Social Media for Business - 5 Reasons to Go Social

If you are a business owner, you might have noticed how other businesses have jumped in to the social media bandwagon ever since Facebook, Twitter, and other huge social networking sites came into the scene. And if you haven't already joined the thousands or millions of businesses worldwide who have taken advantage of social media, you are definitely missing out. Social media for business has become an important part of every business owners' overall online marketing campaign.

The mere thought of adding social media to your online marketing strategy could be stressful or discouraging, most especially if you are just starting out. If you do, chances are you are one of those who have decided not to get your business on Facebook or Twitter, because there's a lot to learn and you just don't have the time.

Take a deep breath. Learning social media for business could seem like a daunting task and could mean the learning curve is huge, but once you realize the impact of reaching out to your potential customers, it will make a lot more sense. If you are not used to interacting with different types of people online, or if you are too shy, you would have to make a little shift in your mindset.

Businesses of all sizes have utilized social media to build their brand and online visibility. Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, helps you in keeping in touch with your target audience (which are your potential customers or clients), to build a strong community of loyal followers who will establish you as a leader in your niche, and who will be ready to buy from you. This is how significant social media for business is and this is why you need to be social.

Here are 5 more reasons why your business needs to go social:

1. Promote your products and services in an inexpensive way (or for free).Whatever your budget is, there is a solution to your needs. Getting out there and building your social media presence is an inexpensive way of informally advertising what you have to offer. I mentioned "informally advertising" simply because social media channels are not like classified ads sites. Social media is used to interact with people, to share interests, and to share information that your target audience would find valuable. When you earn your target customers' trust, they will be ready to buy.


2. Receive advice from similar businesses. Every business has its competitors. The wonderful thing about social media is that it helps us have a healthy competition among other businesses. In order to succeed, you would want to learn from those who have been there and done that, don't you? Personally, I surround myself with people who have already established themselves as experts in my field and I learn from them. By networking with other people who are in the same business as you, you will benefit from their wealth of knowledge in order to help you grow your business.


3. Share expertise to build your credibility. This is one of the things that I usually stress out to clients that I partner with. Social media for business isn't purely for advertising your products and services, but more importantly, for establishing yourself as a leader in your niche. Let's say you are a relationship coach. You can post relationship tips on your social networks, and offer a newsletter where singles or couples can subscribe to in order to get tips on how to handle their relationships. With the help of social media, you will be able to share your expertise with the people who need you.


4. Create buzz about your website, products, and services. You can easily create buzz for your business in a variety of ways using social media. Write how-to articles for your blog so you can address the problems that your target audience might be facing, and being the expert that you are, you will be able to give them solutions. Create short video series about your products and services, or weekly tips video series and upload them on YouTube and other video sharing sites. Extract a sentence from your article and post that as a status update on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Through these activities, not only will you be building your credibility, but you will be promoting your products and services as well.


5. Get Found by Your Customers Online. With location-based social networks, you can easily be found by your customers online. What this means for your local business is more exposure both to your website which leads to more foot traffic to your brick and mortar store.

Internet Marketing Goes Nowhere Without Search Engine Optimization

Maximize your business efforts by paying attention to the following essential SEO techniques:

Constantly review your links.
Links that are no longer valid or relevant impede the success of your business. They mislead potential customers, causing business loss. Invalid links are similar to debris or clutter on your website and need to be eliminated. Clear and clean content is what search engines value.

Continuously add new links.
If your product lines or the services you offer expand, so should your links. Demonstrate you are a valid player in your field by linking with other major suppliers or service providers. Especially link with authoritative forums and business organizations with which you are affiliated. This is very helpful in establishing credibility in your niche and is a growing influence on SEO. Besides looking for popular keywords, search engines also check for authenticity and credibility of a website. Links and backlinks are important in establishing credibility. Make and carry out a plan to set up links with a variety of quality websites. Just as it is important to continuously refresh the content of your web pages, it is important to refresh your links periodically.

