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If you want to upgrade yourself with the passage of time in the world of web marketing, you need to know and strategize beyond bounds. It’s been quite some time that you have been applying all the possible SEO techniques to take your websites to the topmost position. For some reason or the other, you are just not able to outmatch your competitors and therefore your site ranking has remained stagnant for the last few weeks. So, it’s high time that you should certainly bring developments in your strategies. Have you heard about SMO or Social Media optimization?

SMO refers to an advanced method where you are required to perform a series of activities with the help of social media so that your website can get a huge number of traffic. If you are involved in web marketing, you need to somehow get traffic to your website to make good business. Therefore, SMO presently has emerged to be one of the most effective procedures to get traffic to your site. In fact, the application of using social media for your marketing requirements can certainly prove more powerful for your site.

As a website owner, you will always want to make your site highly visible to searches.
So, here are a few tips and techniques that can help you do social media optimization:

• Get fresh and relevant content and upload them in your site so that link building can be boosted. Make sure that the contents can attract readers.

• Try to share your information as much as possible and extend your services worldwide.

• Spread your content from one site to another. Take help of the social networking sites and upload your content there so that people come to know more about your site.

• Make sure you choose the right keyword that can attract the attention of the readers and make them stay with your site for a good long time.

The line of distinction between real life and social media is being blurred gradually. People are going social by shedding the guise of shame and coming out of shells. Social media has taken us out of the cocooned existence, put voice to protests, acted as a platform for making business, globalized local events and reduced the diameter of the globe in terms of distance. In brief, social media itself is a revolution.

Nowadays, be an event local, national or global, it is also tagged ‘social’. All events like meetings, conferences and parties go online before being held. Promoting an event on social media sites helps make it large in real life. It is the maximum number of visitors that makes an event a great gala. The more footfalls an event receives, the larger is it. Here is how you can maximize the online exposure of an offline event by means of social media marketing:

It is difficult to get noticed, publicize an event and get recognition for talents even in real life without buzz or hype online. So, put in the best efforts to create a buzz about your upcoming event on social media. It takes nothing but marketing creativity and costs nothing but time.

User Engagement on Facebook Event Page

The very first do to promote an event online is setting up a Facebook event page using your personal or business Facebook profile or Facebook fan page. It offers a great advantage to let your friends and followers and fans to connect with the event before, during and after it is held. Once you are done with setting up the Facebook event page, share it with your Facebook contacts and start inviting them. Make sure including in the info section of the event page the details of the event. Don’t forget to respond to the questions or comments posted as walls on the event page. An increasing number of Facebook users joining or liking the event page is not enough. Without engagement, there is no promotion.

EventBrite for Online Event Promotion

EventBrite is one of the online tools to promote events on social media. Create a registration page for the event on EventBrite. It offers unique features to customize the event page in keeping with the objective of the event and share it across social media sites to create buzz. Interested attendees can email the link to or share it with their friends in online social circles.

LinkedIn to Invite Your Professional Contacts

Don’t leave LinkedIn behind thinking that LinkedIn is only a professional network. It helps a lot to get an event searchable in Google and noticed by LinkedIn users. Create a page for the event on LinkedIn by clicking the ‘More’ tab. It opens a list of applications. Create a new event by using the Event application. Make sure to optimize the Keywords section with keywords related to the event. It helps people find the event online through Google. Once the event has been published, invite your LinkedIn connections to attend the event and share the invitation with their LinkedIn contacts.

Unique Twitter Hashtag for Event Promotion

Create a unique Twitter hashtag for your event. A Twitter hashtag consists of a hash sign ‘#’ and a relevant keyword. Choose a singular keyword that better describes your event in tweets or discussions and that is not being used on Twitter by anyone. It helps your Twitter followers and their followers identify the event. Use search.twitter.com to check the availability of your desired hashtag.

Twitpic & Twitter for Online Response to Event

If the event is a more-than-one-day long affair, promote it on social media when it is in progress. Take snaps of the event on the first day and use Twitpic to share the snaps with those who could not attend it on the first day. It makes them realize what they have missed and drives them to turn up at the event the next day. The similar is the purpose of using Flickr for event promotion. It encourages response from the attendees of the event too.

Now is the time to make a social media event promotion plan based on the above-mentioned tips and let the people go gaga over the event.

