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Social Media

How social Media Helps Small Business Succeed

It’s not easy to get your business noticed online, and it’s definitely a difficult task to make a connection to a potential customer that will last long enough for them to convert. If you’re trying to market a business as green this can be twice as hard, since people can be quite skeptical around your green credentials.

 

This has been made all the more difficult thanks to more savvy online buyers – due to the amount of time we collectively spend on the internet, even those who would once have been considered less than computer literate are easily capable of filtering out poor quality advertising images and copy floating around their Facebook sidebars; instead going for what the business and marketing types might call higher quality, more sharable articles.

A spokesperson for Make It Cheaper, one of the UK’s leading energy comparison sites, said: “High quality content and social media marketing has been gaining prominence as the way forward for web traffic generation in recent years. It is rewarded by search engine algorithms and word-of-mouth both online and offline. By creating and regularly updating informative website blog content and building customer engagement on social media, businesses can not only have their website re-indexed by search engines but also generate trust and establish authority on relevant topics. It’s easy to see that the business landscape is becoming more transparent because the internet allows fast access to company information and customer reviews.”

It no longer matters what industry a business operates in – high quality content is essential to ensure that potential customers engage with the brand. A business gas comparison expert from Make it Cheaper spokesperson continued:
“As a result, it is equally important to practice ethical business management and to provide quality products that perform according to expectations. Informed and cost-conscious customers base their purchasing decisions on value and convenience for time and money. For this reason, we at Make It Cheaper offer our customers free, fast, friendly and impartial advice on business cost reduction over the phone. Our savings experts help to dramatically reduce business gas, electricity, telecommunications, and chip and PIN bills by comparing market prices, and we can even help you appeal your business rates and source new insurance policies and premiums without charging a consultation fee.”

Categories
Internet Social Media

5 reasons you need a social inbox

Getting involved in social media and networking can seem like a daunting task for any business or individual. Multiple networks, multiple accounts and worst of all, everything you want or need is spread out and in separate places. But not to panic, MarketMeSuite is an end to end social media management tool which helps you condense and orgainze your work into a “Social Inbox”.

This article looks at why you need to be using a Social Inbox and why you’ll wonder how you lived without one.

It’s A Familiar Concept

Everyone has and uses email. Whether it be Gmail, AOL, Mac Mail, what ever, the lay out and interfaces are all very similar. You have an “Inbox” of emails ready to be read, replied to, filtered or forwarded. You have options down the side to view your sent emails, your archived mail, important and starred mail. MarketMeSuite’s Inbox works the same way! You have your data all in one place, it’s then up to you to create your own Inboxes and filters to pull in the content you need and want. The concept is exactly the same. You have your unread tweets, Facebook updates, @mentions, DM’s, wall posts all ready to be organised and filtered however you please.

Archive And Search

Just like with email, your Social Inbox allows you to have access to Archived data. This means if someone sends you a message, you can rest easy knowing that it is stored safely away for X number of days. This means that you can rest easy knowing that important social media content is safe and easily accessible in case you need it to act upon at a later date.

Search goes hand in hand with archived data. These days, with so many tweets, Facebook updates, LinkedIn messages, it is impossibly slow to find and locate one particular piece of information. MarketMeSuite allows you to search through all content, whether it was sent by you or others in one easy step! Just use the “Search Inbox” option by writing in your chosen word or phrase with quotations, and you get all the results you need. You can also do searches outside the inbox with “Real-time” search, which has geo-targeted capabilities and is a must-have for anyone with a local business.

No Social Bias

Your Social Inbox does not favour any particular social network. Many clients (including some of MarketMeSuite’s previous versions) were built for Twitter with an after thought of Facebook and LinkedIn, but the Social Inbox simply has every feed and network in one stream which then allows you to filter for particular accounts. A good business needs to be on as many social networks as possible to ensure maximum exposure and engagement.

Goodbye Panes Hello Smart Inboxes!

