The Importance of Choosing Social Networks

May 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

There are plenty of social networks available now. Many of these networks offer free services. Some charge fees for premium services. These social networks attract different kinds of users and also feature different types of contents. Large corporations can choose plenty of social networks to push their agenda and their goals.

Social networks have truly democratized the distribution of information so that anyone can post information online and have anyone read that information too. Now companies can take advantage of different social networks to reach an audience and to send them messages related to the business.

As a business owner, you need to make sure that all communication channels that you use for your business, add to the value of your message. It cannot be avoided that the kind of medium you use will have an effect not just on the market reach but also on how people will perceive your company.

Choosing the right kinds of social networks will help you roll-out effective social media campaigns for your business. When you make the right social media choice from the very start, you are not wasting your efforts on all the wrong social media and all the wrong campaigns. This will help you get better results from your online marketing, and other online activities.

When you use the right media, you will be able to target your efforts to your target audience. Different social networks attract different kinds of people. Social networks usually have market profiles online that states the range of age of users and other information pertaining to the users. These kinds of information will help a company decide if a particular social network will work for them.

You can also use a combination of social networks to complement your offline efforts and to complement each other. Use Flickr to share photos, use Vimeo or YouTube to share videos, blog about your business under a free host, tweet promos and discounts and use different types of social media for your business. You don’t have to use all kinds of social networks you really need to evaluate which ones will work best for the kind of uses you will have them for. Some social networks will work best for the kinds of campaigns you will run or for your customer service and public relations. Some social networks attract different market segments. Make sure that when you choose a specific social network that it is going to work for your plans.

Lawrence Perry is the CEO of Catch Friday Enterprises, providing virtual assistants around the world, and runs a PR agency in London, England. http://quick.catchfriday.com/

Filed Under: Social Marketing

Free Listening Tools to Monitor Your Online Buzz

August 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Nowadays, managing online reputation has become part and parcel of online marketing, thus you will need to have some good online listening and monitoring tools. There are many tools out there and some are costly tools (such as Radian6 and Scoutlabs), not forgetting some of those greedy agencies and consultants that will charge you a bomb by doing the service for you.

I have compiled here some good tools that you can use to monitor online buzz for your brands and the best thing is these are all FREE tools.

1. Google Alerts

This is the most important and basic automated tool that can help people and businesses monitor the Internet for developments and activities that could concern them. Google currently offers six types of alert searches: News, Web, Blogs, Comprehensive, Video and Groups and results are sent to subscribers daily by e-mail or via RSS feeds.

2. Addictomatic

Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on. Addictomatic shows you results from Twitter, Friendfeed, Bing News, Google blog search, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Twingly, etc. You do not even need to register on the site!

3. BlogPulse

BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs, a free service by Nielsen Buzzmetric. It is actually a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.

4. Boardtracker

This tool specializes in monitoring forums. Boardtracker is currently following more than 66 million topics on more than 37,000 forums.

5. Bloglines

Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. Bloglines can be used to start monitoring the sources you are interested in.

6. Commentful

Commentful is a service that watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr galleries, and many other types of content. When ever there is an update, i.e a new follow-up, Commentful notifies you instantly.

7. Ice Rocket

IceRocket is an Internet search engine specialized in searching blogs. It also offers a search module for Myspace, and this makes it the only tool of these that does so.

8. HowSociable

HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web. You can have your Google Blog Posts score, Twitter score, Flickr score, Youtube, Myspace, etc, on the same page. This tool can be very useful to measure the impact of your actions across the social networks.

9. Facebook Lexicon

Lexicon is a tool to understand what Facebook’s users are talking about on Walls. Use the tabs at the top to explore different trends in the topics listed in the drop-down menu. Lexicon never looks at messages, Chat, searches, or other private data.

10. Keotag

Keotag allows you to search content tags. Once you have picked a tag, Keotag lets you choose the sites you want to it search for you. Of course, the classics among the choices are: Google, Twitter, Technorati, Reddit, Digg and others.

11. Social Mention

Social Mention is a social media search platform that allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. It monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

12. BackType

BackType is a conversational search engine that index and connect millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so people can find, follow and share comments.

Of course there are a lots more listening tools available, especially for social media e.g. twitter which I will need to talk about twitter monitoring tools in my next blog. But I think the above tools would be a good start.

Last but not least, you can also use Yahoo! Pipes to create your own online buzz monitoring tool. Yahoo! Pipes is a web application from Yahoo! that provides a graphical user interface for building data mashups that aggregate web feeds,web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps.

For more articles on internet marketing, please visit http://www.vandachan.com

Filed Under: Social Marketing, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Not So Shocking Reasons Why Twitter Is A Must For Your Blog

August 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Twitter is one of the most useful tools for driving traffic to your blog, period! Twitter is an excellent blog promotion tool and the great thing about it is that it will also allow you to help other people. Although helping others may not be the main motive for promoting your blog it certainly feels pretty good. In this article, I show you what you can do with your blog on Twitter.

So your ulterior motive is off course to drive traffic to your blog. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with that, but you have to think a bit about how you go about doing it. Twitter is a community and it’s important that you actually have something valuable to share. That’s easier if you follow people who are actually interested in your niche. You also need to stay in touch with your people on Twitter. It’s no good only being an active part of the Twitter community whenever you have something new at your blog to share.

