Best of the Net: SEO, Marketing and Social

Social Media is probably the most prized assets of technology, allowing people millions of miles apart to interact with each other. It provides a platform whereby residents of different parts of the world are able to pull together a scheme, share their ideas and sign fruitful contracts. The world is a global village, but the idea of social networking is what has truly justified this statement. Social Media, if put to proper use, can tremendously increase the cash inflow, as has been proved by several business companies. Social Media tips for influential marketing: If the efforts and resources are not directed properly, the entire point of hard work is lost. Nothing, absolutely nothing, including social media, can work wonders if it is not exploited fully. Following are a few tips that should be kept in mind before virtual advertisements:

1. Plan each move thoughtfully. The critical point to consider is that all your ideas must revolve around a central spot, where your main keyword rests. Take into consideration entire details about your business and then think over the related advertising plans accordingly.
2. Choice of content is perhaps the most important point of all. It is the key to haul the potential customers so work hard on it. Put a great effort into it and try to make it as unique as possible. Keep the highlight brief so that they cover all the essential aspects and yet are quick to read. Add graphics and videos, since they are nothing less than an eye-candy.
3. Run a well-managed blog. Blogs are literally the most popular and easiest means of attracting cyber traffic. All you have to do is create a blog, or simply use your company page as a blog, and keep on updating about the daily progress and happenings at your end. Make sure that you spend sufficient time refreshing your posts and replying to comments, otherwise it will leave a bad impression that will adversely affect your company’s reputation.

What are the many benefits of social media?Social media is one the most flourishing aspects of today’s world and has completely taken over mankind. To look into it and use it to the fullest is the best you can do.

1. It allows greater publicity. Everyone uses the internet these days and one of the best ways to inform people about an upcoming product is to fire up an advertisement either on the internet or televisions. This will make sure that the maximum number of people will get acquainted with your products and ideas.
2. It helps get a reliable feedback as to who is likely to greet your offers with cheers. Comments and suggestions firing up on your blog daily will not only help you estimate the possible clientage, but will also help you refine your specifications.
3. It helps you stay in touch, not only with the potential customers but also with the supporting agencies. You can discuss with them the pros and cons of every move, settle on a particular point and then work together towards its completion.

About the Author: Homer Tuttle, author, he write some intereting articles about PayPal money adder, visit: http://newpaypalmoneyadder.com/

Social media is a full time job, and time is a luxury most ecommerce marketers and brand operators don’t have. Another ugly truth? Five minutes a day of social media a day isn’t going to accomplish much, will it? How can you get active consumers and brand evangelists to “work” for you? There are a few more ways, outside of the traditional social box, to get more social content without spending (much) of your own time.

Pinterest

When you’re posting great content with even greater photos on your ecommerce site’s blog, you’ll get pinned. This is basic. But how do you encourage more engagement and kick your pins’ visibility into overdrive? Invite other users to pin to boards with you. Finding pinners active in your vertical is as easy as a Pinterest search. Few pinners are likely to accept, but if your board is interesting enough, you’ll see pins popping up every once in a while.

The key is in your boards, though. You can’t expect to stimulate a bunch of fashion consumers into pinning for you when your board is something as painfully boring as “Cashmere”. Yawn much? Lets kick it up a notch. “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Real Fur”, “Cold Weather Couture”, and “Plaiddicts Anonymous” (get it?) are all titles that can get someone’s attention, play to their sensibilities, and might self-sustain by attracting new users.

Tip: joining a group board is a great way to increase your sprawl! Just make sure you aren’t posting duplicate photos or over-pinning.

Reddit

Within each community are sub-communities, sub-communities of sub-communities and so on. There is always an untapped niche and an unspoken community. Why not start a subreddit that relates to your ecommerce product line? Reddit for marketers essentially requires that you don’t take yourself too seriously. Some of the best nichey subreddits have been:

Fashion: /r/ABraThatFits “because everyone that wants one deserves a bra that fits.”

Toys & Gaming: /r/GreenDawn “taking over the world, one little green soldier at a time.”

Gadgets: /r/TechSupportMacGuyver hacking your gadgets and tech in true MacGuyver style.

Appliances: /r/ToasterRights it’s exactly what it sounds like, but better.

All of the above subreddits are active communities that have been given the covetous “subreddit of the day” award. They also all have over 3,000 subscribers. That’s a lot of engagement potential. How many of these subreddits seem like gold mines for link drop opportunities? Answer: all of them.

When momentum picks up, try to appoint new moderators to your subreddit. This is how you know you’ve proverbially “made it” as it will save you a lot of time and keep your community in control.

Creating a subreddit as a brand is not recommended. Redditors do not tolerate this kind of thing. Rather, craft a persona that will be active in your subreddit, as well as other relevant subs. This will give more credibility to your username and your brand new community by association.

For more tips of the trade, check out the entire ebook, Mastering Social Media: The Guide to Boosting Ecommerce Profits for Indie Retailers.

