7 Social Media Tips for Franchises

Today, social media is ruling the marketing scene. Even B2B businesses are finding that social media can be an excellent source for lead generation and value offering. Franchises can also use social media – however, it will require a unique spin.Though franchises are past the startup phase where social media can be very tricky, they can still run into some hurdles along the way. If you own a franchise, a huge hurdle can be the effectiveness of your strategy. If you’re working on improving your social media game, here are some suggestions:

1. Define the Voice and Purpose

What’s the purpose of your social efforts? Are you trying to generate more customers? Draw attention to the brand? Reach more customers? Your primary purpose will greatly influence your strategies and their effectiveness.

Defining your voice will be a large part of achieving that purpose. When marketing a franchise, aim to stand out from your major competitors. If you’re a McDonald’s franchise, for example, you’ll be up against Wendy’s, Burger King, and other fast food restaurants in the area. Your voice will set you apart from your biggest competitors.

2. Rely on the Brand Name’s Popularity

Most franchises are well-known, and you can use that popularity to your advantage with your social strategy. People love Starbucks, for example, so if you own a Starbucks franchise, you can focus on what the company stands for, their signature products, and their imagery in order to make the most of your social efforts.

3. Use the Best Platforms

Some social media platforms will be more effective for you than others. For most franchises, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are essential for sharing viral content. Original blog posts, videos, memes, vines, and other content that has the potential to spread are best handled through these platforms. Google Plus is also useful for connecting on the professional level and increasing search engine rankings.

4. Be Present on Each Platform

After you’ve figured out the tenets above, focus on building a ubiquitous presence on social media. This is essential to making your specific franchise visible and standing out against competitors.

The most important part of developing a presence is filling out your profile. Make sure contact information, your website, and details about the business are easy to find. Your cover image and profile picture should also be engaging and encourage likes. Use this opportunity to share your voice and make it stand out.

After you’ve defined the profile, be present. Pop onto social pages often to interact with customers, make comments, and respond to messages. Customers respond much better to companies that are readily available.

5. Stick with Timely and Relevant Content

Timely content is essential for attracting attention. Loyal customers enjoy entertainment regarding pop culture, current news events, and trending stories. Scanning local and world newsfeeds can be a gold mine of useful topics that can raise sales and create loyal customers.

The content must also be relevant. If you’re trying to get people to eat at your restaurant, the content you share should make customers want to eat at your restaurant. It shouldn’t gross them out, convince them to go on a diet, or persuade them to do anything else that goes against the purpose of your social efforts.

6. Be Local

Local social engagement is everything for franchises. You are a local business, after all.  It’s your job to stand out from the other franchises in your area, and drawing more attention from locals is essential.

Social media can also extend to your physical activities. For example, attend or sponsor local events. This shows that you’re invested in the community and important causes. After you’ve attended, you can share your experience on your social pages.

7. Create a Vision for Your Marketing Efforts

Ultimately, every move you make on social media boils down to your primary vision. You’ll step back and look at the big picture, tweaking your strategy in order to send you in the right direction. It creates a road map that both you and your customers can follow with ease.

Xiaomi to unveil Yi Erida drone and Yi 4K+ camera at CES 2017

With CES around the corner, all tech companies are gearing up for the event and have also started showcasing their products before the actual event. Xiaomi too has unveiled its new Yi Erida drone and Yi 4K + action camera that will be showcased at the CES 2017.

The new Yi Erida drone is an updated version of the previous Yi 4K that was launched earlier this year. Being an updated variant, the new drone comes with an addition of 60FPS mode while recording videos in 4K resolution, making it the first of a kind for any action camera.

While recording 4K video at 60FPS, this update comes handy, especially while capturing fast moving objects, which makes the video look more smooth and enriched, compared to the existing 4K at 30FPS.

The Yi Erida backs a Yi 4K action camera, with three-rotor design and comes with up to 40 minutes of flying time and boosts a maximum speed of up to 75mph (120kph approx.). The drone also gets a gimbal system that helps in keeping the camera steady to ensure smooth video recording, paired with manual camera controls and an advanced radar/sensor system.

Xiaomi also claims that the drone can be controlled via mobile app. The company claims that the Yi Erida is a "a remote obsolete".

