social media marketing | Review Crushers - Social Media and Internet Marketing

The Impact of Social Media on Internet Marketing

Social Media is obviously all the buzz within the internet world. A typical definition of Social Media can be given as

web-based and mobile technologies used to turn communication into interactive discussion between organizations, communities, and individuals.

In other words, Social Media is a collection of internet applications that may allow the creation and sharing of user-generated content. Social media is accessible all over the Internet, and enabled by scalable communication techniques.

Internet Marketing is also a commonly known term within the business marketing world. Marketing should include strategies to promote your business to the market. Internet marketing is commonly called: the most important part of an online business.

Social Media and Online Marketing:

Each and every individual or business that uses the internet, has an existence on popular social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, Yahoo, LinkedIn, any many more. Social networking is the great way of connecting people with each other and also sharing different types of information. Today, Millions of people are using these social networking sites to connect with their friends and to share, post and more.

How can Social Media benefit your Business?

As I have already discussed, most of the Internet users have their accounts on these popular social networking websites. If you have a business online and also have a business website, you may use these social media websites for Digital Marketing purposes by creating your business profile there. This will not only create a new user market for you, but also will increase your website popularity.

Millions of users are surfing these social media websites regularly, there is a good chance a number of these users may find your business useful for them. These social media sites help your customers and other people know more about your business and see if they are interested in your services…then they will visit your website through your link given on your business profile. The more users coming to your website, the higher the probability of your product or service being purchased, thus social media will be increasing your business by creating a market for your business.

Social Media Marketing is useful not only for businesses and companies who create their profiles on these sites.. Marketing through social media is also useful for social media users and social media itself.

Users of these social media sites may find useful information through these platforms about whatever they are looking for. For example, if you want to purchase a watch online, you may find various watch company profiles on these websites and from there, you can get good information about each of their products. The key here is to use this area to create a professional look and feel for your product & business. Using this correctly can only help the impact of social media and internet marketing for your company.

How Effective is Your Social Media Marketing

1:07 pm by Kathy Baka 10 Comments

Social media marketing is an effective way to promote a business and its presence throughout the world. This is all about creating healthy relationships with your potential customer base through a genuine platform. Traditional marketing procedures have failed to offer this kind of mileage for a business.

For this reason alone social media marketing has excelled in many new ways. Various communities in the popular social networking sites can easily create a significant presence for their business… this has proven to be one of the best ways to improve customer relations. Done correctly it can create lasting relationships where past marketing methods failed. This new way of marketing actually creates real interaction between the business and customer.

This method demands an organized approach from the business with a proper plan and determination. So needless to say your plan will involve a proper understanding of the social networking process.

It is not necessary to create a presence with EVERY social networking site.

Make your choice with the few that are very well known to help like: Twitter and Facebook. But if you have targeted a specific market. .. niche specific sites should be given utmost priority in this social networking sites selection.

It is essential for a business to allocate specific time schedules for these social media sites and make use of the features on them for their business promotion and presence to a great extent. Always share quality content that will help the business presence increase while working this platform. Obviously posting low quality content will result in negative views of the business.

Having a plan in place

There are so many places you can check the performance of your social media marketing. Those are your website analytics, search engine position, your sales graphs, customer base status and your social networking sites that your building your business presence. Listed below are 4 favorites to check your influence.

Tweet Reach – How Far Did Your Tweet Travel?
Klout – The Standard for Influence
TweetsStats – Graphin’ Your Stats
MyWebCareer -Discover, Evaluate and Monitor Your Professional Brand Online

Final Thoughts

Traffic improvements from social networking are good sign if you know specifically where the traffic is coming from. Search engine rankings are another important factor through effective social media marketing you can improve your rank… improve your customer base, sales and response rates. If you don’t find improvements at the mentioned places, then re-think your strategy starting from the bottom and reworking your plan.

Filed Under: social media and internet marketing, social media resources Tagged With: facebook, social media, social media marketing, social networking, twitter

Search Engines are More Efficient than Social Channels

10:25 am by patle 2 Comments

As you may know sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have become so important from a marketing point of view because of the number of people who use them. Facebook has over 800 million active users and Twitter has over a 100 million active users. By not being active on these sites companies are losing out on a lot of earning potential. However, recent studies have revealed that these social networking sites are still not as effective in converting a customer as a search engine.

