Social Media in 2021

by Keely | in News, Social Media | on 18 Jan 2022

There are now 4.55 billion people around the world who use social media, with 400 million of those having joined social media platforms within the last 12 months!

Social networks are constantly evolving and growing in popularity with different demographics, so we decided to look at how 2021 played its part in the world of social.

Top 5 Most Popular Social Networks (in Millions)

Facebook 2,895
Youtube 2,291
WhatsApp 2,000
Instagram 1,393
FB Messenger 1,300

Facebook takes the top spot in being the world’s most popular social network as of 2021* (but we aren’t completely shocked by that are we!) with the world’s most famous video platform – Youtube, following in at number 2. Facebook, or Meta should we say, also own WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger, who likewise appear in the top 5 most popular social networks in the world.

Why People Use Social Media

According to data*, the main reason people use social media is to keep in touch with family and friends, but a high percentage of people also admit to using social media just to kill time (the perfect opportunity to grab your audience with social marketing!).

Some other reasons included:
Reading news stories
Finding funny/entertaining content
Trending topics
Finding Inspo
Searching for products to buy
Sharing and discussing opinions

Among these main reasons, over 20% of people reported that they use social media to follow celebrities and influencers.

Where to Find the Latest News

Social media channels of course!
In a survey* taken in July 2021, respondents were asked how they access news content. A whopping 82% of them said they mainly found out news from online media, including social platforms, with television coming out at 64%.

What Major Changes took Place in 2021

Short-form video has pretty much taken over social in the last 12 months, with all the big platforms making changes and updating their apps to follow suit.

Some other big words you may have come across last year, especially in the last 6 months, are ‘metaverse’ ‘NFT’ and ‘Web3’. Not everyone is jumping on board with these yet, but they are certainly something to keep an eye on in 2022 (we’ll talk more about this soon! Watch this space).

E-commerce, through the use of social networks is on the rise! With so many influencers now promoting products, it’s no surprise that platforms are now introducing shoppable features.

So, what have some of the social platforms done to keep up with these up-and-coming trends? And what other major things happened in 2021?

TikTok

If you hadn’t heard of TikTok in 2020 then we are sure you heard of it in 2021. TikTok became a huge hit during 2020 when Covid-19 had everyone cooped up at home, and since then has continued to reign as one of the fastest growing social networks.

Known as the king of short-form video, TikTok has influenced some of the biggest trends across other platforms.

As the network continues to grow, and with the additional long form video and ads feature to help boost content, people predict more and more users will use the video-sharing app to influence consumer purchasing.

Facebook

As mentioned in the Top 5 Most Popular Social Networks, Facebook changed their name in 2021 to ‘Meta’, as they begin their journey into building their own metaverse.

Facebook also seen the success of short-form video across the web, and therefore introduced Facebook Reels.

Although it may be the most popular social platform in the world, Facebook had a data breach in 2021 which leaked millions of user records onto the dark web*.

The breach included phone numbers, names, locations, and email addresses of over 500 million users across 106 countries.

Although Facebook said the data had been scraped in 2019, the leaked data could still prove valuable to cybercriminals*.

Twitter

It was a year of successes and not so successful features for Twitter in 2021. Towards the end of 2020, the platform tried to introduce it’s own short-form video feature called ‘Fleets’, similar to the ‘Stories’ feature on Facebook and Instagram. However, it was unsuccessful and was removed from Twitter in August 2021.

There were some features that did take off on Twitter though:

Spaces – Spaces allows users worldwide to join in with live conversations from creators. The feature concentrates on the use of audio content, which also leads onto Twitter’s other new feature…
Voice Tweets – This could be the feature a lot of people have been waiting for! No more having to worry about character count, you can literally and physically just SAY what you’d like to tweet.

Likewise to Twitter, LinkedIn didn’t have much success with their ‘Stories’ feature, so was removed from the platform a year after its introduction.

They did however, introduce ‘Boosting’. This allows its users to boost organic posts to try and achieve greater engagement using a chosen budget.

