Social Media Networking - Giant of the Online Marketing World

A recent report from Hitwise has become a buzzword in the online marketing world that facebook has reported to be the number one visited website at the end of March 2010 outstripping Google. Average facebook visitors have increased to 185% as compared to the last year’s same month while only 9% increased has been recorded for Google in the same time frame.

The drastic growth of the facebook is vividly stating that facebook has changed strategies of the game play. Social media networking portals is becoming the giant of online marketing world, whether it’s the startup business or the established one, they are implementing every online marketing strategy they can. Now, there is a handsome amount of budget spend on social media marketing, online advertisement and search engine optimization.

Social media allows us to search in new and different ways; you cannot just search here but also have conversation about different ideas. For sure, you will have a more trust on the information which is coming from a community or group of peers than any other resource. Google should not worry that much as search engine will stay, but can’t say anything about tomorrow.

Companies are actively engaging in social media optimization…….

After having a look on the latest stats, one could say that social media optimization is no less then SEO (Search engine optimization), rather I think both the marketing strategies should go hand in hand.

Twitter rolls-out a new home page

Twitter has recently redesigned it’s home page for new users to give them a greater view of the websites functions. It offers many new features such as, scrolling list of trending topics, a search form, continues updates of the tweets from well known users and a new description of the Twitter. Here is the old and new twitter home page screenshot.

The last redesigned of twitter home page came in last summer with odd hash tags and Twitter memes (and Bieber) that was indeed very boring and unattractive for the users. As mentioned earlier, new home page offer scrolling trending topics, “whose here” and avatars of well known personalities that uses micro blogging service. It also features 20 members in the “see who’s here” heading and offers 3 “top tweets” that are automatically updated every few seconds.

Now, let’s see how it turns out to be……

Twitter has always faced difficulty in converting the new into regular customers, the latest twitter attempt to clearly define its features and itself is a good step. Now, let’s wait and see what it brings to Twitter.

Is Your Business Still Showing a Reclusive Behavior?

So what do you want to do with your business? Do you want to make it like a child having no social life? If that is the case, I am sorry you and your business will eventually not survive due to this reclusive behavior. You should be aware of the fact that social media adoption by the U.S. business owners have doubled since 2009, SBSI (Small Business Survival Index) recently found out that one out of every five business owners is using social media for the promotion purposes. 

So ever wondered why?

75% of the companies have their business pages on social media networks like facebook, LinkedIn etc. because today’s business owners prefer not to spend extra money over the traditional media. This is the biggest reason I believe that this marketing phenomenon will stick around for long. Day by day, market is becoming consumer- driven and if the business doesn’t change with the changing marketing trends then it would rather not survive. Yes! It’s the social media that can help you stand head and shoulder above the rest. This holds so true for the current changing market trends:

“One thing is constant, that is change”

It’s high time to decide……

Decide, whether you want to be like a fresher who sits in the corner of the cafeteria hesitating to even talk while others are busy in their conversation or you want to be someone who takes charge and face the challenges in order to enhance the presence of your brand among masses using the viral marketing strategies. Therefore, it’s up to you how you make an optimum use of social media for the promotion of your business.

Which One Is A Better Advertising Platform For Your Business: Google or Facebook?

Yes! Google is not on the top anymore. As you know, that Google was considered to be best with its most popular pay per click advertising strategy through ever popular search and content network, but now it is facing much difficulty to compete with the social networking portals. The best example today of these social networks is Facebook. These networks provide more targeted advertising opportunities to the business owners.

So what are those better targeting approaches?

Social networks like Facebook allows better targeting of the keywords and specific -demographic ads. Google now seems to be very slow, when it finds you are new in the market, facebook figures out what causes are crucial for you, what kind of videos you need to upload and how much you make recommendation for your friends. This is how; social media provides better results and better ROI-results than Google.

Furthermore, Bing has been turned into a default search engine by facebook for its millions of users. By providing search on the site, facebook gets the opportunity to collect the data that will enhance its image in the advertising world like, why people buy, what do they like and dislike etc.

