Future Searches

Harnessing Social Media to Build a Personal Brand

The days of customers dealing with faceless big businesses are coming to an end. People like to deal with other people, and even corporations understand that now. Just think about some of the most well-known companies and the names associated with them. The late Steve Jobs was the face of Apple. Bill Gates, to many people, is Microsoft.

Sometimes, the person that represents the brand isn’t a CEO or a manager. Many game developers rely heavily on their community managers. Ask a gamer about Pitch Black Games, and most of them will mention Sanya Weathers, a community manager that has served several companies, and is highly regarded.

Socialising as a Brand

When you’re in the public eye, representing a company, you need to be careful. Social media marketing is not the same as social networking on a personal level. This is something that is easy to forget. You might post about “Lolcats” and your favourite, perhaps slightly tasteless YouTube videos on your personal account, but do you really want your customers to see those posts? Just imagine if you went to Elle Macpherson’s brand page on your favourite social network and saw links to online petitions, games, and funny Occupy Wall Street memes. If your political leanings weren’t the same as Macphersons, there’d be a good chance she’d lose a customer.

How To Drive Traffic To Your Website Using Twitter

Twitter has exploded over the past few years as celebrities and authority figures have made accounts to discuss anything from politics to games. With more than 200 million active users, Twitter can be a great way to drive traffic to your website. This is especially effective if you establish yourself on the social network as an informative source for your particular niche. Check out these top four ways to drive traffic to your website by using Twitter.

1. Hold conversations with like-minded people

Most people who use Twitter with the purpose of expanding their website often use it as a way to serial post links to content in the hopes that someone will click on them. This method is generally not very effective because there is no context for the links. If you establish yourself on the social network as an authority on your subject, you can quickly gain a following of people who are more likely to click links to your website when you mention them.

3 Hotshot Ways to Boost Twitter Followers

Why is it that not everyone wants to be a leader in life but just about everyone on Twitter wants to be followed? Interesting, isn’t it. Well, to be a leader on Twitter, you must know how to get people on your side, wanting to follow what you have to share. To do this, I’ve identified 3 hotshot ways to boost twitter followers. Care to follow what I have to say?

Number 1: Follow You … Follow Me
Okay, so people love you when you follow them. It goes with the whole principal of you scratch my back and I scratch yours. So go ahead and follow as many people as you can…or Twitter will allow you.
If you’ve ever wondered how people have thousands of followers, this is it. They do this over and over again. Now, don’t think that everyone who you follow will follow you in return. Some will kindly send their automated thank you direct messages and continue on their way, while others will follow you in return.
That’s why if you want to get as many followers as possible, you must keep this up regularly. You need to find the ones that follow this principal and let me tell you…there are thousands!

Secret Content Marketing and Social Media Strategies

For the most powerful and effective marketing strategies you must combine your methods. If you have a social networking account you want to put these buttons on your website or blog. This allows people to friend you or to share your website or blog on whichever social network.

Visitors won’t revisit your page if your content isn’t top quality and informative. So you can’t just leave it up to networking, you must combine your networking efforts with your content marketing efforts.

If you are not sure how to effectively marry the two I can help you out a bit. Continue reading for some strategies that will help you combine social media strategies and content marketing in the most effective way.

• Ensure all the articles you publish are full articles. You can place these articles on websites such as LinkedIn or on your Facebook Fan page.

• Whenever you post an article or write a blog post or answer a question in a discussion forum or make a comment you can benefit from placing your link into it. 

You can link it to your social network page or straight to your website in different ways, you can do a straight headline or with a small paragraph then the link or you can do it in the form of a question. The latter is said to have the best effect for improving click through rate.

The Best Ways to Use Twitter as a Marketing Tool for Your Blog

Want to get your blog in front of an audience? It isn’t easy. If you want to succeed as a professional blogger you have to realize that most people who try to break into this field fail at it. This means you need to set yourself apart from the rest and realize what the most successful bloggers are doing.

The good news is that once you realize what they are doing right, success isn’t all that hard. It just takes time, dedication, and tools. One of the most helpful tools you should have in your arsenal is Twitter.

But Nobody’s On Twitter

Many bloggers are hesitant to get on Twitter because they don’t believe it’s where their customers are. In reality, there are 100 million people who use the site at least once a month . While this may seem paltry in comparison to Facebook’s claimed 800 million users, half of which sign on every day, it’s a mistake to directly compare the two networks in this way.

