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.