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bestearbuds · 3 years

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Tips and best practices for optimizing your smart home

You’ve figured out the basics of setting up your smart home, now it’s time to raise your game. I’ve spent years installing, configuring, and tweaking dozens of smart home products in virtually every product category. Along the way I’ve figured out a lot of the secrets they don’t tell you in the manual or the FAQs, ranging from modest suggestions that can make your smart home configuration less complex, to essential decisions that can save you from having to start over from scratch a few years later.

Here’s my best advice on how to optimize your smart home tools, top tips and best practices.

1. Choose a master platform at the start These days, an Amazon or Google/Nest smart speaker or smart display can fill the role of a smart home hub (and some Amazon Echo devices are equipped with Zigbee radios).

There are three major smart home platforms on the market, and your smart home will probably have at least one of them installed: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple Home Kit. The industry now revolves around these three systems, and virtually every significant smart home device that hits the market will support at least one of them, if not all three.

These platforms are different, of course. Alexa and Google Assistant are voice assistants/smart speakers first, but the addition of features that can control your smart devices has become a key selling point for each. Home Kit is a different animal, designed as more of a hub that streamlines setup and management. But since Home Kit interacts , it too offers voice assistant features provided you have your iPhone in hand or have an Apple Home Pod.

All three of these platforms will peacefully coexist, but you definitely don’t need both Alexa and Google Assistant in the same home, and managing both will become an ordeal as your smart home grows larger. It’s also completely fine to use Home Kit for setting up products and then using Alexa or Google Assistant for control. If you have a Home Kit hub device (either an AppleTV or a Home Pod), you’ll want to use it, as it really does simplify setup.

2. You don’t necessarily need a smart home hub In the early days of the smart home, two wireless standards, Zigbee and Z-Wave, were going to be the future. These low-power radios offer mesh networking features that are designed to make it easy to cover your whole home with smart devices without needing to worry about coverage gaps or congestion issues.

The main problem with Zigbee and Z-Wave devices is that they require a special hub that acts as a bridge to your Wi-Fi network, so you can interact with them using a smartphone, tablet, or your computer (while you’re home and when you’re away, via the internet). Samsung SmartThings is the only worthwhile DIY product in this category at present; its only credible competitor used to be Wink, a company that is now on its third owner and which has a questionable future at best. The Ring Alarm system has both Z-Wave radios onboard, but it’s much more focused on home security than home control.

As simple as Smart Things and Ring Alarm are, you’ll still face a learning curve to master them, and if your home-control aspirations are basic, you might find it easier to use devices (and the apps that control them) that connect directly to your Wi-Fi network and rely on one of the three platforms mentioned above for integration. It’s worth noting here than the 800-pound gorilla in the smart lighting world—Signify, with its Philips Hue product line now offers families of smart bulbs that rely on Bluetooth instead, so they don’t require the $50 Hue Bridge.

That said, however, you’re limited to controlling 10 Hue bulbs over Bluetooth. The Hue Bridge is required beyond that, and it’s also required if you set up Hue lighting fixtures, including its outdoor lighting line.

The bottom line on this point: Unless you want to build out a highly sophisticated smart home system, I recommend sticking with products that connect directly to your network via Wi-Fi, rendering a central hub unnecessary.

3. Range issues can create big problems

The downside of installing Wi-Fi only gear is that everything in the house will need to connect directly to your router. If your router isn’t centrally located and your house is spread out, this can create range issues, particularly in areas where interference is heavy: the kitchen, bathrooms, and anything outside.

Your best bet is to check your Wi-Fi coverage both inside and outside the house before you start installing gear. Make a map of dead zones and decide whether you can live with them. If not, you’ll want to consider relocating your router or moving up to a mesh Wi-Fi network with two or more nodes. You can read more about mesh Wi-Fi networks here.

Interference can also be a troubling problem that changes over time. If your next-door neighbor upgrades or moves his router, you may find that an area of the house with a once-solid signal has suddenly become erratic. You can tinker with the Wi-Fi channel settings in your router’s administration tool, but deploying a mesh network is a more sure-fire solution. Netgear even has an Orbi mesh node that can be installed outdoors to cover your backyard.

4. You don’t need smart gear everywhere

Many a smart home enthusiast has dreamed of wiring his entire home from top to bottom with smart products. A smart switch in every room and a smart outlet on every wall sounds like a high-tech dream; in reality, it can spiral into a nightmare.

The biggest problem is that while smart gear can be amazingly convenient, it also adds complexity to your environment because all of it must be carefully managed. Does installing 50 firmware updates sound like a great way to spend the weekend? Or troubleshooting that one switch that just won’t suddenly connect properly? Deploying smart speakers all over house, so you don’t need to yell for one to hear you, sounds like a great idea, too—that is, until the speakers have difficulty deciding exactly which one you’re talking to.

Devices such as Leviton’s Decora Smart Voice Dimmer with Amazon Alexa make it easy to put Amazon’s digital assistant in every room, which sounds like a great idea until they start fighting each other to answer your commands. In choosing where to install smart gear, think first about necessity. The hard-to-reach socket where you always plug in your Christmas tree is a perfect place for a smart outlet that can be set on a recurring schedule. The kitchen is a great option for voice control, so you don’t need to touch anything with dirty hands. My living room feature is lighted by three lamps which would normally have to be turned off and on individually; with smart bulbs and Alexa, it’s easy to power them on with a couple of spoken words. But does the overhead light in the master closet really need to have any of these features?

And finally, there’s the obvious issue: Smart gear isn’t cheap, and outfitting a large home with smart gear can quickly become exorbitantly expensive. Think about what happens when your gear becomes outdated (and out of warranty)?

The bottom line: While it’s a great idea to install everything you think you’re going to use at the start of your project, don’t overdo it. You can always add on to your system down the road. Install smart gear only where you legitimately know you will use it.

5. Consolidate vendors It might sound like common knowledge to suggest you try to stick with a single vendor when it comes to all your switches or light bulbs, but it’s easy to be wooed by a product that promises new features or better performance. Avoid taking the bait: Over time, bouncing from one vendor to the next will leave you managing multiple apps, and you’ll likely get confused about which one goes with which device.

Many smart outlets and switches don’t carry a visible brand logo, so it isn’t always as easy as just checking the hardware itself to see where you should go. (Making matters worse, many smart products use a management app with a name that that has no relation to the hardware’s name.) And while most HomeKit-capable apps can control other vendors’ Home Kit devices, you’ll still usually need the official app to get things set up initially and to perform regular maintenance.

The good news is that Tech Hive has plenty of buying guides in almost every smart home category to help take the guesswork out of figuring out which brands to build your home around, so you needn’t experiment to find the best products on the market.

