A few years ago, creating an app for one’s business was something only for the most dedicated of techies—it would surely set you apart from your competition, but it was nowhere in the realms of your customers’ automatic expectations. Nowadays, without an app you are easily set apart from your competition in the complete opposite direction; customers may not even bother with your company if it is not available to them through a smartphone-friendly channel. To further understand why having an app is a huge advantage to your business, and what you risk by not having one, read on. 

A huge trend of 2014, videos have become an unavoidable means of communication. Read on to find out why and how to use them efficiently... The video has the ability to greatly increase the popularity of a site, and there are many who can attest to this. The video is a multipurpose communication tool that proves to be pertinent to several stages of client relations: it encourages interactiveness and increases user engagement on sites.  Video content can also, under certain conditions, boost the SEO of your site.  In fact, a video has 53 times more of a chance of coming up on the first page of a Google search than written content does.  However, remember that only written characters are taken into account by Google search algorithms. To improve your SEO through a video, you will have to pay a lot of attention to the title, the description, and the key words you have chosen. If you take this criteria into account, your video should be able to considerably increase your visibility on the internet. To give you an idea of the super powers that video content has in strategic marketing, a study done by Forrester  revealed that "from this point on, an online video may have more of an impact than a 30 second television commercial". So, are you convinced by the considerable advantages that video content is offering us? Now we will have to develop a strategy that defines the type of video and the channels of communication that you should use.  What better way to enlighten you than to show you how we, at GoodBarber, have decided to use the video?

As there are 1.3 million apps available in the market, user engagement has become a key factor in the success of an application. Today, I'll show you how to achieve this engagement on social networks through five steps (Exist, Know, Offer, Identify, Award).  

Huge! Facebook is the largest online social network and according to Facebook stats has more than 1 billion monthly active users. Almost 90% of worldwide active users are using mobile phones to check their news feed, chat with friends and update their Facebook profile. There is no doubt that Facebook has conquered most of the world's internet users and brings to the table a great opportunity for brands, companies and entrepreneurs to launch their products with a low budget or even, for free. The mobile apps promotion are not an exception. In the last two years, Facebook has improved the advertising tools for mobile promotion, becoming more successful than conventional Facebook ads. The variety of advertising formats, the deep segmentation (gender, language, interests, behavior, connections, pages), and the placement of your ads on the News feed helps to increase the number of downloaded apps, the app's engagement and retention of app users. These facts also contribute to achieve a more relevant position through search tools of Google Play and Apple's App Store. But let's understand how it works in detail.

You’ve most certainly heard of the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise funds for the ALS that went viral this summer. You might have even participated! This brilliant initiative turned out to be a huge success and brought more than 100 million dollars to the ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) association. The concept of taking up a challenge and then nominating your friends has been quite trendy on the socials since a while, but the Ice Bucket Challenge went to whole new level, involving thousands and thousands of people around the globe and becoming the hottest social network topic of the summer of 2014. Everything started when Pete Frates, a former baseball player who was diagnosed with ALS two years ago, challenged a friend to donate $100 to the ALS association or film himself dumping ice cold water over his head. The idea was so simple and fun that it caught on like a wildfire. As this action spread, it changed somewhat because even though people were more than willing to donate, they didn’t want to miss out on the experience of pouring a bucket of ice on themselves, so they began to do both. Totally understandable!... ;)

Be it a real or virtual, it's not easy to create a community! It takes time and a lot of dedication... When it comes to apps in particular, a strong sense of community among users is necessary, but also focusing on the right kind of features to make your app social. But before telling you how to achieve this goal, let's focus on the meaning of community, and why it's so important.

Today, we're honored to talk to Nicola Guerra, web designer at the agency Extera.

Today we're meeting Rosa, the author of the blog CoseFatteInCasa.it, who has decided to make her recipes, hints and tips available on an app, in addition to the web and socials  ! This turned out to be a great decision, given the result it brought :) Only a few days after the launch of the app in App Store it was rated as one of the top new apps!

Your GoodBarber app embeds social sharing features that will help your users to spread the word about your content. It means that almost everywhere in the app, your readers have access to a "share" button that will lead them the sharing screen.   You've probably already added such features to your website: you can easily understand that the more the process will be easy for your users to share your posts or videos, the more they'll share it :)   Since the GoodBarber 2.5 Salvador release, we've also integrated Facebook likes into the apps. It means that once your reader is logged in your app with his Facebook account, he'll just have to click on the "heart" button to like the post he's reading. It's not exactly the same action than a real Facebook share: a share will create a new post in the user's timeline, and a like will just appear in the Facebook ticker feed.   To be honnest, as a Facebook user, I prefer most of the times to just "like" a blog post than to actually "share" it to my friends: the two actions are totally different and apply in different situations.   GoodBarber also allows you to ask your users to login using Facebook or Twitter to post a comment, to bookmark a content, or to submit a picture/video/text from a Submit section. You should enable this feature if you don't want the comments on your website to be anonymous.

Many of you have enabled the social sharing options into your apps, and you're right! It's a very good way to encourage your users to spread the word about your app and your content. Since last week, the Android beta is opened on GoodBarber. You probably noted that new options have appeared in your backend: in expert mode, you can now upload a specific icon and a specific splash screen for your Android app. In order to set up properly the sharing options in your app, you need to set up a new parameter in the Facebook and Twitter apps you have already created. Here is a little summary of the modifications you have to apply to your social apps if you have already created them.

Enhance your application with your tweets, and allow your readers to reply or retweet you directly from your application. Our goal is to enable you to combine all of your content sources in one single application, and to offer an exciting and unique experience for your readers. Integrating Twitter with GoodBarber was planned on our roadmap . For several days, your back office Sources page has included a space for Twitter. It’s extremely simple: you have to click twice. Your live thread is displayed on the application, and the “Reply” and “Retweet” options are available.