What else this new platform has to offer?

This new platform involves psychographic data that is, personality traits, values, belief, lifestyle, interest etc. and as these offers are not provided by the Google, Facebook has taken control over the market. In short, the more your advertising is specific, more will be the clicks.

Now, let’s compare Google and Facebook to determine which one is best for you:

• Keyword targeting in Facebook is optional while in Google it is required.

• On Facebook, you can target by location, birth date, workplace interest etc. while on Google you can target only by location and keywords.

• As far as ad placement is concerned, Facebook directs the user right away on the website while Google’s ads are placed on unclear, cluttered and undisclosed websites.

So, now you have to decide which one is a better option for your business. Facebook or Google?

Yahoo Search Marketing Desktop: An Advertiser’s Time Saving Machine

Yahoo has been providing series of enhancements that facilitates both the customers and advertisers. New yahoo search marketing desktop will be very useful for you, if you want to do bunch of work in a very less amount of time. Yahoo search marketing desktop is a free tool which allows you to run more than one advertising campaign at a time.

Now, it takes few seconds to switch between multiple campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords and modify them at the same time. If you are unsure of your work, you can also undo the selected changes without any serious harm done.

So let’s discuss 5 ways on how Yahoo search marketing desktop helps to save an advertiser’s time:

1. It allows mass editing to the settings such as, match types, status and budgets; increase or decrease keyword bids and transfers your view of keywords, ads group, and campaigns to excel.

2. It will take only one simple step to bring in your third party campaign information.

3. Keyword suggestion engine will help you find relevant keywords in order to use in your campaign. You will also be provided with the URL-based keyword suggestions to increase the relevancy of the keywords.

4. With Yahoo search marketing desktop, you can hunt for particular campaigns, keywords, ads and ad groups in your account; also, you can find and change text in keywords, campaigns, ad groups and ads.

5. Lastly, you can recover status and figures of your account’s impression, CTR, clicks, cost, ad eminent scores and other relevant information.
If you find the preceding features helpful for your work then lose no time and start downloading free yahoo search marketing desktop today. Or, get yourself registered on webinar that will introduce you to this tool.

Hence, using free yahoo search marketing desktop will help you do multiple works in no time, from examining the campaign performance to testing your ads and doing everything that will make your campaign a success.

Facebook introduces a new test feature “Promote your post”

A feature has been introduced by Facebook which allows the Facebook page owners to promote specific post. When you update, you can find a link that says, “Promote” next to “comments” and “like”.

When you click that promote link, a dialogue box will appear asking you to create ad with audience targeting, the ad duration and the maximum price. 

You can go to edit page which will lead you to standard facebook advertising page while clicking on the create ad will take you to: 

However, this is just a test feature and is available for only some admins of few pages, as the company has said, "The "Promote" feature is just a test and is unrelated to our Promotions Guidelines" .Thus, the full launch will heavily depend on the results of this new test feature. So let’s see when this gets a full launch!

Trackur: A Revolutionary Social Media Monitoring Tool

Today, web has made it possible for the individuals to discuss about your small business, therefore, it is imperative that you are made aware of what is going behind you, whether those are the praises or negative remarks made about your business.

I was using Google alert for this purpose, it is an effective multi-purpose tool that helps a lot in tracking keywords, content stealing and even to track the links coming to the site, until I found a new tracking tool which is launched for small business owners, last week. It is called trackur free tool; with this unique online monitoring technology, you can setup a search and can trace out the web contents related to your mentions. Trackur searches in all the traditional and social media websites and delivers you results through tracker dashboard, RSS, email or CSV export.

The only thing which separates Trackur free service from the paid one is that you can only search for one keyword at a time. For the Small business owners who are already using Google alerts, they can also make a good use of Trackur, if they want to focus on one specific term in detail. The best thing a tracker free has to offer is it runs every 30 minutes delivering a graph so that you can easily get up to date report of the changing opinions about your business. If you haven’t use it yet due to the price tag attached to it, now you can sign up and give it a try with Trackur free.

