Blog Category: social media

Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts

05 December 2012

With the explosion of social media throughout the world, one’s first thought may be that older mediums like blogging have actually taken a hit. However, with the different sharing features and the way social interactions can be linked cross-platform, blogging has actually increased since sites like Facebook have been picking up billions of users.

If you have a blog, your number-one goal is probably that your content is recognized per its respective niche. For this, you’re going to need optimized blog posts to ensure that your content is ranked well. Below are some tips to help you write SEO-friendly blog posts.

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How can technology help my business to expand into social media?

10 October 2012

More and more businesses are realising how much they can benefit from the marketing platforms that social media offers them, it is obviously very tempting to jump on the band wagon as soon as feasibly possible. The fantastic leap that technology has offered both small businesses and corporate companies to expand to the far corners of the world has meant a complete rethink on how businesses are run in today’s fast moving world.

The Internet opened up many doors and online marketing presented new challenges for businesses in general. With the advent of Facebook and other such sites, it was only a matter of time before marketers realised what great marketing platforms they had at their fingertips. Social media enhances business productivity by allowing companies to use important tools which allow business collaboration, as well as offering them the opportunity of setting up a very professional looking organization. This is all achieved by social bookmarking tools.

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Pros and Cons of the new Facebook update: Timeline

07 September 2012

If you’ve paid attention to Facebook lately, then you already know about Timeline. If you haven’t switched over when prompted, you will be automatically switched very shortly. This mandatory Facebook update is complete and ready to be instituted across the entire platform. Bringing a new visual design, a new ad layout, and more features, Timeline is something that, according to Facebook, should benefit both users and advertisers. But is it really all it’s cracked up to be?

Let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of Facebook’s new Timeline feature to see if it’s really worth all the fuss or if it’s just another monkey-wrench in your advertising program.

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Should you or shouldn't you have social media badges on your site?

23 July 2012

If you’ve happened to watch a television show in the past ten years, you may have noticed a new trend. Instead of allowing the commercials to do all the advertising, networks have really taken advantage of the wider viewer angle provided by flat-screen TVs, and they have started putting advertisements in the corners of programs as they run. These advertisements are small and nonintrusive. Often you will find that a lot of these advertisements deal with social media on the internet, like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube.

The point of that recent TV history lesson was this: Social media badges have become so popular that they can be found practically anywhere. Using them on your website is the obvious evolution of online business.

Of course, some people are planning on operating serious businesses and believe that having these social media buttons displayed on the site will give it too much of a childlike look and feel. However, research shows that the most successful brands out there today have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. So it’s not like social media is this phase that today’s kids are going through. It’s an advertiser’s dream when you really think about it.

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How to use Facebook timeline effectively for your business pages

20 July 2012

There was recently a lot of hubbub in the advertising world when Facebook decided the change the layout of their page. They went from a pretty standard format, where ads and personal content and other features all fit the basic screen, to a literal vertical timeline running down the center of the page. Facebook’s Timeline feature has since changed minds. Advertisers started spending more money. Ads displayed in this format proved to be more reliable. Pages began receiving more views. And the trust of the advertisers witnessed a huge uptick.

How does any of this relate to you? It’s simple. If you are planning on using Facebook and are planning on creating an effective business page or a fan page, you will need to know how to effectively use Timeline to your advantage.

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To Digg or not to Digg?

18 July 2012

If you’re thinking about building a website to start up an online business, you have probably also entertained the idea of starting a social media presence to tie everything together. For instance, your main website, which will house your main business, will be interconnected with various streams of social media, perhaps video sites, social gathering sites, etc. So with all the many options out there available to you, have you ever considered using a site called Digg?

Digg, simply put, is a social news site that receives its content from its many users.  A basic user will upload their content to Digg, and the community at large thus votes on it. If it’s popular, they can “digg” it, and the content subsequently lives on and rises up through the ranks. If the content isn’t “dug,” however, it is instead buried and ultimately disappears from view.

Any site such as this is a double-edged sword in that, for its ease of use and its massive potential for success in promoting your business and brand, you could also just as easily post something that users do not like and that ends up damaging your efforts.

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How do you manage your online reputation?

