The term “cyberloafing” isn’t new, but it got the precise attention of the corporate world in recent years. The entry of pandemic culture, when we all went online, is to blame for that.

No wonder.

Companies lose around $85 billion every year because of cyberloafing. They consider it a billion-dollar waste of time and the main reason for procrastination and productivity loss at work. Since the pandemic event — when employees worked from home, and there was no one to monitor what employees were doing — the issue of cyberloafing has risen with renewed vigor.

We are now cyberloafing more than usual. With everything available and possible to operate online, how we perceive and practice day-to-day work has changed.

But is cyberloafing really so dangerous and destructive? Let’s sort it out.

What is cyberloafing?

Cyberloafing is a universal term to describe the actions of employees using the Internet at a workplace for personal needs.

It relates to any activities other than work such as:

• scrolling social media
• checking personal emails
• ordering items online
• booking travels
• watching YouTube videos, etc.

With remote work on the rise and a tendency to search for any information, including job search, online, no surprise that cyberloafing is only increasing. According to statistics, Millennial and Gen Z employees spend 2+ hours per workday using the Internet for personal needs.

The reasons for cyberloafing during working hours are many. The most common are:

1. Boredom. Struggling with the same monotonous tasks at work, you look for something entertaining online.
2. Ostracism. When feeling lonely and excluded from peers at work, you seek refuge online.
3. Mental breaks. The human brain works in such a way that we need to pause work occasionally to refresh our minds.
4. Competitive tasks. Challenging tasks consume tons of mental effort, and you take short breaks online to reduce stress and burnout.
5. Non-competitive tasks. Getting the role and duties that aren’t challenging enough for you, you push them away for later and spend time on non-work online activities.
6. Upskilling. Enrolled in online courses from top companies, you spend time learning.
7. Internet addiction. Embracing the “reel” life to gain satisfaction and validation from the community, you get addicted and give up real life and time for it.

The benefits of cyberloafing

So, how can distracting yourself from work — at work benefit you?

The boost for numerous studies on this comes from American and Israeli scientists. They researched cyberloafing as a coping mechanism that helped employees deal with boredom at work. After examining 463 university employees of different occupations, they concluded the positive effect of cyberloafing:

When a person gets distracted from current tasks and takes a break from relaxing content on social media, the brain starts a new cycle of information processing. It looks for a place to define this information and how to save it.

The benefits of such distraction are many:

• A positive effect on mood and mental health
• Easier switching between routine tasks thanks to the brain’s “relax” and restart
• Enhanced activity of the brain’s temporal lobes responsible for long-term memory
• Improved concentration and productivity
• Enhanced creative thinking, thanks to healthy procrastination and its effect on imagination, memory, and idea generation.

So, what’s the truth about Cyberloafing? Long story short

Cyberloafing brings more good than harm. It helps the brain to recharge and makes it cope with tasks faster and more efficiently.

More recent studies examining cyberloafing behaviors among university students confirm these findings:

Non-study activities like accessing online content and gaming affected students’ psychological well-being positively. Such results emphasize the importance of evaluating both pros and cons cyberloafing can bring, as well as developing appropriate policies to manage the level of Internet misuse in class or online education.

If so, then what’s the problem?

Internet addiction is destructive, and nothing good will happen if cyberloafing starts taking all the time allocated to work or study.

Potential harms of cyberloafing:

1. Stress and anxiety, especially if you prefer aggressive content, focus on the negative news, or discuss issues you can’t influence.
2. Low self-esteem, especially if you constantly compare yourself to others and believe everything you see on social media.
3. Bad mood and frustration as a consequence of the previous two points.
4. Insomnia and other sleep problems, especially if you spend time with a smartphone or a laptop late into the night. The screen light interferes with melatonin production, a hormone responsible for sleep.

How do you find the right balance between work and cyberloafing? When is it okay to distract by non-work-related activities without harming but benefiting your work efficiency? How to prevent internet addiction, after all?

Using cyberloafing for good

First, find out how much time you spend online to assess the potential harm of your cyberloafing.

• Examine the statistics of your visits and time spent on social networks.
• Study your smartphone activity.
• Track your time online resources with tools like DeskTime, Toggl, Time Doctor, and others.

The study from Hootsuite says that an average internet user spends 2 hours and 28 minutes per day on social media. It’s about 17 hours per week, 74 hours per month, or 37+ days per year! But:

It’s also critical to consider the practical component of this time.

For example, you exercise with YouTube videos daily, which is good for your health. Or, you listen to a podcast that can help you with self-growth. Such cyberloafing is hard to call destructive, agree?

Online courses, e-books or audiobooks, online language learning, and other content encouraging your upskilling can justify cyberloafing. Indeed, sometimes it’s faster to surf an answer online than distract colleagues from work.