Thus, it will be a good idea to use Google alerts for finding easy terms that you are just casually monitoring, but for more refined results you can go with the Trackur.

How Privacy Is Evolving Online

How would an axe murder react against your privacy? It has been elaborated thoroughly and the issue raise in the article about privacy evolution has been defined genuinely. Of course change is inevitable and social media has played a major role to evolve privacy as we can meet up with our old friends through social media. Sharing information has become easier and the risk to share personal information with others is lower than before. In short, an old concept about privacy has totally changed today.

For more details check out Rohit Bhargava's article “Social Media & the Axe Murderer: How Privacy Is Evolving Online”, hope you'll enjoy reading it.

2010 - Stands as a Challenge to Marketers?

The thing which a marketer likes to adopt is challenge. Marketers have been treating the challenges effectively for years. Still there are various challenges standing in the way of marketers. Those challenges are the major concerns for the marketers to handle in 2010. Challenges that will most likely perturb marketers in 2010 are classified below:

1. Sustainability: After doing all the hard work in the past, marketers would be very desperate in order to make their customers stay with them. They would be planning strategies how to make their customers happy and make them stay for long as clients.

2. How to generate large revenues? Marketers would be focusing high on out of the box thinking to generate large revenues with minimum investment. They would be thinking for a greater ROI with minimum expenses and it would keep them awake at nights.

3. Would it be possible to keep the traffic up at the social media? This challenge would be on top list of the marketers to handle. Marketers would be thinking hard how to make their social media network robust so that more users interact with our social media marketing.

4. Platform to generate output: Marketers would have their eyes pointed at sales. They would be in the hunt for ground breaking ideas rather than cost effective ideas to increase their sales in order to generate a profitable output.

5. Keep up with the change: With the evolution of new marketing models, marketers’ think tank would be planning how to keep their pace up to the market standard so that they can lead the market.

6. Offering U.S.P against the best offer: Marketers would be thinking how to offer U.S.P against the best offer made by the competitor in order to make prospect/customer/client buy marketers product other than the competitor’s product.

7. What should be the plan of action against competitor? Whether the competitor attacks the marketer directly or indirectly or make a pessimistic comment against marketer, marketer would have something in back up to answer the competitor. Therefore, marketers would be thinking real to make some plan of actions against competitor’s attack.

8. Brand Promotion: Marketers would genuinely think how to run their marketing campaigns effectively to promote their brand. They would be in a deep search to make their brand value stand out among their target audience.

9. Planning marketing budgets: Planning marketing budget would be a critical challenge for the marketer as making the wrong decision against your marketing budget can ruin whole marketing business; therefore marketers would be thinking twice whether investing marketing budget to a certain business is beneficial or not.

10. Maintaining the customer’s loyalty: Marketers would be planning to maintain their customer’s loyalty. They would be searching for ideas how to make their loyal customer happy in order to build a robust relation with them.

Conclusion: One thing for sure challenges are meant to be faced and how effortlessly the marketers can handle those challenges no one can.

Social Media – A Road to Ultimate Success

One question i.e. definitely going to push one’s mind who wants to develop social media network is: How my social media will be able to interact global users effectively? Obviously its human nature whenever a question arises, he/she starts seeking the answer. Marketing experts have researched on the remarkable success of Social Media and determined that a planned strategy make a social media successful. Strategic planning to run social media should be as follow:

1. First step to success: You must decide your goal before commencing your network on social media. You should have your target audience in your mind to deliver the best value to your social media; therefore you must have a plan of action to accomplish what you desire through social media marketing.

2. Why social media? After identifying the audience, you must be clear why would users interact with your social media? Would my social media be able to make a strong impact among the audience? Therefore, you must watch your competitors businesses carefully; it will let you develop ideas on how to make your social media marketing successful.

3. Give and Take: Don’t promote your business or service only because social media marketing is not just for you, it’s to deliver fun to all; therefore regardless of your business, you must also give technical support, advice or even free stuffs to your social media users and let them share their views on your social media through blogs, forums or other social media tools.

