Archive for Social Media

Keeping Up With Facebook’s Pace

One of the most staggering facts exhibited in Facebook’s public filing recently, threw light to the strength of ‘mobile traffic’ online. More than 50% of Facebook traffic was through mobile handheld devices such as smartphones and tablet PC’s. What is even more exclaiming is that the smartphone penetration rate in the United States has crossed 50% and is expected to be above 65% by the end of the year. This has accelerated the Facebook Business Pages to divert their Facebook SEO campaigns into a more active direction.

Mobile Organic Search

  • What we need is to have a presence in the 1st search page results. Mobile users are never even thinking of going to a 2nd page of the results! Let’s see some tactics.
  • From your desktop site, you already link to your FB profile. Brand name can be included as the anchor text for the link and try to avoid the ‘Find us in Facebook’’ plugin.
  • In your profile name, try including few keywords as choice. In this way you can optimize the title as well as the URL of your FB profile for matching with the keywords.
  • Upon getting relatively good traffic to your Facebook page you can get an easy to remember Facebook URL. For example if your FB URL is like https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1115529110, you can change it into http://www.facebook.com/(name provided by you).
  • Your FB profile has got valuable Text Fields. Making use of the options such as ‘Info’, ‘Description’ etc with Organically Rich contents can get you sustainable traffic over a long period.
  • Follow the much used strategy of linking your FB page from other social profiles of yours. Connecting with your blogs and video sites are proven tactics.
  • Crawler activities on FB can be monitored once you setup branded redirect tracking links while linking profiles.

Mobile Paid Search

These days many brands are using their FB profile as a mobile PPC landing page. Some ways to maximize mobile engagement are as follows:

  • You need to connect to the exact mobile landing page. Normally FB redirects those offline smartphone users to m.facebook.com Info page, which is likely to change as ‘Timeline’ is already rolled out for smartphone users.
  • Be aware of the fact that mobile users while clicking on your FB links from other web sources mostly requires user name and login password to be keyed in every time ad this annoyance can turn away the user, unless he or she is redirected using their FB app.

Facebook in 2012

Over the years, we have seen a lot of changes in Facebook. Started out as a social network for universities in the United States, it is now a social network which is used by almost everyone in the world. The impact that Facebook put in our life is so great that younger generations feel that they cannot live without a profile in Facebook. Not only known as a social network to connect with friends, Facebook has widen its services and has now become a place to play online games, sell and buy things and various other things.

Today, we will be seeing some of the numbers and figures that Facebook has achieved this year. It is estimated that Facebook has around 845 million monthly active users and this number is gigantic compared to Twitter which is around 300 million active users. There are currently 100 billion connections between profiles in Face and this number increased in thousands each day. The highest number of users of Facebook is in Europe where 27 percent or 223 million Europeans have created at least one Facebook profile. Asia was second with 183 million people using Facebook. However, the continent which has the highest percentage of population using Facebook is North America where half of its population is using Facebook everyday.

Users play a great role in Facebook where they posted photos, comments, pages and likes to their profiles. It is estimated that more than 250 million photos are uploaded into this social network site daily and Facebook has recorded that the ‘Like’ button is clicked 2.7 billion times daily. One of the newer features inside Facebook, the ‘Pages’ is currently clocked at 37 million pages but this is not including the private notes that are not shared by its maker.

It is estimated that 57 percent of users in Facebook is female while the other gender is at 43 percent. With the advent of smartphones and tablets just years ago, these devices also help in making Facebook more popular than ever. There are currently 425 million people that surfed Facebook through their mobile devices and most of them spend around twenty minutes per visit to the Facebook application.

Games also played a significant role in making Facebook one of the greatest human inventions. From the total net income of US$1 billion that the Facebook made in 2011, Zynga, which is the one of the main playmaker in the Facebook games industry provided 12 percent of it. This shows the influence of the games industry in making Facebook the main social network site of the world. Some of the games made by Zynga are Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Zynga Poker, Words with Friends and Hidden Chronicles.

Top 5 Social Network Sites in 2012

Social Networking Sites are sites that are used by someone who want to connect with another person. These social networking sites come in a lot of types and there are also sites which have the same features and functions. Here, we will show you the top ten most popular social network sites this year.

1. Facebook

The top of the list will always be the most used social network site on the planet, Facebook. It has more than 850 million unique monthly visitors and this number is increasing in thousands every day. If Facebook manages to become an Initial Public Offering, it is estimated that its vale will be around $75 billion and $100 billion.