Make sure each page of your site has a unique and specific title.
Also, your URL at the top of each page should reflect the specific content of that page. This facilitates your customer's ability to search for items without scrolling through irrelevant pages. For instance, if your URL reads "Great Recipes," add "recipes for tofu" if that is the page's content.

Have a presence on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
The popularity of social media has changed search engine algorithms and shifted it toward an emphasis on interactivity and participation. This has become a major factor in establishing credibility. Because social media sites generate popularity, search engines pay attention to them.

Use surveys to obtain information about your customers' likes and dislikes and ask for their suggestions for improvement.
Give participants an incentive to take part, such as a discount or special offer. Find out how they found your site, their experience on it and recommendations for improvement. Are their needs being met? Can you offer a new product or service to satisfy unmet needs? Although Google data provides a bare-bones version of how and why visitors came to your site, a survey can give you much more detailed information. It may even give you good ideas for new products. Additionally, interactivity is desirable to search engines, thus a survey can help your page ranking.

Operating a successful online business demands you use good search engine optimization techniques. You must familiarize yourself with SEO and its various strategies the same as you studied your business product or service and keeping abreast of new techniques and methods used by search engines is crucial. Constant updating is required. Apply the above SEO strategies to build and grow a successful internet business. If you feel unprepared to assume SEO functions for your business due to lack of experience or time constraints, consider having your site developed or revamped by a professional web designer.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7520681

Compete’s Study Shows Mobile Users More Active On Twitter In US and UK

Twitter has partnered up with survey and statistics company Compete to work out how active Twitter users are on mobile devices as opposed to desktop devices.

The powers that be at Twitter think of their social media site as a mobile-influenced messaging service, the tweet’s 140 character limit inspired by the constraints put on the classic SMS. The speed at which someone can compose and publish a tweet and the instantaneous nature of the information available to anyone make constant access to Twitter of upmost importance to many of its users.

Twitter Mobile makes access constantly available to its users, whether they are at the office, at home, travelling or elsewhere. Twitter has constantly been improving its mobile apps on iOS and Android to provide its users with the best service possible. In the last month alone, Twitter has updated its mobile apps twice: updating Search to surface older tweets and improving both the Search and Discovery interfaces.
This is Twitter’s view:

Mobile is in our DNA at Twitter, which means our platform can connect your brand to users in real time, wherever they are. Because mobile ads on Twitter are part of the organic content experience, they create a particularly powerful vehicle for brands to create reach, build frequency and drive engagement.

60% of Twitter’s 200 million users log in to Twitter via a mobile device at least once a month. To illustrate the importance of its mobile apps to the success of the service overall, Twitter contracted statistics company Compete to conduct a survey looking into Twitter mobile use in the US and the UK. Last week, Twitter released the findings of Compete’s survey in the US.

Twitter Mobile use in the United States

This is what they discovered:

Working with Compete, we found that these primary mobile Twitter users in the U.S. are more engaged in several key ways. Namely, they are on the platform more often, they interact more with Tweets and they follow more brands.

There are five conclusions that Twitter thinks will help inform advertisers:

1. Mobile users are on Twitter more than desktop users, despite being on the go:


For Twitter advertisers, these statistics suggest that the best audience to target on Twitter are mobile users. Advertisers are encourage to create campaigns with interactive content suited to a mobile device’s lower processing power and smaller screen: “think about content that’s easy to interact with and consider the experience beyond the Tweet too – for example, link to sites that are optimized for mobile.”

2. Generally, Twitter Mobile users are younger:

It is no surprise that 18 to 34 year olds are 52% more likely to access Twitter on their mobile, given that younger demographics have adopted mobile technology to a greater extent than their older counterparts. It is important for advertisers to bear the statistic in mind, however, when they are running campaigns on Twitter.