YouTube

Having seen TikTok’s achievement in short-form video, YouTube (pretty much the over-all king of online video), developed their YouTube Shorts – videos that are 15 seconds or less and can be uploaded to YouTube instantly. Will it take over TikTok? We’re not sure, but we’ll soon see throughout 2022!
‘Video Chapters’ has been another development in the platform, helping an audience to skip to certain sections of a video, without having to fast-forward or rewind a whole video to find a certain video clip.
Influencers are a huge part of social media now, promoting products and brands within their content. With this in mind, YouTube have introduced Live Shopping as a part of its e-commerce shopping experiences.

To Conclude

Every year, social media gets bigger and bigger, and won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

With a forever changing landscape and multiple up-and-coming trends, platforms are constantly developing to keep up with the times and compete against each other to be the most used platform online.

Now here’s to 2022 on social…

*Research/data taken from the following sources
 https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/
 https://www.statista.com/statistics/715449/social-media-usage-reasons-worldwide/
 https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/
 https://www.thedrum.com/news/2021/12/10/2022-social-media-predictions-tiktok-nfts-commerce-meaningful-engagement
 https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-2021-facebook-data-breach/
https://www.businessinsider.com/stolen-data-of-533-million-facebook-users-leaked-online-2021-4?r=US&IR=T

05 Oct
2021

What made the world stop?

by Keely | in Industry, News | on 05 Oct 2021

Many of us will have vowed to cut down on our social media usage at some point since it became a mainstay of our lives. But to have it taken away altogether yesterday for over six hours proved that it had become a vital underpinning of our modern society.

WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook (all owned by the latter) are used by over 3.5 billion people for both personal communication and core business activities – what made these apps all fail and halt everyday life for so many of us?

In an official statement, Facebook cited a faulty configuration change for the outage, but what does this technical jargon actually mean?

There are two key aspects to internet routing when dealing with a company as large as Facebook – BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and DNS (Domain Name System). We can think of BGP like a road map detailing the best way to get to a particular site, with DNS acting as an address system detailing to location (IP address) of each website. While smaller websites do not take charge of their own road map and address system, Facebook have a whole world of connectivity that they maintain themselves. This, as we can see, complicated matters.

All software systems need regular updates to continue running effectively, but when Facebook deployed their latest update yesterday, they effectively told the BGP ‘road map’ to remove all paths to Facebook. This then meant that there was no way to find each website address.

This affected everything that Facebook runs, so WhatsApp, Instagram and even Facebook’s internal servers; employees were locked out of access-controlled offices and had no access to email!

So that of course made it a challenging problem to fix. The people who could diagnose and sort it were both physically and remotely shut out.

While it hasn’t been confirmed, Facebook eventually had to physically travel to and manually reset the servers in California.

Most of us woke up this morning with relief to see our favourite apps fully functional again, but we’re sure that at Facebook everyone is focused on making sure this doesn’t happen again.

27 Sep
2021

Why is web accessibility important and how is it carried out?

by Keely | in Digital, Industry | on 27 Sep 2021

Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.

There are also strong business benefits for accessibility. Accessibility modifications overlap with other best practices such as mobile web design, usability, design for older users, and search engine optimization (SEO). This means that accessible websites have better search results, reduced maintenance costs, and increased audience reach, among other benefits.

So, what can we think about when we build our websites to make them more accessible? We’ve come up with a list here of the things we like to bear in mind; even implementing just one or two into your own site will make a massive difference!

1. Alternative text for images

Images should include equivalent alternative text (alt text) in the markup/code. The alt text should summarise the purpose of an image. The source filename of the image should not be included because generally it is not useful to a visually impaired user.

2. Transcripts for audio

Providing a text transcript makes any audio information accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as showcasing it to search engines and other technologies that can’t otherwise hear.

3. Keyboard input

It must be possible to use all of your site’s major features via a keyboard – including accessing all pages, links, content, and so on.

