Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - New Product Development (NDP)

This post will extend the earlier discussion on the process of New Product Development (NDP) by introducing a slightly different slant. Specifically, creating a Minimum Viable Product or MVP (aka 'earliest testable product' or 'lean startup product') is an approach to market entry that is faster, overall cheaper and less risky. It aims to test and validate critical assumptions (as those related to customer perceived value and buying decisions) in the real market during the product development process. 

The Product: characteristics, raison d'être, types

At this stage of your product's development, your MVP requires the minimal effort to produce because it a basic, least-featureful but launchable version of your final product. However, it already has must-have features that fulfill your brand's basic functional value proposition. 

Consequently, it is sufficiently useable to attract early adopters into your product's life cycle. You need those early adopters to test your assumptions regarding customer perceived value so that you can learn how best to further develop and improve the product idea. To be clear, you are not as interested in earning profits at this point. Rather, your primary objective is simply feedback. 

'Product' does not only refer to a physical good or service in the conventional meaning. Its definition can also mean the 'extended' product as seen in the Zappos case study below in which the physical product (shoes) was not subject to new development. Rather, the distribution channel was.

Timing is important for the MVP process. So since the MVP needs to advance through subsequent iterations within only days to weeks, not all final products fit the model as easily. Such products need to comply with many legal and other requirements like biotech, insurance, banking and so on. As discussed below, there are different types of MVP (like the smoke screen MVP) whose design allows even such 'heavy MVPs' to have similarly fast turnaround times within the NPD model.

Differences between the MVP and conventional MVP processes of NPD 

The diagram immediately below is a famous illustration of the evolutionary difference between the conventional NPD process (represented by the pyramid to the left) and MVP approach (represented by the pyramid on the right). Both pyramids are based on Aarron Walter's hierarchy of product user needs (which is similar to Maslow's hierarchy in terms of progression through the different tiers). The tracking of product development starts at the base with the most basic MVP version and advance upwards, ie achieving and or maximizing functionality, reliability, usability and desirability. 

Reliability refers to whether the product performs according to a prescribed specification under normal usage with little or no reduction in performance. Famous examples include the famous Energizer Bunny was expected to perform for X hours under normal x usage. A classic definition of reliability is 'the probability that a product will perform successfully under specified operating conditions for a given time period' (or, for a specific product, I would say within a given range). In other words, reliability is a measure of quality over a key variable (time or other consumer-important variable). It is usually tested by repeated the environmental stressors. Reliability is very heavily based on performance. Other good examples include performance requirements for jet engines that need never fail during flight and therefore require even more stringent reliability testing. Reliability is arguably a more advanced form of functionality. It is often confused with the sometimes related construct; durability. (Durability relates to whether the product structurally fails). In either case, testing requires applying as many risk scenarios as possible, even acid testing based on improper use by consumers. (See discussion on 'reliability failure rate, a key reliability index)/

In the conventional approach, the development team allows the evolving product to advance through all the phases on the pyramid, out of sight from the public. It is only after having completed all of those phases in privacy does the product get launched for public use. 

Conversely and as illustrated by the second pyramid (for the MVP method); once the product can provide basic functionality, it is produced into an MVP and then immediately launched for sale into the market. 

This method essentially invites the target market to act like part of the development team to test hypotheses. As mentioned  above, doing this is for the sake of gathering feedback from real market circumstances. From that point, each successive iteration develops and improves the product based on real consumer feedback and purchase decisions. 

This approach recognizes that the conventional survey methods of simply getting opinions often produces results that lack reliability or validity regarding market's buying behavior. For instance, a well known challenge with research is that respondents do not always buy when given the chance, even after they had just indicated that they would buy in opinion-based surveys. In short, the MVP approach avoids a manufactuer's risk of making false killer assumptions. 

The changes are called 'pivots'. Pivoting quickly and in ways that improves the product is what separates the successful from unsuccessful entrepreneurial pursuits.

Product Launching

Here is the advice that consultants offer to startups.

Michael Seibel's recommended startup launch goals should be to 

• 'launch quickly"
• "launch something bad quickly"
• "get initial customers" (to see if / how they can get value). 

Reid Hoffman said: 

• “If you are not embarrassed by your first product, you launched too late.”

The early MVP launch therefore presents a second understanding of the concept of product launching. An MVP launch is low key which differs entirely from the other more conventional, highly publicized 'press launch'. Whether you choose to do both is up to you. However, the low-key approach is suggested to be more important for product success.