3. Users of Twitter Mobile are more active during the day:


For advertisers, perhaps the most important statistic above is that primary mobile users are 169% more likely than primary desktop users to access Twitter while they are shopping. People are looking at Twitter while engaging in a little retail therapy, so a well-timed promoted tweet or trend may be seen by someone in a position to purchase the product promoted: users “may be shopping near your store and a Tweet about your current promotion might get them in the door”.

Primary mobile users are also active on Twitter at home:

Primary mobile users also access Twitter inside the home. Sixty-six percent use Twitter in front of the TV at home. Primarily mobile users are 32% more likely than the average Twitter user to use the platform while they are watching television.

Some users will turn to Twitter instead of watching commercials, so advertisers should take advantage of commercial breaks to advertise to large television audiences.

Advertisers should integrate their Twitter and television campaigns to get the best results. Say a company’s advert utilises a hashtag, people will immediately access Twitter on their phone to review the hashtag, where they can be targeted with more advertising.

4. Primary mobile users engage more often with Twitter content:


Advertisers should use links, interesting content and calls to action in their mobile marketing campaigns on Twitter, as primary mobile users are more likely to interact with your company’s tweets.

5. Twitter users engage more with brands on mobile devices:

The average Twitter user follows five or more brands. Users who primarily access Twitter on mobile are 96% more likely to follow 11 or more brands. They are also 58% more likely to recall seeing an ad on Twitter than the average Twitter user.

If advertisers weren’t convinced before, the statistic above makes it obvious how powerful Twitter Mobile is as a marketing tool compared to Twitter on desktop devices.

Twitter Mobile use in the United Kingdom

On Monday, Twitter posted an infographic on its blog which detailed Compete’s discoveries concerning Twitter Mobile use in the UK. Although the questions in the UK were slightly different than those asked in the US, advertisers should come to the same conclusions regarding Twitter Mobile users.

The one thing that UK and US Twitter users have in common is how long they spend on Twitter in front of the television. 66% of UK and US Twitter users are active on Twitter while watching TV, highlighting the importance of integrated multimedia campaigns.



Do you mostly access Twitter on a mobile device? Does your own experience with Twitter correlate with Compete’s findings?

Facebook Users Can Now Promote Their Friend’s Posts

Businesses and individual users have been able to pay to promote their posts on Facebook for a while, ensuring that their favourite photos and statuses will get as wide an audience as possible. Now, users can pay to promote their friends posts.

Say your friend has posted a photo of you that you are particularly proud of, or your partner posted a photo of the cake that you made for them, now you can make sure that all your friends see your achievements – for a fee.

Users will not need to ask for permission from their friends to promote their posts but, according to webzine The Verge who reported the update last week, Facebook has made sure that the content poster’s privacy is respected:

"You can only promote posts to the people that your friend originally shared with," a Facebook spokesperson told The Verge. "If you have mutual friends, they’ll see that you shared it and promoted it."
The feature is only available to Facebook users with under 5,000 friends or subscribers, and is being gradually introduced to users worldwide.

However, after originally setting a 5,000 friend limit to users who wanted to promote their own posts, Facebook made the service unlimited. So, it would be no surprise if, at some point, Facebook made promoting friend’s posts available to all users.

Would you pay to promote your friend’s posts?

Twitter Raises Price Of Promoted Trends To $200,000

Twitter seems to be having some success with their “Promoted Trend” marketing feature, as they have raised the price of the service from $150,000 to $200,000.

For $200,000 (£127,600), a company can have their preferred message on top of one territory’s trending list on the Twitter homepage for a whole day. The promoted trend service can be used to effectively advertise a new product, or raise brand awareness on Twitter.

The $200,000 dollar price tag represents an 150% increase from the original $80,000 – the value of a promoted trend when the service was launched in 2010.

The price increase is due to the service’s popularity, the service’s popularity is due to its success and the service’s success has been well-documented in case studies on the Twitter business page.