4. Choose colours carefully

Colour-blindness spans a wide spectrum and affects different people to varying degrees. So, you need to make sure the colours you select on your site contrast well to ensure that everyone can distinguish between various elements on the page.

5. Use headers to structure content

Adding different header levels will make your content much easier to understand and improves the flow of the page. This will also help screen readers interpret your pages.

6. Underline links

Even though it may look stylish, removing the underline from links makes it difficult for colour-blind users to see them. So, we need to make sure that links are underlined where possible.

7. Use relative CSS units

Low-vision users, and a lot of people over 50, increase the browser default font size to make text easier to read. Absolute units such as pixels ignore this user choice. If we use relative units like EM and percentages however, they re-size according to the screen size and/or user’s preferred font size and work on a large range of devices.

These are just some of the many ways we can think about making our websites accessible. To learn more check out W3C’s comprehensive guide, or contact us today to see how we can help you to help others.

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21 Apr
2021

AI in Marketing

by Keely | in Industry, Marketing | on 21 Apr 2021

Artificial Intelligence is transforming the world around us every day, with all industries developing new innovations to change the way they work. It has been a massive buzzword over the past few years, and it seems that nowadays we can’t be without it. But how is it changing the marketing industry in particular?

What is Artificial Intelligence?

First, we need to define what we mean by AI; by now everyone’s got their own definition, but IBM provides a comprehensive one:

“artificial intelligence refers to the ability of a computer or machine to mimic the capabilities of the human mind—learning from examples and experience, recognizing objects, understanding and responding to language, making decisions, solving problems—and combining these and other capabilities to perform functions a human might perform, such as greeting a hotel guest or driving a car.”

So, it’s easy to see why some people are terrified of AI ‘taking everyone’s jobs.’ AI does have the capability of automating all manner of tasks conventionally part of many roles, but this does not mean that people will be redundant. In fact, it will allow individual to focus on more intensive activities, while leaving the tedious tasks to an AI system. There is no doubt a lot of these in marketing. AI systems also have the capability of processing an incredible amount of data, producing tangible outputs that marketeers can then use to generate leads. So, what are the specific ways that AI is being used today in marketing?

Advertising

With the right data, AI-powered ad tools can detect patterns at scale in your advertising data, then predict what changes to campaigns will improve performance against a specific KPI. This can all happen in seconds, rather than the hours, days, or weeks it might take a human to analyse, test, and iterate across campaigns. This allows you to increase your return on ad spend and reduce the amount of money you spend on staff time and ineffective ad budget.

Copywriting

AI has the potential to both curate and generate content, then get the right people to see it on the right platforms. At the moment this is limited in range, but in the near future AI could develop initial drafts of content based on certain restraints

Personalised recommendations

Intelligent algorithms can help personalise a user’s website experience – By analysing hundreds of data points including location, demographics, device, interaction with the website, etc., AI can display the best-fitting offers and content

Chat bots

Compared with manual customer service, AI chatbots have many advantages, allowing businesses to go beyond the traditional “one- to-one” form of customer service to support to a number of customers at the same time and in different time zones. Of course, AI chatbots don’t need to rest, so they can answer customer queries around the clock and in real time. This makes them both highly efficient and able to provide support outside of office hours, improving customer experience.

It does have to be said though that just because a system uses AI doesn’t mean it’s accurate. AI outputs are only as good as the inputs into the system. If the data it is given is inaccurate, not fit for purpose or too sparse, the system cannot be expected to give good results. Nevertheless, it is an exciting field and worth the hype!

06 Apr
2021

22 years of PDC

by Keely | in Industry | on 06 Apr 2021

Introduction

PDC is a digital agency that has been trading since 1999 & generates revenue by developing bespoke marketing websites & digital platforms. With more than 20 years of experience in the digital world, our passion drives us to build online experiences that have maximum impact and relevance, enabling customers to make real connections with their audience.

We are ‘technology-driven’ and ‘relationship oriented’. We love to build strong ongoing relationships with our customers and their companies.