How search engines and social media is used?

A study called science of sharing was conducted to learn how a consumer uses the social network and search engines. Now this study has revealed that what people do on the web is dependent upon the product type. For the high involvement products, like automobiles, people will not visit sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. They go to search engines like Google and search for user reviews and ratings. For low involvement products like music, people prefer going to social networking sites.

Now, a person who uses search engines or review sites for high involvement products is more likely to buy a product when compared with the user that goes on social media marketing sites. A person who uses social media sites regularly is most likely to recommend the product to someone. However, the study has also shown that users who do not share much to have a more likelihood of buying the product.

Influential channels

There are many social networks out there and not all of them have the same influence over every customer. As mentioned above, search engines rule the roost when it comes to influencing the customers. These are followed by the brand website and then by review sites. The next two positions are occupied by news sites and online ads. When you travel to the bottom of this heap, you will find that sites like Twitter, Foursquare, and Wikipedia, which are least influential for a customer. These three are followed by blog posts and Facebook comments.

The study segregated the products and then tried to figure out which channel has the most influence on the brands. Facebook is on the top when it comes to baby care products. YouTube, as expected, is very influential for music brands, and people use review sites mostly for electronic brands.

Owned, earned, and search results

The study further revealed that search results were on top when you categorize channels as either earned or owned. Owned channels include, brand sites, Facebook, YouTube, and other similar sites. Earned channels are review sites, blog posts, word of mouth etc. Whether it is beauty products, restaurants, or travel, search results were ahead of both owned and earned channels in terms of influencing a customer. This study is very important for organizations because they want to know how their customers will buy the product in order to get an accurate measure of the return on investment. Judging by the study, social networks are just used to share and have a bit of entertainment, but buyers will most likely use the search engine to get to the desired product.

Filed Under: Guest Blogging, seo Tagged With: search engines, social media, social media marketing

Apple Siri and Local SEO

12:55 pm by patle 9 Comments

Apple took the mobile world by storm when it introduced the iPhone. Its latest offering in the series of one of the most popular smartphone brands of the world is the iPhone 4S. Though the device has many features to boast of, the feature that has caught everyone’s attention is Siri. Siri is basically a voice recognition app that allows you to control different functions in your cell phone like, sending messages, calling, and calendar reminders. However, the biggest feature of Siri is that it can do local searches for you and provide you with information on restaurants, banks, or cab services. What this means is that you do not have to perform searches in order to find out these details.

However, this also means that the importance of search engine results and the various PPC advertisements reduces significantly. It is not known that how Siri goes about collecting the information, but it is quite certain that it uses sites like Google Places and Yelp. That is why it has become very important for websites to make changes so that Siri and similar applications can access them without many difficulties. Here are a few tips that can help you in this process.

Mobile site optimization

You may have heard this before, as mobile sites are not new, but it is expected that by 2015 30% of the searches would be have some sort of a local element to them. That is why you should try to make changes and incorporate local SEO as a part of your business plan. You can use some the following steps for optimizing your site for mobiles.

You can use mobile site templates that are available on popular platforms like Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress.
You should make sure that your contact details are prominent on you home page. This helps in local SEO as it enables apps like Siri to figure out the contact details a lot more easily.
The main thing to consider is how Siri and other voice apps will access the information on your website. If you use heavy graphics, Flash, and PDFs for displaying information then it simply makes it more difficult for Siri to find out the required details.

Improving you digital presence

Many people believe that setting up a page on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook is sufficient because social media marketing gives more exposure. You should make sure that you are present on one or more directories like Yahoo, Foursquare, Google Places etc. There are various such directories and to determine which ones you should pick, you should search on Google to figure out the sites and companies that are doing well in your geographical area. Then you should use the directories that are being used by these companies.

It is also important to ensure that you use schema tags for your website. These tags help in incorporating micro data like, contacts address and working hours. This can help apps and search engines in processing information from your site a lot more quickly.