LinkedIn having a huge base of 100 million users tops the list of professional networking sites. Want to build a professional network, to promote your company website, to fetch traffic for your official blog and create a professional identity online? LinkedIn is the ultimate stop. Log on to LinkedIn and sign up to create a professional profile. LinkedIn profiles, if created and maintained from SEO perspective, can boost their owners’ presence on search engine result pages. Here is how to make your LinkedIn profile potential from SEO point of view:

Link with your profile – A social media profile with links for social, entertainment, communication or professional purpose gains momentum in Google. Similar is the case of LinkedIn profiles. You can link your website and blog to LinkedIn by attaching the website and blog’s URLs to My Website and My Blog sections of your profile. These two links are categorized as ‘follow’ links. Most of the users on a visit to your profile are sure to click their way to your blog and website through the attached links.

First impression of your profile – Google crawls the content of web pages in the top-to-toe fashion. Therefore, it is better to stuff the top of your LinkedIn profile with the most relevant info about you. Place the keywords related to your professional sphere and specialization at the top of the profile so that recruiters and others can easily get to know what you are at the very first glance. You can add the niche terms related to your professional identity in the ‘Summary’ and ‘Specialties’ sections of the LinkedIn profile.

Use keywords to make profile searchable – Many recruiters looking for PHP developers (for example) use a set of keywords like ‘LinkedIn + PHP developers’ to access the LinkedIn profiles of PHP developers. So, optimize your profile in a SEO-oriented way by including the right keyword relevant to your profession in the info of summary, skills and specialties.

Get hits for tweets on LinkedIn – Spice up your profile a bit. Link your Twitter account to the LinkedIn profile. It is a good opportunity to get hits for your tweets, from LinkedIn.

Customize the Profile URL – A LinkedIn profile with a random numbered URL is neither Google-friendly nor searchable. A customized URL with your name makes your LinkedIn profile searchable in search engines. You can customize the profile URL in the Public Profile section.

Social media branding can be the Midas touch for your business, if you harness the potential of your social media profiles in a calculated way. Regular quality work is a must for successful business branding on social media. In the list of social media platforms for online branding, the most prominent are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn where you definitely wish to promote your business on.

Having a profile on these three social media is not enough to make your business cover a larger space in the search world. There are many other online platforms where having a business profile means a new brand building opportunity. Some of them are as follows:

• Google profile
• Scribd profile
• SlideShare profile
• Wikipedia profile
• Quora profile
• About.me profile
• Crunchbase profile
• Reddit profile
• YouTube profile

Maintaining all of these profiles on a regular basis is another important key to social media branding. Furnishing the profiles with a piece of pithy and punchy info about your business does not mean having done the job to make huge profits. Keep the profiles alive and noticeable by updating them with a piece of engaging social media content every other day.

If the social media profiles of your page are not updated regularly, visitors will not show up and Google search spider too will not crawl them. Consequently, it will reduce the relevance and visibility of the profiles in the Google social search. Spending a little time out of 24 hours a day online is crucial.

If the purpose of your social media activity is complete business branding, make sure to get your business listed on six social media sites – Google Places, Foursqare, Bing Local, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Get a grip on how these sites work for business promotion and brand awareness. Follow the users who have already kissed success in social media branding.

The way you respond to the positive or negative comments made by people on your business is one of the makings of social media branding. Don’t overlook negative comments. Communicate with the poster and dig the reason for his or her negative view of your business. Ask for his or her suggestion and make necessary changes accordingly. It will let your social media branding activity go a long way.

Don’t neglect positive comments or reviews without responding to those. Thank the persons for having appreciated your business or brand just as we send a thank-giving note to those who we receive gifts from. Thank-you notes will help you earn customer loyalty.

Build relationship with the followers of your business profiles on social media sites by commenting on their posts. It is social media commenting akin to blog commenting. You can build links online and promote your business effectively through social media commenting. Social media profiles are a kind of marketing resource for your business and brand. How to manage this resource for promising online branding is up to you.

Building links on social media platforms like Facebook is in full swing. Sharing posts and videos on Facebook to update profile pages and fan pages on a regular basis is a potential do for building links to websites and blogs. When we share a blog post or article on Facebook, apart from the box labeled ‘Attach’ for pasting the URL of the blog post or article, there are other two boxes: one for the title of the post and another for a brief description about the post.

It is the headline or title of a post on Facebook, which gives visitors the first impression of the content. Only a gripping headline can drive your Facebook friends to click their way to the post. If the headline is compelling, they don’t hesitate to share the post on their Facebook profiles. Thus the post will go viral. How to write headlines that are worth clicking on as well as linking to?