Absolute Radio, Cadbury and LG are three of the companies that Twitter has mentioned in its case studies. Each one has had success using promoted trends to raise their profile on Twitter.


Absolute Radio used the promoted trend #nowplaying, an already popular hashtag on Twitter, to advertise their “Faces For Radio” campaign. The promoted trend was tied in with a twitter competition: every hour for 24 hours one lucky entrant won £250 if they tweeted whichever song was playing on the radio to @AbsoluteRadio using the #nowplaying hashtag.

During the campaign, @AbsoluteRadio spiked at 73,000 mentions reaching 23 million people. During the day of the competition, Absolute Radio also saw the number of online listeners increase by 7%.

After their Wispa Gold chocolate bar was discontinued, Cadbury was bombarded with consumer requests to start making it again. In conjunction with their extensive London 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics campaign, Cadbury used the promoted trend #WispaGold, asking people to complete and retweet their “I love #WispaGold because _____” message.


After the promoted trend was launched, Cadbury saw an increase of 1,800% in positive mentions of their brand.

To promote their new Optimus L Series phone in the UK, LG launched the @LGTicketHunter competition, offering people the chance to win exclusive tickets to upcoming concerts. Using the promoted trend #LGTicketHunter, the company drove traffic onto a map website. Every time someone tweeted with the #LGTicketHunter hashtag, the map zoomed in on where the LG street team were waiting. The first person to find the team won the tickets.

During the five days that the campaign lasted, #LGTicketHunter was mentioned over 50,000 times and delivered over 20 million impressions.



In each of these case studies, the company has either used promoted trends in conjunction with a competition or as part of a larger campaign, making interactions and mentions more likely. However, it was the fact that each promoted trends was constantly visible on the UK’s Twitter homepage for a whole 24 hours that kept them in the public’s consciousness.

Of course, promoted trends do have their drawbacks. Apart from the astronomical price (which, if the campaign proves to be a success is arguably worthwhile), there have been occasions when promoted trends have been hijacked by the public to decry the company’s that use them, as the buyer has no control over what features on the promoted trend’s page.

One of the most notorious examples of a failed promoted trend campaign is #McDStories, when an ill-advised, self-congratulatory McDonald’s marketing campaign backfired: instead of tweeting reasons why they loved McDonalds, the public used the hashtag to accuse the fast food company of animal cruelty, poor hygiene standards and taking advantage of their customers.

So, how does a company best utilise a promoted trend? Firstly, use it as part of a wider campaign, secondly, reward those who mention it and finally, don’t invite praise if your company has little to be proud of.

Would you pay $200,000 for a promoted trend? Has your company used them before? How successful were you?

Ezeesocial: Your Business’ Social Media Needs In One “Ezee” Place

Social media is the future of Business-to-Business networking, online marketing and Business-to-Consumer relations. Ezeesocial helps you manage all your social media accounts, optimizing your business’ profile online.

There are currently over 2 billion people active on social media worldwide, 1 billion active on Facebook alone. Social media platforms have quickly realised the potential that this user base has for monetisation and have begun providing marketers with the tools and services to best target potential customers.

It is of vital importance to the success of your business that you leverage social media to its maximum potential. However, it can prove extremely difficult to keep all your networks managed, monitored, updated and engaging without considerable time and expense.

Ezeesocial is a comprehensive social media management platform where businesses can easily and effectively engage with their customers, monitor mentions concerning their brand, grow their social media networks and measure the effectiveness of their social media efforts with in-depth analysis.


There are two different Ezeesocial packages to choose from: the regular Business package and the larger Corporate package. Both packages have numerous features to help you manage your business’s social media profiles. You can:

• Organise your business’ social media profiles across numerous social media sites: Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, to name just a few.
• Create schedule and automate a wide variety of messages: Facebook posts, Tweets, articles, etcetera
• Analyse and monitor the effectiveness of your social media posts, as well as how your brand is perceived by your customers
• Raise your own profile and the profile of your company with strategic updates and social media management
• Create multiple user licences, controlling all of them from one location
• Manage your contacts across all social media and email platforms.