6. Give your gear short, logical names By default, many smart products will give themselves a name during setup that consists of generic terms and random digits, none of which will be helpful to you in identifying them later. It’s best to give your gear a short but logical and easy-to-remember name when you first set it up.

Start by giving all the rooms in your house a name in the management app, even if they don’t have any gear in them. (You might install equipment there later.) “Bedroom” is not a good name unless you only have only one. You’ll want to use the most logical but unique names possible here: “Master bedroom,” “Zoe’s bedroom,” “Guest bedroom,” and so on.

Now, when you install a product, standardize names using both the room name and a description of the item—or what the item controls. For example: “Master bedroom overhead lights” for a wall switch or “Office desk lamp” for a smart plug connected to said lamp. In rooms where you have multiple products, you can use a longer descriptor, numerical ID (1, 2, 3…), or something similar. In my living room, the three lamp smart bulbs are named Living room lamp left, center, and right, so if one isn’t working in the app, it’s easy for me to figure out which is which.

Doing this work up front will save you time if and when you connect your gear to a voice assistant. Not only does having a standardized, logical naming system make it easy for you to remember what to say, changing the name of a product in its app generally means having to re-discover the product within your voice assistant app, which is a hassle.

7. Wiring never looks like it does in the pictures

Manuals and online guides always make in-wall wiring look like a standard, well-organized affair, but I can assure you that many an electrician has taken some significant liberties with the way that switches and outlets are wired in the average home. Don’t be surprised to find multiple black line/load wires when you expected to find just two, strange in-wall hardware that doesn’t look like the picture, and wiring that simply doesn’t make sense.

The neutral wire required by the vast majority of smart switches and outlets is typically white. So which of these two white wires is the neutral? Of course, you can always experiment as long as you’re patient. There’s little risk of damaging the product if you miswire it the first time. Just make sure you’re turning the power off at the circuit breaker before you touch anything.

As a last tip on wiring, note that neutral (typically white) wiring is essential for most of the smart switches on the market. If there is no neutral wire in the electrical box where you want to install a smart switch, you’ll need to seek out the handful smart switches and dimmers that don’t require a neutral wire, like these C by GE models or certain switches.

8. Expect problems to emerge without warning

You know how your computer suddenly starts crashing every day, or your printer abruptly vanishes from the network? The same kind of things happen to smart home gear, which, after all, are miniature computers of their own, all prone to the same types of issues. Expect the occasional product to abruptly disconnect from your network, vanish from the management app, or stop working altogether—even after months or years of otherwise trouble-free operation, without any discernable reason. In many cases, you’ll need to manually reset the product to get it to reconnect to the app. Sometimes the app will guide you through this process, otherwise a quick Google search can get you squared away.

9. Pay attention to battery life

Devices not attached directly to the grid rely on battery power to operate. Door/window and motion sensors, smart locks, smart doorbells, many cameras, smoke alarms, and more are all likely to require regular battery replacements or recharging, and while many devices claim to last for multiple months or even years, the reality is often shorter than that.

Take stock of the batteries each of these devices use—some are truly oddball cells that you won’t have in the junk drawer—and keep spares on hand for when they die. Devices that use a rechargeable battery like the Ring Doorbell are supposed to alert you via the app when the battery is running low, so you can recharge it before it goes totally dead, but my experience is that these alerts are rarely actually delivered (or end up being ignored).

If your Ring Video Doorbell’s battery is dead, you’ll never know if someone’s ringing the bell (which, in my case, usually means a “missed delivery” slip from FedEx). I check my Ring’s battery life in the app once a week (it’s under Device Health), and when it hits about 35 percent, I remove the cell and charge it back up (you can also buy spare Ring batteries and just swap a dying battery for a freshly charged one).

10. Dimmers can be particularly problematic

Electrical dimmers like the old-school wall-mounted dial type work by lowering the amount of electrical current being sent to the load device, which will, say, lower the brightness of an incandescent bulb or slow down a fan. Unfortunately, dimmers pose particular problems for many devices. Smart home devices are especially problematic when dimmers are attached, because they contain electronics and radios that simply won’t work if the power isn’t coming through at full strength. As such, it’s a bad idea to connect devices like smart light bulbs to circuits that are connected to a dimmer.

On a similar front, you’ll need to be especially observant if you replace an old toggle switch with a smart dimmer. As a shortcut, sometimes switches are wired with pass-through circuitry that is meant to pass along current to other devices (such as a nearby power outlet). If you swap out this switch with a dimmer, you might inadvertently connect the dimmer to those outlets, causing them to lose all or partial power, making for a complex troubleshooting session.

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fiddletwix · 5 years

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A Guide for Navigating a World of Rumors for the #SaveDaredevil Campaign

Hey #FandomWithoutFear! It’s been almost a year now since the #SaveDaredevil campaign started, and I thought I’d do a brief PSA to help save your sanity as we enter the second half of our campaign. I’m talking about rumors.

Over the past year, we’ve heard piles and piles of rumors, some causing chaos, others causing despair, some even being really strange and confusing. In fact, our campaign was basically born into a world of rumors as we’ve been combating the ‘The shows are going to Disney+’ rumor since the instant it was canceled. Only recently have we been mostly freed by that one thanks to D23 releasing their starting lineup, but we’re still seeing it.

Giving into rumors can be a trying experience, especially considering our current situation of Marvel being unable to tell us almost anything about the NMCU properties until the two year clause is up and them being tight-lipped by default. However, there are ways of avoiding rumor rabbit holes and the emotional turmoil they put us through.

Before I start, I’d like to point everyone out to #SaveDaredevil’s official website and FAQ. It is loaded with everything we can say for certain about the status and future of Daredevil given the information that has been confirmed by official sources so far. We even have screenshots and citations.

#1 – Encountering the Rumor

So you’re out in the wilds of the Internet and come across ‘news’ about Daredevil. As mentioned previously, simply the fact that there is ‘news’ is enough to raise a red flag. Since everything is on the hush-hush, there’s an 80% chance the ‘news’ isn’t valid right off the bat.

But let’s say there seems like there could be some validity in the claim. Worth investigating further.

#2 – Beware of Clickbait

Websites love dem clicks, and they know the Daredevil fanbase is filled with people who are yearning for news. Many websites will either make up or perpetuate rumors to fill a video or article and then slap a misleading title on it to go fishing for cursors and their precious left-clicks.

While some clickbait is painfully obvious from the getgo, some is harder to discern. The rule of thumb here is that, if it seems too good to be true or if it feels like something that could be molded out of existing knowledge, it’s probably best to avoid it.

Also be on the lookout for words and phrases like ‘Could be’ and ‘Might’ as they are almost always indicative of opinion pieces/rumor mills than actual news.

Reputable articles will commonly headline with a source of a quote, such as ‘said (name) (some important position) at (Marvel or Disney)’ but even those can be misleading, so beware.