Filed Under: Guest Blogging, SEO & Online Marketing Tips, Social Media and Internet Marketing Training Tagged With: Apple, iphone 4S, local seo, Mobile Marketing, mobile site optimization, seo, smartphones, social media marketing

Facebook Marketing – 7 Simple Strategies to Increase Facebook Fans

1:24 pm by Kaushal Gandhi 1 Comment

You have taken steps to create fresh and exciting content and you share and engage with your fans as they comment on content. You’re off to a great start! However, how can you make sure that visitors new to your page don’t leave without clicking that Like button?

Before you begin working your way through the following steps—which work for e-commerce, B2B, and publishers alike—consider adding Google Analytics to your page as a way to figure out who is visiting and how they got there, making the process of increasing easier overall.

1. Add a Custom Landing Tab to Your Facebook Fan Page.

Rather than taking your non-fans to your wall, take them directly to a customized welcome page. Make it attractive and engaging, and you just increased the chance your non-fan will hit that Like and transform into a fan.

2. Remind Your Fans Why They Are Fans.

Offer your fans access to something exclusive that is available to them only because they Liked you on Facebook. Consider recognizing your top fans, perhaps like Zappos does—they have a Fan of the Week highlighted in their banner.

3. Offer Incentives.

Anyone enjoys receiving something of value for merely clicking on a button. Once the non-fan has clicked on your welcome tab, give them some incentive to click on your Like button as well.

4. Call-to-Action.

Sometimes all it takes to get what you want is to ask. Be sure to have a good CTA message on your welcome page, and often that will be just what it takes to get a new fan. For example, L’Occitane tells visitors to find out how to win a trip, and then places an arrow toward the Like button. Clever!

5. Interact with Your Customers.

Make your welcome page as interactive as possible by showing a video, starting a dialogue, or personalizing it by using your visitor’s name.

6. Be a Tease.

Depending on your content, you may want to consider offering just a nibble of your content goodies before giving the full serving by teasing them with a little content and the promises of more if they Like your page. Be aware that to make this work, people will likely need to feel something for your brand already, and you should take care to not disappoint with whatever your tease or follow-up is.

7. Tell Them Who.

In spite of all of the technology we gobble up, people in general like to feel like they are connecting with other people. Be sure to add a tab to introduce the people in your company. In addition, fill out your Info tab and your About section.

Filed Under: facebook, Guest Blogging, Social Media, social media and internet marketing, Social Media Tutorial Tagged With: facebook, facebook fans, facebook marketing, increase facebook fans, social media marketing

9 Steps to: Improve Your Social Media Marketing

2:31 pm by Kathy Baka Leave a Comment

Are you searching for a couple new improved strategies to help with your social media marketing activities? If that’s the case, look no further. I can assist you with your SMM success, so I have gathered a great list of strategies for you to incorporate into your everyday social media marketing.

Be an excellent listener: When you search through the numerous social websites and discover the sorts of individuals with that you want to engage with, invest some time to hear what’s being said before jumping in to the conversation.

Try This:

Think of social media marketing as a conversation as opposed to an everyday marketing vehicle to make you money: Social media marketing is sort of -an enormous room with many individuals within it, speaking about a large number of subjects. Your job is to discover which parts of the conversation that mean something for you and find the right way to participate. And, by being in a conversation “like” in real life, should you bully your way in attempts to dominate individuals …they will just turn away.

Don’t Annoy Your Followers

Seems like some good advice, right?

Unfortunately, a great deal of businesses which are in the beginning stages — starting up with social media marketing assume the simplest way to “promote” their company will be to distribute consistent offers or whatever else is associated with their business.

Just a Quick Guideline: If it’s something you personally wouldn’t prefer to receive from someone you follow then don’t send it out!

Your social media marketing goal should be trying to be as helpful as possible. People follow and value brands which are helpful, not self-promoting “sales-people”. Give first, then ask.

Try posting useful links to industry articles, respond to all your questions, comments, and engage. The followers, engagement, and ultimately sales will happen ONLY if you’re helpful first.

Consider Your Goals: Whether you would like to improve knowledge of your brand, listen for customer comments about your company, or track what your competition is doing, it’s essential to establish your goals or objectives and concentrate on them. Otherwise, social media marketing can be incredibly time-consuming.

