“The best angle from which to approach any problem is the try-angle. ”
Best Regards,
Michelle
Daily Advice: 365 Ways to Become a Millionaire
June 30th, 2010Report: Social Media Infiltrating Search Marketing
June 25th, 2010
SEO, keywords, cost-per-click… anyone in the search marketing sphere will be familiar with this terminology. This once exclusive domain – consisting of optimizing search results for specific keywords related to particular businesses through Google, Yahoo and other search engines – is now being infiltrated by social media. According to the 6th annual “State of Search Engine Marketing Report 2010,” conducted by the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, we might be seeing terms like social search and social graph enter the search marketing jargon and completely change the way corporate websites attract and retain viewers.
1,471 respondents commented on the importance of social media in search marketing this past January and February, 2010. Those surveyed consisted of B2B and B2C companies of all shapes and sizes. Despite the vastly different corporate profiles among the group, one trend emerged rapidly from the data: social media matters in search marketing. 52% of companies and 74% of agencies included in this survey responded that social media has a huge or moderate impact on their search marketing.
Examining the budgets of companies often leads to an understanding of where their real priorities are. This survey revealed that 59% of those surveyed were planning on increasing their social media budget this year, while 37% indicated that it would stay the same. This means that we can expect to see a significant increase in social media search marketing over the next year, with companies reaching out to people’s social graphs in order to attract them to their websites rather than, or in tandem with, using purely algorithmic search marketing.
Among those B2B companies surveyed, Twitter stood out as the preferred social network for marketing purposes: 72% used Twitter compared to 64% using Facebook, 62% using LinkedIn and 52% using YouTube. Twitter makes sense as the top social network for business marketing. It is text-based, and fits nicely with the methods of search marketing that are already well established. Facebook and LinkedIn allow for multimedia to be more readily brought into the conversation, and YouTube’s video format is one of the newest entries into the complex search algorithm created by Google. This, along with the successful track record of companies like Spark360, indicates that video might be on the rise in terms of search and marketing.
Search marketing is important for business to reach clients and customers, and to make interested parties aware of their services. However, social media changes things up: rather than simply targeting keywords and trying to snare clients who are looking for something your business offers, you must now incorporate relevant social data about that client, including accessing and understanding their online social connections. Receiving product reviews via Facebook messages, hearing about a limited-time offer through a colleague’s re-tweet, or learning about a new service from a wacky viral video are all ways that users are engaging with businesses online, and they all depend on the business’s successful use of social media.
Daily Advice: 365 Ways to Become a Millionaire
June 25th, 2010
“Start working to fulfill your dream or else someday, someone will put you to work to fulfill their dream.”
Best Regards – Michelle http://www.WebMediaExpert.com
19 Free Social Media Tools that Make Life Easier!
June 23rd, 2010
As an Internet marketer, one of the biggest problems I face on a day to day basis is how to keep up with the scores of social media and content outlets on the web. It’s easy to lose entire days to social media upkeep and tracking, which creates the need for automated measurement tools, like dashboards and other measurement tools. Monitoring social media and content that is published on the web is essential to any marketers job. You need to be able to respond quickly when others talk about you or your brand – a quick response can often mean the difference between a brand evangelist and a lifetime detractor. Here is my list of the top 19 social media dashboard tools, which includes 2 tools for aggregating and collecting this data.
Social Media Tools
- Twitter Search
There are some fantastic advanced search commands you can use with Twitter’s search engine. From simple brand related searches to local phrases, Twitter Search can do it all. - IceRocket
Good blog search engine. - Technorati
Another good blog search engine. - Blogpulse
Blog search from Nielsen. - Google News
Track news stories and more. - BoardTracker
Forum search engine, useful for tracking forum conversations. - Facebook Lexicon
See how often people are mentioning you or your brand. - Google Analytics
You may not think of Google Analytics when you think of social media, but you should be. With Google Analytics, you can track referrals to your website from the social media platforms you’re using. - Google Trends
See what’s trending on the web. - Delicious Search
See how many times pages from your site have been bookmarked by others. - Digg Search
Much like Delicious, you can see how many times pages have been Dugg by others. - Google Blog Search
Blog search engine from Google. (none of the blog search engines are perfect, so it’s a good idea to get a mix of data and parse it yourself) - TwitterCounter
Get a rough idea of your Twitter reach. - User Name Check
See if your brand’s username has been taken on major and minor social media networks. - BackType
Monitor blog comments. - Social Mention
Decent search aggregation for various sources, from blogs to social sites. - Google Alerts
Set up alerts for keyword or brand name mentions across the web.