Early days

PDC was founded on 7 April, 1999. In those early days we were focussed on providing web sites and web knowledge to local companies. Some of our early customers, like the Lingerie Company, are still with us 20 years later.

The stimulus of working with lots of interesting companies on a variety of industry sectors was really gratifying, spanning everything from balloon rides to bespoke floor coverings

Training and SEO

Early on, we provided training in Business Development for what is now Birmingham City University, and the Fachhochschule (technical university) Braunschweig Wolfenbüttel in Germany.

In those days Altavista and Yahoo! were the main search engines. Before Google, choice of keywords, good keyword placement and keyword meta-tags were all important. Google gradually grew in popularity and began to dominate the process of search engine optimisation by 2005.

Google introduced the concept of ‘Content is King’, and aimed to give the searching customer what they were looking for. This meant that Google connected the customer with the most valuable web site.

Facebook and other social media were becoming very popular by 2010 and formed part of a strong Internet marketing strategy. At this time, we were training companies in Internet Marketing and Social Media and this led to many fruitful relationships.

A battery of SEO measurement and optimisation tools became available. The MOZ SEO suite started in 2004, Google Analytics started in 2005, Hubspot in 2006 and SEMRush in 2008.

Creating attractive web sites and social media pages for customers, we have been using these tools to provide SEO and content development to small and large (national) companies ever since to achieve very high visitor numbers and remarkable conversion rates.

We have created valuable content around such diverse topics as:

Cyber security
IT in education
Damp proofing and rising damp
Hospital, library and business removals
Low carbon vehicles

Web Portal Administration Suite

PDC designed a set of bespoke, specialised software products (web portal, members’ area, CRM, e-commerce, document repository, collaborative workspace, document review area, meeting organiser, SEO, etc.) to meet evolving client requirements.

This capability allows us to build long-term relationships with clients by providing a comprehensive suite of front-end and back-end digital solutions.

In 2000 we implemented a web portal and members area for the British Technical Council, now known as The BTC Testing Advisory Group, which serves the motor and petroleum industries. BTC is still a customer with us today.

In 2001 we provided a portal and members area for CEC, the Coordinating European Council, developing performance tests for fuels, lubricants and additives for the automotive and petroleum industries. This portal serves many companies from Texas to Japan and all over Europe.

We have since developed members areas for many associations and research organisations. Most of our contacts at CEC and BTC are large companies, and we are very comfortable working in this environment.

The size and significance of our customers is important to the reputation of a growing company like PDC. A contact made at CEC led to a project for BP, one of the largest companies in the world. We had to create our design solutions in line with BP’s design guidelines.

Technical Network

Then, in 2008, we were asked to take on the CEC Test Monitoring System (TMS). This online system monitors several rig and engine database CEC tests. This makes it easy to capture and analyse real-time reference test data and is key to maintaining test quality.

Members can display, analyse and compare reference test results in graphic format across all key test parameters, making this a powerful tool for monitoring test quality against ISO 17025 and spotting data trends.

Research Network

The techniques and facilities that we had developed with CEC and others enabled us to make a bid for the SMMT Foresight Vehicle project. Foresight Vehicle at the time was the UK’s prime knowledge transfer network for the automotive industry, administered by PDC for SMMT

The Foresight Vehicle R&D programme aimed to promote technology and stimulate suppliers to develop market driven enabling technologies for future motor vehicles (cars, taxis, HGV’s, buses and light commercial vans).

PDC then became involved with the Centres of Excellence for Transport Telematics and Low Carbon and Fuel Cell Technologies (Cenex). The latter is still highly productive in this field.

We assist Cenex in organising the UK’s largest Low Carbon Vehicle (LCV) event, providing an ideal platform for UK capabilities to showcase and engage with informers to discuss emerging technologies, industry issues and what the future holds.

PDC was involved with the relevant Knowledge Transfer Networks KTNs, and at one time we were moderating the Low Carbon KTN. Also, we have provided an online platform for many research and technology demonstration projects and also managed the funding and approval process.

Design

In the early years we established how to design attractive and effective web sites, getting the visitor to the sales proposition within two clicks, and making it easy for customer then to respond.