Consider cases of hugely successful companies whose launch dates were not known to the public. They likely seemed to have suddenly appeared out of nowhere, when in reality and to your surprise, they had been in operation for several years. 

Cases in point include Google and Facebook. AirBNB's initial website in the early 2000s was so lacklustre that it did not even have online payment facilities or maps (very important, value adding features). 

Ultimately and as Seibel suggests, one might as well forget the notion of one ultra special launch.  

Uses & Benefits

An MVP allows you to hasten market entry, especially if time is of the essence for competitive advantage, even with a small budget.

An MVP reduces the risk of product failure, or at least failure from which you can not recover because it is so public. It is clear from case studies of failed growth strategies (Ansoff Matrix) that businesses run the risk of failure if they hold incorrect assumptions about market needs. Here is a useful statistic. Startups that scale correctly grow 20 times faster than those that scale prematurely.

The MVP approach reduces R&D costs. Afterall, by applying an MVP to the NPD process, you essentially allow yourself to get paid while you develop the product. This is noteworthy because as many as 29% of startups fail because of cash flow deficits.

To get insight not only into production issues but also other elements within the marketing mix, like advertising, pricing and distribution.

Case study: Zappos. When the internet was still in its infancy stage in 1999, the founder of Zappos wondered whether his at the time novel idea of online sales could actually work (in other words, his hypothesis / testable assumption). Instead of conducting time-consuming and costly market research and setup, he took images of some shoes from stores nearby then posted the images onto a basic website. When his website visitors placed orders, he purchased the shoes and then shipped them out which was a manual version of the proposed final automated version. In reality, he lost money on each sale. That was fine because the process did precisely what is was supposed to; it allowed him to test the hypothesis that the public was willing to buy online. Once he got his confirmation and understood their needs from the experience, he converted his idea into a fully functioning business which was eventually sold to Amazon for over USD 1 billion.

Case study: IMVU designed an app to allow users to interact with friends online while presenting themselves as avatars. The concept gave creators enormous confidence because it combined 2 trends that were very popular at that time; 1) 3-D gaming and 2) instant messaging. What could possibly go wrong?! Confident about their innovation, IMVU worked tirelessly for 6 months to develop their product. Ultimately, their new app integrated all the major instant messaging applications (like AOL and instant messenger). Being confident their new app would be an instant winner, they launched it. However, the public reaction was dismal. The public simply did not want to download the application. In desperation, the team invited in the target market to use the product while discussing their experience. Ony then did IMVU realize that the problem was that their development team had made incorrect assumptions regarding customer pereceived value. Specifically, rather than want to use established instant messaging applications, customers wanted to use a new messaging media that could even allow them to safely make new friends of strangers (not speak with the current friends). In other words, spending 6 months integrating established messaging systems was a colossal waste of time and money. Fortunately, in this case, the business was able to pivot to resolve this matter at that early stage rather than go out of business (as many others do). The lesson is that, if a small sample of the target market tested the product with only 1 established messaging system, it would have become evident from much earlier that there was no point installing all of the established messaging apps. In short, IMVU should have tested the hypothesis / assumption of whether their target valued pre-existing instant messaging apps. 

Case study: YouTube's case demonstrates the power of being sufficiently flexible to listen to what consumers want and to respond by pivoting away from an original beloved idea. YouTube started as a lackluster dating site.

Sub-optimal product development outcomes.

• Crash dummies and many other types of safety equipment were based on only particular body types, usually a statistically average male body. Consequently, these products have been historically less safe for people with atypical body types. In addition to 
• In the medical industry, since the contraception pill was tested on women under 165 lbs, it is less effective for women over that weight.  

Dream Big, Start Small!

Let go of ideas that are not serving customers. Do not become emotionally attached. Pivoting is your friend!

