Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

How to Get the Best of Facebook Fan Page for Facebook Marketing

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Almost everyone is exploring the bowels of online social media for marketing. Twitter and Facebook run neck and neck, when it comes to providing tools, applications and opportunities for online marketing. With a legion of three million fan pages to date, Facebook seems to outpace Twitter in the growing field of online business. The key reason behind the sky-rocketing popularity of Facebook marketing is Facebook’s comprehensive interface featuring multiple applications to let users schedule updates, locate influential people and monitor traffic.

Facebook fan page is a most innovative and interesting virtual marketing platform for brands and businesses. A whole new ball game, it displays your product, promote your brand, fetch you customers and cultivate your relationship with them. The first and foremost important step is setting up a fan page with the name of your brand or business. Then, follow the tips on how to make the most of your fan page to indulge in Facebook marketing.

First – Once you have created a fan page, invite your friends and relatives to join Facebook and be your fans. May be, the page neither interests them nor serves their needs, but it is necessary to make things happen as people go where there is a crowd.

Second – Promoting the fan page is the next important step to take forward. Link your Facebook profile to your website, blog and other social media profiles in order to promote the fan page. Attach the link to the fan page to emails and newsletters and press releases. You can even let it be displayed in business cards.

Third – Make yourself known to get your fan page noticed by others. Join the groups and fan pages that cater to your interests or relate to your business activity. Enlarge your social media network and interact with the people in the network through walls, comments, likes or chatting.

Fourth – Have a go at every possible measure to keep your Facebook fan page active. Interact with your fans, monitor their activities and respond to their comments on a regular basis. Update the fan page with fresh content and share it with your fans. Comment on their posts and respond to their comments on your updates. Active networking will encourage them to promote your brand or business.

Fifth – Many companies doing social media marketing offer discount on their products or services to Facebook fans and Twitter followers. You can go this way to make your fans stay on the page. Offer something to them for a limited period of time. It will boost your Facebook fan page.

Sixth – Keep your fans engaged in some or other activity on your fan page. Throw some questions that pique their interest. Run a competition to make them participate in it. Make a survey on some interesting topic to draw their attention and opinion.

Seventh – Facebook is one of the most prominent members in the world of search engines. It is in the good books of search engine crawlers. Now, search engine bots craw and index social media profiles. So, to thicken your chances of getting noticed in Google’s social search result pages, make your Facebook profile searchable. Optimize the profile page following some basic SEO measures.

Hurry up to have a fan page on Facebook and do Facebook marketing to the fullest. Keep looking forward to the next blogs on the same topic.

Facebook Applications for Complete Engagement & Entertainment

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Facebook is always on the front with release of latest applications for the use of its users crosswise the globe. The social networking giant keeps updating its store of applications to provide more and more dollops of fun and entertainment to the users. You can make the most of these applications to keep your followers coming back to your profile over and again. Here is a list of Facebook applications that I have googled this week.

One of the fun applications on Facebook is Friend Block. It helps you make a collage of your friends on your Facebook profile page. Make a compilation of pictures from your Facebook photo albums and make a collage of the pictures, as beautiful as rainbow. The application will let you pull all those pictures together and display them in colors of brilliance.

Looking on to meet new faces that are not among your Facebook friends and followers. Take a turn to the Video Chat application. From the store of vChatter, this application will help you connect with your friends through live chat. Chatting with friends apart, searching out new Facebook users who have their interests in common with you is another use of this application.

Lucky Train is such a Facebook fun application using which you can make your Facebook friends take interest in your profile. The game based application requires you to send trains to your friends in different parts of the world and helps you build your community with them. You can access frequent updates of the game through the application page.

Tetris Battle is an updated classic game application to be used by Facebook users. It is a nice means of involvement with your Facebook friends and followers online. You can play the game with them and compete with them at the same time. Pique your followers’ curiosity to visit your profile on a regular basis.

Photo of the Day is a fun photo application for the fun-loving Facebook users. The application is as simple as its title implies. You can apply it to both random and tagged photos. It provides an excellent means to locate pictures that you may not have come across on Facebook.

