Twitter Launches Keyword Targeting: Can Marketers Cash In?

It took a while, but Twitter has been regularly improving its ad platform since first rolling out advertising solutions back in 2010. The latest ad enhancement looks to present marketers with some of the most attractive opportunities they’ve had yet.

Twitter recently launched a keyword targeting feature that allows advertisers to target users based on the terms and phrases contained in their tweets. The new system is designed to help businesses produce better results by tailoring Promoted Tweets content around the dialogue their ideal customers use in their social posts. For Twitter’s ever expanding marketing community, the introduction of keyword targeting raises the importance of the almighty tweet, mainly because of the platform’s real-time communication capabilities.

Keyword Targeting in Action

Here is an example to give you an idea how the new keyword targeting feature works. Let’s say a Twitter user posts a tweet about a delicious sandwich they ate at a local

10 Do’s and Don’ts of Using Twitter for Your Business

The popular microblogging platform “Twitter” is taking the social media world by storm! When used correctly, Twitter can do wonders for your business!

Here’s a checklist of Do’s and Don’ts of using Twitter for your business. Keep these points in mind and you’ll be able to make the most of the popular tweeting platform.

Do’s

1. Keep it concise:

There’s a reason why Twitter gives you 140 characters. However, your tweet should ideally be between 100-115 characters. This gives your audience room to add their

10 Popular Twitter Plug-ins for Your WordPress Blog

Those who have tried know how difficult it is to find Twitter plug-ins for WordPress. The problem is that even if you manage to find a few, they take a lot of space and don’t add enough value to your blog. In case you have been searching for some useful Twitter plug-ins, here is a list that will help you make a right choice.

1 – Tweet, Like, Google +1 and Share

http://wordpress.org/plugins/only-tweet-like-share-and-google-1/

This plug-in comes with five different icons that you can easily add to your blog. By using this particular plug-in, it becomes possible for you to add widget from Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. People can come to your site, read your content and share it using the icons on different social media sites.

2 – IntenseDebate Comments

http://wordpress.org/plugins/intensedebate/

To make people write and comment on your content in your ‘blog comment’ section, you can make use of this particular plug-in. It is a useful plug-in for those who conduct a

How To Use The Twitter Vine Video App For Your Online Business

This is probably one of the most overused-but-true sayings in the realm of marketing, whether it is within social media circles or any other kind, is the fact that “words tell but tales sell”.  I am sure that you’ve all heard that expression on a number of occasions.  However the reason any kind of saying like this becomes a cliche like that’s it’s true.  People interact with people due to things that unite us, things that we share.  And exactly how we uncover deep connections with other people is most frequently with the

6 Free Android Apps To Enhance Your Social Media Marketing

Apps are appliances made for devices based on android OS to expand the utility of the devices. As a manager for social media who is at all times on-the-run, you can be sure to depend on these important apps to stay engaged and connected with your social media. Android apps are available in large numbers in today’s large market. It is recommended you consider the 6 free chat apps to manage your social media marketing:

1 .Tweet Deck

With Tweet Deck, people can customize their experience with Twitter through groups, columns, saved searches and automatic updates to keep them updated concerning interesting topics and the public. This free app, Tweet Deck, allows users to follow what

How to Promote Your Blog in Social Medias

You should use social media to increase the reputation and readership of your blog. If you are trying to increase its PageRank using social media, you will make the acquaintance of failure. The Google programmers are never going to put too much faith into social media because it is too easy to manipulate.

A person may start 100 new accounts today, and use them every day, then once a week they may comment on and link to a website. If Google were paying attention, the websites in question would rise high in the Google search engine results. Manipulating social media for search engine results improvement is too easy and hence unimportant unless Google decide to take note of social media mentions/likes.

Your job is to raise the reputation and prestige of your website through social media, so that people will wish to link to you of their own free will. So that people will comment positively on your blog and will follow it of his or her own free will.

Do not forget to put the little social media widgets/buttons on your blog somewhere, so that you blog readers may also follow your social media actions. It is not necessary but is a good idea if you run competitions, surveys or offers on your social media site.