Process

1. Do target market research into what the market absolutely needs of the product's functionality. A CB Insights survey and Dan Olsen separately suggested that the leading reason for startup failure was a failure to meet market needs. In the latter case, he suggested that the need should meet those needs 'better than the alternatives' which is a reminder that market research should also involve analysis of the competitive landscape. (See my discussions on brand positioning, Porter's Generic Strategies including a focus on differentiation, costs and so on). Also learn as much as possible about the target market, including purchase triggers.
2. Write a development plan. It is easy to recognize that you are changing plans or going off course if you can refer back to the plan.
1. Establish product-specific identifiable markers for beta and MVP versions (if they are even different in your business).
2. Identify your critical assumptions to be validated that, if incorrect, run you the risk of losing a lot of time and effort or even product failure. See assumptions in the case studies. Other examples include: 
1. do customers perceive your value proposition(s), brand positioning as you expect?
2. does the MVP actually resolve the core problem? (Ideally, you should resolve this as a preliminary step to an MVP launch. In some cases, this can be an ethical issue. Think of the Theranos case).
3. what are the specifications? 
4. will customers buy the product (at a certain price)?
3. MVP launch date(s)
4. Set dates for introducing new adjustments 
3. Create an early, non-special version to serve only as a base or starting point from which your product can evolve. Apply only the must-have, most highly ordered core feature to the minimum viable product. Do not attempt to deliver all needs immediately. However, to be clear, the MVP should NOT be low quality, simply the most basic version the product can be acceptable to share with the market. For this step, use the MoSCoW method for prioritizing the features, specifically the must-haves (or non-negotiable features), should-haves (important and should be included but the quality  may be compromised, at least for the time being), could-haves (less critical features that are more like nice-to-haves) and won't-haves (offer the least business value and will be currently excluded). You should be able to clearly identify when you have achieved the MVP stage of your product's development. Here are the 2 most common approaches.
1. Conceirge MVP. This involves creating a very inexpensive mockup version of what the full scale operation will look like. The Zappos case study illustrates this. Had IMVU used the MVP approach, their conceirge MVP would have allowed target customers to test the product with only 1 messaging application. Other examples include course outlines and outline of services being provided in the academic industry. One pain killer feature MVPs are based on the single most critical feature that tackles the brand's UVP. The key functional UVP will be the result of the  'M' in the MoSCoW technique for prioritizing the feature.
1. Case single pain killer MVP. An application was established with only one feature that a team needed; to manage very long checklists. The application was free of cost. However, when demand was clear that the market wanted other features on the very bare minimum product, the team then created an add-on feature and began to operate the application for profit. Even though the business had competition, they used strategy, specifically; brand positioning of a meaningful UVP to develop the new feature. See video.
2. Smoke Screen MVP. Like the name suggests, this type of MVP involves creating an illusion of the final product, even before the product was even built but collecting preorders to gauge customer reaction to the plan. Smoke screen MVPs are well suited to the case of heavy MVPs. Other examples include the Exploding Kittens card game is a case in point. A 2-minutes video described the game, how to play and invited preorders. The preorder resulted in millions of dollars in earnings which validated the assumption that people would actually buy the product. 
4. Set a price, even if it is slightly lower than otherwise. Encourage customers to pay as soon as possible. Charging allows you to validate the assumption that they are willing to buy. Additionally, paying customers will likely provide higher quality feedback, especially if they feel strongly about your product one way or other. If possible, resist the common temptation of allowing customers to use your product free of cost. By setting a price or some barrier to use, you will see how strong their problem and consequent desire is to use your product anyway. Free loading customers can be misleading as they might not truly have the problem of the target market but simply want to test out a free product.
5. Recruit a small sample of the target market to test the product. The best MVP test customer is the one who suffers the problem to a desperate extent (NOT your friends who are only barely aware of the problem). Avoid people who can simply exploit a free or easy ride. Finding customers may involve approaching handpicked B2B customers via LinkedIn or Facebook advertisements that encourage interested persons to pre-order. At every point, analyze customer responses, even click rates and viewing time of advertisement videos and so on. Have performance measures.
1. Examples, if video advertisements are being watched fully and your ad gets many clicks but not many pre-orders, you may need to improve the product design to be more attractive.
2. Examples, if your video advertisements still do not get beyond 2% conversion even after 'pivots' (ie improvements based on public response / feedback), the product may simply not be viable.
3. Examples, if response rates improve after each pivot, you may 'persevere' (ie proceed with the product development project).
6. Set up 2-way communication systems with consumers that are keen to engage.
1. Proactively avoid dis-satisfaction; inform the market that the product is being tested and you want his or her input. 
2. Create a survey that seeks feedback to address all marketing mix and branding (positioning) issues. The survey should use data collection triangulation, ie its data should be both qualitative and quantitative in order to get the benefit of using both types of data.
7. Set up metrics. Among the best KPIs is sales (for a paid product) or usage (for free products). Depending on the product, metrics may also include responses from survey questionnaires. However, it may also be as broad as monitoring website activity like visitor actions before and after abandoning carts, time spent looking at the product page and so on. Resist the temptation to use hundreds of analytics. Rather, select roughly 5 to 10 useful statistics to track. 
8. Be flexible. Do not fall in love with your MVP. Specifically, prepare to pivot and or iterate when necessary. Needless to say, this involves hiring a team that is sufficiently qualified to complete the cycle of analyzing and responding and at the right pace to market feedback. Test all aspects of your (extended) product, including branding, your assumptions about the phase in which customers are within their buying decision (as they relate to packaging design), etc.
1. Pivoting refers to radical changes of the current product to capitalize on different market opportunities. For instance, if your market comprises mostly of people with oily skin and they do not appreciate your product that is very conditioning, you may pivot to make your product more suitable to the mode skin type. 
2. Iteration refers to incremental (NOT drastic) changes to the current product. For instance, if your current product requires more intense oil control for oily skin, your product formulation may add a little more charcoal (which draws out oil) than the previous iteration. BTW, For each subsequent iteration, as much as possible, increase costs and complexity only incrementally and as clearly needed, ie versus attempting to immediately maximize the product and budget development. For instance, if your product is a cake. Rather than use all of the toppings available to you from the beginning, test the product with the least number of new additions like cherries for iteration 2 rather than cherries, icing, dolls and glitter. Needless to say, to quickly advance product development, the product should be as easy to reproduce as possible, hopefully within days to weeks. 