Another Facebook application to let you indulge in fun with your friends is Casino City. With this application, you can have your own casino in Las Vegas and transform it into a fun zone for them. Have a go at the application to be the boss of your own casino.

Being an active Facebook user, you keep updating your profile page with latest status statements. Do you know which word you use mostly in your Facebook status updates? My Most Used Words is an application to which word or words you use most of the times.

Spice up the Facebook profile page of yours with some interesting quotes. The Facebook application, All My Quotes, helps you create your own quotes and lets you use the quotes of others. Building a community of followers quoting each other is an advantage of this specific application.

Try these applications to spice up your Facebook profile page, make it visit worthy, get engaged in fun with your friends and boost your Facebook activity. Don’t forget to share your feel with me…

Third-party Twitter Applications to Enhance Your Social Media Experience – Part 2

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

Tlist is a Twitter user application. It is a Twitter directory where you can make a search based

on list topic names, create a list of your own and view the popular lists. Your followers or other users can join your list. You will be notified whenever some Twitter user applies for it. Approving the application is your sole decision. Tlist offers great use to round up the like-minded tweeters at one place.

PubliTweet is vital application to make your Twitter lists more useful. It provides an embed code that in fact presents your lists including the tweet text, headline, blurb and thumbnail of the content being shared in a stream. You can plant the code on your site. PubliTweet not only boosts the usefulness of your Twitter lists but also makes the tweets more shareable through Twitter and Facebook.

TwapperKeeper is an online application using which you can get some fundamental statistics on how a particular hashtag is performing on Twitter. This easy-to-use tool will get you a general overview. It allows you to create an archive of specific keywords, usernames and hashtags to be tracked. It displays the number of times a particular hashtag has been tweeted. It also lists in the archive the tweets that have recently been tracked.

With QuoteURL, it is possible to embed a stream of tweets into a post. Though Twitter gives a code to facilitate interactive tweet embedding, the code is not always suitable. QuoteURL is the best tool to serve the purpose of making embeddable tweets. Using the application, you can embed even a single tweet. It gives a nice, clean embeddable tweet with text of the tweet. It makes the tweets more useful.

Besides Twitter Places that Twitter has come up with for its users worldwide, there are many other sites to display location-based tweets. Local Twitter Trends showcase the tweets based on the trends that are on go in major cities of the world. Clicking on any city in the list on the left-hand side bar will give a pop-up of highly popular keywords and clicking on a specific keyword will show a list of tweets related to the keyword on the right-hand side. It gives you an easy access to the Twitter based conversation is a specific city of the globe. However, you had better have a go at Monitter to track tweets on specific topics. It displays the tweets from a specific location in a three-column format.

WeFollow is a Twitter directory developed by Kevin Rose who is the founder of Digg. This online Twitter directory focuses on the topics that are associated with the Twitter users. You can add yourself to the directory easily. You need to tweet out the hashtag to make your username searchable in the directory. The site lets you discover new users who you have your interests in common with. Plus, you can browse the categories of the site to see the top users.

Twellow is another Twitter directory with the “Twitter Yellow Pages” as its tagline. This directory is the best to search for popular Twitter users from the fields like food, home, garden, biotechnology and other industries. It is a highly useful search engine to access the Twitter search world.

A Review on Facebook Social Plugins for the Benefit of Active Facebook Users

Friday, June 4th, 2010

There is no limit to the offerings of Facebook for its users with different purposes and from different walks. Facebook is up with a palette of social plugins to let bloggers and business site owners make the most of its sharing functionality. If your site has its own Facebook profile and Facebook following base, get your content shared among the Facebook users and their followers, get the content voted, liked and commented on by them through the use of these social plugins from the Facebook store. Implementing the plugins is fairly simple though understanding their applications is a little confusing.