Participation: You might as well participate, since people are talking whether you decide to get involved or not. By participating, you’re able to tell your portion of the story.

Inform: Whenever you encounter an article that you could increase the value of, do so. However, you would be smart to consider when it comes to adding it to the conversation instead of performing a sales presentation.

Understanding Your Target Audience: Understanding the needs and engagement-style of those you wish to get connected to will provide you with a far greater possibility in creating a positive experience with the conversations you decide to take part in.

Practice Makes Perfect: Refining your social media marketing efforts by assessing various methods to enhance your engagement with agents and small businesses is a brilliant approach. Social media marketing is without a doubt not just a one-size-fits-all environment. Find what works the best for you practice getting better at your delivery and you will stand out amongst the crowd.

Working Smart: My favorite by far!! By utilizing zero cost tools like HootSuite and Google Alerts, you’ll be able to create a reasonably sophisticated social media engagement system pretty much no cost.

Filed Under: Social Media, social media and internet marketing Tagged With: media marketing, social media marketing

5 Social Media Mistakes

1:11 pm by Alban Leave a Comment

This Guest Post 5 Social Media Mistakes was submitted by: Alban. If you would like to Submit a Guest Post please see Submit Guest Post.

Social media is often hailed as the best business promotion tool since the invention of PR itself. However, social media is only as good as the person behind it, because unfortunately we still haven’t evolved to a point where the computers don’t need us at all. Therefore, make sure you learn from these five social media mistakes so that you don’t become a social outcast.

1 – Not enough
(or any) planning

Just because you know how to use a computer does not make you an expert at social media marketing. While there are businesses who can develop a following of thousands of Facebook friends, they probably already had a strong following offline. Plus, even if you have all of your fans sign up to follow you from the outset, if you don’t have a plan for promoting yourself on social media, then your followers will soon realize this and follow someone else.

Instead, think of your social media presence as a small town, where a town of 100, 1,000 or 10,000 people will all need some sort of organization input. As well as acknowledging the need for organization and planning, you also need to know who will be in charge of your little community.

Seeking out expert knowledge should be part of your social media plan, but beware of putting too much store in the term ‘expert’. Social media is such a new and rapidly evolving medium, that a Facebook expert for example could only possibly have seven years experience, and that is if they signed up for an account on the day the site went live. In reality most social media experts will have around three years of experience, but their field of knowledge is still shifting around them.

Therefore, before you seek out someone to help you plan your social media approach:

* Ask about their experience with similar businesses. As you would in any new business partnership, ask about your social media expert’s experience with businesses or campaigns similar to yours. Find out how the social media presence is developing, and what their ongoing involvement is.
* Know how marketing fits with social media. Ask potential social media experts about their understanding of how marketing and customer service integrate with social media platforms. A true expert will need experience in both areas to be successful.

2 – Letting someone else do it

While it is valuable to seek the advice and assistance of a social media expert, it is a big mistake to let someone else take over your social media campaign. For example, many businesses assign the role to their admin assistant, or the work experience kid, without realizing that the person has now become the face of their business.

The person managing your social media needs to have a thorough understanding of the business, the products and services and the branding you want to portray. That is why it is much easier to teach an experienced member of your team to use social media, than it is to try to instil your business plan with someone who already understands social media.

It can also be useful to seek the assistance of a professional to launch your social media communities but not only will the cost of having an agency manage your social media be high, the medium requires a genuine approach, and users will be able to tell who is really behind the wheel. Your community wants to hear from you, the people running the business and making the decisions because no one knows your business and your product like you do.

Also, while there are a number of programs and systems which can automate interactions on social media, a genuine connection with your customers can’t be achieved with such a short cut. You can set up a direct message to be sent to every new person who follows you on Twitter, but you can’t automate a conversation, or troubleshooting for a customer.

3 – Using just social media

Social media should be treated as an extension of your traditional marketing methods rather than your only marketing and advertising platform. Don’t forget about your real world marketing and customer support plans and services because while social media is here to stay, there are still some interactions and approaches it can’t replace.

4 – Not spending any money

Just because it is free to create an account with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any of the hundreds of social networking sites available, it doesn’t mean that social media shouldn’t be a line in your business budget. In order to successfully manage your social media profiles and campaigns you will need to spend time and therefore money.