A long time ago, at the beginning of  social dashboards, it was decided that vertical panes were the best way to disseminate social information. And for Twitter, it worked. But who out there has experienced the endless horizontal scroll where you need a 57 inch screen to view everything all at once.  Not anymore.

Your Social Inbox allows you to have one normal sixed screen with options to change what you are looking at by one click of a mouse button. By having inbox options down the left hand side, you simply have to click on “@mentions” or “Facebook News feed” to get that data. And, you can create smart ways to filter that data. Facebook notifications and @mentions for 2 Twitter accounts your priority? Make a “Smart Inbox” for just that. No more scrolling left and right trying to frantically locate it in a pane.

Curation and Leads

When you have so many accounts and pages to manage, it’s essential that you have a way of organizing it all and knowing what’s been replied to, which content is a worth flagging, assigning, or marking as lead. That’s powerful. Imagine you see an update you believe could get you a new customer or is of importance, you can tag it as a “Lead” so you can track that update,make sure it’s been replied to, and convert that follower or fan into a customer.

Key Take Away

A Social Inbox is an intuitive and natural progression for social media organization. It’s a interface you are used to, easy to understand and incredibly simple! It’s time to move beyond the “classic” dashboard. Set up a Social Inbox for your business today.

Categories
Social Media

Tips on using Facebook Effectively

Have some people become obsessed with their Facebook profile. Have they become their own brand and social media marketing entity? Have we all fallen into the trap of thinking we are something important to the rest of the world and we must invest in hours of personal online marketing? Here is a no-nonsense look at how to interact on Facebook.

Facebook is the core of social media marketing, but how many of us really know how to use it? How much are all of your friends actually paying attention to what you are doing on it? How much are you interacting with others on the site, or are you really just reading whatever is put in front of you? Getting attention on Facebook takes some special skills, it also takes some other abilities. Here is a look at how to get more involved with others on Facebook. Let’s face it, you are after attention yourself.

Use your likes

While we all want to be the wittiest person ever, most of the time it is hard to come up with something more entertaining than an eight year old. Your next option is to use your like button. This is an easy way to interact with others and make them feel good at the same time. Whether you like it, them, or not, does not really matter, they will feel that you have given them some positive attention.

Upload photos as much as possible

Just like a picture speaks a thousand words, photos give you a whole essay of material you could not possibly write. It would be great if I could come up with something interesting everytime I opened the site, and it would be something that attracted attention. Just like most of us, I can’t. The next best thing is to upload photos. Everyone likes to look at photos, it is just the way people are. Photos give a visual dimension to your existence, and this adds more to your personality online. Words are wonderful for conjuring up provocative thoughts, but photos and videos lay it all out there for others to see. Do your best to select only those photos and videos where you look fantastically fabulous or completely ridiculous. Either one will intrigue.

Comment on photos

Looking for somewhere to say something, and not sure what to say. Other’s photos will always give you something of interest to say. More importantly, because it is them you are talking about, and it is plain to see for everyone else, you will get a reaction every time.

Be yourself

Facebook is your personal online marketing tool. Perhaps you are not that interesting in the first place. Perhaps, what is more important, is those who care about you. Don’t try too hard to impress. Just be yourself. If people out there are not interested in you, it is time to find friends who do. Don’t take your Facebook profile too personally. Those who like you will like you anyway. Those who added you just so they could add another number to their total friend count, are not your friend anyway. Just because someone has more friends on Facebook, does not mean they have more influence. The quality and amount of interaction with that network is what really makes the difference.

Categories
Internet Social Media

Do’s and Dont’s of Social Media for Business[Infographic]

If you are wondering how to start your social media campaign? what to do in your social media campaign and what to avoid in your social media campaign, this infograph will definitely help you. It provides quite useful points about the usage of Social media for the business. The rise of Social media has made many business embrace it. But it is as essential to know the strategies to make maximum benefit out of it. The points cited in this infographic is very general but quite useful. Most of us know about it but don’t follow. So I would suggest those using Social Media as one of their primary marketing medium to abide by the points cited here, this will surely help you guys.

