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