The company hasn't really emphasised on the Yi 4K+ specs, but considering the Erida drone, this too will be very much like its predecessor apart from the improvement in its video recording options. The previous model came with a touch screen display that is placed at the back, along with a good battery output.

For more details on the two new products, we will have to wait till CES 2017 kicks off.

Xiaomi Redmi Note 4X rumoured to launch soon

Xiaomi always finds ways in getting the spotlight and this time it's in context to the new Redmi Note 4X. Although the company launched two new colours of its existing Redmi 4 smartphone in China recently, now the company has shifted its focus on the upcoming Note-series phones.

Rumoured reports suggest that Xiaomi is expected to launch the Redmi Note 4X soon, which would be a much powerful version of the Redmi Note 4. The Note 4X will most likely be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 653 processor, coupled with 4GB RAM and for storage might comes with 64GB internal storage.

The existing Xiaomi Note 4, which is likely to arrive in India soon comes with interesting specs too. The Note 4 features a 5.5 inch IPS LCD capacitive touch screen, with 1080 x 1920 resolution. The phone runs on Android v6.0 Marshmallow OS, skinned with MIUI 8.0 and powers on a 2.1 GHz Deca-core Mediatek MT6797 Helio X20 processor with Mali-T880 MP4 GPU. The phone gets two variants, the first being 2GB RAM with 16GB storage and the other a 3GB RAM version with 64GB storage. The phone comes with a microSD card slot that allows storage expansion of up to 256 GB and also features a Fingerprint senor, mounted at the back.

In terms of optics, the Note 4 at the back uses a 13 Megapixel camera with dual LED (dual tone) flash and on the front is a 5 Megapixel camera for video calls and clicking selfies.

Powering the phone is a Non removable Li-Po 4100mAh battery and comes with connectivity options like Bluetooth v4.2, GPS, microUSB v2.0 and Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac. The Xiaomi Note 4 is available in five colour options of Silver, Gray, Gold, Blue and Black.

The Note series is a very popular phone line up in China and if the rumoured reports regarding the Redmi Note 4X are to be true, then we might have a much powerful phone with a much better performance.

Xiaomi Mi 6 likely to launch on Valentine’s Day

Xiaomi is tipped to make an entry at CES 2017 next year and reports suggest that the company, most likely will be launching its new flagship, the Mi 6 at the event. If rumours are to be true, then it's highly possible, since Xiaomi had launched the Mi 5, early in 2016 as well.

Weibo, the Chinese social media known for mobile leaks, initially pointed to a tipster, which said that Xiaomi would officially launch the Mi 6 in March, but now another conflicting report points that Xiaomi Mi 6 most likely will be announced on February 14, 2017.

If the leaks turn out to be accurate, then the Mi 6 would actually be the first smartphone to be announced with Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 CPU.

Other reports suggest that Xiaomi might launch the Mi 6 in three different variants, of which the international version would be called Xiaomi Mi 6S that will feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset, second being the Xiaomi Mi 6E that might run on MediaTek Helio processor and the third would be Xiaomi Mi 6P that might house the company's very own Pinecone processor.

In terms of specs, the phone is expected to come with a 5.2 inch display with 2.5D glass. Tipped to launch with three different processors, the handset might feature a 4GB and a 6GB RAM variant as well. It likely would back a dual 16 Megapixel camera at the back and would power on a 3000mAh battery with support for QuickCharge 4.0.

Point to be taken here is that, all information's tipped are sheer rumours and can't be confirmed till Xiaomi officially launches the phone.

5 things that suck about Apple’s new MacBook Pro

While mostly I’ve liked the new MacBook Pro in the weekend I’ve used it there are some glaring issues that I need to point out which make me question the use of the Pro nomenclature on these notebooks. Apple is obviously arguing otherwise, and there is some logic to what it is suggesting but some of the things with these notebooks are going to be deal-breakers for people. Even, I, someone who doesn’t really push the limits of the new Macs to their fullest has found some of the design decisions to be limiting. Let me elaborate.

1. The biggest issue is the absence of the standard USB ports. There really is not getting around the fact that at the moment you can’t plug in even a pen drive to this laptop leave alone a memory card or an HDMI cable. The only route is a dongle for one thing or the other. If you end up with Apple’s dongles, you will pay a lot of money and have ugly dongles hang out of the sides of this beautiful machine. I haven’t been able to hook up my camera, nor can I charge my iPhone on this machine. Ironically, the charger of this machine has come in handy in charging my Google Pixel, which is all kinds of strange.

