Fake reviews can affect everyone. Whether you’re an online entrepreneur looking to launch an ecommerce business, or a consumer searching for a nice restaurant, deceptive and deceitful appraisals muddy the waters. And although fraudulent comments have been around since time immemorial, the internet amplifies them in real time to a global audience. Spotting false reviews…

Social media platforms represent a crucial promotional route for any business, but these ‘free’ services still come at a cost. Specifically, they demand significant time investment, with the creation and management of original content to promote a brand and its products or services. While no automation tool is currently capable of generating engaging and well-written…

Your customers are out there, ready for the taking. Not only that, they may well be crying out for your products and services at this very moment. And yet, if you’re not promoting yourself in the right places, they’re unlikely to know what you can offer. The internet is a daunting place, and it’s very…

It wasn’t all that long ago that the news world and the social media world were separate entities. While the articles that journalists wrote were typically shared all over social media, the actual news they broke—from inside scoops, to on-the-record interviews, to investigations—appeared in newspapers and on publishers’ websites before they appeared in newsfeeds and…

Shakespeare once said that “brevity is the soul of wit”, and in the case of Twitter that’s certainly true. Indeed, during its ten year existence, one of the most defining things about Twitter has been the character limit it imposes on its posts. Far from causing people to be sloppy or use too many abbreviations,…

The hashtag is such a mainstay of internet culture these days, it’s hard to remember there was a time when it didn’t exist. Indeed, when Twitter was launched  in 2006, its founders and developers had not yet devised an easy and seamless way to “group” conversations together under one topic. It wasn’t until a year…

When you look at the amount of time the average technology user spends using products or services created by Google, Facebook and Apple, the volume is striking. While we think of the technological world and the internet as a diverse and dynamic industry, the truth of the matter is that these three companies dominate an…

The “Snapchatification” of just about every social media network has reached almost comical levels. Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp have all implemented a version of “stories”, leaving many to wonder how Snapchat will fare now that its unique selling point is not so unique. While everyone else is busy copying Snapchat, the original ephemeral social network…

If you thought social media marketing was easy, think again. This multi-billion dollar industry remains one of the fastest-moving and challenging aspects of corporate self-promotion. While we’re all comfortable uploading photos to personal pages or swapping memes with friends, using a business account to handle customer complaints or advertise forthcoming products requires a detailed understanding…

Last year, the photo-sharing network Instagram made a game-changing alteration to the way that users interact with their feeds. Instead of showing every photo chronologically as it is posted, the network adjusted to an algorithmic format, wherein users see photos that the network says are “ordered to show the moments we believe you will care…