Katie Patkowski manages all things social media for Retail Packaging.

The key to using Facebook as an effective marketing tool is to get people involved with your conversation. They will like what you do, share it and comment on it if it’s useful to them: note, this conversation is usually ad free.

Ads are what real people hate about businesses on Facebook. People use social networking as a way to share in a conversation.

That conversation can be showing off the new shoes they bought, a trailer to a movie coming out, or simply a status about how they’re feeling that day. These posts generate likes, shares, and comments because they are interesting to their friends.

They did not get on Facebook to see another video selling them a new Laptop or Snuggie. They turned off the TV for a reason.

Facebook users only want to see something they agree with, are funny, unique, helpful or entertaining in some way. Check out 2 vastly different approaches.

Doritos took on a campaign of creating ridiculous images and quotes that all involved their product. They created a ridiculous marketing ad for the “dPhone”—an orange chip looking phone that imitates the iPhone.

They listed a bunch of hilarious features that create a good image of what an iPhone would look like if it fused with a Dorito chip. They created an ad, yes, but they did it for humors sake.

Its purpose was to be funny, not to sell a product. By making it funny, their images have created thousands of likes and shares, increasing their exposure.

Very quickly, people were laughing at the dPhone and creating positive associations with the product. The more positive the associations, the more likely they are to buy it come game or shopping day.

They drive the conversation with humor. Look in contrast at Random House’s Facebook page.

For those of you that don’t know, Random House is one of the biggest book publishers in the country. They focus their attention on posting about things that appeal to readers.

You can find a picture of a beautiful bookcase or armchair in someone’s house. You will find quotes from famous authors about reading.

These quotes reflect strong opinions readers have about literature, writing and reading. They like them because they agree.

Their focus is to get people to agree with what they say; that way they’ll agree with what they do—sell books. They know what their audience wants to see and cater to them.

Your conversation will increase as you make content that people agree with, learn something from, or find humorous. Think like your audience thinks and you’ll capture their attention.

Don’t worry if your conversation isn’t generating as much conversation as these two examples. Remember that their pages have tens of thousands of likes, meaning their images reach more newsfeeds than yours.

You can increase your exposure by asking people to like you. You can also run a contest that requires as little as a like on Facebook to enter you into the drawing.

These will help you increase your market reach and drive people to notice your conversation more. They can only do so much though.

It’s your content that’s going to sell people on who you are and what you do. Avoid making ad posts your primary focus.

Instead, add something that would perk your interest. It will likely perk their interests too.

Stevens Henager is in the business of helping students in Mountain Home put social media technology to use in their careers. They bring help residents in Mountain Home master Social Media Technology.

This education is open to people of every walk of life. Even if you’re knee deep in a career already, it’s never too late to come back to school to complete your education.

Find out how Stevens Henager can help you. Come to our campus in Mountain Home for your Social Media Technology education.

Every business is trying to figure out how to ride the wave of social media to business success. Unfortunately, old business habits and ways do not work on the new media. Straight up advertising is not going to garner the attention that it once had, and will entirely turn off those who are using social media. While a good Facebook page design is a great start to a social media campaign, your business should understand what social media is for and how to use it so that you don’t turn off the very people that you are trying to reach.

Types of Social Media

The social media landscape is bound to change even while you are reading this. The thing that any business needs to know is what social media to use and how to use it. Facebook has over 800 million users, and Pinterest is the fastest growing social media site. Twitter is still huge, and Google+ has been slow to develop, but may be coming on. LinkedIn is the largest business site. Each of these websites has its own sets of unwritten rules on how it should be used.

Twitter and Pinterest

If you don’t know by now, Twitter will allow you to relay messages and links in 140 characters or fewer. That is not a lot, but people are communicating through this medium. Books and stories have been written in this way, so it must be usable. As a business, you want to make sure that you are engaging the other people in the community. Ask a question, use hash tags, and do not use several tweets to create one message. No one wants to piece together that mess. Pinterest is the fastest growing social media site on the net. This site acts like a corkboard where people can pin the things that interest them, and find things that are like what they have pinned to their board. It is important to know that a majority of the people that use Pinterest are women.

Facebook

With Facebook having gone public, it is important to keep up on its developments. As it becomes more profit driven, Facebook will face the problem of trying to turn a social media website into an advertising juggernaut. If the site goes too far in its advertising ventures, you can bet that people will leave it in droves for one simple reason Facebook forgot why people joined in the first place. People want to interact with others in a social way. Any company that insists in only putting on static advertisements will face an unmeasured backlash. In order to engage the Facebook community, companies need to create a Facebook page design that reflects their personalities. In any social media campaign, it is important for the company to embrace the fact that the only way to make a profit is to not look like that is what you are only doing. Be sure to have a personality, and have messages related to but beyond what you are selling.