Business communities on social media aren’t to blame for destructive cyberloafing, either. Articles, videos, or reviews you find there can help you take a break and learn something new at the same time.

How to balance work and cyberloafing for better productivity:

Take a 5-10 minutes break every hour. The ideal variant would be to spend them on physical exercises. However, if you need an emotional recharge, social media could be a good option, too.

Find content that relaxes you personally. Thus, images or videos with cats will hardly inspire or cheer up those who love fighting dog breeds.

Give preference to content that is soothing rather than stressful. Simply put, views of nature are better than disaster videos, especially if you are a news editor watching those disasters regularly due to your professional duties.

Answer the question, “Do I feel better after a cyberloafing session?”

If blaming yourself for it and moan that you don’t have enough time to complete tasks now, do your best to limit your non-work-related activities at the workplace. But if 10-15 minutes of chatting with friends make you feel inspired and vigorous to continue working, there’s no need to ban such cyberloafing pastime.

In a word

Now that you have a better idea of cyberloafing and its positive impact on your work, it’s time to practice it for stellar productivity.

While many employers or independent specialists limit cyberloafing and use specific tools to manage it, it’s critical to understand the thin line between taking a mental break and destructive procrastination. When used right, cyberloafing brings nothing but benefit and pleasure — and the productivity employers are seeking in the first place.

Featured Image Credit: Artem Podrez; Pexels; Thank you!

The post Why Cyberloafing Isn’t as Destructive as Many Believe appeared first on ReadWrite.

What is the first strategy in a marketer’s mind when they need to increase their brand visibility online?

Most brands use the same toolkit:

PPC ad campaigns for landing pages, SEO for higher rankings from search engines, and targeted ads on social media. They have one goal: more sales right here and now.

But such an approach may lead to a dead end, even if your budget is high and your marketing campaigns are of high quality. The pitfall here is a customer’s path to your desired action: It may differ from what you think.

If you take a standard sales funnel as an example, the path will look like this:

The people at the top level don’t even know your brand exists, so it’s not a good idea to offer to buy something right away.

What to do?

Use all alternative promotion channels. It is critical to boost visibility where most of your targets are active and to build a positive brand reputation there.

Below you’ll find 13 such channels to consider. Choose the most relevant to your niche and brand identity — and your target audience will see you.

13 Channels to Consider for Your Brand Visibility Boost

1 — Content marketing

It sounds like a cliche, but the content is still king. And it will continue to be king in 2023. With that in mind, it’s worth focusing on content marketing campaigns: They are among the most compelling instruments to influence brand visibility online.

Consider guest blogging on niche media and publications at third-party resources like relevant Q&A forums (Quora, for example), online newspapers, and article directories. Free resources like Medium, Reddit, SlideShare, and LinkedIn are great for content syndication:

Not only will they make your brand more visible, but they can also bring you natural backlinks, more traffic, and, as a result, higher rankings in SERPs (again, for better visibility).

For this strategy to work, ensure you craft high-quality, informative content relevant to your brand goals and target audience needs.

2 — Social media

Your brand’s presence on social media goes far beyond sales. First and foremost, it’s about providing the followers with handy information that answers their questions and helps them solve daily problems.

Look at big brands:

Do their social media accounts sell 24/7? They don’t; otherwise, users wouldn’t subscribe to them. Instead, big brands use social media channels to remind about themselves: They post educational and helpful information, organize contests, communicate with the audience, share news and perks for clients, engage with quizzes, etc.

Source

All these allow them to engage a broader audience, promote brand authenticity, and build trust. Plus, branded visual content on social media works to increase brand visibility online:

When your custom (branded) content is appropriate and instrumental, users are more likely to save and share it, thus boosting your brand awareness in their social environment.

3 — PPC ads

Yes, PPC ads attract users who come to Google with a transactional search intent, i.e., when they want to purchase, download something, start a trial, etc. However, PPC ads you create via Google Display Network also work to build your brand awareness:

While users who see your ads on websites don’t intend to buy right now, they will notice you anyway and may think of your brand the next time they need corresponding information.

Big brands often use PPC ads to attract users’ attention to new products or discounts.

4 — Media ads

Known as web page banners, such ads work like billboards on roads: The main goal is to grab a user’s attention and make a brand more visible. To reach as many websites as possible, marketers advertise through specialized networks. (Google also has one.)

The only problem here may be such a long-known web user behavior as banner blindness:

People tend to ignore page elements they perceive to be ads. Plus, competition is super high: Big chances are that your media ads will sink in the crowd of other ads, and users won’t notice them.

So, ensure this channel will work in your particular case; otherwise, it’s worth considering some more native ads instead.