Eight Tips on How to Get the Most out of your Facebook page

Social networking sites particularly Facebook has become an important advertising platform for small businesses, brands and even celebrities. Facebook is undoubtedly the most popular social networking site boasting 800 million active users and an annual revenue of no less than $4 billion.

For marketers, Facebook provides a genuine opportunity to attract people and get free publicity. With Facebook’s growing importance as a marketing tool, companies and online marketers can no longer ignore the social networking site’s importance. So if you’re planning to setup your business’ Facebook page then here are 8 sure fire ways you could optimize this platform.

1) Use your business name, logo and/or trademarks

Using your real business name, logo and/or trademark is just appropriate when you’re starting out with your Facebook marketing campaign. Small businesses and/or brands should thrive to use their Facebook page to gain name recall advantage over their competitors.

2) Write a catchy, descriptive Facebook bio

A company’s bio is the most critical component of a successful Facebook marketing campaign. An excellent Facebook bio is one that is catchy at the same time descriptive so that fans and supporters can get to know your small business or brand better.

The Future of Search – SEO or Social?

The web is currently alive with talk of the evolution of social marketing. With new social plugins expected in the form of the “Send” button from Facebook and the “+1” button from Google, it feels like there is a change in the air regarding the way that people find the websites and information they are looking for online.

With social seemingly gaining momentum and arguments over whether you need to hire social media experts circling the web (for http://www.seomoz.org/blog/everyone-should-hire-social-media-experts and against http://shankman.com/i-will-never-hire-a-social-media-expert-and-neither-should-you/), is the future going to see a move away from more traditional forms of SEO in favour of a more socially driven internet experience? If your career is based in SEO, do you need to get more social to survive? Let’s take a look at the state of the industry and see where the future of web marketing lies.

Social

Social networks are enjoying the very peak of success at the moment, with Facebook users increasing all of the time and Twitter gaining more followers as it becomes the ultimate resource for keeping up to date with the latest news stories.

Tips for Writing an Effective Facebook Advertisement

There is only one reason to place an ad on Facebook – to gain attention and attract website traffic. So what motivates readers to do that? How do you write an ad that gets those fingers clicking? Here are a few tips that should help.

Target Your Ad

There’s no use firing off an ad if you don’t know where to aim it. Facebook will give you choices about where your ad appears and which type readers will see it, so you need to think hard about who your target customer is. There is no need to advertise to those who would not be interested in your product, whether that product is a service, a blog, merchandise, or something else. If you’re paying by the click, you want those clicks to be from the right people.

How old is your ideal customer, where do they live? Do they have children, are they married, what is their occupation? Should they have special interests or hobbies? Narrowing down these demographics are key to successful marketing. Make sure your add appeals directly to your target customer with words or graphics so every click counts.

Quora – What Makes it Different?

I’ve always been quite a fan of the “question and answer,” platform online. It interests me both in a general internet marketing context and also from a user perspective. The ability to share knowledge online and actually communicate directly with experts from various fields from all over the world is incredible on any level.

That’s why I was, in the early days, a bit of a Yahoo Answers fan. However, I started to find the quality of many of the answers (and the questions too) quite poor as time went on. Enter Quora.com. Dubbed, by some as “the new Yahoo Answers,” the site is growing at a rapid pace. 3.5 million indexed pages in Google in January, 5.9 million at the start of February and, as of today, 6.5 million.

But it’s not the new, ‘Yahoo Answers.’ Not in my opinion anyway. It’s like a higher quality Experts Exchange meets a much higher quality Yahoo Answers and somewhere along the line meets Twitter too.

But what makes this platform different?

Social Media Past Twitter & Facebook

There can be little doubt that social media is one of the most important recent innovations for both the business world and its’ customers. The speed at which it has been adopted means that businesses simply cannot afford to ignore social media platforms.

That being said, there is a problem that threatens to damage all the good work businesses have put into becoming active members in the social media community. While there is no doubt that Twitter and Facebook are the major players, their very dominance can lead to a false sense of security as well as a business’s social media strategy becoming stale and static.

The truth of the matter is that there are a number of other key players that most businesses need to be aware of so that they can ensure they are covering all the bases and not getting a nasty surprise that can have a negative effect on their brand’s reputation.

Linkedin

Probably the other major player after Twitter and Facebook, Linkedin is arguably the most “professional” of social media platforms and is a superb resource for networking. However, even if a business feels that their core audience lies beyond its typical user, it should still maintain a presence, especially if the business provides B2B services.