Content writers had better take a journalistic approach to writing headlines for web articles and blogs. In the language of journalism, headlines are defined as pithy and punchy statements with driving force. Keep in view the content of a write-up while composing a headline for the write-up. Headlines are supposed to pack in the kernel or substance of write-ups.

Headline Writing Tips

Writing driving headlines is an art that a content writer or a copy writer must have a grip on. Article or blog or social media content writers should keep in view some aspects of headline writing to pique a visitor or reader’s interest. I am going to share with you a few ideas which you can use to construct attention-grabbing headlines:

• The headlines of posts intended to update your business or brand fan page must contain the business or brand name. It is because the followers of the page with feel concerned with your business or brand.

• Highlight the prominent features of your business or brand in the headlines. It is because the Facebook followers who take interest in you are curious to know more and more about your business or brand. Moreover, it helps to catch their attention and win their trust.

• Headlines that seem thoughtful or sound funny are more appealing than flat and dull headlines. As far as social media content is concerned, headlines should be presented as thought-provoking ideas or headways to something new.

• Researches on what makes readers click on headlines reveal that “how to” and “top 10” headlines are the most clickable. For example, “How to Cook a Most Delicious Lobster Recipe at Home”, “Top 10 Ideas for Home Based Business”.

• Using the superlative forms of adjectives like “funniest ideas”, “creepiest things”, “most important facets”, “yummiest recipes” in headlines is one of the secrets to writing clickable headlines.

• Human brains quickly understand something logical while minds understand something emotional in no time. Logical headlines with emotional appeal cut a mark with readers successfully.
Try these ideas to write attractive and effective headlines and get maximum views for your online write-up.

Google, the Goliath of online search, is never at rest. The ceaseless tempo of the Search giant is synonymous with constant innovation and nonstop evolution. Next to e-Books, Plus One or +1 is another wonder from Google’s kit to cast a spell on the users. It is being speculated to be a social feature of Google’s search service. Many think that Google +1 is a challenge to Facebook and Twitter.

Google’s + 1 is almost akin to ‘Like’ button on Facebook. It is supposed to be as impactful as likes on Facebook and retweets on Twitter. It will add as much value to a website or blog in search engine result pages as a post with likes and retweets get in social search results. What distinguishes Plus One from the features of social media sites is its direct influence on Google search results.

As Google dominates the online search world, any new change in the way the search magnate works impacts the global SEO field. Google +1 is, in fact, a recommendation button. It will help the users recommend a website, a blog or any other online post of their choice to their friends and the members in their social networks. The recommended website or blog will be more visible in Google’s search result pages.

To access Plus One, you need to have a Google profile. The profile will be accessible to the contacts in your Gmail, Google Talk and Google Buzz networks. You can import your Facebook friends and Twitter followers to the Plus One network. You can use your contacts on social media sites to get your website or blog recommended by them directly. The more +1 recommendations, the higher value for the site or blog in Google’s search result listings.

As per a report from Matt Cutts, Google Plus One has lots of potential for social SEO. It is a new powerful SEO approach to fetching traffic from different parts of the web world. Now you need to go social more actively in order to enrich your +1 network. It is assumed that SEO professionals will develop better social media communication strategies to increase their social media contacts so that they can build a huge Plus One network to get recommendations for their clients’ sites, blogs and brands.

To make use of Google +1 for the benefit of their clients, SEO professionals need to restructure their Google profiles. People will visit the Google profile of the person who will recommend a site or blog using +1. If the profile is convincing, the recommendation will work. People may not go with the person’s recommendation, if they find his Google profile uninteresting or unconvincing.

This social feature of Google is available in the English market. It will be launched internationally a little while later. Now the time has come to build a huge social media follower base and spice up your Google profile page, if you intent to promote your site or blog and fetch traffic for it using +1.

Psychology is the buzzword in the marketing field. It has become a vehicle for marketing campaign development and execution. Be it print media marketing, digital media marketing, internet marketing or social media marketing, product promotion and brand awareness campaigns are designed taking the psychology of target consumers into account. That is why; the concepts like consumer behavioral psychology and social media psychology have come into play.

It is the content, verbal or nonverbal, of a promotional campaign that people react to. The copy for raising brand awareness across social media platforms should be written keeping in view the psychological perspective of online social butterflies. A piece of well-formatted, relevant and clearly written social media content is not strong enough to overwhelm the people. It should be coupled with logical data and emotional elements as well to appeal to the intelligence and emotion of target online consumers.