Facebook

If you have a business page feed, you should enable the auto-share function. It will share

5 Tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest

One of the best ways to drive engagement and build word of mouth traffic about your brand is to run a contest via social media channels. Not only does it engage consumers with your brand in a fun and exciting way, it results in a treasure-trove of customer information, preferences, and feedback you can then mine to improve your business. And, best of all, launching an online contest can be very inexpensive.

However, there is a subtle art to social contests. Your brand needs to appear neither too “cheesy” nor too “salesy,” and you must deliver a prize that people really want. This can be a standard product or gift card, or a “notoriety” prize, such as publishing a winner’s video. What’s more, the contest itself has to be fun and easy to participate in. Few prizes are worth doing something extremely boring, monotonous, or complicated.

Here are five specific strategies you can follow to launch and manage a social contest, and leverage it to deliver real business value:

1.Define the marketing goal:

 Every contest you launch should meet a specific marketing goal. Do you want to drive awareness of a new product or service? Collect a list of customers interested in a specific product segment? Encourage new participants to use your company’s social networking channels? There are many valid reasons to launch a contest, but it’s important to know ahead of time what you’re trying to accomplish.

2.Get Creative:

Here’s the fun part: Creating your contest. The sky’s the limit when it comes to the type of contests you can launch. Here are a few ideas:

- A video contest inviting users to create a new commercial for one of your products

- A user-generated content contest that awards the best ‘personal experience stories’

- A photo contest related to your product or service

- A product invention contest with a large cash prize.

3.Leverage  Social Channels: 

The best part about online contests is how easy it is to take them viral, encourage participation, and link them into your social marketing activities. Promote your contest via Facebook, Twitter, your company blog, and all other social channels, as well as via traditional marketing channels such as print, e-mail, and in-store signage.

Just search the word contest on Twitter to see hundreds of contests going on right now. The best contests are intensely social by nature, because people like to play games and contests together, and most people love to share the chance to win a cool prize with friends and family. Ensure your contest is easily sharable by embedding “share this” links on the contest site, on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (YouTube), and everywhere else people will come across it.

4.Finish the Contest: 

Everyone loves a winner, so make sure you don’t let your contest drag on too long. A typical social contest runs about four weeks –- longer.hen the winner is chosen, do a PR push to publicize their win. Of course, use Facebook and Twitter to promote the winner like mad. Go back to your social media tracking software and find out which people and social sites are talking most about the winner, then post comments on those networks to drive even more interest in the winner.

5.Measure the Contest: 

Of course launching a contest wasn’t just for fun, it was to achieve a specific marketing goal. So after the contest is done, you need to measure the impact it had on brand engagement, clickthrough to your site, conversion, and bottom-line sales. Again, you can use your social media tracking tool to measure all of these success metrics. Find out whether your contest drove as much traffic to your site as you had hoped, and whether this traffic resulted in conversion.

Sorce: Mashable

Staying Social: Social Media Updates

Social media technology is constantly evolving and it can certainly be challenging to stay up-to-date with the evolution of familiar products. The business world has reached a point where social media participation is not only expected, but required in order to stay relevant among competitors. Here are a few updates from around the social media world to help you stay tuned into what’s going on within this infinite space.

•    In April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook Home , a new platform for the social network available on certain Android devices. At the announcement, Zuckerberg said, “Our phones today are designed around apps, not people. We want to flip that around.” Features include a live news feed of “friend” updates

Social Media Profiles for Online Reputation Management

Your reputation, online or offline is vital extremely important. Recently, a friend of mine owned a travel business. After hiring an employee with a light criminal background and having thousands of dollars embezzled from him, he started to pursue legal action against this individual. This person decided to get revenge by badmouthing the owner and business through Rip Off Report and other online platforms. Now, anytime you Google his name or business some very offensive things are displayed as a #1 result. Consequently, his business has suffered tremendously.

