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7 Ways to Use Facebook for Business Right Now

December 16th, 2010

Do you have a Facebook Page for your business but not exactly sure what to do with it? Below are 7 ways to use Facebook for your business, RIGHT NOW.

Facebook Ads – Instantly increase your brands exposure by getting thousands of impressions on Facebook. You can set-up a campaign similar to how you might with Adwords, only much easier. You simply create your Ad headline, copy and image. There are impressive demographic targeting options as well that can put your ad in front of the most appropriate and targeted audience. Good news is, you only pay for clicks.
Create a Facebook App – Apps are a great way to add a level of interaction with your brand. You can have one custom built or use semi-automatic services that can have you an app in minutes.
Start a Contest - Facebook is an ideal platform for contests. Make Facebook your main hub for the contest. Giveaways work well. People love getting something for free. Make it fun and interactive. You can have folks “Like” your page to enter, upload a photo, share an idea, etc. Facebook has some tools that help as well.
Events – Promote upcoming events through the events interface. You could promote upcoming trade shows you will be at, seminars, etc.
Surveys – Want to know what your customers are thinking? Why not ask them? Facebook has some great polling and survey apps that make it easy to get feedback and ideas. Who knew market research was this easy?
Feature Recent Blog Posts – Facebook is a great platform to syndicate your blog content through your network. There are lots of ways that automate this process.
Post Links to Recent Press Releases – Keep you customers up-to-date with recent news about your business. Don’t over do this part. Facebook is a great tool to promote your business, but no one wants to feel like they are being advertised to on Facebook.

If I’ve sparked some ideas for you, put them in action and share them in the comments section below. If you have tried some of these ideas or have some of your own, share your experiences. What worked, what didn’t? What would you change?

Tags: Facebook, Social Media
Posted in Facebook | 2 Comments »

Come on Bing – That is Not Very Nice

December 9th, 2010

So I was logging into Bing local and was brought to a screeching halt. Looks like they don’t support the Google Chrome browser… Wonder why?

Tags: Bing, Chrome, Google
Posted in Web Browsing | No Comments »

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

November 29th, 2010

Tags: funny
Posted in Web Browsing | No Comments »

Where Dial-up Really Came From

November 12th, 2010

Tags: funny, internet
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Why Blogging is a Good Idea for Business

November 8th, 2010

Blogging is very popular right now and for good reason. Having an active blog synced to your website can do great things for your online marketing such as keeping fresh content pumping in, providing additional opportunities for new inbound links, adds credibility to your business and can increase your overall traffic volume to not just your blog but to your website as well.

Fresh Content and Additional Pages

If you have heard anything on the SEO front then you have probably heard that Google and other search engines love fresh content. Having lots of content is good for so many reasons. Each post you write is another opportunity for you to have content that supports some of your targeted keywords. Even if you do not really put a conscious effort into optimizing your posts, you can and will most likely still get traffic from long tail searches.

Like I mentioned earlier, each post is a new page on your site. The more pages you have on your site the better. Also, with each page having it’s own opportunities to rank and send traffic, over time you will see steady traffic coming in to your various posts. It’s almost like free advertising.

Inbound Link Opportunities

One of the best ways to acquire inbound links is to give folks good reasons to link to you. Blogs are perfect for this because they can act as a giant online resource filled with useful information that other sites love to link to.

Blog content is a perfect match for social media. Blog content is fresh and timely and information like this often does well in social media. Frequent content gives you new opportunities to syndicate your information out to the various social networks you are involved in. This will build you a source of new inbound links. Search engines love social media links and these links often have a reputation of sending visitors along with it.

Credibility

Businesses that blog not only add more value but by doing this they earn additional credibility and authority. Blogging about your business and your industry positions you as an expert in your field. You get a platform to showcase your industry knowledge and experience and your readers receive a valuable resource of industry information.

Increased Traffic

This is a given. When you add extra content, links and social media, all this easily equates to increased traffic. The content and links will send you reoccurring organic traffic and social media provides instant traffic spurts. When you generate new content on a regular basis, you will enjoy the traffic benefits that come along.

Many businesses have already found the benefits and value in an active business blog. For those of you who are reading this that do not have a blog for your business, hopefully this post will encourage you to explore this idea further. If you have a blog, what are some challenges and successes that you have had so far?

Tags: Business Blogging
Posted in Blogging | 3 Comments »

Top 5 Online Marketing Infographics

October 26th, 2010

1: The CMO’s Guide to The Social Landscape

2: Are We Addicted to the Internet?

3: Google’s Long History of Social Media Attemps

4: How Mobile Phones are Changing Social Media

5: What People do Online

Tags: Infographics, online marketing
Posted in online marketing | No Comments »

How to Repurpose Content for Maximum Efficiency

October 22nd, 2010

Let’s face it, as much as us marketing folks preach ongoing content creation for various promotions, not everyone has the time. So how can a company pump out a blog post, press release and an e-newsletter all in one week? I think you might be seeing where I’m going with this.

