, activity, which is what apps the teams are spending time in and how much time they’re spending in meetings together. So with those metrics, it can determine I’m quoting here, the metrics in the dashboard can help you determine how quickly your workforce is adopting g sweet how teams are collaborating if they’re using g sweet products as expected, and if you need additional training resources to help users understand a new workflow.

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So this is really important that if you’re going to invest in G sweet as an IT infrastructure for your business, you can really start to understand what people are doing with work insights and then determine Do I need to bring someone in? Do I need to provide more education in terms of how people do or incentivizing people to use the the G sweet products we have, as opposed to using potentially insecure or at least non optimal tools outside of the Google ecosystem, right, because you get the benefit of security and seamlessness of the workflow inside of G. Sweet. Also, Google has announced last week that they are bringing the real time presence abilities for say, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and otherwise to Microsoft Office documents as of October 17, 2018.

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So what this means is that if you use Word Excel or PowerPoint in their native file

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formats, you can now when when you put those into Google Drive, right? Because Google Drive is if you think about it as Dropbox, it’s basically the file storage component of G Suite. When you put files in there, now, users will actually be able to see if someone is viewing or editing one of those Microsoft Office files so that they don’t edit the same version at the same time and create conflicts, this is going to be a really huge benefit to productivity so that you don’t have that kind of problem happened in the future. So look out for that in your Google Drive settings within the admin at the admin admin console. And you can go ahead and activate that as of October 17. I also wanted to note that Google will be retiring the Gmail Offline Chrome app that some of you may know love and to use, but don’t fear, the reason why they’re actually retiring the Gmail Offline application is because they’ve actually bundled that functionality into the new

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New Gmail. So with the new Gmail has come a number of different things. One is that Gmail Offline will be taken out of the web store on December 3. And so that means if you are using that on the consumer level, just the normal, you know, Google consumer account, you just have an at gmail account or whatever, you need to, obviously deactivate that before December 3, and just activate that functionality within your normal Gmail, the new Gmail interface. And if you’re a G Suite administrator, you need to make sure that you enable that at the domain level, and then tell your users to go ahead and do the same. And that way, both levels will allow Gmail Offline in that same vein, as new things come, all things must go. And so unfortunately, Google will be killing off the inbox by Gmail application next year, as they brought out and launched the new Gmail are taking those experimental features that

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Or tested in Google inbox or inbox by Gmail and are bringing those into the new Gmail interface. So as of March 2019, inbox by Gmail will say goodbye be be aware of that. That if you use inbox as a workflow for various things that task management saving items from your Chrome mobile browser to inbox by Gmail, or otherwise, you need to start changing those workflows over now to the new Gmail, a lot of the functionality that that is an inbox by Gmail is available already in the new Gmail, but they’ll Of course, be pushing all of the other email, experiential features over to inbox by Gmail. And so inbox is going I just want to let you know now so you can start figuring it out. You have a good six months at this point to start the process. And I know how important email is to many of us. So make sure that you start moving over to that so you know, smart replies.

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All of those kinds of features are moving over into the Gmail applications on Android, iOS, as well as in the new Gmail desktop interface. Okay, a couple of fun things. Google Home hub has been announced. And it is still one of those things that a lot of people don’t know about. So I just wanted to explain it to you. So this is a smart display, very similar to a Google Home, or Amazon Alexa, the Siri home pod. These are devices that sit in your office or home. I’m going to talk about this from an office perspective. But what will happen is you have now Google Home hub, which is a smart display, which means that it’s a visual display and speaker so you can actually see its responses and it can give you audio feedback and so on, so forth. But the idea is that you then have a display ready and available to you for being able to interact with Google Assistant so you can ask it questions and it will then be able to display those