Selling commercial vehicles for Lex Group/ RAC was a significant exercise. For Finning CAT we were selling a variety of used heavy equipment like excavators, dozers and backhoes and wheel loaders in four languages, using database lookup tables

In addition to our own excellent design capabilities, we have provided a technical service to design houses, to realise their original designs and layouts as web pages. We have worked with several design houses in London, and as far as Australia. We’ve also worked in Japan and China on low carbon web sites, albeit without leaving Market Bosworth.

Our first printed documents were the Foresight Vehicle Technology Road Maps, from 2004 on. We expanded our design for print capability to include conference volumes for Low Carbon Vehicles and Future Powertrains, among others. And, in due course, we have designed vehicle liveries and exhibition stands.

SIMPLE

PDC has been engaged with several Universities, most recently Imperial College, Birmingham, Leicester and Derby Universities. PDC have been researching with the latter two to develop and create a Digital Platform, integrating multiple services into one single solution to become the market leader for small business and project development.

PDC will provide an affordable, superior alternative by automating and ‘modularising’ our bespoke front-end and back-end solutions. This will allow customers to choose and instantly activate digital solutions as required (e.g.: create a marketing website or activate additional services such as SEO, CRM or a document repository, etc.). The internal project name is ‘Project Simple’.

e-conferencing

In the lockdown, many of the conferences and exhibitions that PDC usually support could not go ahead onsite. PDC developed a solution for an online event, in a new novel format with themed sessions scheduled across multiple days. This was not just a webinar but a conference with chairperson, speakers and Q&A sessions. Members were invited to make a company capabilities pitch, followed by facilitated networking which helped members make valuable new business contacts.

After 22 years, PDC is still technology-driven and people-oriented. We continue to renew and develop our products, and to respond to market opportunities. We have relationships with customers in a spread of industry sectors. Many of our customers are friends, and many of our friends are customers.

25 Mar
2021

Improving engagement with your LinkedIn content

by Keely | in Marketing, Social Media | on 25 Mar 2021

Your LinkedIn feed is probably packed full of insights from companies and people, and it can seem like a mystery as to how some content gets to appear at the top of your feed. Meanwhile your carefully crafted content never seems to get any engagement. While there is no silver bullet to perfect engagement, there are some methods you can use to increase the chances of your content getting seen:

Publish content within LinkedIn

The LinkedIn algorithm favours content that keeps users on the platform over content that sends them elsewhere. So, add videos using LinkedIn’s native video uploader rather than YouTube for example and publish articles within LinkedIn rather than linking out to an external blog.

Use captions

Most people will be watching videos with volume low or turned off, so it is important that they are able to still understand what is being said.

Publish both posts and articles

A post view can just be someone scrolling their feed and not looking at the post, whereas people have to physically click a link to view an article. This is a greater indicator of active engagement.

Track comments

Comments, rather than views, are a better indicator of the success of your content as this shows that people are actively engaging with your content rather than scrolling past it.

Utilise text-only posts

Text-only posts have been found to outperform every other content format, so it would be useful to prioritise these in your content plan. Also making text-only posts visually appealing – by adding emojis and bullet points, for example – increases engagement

Use hashtags

The more you use hashtags on a LinkedIn post, the better it categorises content and highlights relevant posts to each user. This will increase your reach and ensure that your posts are being seen by the right people
You can also pin hashtags related to your industry to see the latest updates on your newsfeed. This will allow you to connect and engage with others in the industry.

Encourage early engagement

If no one reacts to your posts within the 60 minutes of posting, then the chances are it won’t perform well. Try to get 20 reactions or comments in the first hour of a post’s life by encouraging employees to engage with the content as soon as it is published. You also need to make sure to reply to any comments on your post swiftly, as this engagement all contributes to the velocity of the post overall.