Still, the goal is to promote your blog. There are many different things you can do when promoting your blog. First of all, put the link to your blog in your public Twitter profile. While you’re at it and if it’s within your resources it’s well worth it to show your blog address on your Twitter background image. People can’t click it, but if something sounds interesting you’d be surprised to know how many people are actually willing to type a url into the address bar themselves. Whenever, you create a blog post you should off course tweet that post as soon as possible. There might not be enough room to tweet the entire URL so you might need an URL shortening service, but that’s ok. You’re not posting your blog posts for SEO purposes, but solely to drive people directly from twitter to your blog. If you don’t have anything to say yourself don’t be afraid to share other people’s tweets. Although that might not initially help you, people will be more inclined to share your stuff if you are willing to share their stuff.

Along those lines, you should focus your tweets on helping people. They say that you have to give to get and that is certainly true when it comes to Twitter. If your tweets generally help people with their questions they are far more inclined to click your links. When you run a blog it’s fair to assume that your blog posts are generally advice or information that people in your niche, your followers, would find helpful. So why not use a plugin to automatically tweet your latest blog post? If you’re using WordPress I know there are about a gazillion out there that will help you do just that. The important thing in your posts, however, is still to be as helpful as you possibly can in everything you tweet. If you make sure of that you are far more incline to get traffic from your tweets.

So, are you ready to use Twitter with your blogs. There are many incentives to do so and Twitter is a perfect match for just about any blog. The key things to remember is to be actively involved, be sociable and be helpful. Have fun Twitter-blogging.

Twitter is an awesome tool for your blog. There are far more great things you can do with your blog in Twitter than I have been able to share here. Go to http://blog.gettwittertrafficnow.com for more information on how to use Twitter

Filed Under: Blogging, Social Marketing, Traffic Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are You Embracing Social Networking?

August 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment

For budding webmasters or individuals that want to improve their web optimisation, there are tips to help you facilitate this and drive more traffic, more visitors all at the expense of links, wite submission and engaging social networking.

POPULARITY

So you have now made your website as search engine friendly as possible, we now need to give them a bit of help to find you and start indexing your site. We now need to consider the following areas;

  1. Inbound Links
  2. Search Engine Submission
  3. Social Networking

Inbound Links

Links from other websites are an important tool for increasing your popularity. Not only will you get more visitors but the search engines will also hold your website in higher regard the more people who are linking to you. There are some really easy and again free ways to do this;

  1. Press Releases
  2. Business Directories
  3. Networking Forums

Press Releases

This is one of the most powerful free tools, a well written press release both promotes your company to potential customers and can create hundreds of back links to your website. They are often picked up my automated RSS readers and can very quickly spread around the web. You can also create as many as you want!

A few things to bear in mind when you write the release are, make it catchy, always write in the third person, where you can include your logo always do and always put a link back to your website where you can.

There are many free press release sites available, just peform a search for free press release

Business Directories

Business directories are a great way to get some genuine static links to your site, take the time to fill out as much content as you can and be careful which categories you place your business in. A quick web search for Free Business Directories brings up hundreds.

Search Engine Submission

Search Engine submission is an important tool that can help speed up the time it takes for the search engines to find and index your website. It is not recommended to submit your website more often than every 6-8 weeks.

Social Networking

Social Networking for Business is still not being used as much as it should be though websites such as Facebook and Myspace are very highly ranked by the search engines and having a page for your business can prove very useful. You should also encourage your employees to become a fan or join your network as you never know who their friends might be. They might just be your target market. Some of these networks such as Facebook also allow you to have a subdomain such as mynetwork.com/mycompany. A few of the biggest are:

  1. Facebook
  2. Myspace
  3. Linkedin

Another useful tool for your website is to add a way for your visitors to add a link to your website on their own Social networking page. People are often using this now to save their Favourites/BookMarks so that they are accessible wherever they might be, tools such as addthis make it very easy to include these on your site.

SEO is an ongoing project and should be an integral part of your overall marketing strategy and done correctly can provide an excellent, cost effective route to market.

Tracking Your Success

So you have now submitted your website to the search engines, sent out your press release and created your Facebook page, how do you know how successful you have been??

There are lots of ways to measure the traffic to your site, the obvious one being an increase in orders though this does not tell you how many you are missing where customers are visiting your site but not staying or are leaving through the checkout process.

There are a number of free statistical tools available such as Google Analytics that will provide you with detailed statistics for the traffic to your website. All that you need to do is insert a piece of code, similar to embedding a YouTube video, within the code of your website and let it do its job. When signing up you will be given a username and password so you can login and view the information it has collected.

Other websites that hold statistical data or will analyse your traffic for free are:

  • Alexa
  • urltrends
  • About
  • Addfreestats
  • Gostats
John E, Media Relations Adviser http://easily.co.uk – Domain name registration, register your low cost domain name today! Search domain names quickly, all major extensions and no catches.

Filed Under: Social Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Marketing and Social Media

August 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Marketing and social media go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly. It really is as if one is just not as good if the other one isn’t there. Who cares about spending zillions of dollars on television advertising or ads in the news media when you can go online and pretty much market your product and/or service for free? Look at microblogging services such as Twitter for example. These are sites in which people have the foresight to create profiles for their business, stick a link in the profile and wait for the money to just fall out of the sky. It doesn’t quite work that way.

One thing that marketers and regular Joe’s need to keep in mind is that marketing and social media on the Internet are different. It takes a little more leg work than you would think to get your product seen and then pursued by others. Let’s take Twitter to start with. Twitter is great for sending out short bursts of messages to hundreds upon thousands upon millions of people. Obviously, you want your message to have meaning so that people will be inclined to respond to it. The main thing here is

Filed Under: Marketing, Social Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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