#3 – Check the Website Before Clicking

You really, really want to click the link no matter what the title says. Understandable. But before you turn that blue link purple, let’s see where it came from.

Another way you can discern what is likely a rumor from what could possibly be legitimate is by checking the source of the link. Sites like Cosmic Book News (That’s not a typo, that’s the name of the website) and wegotthiscovered are some of the better known rumor mills, but if you’re unsure about the reputation of a site, ask around. However, sometimes the only way to know if a website or news source is reputable is by investigating the content of the link.

Which leads us to….

#4 – You’ve Clicked the Link. Now What?

A few things you should be on the lookout for while investigating the page before even reading the content are the author of the article or creator of the video (if one isn’t listed, that’s a red flag in itself), how professionally made the website looks, the date of the article/video posting (the more current, the better) and how well-written the article is overall. Poor grammar, punctuation and formatting can all be red flags to misinformed or false content.

Sensational graphics, such as pictures with red arrows, circles or obnoxious text – this applies to the video if there is one – can also be an indicator of less than legit sources. Overly produced videos and graphics have become quite common as they are attention grabbers, but they don’t exactly give off the professional air that more legitimate websites and content creators strive for.

Fair warning, while a good chunk of rumor articles are fairly short, many rumor videos can be insanely long because longer videos can have more advertisements crammed on it, which means more money.

Longer videos don’t instantly mean legitimate information. In fact, outside of opinion pieces, many ‘news’ videos will regurgitate information we already know about and go into length about that to extend the video’s run time. Even if you’re only in it for opinions, a significant portion of the video could be padding.

You don’t necessarily have to watch the entirety of the video (or even read the entire article) to tell if it’s spouting nonsense or not. It’s a good idea to do so, but in many circumstances the writing is on the wall within the first paragraph or first few minutes of the video.

They jump to conclusions based on something that is entirely unrelated. They add the could be’s and might’s to the content, instead of the headline. Or they accidentally show their rumor hand by saying the dreaded words ‘I/We heard...’ or even ‘rumor has it.’

Some writers are also tricky about their wording to get you to stay the entire way through by ending the article or video with ‘but this is all speculation. We won’t really know until (blank)’

If the author seems intent on getting you to believe this is all fact and the red flags aren’t quite visible to you, there are still options to explore.

#5 – Read/Listen Carefully

Some writers are particularly good at twisting words around to suit their needs. Even direct quotes can be manipulated in their favor. Read the article or listen to the video host very carefully. Take note of context. Be wary of anything that doesn’t mesh with existing knowledge. You may also find that the content contradicts itself sometimes. If things seem fishy to you, your instincts are likely right.

#6 – Who Else is Saying This?

Daredevil news would be huge, and anything even slightly confirmed by official sources would be plastered on a plethora of news sites so quickly you’d think they were announcing their first born child. When you’re first out the gate, you tend to get the most clicks. However, reputable news sites, as you can guess, want to stay reputable, and jumping on rumors isn’t going to be helping them maintain that status.

Do a quick Google search for the main news item in the headline. Using quotation marks on specific phrases used in either the title or body of the source can help narrow things down.

If there are no very recent news articles from several other websites (Let’s say five or more) containing similar news, it’s probably false. If the initial posting is particularly recent, wait a few hours and do another search. By then, the reputable news sites would certainly have something out if it’s true.

#6 – Cited Sources: They’re Not Just for College Papers

Some rumors do get out of control, however. False information can spread like wildfire, and sometimes reputable news sites make mistakes. One thing can still save you from falling into the rumor rabbit hole – cited sources.

They don’t have to be as meticulously formatted as they have to be for college papers (though that does help!) but having quotes from officials within Marvel or Disney (with context and notes about when and where this quote was said) and links to information sources mean the world when determining if ‘news’ is actually, well, news.

Like before, even if the article does cite sources, that doesn’t mean much if the source itself isn’t reputable. IE, you may want to use Wikipedia in your term paper, but your teacher won’t let that fly. Check out the links and double check the quotes to be as certain as possible.

Also, if something simply says ‘sources claim’ without giving actual….ya know...sources, they probably don’t have any. Or, if they do, they’re not reputable.

#7 – This Random Youtuber I Like Said This, That and The Other Thing

This is cropping up more frequently, so I thought I’d include it. Just because you like a Youtuber doesn’t mean they’re always right. It’s not even a matter of calling them a liar – many times these people are just misinformed or fell down a rumor rabbit hole themselves.

Dealing with people who are saying this to you is difficult because they’re frequently too blinded by their liking of the Youtuber to listen to reason. All you can really do is explain to them what I’ve explained above and direct them to the #SaveDaredevil FAQ.

#8 – Dealing with The F Word

Another problem that has been frequently popping up over the past several months is the F Word: Feige.

A rumor that has been unavoidable since practically the instant Daredevil and the other NMCU shows were canceled was that the properties would inevitably fall into the hands of Marvel Studios president, Kevin Feige, and DD and The Defenders would be in the MCU after the two years is up.

Feige has never spoken a word, post-cancellation, about Daredevil or The Defenders futures, and for all we know he has no role in their futures considering they were originally with Marvel Television. However, so many people seemingly believe bringing up Feige is enough to confirm or deny all things speculation about DD. Some won’t even humor the idea of DD going anywhere else but Feigeville.

Like with the Youtuber fans, it’s hard to reason with people who seem to hardcore support Feige in everything involving Marvel, and dealing with them is about the same. The main cannon you have in this situation outside of the norm is that, as stated before, Feige has said nothing about this, so they don’t really have sources to cite here, leaving everything up to speculation.

Let me clarify that, if you’re of the opinion that Daredevil should be in the movies, that’s perfectly fine. Everyone has their own opinions on what they want for Daredevil’s future, even if the #SaveDaredevil movement has made their own hopes and views very apparent. However, the story of Daredevil’s does not begin and end with Feige and it shouldn’t be treated as such.

#9 – Scooping the Inside from the Outside

There have been a couple of people, won’t be naming names, in the past year claiming they have the inside scoop on this matter because they either are on the inside (IE an employee at one of the companies involved, such as Netflix, Marvel or Disney) or they know someone who is.

These people may very well have inside information that they’re willing to share with us, but the problem is which information is valid and which isn’t.

The ‘insiders’ I’ve seen seem to work on a system very similar to an old fortune-teller.

Fortune-tellers have a habit of predicting something that they know will come true because of something else they knew ahead of time or just getting lucky on an educated guess. If they’re right enough times on little things, that gives them all the validity they seemingly need to prove they’re right about anything else they claim. They will likely be wrong on numerous occasions, but it’s when they’re right that gives them power. They’ll also likely contradict themselves and double-back on things they’ve said in the past to make it look like they weren’t wrong when they were.