It is a string of words that builds communication between two people. Each of the words for a social media advertising copy should be picked up with care. Words that arrest the attention, pique the interest, kindle the desire of people and make them spring into action. It is possible only if the psychology of social media users is studied. Content with a personal feel is a strong social media marketing tool. For example,

• We offer an exclusive range of gift items for you (ineffective)

• We offer an exclusive range of gift items to suit your exclusive choice (effective)

Acknowledgement & Appreciation

Everyone loves to be acknowledged and appreciated. You have developed a business page or brand page on Facebook. The page itself is a community of your fans and followers. Update the page with inviting copies to elicit response from the fans and call them to participate. Acknowledge their participation and appreciate their contribution.

For example, you have posted on the page, “We are a NGO working for the neglected and deprived weaker sections of society. We are requesting you to cooperate with us.” If someone comments on your post or posts a link in the comment bar, make sure to acknowledge the person and appreciate his participation by liking his comment. This practice will influence their psychology and make them feel being part of your Facebook page.

Paying Attention to Social Media Users

When you visit a store, you seek the storekeeper’s attention to your need. The same is true about social media. Make sure to pay attention to the fans in your business or brand profile page on Facebook. Being the page owner, you need to be active and communicative. Your indifference to the social media fans and friends will get you nothing. Post a message as short as a tweet in the walls of your fans or friends’ Facebook profiles.

From a marketing viewpoint, being communicative and responsive helps one get into the psychology of target consumers and strike an engaging conversation with them on social media. With the number of activities increasing, people’s memory is becoming weak. Therefore, constant interaction with the members of your social media communities is a must.

Assurance and Approval

People want to get assured and their ideas or plans approved of by those who they interact with. Similar is the case with social media users. Approval and assurance are essential parts of interaction with the target consumers on social media too. If your Facebook friends and fans are going to do something noble and constructive, give your approval and assurance to them. It is a social media trick to drive their psychology towards fulfilling your own purpose.

Keep in touch with the members of your social media communities. Highlight in the notes, discussions and wall posts the names of those who show interest in your product or brand. It will make them feel important and valued. It will help your relationship with the social media friends who can prove to be potential customers for your product or brand. Make your social media advertising or marketing campaign a success by developing it from a psychological perspective.

Enough of SEO! All my previous posts are related to SEO in direct or indirect ways. I have written a lot about the application of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook in search engine optimization and social media marketing. This time, my focus is on the use of Twitter in education. Twitter is a technology tool of online education for modern day learners to connect with other students and teachers around the globe. Data gathering, communication with experts and information exchange are the ends of Twitter activity.

Global Connections –You can make connections across geographical boundaries on Twitter. Follow Twitter users who are from different geographical locations of the world and different academic backgrounds. It will attribute a global dimension to your Twitter profile.

Information Exchange – Twitter is a platform for international information exchange programs. Have online discussions and exchange information with your intercontinental connections on Twitter, once they start following you. Get to know about the culture, tradition and atmosphere of their cities.

Creative Boost – A tweet is a string of 140 characters. You should have a creative bent of mind to sum up a piece of information within a limit of 140 characters. It delivers a creative boost to the writer in you. It will help you utilize your creative potential to write pithy and punchy taglines or concise ad copies in the advertising industry.

Make an Online Survey – Students can conduct a survey on any current affair, historical event or scientific issue among their Twitter followers using Twitter Poll at twtpoll.com. Once the data is collected from the survey, you can analyze the data, draw graphs and develop data tables to build a picture of the survey topic.

Improve Vocabulary – Select a word and tweet it among your Twitter followers requesting them for synonyms, antonyms and homonyms of the word. Gather all responses and enrich your vocabulary. It helps you keep in touch with the network. Isn’t it a wise use of the social network?

Communicate with Experts – Build a network of experts or professionals on Twitter from different walks of life. Develop questions of 140 characters and tweet the questions to them, if you are doing a project on some issue. Response from the experts in your network will add value to the project.

Share with the Network – The give-and-take policy applies on Twitter too. Share your disciplinary topics on English, Math, Science, History and others with the network of other students via tweets. It will keep you followed by them on Twitter.

Thus, the application of Twitter goes beyond social peripheries to online teaching and learning. So, parents should not have any reasons to prevent their children from using the social networking site. The use of such online learning tools as Twitter is a breath of fresh air to the students who at times get bored with reading books.