The best time to post

A bit of experimentation is always required to find the best engagement time as no one business will have exactly the same client base/demographic. Having said that, we can make an educated guess as to when there may be more traffic:

Working hours

As LinkedIn is a professional network, its users tend to browse their feeds during the prime working hours of 9am to 5pm. So, it’s best to post during these hours especially in the morning, as people are more likely to have time to log on before getting stuck into their daily tasks.

Commuting hours

In the same vein, another potential target is commuting time – 8am-9am and 5pm-6pm. As people are getting ready or winding down many will scroll their LinkedIn feed to stay on top of industry updates.

As you can probably imagine then, there tends to be less engagement with posts on the weekend and evenings. It is also probably better to avoid posting on a Monday too, as people tend to be too busy catching up from the weekend to have time to spare on social media.

Remember that these are only guidelines – depending on your business you may find that your post engagement bucks these trends entirely! But they are a good starting point to go from.

03 Mar
2021

A Practical Approach to ROI in Social Media

by Keely | in Marketing | on 03 Mar 2021

A strong social media presence can be a good way of generating business, but is there a way to clearly track how our hours spent cultivating the perfect content translate into new leads?

ROI means ‘return on investment’. Social media ROI represents the return on investment from your organisation’s social media activities. Historically it’s been a difficult thing to track and prove, especially since a lot of social media return is based on personal relationships and is long-term. Broadly speaking to calculate your ROI, you divide the overall value by the investment and times by 100.

Sounds easy enough, but how exactly can you figure out a total monetary figure for both your personal value and investment? Let’s take a look at what each of them can entail.

Value

What defines value will be different depending on your goals. These can include:

New followers
Link clicks
Online purchase
Contact form submission
Signups for newsletter
Downloads
Time spent on a particular webpage

Once you have a goal, there are a lot of tools you can use to track different forms of value:

Social Media Built-In Platform Analytics Tools
- Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have tools that you can use to track likes, retweets, shares, new page follows over time and overall reach.
Google Analytics
- This is a free powerful source to get clear figures on form submissions, traffic, page views and conversion rates

These tools can help to give you additional metrics such as:

Average sale price
Lifetime value per customer
- This can then be used with the data to establish a monetary value i.e. if you can see that 1 in 10 people that view your blog post becomes a customer and your average lifetime value per customer is £100, then the value of someone viewing the post is £10.

To take a full value example, if your goal is to get more online purchases, then your main value metric will come from the number of purchases made as a result of clicking on a post link. If you see that half of clicks result in a sale, and the average sale price per customer is £5, then each post view is worth £2.50 in value. BUT that doesn’t factor in the very human element of social media, that of making a personal connection. The blog post that you write may not directly convert into a sale, but someone may remember your name as a result and months later could act or recommend you to someone else.

So, it can easily become quite tricky to track an exact figure. This is why it’s important to always think long-term with social media ROI. ‘Untrackable’ data such as the previous example can be gathered through customer feedback surveys and social media polls. You can also use your previous experience to estimate a figure for a certain value.

Using a combination of all of these methods will allow you to capture whether you are hitting your goals and will also highlight any additional value that your social media efforts can bring.

Investment

Investment is an easier thing to quantify, simply tracking and adding hours spent on social media then multiplying them by an hourly rate to get a clear figure. Activities can include:

Cost of tools
Paid advertisements
Planning and content creation

Once you have your figures, you can divide the value by the investment to see a clear ROI figure. This may seem complicated, and it is! But by regularly tracking your social media strategy in this way you can tailor your approach to what works!

Coming Soon

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26 Feb
2021

The importance of text hierarchy

by Keely | in Graphic Design, Marketing, Uncategorised | on 26 Feb 2021

Typographic hierarchy is a system for organising text, which allows the reader to immediately understand the order of importance of what’s to be read. This is important in any design, as the easier the piece is to read visually, the more likely it is to be read and to keep your audience engaged.

The text hierarchy system applies to near enough everything, from print assets – letterheads, business cards and flyers, to web design – where navigation and call to actions need to be as clear as possible for the best user experience.