CONTENT RELATED TO MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT (MVP)

• Articles related to  New Product Development (NDP)
• New Product development 101 (the conventional way without an MVP)
• Minimum viable product, a quicker way to market in the new product development process
• Product life cycle / PLC
• New product launch
• Register and protect your trademarks
• Boston Matrix
• MVP applies to developing service offerings. See video on 'becoming a business consultation'.
• Case studies:
• AirBNB
• Exploding Kittens
• Facebook
• Google
• IMVU
• Industry/ies
• academic ~
• Theranos
• YouTube
• Zappos

Social Media Marketing 101

Social media are highly interactive online technologies that allow individuals and groups to share content, often in virtual communities. Their best advantage is their ability to facilitate engagement, and I mean lots of highly valuable engagement I have often mentioned otherwise, like in posts about nurturing leads through x number of touchpoints down through the sales funnel.  Social media is the tactical side of those discussions. To put it otherwise, the whole point of social media is to network, ie to reach and engage with otherwise strangers.

The game changing aspect of social media is the fact that they are dialogic (ie they provide two-way communication) which varies considerably from earlier monologic (or one-way) forms of marketing communication like newspapers, television and magazines. For this reason, when using it, remember to harness its dialogic super power. If you can do that, you will be exploiting it far more fully than otherwise.

Uses & Benefits (of multiple social media channels. Beware however that, if you wish to use multiple channels, only select the few best fits. Avoid spreading yourself too thin.)

• Improve market reach. Reach as many portions of your market as possible by participating in multiple communities. Do not put all of your eggs in one basket, especially since many of your competitors likely limit themselves this way.
• Improve search engine rank. Your social media presence will be considered as part of the content that affects your rankings. Consequently, if you have your brand’s name on social media, and even multiple websites with their own high page rankings like Facebook, Twitter and so on, your business will piggyback off of those high rankings.
• Improve Customer Service & protect your brand's reputation against negative feedback in 2 key ways. First, social media platforms allow you to track what is being said about your brand. It also allows your customers to communicate with you directly regarding their grievances. You can therefore respond quickly to resolve customer problems. Your quick responses signal that you are willing and able to resolve customer concerns and are therefore a good choice.
• Follow your competition to platforms to reach their customers. Once your competition is on a platform with an audience, you will likely benefit from it also. Review their website or content for a list of all of their social media accounts.
• Go viral. If your content is well received, your audience actually does the promotion work for you. This is a marketer's dream because it costs considerably less that otherwise. Social media sites typically provide some type of function(s) that facilitate this. Examples include Facebook's 'share' function, Twitter's 'retweet' button, Pinterest's 'pin' function, Tumblr's 're-blog' function and so on.