4. Brand Promotion: Rather than being social, you should market specific items through your social media to make sales in order promote your brand effectively. To achieve brand promotion, you must build your connections with partner websites through banners to make prospects reach your social media network. The more ROI (return on investment) you receive, the more your social media is successful.

5. How to make users feel your presence: You should take a step forward to let your social media generate respect among your business partners, potential customers, customers or friends; therefore you must decide whom will represent your social media and how well he/she will represent your business/service to stand out creative in the market.

6. Participation: Your social media network should provide a platform for users to interact with each other and share their views online.

7. Openness: Your social media network should be open for all users. Resources to make your social media open are polls, contests or message sharing online.

8. Conversation: Social media network should provide a communication source to let the users interact online. A tool used for this purpose commonly is a “shout box” for a live chat.

9. Community: One thing that a social media must have is a community. Community is formed by building good relation with the others. More the users are attached towards your site; more are the chances for your social media community to prosper.

10. Connectedness: Your social media should also have useful videos, articles or online blogs to develop connectivity.

11. Sharing: Once you have established your social media presence, you should connect with social media users either through face book, twitter and LinkedIn and participate in discussion forums to know how they feel about social media marketing. It’s a good idea to attend conferences on social media to generate some ideas for your social media network.

12. Updating the social network You should keep on updating your social media to progress along with your competitors. You can post an interesting fact, an article or a blog to keep users stay towards your social network.

13. Where does social media fit? Social media fits into the marketing channels such that what you want to communicate about your services with the users and how well you use those channels to communicate effectively with the users.

14. Success or Failure: If your social media is good enough to develop strong customer relationship and able to generate large revenues for your social media; it means your social media network is a success. Positive comments and reviews about your social media ensure success while improper plan of action to run your social media will definitely result in a failure.

15. Spend more on social media: It’s a wiser thinking to spend more dollars to promote your social media network rather spending money on other advertisements. It gives you a slight assurance regarding the stability of your network.

Conclusion: Following the preceding steps in a proper sequence will gradually lead your social media to achieve success.

The Emergence of Media in Different Decades

In 60’s

Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play


In 70’s

Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite


In 80’s

Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite, CD, Walkman, Video Game, Personal Computer, Videocassette, Recorder, Mobile Phones, Laserdisc


In 90’s

Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite, CD, Walkman, Video Game, Personal Computer, Videocassette, Recorder, Mobile Phones, Laserdisc, DVD, QuickTime, Internet, Email, Webcam, Tivo, PDA, Smartphone


In 2000

Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Cinema, Theater, Poster, TV, Long Play, Tape, Satellite, CD, Walkman, Video Game, Personal Computer, Videocassette, Recorder, Mobile Phones, Laserdisc, DVD, QuickTime, Internet, Email, Webcam, Tivo, PDA, Smartphone, Satellite Radio, HDTV, Blue Ray, iTunes, Podcasting, Blog, RSS, Flickr, BitTorrent, YouTube, Wikipedia, Joost

Article Review: 7 Tips for Writing Engaging Content

While reading through the social media today forum, I found this article with pretty ordinary title. But when I start reading the article, I found it is challenging the ongoing school of thoughts about blogs and their content.

This article is providing “7 tips for writing engaging content”, but it is actually focusing on what to avoid while writing content for a blog. In the first tip the author is advising to not clutter your articles/content with lot of sharing buttons, widgets and so on. It will only distract the attention of the reader and make it difficult to focus on the content.

Secondly, he talks about the banner blindness that how side rail distract the visitor attention from the content.

Thirdly, he advices to avoid putting your big smiling picture on the blog.

In the fourth advice, he emphasizes to avoid slang words and bad language.

Fifth advice is about the comments on the posts. Author says, not to pull unnecessary comments from the social media. Let the relevant people participate in a neutral manner instead.

Second last advice is about moderation of comments and importance of their replies.

Finally, he advices to avoid unnecessary posts for just filling up the space. Write only when there is something really important, and spread it through RSS and social media.

Read the full article at http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/162838