Small Business News

Instagram offers a big opportunity for small businesses. In fact, they have over 25 million business profiles and over 2 million advertisers, according to Jason Hsiao, Chief Video Officer and Co-Founder of Animoto.

Small Business Trends spoke with him about how to create the best videos for the popular social media site that’s gaining serious momentum in the business world.

“The bottom line is Instagram is a rocket ship right now,” he said. “It’s by far the fastest growing social media platform.”

He added that while it’s not the biggest (that’s still Facebook overall) Instagram has just surpassed one billion monthly active users to get the attention of the brick and mortar and digital business owner both. Animoto studied the trends and found, among other things, 200 million people visit at least one business profile each day.

So, how do small businesses get involved? What are the best practices to get video working for you on Instagram? Here are a few thoughts that should supply a framework and even allow your sma

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We read and hear about how fast-moving society has become, thank due in part to people having online access and generating an always-on awareness. That awareness sometimes celebrates overnight success, instant gratification, and unfortunately hyperactive short-term thinking. With that environment in mind how can marketers craft messages and ideas that stick with people enough to attract a customer? Even deeper, how does a business establish the right operations for long-term….to even build a legacy?

One answer comes in the book Legacy In The Making: Building a Long-Term Brand to Stand Out In a Short-Term World by Mark Miller and Lucas Conley. The authors offer ideas and solutions for how business leaders take the right operational risks to establish their companies for the long haul. Miller and Conley offer ideas based on in-depth research and insights from leaders at venerable brands like Patagonia, Lexus, and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

Miller is the founder of the Legacy lab and the chief strategy officer at Team One. Conley is author of obsessive branding disorder and co-author of the method method. There is also a forward by Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia.

Legacy in the Making offers profile of leaders from the brands examining their decisions.   The authors advocate that business legacies develop from companies that really don’t stand still in their markets, offering the same approach to services or products. The current time has evolved the properties of legacy to require more dynamic thinking.

“We are all familiar with the traditional meaning of a legacy … We see it in every leader who seeks to “cement” his or her legacy as if it were something set in stone and left behind on museum pedestal to gather dust … In contrast our lives or anything but static they evolved fluidly on a continuum.”  

Each profile shares a scenario and lessons, noting how the modern age is revising long held views.  Examin

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Who would buy 20,000 Mercedes-Benz vans?

Amazon would, actually. And they already did, according to one headline this week on Small Business Trends.

My guest this week on This Week in Small Business, John “Colderice” Lawson, says he believes the move to purchase all these fresh off the line Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans is a sign that Amazon is ready to take control of the whole process, from its warehouses to your front door.

(To be precise: This week’s show was recorded in his media studio, so I was his guest, in a way.)

We think two things are happening here. Amazon is moving forward with its plan to partner with local delivery and transportation companies to fulfill orders. And Amazon is taking over the “last mile” part of the order fulfillment process.

Right now, a lot of that business goes to the U.S. Postal Service. And it’s been reported — by some — that Amazon gets a good deal on postal rates but that may not always be true in the not-so-distant future.

Check out our takes on this move, especially, as it has the biggest impact on small business in the entrepreneurial sense.

John, the world traveler, schooled us all on why they’re going with the Mercedes-Benz vans, in particular.

“It sounds great on the surface, but if you go to Europe, all the vans are Mercedes-Benz vans. What people don’t know is that Mercedes-Benz makes vehicles and engines that are great for repeated use,” he says rather expertly.

On the rest of the show this week, John and I also discuss some of the latest SEO advice from Larry Kim and some tips on creating some top-shelf retail experiences for your customers.

Be sure to subscribe to the Small Business Trends YouTube channel to never miss another This Week in Small Business show and more.

For the rest of the week in small business headlines, check out this Small Business Trends news roundup:

The new Discover it Business Card is going to give small business owners unlimited 1.5% cashback on all purchases with a dollar-for-dollar match. Discover it Business Credit Card In addition to the cashback offer, Discover (NYSE: DFS) is also providing free business and security features while at the same time getting rid of the annual fee for the first 12 months.

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Well, after the bomb Amazon dropped yesterday announcing an arsenal of Alexa-enabled devices – from microwaves, cars devices, wall clocks, outlet plugs, subwoofers – it’s easy to see we’re a quickly moving into a voice-first world.  But the reason for all these new voice-enabled devices is because we kind of like talking to them, according to a recent study from Adobe called The State of Voice Assistants.

Taylor Schreiner, director of Adobe Digital Insights, shared some of the key finding from the study with me for this series.  Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear the whole interview check out the video below or the embedded SoundCloud player.

Small Business Trends: So, what were some of the key takeaways or findings that you came out of this with?

Taylor Schreiner:  People check the weather. People play music on their devices, right? We sort of think of the world like there’s a set of behaviors that you expect people to do and they do. And then there’s a deepened set of other behaviors that are more interesting like sports scores, kitchen recipes; all sorts of the things that are indubitably you see but specifically an individual might not get. So a lot of people, almost everybody does the first category. Everybody does some of the second category. And then we see everybody seems to do one or two of what I call the third category which are really deep interactions that for marketers and for consumers are really new and interesting. Like; “I’m actually gonna check my credit balance. I’m gonna price these tickets.” You’re maybe in the middle of a debate as to whether you should get a bigger television. You can actually ask the device like “How much would it really cost you to get a 60 inch smart television?” You can actually have these conversations really quickly, even more quic

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