Online Marketing for Local Business
Posts tagged facebook
Top Myths About Social Media Marketing
14 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
There are a number of myths that are common among many businesses that are keeping them from joining everyone else in the social media marketing world. We would like to address each of these myths and expose them for the misconceptions that they are.
Myth #1: My Customers Aren’t on Social Media
Wow, if we had had a dollar for every time we’ve heard this one….This myth keeps more companies and business owners from interacting with their potential customers through social media than any other myth.
The nice thing is that all you need is a little bit of data to convince people that their target customers are indeed on social networks.
For instance, 80% of female Internet users have become fans of a product or brand on a social network site and 72% report that they learned about a new product through social media. Take a look at the graph below – more than half of Facebook and Twitter users are over 35, not to mention LinkedIn.
Social networking is a pervasive cultural phenomenon, and there is no demographic that isn’t represented substantially on one or more social networking sites.
14 Ways To Promote Your Company Or Brands Online – Conclusion
14 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
Top Web Promotion Methods #8 – #14:
8. Bookmarking/Tagging
Social bookmarking has become a popular method to share, organize, search and manage bookmarks of web resources. Some of the most popular social bookmarking websites: Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Fark, Mixx, MyBlogLog, Newsvine, Propeller, Reddit, Slashdot.org, StumbleUpon, Yahoo!, and Buzz.
9. Discussion Forums and Boards
Participating in online forums can be a great way to market your products and services, and interact with your audience and other professionals. Engaging your audience in a niche forum can bring high value to your website and brand, too.
10. Content Aggregation
Content aggregation offers you the chance to bring all news and feeds around your online community accounts in one place. Some would argue this is the future of social media. Emerging content aggregation websites are: Bloglines, FriendFeed, Lifestream.fm, Lijit.
11. Brand Monitoring
Social networks are also offering a variety of tools that can help businesses understand the positioning of their brand. Popular examples are: Buzzlogic, Radian6, and ReputationDefender.
12. Ratings and Review Sites
Another great way to find out where your website stands, or how your brand is perceived by others, is through ratings and reviews. The two most popular are Yelp and GetSatisfaction.
13. Widgets
For those trying to promote their own brands, they can create personalized badges, using interesting widgets on Facebook, Twitter, and other networks by using WidgetBox or SpringWidgets.
14. Wikis
Wikis are like an online encyclopedia. The most well known is Wikipedia.org, but many other wikis exist, including: Citizendium.org, AboutUs.org, Pbwiki/PBworks.com, or Wetpaint.com.
Along with all the new ways of publishing your content on networking sites, it is important to publish your articles on publishing sites like EzineArticles, eHow, Google Docs (docs.google.com), IdeaMarketers, Yahoo Articles Group (groups.yahoo.com) and submit your press releases on important specialized sites like i-Newswire, PR.com, PressReleasePoint, and PRLog.org.
Social Media Marketing can be very confusing at times, since there are so many networks and channels to choose from. Creating a presence on all the channels is quite time consuming, and randomly choosing a network or networks is not a very good social media strategy either. Many companies have struggled to understand what social media marketing mix they should use to make their brand successful online.
That is why it’s vitally important to identify which channels are suitable for your business depending on your target audience. Businesses should plan a step-by-step onlíne marketing strategy, and brainstorm ideas with their onlíne marketing representative(s) that will work to promote their products and/or services.
Can Google Overcome The Dominance of Facebook?
14 years
by admin
in Uncategorized
It seems that Google recently put everything on its main homepage, except for Google Buzz. What’s up with that? They even put the PacMan game in their logo for two days running for heaven’s sake…so you would think that some of the brightest minds on the planet would have figured out by now that if Google truly wants to be the winner on the new web, they simply have to fully integrate all their programs into one homepage – or at least place Buzz right there side-by-side with the Gmail button.
Google wants to be your one-stop center on the web – as does Facebook – and Buzz has all the ingredients to finally make that happen. It could be THE place for sharing not just your conversations, but photos, videos, and everything else. Will it ever live up to its full potential, and become a true Facebook killer?
The main reason Facebook is such a serious threat to Google is not just because of the massive amount of users it has – but the amount of time those users stay on Facebook. If you look at only an Alexa comparison alone, Facebook users spend over 30 minutes on the site, which is three triple the time users stay on Google. Facebook also beats Google in pages viewed per user and bounce rate. Could all the recent changes to their SERPs be not only their answer to the upcoming marriage of Yahoo and Bing, but a strong way of presenting a real challenge to Facebook’s overwhelming statistics?
Truth be told, most web users are lazy, and they want a one-stop solution to meet all their needs. They want to connect with friends and family, they want to broadcast to the world, they want to search for something to purchase, they want to be entertained… Google could be that solution, but not until Google Buzz becomes a force.
The main problem with Google is that it has no well-defined center which users could call their own. I don’t think that most users have fully bonded with iGoogle. Putting any privacy issues aside, I don’t think they have embraced it in the same way most web users have embraced their Facebook pages. There needs to be one rallying point on Google, which seems to be a disjointed collection of undoubtedly fantastic services right now, and all the elements that are present in Google Buzz could be the answer.
For many web users, Facebook is the starting point of their web day. In many cases it’s probably the only place they go online religiously each day. Why? Because all their friends and family are there, and they don’t want to miss out on any news or gossip. In the new, evolving social etiquette, not checking your Facebook page has become the ultimate faux pas.
But before you say that no one is going defeat or compete with Facebook, not so fast! Even empires come and go; and a web site is even more fickle, especially when something more convenient comes along. Does anyone remember MySpace, which is still a very popular site, but has now assumed a completely different niche (music, entertainment) and no longer has the near the same numbers it once had. Facebook, or even Google could suffer the same fate if something better comes along.
Google’s main business has been and still is online search. It is Google’s bread and butter, which may have blinded those in charge from seeing the bigger picture. And a bigger payday.