Collection Points
- Google Reader
What’s great about the tools mentioned above is that almost all of them offer RSS feeds for your searches. If you’re an agency, or just represent multiple clients, it’s real easy to aggregate a bunch of searches for one client into unique folders. - Netvibes
Netvibes actually allows you to set up a pretty nifty dashboard using a combination of RSS feeds and widgets. There’s a great tutorial on how to do it
Any others you feel deserve a mention? Let me know with a comment!
Daily Advice: 365 Ways to Become a Millionaire
June 23rd, 2010
“To succeed… you need to find something to hold on to, something to motivate you, something to inspire you.”
Best Regards,
Michelle
Daily Advice: 365 Ways to Become a Millionaire
June 22nd, 2010
“If you view all the things that happen to you, both good and bad, as opportunities, then you operate out of a higher level of consciousness.”
Best Regards,
Michelle
Over 500 million customers are waiting to buy your products on Facebook! Why not open a Facebook e-commerce store? I can help!
June 21st, 2010
Over 500 million customers are waiting
Facebook’s #1 E-Commerce Solution
I can help you launch an e-commerce storefront on your Facebook page. You get everything you need including a full-featured admin area built directly into Facebook to manage your storefront, products and sales. Plus, when you launch your Facebook store, your products can be discovered across every storefront on Facebook.
Increase loyalty and sales by incentivizing Facebook users to become “Fans” of your brand
Forbes reports how valuable Facebook Fans are to your brand and business. Facebook Fans are 41% more likely to recommend a brand and 28% more likely to continue using them. Plus a Facebook Fan is worth on average $136.38 and spends $71.84 more per year than non Fans. A Facebook fan strategy has become essential for all brands. Having a Facebook store on your Facebook page enables you to incentive Facebook users to become “Fans” of your brand. The “Fan Discount” feature enables a Facebook user to get an instant store discount from your Facebook store as soon as they become a Fan. .
Contact me to help you set up your Facebook E-commerce store today!
Best Regards,
Michelle
http://www.WebMediaExpert.com
Daily Advice: 365 Ways to Become a Millionaire
June 18th, 2010
“In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.”
How to create lists to manage your Facebook news feed. Very useful!!!
June 18th, 2010
I had one member of the group ask about creating lists to manage your Facebook news feed. I thought I would post this here for any others that would like to take advantage of this great feature.
Now that you have added 400 plus business pages to your newfeed I am sure you would like to see you friend’s news sometimes too, or just see what other business connections are doing exclusively.
Here’s how to set up lists and segment your connections.
>>login to Facebook
Using the Account tab in the upper right hand corner>>Select “Edit Friends”
From this page use the left hand navigation and >>Select “All Connections”
This will display all your connections including any business pages you have liked. You will notice that beside each of the connections there is a drop down for “Add to list”. Use that drop down and at the bottom you have “Create a List”. Type in your list name, for instance, networking or business contacts etc…. and hit return. That list is know available. You can now go down through all your contacts and add the ones you want to that list. You can create as many lists as you like and connections can be in multiple lists. Once you have your lists made and your contacts segmented you can now view.
Using the top right nav >>Select “Home”
From this page use the left hand navigation and >>Select “Friends”
Note* you may have to then select “More”. At that point you will see the lists you have created. Select a list to see the news stream just from the connections that have been added to that list.
That’s all it takes.
Original post provided on LinkedIN by Bryan Grundon
How to Claim your Facebook Fan Page User Name
June 18th, 2010
How to Claim your Facebook Fan Page User Name
For Example: This will change your fan page link from looking like this…
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bonaire-GA/Georgia-Angel-A-Southern-A…
To this… http://www.facebook.com/GeorgiaAngel
Go to: http://www.facebook.com/username/
{DO NOT change “username” to your user name, copy and paste the link just as it is}
You should see a link that says something like “Set a username for your Pages”
I have 3 fan pages, so I had to select the page, then type in the user name I wanted.