Problem is, you don’t know who these people really are, what role they have in whatever company they work for, if they do, or what relationship they have to whatever insider might exist.

They might act like they have the insider knowledge of a high-level executive, but, in reality, they may actually have the bare bones knowledge of a lower ranking employee or just hear stuff around a water cooler and build off of that information. It’s impossible to tell because they don’t say out of fear of being fired or otherwise getting in trouble with one of the aforementioned companies.

That’s also where the difficulty in discerning fact and fiction/opinion with them comes from. We’re all outsiders and any actual known insiders can’t give us really any information. Debunking them or confirming what they say is incredibly problematic given the limited information we have.

That’s not to say there aren’t people out there who pay a lot of attention to what these people say over time and analyze their statements heavily to see if they hold water, especially if it contradicts something they’ve said in the past. I said it was really difficult to discern fact and fiction with them, but it’s not impossible. When you’ve exhausted every other option with these ‘insiders’ the only thing you can do is wait and see if they’re right or wrong.

It’s been my experience (and this is my personal opinion right now) that it’s best to just ignore these people altogether. They never seem like they have good intentions with their info sharing, no matter if their information is accurate or not. They always seem like they want to make people in the fandom angry or sad with their ‘inside scoops’ then eat up all the special attention they get as a rare person ‘on the inside’ that will actually talk with the masses about the subject. Nothing good tends to come out of hanging on the words of these ‘insiders.’

#10 – Avoid Confirmation Bias

For every ‘news’ source that claims something negative about Daredevil’s situation, there’s another that claims something positive. We, as fans of the show, want to believe the more positive stories that are released while also wanting to combat against the more negatively slanted pieces.

While this is entirely understandable, it’s also very biased. It’s great to have hope and not let the negativity get to you, but allowing yourself to more easily fall prey to positive rumors may set you up for a fall. It’s difficult, but you have to take the blinders off.

Staying objective is important in both ensuring that you get the most valid facts and keeping your emotional roller coaster from going off the rails. Even among less than positive news alerts, we have had many nuggets of actual validated hope spring up consistently, and there’s a good chance we’ll get more down the road, so don’t get discouraged if you find some positive rumors turn out to be just that – rumors.

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As a final note, remember that the community is always here for you to both discuss any ‘news’ that comes up, dig out the real facts, and help get you through any struggles you might be having with campaigning. We’ve taken our share of hits, but like Daredevil, we keep getting back up. #SaveDaredevil has already made it nearly halfway through the two year wait with tons of support, positivity and legitimate good news. Together, we can take on the second half even stronger than before.

We can #SaveDaredevil. We’re #NotGivingUp.

#SaveDaredevil #Daredevil #Marvel #Disney #comic book #news #rumors

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jesssaga · 5 years

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Romancing SaGa 2 is complicated

Romancing Saga 2 is a great game but its really harsh to new comers barely telling you anything of how the game works, the only way to really understand how the game works is to use info and guides that are mostly scattered around, i had a lot of trouble finding help for this game myself until i found the discord where some of my questions could be answered, but not understandably not everyone can be avaible to help all the time So i really wanted to make a small guide that could have everything i found to be the most useful and necesary links to have for this game

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FIRST OF ALL

you will probably hear about people saying how you should avoid battles please do not avoid battles you will end up being to weak it happened to me the best way to go is to fight things as much as you can getting levels on your weapons and magic bring items from the store room to heal your mp and sp so you can heal them if you aproach a boss

fighting and using magic is very important as you level up some hidden stat thing called global levels wich makes it so people who learn magic in the future start with higher level magic than normal and i belive this works for the weapons levels too? also magic global levels are very important for getting some really strong magic

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Some tips for early game things

Heres a guide that was really useful for me it helps with knowing what the right options are for scenarios https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588633-romancing-saga-2/faqs/31378 and its helpful for nagivating around the places just have in mind that its an old guide so some of the names for about everything may be different if you prefer visual guide of how to navigate the dungeons this video guide of the snes version of the game was really helpful to me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Flj8e6l4c&list=PLUdV46H5Wd4NA9ZzsQgDBDl2mOzUtHPW1&index=1

The revenue is the ammount of money you get from each battle even if you run away from it i really dont recomend running from battles unless you have already reached battle count 1000 and monsters cant get any stronger from that point on so feel free to run and just make money you need

speaking of money

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The orchard

at some point in the game you will get the option to build this tree wich will make it so you get more money per battle (other ways to get a higher revenue is doing the game scenarios wich adds new regions to your kingdom )

heres some orchard info thanks to Elliot20 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/588633-romancing-saga-2/76108365

on how to level up the orchard and how many battles you need to do and how much money you get from it and the costs

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RNG THRONE

About building new places you wont always have the money needed to build it on the spot and when you get the money you could get confused about how to be asked again to build it Well theres some RNG when you sit on the throne you have to keep sitting on it until finally your emperor says Ahem and calls that guy then you can ask him to build again

Magic Fusion and GRINDING Getting fusion magic is very importan they are the strongest magic you can get in the game and you cant get them if you have hit the final emperor (wich happens once you beat 5 heroes after the Gerard stuff )

First of all to get the magic lab your emperor needs to reach 25 mp then you will be asked if you want to build the magic lab in the magic lab you can unlock new spells simply as you level up the global levels of each magic so make sure you level each one magic levels up just by using it i belive its based on how much mp you used on that type of magic and the Tech points you get

you will need 15 global level to unlock the first tier fusion spells and 25 for the second tier (on both of the elements that make that fusion spell) you also need to have buit the university to research the fusion spells you get this based on controlled areas just keep beating scenarios until you are asked if you want to build it

To know your global level when you teach magic to a character that didnt have any magic to begin with (its better to try with characters who dont specialize in using magic) their initial magic level will be your global level -7 so just teach that character a magic and you can tell what your global level is

once you are strong enough my favorite place to grind was Lake Wyringa because its next to Bihara a town you can get to from the savannah just walk southwest and you will find this town i did all of my grinding for levels in this place once you hit 1000 battle count theres this single monster encounter that is really quick to do and helps with tech sparking too

once your global level is high enough you talk to the npcs in the magic lab and they will ask if you can give them money to research a new spell each one costs 500 000

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c2Q6-k4HodGskLaa4Byg0mnBqF_xwDCVg6U29QureCs/gviz/tq?tqx=out:html&tq=SELECT+*&gid=881938408

you can find all the spells in this link from the data sheets from Elliot20 they are at the bottom after the techs

Techs

So techs are learned very randomly in battle but some are very specific to using an older tech you learned or using a weapon in specific again for this i grinded in the Lake Wyringa