Not far is the day when people will surf the Internet for information less and use social media for engagement more. Internet surfing is likely to be cornered by social networking. With the growing popularity of social media, marketing, communication and information have got a new definition. A high-tech platform for online communication, social media has bridged the gap between buddies and businesses. Engagement among the like-minded people and the people with similar business interests is the buzzword in the whirligig social media world.

Social media is a colossal online market to dig out resources for businesses. Any business can make inroads to this zone of the Web World by creating a profile. The profile is a mere entry pass to the platform. What makes it worthy of representing the business is engagement between the business owner and the visitors to the profile. With adherence to the rules of engagement, the social media profile itself becomes a benchmark for the brand image and value of the business.

The application of social media tools is one of the rules of engagement for all including business owners and marketers. As social media keeps on evolving, so the rules of engagement keep changing just like the rules of game. It is the rules of social media engagement that encourages interaction between two brands, two businesses, two customers, two peers, two websites and two friends. The end results are relationships that translate into business conversions, if the making business online is one’s ultimate purpose of using social media.

Here is an agenda of best dos to set and maintain the rules of engagement for social media users:

• Discover some social media communities and groups relevant to your niche
• Observe the needs, choices and challenges of people in those communities or groups
• Relate your product to their choices, offer solutions to their needs, help them meet challenges
• Participate on other online platforms outside the boundary of Facebook and Twitter
• Determine the personality and identity of your brand or business and relate it to your social media contacts
• Respond to the reviews on your brand or business from the contacts to make them feel engaged to your venture
• Associate yourself with the things that help you enhance the brand perception among your contacts
• Engage yourself with the social media users by replying to their queries about your business
• Observe the online behavior of the users in each of social networks and approach them accordingly
• Be passionate in your approach to them. It should not make them feel that your purpose is marketing or sale
• Tone down the professional feel of messages to your contacts. Keep them a bit informal and friendly
• Be patient to listen to your contacts. It helps you make them listen to you
• Offer glimpses of your brand or business to your contacts through direct messages to them or social media updates
• Be open to the ideas and suggestions of your loyal contacts to improve the brand or business

The new Twitter design has made it easy to embed and view videos directly on your Twitter profile. It has also facilitated the sharing of videos from yours or others’ profiles on Twitter. With the innovation of Twitter, businesses can take maximum advantage of online videos for Internet marketing or social media marketing. Watching videos in the stream without going to the Twitter profiles of their owners is a great feature of new Twitter. With the latest transformation of look and design, the microblogging giant has evolved into an ideal platform for video marketing.

Video marketing on new Twitter is a boon to businesses using content as a tool to promote their brands, display their products and advertise their services online. Twitter video marketing has immense potentiality to offer for online reputation management. It is an opportunity for marketers to get the message of a brand across and boost the reputation of a business online. Twitter has partnered with YouTube, TwitVid, Justin TV, Flickr, DeviantART ,Vimeo and others. Adding videos to the Twitter stream is now a cakewalk. Here are some tips on how to make the most of Twitter video marketing for multiple purposes:

Twitter Video – Search Engine Ranking

Search engines give value to videos as highly ranking components for real time organic social search results. Quality videos promoting a website for some business or other purpose contribute to improving search engine ranking of the website in Google. Google shows a liking for video-embedded tweets as potential search results. If a tweet with a video embedded to it is retweeted by others, the chance of your visibility among the most clicked in search engine result pages doubles up.

Twitter Video – Real Time Update

Through Twitter videos, news spreads like wild fire in real time. With interesting real-time videos on new Twitter news, information or messages go viral in no time. One of the fastest communication modes, a Twitter video not only channels its content across the Twitter search world but also makes its way to the search engine result pages. A video-embedded tweet is a good real-time update of a website and Google indexes real-time updates.

Twitter Video – Pithy & Punchy

Twitter is all about micro blogging. Micro blogging means making your visual or textual content as brief as possible to get the message across quickly. Brevity is the soul of Twitter marketing. Keep your videos to be embedded to tweets short so that your followers watch them in the stream on their Twitter home pages. Condense the message in tweet videos to make pithy and punchy. Videos should be specifically designed for Twitter video marketing.

Twitter Video – Online Reputation Management

Google crawls and indexes tweet videos in real time search as well as social search. Twitter videos containing positive picture of brands or businesses, when indexed by the search engine bots, are sure to give rise to the ranking and reputation of target websites in search engine listings. Online reputation management through Twitter videos is potential enough to build a huge base of loyal customers for a brand or business.