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products, those search results and otherwise on screen so we can give you instructions that can tell you how long it will take to get to your next meeting. and all kinds of other really important information that you might want to have at hand. This is going to be a great tool, and I can’t wait to play around with it in my own office. And there’s no camera on this product. So this is a little bit different than maybe some of the other ones that have cameras, but this one will not have a camera just so you have an idea. I think for those who are privacy focused, that’s actually a benefit for me, I would like it probably to have a little bit more functionality with a camera because it can potentially do more if it doesn’t have that camera, but it doesn’t have a camera, at least in this version, some from the reports I’ve been hearing, it’s going to only be priced at 150 bucks. So if that’s the case, and it actually comes out at $150 later this year. That’s really really cost effective. And it allows you to put a smart display in offices to be able to have you and your staff interact and engage

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With g sweet and other products within the Google ecosystem pretty easily, so just keep, keep an eye on it. I think that the Internet of Things, which is where the home hub lives, right, in the connected devices world, your business is going to be a huge productivity beneficiary of these kinds of connected devices, what we call the Internet of Things. And I think Google Home hub is going to find a proper place in that ecosystem. All right, Google podcasts is getting Chromecast support. So for those of you who have listened to past episodes, you know this, but for those of you who have not, I am putting out a book called podcasting for small business with my co author, Steve or Steve or media. Google has recently launched an application called Google podcasts. And so if you want to listen to a podcast you can use on the Android platform, you can just install Google podcasts and you’re off to the races. And one of the big missing features was the ability to stream the podcast from your phone or tablet or from the Google podcasts app.

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To Chromecast, which is the the device that you can connect to televisions so that you’re able to then stream content from your mobile device to a TV. And so now we’re getting that support. We’re getting Chromecast support. So it’s going to be a really, really great functionality. So if you’re smart TV, you know, say you have a smart TV in your office or conference room. Now if you have a Chromecast or have that smart TV support for Chromecast, you will now be able to play Google podcasts directly into the Smart TV or Chromecast supported devices. Very, very cool stuff. YouTube will soon start showing vertical video ads alongside video recommendations. And so if you don’t know this, Google has started within YouTube. So Google owns YouTube and YouTube has started to allow you to record in vertical view this is in competition with Instagram and Snapchat and others where you’re able to to record

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You know, a live stream video stream kind of event in vertical video. But YouTube now is allowing you to record non live video and then upload it. Very similar to IPTV, which is Instagrams TV channel app. Now you’re capable of potentially displaying ads. So if your business is thinking about doing Google ads, this is a new opportunity for you to record video in vertical view, and think about the demographics, right? The demographics are going to be younger people who are watching video, vertical video, right? They’re looking for vertical content, and they’re consuming that content. And now there’ll be able to consume vertical video ads from the mobile application environment. So if they have their smartphone, maybe their iPhone or their Android phone and they’re watching video in vertical, this is a great opportunity because you’re gonna there’s not going to be as many of those and not as many people putting ads on them. So, they’ll probably be underpriced.

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A couple of quarters until the big brands and so and so forth, get wise to it and start putting out ads. So if you’re thinking about it, jump on the the opportunity before it gets too popular. And last but not least within the What’s New at Google. For the geeks out there, if you have been using Google Analytics and some of the tools within the Google Analytics suite, one of them that has only been available in beta up until now is the Google Data Studio tool. This is a an analysis and visualization tool for a whole bunch of different Google suite of products that has analytics ads, YouTube, analytics, Google Sheets, and a whole bunch of other products and services both within and without Google and now it’s out of beta, and it’s available free of charge for everybody, which means that you’re able to suck in all of this data from different places. Say that you want to pull in some Facebook Insights you want to pull in some Google AdWords.