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/588633-romancing-saga-2/76115865

heres a list of really the best techs you might want thanks to Elliot20

First check your characters names and find them here: https://tinyurl.com/y952wn6q find their spark type and then use this: https://tinyurl.com/ycc8u54x to know wich techs that character can get yes this is really convoluted but its how it is , the part that says Alt spark refers to the tech you need to use in order to trigger it and if the weapon doesnt have a generic name then you need that specific weapon to trigger it usually these weapons are found in chests around the world and all the dungeons

Formations

you get 2 formations to start well 1 since free for all seems to be a punishment one formation is obtained by progressing the green maze heres a link with how to get the others https://saga.fandom.com/wiki/Formation_System_(Romancing_Saga_2) they are adquired by having your emperor be a class the way i got them was just going outside with a new emperor and getting killed and then changing until i got the formations i wanted have in mind that getting killed like that for a emperor change adds 10 battles to your battle count

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some last few things

Blacksmith

i wont go in depth myself here this guide is what i used to understand how it works https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1385141788

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/588633-romancing-saga-2/73916179 a post mentioning the best equipment you can get in the game https://saga.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Romancing_SaGa_II_weapons https://saga.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Romancing_SaGa_2_armor

i mostly used these wiki articles to see their stats and how to find some of them

Maze of memory

this place has 2 classes to unlock in the Red and black (purple?) mazes they also have super bosses at the end you dont need to fight them but be careful as you go through the floors enemies get stronger you should be fine to do the bosses when you are at end game i was able to beat them all you can visit early floors of the maze since monsters arent too difficult and you can get money and some good items https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/588633-romancing-saga-2/73900098?page=2 this post has info on the items you can find in chests

also you can get an item called fatestone in the blue maze this is a set chest at some point after some floors you can give this item to the blacksmith and get the sevens sword wich is a really good sword

heres a guide for all the classes you can get

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/228824-romancing-saga-2/76142573

thats all the basics i can think someone might need to understand this game better and have an easier time going through it

i hope this can help anyone

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evincedevelopment · 5 years

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All you need to know about eCommerce customer service

To be in the eCommerce business, it is of no doubt that relationship management and customer loyalty go hand in hand. Rather, they directly proportional to each other.

This blog will provide deep and clear insight on the importance of eCommerce customer service and the methods to master them in the eCommerce business.

Let's dive into it.

In the traditional scenario, you'll sell the product to the customers and if the customer is happy, they'll come back to make another purchase.

But in real practice, things can go negative.

There are reasons for that. In the real-time scenario, there can be a huge number of factors that can lead to bad customer experiences. At this point, the customer jumps to the customer's support team to get the issues resolved. This where customer loyalty and relationship is built.

Why customer support/service matters for your brand?

Generally, there is a myth that customer service comes to the play after the sales are made. But in reality, the customer service is one of the major reason affecting the buying behavior of the customers. Therefore, it's important to assume customer service as valuable as marketing efforts.

The poor customer service costs to the reputation of brand and money. There is a huge probability that once the customers are annoyed by the poor support and service, they tend to shift the brands in the short span of time.

Here, you lost the customers have they made the sale. Today, in the world of social media, the negative comments and reviews posted by the dissatisfied customers spread like the traditional world of mouth marketing. Now, this costs to entire marketing plan going in the trash.

Some tactics to fix the problem.

The key reason why customers approach the support and service team is due to the confusion about the product they are going to purchase.

Here are some strategies to deal with this issue.

1. Product Description: Keep it smooth & simple The product description must be as simple as possible so that everyone can understand it very easily. The use of complex vocabulary should be minimized, rather avoided. In short, the product description should be absolutely confusion free and must include encouraging words that force the customers to make an action.

2. Video Description The use of descriptive videos has its own significance. Trying to explain the product using the video is very trending nowadays. An encouraging feature behind the use of videos is that they tend to explain the products in a much more effective way without any confusion. Also, the videos can easily attract and engage much more customers in comparison to the textual content.

3. The FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) The product description is read by thousands of site visitors. So, there can be a huge number of queries that can be raised out of the product description.

To solve this issue, (in case of Magento 2 eCommerce Store) the 'Product FAQ Magento 2 Extension' can be used to deal with the issue. The store admin can add and display the FAQs about the product.

4. Product Inquiry Sometimes, the customer has a critical question that has not been answered clearly. In that case, the 'Product Inquiry Magento 2 Extension' comes in the play. The extension allows the potential customers to submit their inquiries to the admin. The admin can then answer the question via the email provided by the customer.

In this way, the potential customers can get answers to all the questions before making the purchase.

5. Live Chat The live chat is one of the best source ever developed to handle all the customer inquiries in real time. There are numerous methodologies that can be used to handle live chats. For eg., the facebook messenger chatbot, WhatsApp chatbot, third-party chatbots, etc.

Most commonly, the WhatsApp chatbot is highly trending these days. Integrating 'WhatsApp Contact Magento 2 Extension' with Magento 2 store allows the visitors to communicate with the support team in the real-time scenario independent of the device being used by the customer.

To sum up...

Having understood the importance of strong ecommerce customer service, the brand needs to take care of its support and service teams in order to handle all the past sales and build a brand reputation with 100% customer support and service success for future sales.

For more eCommerce consulting and support, visit evincemage.com

#ecommerce customer service #ecommerce customer #how important is customer service #importance of ecommerce

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myecommerce-blog1 · 6 years

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How You Can Drive Sales with Facebook Messenger Chatbots

Artificial Intelligence (AI), neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) all sound like visions of the future. Or at least something reserved for the elite programmers and smartest engineers at companies like Google, Amazon and SpaceX.

The reality is that chatbots are bringing these innovations to everyone. While these technologies are still young, they have tremendous potential to help you grow your business today – and they can be implemented with no prior knowledge of programming at all.

There are a lot of products nowadays that make life easy for e-commerce entrepreneurs. You’ve got companies like Shopify that make it easy to set up your store, and companies like Oberlo that make it easy to add products to your store.

Chatbots are another tool you can add to the mix to make it easier to get sales.

Chatbots have the potential to do to e-commerce what e-commerce has done to traditional retail.

Think about that.

The Future of Shopping

We may not be too far from a time when customers no longer shop at superstores like Amazon, but within personal, real conversations privately.

Let’s take shopping for sneakers as an example. What’s the current buying experience like?

You go to a website you like – maybe you heard about it from a friend or found it through an intriguing Facebook promotion. Once you’re there, you find the shoe section, you filter by style, size and color, and then you’re presented with a list of options.

You compare a bunch or them and then you add a few to your cart so you can come back later. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t, although the research says that you probably won’t.

Now maybe you’ll get hit with a retargeted ad or see an advertisement on the way to work the following week and return to your abandoned cart to follow through with the purchase.

