Archive for the ‘Social Networking’ Category

Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Linkedin Login from Your Desktop

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Having multiple social networking accounts can be quite troublesome especially when it comes to logging in to different accounts to check on updates. However, this may no longer be a problem with the help of Sobees.

The Sobees Lite is a Windows application that allows users to receive updates on not one but 4 different websites at the same time. These websites are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Linkedin. All of this is available from the vicinity of the user’s desktop.

Once started and left running in the background, Sobees will wait until it gets an update from one of the four sites. If there are any updates at any period of time, the user will be notified immediately and they can then check on them.

This is a very handy application for people who regularly checks on these sites. Due to the fact that it operates on the .NET framework, the application will only be available to those having Windows XP and above. However, they will have to make sure that their computer has the latest version of the framework.

The application is currently in alpha version which would mean that it is still a long way from being completed and may have several bugs that needs to be fixed as well. However, it is most unlikely for the users to encounter any problem.

Top 3 Social Networking Sites

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Social networking sites are vital to the success of any sites. It allows the owner to gain access to millions of people around the world. With proper advertising, a site can be very successful with only the help of these social networking sites. Therefore, it is best to know which of these sites are the most used on the Internet.

#1 – Facebook

Launched in February 2004, Faecbook may be one of the most successful sites on the Internet. In fact, it is so successful that it has become the second most viewed site on the planet. Next to only Google based on its Alexa ranking. Advertising on Facebook is easy as well as flexible. Depending on the budget and the settings for the advertisements, it can be very lucrative as well.

#2 – Myspace

MySpace gave birth to some of the most famous artists on the planet such as Secondhand Serenade and many more. Advertising on MySpace is possible with the correct amount of money. On the other hand, users can also interact with other MySpace members and potentially get a lot of visitors through that method as well.

#3 – Bebo

Founded in January 2005, Bebo is another famous social networking site on the planet. There are millions of members inside the network which the user can potentially advertise to. Users can also create their own advertisement provided that they have enough money as it can get quite costly especially with all the advertisement from corporate companies.

All in all, through these sites alone, the user will be able to advertise to potentially hundreds of millions of members. With proper advertising method, it can surely put any site to great length.

Twitter Background for Product Awareness

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Twitter is an essential marketing tool for a lot of sites. It allows the user to post quick updates on their Twitter profile to let their followers know what is currently going on. Most users however, opt to use some of the generic themes given at their Twitter account. Instead of doing this, it is better to use a custom theme as it promotes product awareness in a good way as well.

In any twitter page, there are spaces on both the left and the right side of the page while in the middle resides the main twitter content. Users can actually create a background image that can take advantage of one or both sides of the picture. However, it is best to place all the contents wanted at the left side of the page rather than the right side as most people places more attention on their left instead of their right.

There are a few sites that the user can actually go to should they wish to create their own backgrounds. Stripe Generator is a pattern generating site on which the user may use to create striped backgrounds. Another great site to go to is ColourLovers which has an extensive control panel for the users.

Below are some examples on what the user may create for their own twitter page. Notice that for the second example, everything is blended in so well that it may seem to be an actual page without any major editing.

twitter-bg

twitter-bg2

Viral Marketing

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Viral Marketing is an important step towards a good Search Engine Optimization. It is being used by a lot of individuals as well as businesses and the results are often great if it was done well.

So what is viral marketing? In Wikipedia, it says that it refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes. This means that viral marketing uses sites that the public do gather. This may be social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace or a video site such as YouTube.

Viral marketing can take place in so many different ways. One good way of doing it is by posting videos to various video sites such as YouTube, MetaCafe and many more. Bear in mind that these videos have to be catchy so that it will be able to attract a lot more people. It also has to be relevant to what the site is all about as well. An example is a video on how to lose weight. Instead of having irrelevant contents, the video can talk about useful things related to the main topic and then give a link to a site for the users to follow up. That way, users will be less hesitant to check on these sites as compared with a spammy video.

Not only that, site owners can also utilize other social news sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and many others. However, bear in mind that these sites offer only a short term visitor boost so contents on the intended sites needs to be regularly updated as well.

There are a lot more ways to do viral marketing. Users can experiment with various methods that are available on the Internet. Tweeter and Facebook may be a good option as well.

YouTube – how to build your personal brand

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Building-YouTube-brandIn today’s business when the world has changed into a global village with the everyday advancements in the field of technology. The rapid increase of Internet users across the globe is also growing with every passing moment. Social networking sites have grabbed the attention of millions of users in no time. Individuals and businesses want to build their brand to get maximum visibility in a short span of time. Building your personal brand using various websites is very useful like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook but there are some websites which increase your brand visibility in the most effective manner. In the following article we’ll focus on building your personal brand using YouTube.

Building your personal brand via video is one of the most effective medium because of its content type and interactive nature. YouTube has brought the facility and leverage to everyone to broadcast one’s favorite videos.