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Google Ads insights, Google Analytics and your email marketing statistics. And now you can pull all of that into Google Data Studio and actually see visualizations so that you can do better analysis and synthesis of that data. It’s a fun tool to play with. It does take some training and getting used to. But once you do, then can see your data in a much more visual perspective, which will help you make better business decisions. So with that, that closes out this section of the episode for what’s new at Google. And we’re going to move on to some miscellaneous I’m going to talk a little bit about Amazon and they’re embracing small business some information about some tools that I really like and some updates to those and three different particular resources that I think it’d be really useful for you and then finally closing out with some discussion of upcoming holidays that you should be paying attention to that will really help small business especially for you know, retail but i think you know, even service providers can

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can get real benefit out of out of these holidays. And I will probably talk about them every year because I think it’s so important. But I wanted to talk about what they are and the dates for this year and how you can get engaged. So let’s start off with Amazon. Amazon has embraced small business with a new platform called Amazon storefronts. And so Amazon storefronts is basically an online marketplace where you can add products and businesses to hundreds of thousands you know if not almost a million small businesses probably sell on Amazon at any given time. Amazon is giving people the opportunity to get on this new product called storefronts and they fit into this thing called curated collections. So basically, there’s sections that are either industry or product specific or or holiday specific or otherwise. So that gave some examples of back to school Halloween beauty and grooming pet supplies, home grocery toys, electronics, books, jewelry, and so on, so forth. I think that this is going to be really great.

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opportunity for you to get in front of Amazon and bring people to your store. Amazon already has handmade at Amazon, which allows artisans to put their products onto onto Amazon directly. But I think that with storefronts this really opens up to a wider range of of small businesses so I think you should really check it out see if it’s available to you and there is a link in the trend cast for you to be able to sign up for updates on Amazon storefronts so that when the opportunities arise, you can go ahead and get yourself listed on Amazon storefronts. Next is wave so wave accounting is an application that allows you to do all of your bookkeeping accounting payroll and so on so forth online and there are various competitors out there zero accounting which is x e r o into its QuickBooks is available as an online product as well and multiple other online accounting focused

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Software. And so the point is, is that wave just put out a whole new interface. And it’s really beautiful. It’s a great interface, the product is mostly free. And so you can you can do all the accounting stuff and and invoicing and so on so forth, is free for invoicing you obviously paying the transaction fee. And that’s how they get paid for the product, payroll services or a fee based service and so on, so forth. So they, they try to give you the bulk of the tool for free. And then there are these various aspects of the tool that obviously cost but I would check out wave if you just go to wave apps. com and look at the look at the new new product, look at the way in which they’ve visualized the dashboard and they’ve made it faster and they also have a marketplace where you can find partners who can help you with various aspects of your accounting so I really like how they’ve done it and so check it out the new wave so if you go to wave apps.com forward slash rebrand.

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You can learn all about the new wave if you’re already using wave. And if you aren’t using wave yet, you can check it out and see if it’s something that you want to do. If you want to bring your accounting software into the into the web environment where the rest of your world maybe then it makes it pretty seamless connects to your bank account and, you know, does all the high level stuff that you would need an online accounting software to do next step are just three different articles that I found that help us go over some of the basics of getting on social media and video marketing. And I just thought they were really useful so I wanted to share them here. One is an article on what are the best times to post on social media in 2019, and they covered Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and they talk about what when are the most notable times for you to post on social media. Now, I preface this with the caveat that I am generally skeptical of these kinds of generalized statistic based times to post

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Because every audience is unique, especially local audiences. So if you have a local business, you’re really going to have to look at the insights to figure this out. But if you have nowhere to start, if you’re just starting off and you have no idea when to post, these are some good guidelines to get started, then you can double back and look at your data to see when your content is being looked at and engaged with the most and then you want to obviously optimize to post at those times. So for Facebook, they’re saying the best time is between noon and 4pm and then the next runner up is at 9am. So basically in the middle of the day when people are taking breaks or first thing in the morning when people show up at their their offices presumably best day or days to post our Wednesday Thursday and Friday on Facebook for Instagram Instagrams, a little bit different it’s 11am to 1pm, so a shorter period of time so it looks like there’s a smaller window of opportunity there for

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Hi engagement and then 2am, so 11am to 1pm and then 2am in your local timezone best days are monday wednesday thursday friday so for some reason Tuesday drop below the the the threshold for engagement rate. But Monday Wednesday, Thursday and Friday on Instagram are the best days to post Twitter noon. That’s it noon as the best time to post on Twitter. And the runner up for that was 5pm to 6pm. So presumably people finish their their work for the day they leave the office and on their Metro ride or on their way out the office. They’re catching up on tweets from the day the best days to post on Twitter are when Monday Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, best days to post on Twitter. LinkedIn gives you 5pm to 6pm. So again, more professional networking environments.