What makes Ezeesocial stand apart from its competitors is the ability to personalise interactions with your target market: on Twitter you can automate and personalise responses to people who use specific keywords, hashtags and terms.

Ezeesocial also provides subscribers to either package with a comprehensive user guide and an extensive video training suite: an easy to follow, easy to use step-by-step guide on how to use and best utilise Ezeesocial’s numerous features, with demonstrations narrated by Ezeesocial’s CEO Paul O’Mahoney and Managing director Mili Ponce.

With the Corporate package, you can even manage your marketing outside of social media: the Corporate package has both SMS mobile marketing and email marketing tools, including comprehensive scheduling and analytical services so you can monitor how successful your marketing is.


You can import all your contact information from email providers such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL with the email tools while, with the SMS Autoresponder, you can create, personalise and schedule automated response messages to answer customer correspondence when you are away from a computer.

The email and SMS services also allow you to build and pre-schedule a series of automated emails for birthdays or event alerts that are triggered as soon as your customers subscribe to a list via Ezeesocial’s newsletter signup service, a regular service allowing you to post your company’s news and updates to your contacts.

The Corporate package even gives you free, dedicated help desk support from the Ezeesocial team. The help desk support service is available Monday to Friday during working hours, or you can send an email at any time and expect a reply within a few working days.

The Business and Corporate packages are both free for the first 30 days. Register for your free thirty day trial here.

Have you tried Ezeesocial yet?

Leave your comments below.

Best Tricks to Generate Business Leads Through Social Media Optimization

Business leads are critical to the operations of the business. Business leads are customers in the making and this is the reason why many business owners and web marketers are looking for the best approaches to how to source these leads and pounce on the business opportunity. But how do you get the best leads in a highly competitive market?

Social networking is playing vital role in generating business leads and relevant traffic on your website. With social marketing increasing its influence on the web and the increasing number of registered users, it is now a must-do activity to include social media optimization in the strategic planning process on how to market and boost online stores. So how should a businessman carry out a campaign with strong focus on social media?
You'll find many resources online that can explain the best tricks to generate business leads. But if you are looking for a tried and tested trick, then focus your attention to social media optimization. You should learn how to generate business lead through social media optimization to get your desired results. Social media like Twitter and Facebook are two of the biggest sites now, thus focusing your attention to these sites is a logical step to take.

There are different steps that you can take on how to make this happen. The initial step is to sign up for accounts on these websites. Create profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Once you are inside the communities, make it a point to listen to your customer base. The keyword here is to engage customers and prospects. To get an idea on what are the best practices, try to search for the experts and sought-after account holders online. You can gain a lot of things from the best practices of the experts on social marketing.

Once you have the tools and the idea, then you can engage customers by interacting with them. Engage your followers in conversations and provide answers in forums. Engaging customers in social marketing talk doesn't mean selling products and services. You need to know what they are talking about, and focus on these. Quality content is also critical when it comes to social media optimization. Delivering content using social media is easy thanks to different websites suited for various types of contents. You can post videos on YouTube, post tweets on Twitter and deliver blog posts on WordPress.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7489639

Pinterest Updates iOS App to Make Editing Pins Easier

Pinterest updated its iOS apps Monday, adding some new editing options as well as improving how users scroll while navigating the app.

Now, users can edit a pin's description, change its board location or delete the pin entirely — directly from the mobile app. Comments can also be deleted anywhere on Pinterest using the app, so users can remove offensive comments from their own pins, or fix typos in comments they make on other pins.

Pinterest first launched its app for iPad last August, alongside the first version of its Android app.
The latest version of Pinterest's iPad app is now available on the App Store.

Thumbnail image via iStockphoto, maxphotography; screenshot courtesy of Pinterest