This situation is the perfect example of the need for reputation management. One of the most powerful (and easiest) methods to begin to control your reputation in the search engine result pages (SERPs) is to create social profiles on major social media websites. Since domains like Twitter or MySpace have such high authority it takes a lot less effort to rank, than creating your own site, by creating a profile that will outrank and push down undesired search results. Also, these search results gives you the added benefit of having control over your brand and being accessible and available on multiple platforms strengthens your overall branding efforts.

Which social profiles should I have?

Once you understand that you should be monitoring and repairing your reputation, you will need to figure out how to do it. As a rule of thumb the Big 4 social media sites are a great place to start. Generally your goal would be to obtain user profiles that are an exact match as the keyword you are trying to manage. In most cases this is a branded term such as your company name. Additioanly branded usernames are generally available on social media websites. Many sites, particularly niche sites, can be useful to your company and your specific ORM situation. But the 4 you must have are:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• MySpace

If you want to check across 120 different social sites to see which keywords or names are taken you can do so very easily with one of the best social media monitoring tools out there called KnowEm.com. Just type the desired username and click “Check Username”. Additionally, they offer a service that will register you on all those different social media sites as well for .50 cents per social media site.

Steps to Take

Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do a few things before your campaign can be effective.

1. Create a complete profile
Simply obtaining the name twitter.com/companyname, isn’t enough. You need a complete and full profile to have a legitimate working account, this includes bios, avatars etc. As much information that you can fill in and feed to search engine spiders, the better.

2. Engage and Interact
Participating in the community strengthens your profile and gives your account credibility. An account that has your name but nothing else looks like a spam account.

Also, you gain the added benefit of internal links from these social sites. If you just create a profile and let it sit then it doesn’t gain internal link equity it needs, for high SERP rankings, from other profile pages, group pages, etc.
Interacting (e.g. returning messages, commenting, voting) is vital to the strength of your profile. For an example, check out the hat tip to Steve Espinosa for showing how to get DoFollowed links on YouTube here.

3. Monitor
When a company engages in social media they are opening themselves up for a lot of commentary regarding their brand. Be prepared to monitor the sentiment to measure if it’s positive or negative. Have a contingency plan for when you come across negative sentiment. I’ll spare the lesson on monitoring and handling sentiment and direct you to The Online Reputation Management Guide by Outspoken Media.

Read More>> 

LinkedIn Introduces Company Page Analytics and Sponsored Updates

While the audience is diverse in terms of demographic makeup, LinkedIn primarily caters to a single target market: goals-oriented members who are using the site to meet professional needs. As long as the company continues to provide tools that enable this group of users to thrive, it will forever have a cozy position in the competitive social space. So far so good, and LinkedIn is back at it again with a feature that will surely pique the interest of its most dedicated users.

LinkedIn has rolled out Company Page Analytics. The new tool offers instant value by allowing you to easily track engagement levels across your page. Businesses, especially, should find the feature very useful as the data it provides addresses many of

How To Gain More Blog Traction With Less Effort

The average blogger spends around 3 hours on getting his article read. Recent studies from blog polls show that the outcome is about 40-80 visitors a day.

So, how can you create more traffic for your blog, without wasting critical time you could use for creating good content?

In this article i will give you some tips and tweaks that help you get more traction with less effort.

1. Don't prostitute for views

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_likes

We could also call this the “Don't be angry at friends that don't like to read your articles” rule.

Everyone has this one friend who completely ignores your social media activity.

This doesn't mean he/she doesn't like you, it just means that a given topic might not be that interesting to him/her or just there's just no time to engage in it. So, don't make reading your articles a favor, find the people who appreciate your writing.

If you want to attract a certain group of readers, write something they care about and then share it with them.

2. Link building is dead

Back in the old days setting links on your website created huge traffic on your blog. This way of SEO is dead. Since the new Google penguin update (release April 24th) it seems like Google doesn't care that much about link velocity any more. They are now confident enough to prefer good written content on certain topics to articles with a lot of interlinkage. This is something many SEO people in my surrounding noticed when their SEO businesses started struggling last month.

There is no need for link spreading anymore, being particular about what and where to spread matters again. So stop the link spamming.