3 steps to consider going about this

To begin with, it’s essential to recognise what message the text is trying to convey. The branding and aesthetics will come after, but to start with it’s important to find the purpose and meaning.
Content should be treated as a visual component – along with shapes, icons, colour, typography etc. If colour is used to differentiate rank, think about the psychology and the meaning of that colour – red for example portrays danger or caution, and similarly in terms of type, text that’s in bold all caps can sometimes give off that same message.
Put yourself in the reader’s position and try to see things how they would at first glance. Are each of the sections clear and contrasting enough to show a hierarchy of importance? The article page from one of our newsletter designs below displays the 3 main levels:

Heading

The heading or title is the first thing the reader sees when glancing through content. This is of the highest importance as if it’s not engaging enough or not visually striking, the reader may flick past and never even get to the main content.

Subheading

Next down the hierarchy are the Subheadings, and these are used to separate the text into sections. This text should be less eyecatching than the header, but more visual than the text body, as this is a summary of the main content within it.

Body

Finally we come to the body text, this section is more content heavy and includes all the meaty information, so it’s crucial that it’s easy to read to ensure the reader continues all the way through to the end.

With and without a designed hierarchy

We love comedy here at PDC, myself in particular loves going to see stand-up comedians – although a bit difficult in these times! Using this sector as an example, I wanted to show how the way a listings page is displayed can impact the readability.

Eye-tracking research by the Missouri University of Science and Technology shows that when looking at a website, it takes users less than two-tenths of a second to form a first impression, spending around 2.6 seconds scanning a website before focusing on a specific area. This doesn’t surprise me at all, as personally if I don’t see what I want to see straight away I just won’t bother to look.

Imagine trying to find someone specific if this were a list of hundreds of comedians:

It’s a little extreme, but as you can see, without any system of hierarchy it’s actually quite painful to sift through the text to find what you’re looking for.

However as you can see below, by using colour and varying type size and weights, it’s easier to isolate certain sections to make it much more readable and scannable:

And to make it even clearer than that as well as being a bit more visual, the use of icons can also help:

Overall, there are many styling techniques that can be used to create a textual hierarchy; size, weight, colour, position, type contrast, and a lot of the time these techniques are used in combination with each other.

Understand the purpose of the text and what message it is trying to get across, decipher what is the most important content, and then present this content in the most organised way. Remove the clutter and design a clear and readable piece for your audience – less is more!

17 Feb
2021

Virtual Events

by Keely | in Digital, Industry | on 17 Feb 2021

The ongoing pandemic has thrown the entire events industry into uncertainty; we can no longer set dates for in-person events for the foreseeable future. This is why it is a great time and resource investment to start thinking about taking your events online.

Whilst hosting virtual events is not an ideal situation by any means for most of us, there are several unexpected benefits unique to moving online. Here we have looked at 9 ways that virtual events can positively impact your organisation, whether during the Coronavirus pandemic or long after.

1. Capture a new and potentially wider audience

Provided that someone has an internet connection, they can tune into your event no matter the geographical location. This exponentially expands your reach and could even generate a new in-person audience sometime in the future!
What’s more, it is easier for attendees to fit virtual events into their schedule, dipping in and out of the day as they choose whilst also getting their own work done. The convenience of this is sure to please the crowd.

2. In-depth analytics

It goes without saying that it is much easier to track online engagement than in-person. Whilst you cannot physically track your attendees’ attention span, it is possible to get continuous insights into session attendance, resource viewing and networking connections made.

3. Cost reduction

Venue hire can cost tens of thousands of pounds a day, and additionally you must factor in the cost of food and drink, accommodation for speakers, and venue insurance. Virtual events can offer potential cost savings depending on your platform, promotional activity, and support requirements.

4. Easy to manage

When running a physical event, you will often find yourself with the impossible task of being in several places at once. In contrast, simply having one or two laptops on hand will allow you to control every aspect of your virtual event. This is also reflected in greatly reduced number of people that you will need to employ for admin and management purposes.