Branding your profile

Branding your personal profile on YouTube is not difficult to do. You have to decide how to make your existing brand consistent with your newly created YouTube channel. Choose wisely between multiple face and single face channels as this might affect your branding effectiveness.

Choosing a channel name

Choosing a channel name on YouTube for your personal brand can greatly affect the overall impact of your branding efforts. You can choose the channel name as your business name or full name or any keyword for which you are doing your branding activities. In order to create a channel on YouTube, you have to register yourself first as a user and then you can create the channel as desired.

Setting up your profile

Setting up your profile and filling it out is very crucial as it may help people and other users in the community to locate you. This way you can reach to millions by only giving a single URL which best describes your brand.

Customizing your channel

In order to view your channel as it stands you need to log in to your account and select the option ‘switch to player mode’ (which is on top right on your account information screen). This will display the newer layout where people can choose your latest brand videos and watch others.

Title and tags of the channel

On the ‘Edit Channel’ option click on ‘settings’ to give your channel an appropriate title. It will be more effective to give your channel a title which best reflects your brand. For example ‘Tim’s SEO tools blog’. On the right you need to specify the tags for the content of your channel. These tags will be used while people will use search engines to look for a specific brand.

Once you have set up your profile for your brand and other customization. Focus yourself to creating amazing videos.

Create amazing videos

By keeping in mind the phrase ‘content is king’ you have to create videos that are really interesting and have something to watch for people that they have not seen before. You must keep in mind that your brand videos are worth spreading if they are unique and different.

Producing video content

Producing video content is very important part of building your personal brand using videos. You have to take several videos of the same concept and then select the best one that fits your content. In the description part of your brand video you need to post a link back to your website. This way you can make people visit your site who might not have heard about your brand before. Once you have created 8-10 videos you can start promoting your videos.

Promoting your videos

You are required to spread your channel and videos everywhere like facebook, twitter, Google reader and your blog. You can also embed your videos from YouTube to your existing website or blog.

With YouTube channel and video facility you can reach to hundreds and thousands of visitors within days. You can share your videos to a vast majority of people and can give a boost to your brand. Thanks to YouTube channels and videos.

Video blogging

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Video bloggingThe idea of video blogging is not a new one as video has been remained a very important type of content creation and distribution. The interesting thing in video blogging is its nature of content and ability to produce the desired impact on the viewers. Video blogging is there for quite some time now but only some of the video bloggers know how to create and distribute it effectively. Even the video equipment to create video and platforms to spread them are easily accessible and cheaper yet the idea of video blogging is not promoting considerably. Following article will highlight some of the most important ideas which will help video bloggers to create and distribute the videos easily.

Video blogging is still in its early days

Besides the growing demand of video viewership the idea hasn’t really made its impact so far. These can be many reasons for that and the obvious reason might not be to purchase the equipment and other tools to create and generate video content rather the short time. People don’t have time to really prepare for the shoot of a particular experience of them and record it in the form of video to make it available for others to view. The trend of creating videos and distributing ones own video is taking off slowly and nobody can speculate what will be its impact in the coming days.

What does web video do

Since the demand of video is great on the Internet therefore it can really help the businesses and individuals to promote their brands locally and globally. With everyday advancement in the technology gadgets it has become very easy to every individual to create and publish the videos of his / her own choice and convey to world as desired.

Creating video for your video blog

Creating the video for your video blog is very easy and inexpensive. You need to have some research on the web to look for a list of digital camera. Even mobiles contain the facility to generate quality audio and video content that is publishable to listen and view on the web. You need to be very careful in purchasing the video camera or device. Choose the one which best fits within your budget and has good audio and video quality. You must know the art of editing and mixing your videos well because that is necessary to get the attention of the viewers. Choose your video cam that is compatible with your technology platform e.g. Windows, Mac or any other.

Distributing video blog

Posting videos on different social networking sites is very easy and free. There are a number of social networking sites including YouTube. You need to embed these videos in your websites or blog as well to grab the attention of visitors. Produce quality videos and embed them within your blog. You need to improve your videos continuously and the best way to do it is to post the video and then view it. Notice the areas that need improvement and after editing them post it again. This way the quality of your video will keep improving all the time.

Posting videos to different social networking sites is very easy and free. You just need to get yourself registered and then you can have the option to start posting as many videos as you can. YouTube allows creating channels based on a specific topic and keyword. Once you are registered and set up your channel you can upload your favorite videos to your channel. You can customize the way you want to allow the people to view your videos.

Measuring / Tracking social media ROI

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Tracking social media ROIA large number of businesses and individuals don’t really measure or track their ROI (return on investment). A great majority is unaware of the ROI and those who know something about ROI can’t track it or don’t actually know how to get started with it. Businesses and individuals needs to know the impact of their every social media or investment activity whether positive or negative. Getting started with measuring ROI for every single social media investment activity seems impossible but it is not. There are a number of metrics that are needed to be tracked or monitored. Following is a brief description to different steps that will help you to measure the ROI in effective way.