Social Media Strategy

Do not post just for its own sake. Have a strategy instead. For for-profit businesses, you likely want your posts to convert leads through stages of the sales funnel. A social media strategy involves 1) objectives, 2) tactics and 3) performance measures. 

1) Objectives.  

1. Establish social media marketing objective(s) that align to business goals (like mission statements) and your corporate strategy plans.  Ensure these objectives are S.M.A.R.T, ie specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Common social media objectives include the following.
• improve brand awareness
• encourage engagment
• advertise your products and services
• sell your products and services
• measure how your market perceives your brand
• offer customer service over social media platforms. Example(s).
• To use [a platform, to be subsequently selected] for customer support to lower average response rate to under 1 hour by the end of quarter 2. 
• Track your brand's performance and adjust your strategy accordingly
2. Know your audience as intimately as possible. The better you know your audience, the more consistent and attractive you can curate your brand voice and tone.
3. Know your competitors. This includes looking closely at their offering and social media behavior. Can you create a type of mini marketing communication centric SWOT analysis (using Porter's 5 Competitive Forces and Pestle)? 
• Strength: You can use the special dialects of the small local towns community while the international market leader can not.
4. Select social media platforms that meet your objectives. Key considerations include whether your audience comprises customers (B2C) or businesses (B2B), the type of content you produce, whether you want the content to be  found via daily feeds vs audience searches over the long term. For instance, if you want to know what people are saying about your brand right now, feeds are more useful than search engines. Since pull marketing content requires keywords for search optimization, YouTube is a better option over Facebook. Consider the demographics of your audience. 10-year old YouTube content can continue to generate leads and engagement in ways that Facebook won't. See basic details about different social media platforms to consider when undertaking this step. 
5. Be sure to get your account verified as a safeguard against imposter accounts. See each platform's steps.  

2) Tactics.

1. Create a social media content calender. To this end, establish tentpole events that are most likely to appeal to your target market. For each tentpole, calculate all associated dates that require your action for each tentpole event. Use tools like Buffer to schedule your posts well in advance to different platforms (Twitter, Instagram, etc).
2. Determine what content is truly valuable and engaging for your target audience. If unsure or need inspiration, follow these tips.
• look at the content of closest competitors, direct and indirect. 
• Sometimes, a competitor is strong on one platform but weak on another. Analyze whether dominating the platform with their weaker performance is an opportunity for you to dominate that platform and attract a lot of the market.
• Use social listening tools. Social listening allows you to know what current and potential customers think about you and your competition. These analyses may uncover opportunities for brand (re)positioning, at the very least in your messaging.
3. Design brand voice and tone that appeals to your target market. Include it in your brand style guideline to ensure that your personality remains consistent, even across platforms.
4. Create content that will appropriately engage your audience. Examples include the following.
• answers to audience questions
• routinely seek out posts of other creators with a significant following. Make some meaningful and positive feedback that could get the attention of their followers. Various platforms have their means of facilitating this like Twitter's retweet feature, Instagram's @tag and so on. 
• In response to an article, you can say "I liked your perspective on X ..." (and NOT simply 'I liked your article"). 
• Demonstrate your expertise. However, for the sake of being relatable, post content that also shows your imperfections like mistakes.
• include images (NOT only text and links). For instance, businesses using inforgraphics generate traffic over 10% more than otherwise. Remember that humans process visual content faster than text. This is particularly noteworthy when considering the limited amount of time in which to capture the attention of an audience online.
• Kylie Cosmetics engaged its audience over 2 years of content in the form of selfies and home videos. They portrayed Kylie just as a luxury lifestyle brand with repeated, obligation-free touchpoints before the launch of her lip kit business. Read my full case study of Kylie Cosmetics.
• Gamification is fast becoming a great opportunity for encouraging customer engagement.  
5. ...

3) Social media audits.