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So people are finishing their work day and maybe closing out with checking out their, their their feeds on LinkedIn answering messages, LinkedIn messages that might be being sent. And they’re doing that between the 5pm and 6pm our most, most of the most, most days runners up are between 8am and noon. So people are starting off their days early earlier on social media with LinkedIn. And so between 8am and noon, they are logging into LinkedIn. I’m presuming to update profiles to read their feeds, potentially doing some LinkedIn networking and so on so forth between those hours, best days to post on LinkedIn our Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. So it seems like the weekends and then monday and friday or not when people are most actively engaged in their kind of work work hats, and so Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday on LinkedIn. So they talked a little bit about time zones here and I would just recommend that you check out the time zone little note here but i think that you know if you’re posting for multiple time zones

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The time zone that is going to have the highest engagement across each of those time zones, and that means you might need to post multiple times. Or you might decide that you want to just post you know, during a time period where where more than one time zone overlaps, and therefore, you’re going to see the most people in that time zone. But that was a really good article updating you on posting times and days for social media. So that link is in the show notes. Next up is video ad suppressor, which is a tool that is built by Hootsuite for developing ads on various platforms Facebook and Instagram and so on so forth. And espresso put out this article, which are the 16 best video editing apps you must use in

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and they talked about some of the statistics of how important video is becoming on the internet and they listed a couple of new applications I had not yet seen. And so I thought it would be good to to share.

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Those with you. And that way if you are looking for a video editing application, you can go ahead and do that. So Phil Mora go is a is a video editing app I had not heard of before, but it’s number one on their list. And so it says it’s known for its incredible video editing software. And so this the app Fillmore ago is supposed to be really great. You can trim video, create subtitles and text, speed up the content, add filters and add overlays. So it sounds like a pretty full bodied application. It’s free. But it also has in app purchases, which I’m presuming upgrade some of the features within the tool. It’s avail available for both iOS and Android. And then I’m only going to talk about the next two apps and then you can look at the other 13 applications. But next one is just DOMA just it was a long time application that I’ve used. And justo is an easy video editor. You can install the app and get get going for enhancing your videos really quickly. So you can

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style, you can create all kinds of fun, you know, filters and edit and and publish to your various platforms using Mojo. So it’s free on both iOS and Android. And there is a business plan that allows you to be able to do more in terms of moving around different segments of video and publishing on different platforms, and so on, so forth. And then their third option is another tool that I actually didn’t know existed. It was it’s called Adobe Premiere clip, and it says, you know, obviously put out by Adobe, there’s a full desktop version, but this app is for mobile, and it allows you to create, edit and share videos as it says. So there are two editing styles you can choose automatic where it automatically tries to generate a great video for you and edits it and publishes a video next is free form which allows you to trim sequence and edit the video manually. So you have two different options there from what I’ve played around with in the few minutes I’ve had with it, so

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Far looks pretty good, looks pretty solid. And it’s a free app and you probably don’t need to upgrade to any of the paid plans. But if you need to, you can obviously upgrade if you need it to do more than what it already does. And if you’re in the Adobe Creative Adobe cc suite you you probably have access to those features anyway so check out the the link to it if you’re if you have tried those and you need to find other options maybe you’re on a specific platform and so on so forth. Go to the link in the show notes. And you can see the other video editing applications that have more bespoke features features that maybe you’re not in the ones that I just listed. I wanted to close out this episode with a discussion on the four big shopping holidays of the fall that start off kind of the winter holiday season. But these are really important for small business and I want to make sure that you all know about them for this coming season. So they are Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday what they are

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Our Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving. And that’s November 23, 2018.