This infograph is created by the steel method.

Categories
Social Media Tech News

Facebook account not available

Facebook seems to have a hard time maintaining the infrastructure to support it’s more than 600 millions users. So in recent time people have started facing many irregularities with Facebook. Even I have experienced a few issues on my own. Issues like the online users section shown at the left side of Facebook showing multiple times or chat windows not opening when you click on  user name seems to be quite common. Moreover there are issues like messages disappearing from wall and Facebook group is a matter of concern.

I moderate 2 groups in Facebook and I have seen threads with a lot of response have suddenly disappeared from the

Facebook Groups. I inquired with other members about the issues and some of them told they are able to see and some reported as not available to them. So it seems to be issues related on per account basis.  Contacting Facebook for such things did not yield any result. So I was ignoring that thinking it will be a temporary issue and will be rectified soon. But today an extremely strange thing happened. I was chatting with the members of one of the group when I tried to post a comment to one of my friend’s status message. It did not get posted and I received an error saying not posted and try again. I tried again, but that also did not result in success. I tried refreshing my page and I was surprised to see the following message instead of my Facebook wall:

Your account is currently unavailable due to a site issue. We expect this to be resolved shortly. Please try again in a few minutes.

I tried refreshing my page numerous times but that did not work and I was greeted with same message. I was suddenly concerned and thought that Facebook has deleted my account or banned me. I tried to access it with another browser. I put my username and password and huh…instead of logging me in, I was greeted with a slightly different message with option to login with a  different user name and password.

Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

This message looked bit relaxing as I became sure by now that my account has not been banned or deleted. And seems like a Facebook issue.

Such incidents are not new to users and Facebook is aware of it. They told to CNET long back about some internal glitch in their server which is preventing users to access their account intermittently.  But as Facebook is growing like anything and many users and enterprise are heavily dependent on Facebook for their brand promotion and connecting with their customers, such downtime will definitely hamper their business. Facebook should take care of such issues by expanding their infrastructure more aggressively. Also they need to publish any anticipated downtime or issues in a publicly available location.

By the time I am writing this, I tried again refreshing browser and Alas I am inside my Facebook profile. So it was definitely a  temporary glitch. If you had a similar experience with Facebook recently, we would love to know about it. So please share it through comment.

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Internet Social Media Tech News

How to use Google +1 social recommendation feature

The Search Engine giant Google announced yesterday about  a new Social recommendation features called Google +1 which is inline with the Facebook’s like button. Google seems to be in a hurry in releasing new features to enhance the end users experience and provide the best search result. Some days back they released the feature to block unwanted search result and now this Google +1. Google claims that it is their endeavor to provide better result through human recommendation rather then completely relying on machine. With this new Google +1 feature you can now publicly recommend any search result or ads that appear in Google search result and it will be included with the search result. Google will show the number of recommendations for that search result when it will appear for any query.

Google +1 is now released as an Experimental feature and in order to be able to use this service you need to have a Google profile and join this experiment. In order to enjoy the Google +1 feature, please perform the following steps in the same order as they are given below:

1. If you do not have a Google profile create a Google profile and make it public. If you have a Google profile upgrade it to accommodate the new features.

2. Go to Google Labs experimental search page and click on Join this experiment button. (Thanks Vibin Reddy)

3. While logged in to your Google account search for something in Google and look for the search result. You will see the +1 button beside the search result now. Click on the +1 button near any relevant result to leave your recommendation for that page to the world.

4. For the first time when you click on the +1 button you will see a pop up window where you will need to confirm for the +1 to take effect.4. You can undo your action immediately by clicking on the button again.

While showing the recommendations to you or any one in the search result Google takes into account your social connections to determine. The social connection includes people from your Google contact, Google Buzz  and Google reader followers and Google chat contacts.