2. Twitter

The second place goes to the social networking site which is known for its cute blue-coloured bird logo, Twitter. Even though it is placed second, the unique monthly visitors that the website received are too small compared to the throne holder with just 250 million. Not like any other social network sites available, Twitter can be said as a unique site which is so far able to connect popular people around the world with their supporters.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn occupy the third place in this list. Known as the social network site for professionals, it has more than 150 million members with around 110 million unique monthly visitors. This social network site is able to not only stay in touch with your current and former colleagues but is also a place where you can explore opportunities to launch your career to the top. You will also be able to find experts and share ideas with them using LinkedIn

4. MySpace

At fourth is MySpace, which is now owned by the pop star Justin Timberlake. With around 250 employees, this social network site is able to receive around $109 million revenue in 2011. It is estimated that MySpace has around 70 million unique monthly visitors. During its early days, MySpace copied some of the features in Friendster which is a really popular social network site before 2005 and it manage to become the most popular social network site for three years until Facebook overtook the popularity vote in 2008.

5. Google+

The fifth place goes to Google Plus+, the most recent social network sites among the top five. Most people said that Google Plus+ or Goolgle+ is a mixture of features from different social network sites. It may not give a unique feeling to the social network site but thanks to the brand that they use, Google+ is now the fifth most popular social networking site in the world, surpassing DeviantArt which is on the sixth place. Google+ has around 65 million unique monthly visitors and this number is greatly increasing day by day.

Handling Negative Responses In Social Media

Any form of Social Media used by businesses, irrespective of their characteristics will have some sort of response and feedbacks from its users. While most feedbacks that appear on web platforms are positive, we do have negative ones too. So, how do we handle such negative customer responses on our social media presence online? Well, there is no specific way or answer to the above question. All you have to do is to follow certain of practices while dealing with such responses.

Remember, Social Media even though not too formally declared, are still a part of a businesses’ customer service function. It’s a medium where the customers can open up any viewpoints regarding a product or service. This is the crucial point where the customer might take up the opportunity to back lash, as he or she can make use of the benefits of their virtual presence and can put forward any critical comments that can even bring down your sales! Hence you need to handle carefully such situations. First of all you have to keep in mind that a feedback or response can be true as well, whereas on the other hand it can be purposefully posted to harm the company or business. The identification of either of these two lies within the hand of the business owner. If the latter is found to be true, then it’s always recommended to delete such illegitimate comments and provide the other web visitors with a reasonable statement for the same. If the former is found to be the reason for such posts, various moves can be adopted as follows –

  • If the response is a complete truth, then acknowledge the same, apologize formally and try to figure out a solution offline with the complaints.
  • If the response is partially true, acknowledge it and provide the users with proper information. Further clarifications can be done offline.

Remember, a feedback provided by a web visitor can’t always be controlled, screened or monitored by the administrator and there can be many other visitors who might have gone through the contents before the administrator himself. Deleting such feeds and posts straight away will throw a bad image of yours in the minds of many other users. A ‘smart’ action is recommended, where the business gets its image doubled when it is ready for apologizing on its falls and to discuss it openly with its clients, rather than opening up a battle against its own customers and well wishers!

What Businesses Must Not Do on Facebook

There are a lot of businesses that are using Facebook as a marketing tool and also advertisement. However, that does not mean that you can do anything on Facebook. Here, we will tell you on what you must not do on marketing through Facebook in order to make sure that your business flourishes the way it is meant to be.

What You Must Not Do In Facebook Marketing?

The first thing that you must not do is do not post messages at random people’s Facebook wall to sell your products or services. This is because it is unethical to do so. Instead, post informational tips or offers to the Facebook wall as it is a way to promote your business and to attract more customers instead of posting your product’s picture with only the price as its caption.

It is also unadvised that businesses to disable their wall posts. This is because the business is afraid that the wall will be spammed with messages from users or those who want to post degrading comments that may affect the business. This is an act of cowardice because you must be able to receive user’s feedback to improve on your business.

If you have a business page on Facebook, you must also make sure that you are able to handle it or at least, hire someone to manage it. If a customer gives a good feedback, you must reply to it so that they know that their voices are heard and if a customer gives a bad feedback, do not run away and ask for what to improve from them. By doing this, you will be closer to your customers and this can improve your business easily.

You must also know when to post. If you post too often, you will irritate your followers because you will flood the timeline. However, by posting too rarely, your customers will tend to forget about your business and you will not stand out at the customer’s Timeline. You must also know the correct time to post something on your Wall. Facebook Wall posts made in the early morning and weekends will have more attention from customers compared to other times.

In conclusion, marketing your products through Facebook can help your business but you must know how to do your marketing. You must know how to attract potential customers and make sure that they continue buying items from you. To make it easier, hire someone who is an expert in Facebook Marketing.