It takes time and expertise to create content, promote your profiles, monitor interactions and participate in conversations. Your social media marketing campaign should be allocated a budget just like any other campaign for success.

5 – Not providing useful content

Once you are online and you are connected to your customers, clients and potential customers, then you need to be offering them valuable information. Your social media community is bombarded with thousands of messages every day and they need to be able to identify and access the important and useful information in their day, and move on – if they don’t find that information with you, they’ll move on from you.

Social media is also about the interactions, so make sure that you take the time to listen to what your community is saying. Make a meaningful connection with your community, don’t just bombard them with advertising, and if you receive a direct question, comment or complain, address it directly because that is what the medium is there for.

Did we cover everything here? Can you think of any other Social Media Mistakes?

Filed Under: Guest Blogging, marketing, Social Media Tagged With: pr, social media campaign, social media marketing

Enhance Your Business Prospects through Internet Marketing

2:00 am by sirangikalpana 2 Comments

This Guest Post Enhance Your Business Prospects through Internet Marketing was submitted by: Sirangi Kalpana. If you would like to Submit a Guest Post please see Submit Guest Post.

At one time business men and business corporations were not interested in web marketing and under estimated its performance.

However, it took them some time to understand the real benefits of employing the internet medium for its marketing purpose. However, the rivals who took an early initiative to do web marketing have become the kingpin in the internet business and are highly successful in the current scenario.

Every kind of business is targeted towards the youth and they spend most of their time in the internet. The social media websites have become very popular and it has become the best platform to advertise the products and services.

Own Experience:

I would like to share my friend’s experience with the social media sites here. My friend got a ticket to see the ICC 2011 World Cup League match that was supposed to be played by 2 powerful teams. He had a free ticket that was worth about $75. He was not interested in visiting the venue and he had simply updated his status on Facebook. He was unable to believe that in the next half an hour, he had received several queries regarding the sales of the ticket and the asking price went up to $400 in just half an hour time. He was rude shocked and very happy to sell the ticket for $400.

This experience is just the tip of the iceberg and he made no efforts to earn that money. But still, he was able to gain and the full credit goes to the social media site. There are many other sites that are highly beneficial to the business users. These sites act as a true platform for both the business and user communities.

Advantage of Going Online:

There are umpteen numbers of benefits that can be reaped by preferring the online medium and online advertisement. It is possible to reach out to millions of customers at once and it requires no special efforts. Is it possible to reach out to millions of customers over phone in your traditional way of marketing? It is one of the best cost cutting measures adopted by most of the business corporations. The customers would like to engage in business with vendors who can give quick and prompt replies to their queries. It is made possible in this online platform. Receiving the query and giving back a personal call to the customer will not take more than 2 minutes. It is the best possible way to grab a potential client and to improve the sales.

Simplicity of Social Media Marketing:

The beauty of these websites lies in the simplicity of their operations. It is possible for the clients to leave positive feedback which will be viewed by most other clients. It is one way of doing word of mouth advertising. A good review can rope in better clients to your business. Make sure you get benefited through effective marketing strategies and do not miss out even a single opportunity to expand your business.

Author Bio:

Sirangi Kalpana is a promotional items expert and write a lot about cheap coffee mugs, promotional flashlights, custom flash drives and other promotional products.

Filed Under: Guest Blogging, internet marketing Tagged With: online advertisement, social media marketing

What is Social Media Analytics?

11:04 am by rosemartin 1 Comment

This Guest Post What is Social Media Analytics? was submitted by: Rose Martin. If you would like to Submit a Guest Post please see Submit Guest Post.

It is true that proper search engine optimization contribute to the success of social media campaigns. But the real success of such campaigns may not be measured without the use of a special tool. There is a method which social networks have adapted to measure marketing efforts of products and services offered by companies. This is called Social Media Analytics.

Social media analytics involves measuring, analyzing and interpreting results of interactions between brands and customers or businesses across digital channels on websites like Facebook, Twitter and Linked in. This is done in line with goals and objectives the business may have. It involves constant reviews to check on progress and change of different things. This method uses both qualitative and quantitative data given by these social websites.