Activity Feed

The Activity Feed plugin shows the latest activity centering around your site on Facebook. It also delivers data on the number of times your content hosted by Facebook has been liked and shared by the Facebook users. Displaying a steam of activity from your Facebook contacts and highlighting their content is another application of the Activity Feed plugin. When you are logged out, it will feature recommendations from the site of yours. This powerful tool will let you know how hot your content is and what is hot on Facebook.

Comments

The Comments Box another Facebook social plugin will your friends comment on the link or content that you have posted to your Facebook profile. The plugin appears like a box in which the Facebook users can enter their comments on their followers’ articles, webpages, photos or their Facebook status. The users are allowed to leave their comments with links that get published back on their Facebook profiles and in their friends’ streams. The Comments Box is a high-end comment system with link sharing potentiality.

Login with Faces

The Login with Faces one of the useful Facebook social plugins will display the profile pictures of your friends who have joined or liked your site on Facebook. It lets you specify the number of rows to display the faces in. The plugin customizes the rows according to the number specified by you. If you are on lookout for more users to join your site and share your content, using this particular social plugin is a recommendation.

Like Button

The Like Button is a most simple Facebook social plugin to vote for a product, an article, a webpage, a link or a photo by clicking once on “Like”. Using this one-click icon, your friends express their liking for your content posted on Facebook and share it back to their Facebook followers. If any of your friends is logged in, the button will highlight the users who have already given like for the content. This plugin is useful particularly for media sites, e-commerce sites, software application sites and blogs.

Like Box

Akin to the Fan Box, Like Box is an updated Facebook social plugin. It features the Like button and displays a gallery of the users who have clicked the button to like a particular piece of content. A single click on the Like button will include you among the followers of a Facebook page. Then onwards, you will be receiving updates from the page to your newsfeeds. This plugin acts like a promotion tool using which you can gain likes for your product or site featured on your Facebook page.

Live Stream

The Live Stream is a great Facebook social plugin to let the users stream a live event. A great application for real-time comment and chat on Facebook, it will let your friends visit your site, share your content and comment on your activity in real-time environment. It works best when you run a live streaming video for speeches, concerts or webcasts.

Recommendations

The Recommendations feature a list of the content that has been mostly liked by the Facebook users. It is almost akin to the Activity Feed. However, the latter offers a more dynamic social experience to the users. The plugin generates recommendations for the most liked content from your site. The Recommendations is an alternative, not a complement to the Activity Box.

Google Social Search – A SEO Benefit for Bloggers, Social Networkers & Social Media Marketers

Monday, May 10th, 2010

The growing popularity of Facebook has prompted Google to launch Social Search service. In the third week of March, this year Google received a defeating blow from Facebook in number of visits and views. Social Search is an outcome of Google’s innovative efforts to affirm its stand as the most visited platform against social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. This Google service is an all-in-one key to explore the social media sites for updates from friends, fans and followers in online social circles. Google social search

Online identity, online reputation and online entity are the terms associated with social networking activity that has been made a part of SEO campaigns. The promotion of social media content is one of the SEO measures for the enhanced search engine relevance and reputation of websites. Google Social Search is a medium to generate visitors in a bulk for the social media content. It is not a mere launch from the Google labs but an advanced step of the search giant to help you keep up with the social networking activities of your friends.

Know how to Get the Best of Google Social Service to Gain Huge Notice in the Online Social World -

• To get your social media content noticed widely and access tweets, feeds, reviews, blogs, buzzes, diggs and social updates from your friends in the Google Social Search world, you need a Gmail account. You are required to form a social circle that will automatically incorporate the contacts from your Gmail chat list and groups like Friends, Family and Coworkers.
• You can widen the sphere of your online social circle by linking your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, FriendFeed, Yahoo! Buzz, Picasa and other social media accounts to your Google profile. Google will access all your social media contacts from your Google Profile and feature them as in its Social Search world.
• You can conduct search on a particular keyword or phrase related to your friends’ or your social media content, once you are logged into your Google account. Right keyword usage is similarly significant in Google Social Search as on the other search platforms of Google. The Social Search bot will pull information on the search keyword from your social media links and your friends’ social media profiles.
• The search result pages will feature the results on your search topic at the bottom. The Social Search results will highlight the social media content from those who are in your social circle, if it is found relevant to your keyword or search phrase. Providing personalized search experience is another objective of Google Social Search service.
• Get into the swing of online networking with more and more people. Keep your social media profiles active by updating the content at regular intervals. Let all sorts of your social media content go publicly visible and accessible in order to drive traffic from Google Social Search world to your social media profiles.

