If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or someone hoping to break into the world of business, you’re going to have a lot of questions. You can go to school for four years and pick the brains of your professors and spend all night doing homework in the library, but you’re still going to have questions. This is true with any profession, and most will tell you that finding the answers to these questions aren’t always easy. It’s intimidating to ask your boss a question that you may think should be obvious, and Google doesn’t always do the trick. Fortunately, Quora is beginning to take the world of questions by storm. For those who are unfamiliar with it, Quora is a new social networking site that centers around asking and answering questions. These questions go from very specific to simple wonders. And it’s not like your typical Internet-based source of answers: • Google: This works well when you want to know the – Read the full article
Social media seems to be dominating the lives of Internet users today, with 800 million users alone on Facebook. Other sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube don’t seem to be doing too bad, either. It is amidst the rise of this new era of social media that businesses are now adopting new online marketing strategies to promote their products and services. Yes, we’re talking about the increasing importance of having a social media strategy. This post provides some guidelines on creating your own social media strategy, as well as a number of essential tips on marketing on today’s most popular social networks and platforms. Define your goals: Before you take the plunge into social media, it’s important to define your objectives first. What do you really hope to achieve by going social? Do you intend to boost traffic? Would you like to increase your number of followers? Do you aim to promote a new campaign or brand awareness program? – Read the full article
We stand in a society incessantly connected to each other through virtual networks. One may wonder why virtual (Web-based) platforms are popular and the reason solely lies in the fact that they offer a variety of applications that help people share and connect with one another, which has always been the core needs of society. With greater technology, speed and living standards, the social networking sites help cater to newer demands and go beyond physical get-togethers. It is this platform that unites people and hence, has immense potential for online marketing and advertising. A brand is a brand because of the support – and recognition – it gets from people. Social Media Interaction and Competition One of the latest methods adopted by marketers is to engage audiences in contests and interactive competitions, giving away their commodities for free. Or, alternatively, these contests may engage people by giving away various other articles, trial offers, commodities, etc. These are becoming increasingly popular – Read the full article
Facebook’s photo sharing feature has become increasingly popular among Web users. This feature has enabled people to share their special moments with their family and friends all over the world. Besides individuals, businesses have also taken advantage of Facebook photo sharing as a social media marketing tool to promote their products and services. The following are some guidelines that will help you use Facebook’s photo sharing feature more effectively. Name your albums Facebook automatically stores uploaded photos into an ‘untitled album’ (usually with the date of upload). You can change or arrange such albums easily according to your personal needs. When creating an album, the first thing to do is to appropriately name the album. Facebook automatically names albums according to the date when they were uploaded. However, a name such as ‘August 8, 2011’ is not likely to grab anyone’s interest. Therefore, select titles which are catchy and relevant to the photos contained in the album. Customize the album – Read the full article
Social media advocates are often quoted as claiming that social media is the greatest form of advertising because it is free. At Silicon Beach Training we use social media in a big way; we use it to increase exposure for our training courses. We use it to build relationships with key influencers and our customers. We also use it extensively to promote and share our flow of content generated to inform and inspire our existing customers and potential clients. One of the most important paybacks for all of this activity is it seriously improves our ranking. I believe that Google is going to up the stakes on this one, too; social shares are going to become even stronger signals that affect page position. In order to sustain these benefits, however, we need to employ people. We employ full-time people and we need to tap many external sources for content generation, paid for in currency and in back-links. Time and people – Read the full article
In light of the current recession and housing market downturn, real estate agents have to turn to new ways of creating and running their businesses. Social media marketing is one of the best, if not THE best way to do just that. The National Association of Realtors has a whole section of their website focused on social media for the real estate professional. The Field Guide to Social Networking for REALTORS® has eBooks, videos, and a ton of other resources to help you along the way. Facebook Ask around and you will be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of Facebook. Even if they don’t use it, they probably saw the movie last year about it! And it’s likely that most people you know are using Facebook and have hundreds of friends. A word of caution on catapulting yourself into this too quickly: mixing personal and professional can be a very slippery road. Keep your personal Facebook profile and create a Fan Page – Read the full article
It’s not uncommon for businesses today to use social networks – namely, Twitter and Facebook – as a platform for engaging with customers and managing customer relationships. This development has given rise to an increasing number of social media solutions and dashboards, each promising to streamline all tasks and bring a new level of ease in customer engagement. Let’s take a look at the best of these solutions and their features. MediaFunnel MediaFunnel is a social media suite for businesses and enterprises, with a host of features designed to make Twitter and Facebook accounts easier to manage. One of these distinguishing features is Multiple User Roles, or the ability to assign Administrator, Publisher, and Contributor roles and grant various levels of permission to review or publish tweets and Facebook posts (for greater editorial control and efficiency). Apart from monitoring Twitter and Facebook for mentions and tracking the performance of links via Bit.ly and BudURL, MediaFunnel also enables you to – Read the full article
Search engine optimization is considered both an art and a science. You can learn it and fine-tune your processes to allow for your own set of SEO best practices. But as a beginner in SEO, you should expect to make a lot of mistakes. But that’s okay: it’s a good way for you to learn. However, you could also learn from the mistakes of others. Here are the top five mistakes that most SEO beginners commit: 1. Not focusing on content. Most site owners and webmasters tend to rely on tricks and so-called SEO techniques to get a better ranking on search engines. Because of that, they neglect the content of the site. This is probably the biggest mistake that anybody doing SEO could commit. Over the years, webmasters have gained artificially high ranking from getting links from link farms, or getting reciprocal links, or spamming DMOZ. There were other black hat and grey hat techniques. But over time, these tactics were found out – Read the full article