The need to repurpose

Companies are busy and often understaffed, many want to be everywhere and do everything, but simply do not have the time. A great way to maximize the content you do produce is to repurpose. Now, this might not be appropriate in every occasion, but it is great when you can pull it off. One example is big company news. Let’s say you just released a new or improved product and you want to let everyone know about it. A good plan would be to announce the news in a press release, in a blog post and through an e-newsletter.

Think ahead when developing content

If you put a little thought into your content ahead of time, you can think of a a way to write it so it will be appropriate across several mediums.

5 Ideas to get you started

Below are some ideas of content that you might be creating and how you can maximize it by repurposing:

A good place to start for company news is with the press release. Once this copy is finalized, you can add it as a new blog post and add it into your email as well. This gives you three opportunities to broadcast your news to different audiences from only writing once.
If you recently hosted a webinar, you can take your slides and add them to your blog, send out an email with the link to the blog and even add the slides to Slideshare and Flickr.
Break-up a recent long article, ebook or whitepaper into blog posts.
On the flip side, you can take a series of current blog posts and turn them into an ebook.
Take snippets out of any pre-existing content and share them on Twitter and Facebook. This should supply you with a list of updates!

As everyone knows, savvy marketers and businesses don’t work harder, they work smarter!

Posted in online marketing | No Comments »

How Social Media can Help Drive Sales

October 12th, 2010

Social media, blah, blah, blah. Everyone wants to be involved in social media now. Lots of businesses have either dipped their toes in social media or have thought about it. Besides social media being such a buzz word, why would a business get involved?

Help Drive Sales

Ahhh, probably just got your boss’s attention with that subheading huh? Yes, if done correctly, social media can have an impact on sales. This may be directly or indirectly, but solid social media involvement without question can have an impact on your bottom line. Bet you’re wondering how!

Links

Social media is a great place to build new inbound links to your website or blog. Each time you submit your content out you get a backlink. Often times, when someone votes for your content, you get additional backlinks. Some sites have nofollow links and some are actually dofollow. Either way, it is a link back and Google loves social media links right now. If your content gains some traction on a popular social site, you could get thousands of inbound links as well as thousands of unique visitors to your site.

How does this equate to sales? Inbound links help with organic rankings. Inbound links send visitors. The more visitors you get, the more chances you have for conversions.

Engagement

One of the best ways to get people to engage with your brand is to put your business out there. Get out and be social. Try to shy away from heavy self promotion. Share and publish things that you know people would be interested in. Put your ideas out there and get folks talking. Listen and respond.

Brand Awareness

Social media is great for brand awareness. It is one of the best “bang for your buck” venues out there. There are so many sites to get involved in and each site has its own community. Great way to build a community around your business.

Content Syndication

There are tons of sites that you can submit your content to. That alone is a form of content syndication. If anyone shares your content on any social networks, then your content will spread way past your connections. Social media enables you to put your content out to be broadcasted across the globe and gives you international syndication. Plus, if your content catches on it can go “viral” which really gets you out there.

Make new connections

Social networking gives you the opportunity to connect with folks all over the world. You can greatly enhance your existing contact base. You’ll have many many people recognizing your brand just from your social media presence alone. You never know which one of those contacts might need what you have, or know of someone who would.

This is just scraping the surface of the new possibilities social media can provide your business. Please remember though you will get out what you put in. The more time you spend in social media, the more luck you will have converting traffic to sales. If you just “dabble.” don’t expect much to happen.

Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Browser Falls Below 50% of Worldwide Market for First Time

October 5th, 2010

Finally!!! IE is dying off. If you know any designers, then you know that there is a real hate towards IE, and to be honest, for good reason. If you just step back and try Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, then no doubt you will choose Firefox or Chrome. They are simply better browsers. Firefox has a big following but Chrome is growing in popularity at a rapid rate.

Don’t just take my word for it, read the press release from StatCounter:

BOSTON & DUBLIN–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser has fallen below 50% of the worldwide market for the first time according to StatCounter. The company’s research arm, StatCounter Global Stats finds that Microsoft IE fell to 49.87% in September followed by Firefox with 31.5%. Google’s Chrome continues to increase market share at an impressive rate and has more than tripled from 3.69% in September 2009 to 11.54% in September this year.

“Just two years ago IE dominated the worldwide market with 67%.”
“This is certainly a milestone in the Internet browser wars,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Just two years ago IE dominated the worldwide market with 67%.”

He added that Microsoft’s agreement with European Commission competition authorities to offer EU users a choice and menu of browsers from March may have tipped IE below 50% globally.

In Europe, IE market share has fallen to 40.26% in September this year from 46.44% in September last year. In North America IE is still above 50% at 52.3% followed by Firefox at 27.21% and Chrome at 9.87%.

The rise of Google Chrome in North America has also been impressive and in June it overtook Safari for the first time.

StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. StatCounter, which provides free website traffic information, publishes browser stats in its StatCounter Global Stats, a free online research tool. It also monitors Internet market share battles including Search Engines, Social Media and Operating Systems including mobile.

Read full release

Tags: Browsers, IE, Internet Explorer
Posted in Web Browsing | No Comments »