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That is then followed by Small Business Saturday, which is a program by American Express. And what they do is they give discounts to consumers and they are enabling small businesses using the hashtag shop small to go out there and engage people to buy from small businesses on Small Business Saturday. Then there is Cyber Monday, which is an online shopping holiday and then Giving Tuesday, which is a charity focused holiday so that people can use their charitable giving dollars for the season on that day. Okay, so there is a link in the show notes to this, but there’s some information on things you can do to prepare for Giving Tuesday. And I think from a from a business perspective, Giving Tuesday is a great opportunity for you to find a charitable marketing Alliance so that you

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You can find stories of people who maybe benefited from the charity and also benefited from your business and telling those cross related stories and getting all of the pieces in place. So that if you want to do some some corporate charity work, maybe you share the Giving Tuesday donor link for a charity of your of your preference on behalf of the business and share that out on Giving Tuesday. This gives you some social good perspective from a branding perspective and goodwill perspective to your community, but also an opportunity for people to potentially buy from you and give a percentage away to the charity of your choice. So people who are shopping maybe on Small Business Saturday letting them know that on Giving Tuesday, you’re going to be giving away some percentage of those dollars spent at your store to the charity on Giving Tuesday. And now you have a multi staged social media and public relations opportunity campaign.

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That you can develop based on using that. So look at the the resource link that I provided in the show notes and think about how you’re really going to utilize these opportunities for you. They are big shopping, holidays. Obviously, big businesses take advantage of this. But a lot of people want to support small businesses. And this is one way in which you can do that by implementing ecommerce opportunities where people can buy from you online and or come to your store during those time frames in order to patronize the store Small Business Saturday, specifically, you can actually apply to be a neighborhood champion. So if your neighborhood doesn’t have someone championing your small business community, maybe you will, you can head over to the American Express website. Again, there’s a link to it in the show notes and you can you can engage with the small business community and be a hub for them there but it’s as easy as as also applying as a business and if you it doesn’t matter if you accept American Express or not at your store. There are still ways in which you can

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Engage and they give you bags and mats and that kind of thing that you can put out for people to know that you are a small business that they should patronize during Small Business Saturday on November 24 so I just really hope that you take advantage of these great shopping holidays that allow you know people in your community to be able to buy from you and to know that you exist by virtue of the conversation that is already happening around those kinds of holidays especially Small Business Saturday I know the SBA gets involved and doesn’t quite a bit of promotion and so do the Small Business Development Centers in your regions and that does it that closes out this episode of 009 of weapon beyond cast the state of Small Business Technology sep tember 28 edition thank you so much for sticking around and listening to all of the various happenings that are going on in the small business technology space next week I have a great conversation with Sharon Sobel of picture this video she’s a video production expert and she’s going to talk about

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Video Marketing and production for small business with me she’s going to focus of course on the production side I’m going to talk about the video marketing side. And this is going to be a great rundown for you to understand how to actually get the videos made that are so popular on the web, mobile and social media today. I can’t wait to hear back from you on this topic because it’s so important. And I’m happy to answer questions. So do you have a question? I will be happy to answer those either offline or here on the show. Just go to web and beyond cast.com forward slash contact and go ahead and leave a question there and I’ll be happy to try to help you out and give an answer. Like I said, you know, if it’s if it’s one that needs to be privately responded to, I can do that or we’ll go ahead and answer that here on the show. Because if you have a question about something, it’s likely that many people listening will also have that same question. And for those of you who are listening for the first time and you’ve come across this episode, serendipitously please feel free to subscribe and share with your network whether that be

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On cast, we’re happy to have you here and we’re looking forward to sharing with you in the future. Thanks for listening to web and beyondcast, where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I’m your host Ray Sidney-Smith. Until next time, here’s to your small business success on the web and beyond.