But what if you received a friendly reminder right on your phone? What if this reminder was personal, human even? What if this message came through the same channel that you use to catch up with your friends and family throughout your hectic life of e-mails and meetings, not to mention those telemarketers ignoring the fact that you’re on the Do Not Call list?

Do you think that might make it more compelling? Do you think your subconscious might connect better with that feeling of familiarity and individualism?

Now imagine that two weeks after your order arrives you get a friendly check-in from the customer service team:

“Hey Dave, how are you diggin’ your new kicks?”

You know they’re ready to help you with any issues, so you shoot back:

“They’re awesome! Thanks so much!”

And then you get an immediate response:

“Cool! As always, let me know if you need anything! If you’d like to leave a review about the Jordans you just bought, here’s the link: sneakerstore.com/review”

Now six months down the road (the usual time when you’d be looking for another pair of shoes, based on your order history), that chat comes back to life with a friendly check-in:

“Hey Dave, how’s it going? I just wanted to let you know about our big summer sale coming up!”

The chatbot becomes your personal open door to dialoguing with the company.

They’ll send you tracking updates, process returns, and keep you up to date with the latest promotions, all customized to your taste.

If done properly, Facebook Chatbots provide enormous potential (a connection to 900 million people on FB Messenger) to drive sales and enhance the customer relationship. But these bots are new and foreign to most of us and aren’t superhuman (we’ll debate whether a computer can be superhuman later, okay?).

But if you aren’t careful, using a chatbot may backfire. You could annoy or confuse a customer, provide bad information or make it difficult to complete a purchase. A frustrated customer not only won’t buy, but they’re likely to suggest that others steer clear of your brand as well.

Back in 2015, messaging apps surpassed social apps in the number of monthly active users – and Facebook Messenger has 1.2 billion monthly users on its own. People around the world use it to easily keep in touch with friends and family – even those who tend to avoid that “social media stuff.”

Let’s look at a few ways that e-commerce businesses are using chatbots to grow their business as well as some important tips for building the most effective bots you can.

How to Use Facebook Messenger Bots

The best thing about chatbots is that they give you an automated, cost-effective way to communicate with your customers in a way that is more direct and personal than ever before.

It’s something you can easily add to your Facebook marketing strategy.

Here are some great ways to leverage the power of Facebook Messenger to connect with your customers:

1) Customer Service

Both social media and chat are becoming increasingly important for e-commerce customer service. One study found that you’ll lose as many as 15% of your customers if you ignore social media requests and that revenue per customer can grow 20-40% for businesses that do respond. Here’s what another study found:

44% of customers believe live chat is the most important feature a site can offer during a purchase.

There are a few ways to use your chatbot to help with customer service. For starters, you can use it to field FAQs and provide simple answers. You can also use it to collect some basic information like e-mail, order number and description of the problem before passing it along to one of your support reps to take over.

It’s important to remember that this technology isn’t state of the art yet. You can’t expect your bot to handle any complicated or unique requests, so it’s essential that whenever you use bots you should have human support on standby to help answer any such questions.

2) Order Confirmation and Updates

You can also offer your customers an opportunity to use Messenger to handle order and shipping confirmations. Send out tracking numbers, order updates and solicit feedback all from a single message thread.

One way to really boost sales is to make it easy to reorder via Messenger. If the bot has a customer’s order history, you can offer options to browse and reorder straight from their phone or browser.

3) Upsell and Cross-Sell

While improving the buying experience will certainly increase sales in the long run, you can also promote new products and offers directly to your customers via Messenger.

You already know their buying habits and their demographic information. You’ve established a line of communication. Now you can use this platform to remind customers of products they might want to check out or new promotions you have coming up which might interest them.

There is one caveat here.

Do not be too pushy or annoy customers. Unless they opt in for it, you shouldn’t be blasting them with the latest promotions every weekend – just the promos and offers that are catered specifically to their interests and purchase history.

These messages can be very invasive to a customer as they’re going directly to their personal phones and computers in a way that mimics the conversational experience they have when chatting up a friend or a cute girl they met last Friday. The occasional, useful promotion will be welcome by most– but salesy spam will not.

Your bot serves at the pleasure of the customer. If you annoy them, not only will the communication line be severed, but it’ll leave a bad taste in the customers’ mouth, too.

4) Facilitate Sales

You can also try to facilitate your sales directly through chat.

However, keep in mind that these bots are still pretty basic. If you sell products like apparel with multiple options (size, color, style, etc.), it might be easier to direct your customers to browse your site in order to provide a better experience.

If not, you’ll definitely want to have a human on deck to help pitch in, as you can see from the example above. But if you sell a few straightforward products or wish to facilitate re-orders and add-on sales, this does provide an exciting opportunity.

Tips For Building Effective Chatbots

It’s important to keep in mind that no matter how cool and exciting these new bots are, they are still in the early stages and customers might not be used to interacting with them. Here are a few tips to help make the experience a good one.

1) Use Simple, Clear Language and Instructions

You can have some fun with greetings and witty jokes, but when it comes to the core functionality of your chatbot, make sure it’s easy to understand. The user should get a simple answer or solution and know what they need to do to move forward. Don’t leave them guessing as to what they need to say.

2) Use Guided Responses

You may have heard that NLP technology is helping computers understand complex sentences and formulate intelligent responses. While that’s true, your basic chatbot isn’t going to be equipped with the fanciest technology on the market.

You can solve this by using simple, clear language and prompting the user with options to respond. This maintains the flow and dynamic of the conversation without forcing customers to worry about formatting their answer properly.

Leaving questions open ended is likely to create a frustrating experience for shoppers. It forces them to guess what to say and increases the chance that they won’t have a coherent experience, thereby increasing the odds that they will leave before accomplishing their goal.

3) Don’t Be Pushy

I’ll say this again – your chatbots serve at the pleasure of your customer.

Before you can start chatting with anyone, they must approve and initiate contact. Users can also easily block your bot if it’s annoying them. Facebook does this to protect the platform from becoming the next generation of spam and maintain its status as the most popular chat app on earth.

It’s probably best to start by using your app to help improve your customers’ experience first by making it easier to manage returns, orders and customer service. Then slowly introduce promotions or selling opportunities. Monitor your customers’ reaction closely to make sure you’re not annoying anyone.

4) Have a Plan

Know who you’re building this bot for and what problem you’re trying to solve. Think about your customers right now and solicit their thoughts.

What part of the buying experience has the most friction? Where are they dropping off? What steps are costing you the most money or causing the most headaches?

Build a chatbot to solve those problems. One at a time.

5) Offer a Way to Speak with a Real Person

While it’s fine to get excited about this new technology, don’t expect to have robots fully servicing your customers like a Star Wars droid just yet (you’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, right?).

