Category: Featured

Apr 07

Use TwitRand to Hold Twitter Contests

TwitRand allows the randomization of followers and retweeters for contest purposes. The free service offers two options:

  1. Selecting be Follower List: For example, if a company is giving away a new laptop to a random user who follows them, they input their own twitter username (@company) and then TwitRand randomly selects a user from their follower list to win the prize.
  2. Entering a URL, phrase, or hashtag will randomly select a twitter user who has used this phrase in one of their tweets. This would work if the company was giving away the laptop to a random twitter user who included their URL or custom hashtag in their tweet. An example of this would be, “ReTweet this message to win a free laptop from @company! http://www.companywebsite.com #laptopgiveaway2010″

In this example, the use of http://www.companywebsite.com or #laptopgiveaway2010 would both be good choices to input in the field on TwitRand.

Many companies and individuals who do online contests also use Random.org. This generates a random number in a certain number range. To use this, the organization would have to assign each entry a number.

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Mar 24

How to get your social media profiles crawled by search bots

Social media profiles like those found on Twitter and Facebook are crawled by search engines and are indexed. In addition, user contributions on social media sites- notes that are posted, statuses, tweets, are also indexed, sometimes at an alarming rate.

Be sure to use clear, plain language cut to the chase. No one wants to read a tweet about what the intern is wearing or the color of the new carpet being laid in the office.

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Mar 15

Internet Marketing Webinars: Staying On Top of Current Trends

By Kaila Strong

An alarming rate of change occurs in the world of internet marketing. That’s why, as marketers, its important to stay on top of the changing trends in our industry. One way I stay aware is by attending webinars in addition to reading industry blogs, signing up for Smart Brief newsletter e-mails for the industry, checking out handy infographics on a regular basis (like “35 Great Social Media Infographics), and following industry experts on Twitter to hear their daily words of advice.

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Mar 12

Social Media Marketing: An Overview

The first aim of any business is to be known amongst their target audience. This is no different for online businesses that strive to shine out amidst billions of sites. Online businesses aim to market their site in several different manners to gain them more customers and business. One such marketing technique is social media marketing.

Social media marketing is a term that defines marketing that is done via social networks, such as online communities, networks, blogs and many other marketing tools to raise awareness amongst their potential clients. These sites are used to publicize, make sales, create connections between the business and target market, and to handle customer service. Some common tools used to perform social media marketing are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Orkut and YouTube.

The three main aspects of social media marketing are firstly, it creates a buzz and attracts readers with catchy and impressive messages. This buzz spreads through the Internet through contact between users who in turn pass it on to their own contacts. Within moments, these messages spread like wild fire.

Another aspect is that it gathers all fans of a brand or company together and allows them to interact with one another, create an identity and communicate their interest for this brand or set of products. It is also based on online conversations that cater around the business, and brings together current and potential customers. Their loyalty would also in turn promote one’s brand and raise awareness amongst other possible clients.

Through either simple networking, or marketing, these social media outlets help websites gain an online presence rapidly. They allow one to reach their target audience regardless of which part of the world they reside in. Another great advantage of social media marketing is, when done well, it could help enhance the search engine friendliness of one’s website.

Effective social media marketing would help generate a good number of quality backlinks to one’s site. These tools help the members of social networks to resend links to one’s websites to other interested viewers, hence adding more backlinks and increasing the popularity of one’s website. This way, their social media marketing campaign achieves two purposes-increasing search engine ranking and online visibility.

In conclusion, social media marketing is effective and natural. It is a great source of web traffic, and achieves great results at a low cost. This form of marketing would work well with any other advertising campaign.

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Mar 04

Social Media Optimization: An Overview

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the brother of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)- they are both attracting customers to their website content, except SMO is attracting visitors to a company’s web site by using its social media pages or profiles on sites like Twitter and Facebook. In addition, creating a SMO-friendly website means making social media a core component of how users interact with content.

There are several different things companies can add to their site to make it SMO, thus increasing traffic and building links. Some of these include:

  1. Adding RSS feeds and making subscribing to RSS feeds by email easy (like the Feedburner Subscription box on the sidebar of The Social Robot.)
  2. Adding social media share buttons (like those found on addany.com or sharethis.com)
  3. Plugins and components that allow users to rate and comment on posts and content
  4. Widgets that pull in company tweets or facebook updates
  5. Easy customer engagement, like the ability to upload videos with their company feedback and thoughts.

In addition, there are also some social media optimization tactics that work as a ‘pull’ method to get users to come to the site.

  1. Guest blogging on other’s blogs with a link back to company website
  2. Commenting on relevant blog articles and including website address in the URL or comment itself (but only if it is topically relevant- otherwise would be spamming)
  3. Answering questions related to company’s industry on LinkedIn Answers or Yahoo! Answers, in addition to forums and message boards. Include link to company website in signature, if applicable and allowed.

Here’s some great posts on social media optimization from around the internet:

13 rules of SMO
social-media-optimization.com
16 rules for SMO revisited
The beginners guide to SMO

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