2. The new keyboard is very shallow and people who like clattering the keyboard will find it hard to adapt quickly. Only after 4 days of heavy duty usage, I’ve become used to this keyboard. I can imagine people who are used long key travel will not like this keyboard. It really is a keyboard that’s likely to appeal to touch typists more than anyone else.

3. The battery life isn’t as good as the MacBook Air which will be a deal breaker for someone upgrading from an Air. The bigger issue is that it isn’t even as good as a 13-inch MacBook Pro from last year. Apple could perhaps make some improvements to the operating system with a software update, but until that happens, I am not getting more than 5 hours with the screen brightness at full and no more than 7.5 with it lowered to usable levels.

4. Apple reportedly made the display assembly so thin that it didn’t have any room left to add the backlit Apple logo on the top of the notebook. Instead, like the retina MacBook, the new Pro models get this machined Apple logo, which looks quite nice, but it doesn’t exude that level of coolness in the dark as the older MacBooks.

5. The touch bar, so far, it hasn’t proven to be life changing. Perhaps, that speaks of the amount of apps that are leveraging it or perhaps it also speaks about a pro user who has had years of training of Mac keyboard shortcuts would probably find it quite pointless. So far, the touch bar seems like something designed for a dummy, but not a pro user, which is the target audience of the MacBook Pro.

LG announces new K3, K4, K8, K10 and Stylus 3 ahead of CES

LG has officially announced its new K-series smartphones along with a new Stylus 3 smartphone, ahead of CES 2017 that is schedule for Las Vegas next month. As mentioned earlier, the new K-series phones and Stylus 3 handset will be marked in the mid range segment that will help the company strengthen its portfolio.

Juno Cho, the president of LG Electronics Mobile Communications went on to say at the launch that, “Our 2017 mass-tier, mid-range smartphones focus on giving our customers a wide variety of options and choices for their smartphone lifestyles. What's consistent in all our K Series and Stylus 3 devices is that they look and feel premium, offer replaceable batteries and all come with expandable memory slots, what customers consider key factors when buying smartphones in this category."

According to the company, its new mid-range phone will sport some features like rear fingerprint scanner and 120-degree wide-angle front camera lens. LG claims, that the new 2017 K-series phone have been designed with “"the diverse needs of consumers in mind" and will be making the devices available in weeks to come.

Following are the specs of phones officially launched by LG.

LG K3 (2017) 
The LG K3 features a 4.5 inch FWVGA IPS display with 480x854 pixels and sports a 1.1GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor, paired with 1GB RAM. For storage the phone comes with 8GB of inbuilt storage that can be expanded to 32GB using microSD card. For capturing images and recording videos, the phone at the back uses a 5 Megapixel rear camera with LED flash and 2 Megapixel sensor on the front. Running on Android v6.0 Marshmallow, the device comes in many connectivity options like 4G LTE, 3G, GPRS/ EDGE, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, and Micro-USB. Powering this phone is a 2100mAh removable battery and the phone will be offered in two colours that include Metallic Titan along with Pink Gold.

LG K4 (2017) 
The LG K4 comes with a 5 inch FWVGA display with 480x854 resolution, with pixel density of 196ppi. This too runs on the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor like the LG K3 and is backed with 1GB RAM along with 8GB internal storage, which can be increased to 32GB using a microSD card. This phone comes with a 5 Mega pixel camera, both front and back. The phone powers on a 2500mAh removable battery and will be offered in two colour options of Titan and Black.

LG K8 (2017) 
The LG K8 sports a 5 inch HD display with 720x1280 resolution with pixel density of 294ppi. It powers on a 1.4GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 processor, paired with 1.5GB RAM. For storage, the phone comes with 16GB inbuilt memory that is expandable to 32GB, using a microSD card. To capture images and record videos, the phone at the back comes with a 13 Megapixel rear sensor, whereas on the front is 5 Megapixel camera for video calling and clicking selfies. The K8 runs on Android v7.0 Nougat and powers on a 2500mAh removable battery. The phone will be available in four colour options of Titan, Silver, Dark Blue, and Gold.