18 June 2012

As you begin to get into the flow of online business, you will find that the process is just beginning. Now that you have established your business, you have to begin to establish your brand. Your brand needs to stay intact and it needs to be seen in a positive fashion over the entire duration of your business. It’s up to you to take the steps necessary to promote your brand.
Letting your brand management lapse can result in some really bad things circulating about your brand. Before you know it, you may be dealing with a destroyed online reputation. If this happens. You’re not going to recover from it.

5 Ways to Handle Your Reputation Online

1: Promote the Positive

Always promote any positive goings-on with your business. Be the person who is sending out press releases. Update your Timeline with certain milestones. Update your site with great updates that illustrate just how well your brand is doing and how satisfied your customers are. Be 100% positive and promote a happy image.

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What is Klout and how do you use it to understand your social presence?

15 June 2012

Not only is today’s net filled to the brim with tons of different social networking sites, like Digg and Twitter and Facebook and so on, but you can also find many different sites out there that can give you statistics as to how successful your overall social media presence is. Just as you can find many different sites to tell you what kind of traffic you’re receiving for your main website, you can get important information as to your social presence. This information is quite invaluable if you’re using social media to build your brand.

The main site people use for this purpose is Klout. So, it’s important that people understand exactly what the site is and what it does before they attempt to use it as any barometer for their overall social presence.

Defining Klout and What it Is

Operating as an online tool to measure your business’s social media influence, Klout uses a complicated algorithm to gauge your effectiveness. Things taken into account include categories like Amplification, True Reach, and your Network Impact. For Amplification in particular, you’re looking at how engaged and how motivated your followers are on your social media sites. Obviously, this is the most important chunk of data in the criterion, and thus having a few engaged followers gives you more clout than having a lot of followers who aren’t engaged at all.

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Top 5 ways to destroy your Twitter credibility

21 March 2012

Although it’s only a few years on the scene, Twitter is a massive social media network that practically everyone with a mobile device uses. From famous celebrities and politicians to the average plumber and stay-at-home mom, sending out a tweet has become as addictive as cigarettes in some circles. With so many active users, of course, Twitter is a marketing metropolis that any skilled individual can take full advantage of.

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Which are the second tier social media networks to look at using for your business

17 February 2012

Everyone knows that to promote an online business you need to make use of social networks like Facebook. But second tier networks, as they are called, can play an important role in marketing to a niche. Unless your website has wide-ranging global appeal across all demographics, you’re going to want to look at more specialized networks to promote your brand and your ideas.

What makes a network “second tier”?

Second-tier can mean a number of things, but generally it means “less popular” than Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. Even Google+ counts as second tier, as it’s generally more interest-specific. Second tier social media networks are places where you can access an audience that is more specialized, and more interested in what you have to say - if you do it right.

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What are lists in Twitter and why are they useful?

13 February 2012

Twitter unveiled its long-awaited lists functionality in 2009, and this has given both private and business users much greater power over how to organise information on the popular microblogging service. As a business owner, you’re probably wondering how you can turn Twitter lists into money. While their application is more useful for personal feed organization, you can use (read: abuse) lists to improve your visibility on Twitter.

What are lists?

Lists, in a nutshell, are “groups” of feeds. You can follow a list without following all of the people on it, which makes it easy to get a snapshot of what people in a certain industry are all talking about at one time without suffering information overload. You can keep your friends and your competitors separate, and it makes it easier to sift out context-specific information. Lists can be formed according to the people you follow, or topics that people are talking about.

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What is social bookmarking and what is it for?

13 January 2012

social bookmarking is the practice of posting links to articles and web pages to various “link aggregator” or social bookmark sites, such as Digg, Stumbleupon and so on. Social bookmarking sites rise and fall in popularity fairly quickly, but they generally have a few common features:

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What is Twitter seeding and what is it for?

11 January 2012

“Seeding” is the practice of carefully distributing content online through various channels, in the hope that it will become “viral” and be spread of its own accord. If this content is an advertising campaign cleverly disguised as a joke or some other kind of content that is noteworthy, the company that created it can reap huge benefits.

Twitter is uniquely suited to seeding viral content, because of its unique “trending” feature. A trending topic on Twitter can be seen by everyone - not just the people in your immediate network. This means that all you have to do to get tweets about your “topic” (for lack of a better word) seen by millions of people is reach a critical mass where that topic begins to “trend”.

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