5. Easy to collect feedback

You likely send your physical attendees a feedback survey after the event has passed. This has a less successful response rate than gathering this feedback right at the end of the session, which is what many virtual platforms offer when a participant leaves a session.

6. Environmentally friendly

Physical events incur thousands of miles travelling, which of course has an impact on the environment. Virtual events negate this completely, allowing your organisation to play their part in the fight against climate change.

7. Increased engagement

This may at first glance seem counter-intuitive, but research has shown that people are 30% more likely to initiate a chat with somebody virtually than in person.
Additionally, it is possible to gamify the experience online, with quiz features, challenges and a points-based leader board for attendance and engagement with resources throughout the day.

8. Scalable

While in-person events are limited to the venue size that you hire, virtual event hosting plans can expand and contract. This allows you to focus on your reach without maxing out capacity.

9. Reliability

Perhaps the most crucial point – whilst there is still potential for technical failure, virtual events do not have to be called off for adverse weather, venue issues or global pandemics…

So, you need not see virtual events as a hinderance by any means. Some of us may even find we make a more permanent switch to online thanks to these benefits! Of course, there are many obvious benefits to running your events in person. But a hybrid of the two may be a mainstay looking into the next decade.

Get in touch with us today to see how we can help bring your event to life!

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09 Feb
2021

Safer Internet Day

by Keely | in Industry | on 09 Feb 2021

The 9^th February 2021 marks the eleventh globally celebrated Safer Internet Day, aimed at helping young people navigate online resources. The theme for this year is ‘an internet we trust: exploring reliability in the online world.’

There are lots of benefits for children and young people when using the internet, such as staying connected with friends and family, enabling innovative ways of learning and creating new ways for them to express themselves. But there are also risks that we need to make children aware of should they run into them.

Grooming

Children may be at risk of being groomed if they have an online profile on any platform. If children are posting personal information online, then perpetrators can use this to groom young people. In addition, contacting children and young people is easier than ever if they have an online presence. Anyone can make a fake profile in minutes.
This is why you need to make sure that you and they are able to apply sufficient privacy settings to their accounts, explaining that contact information and posts should only be visible to friends and family that are part of your real life. Children and young people should also be aware of what they are posting online in any case, making sure as much as possible to avoid using personal information. The best way to stay secure online is not to contribute life details at all.

Cyberbullying

Bullying is sadly still all-too commonplace in schools, and this can be intensified by bullies utilising the internet to continue their tirade 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In a recent study, 56% of young people said they have seen others be bullied online and 42% have felt unsafe online. Harassment, rumour-spreading, impersonation and exclusion can cause children and young people long-term depression and anxiety.
Children and young people need to know that they must talk to a parent, guardian, or a teacher who can then step in to mediate the matter or even contact the police. Cyberbullying should never be taken lightly; lockdown has only encouraged further online bullying in the past year, so young people need to know that they are not alone.

Upsetting or explicit content

Not everywhere online is filtered, and so there’s a chance that your child will come across content related to radicalisation, racism, sex or violence.
Many browsers and PCs have a child-safe mode built in that you can activate to be effective immediately.

Doctored images

In an age where any photo can be ‘beautified’ in seconds, it is crucial that young people understand that what they see may not be reality. Social media has increased both male and female eating disorders, feeling that they must conform to a particular body type that in reality is impossible for them to achieve. We are all able to look up fake content such as this in seconds, and it is very rare that an image will identify itself as being edited.
Children and young people need to be aware that these images are commonplace on Instagram in particular, and that every body is different and doesn’t have to conform to a fake ideal.

Email scams

To us it may be obvious when an email claiming we have won £1000 comes through. But children and young people may not be so aware. It is important that they know to always be cautious with these things, and show them to a parent or guardian before taking any action.
Take a look at our blog ‘8 ways to spot fake news’ for tips on what to look out for.

Just as not all people are bad, not all internet usage will be malicious; in fact, there’s a chance that children or young people won’t come into any of these issues. But it is crucial to make them aware of the risks and open up a dialogue moving forwards. The internet is a great tool, as long as we all use it responsibly.

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