Using Facebook’s Timeline: A Good Idea for Businesses

Facebook’s Timeline has both fans and detractors, which is to be expected of any new major UI upgrades. After all, some will find it pretty and useful, while some will just want to keep on using the old look being more comfortable with it. No matter what your personal preference may be though, for your business pages, you have to set aside your personal biases and use whichever look will benefit your business the most.

Mashable’s article wherein they used data from eye-tracking group EyeTrackShop to compare visual statistics from Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, as well as compare the old Facebook and the timeline version, showed some interesting points in favor of using timeline. These three include the following facts:

1. Facebook Timeline cover photos get noticed first
2. Facebook ads get noticed more in Facebook Timeline
3. Personal information such as employer and location gets more attention in the new Facebook Timeline

As you can see, using timeline on your page can help you leverage certain things you want to get noticed more. Since cover photos get notices first on the timeline version (Not surprising with it occupying such a huge amount of space), it makes sense to put up your company logo and whatever special product/service/event/promotion you are pushing for at the moment in that space. Of course, you’ll have to be creative about it, because putting up something really boring and amateurish as cover photo will mean that the poor quality will also get noticed first as well. With the info page also getting more attention, this means that it is important that you really fill out those fields and squeeze in as much information as you can.

Last, but not least, with ads getting noticed more in timeline, and with more people shifting to the timeline version each day, this means that it would be a good idea to start looking into investing more money into your Facebook ads.

Image via Facebook – Introducing Timeline Page

Social Media in the New Year

2012 might mean the world’s end if you believe the popular doomsday movie, but it sure is looking good for those who have invested much, and are thinking of investing their resources in social media. With so many different internet marketing strategies to choose from, it seems that next year (and probably more years after that) will see social media marketing efforts gaining even more in popularity.

We might not need convincing when it comes to the usefulness of social media for word-of-mouth marketing, but what you might not have realized is that social media marketing’s sister industry, the search engine optimization industry is becoming more and more reliant on the social media aspect of SEO. In fact, gone are the days of the two being treated as separate online marketing techniques. Instead, any self-respecting SEO nowadays know that they need to brush up on their social media offerings to survive the evolving SEO landscape.

What this also means, however, for those who specialize in specific social media platforms, is that you need to gain a better understanding of social search. No, there’s no need to suddenly become an expert in technical SEO, but you at least have to get a firm grasp of the relationship between the two because it will help you steer your social media efforts in a way that will benefit you not just in that specific social media platform/site, but to also have a positive effect (and minimize the negatives) on SEO efforts. It might not be your primary responsibility, but anything that will benefit your client/site, will surely benefit you as well.

As Maria McDavis put it, “Social Media and SEO is not an either/or proposition, it is an AND equation.” Forget about the days of social media or SEO, social media in the new year is all about Social SEO.

Image via WebSuccessDiva

How to Automatically Connect your Blog Posts to your Facebook Account

Did you know that you can post your blogs automatically to your Facebook account? Since blogging today is now considered the most powerful marketing strategy for both business and personal purposes, combining it with equally powerful social media site, you can expect a stream of success in the blogging business. Sharing contents through your Facebook page will result in more comments and feedbacks on personally constructed or imported blog posts. By automating your system, you can publish all posts you want simultaneously on your Facebook wall. Your blog could be about any topic like nursing. Click here to know more and follow the steps below: Read more »

New Skype Versions Supports Facebook-to-Facebook Calling and Group Screen Sharing

Skype announced last week that the release of Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and 5.7 for Windows will mean support for Facebook-to-Facebook calling from within Skype. While video calling within Facebook has been possible for a few months now thanks to Skype, the ability to call your Facebook contacts while logged in to your Skype account takes the Facebook and Skype integration much further.

Facebook to Facebook calling within Skype is really easy and is possible for any who links their Skype and Facebook accounts. All you need to do is choose a Facebook contact while on Skype, and call them like you would your Skype contacts. Of course, previous features that have already been supported like reading your friend’s status updates and sending them IMs via Skype are still possible. While these features are not revolutionary in anyway, it is still quite convenient for users who do prefer to be able to have an easy way of contacting their Facebook friends, but prefer not to be constantly logged into Facebook or are not allowed to access their Facebook accounts at work.

Skype also said that the Skype 5.7 for Windows will mean that group screen sharing will now be available to Windows users (a feature that has been available to Mac users for earlier Skype versions). This is good news to business who use opt to use Skype to communicate with their employees, or even with customers, because it is a great way to go through presentations/tutorials without having to rely on words alone. Of course, group screen sharing is still available only for Skype users with Premium subscriptions.

Image credit: Skype Blog

Promoting Your Blog with Directory Submissions

Harnessing the power of social media to leverage your business site is the in thing right now, especially since it is indeed proving to be an effective multi-purpose marketing strategy. However, it is a mistake to rely on social media marketing alone since its effects can take some time to become evident. The wiser course is to employ other strategies to promote your business site, and if possible strategies that will not only help increase your sites visibility, but also overall SEO strategy.

Directory submission is an online strategy that has been around longer than search engines, after all directories were the in thing before Google made its appearance. Directory submissions, however, fell from grace due to the many link farms that littered the Internet, which then had the unfortunate effect of getting many of the sites listed on those link farms devaluated by Google due to their association with the said spammy link sites. Despite this, there are indeed good web directories still in existence today that can really help you promote your blog. All you need to do is to learn to separate the good from the bad before you submit your site to the sound ones.

