From both a marketing and consumer perspective, Facebook is king. Few can deny the power of Facebook to pull and aggregate social data on a massive scale. According to an eMarketer report, Facebook has overtaken Google in “social sign-ins.” In Q1 2011, Facebook was the top network ID used to sign in to a website to share content, at around 35% of the user social login market share. The social sign-in is a new feature that online publishers love. Website registration is often times a daunting task and is attributed to high exit rates. Social sign-ins use pre-existing identities to login to a website, bypassing annoying registration forms. The most important benefit of social logins is to increase engagement and access more profile data. From a marketing standpoint, social sign-in allows marketers to aggregate crucial demographic data that was previously unknown. Marketers are able to understand what gender and age groups are accessing their materials, in addition to potentially rare – Read the full article
Over the recent years, consumers have been spending billions of dollars at e-Commerce sites. With the growth of online business, e-Commerce has become a very viable venture. Many people even begin an e-Commerce website as their main business. If you have a physical location where you operate your business from, beginning an e-Commerce website can provide an extra sales channel for you. Creating a site for selling coupons, services, or products online, however, involves a lot of research and planning. The following are steps you can take in starting an online business. Establish a business and marketing plan: Set up a meeting with your team members or business partners. Brainstorm together and write out all the plans in one document. The plan should include all startup and recurring expenses. Set up an overall sales forecast and expense budget. Choose a good domain name which will help customers find you: You need to choose a domain name for your website that – Read the full article
Social media has garnered a great deal of attention for big business. Corporate budgets are able to integrate complete marketing campaigns and promote them on social media. If you are a small business looking to be the next social media influencer, you are probably finding out how tough it is to engage with users on social media. However, there is some good news for you and for other small- and medium-sized business owners. The 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report saw that SMBs who used social for local marketing saw boosts in exposure, traffic, and sales. Whether you are a late adopter or consider yourself a social media pioneer, chances are, if your business is doing some sort of social media marketing, you at least understand its significance. Over 90 percent of small business owners and Internet marketers believe that social media is important to their business. Depending on the industry you operate in and how “brand-heavy” you are influences – Read the full article
Whether your business has 100 followers or 100,000 fans, you’ve probably already realized that your community needs to be cultivated – and monitored – on social media channels weekly, if not daily. Recent news about the Taco Bell class-action lawsuit, which was filed against Taco Bell for “misrepresenting the contents of its beef,” is nothing surprising. I’m sure most customers don’t expect they are eating wholesome, organic meals at Taco Bell. However, it’s not the lawsuit that is interesting here; it is the way that Taco Bell warded off a potential crisis by being proactive and effectual on social media. Taco Bell has already gotten some previous press for their impressive works on Facebook and Twitter; but this is more impressive, and the way they turned this particular misrepresented beef crisis into something positive is a great lesson for Internet marketers as well as for online reputation management professionals. First step: Address the issue A confident and clear message doesn’t – Read the full article
Paid search is a wonderful advertising platform because it gives you clear-cut analytics for ROI decisions. Twitter, on the other hand, is a wonderful advertising platform because it is still natural and fun. Both paid search and Twitter advertising differ in scope and functional use in the marketing mix; however, Twitter recently announced a tool called the “Follower Dashboard”, which, in conjunction with geo-targeted ads, makes Twitter a very attractive advertising medium. Twitter announced the ability for companies to pay for “Promoted Tweets” earlier in 2010, where Coca-Cola garnered 86 million impressions with a single promoted tweet. Holy! Okay, sure Coca-Cola probably paid out the “Wah-Zoo” for that tweet, but even if they paid half a million dollars (ex: cost-per-engagement, or CPE, at $.10 & $6.06 per 1,000 impressions) for that promoted tweet, it would still be competitive with a paid search of $10 CPA. Okay, Twitter is great, we know. But up until now it was only great for – Read the full article
Before Facebook, before Twitter, there was something called blogging. Remember that? Well, blogging hasn’t exactly gone out of fashion; only, this form of online content publishing has evolved since the time of LiveJournal and Open Diary. (That was so 1998!) And it’s certainly attracted the attention of more and more business owners who have recognized that the interactivity and SEO benefits of blogging go a long way in establishing – and enhancing – their visibility online. Now, any SEO expert will tell you that incoming links are a great way of boosting the popularity of your company or business blog – that they increase your PageRank (PR). But few ever counsel linking out to other sites or blogs, which should actually be just as integral a part of your linking strategy as generating incoming links. Why? Well, here are only some of the reasons: It’s good practice. Bloggers tend to get obsessed about getting as many incoming links as possible. – Read the full article
Sometime last year, social networking giant Facebook launched an online Q&A product called Questions. It was thought to be a feature that would rival Yahoo! Answers or the much buzzed-about Quora – in that Facebook Questions would be a similar online database of knowledge, built by hundreds of millions of users – but the product eventually failed to gain traction. Few people used it. Now, Facebook Questions has been revamped and made more “social”. It’s probably less ambitious than its first version, but it’s certainly better and more useful this time. In a March 25 announcement made on the Facebook blog, product manager Adrian Graham explained the Facebook Questions update: “Friends are often the best source of advice when you’re trying new things. Friends know your tastes, and you have confidence in their opinions. Over the summer, we began testing Questions with a small group of people, and today we are beginning to roll it out to everyone…. There are – Read the full article
Don’t think that scrapbooks will cut it. Not in today’s world. If you’re a photographer serious about marketing yourself and showcasing your talent to the world, you’ll have to establish your own online presence – with which you can create your portfolio, show your best shots, tell stories through images, and maximize every opportunity to render your professional services. That’s where WordPress comes in. It’s one of our favorite content management platforms here at Lakeshore Branding. It should be yours, too. We’ve already created the ultimate list of awesome small business WordPress themes for the biz owners; now it’s time to show some love to the photographers. In this post we have compiled 49 of today’s most stunning, flexible, and user-friendly photography WordPress themes that are out there right now. If you’re a designer, graphic artist, or illustrator, don’t hesitate to check the themes out, too. These WordPress themes are actually pretty versatile. Feel free to share, tweet, post on – Read the full article