3. Get your articles on Newsgrape

If promoting your content consumes so much time, why not let somebody else do the job for you?

The Newsgrape platform has a wordpress plugin to automatically sync your content with a large community without having duplicate content issues.

What happens with your article:

1. Newsgrape connects your articles with similar ones. Meaning: If somebody reads a topic connected to yours, they will see your article pop up at “related articles”. Cool about that: They are more likely to be genuinely interested and appreciative of what you have to say.

2.

Newsgrape informs readers with certain interests that articles have been written about those given topics. This means, if you write something of popular interest, you have the chance of attracting over 5000 currently active readers on the site.

4. Automate your social media appereance

Its good to have a constant information flow about your website going on out there. But don't waste every single day on setting up new facebook and twitter updates - use tools to automate your appearance. Of course there are thousands of plugins for wordpress, but i will give you two powerful tools you can use with any blog:

Twitterfeed  - is the most automated system to do so. It creates twitter, LinkedIn and facebook updates by crawling your feeds. You can customize your updates a lot, for example how often and how many articles it should publish and define prefix/suffix etc.

Buffer - You have a productive week ahead of you? Fill your Buffer with twenty to forty updates, define the frequency and you are set to go.

Of course you can connect your social media accounts with Newsgrape as well.

To wrap it up

Don't prostitute, no SEO bulls%*&, connect with distributors and last but not least automate your social media appearance.

original post>>

5 Reasons Why Pinterest Drives Traffic To WordPress Sites

If you are looking to get your WordPress site ready for Summertime, Pinterest, and other similar social media networks, are user friendly and great for giving your site a fresher look. Whether you are researching new marketing techniques or you are launching a new business website, social networking deserves your attention.

It is no secret that social networking is a major component in ramping up your business’ marketing plans. After going to a site like best10webhosting to compare hosting companies, and then choosing an attractive web design, many businesses rely on sites likes Facebook and LinkedIn to connect to their customers. What might surprise you is the rapid growth that Pinterest has experienced this year. Mashable.com reported earlier

Effective Instagram Marketing Secrets for Your Business

According to statistics, 63% of teens use Instagram on a daily basis. Hence, you can easily guess who the Instagram masters are. As a marketer, you must learn about the tricks you need to use to make your Instagram marketing campaign work. And knowing the secrets that the regular users don’t can definitely help you to strategize better.

Of the 1 billion monthly active Instagram users, 34% are millennials. Thus, if you don’t align your campaign with this demographic as your target audience, it is going to be a total failure. Instagram introduces new features every now and then. You have to make the right use of the same to attract the maximum number of users.

Here are some Instagram secrets you can use for promoting your brand:

1. Using effective hashtag

Twitter has shown us how hashtags can be used in a brand new manner, but Instagram is where we see the maximum use of hashtags. On Instagram, a lot depends on the correct use of the hashtags. While using the right hashtags can bring many users to your profile, the wrong hashtags can give out the impression that you are using it without having much knowledge about it. You can use different strategies for using the hashtags and see which one works for you. If you use related and local hashtags, it can bring you a better result, ensuring that your post will always reach the right people.

2. Instagram influencer marketing

This method of marketing can be effective for every business, be it a cosmetic brand or a homework help service. This marketing method uses influential people to promote your product/service on Instagram. Consumers get highly influenced by these personalities who have a significant impact on their purchase decision. An article by Variety shows that teens get more influenced by YouTube stars than the regular celebrities. It is also seen that these individuals can engage the audience in a better way than the usual stars. Thus, using them for promoting any product or service can be very beneficial for

3 Key Ingredients Of A Successful Video Marketing Campaign

Video creation is an art. Get down the lighting, the energy, the presentation, and you can easily create an absolute masterpiece. The secret is in practice. Persistently practicing your video creation skills can help you become a true master. Just like any other skill, if you work at it over a set period of time you can churn out truly noteworthy creations. Feeling comfortable in front of the camera might take some time. Practice!