LG K10 (2017) 
LG K10 features a 5.3 inch HD display with 720x1280 resolution and a pixel density of 277ppi. It powers on an octa-core MediaTek MT6750 processor, which is clocked at 1.5GHz, paired with 2GB RAM. The phone will come in two storage options of 16GB and 32GB memory that can be expanded to 2TB via microSD card. To click images and video recording, at the back is a 13 Megapixel rear camera, whereas towards the front is a 5 Megapixel camera. The phone powers on a 2800mAh removable battery and runs on Android v7.0 Nougat. The LG K10 will be available in colour options of Titan, Black and Gold.

LG Stylus 3 
The LG Stylus 3 comes with a 5.7 inch HD display with 720x1280 resolution and supports a Stylus Pen. It comes powered by an octa-core MediaTek MT6750 processor, similar to LG K10 and is backed with 3GB RAM. It supports 16 GB inbuilt storage that can be expanded to 2TB using a microSD card. At the back is an 13 Megapixel rear camera and towards the front is an 8 Megapixel sensor. The phone runs on Android v7.0 Nougat out-of-the-box and powers on a 3200mAh removable battery.

How to Develop Your Technology Idea

It’s pretty clear that technology rules the world. No business would be caught without technology backing their infrastructure, and consumers rely on their various gadgets and software daily. Getting into this market is a sure moneymaker. But if you have a brilliant tech idea and no background in technology, can you make it?

Yes! Hundreds of technology companies got started in some of the most unlikely places with people who didn’t know much about technology. Instead, they knew how to build teams and roll with ideas that their customers would love.

The inspiration for building your tech idea can be found in looking at where some of the largest tech companies started. David Packard and William Redington Hewlett, two regular guys, founded Hewlett-Packard in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939. Now, Palo Alto, and that garage specifically, is considered by many to be the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

Steve Jobs was more of an inventor and designer than he was a technology builder. He also started Apple in the Silicon Valley and ran the business from his parents’ house for a while. He grew his business by relying on teamwork. One of his more famous quotes is, “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” He lived by that motto and the foundation of Apple was built by teams of inventors, tech gurus, customer service reps, and business professionals.

Getting started in tech, just like Apple and Hewlett-Packard, is possible for anyone with a great product and the perseverance to get it done. However, in order to get started, you’ll need to do a few things.

Find Money

You’ll need some cash to build your prototype and get started, but you don’t need money on hand to start a business. There are plenty of options for financing, including taking out a business loan.

One of the more popular ways to build capital for production is crowdfunding. Through this venture, you’ll attract money from friends, families, fans, supporters, and angel investors who want to see your product grow to fruition.

Learn a Little Tech

You would be wise to learn a little about the coding and/or technology that goes into your product development. Complete ignorance is a good way to let people take advantage of you. Take a couple of night classes or watch endless YouTube videos for a foundation in the technology used for the production of your product.

Find Someone to Build Your Product

This is the first step for most, especially if you only have a vision of what your product looks like. You can’t very well build a prototype in your own home if you don’t know how to connect wires and such. There’s only so much you can learn on YouTube, after all.

There are a few choices for having your product built. The most common is meeting with a third-party development company to discuss your product and make sure the prototype is viable. This is the more favorable option since you’ll work closely with the developers and make necessary tweaks as you go. The costs can be high for this option, however, so people often choose a different route out of necessity.

Many are going for a hybrid model of sorts in which you have a middleman find an excellent developer and keep your prices down. You’re able to maintain control of the product while reducing your bottom line and taking some of the responsibility off your plate.

Over time, you’ll need to focus on ways to build your products in more affordable ways. This may require bringing production in-house, although this won’t occur until after you’ve made money from the product.

File for Patents

If you don’t protect your product, there’s nothing to stop your developers from selling it themselves or selling it to the highest bidder. There will also be copycats who will utilize cheaper production and competitive pricing.

Talk with a patent lawyer at the very beginning of product production. Once you have a prototype, you can begin filing for the patents you’ll need to protect it.

Build Your Business Plan

You’ll also need a business plan that focuses on bringing in the revenue. Oftentimes, your plan will simply be to develop a product, sell it to the highest bidder, and collect royalties for the rest of your life.

If you want to make and sell the products through your own platform, you’ll need a business plan that can sustain your business. That warrants a completely separate post, but here’s a great guide for creating a business plan surrounding your product.