Most chatbots are still programmed to respond to simple commands. And the last thing you want to do is leave your customer frustrated with an unresolved issue. Instead of making things easier and quicker for them, you’ll only infuriate them before they call you angrily, decide not to buy and/or leave a scathing review on all your social media.

This tip is especially important for Customer Service bots. Customers should always know that they can reach out to a real person for help. It’s a good idea to let them know how (like typing a certain command or calling your support line) in the beginning.

If you’re suggesting solutions to a problem, you may also want to offer a preset option like “Contact Support” in case their questions remain unanswered.

If you have the size and budget for it, it may even pay to have someone supervise the conversations in real time and jump in whenever things look messy.

Even though you need staff on standby, you’ll still benefit greatly from having bots handle the common and easy problems that would normally be repetitive and a waste of time. They can also do the legwork by collecting all the necessary information from your customer while she waits for your agent to connect.

6) Optimize and Update Your Bot

As with any new technology or marketing strategy, you’ll benefit from continued testing and improvement. Watch how your customers respond to new ideas and see which steps trip them up.

You won’t build the perfect system on your first try, but if you pay attention and aim to improve it each quarter, you’ll get more and more out of it. Watch technology trends and as this technology improves, you’ll be able to grow and do more with it. You’ll be lightyears ahead of the competition who wait until the next big press buzz to start.

How to Set Up Facebook Messenger Chatbots

There are many services out there that will help you set up Facebook Messenger Chatbots. In the beginning, you’ll probably want to use a platform like Chatfuel, OnSequel or Botsify. For a simple do-it-yourself guide to creating a chatbot, Social Media Examiner has a great post.

Start by building a bot with a single goal like handling order confirmations or navigating your FAQ. Watch how your customers use it and refine it based on their feedback. Then slowly start adding features to help more customers and start actually driving new sales.

As a bonus, the early users will be excited to grow with your brand as they see their online shopping companion evolve based on their specific feedback.

While you could code these bots from scratch or hire a developer to build them for you (the same companies mentioned above offer custom development services), it’s really not necessary and probably a waste of money until you have a better idea of exactly how your customers are responding to it.

Conclusion

While we’re at least a few years (and it really might be just a few years) from building our own android assistant like C3PO, chatbots are already starting to help businesses mimic human conversations to enhance their relationships with customers.

That’s why Amazon and Apple both announced that they are focusing on machine learning technology in 2017 and why Shopify includes Messenger as an official sales channel.

Facebook Messenger chatbots are easy enough to set up on your own, so why wait to try it out?

Source: https://www.singlegrain.com/social-media-news/how-e-commerce-companies-can-drive-sales-with-facebook-messenger-chatbots/

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unifiedsocialblog · 7 years

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9 Ways Your Brand is Wasting Time on Facebook

We’re all familiar with the dangers of wasting time on your personal Facebook page, but you might not realize all the ways your business is also wasting time on the network. To avoid any potential hurdles to your Facebook productivity, we’ve come up with a list of ways you could be mismanaging important social media minutes.

Continue reading to find out:

The dangers of republishing without reformatting

Why failing to test your ads is a costly mistake

How to save time in the future by spending more time now

9 ways your business is wasting time on Facebook

1. Creating overly promotional content

You’ve probably heard this advice before, but it’s worth repeating. Content creation is time-consuming, and you don’t want those hours of hard work to go to waste. If you’ve been wondering about the reason for that drastic dip in your business’s organic reach, you probably haven’t heard our calls to halt the creation of overly promotional content.

Facebook has been encouraging content creators to replace the straight-up promo material with stories that add value or provide more history for your business’s products and services. Facebook’s algorithm favors posts that aren’t overly promotional Helpful and shareable content has a higher likelihood of being seen by bigger audience

2. Republishing content on Facebook without reformatting

Here’s a thought process that might sound familiar: Instagram runs on beautiful images. Images increase engagement on Facebook. Instagram is part of Facebook. So I should repost all my Instagram photos automatically on my Facebook Page, right? Even if it may seem like a time-saving technique to automatically post the same update to multiple networks, it might cost you reach on both networks. For starters, your brand’s Instagram profile and Facebook Page may be serving different purposes, so content from one may not fit the overall tone of messaging on the other.

Your audiences on different networks may also be drastically different, so what resonates with your Instagram followers may not quite jive with your Facebook fans. If you want to reuse a photo, make sure to provide enough context so that it is actually of value to your audience.

Finally, these posts just don’t look great a lot of the time. When you automatically share a post to Facebook from your Instagram account, your caption and hashtags go along with it. If you’ve tagged anybody by their Instagram handle, this will look odd in a Facebook post as Instagram usernames are not the same as they are on Facebook. If you’ve used a ton of hashtags, these will also look strange on Facebook.

3. Getting in comment wars

As of April 2017, Facebook Messenger has 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide. With so many Messenger users, there’s a good chance you can engage with any disgruntled customer here instead of the comment section under a post. If a disgruntled customer comments on your Facebook post, reply quickly and reach out to them via Messenger. It might go without saying, but it’s also a good idea to stay away from any negative Facebook comment threads from competitor brands. It’s important to be aware of these conversations, but participating in them isn’t necessary—especially if none of the negative claims are substantiated. You risk doing more damage to your online reputation if you do get involved in a comment war with your competition—especially if this is done at the expense of your engagement with followers and fans.

4. Liking irresponsibly

Just like any other Facebook user, Facebook Page managers can like other people’s posts and Pages. In a similar fashion, businesses you’ve liked on Facebook show up in a Liked sidebar on your Page, so you must exercise caution when pressing the ‘Like’ button. You don’t want visitors to your Page to see brands you wouldn’t necessarily endorse as a business.

Select a few partners or clients to like, and let your Liked sidebar highlight your professional relationships. Plus, liking a Page authorizes new updates to appear on your News Feed, and you don’t want to create distraction by liking Pages that will share irrelevant content.

5. Not taking advantage of Automated Rules

Constantly monitoring and optimizing your Facebook ads can be time-consuming. With automated rules, “you can create rules in Ads Manager that automatically update or notify you of changes to your campaigns, ad sets, or ads.”

Instead of constantly having to check and optimize your active campaigns, automated rules can do this for you. For example, you can create rules that:

Turn off your ad when it doesn’t perform well

Increase the budget of your ad when more people click on it

Send a notification to your email address when the number of people who view your ad over a certain period of time decreases past a certain number

Automated rules can help you save time optimizing your ad, but it’s still important to keep tabs on the overall performance of your campaign to ensure success.

6. Skipping A/B tests for your Facebook ads

Facebook allows businesses to run split tests on ads to see which one performs better. This means sending out two slightly different versions of an ad to see which one receives more engagement.