1. Perform a social media audit of your accounts. Since specific steps are outside the scope of this article, read otherwise on how to perform social media audits. Example(s) of common metrics of social media audits include the following.
• engagement metrics. Focus on these metrics (over less meaningful types like vanity metrics) because engagement indicates actual engagement. They include engagement (like comments, virality behavior, etc), click-through, conversion and so on. 
• vanity metrics (number of likes, followers, )
• audience profile as planned? (demographics, demand, etc)
• Find and report imposter accounts that use your name to capture or mislead your target market.
• Useful analytics tools include hashtracking, Followerwonk, etc 
2. Have appropriate expectations for the results. For instance, brand awareness marketing is geared towards long term results like trust, loyalty, authority and so on. Consequently, do not expect immediate 'direct responses' like purchases, clicks and so on from efforts designed for brand awareness. Brand awareness is a more nebulous measure and usually takes several months or longer before sales occur. Here are some common examples. To ensure you are taking a strategic approach, list your metrics in a meaningful way. The stages within the sales funnel is an example.
• Brand awareness
• To drive traffic (with Linkedin) to your website, monitor click-throughs.
• To raise brand awareness (Instagram), track number of Instagram Story views. 
• number of followers, shares, etc
• Engagement (ie how much audience interacts with your content)
• Comments, likes, mentions, etc
• Conversions
• to advertise (Facebook), monitor cost-per-click (CPC).
• Relationship management
• testimonials, repeat sales, your team's average response rate, etc
3. Adjust your strategy accordingly.

Summary of most popular social media platforms

Among the most popular forms with over 100 million registered users include the following (listed in alphabetical order).

• Facebook and its associated Facebook Messenger.  
• Audience profile: teens to grandparents for B2C
• Your method(s) of use: business pages; groups; host events)
• Usage: brand awareness, conversion campaigns, B2B, B2C, retargeting campaigns.
• Useful features: targeted advertising; live broadcasting; offers continuously / dynamicallly evolving results for current trends
• Facebook Messenger
• Feature: Businesses can respond directly and personally with target customers who download the app.
• Instagram
• Audience profile: a bit younger than that of Facebook, gen Z, millenials; mainly used as a mobile app
• Business content type(s): visual, photos, short videos, live streams and stories that disappear at the end of each day.
• Usage: brand awareness, visual-first platform, B2C, influencer marketing.
• Useful feature(s): influencer marketing is  potentially much higher on this channel; Interactive questions in 'Stories' make the feature exceptionally good for engagement; Up to 30 hashtags are allowed per post as a means of potentially appearing in the continuously trending search results; @ tags of other accounts are useful for shoutouts for non-competing companies with the same market for new customer acquisition / market penetration.
• Pinterest
• Audience profile: mostly women, millennials.
• Usage: brand awareness, e-commerce, shopping, website visits, retargeting, campaigns, travel, food, B2C, influencer marketing.
• Quora
• Useful features: ranks highly on Google search results pages. It is also a search engine itself. This is powerful for creating backlinks and therefore boosting SEO. Consequently, it is ideal for business promotion. Users select specific topics and can therefore find you if you offer something in which they are truly interested. Your content can be shared and liked by users to rank it higher on results pages. You can enter your credentials in your profile. in order to plan your questions strategically, you can search for questions with the highest number of followers.
  
  
• Tik Tok
• Business content type: short viral videos, creative.
• Audience profile: mainly popular among young viewers.
• Useful features: some of the videos get shared on other sites as well.
• Twitter 

• Audience profile: Males; between 35 and 65, especially below 49. 

• Business content: microblogging (NOT as visual) so best for news and B2B; starting conversations; images, links (back to your business website) and other types of popular social media features

• Usage: brand awareness, retargeting campaigns, politics, news, B2B, B2C, mobile-first marketing efforts.

• Useful features:  polls; retweets (ie virality potential technology); paid private publishing
• LinkedIn  (to boost professional networks)

• Audience profile: B2B professional clients;

  ---

• Usage: brand awareness, recruitment, B2B

• Your content: business-oriented; general posts that showcases your expertise, long-form content, and even job listings; great if you are a startup or entrepreneur looking to boost their professional networks, to reach out to B2B clients, to reach investors or to boost brand recognition 

• YouTube
• Business content type(s): video content; tutorials or demonstration (very popular).
• Usage: brand awareness, educational content, how-to videos, SEO-focused content (NB.YouTube is the second most popular search engine), influencer marketing.
• Useful features: share videos on non-YouTube sites; create playlists; interact with audience on the YouTube platform; content is optimized for search.
• Audience profile: Varied, even including persons over 55; over 2 billion monthly logged-in users and even more viewers without accounts, fastest growing demographics. B2C and even some B2B. 