One such web directory/portal is the Blog Search Engine. The good thing about their service is that they will not only provide a link back to your site’s blog, but will in fact review your blog, providing a better value link not only in the search engine’s eyes but more importantly to users who can glean information from the review. Submitting a site there is easy. All you need to do is submit your blog details, pay the basic fee of $14.99, and sit back and wait for the traffic they send your way. You can also choose higher packages, which will earn you more links from their network, get your blog featured, and even have your banner ad place on their homepage.

10 Great Tips and Tricks for Better Google+ Brand Pages

With regards to social networking, Facebook remains the most popular with over hundreds of millions of users daily. Likewise Google+ pages are also available for social networking and integrating people on the internet.

The Google+ Project offers various features to help people connect with others. First, there are Circles, where you can easily separate people you know into groups so you can share different information with them. The next feature is called Sparks, which is basically an online sharing engine. You can type different keywords and find relevant information in them.

The third feature is Hangouts, where you have the option of chatting Circles of people whom you have added as your contacts. You can also see them on the computer screen. And the last feature of Google+ is Mobile, where you can easily upload your pictures, group chat, share your location, and a lot more using your mobile phone through the platform. Read more »

Fast Facts on Google Plus Pages for Businesses

Finally, Google has launched a way for businesses to easily join in on the social media fray on Google+ via the Google+ Pages for businesses. Although I’m quite sure that this feature has been in the works for some time now, you have to wonder if it also has something to do with the whole Techcrunch issue and maybe even the seeming flagging interest of users in Google Plus. I don’t about you, but my Google Plus stream has been getting quieter by the minute. Reasons aside, Google can definitely expect interest with Google+ to pick since businesses are ever eager to find more ways to leverage their content, especially these days with the social media interest experiencing an upward trend.

So what do we know so far about Google+ Pages for businesses?

1. Publishing posts just work the way they do with your personal Google+ account. So this means that you don’t really have to go figure out how to use it. If you use Google+ (even Facebook), you’ll feel right at home managing your Google+ Pages for your business.
2. Contests and Promotions are not allowed. You can share whatever content you deem relevant to your business, but you are not allowed to post contests and promotions, which is one of the most popular things businesses use their Facebook pages for.
3. Hangouts are encouraged. The Google+ team seems to be pushing the use of the hangout functionality, encouraging businesses to host hangouts for event such as product demos, meetings between key persons of the company, tutorials and classes, and Q&A sessions.

These are just the very bare bones of what to expect from Google+ Pages for businesses. If you want to learn more, just create your own page for your business and start playing around.

Image credit: Google+ Your Business

StumbleUpon: Different Ways To Grow Your Business

StumbleUpon is incomparable bookmarking and rating site which works as a search engine that allows users to discover web pages, photos and videos which are useful and interesting to the users . It’s basically a bookmarking site that allows users to generate traffic on their web pages at an outstanding low cost.

This site provides the users a combination of opinions on the quality of the web pages through forms of rating. Whenever a visitor goes through your web page he can gives a thumps up or thumps down depending upon how useful your resources are on your web pages. The visitor can also post a comment as a review. These visitors can also share this web page with other users in the network. Through this site one can get connected with millions of web users of the same interest as yours, thus ultimately becoming friends. One should be aware of the fact that he can only visit the web pages his friends have recommended for him and vice versa therefore one must ensure the content he is sharing must be of high quality in order to attract thumps up rating hence through these rating he will be able to attract traffic on his website. Therefore the more the subscribers are attracted the more the traffic is generated through Stumble upon. Read more »

Social Media for Brand Building

Brand building is something that businesses, both big and small, take very seriously. Your brand is after all the one that carries your company’s name and products, influencing a customer in that truly subtle way each time they shop, whether in a convenience store or online.

Brand building is a process that takes a whole lot of effort though, and affected by so many factors both within your control and not. Thankfully, the Internet has revolutionized brand building, so that even small businesses can now engage in brand building activities that will reach a bigger segment of their target market without having to spend as much money as they would have done given traditional methods alone.

The use of social media for brand building in the Internet, or social media marketing, is one of the favoured ways of brand building these days. Social media marketing after all has lots of benefits, not the least of which is an unbelievable number of organic users who happen to be the very same target customers of businesses. Social media’s nature is also such that it is the online equivalent of word of mouth. If you want any news to spread fast, there’s no other platform like social media to do it for you without you even having to blink. Of course this means that anything about your brand can go viral, both the good and the bad. This means that this relatively cheap marketing method/tool should be handled really carefully. One slip up and you can bet that your foot-in-mouth moment will be all over the internet in hours, with effects on your brand’s reputation for a woefully much longer time.

Some Notes on Social Media Strategy

Both large and small businesses are getting in on the social media game. This means that social media strategies are getting integrated into their marketing schemes. In order to form a good social media strategy, a business needs to consider this type of marketing from several different standpoints. The following are some strategic elements that go into a good social media marketing campaign.

Good Planning

The first step to a successful social media campaign is to plan it out well. The plan can be something that is outlined by a small business on a single handwritten sheet of paper or a large formal outline put together by a large corporation. The point is to outline a series of steps beforehand and get a general sense of what the approach will be. These steps can be modified as the campaign progresses but it is important to get a general sense of how to proceed. Budgetary concerns such as paying employees that are designated to manage social media should also be part of the plan. Many of the items below will factor into the strategy that is arrived at. Read more »