Then click “Check Availability”.
A message will display if the name is available or not.
For more information, here is the Facebook Help Center page on “Usernames: Facebook Pages” http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=896#!/help.php?page=900
It states that “All Pages are eligible to claim usernames if they have more than 25 fans.”
Best Regards,
Michelle
Daily Advice: 365 Ways to Become a Millionaire
June 16th, 2010
“Instead of thinking about what you’re missing, try thinking about what you have that everyone else is missing.”
http://www.WebMediaExpert.com
7 Secrets of the Twitter Marketing Experts
June 16th, 2010
Twitter founders recently revealed that their site has over 110,000,000 accounts and the site is growing by hundreds of thousands of users per day. Twitter is a great way to bring a personality and voice from your company out in the open.
- Use Twitter as your company office hours. That means setting aside time to answer community questions, point people to resources, and find ways to be useful to your audience – whether that’s educating or simply entertaining them.
- The great thing about Twitter is that anyone can sign up and easily find his “community.” It shouldn’t take too long to monitor the streams via a search tool to find the people who talk about things that are interesting to you. Build relationships first, then promote your content.
- Somewhere in its evolution Twitter turned into a link-sharing service, with most of the tweets I see now just links to elsewhere. This kind of tweet can work well, but you won’t build a following based on the links you share. You need to balance this with some personality, so you followers can get to know you.
- Share good content around your niche or industry and engage in conversations with smart people on the subjects most meaningful to you. Do that and you’ll gain the right followers at the right pace.
- For both Twitter and Facebook, do the homework on the end consumers and influentials you’re trying to reach. Create profiles or personas of their characteristics, behaviours and preferences. Then target those personas in your friend and follower tasks to grow a high impact network. Search.twitter.com can be very handy to find who you’re looking for or you could use tools like tweetminer.net. Grow a network, execute on a plan to provide value and opportunities for the network to do what you want them to do whether it’s to upgrade to a more commercial relationship, spread the good word about our brand or recruit others to join the club.
- Twitter is one of those sites where having 10 really good followers is better than 10,000 bad followers. In order to retain the audience of meaningful followers, you need to provide value in your updates. Find one thing, preferably not from your own site, that your audience would find helpful and share it each day. Maybe it is a comment about something you learned, a question that engages them in a meaningful way, or a link to a news story they would find interesting, but providing quality updates will keep you on people’s follow list.
- Twitter is like a party. It’s all about fun while providing value at the same time. Spread links that help your audience (and that you know they would like to spread on to their own network). Include your own blog post links but make sure it’s mostly other people’s stuff. By promoting others over yourself, you grow your Twitter following with engaged people and drive traffic back to your blog. Use the @ feature to reply to folks when you can. Links should not always have to be about your business topic: have fun and watch massive traffic roll in.
Quick tips from the Facebook Marketing Experts
June 16th, 2010
After recently surpassing Google as the most popular site in America and closing in on 500,000,000 monthly unique visitors, Facebook has huge amounts of traffic that you can ethically leverage to grow your business online.
- Create a “Welcome” page for your business
It lets people know what they can expect from following your brand and massively helps to increase signups. The more likes and diverse comments you get on an update, the more homepages it is shown on, so try to ask engaging questions that get people involved.
- Engage your audience
I would treat Facebook almost as a stand-alone website. Use it to engage your audience with questions, contests, photo, video sharing and sharing relevant content that makes people want to keep coming back to your page.
- Offer fan incentives
Offer discounts exclusive to Facebook fans and engage them in discussions and chats. These are indirect ways to make your fans feel that they are appreciated.
- Master the news feed algorithm
Just because people Fan (or now, like) your page on Facebook, doesn’t mean they’re seeing everything you do. If you want people to see what you’re posting than you need to get that piece of content touched by as many people as possible. Post content that asks questions, that’s eye-catching and that people will want to pass on. Because Facebook filters what appears in a user’s news feed based on comments, shared friends, recent interactions – the more hands you get on something, the more likely it is users are seeing your brand and content.
