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
Google’s quest for perfection in search results has led the tech giant back to the drawing board to once again tinker with its AdWords algorithm. The goal remains the same: to deliver users to the most relevant content available that fits their chosen search words while also attracting advertisers by delivering superior return on investment for online advertising. Google Adwords auctions control the “promoted search results” seen at the top and to the right of the organic search results; however, Google and businesses lose customers when those results are of poor quality, because people have no use for spam and will use other search engines. To avoid this, Google offers lower prices to advertisers who have higher rankings as determined by its algorithms. In short, this keyword auction wherein advertisers bid on keywords relevant to their businesses is the way Google makes ad revenue without disappointing search clients. This process is somewhat contentious considering that the real high-quality material should – Read the full article
The face of one of the most innovative companies in history is their ever-changing, extremely memorable logo. While Google leads innovation in many verticals and constantly “brands” that simplistic colorful logo in our brains, there is a lot behind this work of art and its purpose is not merely to line the walls or logo mats of the Google complex. Way back in 1998, Google created the basis for what we still see today: a simple wordmark logo utilizing 3 main colors and the oddball green on the “l”. The rebellious green goes against the pattern of the main colors in a symbolic gesture that “Google doesn’t always follow the rules.” Since 1998, the main logo has only changed twice with simple changes to the gradient and letter shadowing. The colors and the font are still recognizable across all three with the Google Logo font coming from the German designer, Gustav Jaeger, entitled “Catull BQ”. What is truly inspiring about – Read the full article
Google+ is gaining immense popularity and everyone’s talking about it right now. Forget for a second about its “competition” with Facebook and other social media sites; in and by itself Google Plus is receiving fast and wide acclaim, at a global level, and many even say that soon it is going to act as a channel to get people to patronize your business. A channel, in other words, for Internet marketing and social media marketing. Currently, there are no Google Plus profiles exclusively for businesses, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use the social networking site to help your work gain more visibility. Here are some tips on leveraging Google+ in order to advance your business objectives: If you already have a Google+ profile, you are halfway to generating, well, more business buzz. Not yet a member? Well, first you have to create a Gmail account (if you don’t already have one). Then you have to get an invitation. For – Read the full article
The WordPress sidebar is a helpful tool that gives site owners a chance to engage readers, direct them to content and other pages, and read prior entries. With an extensive sidebar widget system, there are lots of great options for blog owners who are looking to take their design — and their readership to the next level. Subscription Options Offered as an optional plugin for the standard WordPress installation, the Subscription Options widget allows your readers to subscribe to your site’s blog entry or comments RSS feed. That means they’ll always have your freshest entries in their RSS reader of choice, and they’ll be alerted to new content. It’s a great way to keep people coming back again and again every time you post new content to your blog or other website. Users can also use this handy widget to subscribe to email updates, like a digest of your site’s weekly entries, as well as post your entries to Twitter – Read the full article
Great content comes from great authors. At least that’s what Google thinks. That’s why, in an effort to recognize the people who write original stuff on the Web, the search engine company has recently rolled out a new authorship markup feature. “(It’s) a way to connect authors with their content on the Web,” wrote Google software engineer Othar Hansson in a company blog post. “We’re experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.” It gets a little technical, but the development is in line with Google’s attempt to encourage more original content to be published on the Web, all while minimizing the influence and performance of low-quality content (from content farms) in search results. Google’s support for authorship markup extends to include: Prominently displaying the names of authors of articles within search results Enabling people to use Google search results to learn more about, find other works by, or contact and – Read the full article
In lieu of the recent news about the Facebook smear campaign against Google, it seems that Google may be poised to remain the top dog in online ad spend this year. Last week, the story regarding Facebook hiring PR firm Burson Marsteller to spread lies about Google’s new “Social Circle” went viral. The war over the social graph, a data set of information about the social networks users are connected to, is in full force. However, Google isn’t even flinching. According to Fortune, Google’s Eric Schmidt insisted that Microsoft, not Facebook, was the true competitor to Google. He said, “Facebook users tend to use Google Search. Facebook’s ads business does not displace our advertising. I’m somewhat perplexed by the obsession because I don’t think the facts support it. Things are going great for Google.” The facts may support that businesses prefer to use Facebook and Google simultaneously; however, the percentage in which they invest their marketing budgets may be a – Read the full article
Since the most recent Google Panda update, a number of sites have found that their traffic has taken a big hit. Google’s aim was to stop “thin content” sites from ranking; unfortunately, as usual, the definition given by Google is frustratingly vague, and with the update, it may not be so obvious what the issues are. I’ve compiled a short list of some common reasons sites have suffered after the Panda update. Hopefully, this post gives you a better idea, especially if you are one of those having a difficult time trying to determine the source of your traffic dip. (Note: I’m assuming that you are running a legitimate site, not scraping and stealing content; otherwise you pretty much have your problem right there already!) 1. Duplicated Content This is perhaps the biggest issue for legitimate sites that have suffered. It’s obvious that duplicate content can trip the “thin content” flag, but the problem is often quite complicated. For example, – Read the full article