Overcoming the Blocks: I Sound and Look Funny

I know these two blocks are chief impediments to video creation success. Most people feel that they look funny when on video for the first time, and virtually all people believe that they sound funny. This is because you are not accustomed to hearing your voice in

5 Online Skills Any Entrepreneur Needs in 2018

Business is quickly moving online. Ecommerce sales have increased, year over year, for more than a decade now, by at least 10% per year. Meanwhile, total retail sales have remaining pretty much flat. The result? Around the turn of the century ecommerce made up less than 1% of total sales in the United States. In 2012 that number had already passed 5% and hasn’t slowed down since.

The world is going online, so if you’re an ecommerce entrepreneur you had better do the same thing.

Here are 5 skills that you’ll need to not only survive, but thrive when selling online. There’s

3 Online Branding Mistakes You Need to Avoid

Branding properly can build your business at an alarming pace. You can gain your target market’s trust, improve your visibility and increase sales quite quickly if you brand yourself effectively. Unfortunately, many people take all the wrong steps during the branding process.

Many rush mindlessly ahead, desperate to generate sales, so they plaster their business link all over Facebook Groups, twitter and Google Plus. These practices are repelling, meaning that you scare away people who might otherwise be interested in your opportunity.

Check your energy. Do you feel confident, about yourself and your opportunity? If you don’t, take a step back. Either build up confidence in yourself and your business or select another opportunity, because you can’t build a successful, thriving brand while lacking confidence in yourself and the business you attempt to grow.

Lack of Clarity

Branding newbies usually have zero clarity around their campaign. The brand message

How Should Niche Businesses Use Social Media to Best Effect?

This article gives suggestions and best practice tips to niche businesses around capitalizing on the potential of social media.

Time to Socialise

The big mistake that many smaller niche businesses make is to forsake social media platforms completely. There is a prevailing attitude that, because only a few people will probably be seeking out a social media presence, that there isn’t any point in doing it.

Instead, these businesses should view social media in much the same way that they view search engine optimisation. Accept that yes, fewer people will be seeking you out, however take that opportunity to focus on the specific market that has an interest in you and make your social media content as relevant as possible.

How to Stand Out

If you are a niche business then it is not easy to stand out in a world where the biggest

The Most Popular Social Sites in Other Countries

Americans tend to think of social networking from a personal perspective, likely in simple terms of Facebook and Twitter and maybe even Pinterest. In reality, though, there are dozens of flourishing social networks across the globe, some of which U.S. residents have never even heard of. Social media is truly a global concept.

Here’s a quick look at some of the most popular social sites in countries other than the U.S. used by millions upon millions of people.

Orkut

Orkut logo You may have never heard of Orkut, but everyone in Brazil has. With over 33,000,000 active and unique users, Orkut is Brazil’s number one social networking site. In fact, almost 60% of Orkut traffic originates in Brazil and the company (originally a branch of Google) was recently relocated from California to the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. Orkut is similar to Google+ in that users separate each other into groups and

5 Useful Tools To Improve Your Instagram Marketing

Instagram is the most popular social pictures community with an estimated user base of more than 100 million members. With its huge audience, Instagram is becoming a major asset for companies to reach their target audience. If your business isn’t already on Instagram, it is the right time for you to jump ship and create an account.

Unlike other social media sites, the marketing success of Instagram solely depends on the quality of pictures you’re posting in the network. By posting good quality pictures which are eye catching, you can get a huge number of following which will ultimately help to get better results for your business. In this article, I am sharing the 5 useful tools you can use to increase your following, get them engaged and get better results with your

How To Use Infographics As A Useful SEO Tool

Infographics are the latest craze in the SEO community. They are a platform where you can demonstrate plenty of information through a graphic form. This means that they are an engaging way to communicate with your audience and ensure they want to come back for more.

If you post useful content through your infographics you’ll be much more likely to have an audience that appreciates your content and is willing to share. However the main problem is that many people don’t know how to use infographics or where to put them. Below is a series of places where you can place your infographics to get the most exposure.

Infographic Directories

The first place you should aim to get your Infographic into is the various Infographic