Defining Goals

The first and most important part of measuring or tracking down the ROI is to define your goals that must be clear and concise. You have to be very much sure about the outcome of your social media activity before proceeding to calculate ROI. There is another thing which needs to be tracked before you are actually going to track the ROI for a particular social media campaign. This is related to defining the current baseline of your media campaign for which you want to calculate the ROI. If you know your starting point only then you will be able to accurately calculate the ROI for any given campaign.

Calculating ROI

While calculating the ROI for your marketing campaign you need to be very much sure whether you need an increase in your website visitors or your goal is to increase the sales out of the marketing campaign (this is related to defining your goals as stated above). In fact you would not be looking for only a substantial increase in your website visitors alone but also an increase in the sales of your product.

ROI measurement tools

There are a lot of ROI measurement tools available for free. Every tool has its own set of parameters and ROI calculation criteria. Some of the tools are Google analytics, Omniture, HootSuit etc.

  • Google analytics: Using Google Analytics you can keep track a number of factors related to your website. You can keep track of the areas people click the most when visit your website and the regions of the world where you are getting the clicks during a specified time interval.
  • Omniture: Omniture provides various services that you can go back and forth and track the outcome of your marketing campaign.
  • HootSuit: HootSuit offer a remarkable twitter manager. It also provides an exceptional analytics to measure the impact of social media campaigns actually turning out to transactions or not.

There are a number of sentiment analysis tools that are used for twitter such as Crimson Hexagon, Viral Heat, and Sentiment Metrics etc. A brief description of these is given below:

  • Crismson Hexagon: It is a social media tracking tool for enterprise level businesses. It helps you know the sentiment of the consumer on the basis of social media mentions.
  • Viral Heat: It provides an inexpensive tracking of social media campaigns.
  • Sentiment Metrics: It is another important social media tracking tool for large businesses.

Correlating the Data

Now that you have defined the goal and baseline of the campaign its time to correlate the data trends shown by the tracking tool to your goals. You have to calculate whether you are heading towards achieving your goals with time or is it only helping in getting your more clicks. You have to decide whether an increase in the investment brings you more sales or not and here it’s crucial to look your business needs and trends followed by successful competitors.

SocialGo

Friday, December 4th, 2009

social-goThere are millions of people that are registered to social networking websites such as Facebook, Friendster and MySpace. These sites allow people to keep in touch with each other. Users can upload their photos, music as well as watch videos and send comments to each other through these social networking sites. People that live far from each other can get connected through these sites. These sites revolutionize communication in a way that everyone can stay connected no matter where they are.

SocialGo is a social networking website builder that allows anyone to create their own version of Facebook. This site is mainly targeted to those that would want to create a social website for their own community. For example, one of the websites that were made through SocialGo is The Word Cloud. This site caters mainly to writers that wish to group with each other in a single site.

There are four main packages available for the site and each with their own pricing. The free package offers every standard feature of the site including advertisement and to remove this, users can choose the starter pack at a price of $4.99 per month. These two option features a small storage and bandwidth. The premium package on the other hand has almost every feature available except the branding removal and to do this, an additional charge of $19.99 per month will be billed to the customer. The highlight of the site is the concierge package costing $149.99 per month. Users with this package will have the branding removed as well as a free design made by SocialGo. This package offers a higher storage capacity as well as bandwidth as compared with the other three packages.

SocialGo is one of the best solutions to those that would wish to create a social networking site for their own private community. It is easy to set up and is priced reasonably as well.

Blog Flux

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

blog-fluxBlogging has been making its mark on the Internet for quite some time and now, there are thousands if not millions of blogs available in the World Wide Web. Most often than not, bloggers find it quite hard to get their blogs noticed by the public and in the end, they simply quit blogging. This is a terrible waste for good bloggers. However, there is a simple solution for this problem.

Blog Flux is a service portal that caters mainly to blogs. They offer services such as yellow pages for businesses residing in countries such as the United States and Canada. They also have extensive blog directory with a significant number of categories. As of now, they have more than 150,000 blog listings in their directory. This proves that the site is a valuable resource for bloggers as they can conduct researches about other people’s blog and get ideas as to how to improve theirs as well. Users can also check the Top Sites directory and get ideas from these sites.

In addition to that, Blog Flux provides valuable blogging tools that can be used for free. Users can create their own buttons from the Button Maker tool that they can then use for their own sites. The Who’s Online tool on the other hand enables bloggers to keep track of their site’s visitors. This is a handy tool indeed for those that want to do some Search Engine Optimization as this instrument allows them to check on some of the basic information of the visitors.

Blog Flux is a must for any bloggers. This site certainly provides valuable information on how to improve one’s blogs as well as making it noticeable by the public. It is absolutely user friendly and is highly recommended to bloggers all around the world.

For more info Blog Flux