WhatsApp

• Content type & useful feature(s): text, voice or video messaging mostly to audience's mobile devices; 1-on-1 or group chats (group chats may allow or block audience participation);
• Audience profile: U.S. and globally; especially younger groups.
• Telegram
• (similar to WhatsApp)
• Snapchat
• Audience profile: young audience
• Content: photos, short videos or text messages that remains available for 24 hours.
• Features / benefits: useful for raising brand awareness among adolescents.
• Pinterest
• Business content type: visual; posts of products, blog posts and a variety of other content; fashion; home decor; food; DIY content.
• Feature: search engine
• Audience profile: young people; women.
• Reddit
• Chat bots

CONTENT RELATED TO USING MULTIPLE SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS

• Sales funnel 101. Social media is useful for the all important 'engagement' phase of the sales funnel.
• Brand voice and tone
• Social media 101
• Instagram 101
• Facebook Groups
• WhatsApp Business
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Chatbots
• Tawkto
• Social media management 

• Social listening
• Use tools like Buffer to schedule your posts to various social media platforms well in advance.        

• Be guided by where in their purchase decision process your customers are. This will help you to create appropriate posts, advertisements and other engagement content. 
• Summary of other social media platforms: https://smallbiztrends.com/2016/09/social-media-channels-marketing.html 
• Internal links
• Details of the most popular social media platforms to be considered when selecting social media platforms. 

• Social media content ideas 

Nudge customers closer to buying decision by asking questions like:  

• 'Which do you prefer between A, B and C?, Which is your most favored or hated disliked option?

Use a snippet of the most powerful part of a testimonial in a graphic. Then place the entire testimonial in the description of the post (of Instagram for instance) 

Transparency: Show behind the scenes, where ingredients come from, etc especially if not usually made public knowledge.

Quick tips:

FAQs:

Before & after: results after you helped.

Other related industries:

User generated content:

Long form content (apx once monthly)

Community issues

Direct sales offer 

• Abovementioned case studies in other content
• Instagram 101 | Instagram
• Kylie Cosmetics

Add Admin Account to Facebook Page

You can allow others to work on your Facebook page without sharing your personal login details. To do this, you will need to add an 'admin account'. This post illustrates the steps for adding one or several persons as admin users. Note however that the other users must first have a Facebook account.

If you already have a Facebook page

• Log in to your Facebook account
• Click the drop down menu in the top right corner of the page.
• Select the page 
• Select 'Settings'
• Select 'Page roles'
• In the section 'Assign a new Page role', enter the person's name or the email address that is associated with the person's Facebook account
• Use the drop down menu to select the type of account authorities you wish to grant. When you make a selection, Facebook displays details about the role.
• Admin users: can do anything on the page, even remove you as an admin user
• Editors: among other things, can add posts
• Advertiser: create the ads and review the analytics
• Analytics: can not create ads. Can only review your analytics

If you do not already have a Facebook page and want the other person to create one for you

• Give the following instructions to the person
• create the page (using his or her own account)
• give you admin access
• As an admin person, you can now edit that other person's user account type. For instance, you can change it from admin to editor, advertiser or analytics.
• Use the instructions (provided on this page for cases in which you already have a Facebook page).

If you want to remove the user's access.

• Log in to your Facebook account
• Click the drop down menu in the top right corner of the page.
• Select the page 
• Select 'Settings'
• Select 'Page roles'
• Click the 'x' box next to the name of the person

CONTENT RELATED TO ADDING A FACEBOOK ADMIN ACCOUNT TO A FACEBOOK PAGE

• How to set up a Facebook page
• How to add live chat to a Facebook page

Change or upload Facebook page cover banner

A Facebook banner image is called a 'cover'. Since it dominates the top portion of a Facebook fan page, arguably dwarfing the logo, its high visibility makes it very important in reflecting changes in your business. Here is how you can quickly and easily change it for tentpole marketing or just routine improvements to your Facebook page.

• Log in to your Facebook page
• Hover over the camera-looking icon in the top left corner of the Facebook cover / banner image. As pictured below, the text 'change cover' will appear. 

• Click 'change cover' 
• Select from among the image options that appear

--

--

CONTENT RELATED TO UPDATING FACEBOOK COVER / FACEBOOK BANNER IMAGE

• Facebook page setup
• Change the banner to reflect current promotional strategies and or Facebook advertising campaigns
• Create special effects and resize images using InkScape
• Free online GIF maker from still images
• Free online GIF maker from video 
• Videvo offers free videos
• Pexels offers free videos under CC0, ie no attribution required
• Pixabay offers free videos under CC0, ie no attribution required
• Notes on how to use Adobe Illustrator