5 — SEO

Higher rankings in search engines are a giant step toward increased brand visibility. The higher, the better: As we all know, users pay much attention to the top 3-5 results in SERPs and don’t care about lower positions; websites that win Google Snippets and the tops of SERPs get more loyalty and trust from searchers.

Long story short, search engine optimization does matter for visibility.

So, do your best to craft high-quality SEO content satisfying informational search intent. It is much more effective in the long run than short-term SEO manipulations some specialists still practice in the hope of fast results.

6 — Influencer marketing

You know the rules:

Collaborate with popular YouTubers and Instagrammers whose audience relates to yours. As a rule, their followers are super loyal and engaged, so the promo of your products or services on their channels will influence your brand visibility greatly.

Source

7 — Interactive content

Contests, flashmobs, challenges, sales — such content are super engaging, and users enjoy participating and, thus, promoting your brand to a broader audience. Brands often use interactive content on social media when they need to represent a new product to the market, and they also invite influencers to such campaigns.

You can make up any contest or challenge you want. The main thing is to mention your brand name or product and decide on the award to motivate the audience to participate. Also, it’s critical to craft content relevant to your business goals and your targets’ needs.

8 — Referrals

For users to help you promote a brand, provide them with corresponding instruments. Why not consider affiliate marketing or make them your referrals? Your client invites a new customer or subscriber — and gets a discount or another bonus from you.

Such a referral program helped Dropbox to increase sign-ups by 60%. Users were happy to share links with others because they got extra storage space for each referred friend.

Discounts, giveaways, free trials, and other goodies always work. Feel free to use them for any type of brand promo.

9 — Video Marketing

Video is your friend for winning new platforms and getting more visibility. Now it’s not just about advertising but also entertainment content, as well as the processing of informational requests.

Your video channel may cover interviews with niche specialists and your team, webinars, Q&A sessions, helpful advice, etc. It’s your instrument to build brand awareness, get more audience, and build authoritativeness and trust.

Please pay attention to video design: A short stylish intro is an opportunity to mention your brand to the audience again. A few views are already enough to cement your brand in their memory. Be creative: video storytelling tactics will work best here.

10 — E-book

Free e-books are a great lead magnet for users to get to know your brand and subscribe to it in search of more content like that provided. The challenge here is that the process of e-book creation consumes tons of resources:

To make it high-quality, engaging, and informative, get ready to spend time, energy, and budget on research, planning, writing, and designing a book. Otherwise, the game won’t be worth a candle: E-books make sense only if they are informative, a la “all-inclusive.” If they are of low quality, users will get disappointed, and your brand will get a reputation of nonprofessionals in the niche.

11 — Guestographics and instructographics

As you may guess from the name, this content type relates to an oldy-moldy infographic.

But:

While infographics may inform users about everything, instructographics provide instructions on how to do something: They are about step-by-step and how-to guides with a super high potential for sharing because they explain complex data in an easy-to-digest format.

Users love sharing such content, so it’s your chance to reach a broader audience: Just do your best to design instructographics so they would grab attention and help users solve a problem.

The full version

Guestographics are infographics you create in collaboration with other brands. For example, they provide content, and you — design, or vice versa. Guestographics allow you to build brand awareness, reach a broader audience, and establish connections.

12 — Podcasts

Content is not only about text, pictures, or video. Audio format is the best one to reach people who are lazy or busy to read but will be happy to listen while doing a few things at once.

Podcasts remain the top trend in 2023, and streaming giants like YouTube and Spotify support and encourage users to practice them. So, if your target audience prefers this format, you can use podcasts to promote products and connect with customers.

If you have no resources to manage a podcast, you can collaborate with popular podcasters who are influencers in the niche to share brand stories and invite the audience to learn more about you.

13 — Stickers

Let’s face it we live in an era when people communicate more by pictures than words. And before we go into telepathy, why not take advantage of brand visibility and promotion via stickers?

Many companies are already doing this, offering free branded stickers in exchange for various perks. Users then exchange those stickers in messengers, thus increasing your visibility to a new audience.

Please note: This instrument works only if your branded stickers are super cool and engaging and you know how to use them right. Otherwise, it can be just a pleasant bonus to use inside your company.

In a Word

With all the competition and user behavior changes online, it becomes more and more challenging for marketers to introduce brands and products to the audience. Direct ads won’t always work, even if you have a budget for PPC and social media targeting ads, so it’s high time to rethink your promotion and user acquisition strategies.

In this article, you’ve read about 13 alternative channels for brand promotion. Use those most relevant to your niche, business goals, and audience needs — and your brand visibility will skyrocket.

All Image Credits: Provided by the Author; Thank you!

The post How to Increase Your Brand Visibility Online in 2023 appeared first on ReadWrite.