Key areas to test include the:

Call to action: Try out different ways of asking your audience to engage. For example, you could test whether “buy now” works better than “learn more.”

Text: Test the length of your ad copy (number of characters), style (a question versus a statement), use of emoji, punctuation, and tone of voice.

Visuals: Test different images and video, text-only posts versus those with images, a regular image versus a GIF, images of people or products versus graphs or infographics, and different video lengths.

Format: Test different formats against each other, such as carousel ads, canvas ads, app install ads, video ads, lead ads, collection ads, slideshow ads, and regular photo ads.

Hashtags: Find out whether hashtags are helping or hurting your conversion potential. Test out the use of multiple hashtags versus a single hashtag, which industry hashtags result in the best engagement, and hashtag placement within the messaging (at the end, the beginning, or the middle).

Target audience: Test your ads against the different audience segments to see what works best for your business objectives.

Try out different variations with each ad you create, and note the winner of that category. Not only will this save you some time—you’ll also increase the ROI of your Facebook ads.

7. Taking too long to create a Facebook update

There’s nothing wrong with taking your time to create quality content for your audience. But busy social media managers often don’t have hours to spend creating a single update. If inspiration doesn’t strike, do some productive social media browsing to find ideas.

Another solution is asking your colleagues for advice. Run existing posts by knowledgeable coworkers to see what improvements can be made, and what suggestions they have for new content. You can also take a look at posts that have performed well in the past to repurpose this content for a new post. Try looking for content that can be updated with new information, visuals, or a new angle.

If you’re still not satisfied with your Facebook post it might be a good day for some curated content. If you need help with this, the Right Relevance app (available through the Hootsuite App Directory) lets you easily search and share the most authoritative content currently trending on the social web.

8. Reposting videos from external sources

Social media analytics organization Quintly took a look at 6.2 million posts in 2016 and found Facebook native videos performed better than embedded content. Videos uploaded natively on Facebook saw an average of 110 percent more interactions, and 611 percent more shares.

Additionally, the autoplay feature within Facebook’s native video tool encourages your followers to spend more time engaging with the content. This registers with the network’s algorithm and helps your video get seen by your target audience.

9. Not completing your About section

Sometimes it’s best to invest more time upfront so you can save time later. If you don’t include all the necessary information about your company on your Facebook Page, you risk creating confusion among those who turn to that social account for details about your business. If you want to avoid spending time answering the same questions, provide a detailed description on the About section of your Page. This includes a brief description of your brand mission, list of products and services you provide, link to your official website, and physical address (if your company has one). Think of this as a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section.

Another way you might be wasting time on Facebook? Page management. Hootsuite makes it easy to schedule posts, share video, and monitor conversations so you can spend time on what matters—connecting with your customers.

Learn More

The post 9 Ways Your Brand is Wasting Time on Facebook appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

9 Ways Your Brand is Wasting Time on Facebook published first on http://ift.tt/2rEvyAw

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bizmediaweb · 7 years

Text

9 Ways Your Brand is Wasting Time on Facebook

Continue reading to find out:

The dangers of republishing without reformatting

Why failing to test your ads is a costly mistake

How to save time in the future by spending more time now

9 ways your business is wasting time on Facebook

1. Creating overly promotional content

2. Republishing content on Facebook without reformatting

3. Getting in comment wars

4. Liking irresponsibly

5. Not taking advantage of Automated Rules

Instead of constantly having to check and optimize your active campaigns, automated rules can do this for you. For example, you can create rules that:

Turn off your ad when it doesn’t perform well

Increase the budget of your ad when more people click on it

Send a notification to your email address when the number of people who view your ad over a certain period of time decreases past a certain number

Automated rules can help you save time optimizing your ad, but it’s still important to keep tabs on the overall performance of your campaign to ensure success.

6. Skipping A/B tests for your Facebook ads

Facebook allows businesses to run split tests on ads to see which one performs better. This means sending out two slightly different versions of an ad to see which one receives more engagement.

Key areas to test include the:

Call to action: Try out different ways of asking your audience to engage. For example, you could test whether “buy now” works better than “learn more.”

Text: Test the length of your ad copy (number of characters), style (a question versus a statement), use of emoji, punctuation, and tone of voice.

Format: Test different formats against each other, such as carousel ads, canvas ads, app install ads, video ads, lead ads, collection ads, slideshow ads, and regular photo ads.

Target audience: Test your ads against the different audience segments to see what works best for your business objectives.

Try out different variations with each ad you create, and note the winner of that category. Not only will this save you some time—you’ll also increase the ROI of your Facebook ads.

7. Taking too long to create a Facebook update

8. Reposting videos from external sources

9. Not completing your About section

Learn More

The post 9 Ways Your Brand is Wasting Time on Facebook appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

9 Ways Your Brand is Wasting Time on Facebook published first on http://ift.tt/2u73Z29

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edwardbhicks9 · 7 years

Text

Ways to get Consumers To love Your Best seo company Fort Worth 2018.

Internet Marketing Strategies For Getting Results Now

Online marketing is definitely an incredibly lucrative business strategy. The majority of people use the Internet every single day. For the newer generations, the phone book will be simply a distant memory at best. Marketing on search engines like yahoo is very subtle and effective.

A mailing list of your respective clients is essential. Have a place on your web site where people can join your email service. However you do this, a list will be employed to inform customers of future sales and promotions or perhaps to request feedback.

Your site tags should accurately project the primary purpose of your website. Tags affect your search engine rankings, and also the main heading tag will probably be visible to potential visitors. Misinformation or confusing information will cause readers to have your web site.

Build a FAQ page to promote products. Spend some time to develop questions that allow for answers packed with product suggestions. Be sure that you avoid rendering it appear to be an ad by going overboard with product suggestions.

As a way to increase your income, you should increase the amount of subscribers for your site. Testing out different versions of your respective site is possible through split testing, where one page is served to half your audience and the other to everybody else. Then you certainly select the best one based upon new subscriptions.

Make the best use of email for marketing your enterprise. Develop informative, intriguing newsletters for the customers. You need to make sure the individual understands you will be giving them pertinent information, instead of spam. Even though your potential customers leave your internet site, your newsletters will enable you to maintain exposure to them and assure them that you are committed to their continued business.

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Image searches can be a substitute method of enhancing your internet marketing strategies. Don’t limit your search results to only text searches. Your site can have up in additional searches, and therefore receive more visits, in the event you add images that are great for your site content. Individuals who are merely wanting for information might miss your blogbest seo company Fort Worth 2018 You will build understanding of the manufacturer you will be selling, and raising the opportunity these particular people will come back often.

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from Freiestimme Best Home Improvement Website http://www.freie-stimme.org/ways-to-get-consumers-to-love-your-best-seo-company-fort-worth-2018/

#News

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