For more great tips visit our website at http://www.WebMediaExpert.com
49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 and Internet Stats!
June 15th, 2010
As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally.
Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.
I thought it might be fun to take a step back and look at some interesting/amazing social media, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and internet statistics. I tried to find stats that are the most up-to-date as possible at the time of publishing this post.
The numbers presented below should be a close representation of today’s numbers (please correct me in the comments if you find more recent numbers somewhere and I’ll update).
Let’s break them down by section:
Google search stats:
1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) - approximate number of unique URLs in Google’s index (source)
2,000,000,000 (two billion) – very rough number of Google searches daily (source)
$110,000,000 – approximately amount of money lost by Google annually due to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button (source)
24,400 – number of people employed by Google (December, 2008)
68,000,000 – the average number of times people Googled the word Google each month for the last year (source: keyword tool)
$39.96 - the average cost per click for the phrase “consolidation of school loans” in AdWords (source: keyword tool)
1,430,000 - the number of Google results for “Robert Scoble”
136,000 - the number of Google results for “Admiral Ackbar”
Wikipedia stats
2,695,205 - the number of articles in English on Wikipedia
684,000,000 – the number of visitors to Wikipedia in the last year
75,000 - the number of active contributors to Wikipedia
10,000,000 – the number of total articles in Wikipedia in all languages
260 – the number of languages articles have been written in on Wikipedia
(source)
YouTube stats
70,000,000 – number of total videos on YouTube (March 2008)
200,000 – number of video publishers on YouTube (March 2008)
100,000,000 – number of YouTube videos viewed per day (this stat from 2006 is the most recent I could locate)
112,486,327 – number of views the most viewed video on YouTube has (January, 2009)
2 minutes 46.17 seconds – average length of video
412.3 years – length in time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)
26.57 - average age of uploader
13 hours – amount of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
US $1.65 billion in Google stock – amount Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for in October 2006
$1,000,000 – YouTube’s estimated bandwidth costs per day
Blogosphere stats
133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002
346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)
900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period
1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)
77% - percentage of active Internet users who read blogs
55% – percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)
81 - number of languages represented in the blogosphere
59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years
Twitter stats
1,111,991,000 – number of Tweets to date (see an up to the minute count here)
3,000,000 – number of Tweets/day(March 2008) (from TechCrunch)
165,414 - number of followers of the most popular Twitter user (@BarackObama) – but he’s not active
86,078 – number of followers of the most active Twitter user (@kevinrose)
63% – percentage of Twitter users that are male (from Time)
Facebook stats
200,000,000 – number of active users
100,000,000 - number of users who log on to Facebook at least once each day
170 - number of countries/territories that use Facebook
35 - number of different languages used on Facebook
2,600,000,000 – number of minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily
100 – number of friends the average user has
700,000,000 – number of photos added to Facebook monthly
52,000 – number of applications currently available on Facebook
140 - number of new applications added per day
Digg stats
236,000,000 – number of visitors attracted annually by 2008 (according to a Compete survey)
56% - percentage of Digg’s frontpage content allegedly controlled by top 100 users
124,340 - number of stories MrBabyMan, the number one user, has Dugg (see updated number here)
612 - number of stories from Cracked.com that have made page 1 of Digg (see all 41 pages of them here)
36,925 – number of Diggs the most popular story in the last 365 days has received (see story here)
Daily Advice: 365 Ways to Become a Millionaire
June 8th, 2010
“The wise person understands that his own happiness must include the happiness of others”
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Alene Geed
Alene's Adornments
"I am working with Web Media Expert to improve my online presence for my Jewelry Design business. Michelle is prompt, focused, full of ideas and I have already seen results." Top Qualities: Great Results, Expert, Creative
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Bill Corbett
Cooperative Kids
"Web Media Expert is awesome! They increased the number of likes (or Fans) to my business Facebook page by 1000 fans in less than 1 week! The result has been more interaction on my FB page and a greater following! Thank you!!!
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Amanda Miller
Smart Steps Life Coaching
I cant believe that Michelle’s simple idea for marketing has been the number one reason that my own facebook page has grown purely down to the sharing of ideas! I can't thank you enough for setting the ball rolling for me!