Managing the +1s

All the +1 recommendation you have done will be available in your Google profile +1’s tab. However you have the option to choose whether to make this tab publicly available or make it private by clicking on Edit Profile and un checking the option “Show this tab on my profile”. In order to manage the +1s:

1. Login to your Google profile and click on +1’s tab.(For me the +1 tab did not appear immediately but took almost 5 minutes after I did a recommendation)

2. You can delete any recommendations, you no longer want to share from this tab by clicking on the X mark towards the right of the +1 content.

+ 1 on non-Google sites: (This part is a direct copy from Google as the information is not clear)

The only time the +1 button will associate your identity with specific web content is when you choose to click the +1 button for something on the web. By clicking the +1 button, you’re explicitly signaling interest in displaying, sharing, or recommending specific online content, including ads. So if your friend chooses to +1 an ad, page, or search result, you might see that +1 on other websites. Google stores your +1’s to personalize the web, for example, by showing them to your social connections and others who may find it relevant. To change the +1 preference on non-Google sites:

1. Login to your Google account

2. Click on the Edit link near + 1 on non-Google sites

3. Select the appropriate option in the following window and click on save.

Google will utilize the +1 activity, Google profile and your social connection to tailor made the content for and ads for you. Though this is a nice move from Google to make their search result more social but it has lot of potential for exploitation. In order to promote the search result website owner will now hire people to recommend their website and gain higher recommendation for crappy results. But when this is used without any evil purpose this will definitely going to help web searcher to find good result for their queries. Please share your opinion on what you feel about this new Google +1 feature.

Categories
Internet Social Media

Prevent the Facebook Virus “Get your Facebook Email” @facebook.com

It has been seen recently that Facebook has been the primary target for Scamsters like spammers and hackers. We have seen quite a lot of virus like ” Click here to see how I look like in 20 years” and “OMG I don’t believe this” spreading in Facebook now a days. The most recent one is the “Get your Facebook Email” @facebook.com. These viruses are spreading in the form of Facebook Apps and advertise themselves through Facebook chat messages. Many people think these are legitimate messages from their friends and fall victim to it. So this way the virus spreads themselves exponentially in a very short period of time.

Today I received a message from one of my blogger friend which said Hey claim your @ fb email address b4 its 2 late! bit.ly/fA05Dk. In a moment the suspicious me, found out that it is another hoax message. But I wanted to delve into it further. So I clicked on the link and found out that it is the work of a new App called ownuniqueemail. It seems I was among the first one to receive this message as at the time when I tried to access the app, it had only 2 fans. My suspicion grew stronger when I saw a message that the Application can not be accessed over https. (As I have enabled https in Facebook for better security). Within a couple of minutes I started receiving this hoax message from many friends. All saying the same thing in different variant and using different URL shortening service pointing to same app.

What does it do?

When you receive a message from your friend and you click on the link, the app will ask for your permission to integrate with your Facebook account. In the permission page it will also ask the permission to access Facebook Chat. Once you grant access that’s all. It will send a message to all your facebook friends which says “Get your Facebook Email” @facebook.com or “Hey claim your @ fb email address b4 its 2 late! bit.ly/fA05Dk” or some other variant of this message. In a very short span of time this App will spread virally. This has not been seen to cause any harm or steal/hack any account. This is just a self promoting application.

How to prevent “Get your Facebook Email” @facebook.com virus?

1. If you have enabled the https in Facebook account security section, you will see a message to switch to regular connection, when you click on the link to go to the apps page. So it will prevent you from direct access of the App. You can click on cancel on this page. Moreover this viral app can not be accessed over https. So you are somewhat safe.

2. Even if you have clicked on the link do not grant permission in the next page where it says “Request for permission”.  Just click on leave App and you are safe. As a contribution towards the community, you can instead click on Report App on the same page.

3. Ask your friends not to believe this message they received and refrain from sharing it. Also share this blog post with them and post about this post on FB wall. (I know this is a shameless promotion of my blog post, but at least it will help people in some ways.)

Please let us know if the post helped you and your friends by writing a few lines in the comment.