Studies have shown that internet marketing is now the most effective way of marketing. Increasing social buzz using chat networks is very effective as compared to television, newspapers and magazines since the internet has millions of users. It is very important for internet marketers to employ effective communication and to know where best they can place their adverts to reach out to the target group and to maximize their marketability.

Since millions of people are mostly online in chat rooms and are stagnant there thus they are prone to visit interesting adverts since they spend more time in chat rooms. It is very hard for them to ignore eye captivating adverts we therefore create social buzz on these chat rooms. It is vital that you communicate effectively; the message you send should be trendy and interesting to be easily noticed and to attract more people via Zinzz. You can also increase social buzz using chat networks or rooms since the people we know will definitely attract more people in your buzz.

Chats and instant messages enhance effective and prompt communication thus making connection to others possible everywhere in the world. Zinzz chat is a good social media that can be used for marketing purposes since it is possible for one to interact in quite a number of ways. Zinzz will definitely boost your audience and number of interactions you have online, it also has features that allow one to share multimedia files thus reaches out to a large number of audience in an entertaining yet effective manner.

Zinzz chat increases social buzz since being a built-in chat room, it allows people to meet new people and also allows effective interaction thus boosting the number of clients reached at any particular time We get an assurance that quite a good number of individuals will come across your advert and campaigns since thousands of users enter and leave this particular website on a daily basis.

When using Zinzz chat rooms, many ways can be used to post marketing material because one can campaign in profiles and also post the adverts on the sidebars where interested users can view your adverts when they visit their profiles. It is also important that you use chat features that will converge people from different places since with this you get easy access to your target group.

Zinzz is a free site thus we realize that any marketing strategies employed are very effective since many people can access it Also you will not have to spend extra cash or pay for traffic that would lead people to your site since users welcome the mentality of free services thus there is an opportunity to boom inchatrooms and social sites.

Conclusion The bottom line is that Zinzz being a social site is an avenue for people to see your adverts, pass them to possible clients from the already acquired market niche or group by sharing and spending less as you achieve your desired goals and set objectives. It also has the viral campaign necessities required in social networks for proper media marketing and reaching a wider market which is undoubtedly quite healthy for any marketing strategy.

Measuring your social media ROI is one of today’s most controversial marketing subjects. Frankly everyone seems to be using a different system with different metrics, trying to quantify for management what reach, and profits, their social media efforts actually produce. You may have heard terms like ‘ROI on engagement’, ‘ROI on influence’, or ‘ROI of conversation’ thrown around. Forget about how many fans, followers, likes, or retweets you have. Measuring the performance of your social media efforts is just like measuring the ROI of any marketing effort. In its most simplified form you measure performance by analyzing how much you spend on content in relation to the actual leads and conversions it produces at your website. Cost of Content / Website Conversions = Cost Per Lead In today’s information obsessed environment you must provide value driven content that engages people. To measure the effectiveness of your content you should consider your campaign’s reach, engagement, and the frequency of that engagement. This will help you determine how your content is performing. It is important to understand that generally social media content does not produce quantifiable sales, instead it usually produces what is called a soft lead — such as an exchange of the user’s email address for some kind of information the user is looking for. The actual conversion will come later from some other type of marketing, for instance email marketing, at this time the user becomes a hard lead (a qualified prospect, a user in the sales funnel, or a user who is already a customer). So your goal is to use soft leads generated by your social media efforts to drive traffic to your website and convert them there. This is why people have trouble measuring the ROI of their social media efforts — because social media doesn’t produce direct sales, instead it is just an additional part of the sales funnel. You should also remember that by the time a consumer makes a purchase, or completes the buying cycle, they have probably already come in contact with multiple aspects of your marketing efforts. Marketing is no longer a linear funnel that where we start at one end and come out the other. So what should you measure? Cost Per Lead. (Or cost per acquisition.) How much did you spend to get paying customers? Many people want to measure social media in the social channel, but the value is more likely to happen through the website. The advantage of measuring cost per lead is that it is a metric that most managers and executives understand. It is one of the three benchmarks of acceptable cost — cost per lead, cost per engagement, and cost per impression. In order to measure your social media efforts, you have to track your social media activity. How do you know if a particular piece of content is working? One of the best ways to do this is with Google Analytics. Analytics accounts include Google’s custom URL builder and with this tool you can set custom URL parameters to track each visitor, including the campaign and the source. You can track it right down to the status update that produced the visit. Even in the socialsphere remember to be a real human and provide real value; this will result in the highest number of conversions or sales. If you are just starting to measure social media for the first time, keep in mind that at the beginning it is likely that your ROI will be negative. Understand that this is the result of not being tracked and therefore not being optimized. Start tracking and optimizing your content and you should see more positive results quickly. For more detailed information on measuring ROI of your social media efforts read this article by . Get started with Google Analytics and Google’s Custom URL Builder.

Take a look here on how to help manage your social web efforts.