Google Social Search is a benefit for active bloggers, online social networkers and social media marketers from SEO perspectives. The wider your social network expands, the more it will be difficult to manage. The Social Search is Google’s voluntary service to help your keep track of all happenings in the circle of your social networks at one go.

In near future, Google Social Search will, no doubt, turn up with opportunities for SEO experts to devise strategies in order to promote one’s social media content to the top of social search result pages.

A Guide on How to Use the Latest Facebook Marketplace – A Cutting-edge Internet Marketing Tool

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Social networking platforms are much of business networking podiums. Integrating business networking tools, Facebook and Twitter are abuzz with the internet marketing activities. The second most popular social media site according to Alexa, Facebook has come a long way as a powerhouse platform for businesses marketing products online. Facebook had first launched its Marketplace application in the mid of 2007 to facilitate the posting of classifieds on the site. The updated Marketplace is the latest launch from Facebook. The new version of the Facebook based internet marketing application is powered by Oodle, a leading online classified company. Oodle has developed it with the thought of making it more convenient for people to buy and sell things, in mind. facebook marketplace

Fundamental Objectives of Using the Facebook Marketplace

Selling, buying and searching for anything are the purposes that the use of Facebook Marketplace is meant for. Using the Marketplace, the Facebook users can sell unwanted goods to support charities for a good and great cause. Moreover, you can track what the friends and fans in your profile are buying and selling. Millions of the Facebook Marketplace users all over the globe can view your classified listings. There is an option to let you transfer your listings from the old Marketplace to the new one. If you are a first-time user of the Facebook Marketplace application, log on to facebook.com/marketplace.

The Procedure to Create a Classified Ad for the Facebook Marketplace

Take a digital camera and shoot a close-up picture of the thing that you want to market online. Click the picture against a brightly lit background. Transfer the photo in the JPG file format from the camera to your computer screen.

Log on to Facebook.com and log in to your account. Then, click your way to the Marketplace application. Make a click on the Applications menu in the lower corner on the left hand side of the computer screen to choose Marketplace. The Marketplace welcome screen will pop up.

“Sell It”, “Sell for a Cause”, “Give It Away” and “Ask for It” are the main options that you will find at your disposal. Selling things for money is the primary purpose of using this Facebook internet marketing application. Compose a pity and punchy description on an item in the box displaying, “Sell something to make extra cash”. A click on the box will change it into “Yourname” is selling. Give a headline to the listing. After writing the headline and description, click on the blue Post-button.

Write a punch line in the box featuring “Why are you selling it”. You can write that you want to earn money. You had better use the space to write a sub headline for your classified advertisement. Write a brief but power-packed description. Type the figures of your price in the “Price” box and mention your location. Browse the list of categories and choose a particular category to include your item.

In the box next to category, you can provide the details of the item. Focus on the size, color, style, condition and use of the item. You can change the details whenever you wish. Once you are done with the advertising text, click the Browse button to upload the photo of the item from the computer. Putting a tick in the terms box, hit the “Submit” button.

Next a screen asking you to publish the listing in the Facebook profile will pop up. A choice for a short, a full or a one line description is available there. Choosing the short description option is recommended. You can tick the box, “Always do this for Marketplace”, if you want to go with the same option whenever you publish something. Hit the “Publish” button to get the listing published on your Facebook profile. Or get it displayed in the Marketplace by choosing the “No, Tanks” button.