For example, a company can be able to know how many people visit their profile and the comments they make on their products. This is important feed back for the businesses. Analytics tools can be adapted to give the business holistic information. This data is then used to inform businesses for them to make proper informed decisions. If the business objective is to expand then the search engines to be prioritized will be those enhancing such an objective.

The business failures and successes can also be gauged through such tools.

To get the best information, one needs to use the appropriate applications, get the right software and storage service for the harvested data. Some companies specialize in helping businesses to harvest important data for on unstructured data such as those found on Facebook and twitter. A sophisticated data analysis tool is necessary for efficiency and this involves the interpretation and validating of findings generated in the social media analytics tool.

Social media analytics is a cycle revolving around the process of discovering the social web, filtering the relevant information and dividing the information into information that covers the company needs or product information and information that covers the company marketing and advertising needs. This should be made in such a way that it covers the companies’ strategies and future innovation and directions for customers’ satisfaction. It is also important to understand the clients target market since everything today is focused on consumer satisfaction.

By using the web, one can be able to know who is about to purchase what product or service and reach out to them through the different subjects of conversations on the web blogs. This will also pave way for sales to be made through human intentions.

After all, social networking sites are not just about getting to meet friends and family and community interaction. They are also marketing avenues for companies offering different products and services and monitor their progress, their products, their competitors and compare their overall performance.

The world is indeed technologically advancing in all sectors. So the next time you make a comment about a product or service, remember you may be affecting a decision somewhere. A genuine comment will make for the good but a fake comment may not give accurate results. All these measurements may not be accurate per say but they do give an impression on the product or services.

Filed Under: Guest Blogging, seo, Social Media Tagged With: search engine optimization, Social Media Analytics, social media marketing

Why Your Web Site Should Be “Home Base”

11:53 am by dgabbard Leave a Comment

There are more ways for businesses to communicate with clients and prospective clients than ever before, and most of them are easily accessible and easy to use. Social media sites offer businesses a low-cost or no-cost platform to talk to customers, promote and inform. As an added bonus, these sites have been in use for personal purposes for a while now, so people – both business owners and consumers – generally know how to use them.

Small business owners, though, the ones who don’t have legal and marketing departments, may not be aware of a few important facts. Possibly the most important thing to know about sites like Facebook is that you do not own the content you post there. Facebook can make changes as they see fit. They can put your content into an aggregated feed. They can remove your business’ page, without warning, for hosting an unauthorized contest or giveaway.

A careful reading of Facebook’s TOS may have you worried about even starting a Page for your business. You probably should. It gives you one more way to meet your customers or clients where they are, and to learn more about what they need and want and how you can help. However, you should not make your Facebook Page your primary online “home.”

Everything you do online for your business should direct your clients and prospects back to your site. If you guest post for someone else, you want a link to your own site, right? If someone visits your Facebook Page, it should be similar to reading a guest post. It should make them want to check out your site, too.

The same goes for Twitter. Everything you post on Twitter that isn’t a Direct Message (DM) is indexed by search engines. There is no extra step you took to make that happen and there is no step you can take to prevent it (other than closing your account, of course), because Twitter owns the content and has decided to make it public. Handled properly, this is a very good thing for business owners. You just need to be aware of it and make sure that in your Twitter stream and most certainly in your bio there are references and links back to your own website.

On your own site, though, you are in control. The best analogy I’ve heard to describe the difference in social media sites and your own site is that it is like renting vs. owning a home. If you make your Facebook Page your main hub of online communication, you are renting the space and the owner – Mark Zuckerberg in this case – calls the shots about what can go on there. Your web site is your own little piece of cyberspace. If you don’t like a comment someone leaves on a blog post, YOU get to call the shots and remove it.

Businesses, large and small, would be foolish to ignore the arsenal of tools available online, but it is equally foolish to use those tools without understanding how they work and to whom they belong. If you are confounded by how to go about building your own site or how to use social media to your best advantage you have options. You can pay someone to help. You can put in the time and brain power it takes to figure it all out. You can find a mentor who might be willing to give you advice. Just don’t go flailing around blindly at the risk of your business.

Filed Under: Guest Blogging, Social Media Tagged With: facebook, social media marketing, traffic, twitter