You can ask your Facebook friends and fans to promote the listing in their respective News feeds. You can add maximum five of your friends to your Facebook Marketplace account by clicking on their Facebook profile pictures. Using the “Find Friends” box, you can locate them. Choose the “Skip” button, if you do not want your friends to be bothered about the promotion of your listing.

If you want to customize the post by adding a personal message, click the “Add Personal Message” button on the confirmation screen. If not, simply click the “Send” button. It is easy to edit or update your already published listings. You can perform this task by clicking the Edit Details-hotlink in the Manage My Listing page. You can edit or update each of the details of your items. You can also manage your listings by clicking the My Listings in the Facebook Marketplace menu.

Promote Your Social Media Profiles Using these WordPress Plugins

Friday, March 5th, 2010

In the present era of social networking, one’s social media profiles bears evidence to one’s online identity. Product promotion, brand visibility, business publicity, blogging, networking, fun and gaming are the bread and butter applications of social media. That is why; promoting social media profiles is an unavoidable issue. The use of WordPress plugins makes it easier to perform the task by integrating your social media profiles with your WordPress blog. WordPress is two in one – a blogging platform and a content management system. Promoting your social media profiles using WordPress plugins is as important as promoting your WordPress blogs using social media applications. I have assorted a few highly innovative WordPress plugins for your benefit.

DandyID Services – with a support for nearly 330 social networks, the DandyID Services is the most useful WordPress extension. You can integrate any of your social media profiles with your WordPress blog using this plugin. It requires the user to create a free account with DandyID. The plugin is customizable.

Social Media Page – This WordPress plugin comes handy for social butterflies. It is supportive for near about 140 social networks. It lets you integrate your social media profiles with any page or post. Using the plugin, you can link to your social networking profiles instead of cramming the sidebar with multiple icons.

Social Profilr – Though not all inclusive, this plugin is useful for WordPress bloggers with 14 important social media profiles. The Social Profilr works with a simple line of code (HTML or non HTML). It integrates the social media profiles with the WordPress About page.

FriendFeed Activity Widget – It is a popular lifestreaming plugin, convenient to use. What you need to use the plugin is a FriendFeed account. You can set it up simply by logging in to your account. It allows you to keep Twitter @replies hid on your WordPress blog pages. It is easy to use because of its minimalistic design.

Lifestream – This plugin offers an independent use. It does not entail a third party account to keep your social media profiles in tune with your WordPress blog. You can utilize it either as a sidebar widget or an icon on a WordPress page or blog post. Lifestream too comes with the option to hide Twitter @replies from the stream of your social media activities.

Lifestream.fm – This plugin offers support for the largest number of social networks to let your stream your social media activity onto your WordPress blog. You need to have an account with the Lifestream.fm. Setting it up as a sidebar widget is simple. The only downside of this plugin is the display of all your tweets including @replies.

Retaggr – Supportive for over 180 social networks, Retaggr lets you not only promote your social media profiles but also the profile information of your commenters from the tiny icon next to the comments. The social media profile information of the commenters pops up at the rolling of the mouse over the icon.

Social Profiles – This plugin is tailor-made for multi-authored blogs and sites with registered users. It lets your visitors register for your WordPress blogs to promote their own social media profiles through effective comments on your blog posts. The Social Profiles plugin provides fields for the visitors to put their usernames for ten social networks.

WP Twitip ID – It is a Twitter oriented plugin. It integrates your social media profiles with the comment form of your WordPress blog. It requires your commenters to have Twitter account. Inserting an extra line of code in the comment template file of your WordPress blog, this plugin provides a field for the commenters to put their Twitter usernames.

Tweetmeme – Tweetmeme is among the plugins to promote both blog posts and social media profiles simultaneously. Akin to the Digg style vote button, this plugin lets your readers retweet your posts easily. By default, it retweets a post as ‘RT @tweetmeme” along with the post title and URL. It is customizable in size. It comes with an option to let you select its position. It can be displayed on your RSS feed.

Hurry up to use these WordPress plugins for promoting your social media profiles and get the best of social networks. Make sure to let me know your feedback.