Category Archives: Social Media

The importance of social networking sites in social media marketing

Social networking is the newest and most popular trend on the internet today. Many individuals who join a social networking site are able to keep in touch with old friend and relatives, meet new people and make new friends. With just a few clicks of a button, you are able to access and share so much information, and many businesses have taken advantage of social media to market their products as well as to promote their websites.

Social media marketing is now one of the fastest growing trends among online entrepreneurs today and small business owners can benefit as well. What makes social media marketing via these social networks so attractive is the fact that anyone can join. Whether you are a college student, a housewife or an entrepreneur, anyone and everyone with internet access has the ability to join a social network. With millions of active users constantly on these social networking sites, a small business owner has surely a lot of potential customers to do business with. Most of the social networking sites are free, so you do not have to pay anything to sign up. By simply creating an account and updating social networking pages, businesses can advertise their wares.

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are some of the popular social networking sites available. Facebook is a great way to advertise products and services. With a like feature, users can recommend a web page or link, which increases the chances of people investigating your site further. Be sure to utilise all possible Facebook tools such as posting a fan page for your business and include pictures, questions, information, and resources that your target audience would find useful. Twitter has a limited amount of text to use, so make sure that you customise your page to be unique with a catchy background and title. Also, hyperlink words back to your company website, which will create traffic and increase the possibility of being picked up by search engines such as Google. By using LinkedIn, you can link your company’s website to the network and it will be shared with the professional community. You will have the ability to answer questions posted by your target audience which will give you expertise in the field.

If you are a business owner who is considering online marketing to increase your sales, then use social networking. This way you can increase your advertising potential by reaching more people and at the same time develop a niche market for your products and services.

Smo To Help Make Your Website More Friendly

SMO stands for social media optimization. It is a method in which the content of the web page is made attractive that could possibly attract the viewers from various social networking websites and can hold them for a longer time. This process is basically adopted to improve the rank of the website and increase the traffic on the web page. This is basically done through social networking activities across the internet. There are various companies who inherit social media optimization tools to improve the social appearance of their companies. The rising traffic on a web page is a sign of increasing sale and hence the importance of diverting traffic from networking websites. One can develop their business by enhancing the visibility of their web page and with the help of social media optimization.

SMO can be divided into two categories. Social media is the one in which social news, polling tools, sharing buttons are added. Beside this, images and videos of third party are also included. The other one is mostly a promotional activity. In this category, blogs, comments on blogs, group discussion, updates and other social networking tools are used to promote a website.

Social media optimization is a technique in which the social networking, video sharing, photo sharing are used as a tool to make the website familiar and to engage more people on the website and its various features. There are various companies that use media tools to make their web page popular. Through this medium, they eventually create awareness about their product and company among the net surfers.

Social networking tools are used to increase the traffic on the web page that could lead to improve the rank of the website. Social media optimization is a tool that is used by companies for brand building and brand promotion and is also used for building a healthy business relationship with the customers and thus to build up customer relationship. In social media optimization, the content of the web page is spread on the net making the web page more valuable for the internet users. This is a medium through which you can make your website friendlier by increasing the number of viewers. Use of active content, attractive design and use of tools like updating your readers, enhancing chatting, posting blogs, uploading press releases and keeping your viewers updated make your website rank high and increase the web traffic.

Blog Popularity Why Blogs Become Popular

Blog Popularity

Lets step back for a moment to examine the top, singular goal for your blog:

Forget for now the myriad strategies and tactics that lead to blog popularity such as link building, networking, social media, search engines and all the other stuff.

Focus just on the fact that you want your blog to be popular like the bloggers you admire and follow.

Getting away from the trees (specific tactics) so that we can see the forest (what makes a blog popular?) is a crucial element in helping to define what popularity means and how we go about getting it.

Why Some Blogs Become Wildly Popular:

1. Content worthy of praise by a target group of people: But not only praise. It has to be content people will go out of their way to tell others about in tons of different ways.

2. Simplicity: Navigation, purpose, topic range, and cleanliness of sidebars and the posting area itself are determining factors. Blog design!

3. Networking: Getting connected with the right people online is not just a goal for regular surfers who use social sites. It is a most vital factor in the length of time a blog takes to become popular. Win friends and influence the influencers in your niche and youll become popular.

4. Usefulness: Aside from your content being useful, which is understood in point 1 above, most popular blogs offer some kind of popular, needed, wanted, highly desired service to their community. One that gets linked to as the only place on the web one would go for such utility. Think resource lists, simple software that helps people do something that is otherwise manual and time consuming for them. Things like that.

5. Uniqueness: Popular blogs do overlap with each other in topic areas, but in some important way they are different than everyone else. This could be a simple as a different style of writing by the blogger, more or less attitude, opinion, creativity. Or it could be an overall sense that, while there may be a lot of similar blogs in topic, yours is considered the defining blog in the niche by which everyone else is measured.

6. Likability: Literally, are you writing as a likable person? Are you reaching out and making people identify with you personally? The person behind a blog is the only true determining factor of the difference between them and someone else. It is the only truly unique factor. Everything else can be copied by someone else: design, topics, posts, etc.

7. Dependable: All popular blogs have some sort of publishing schedule they adhere to. Readers come to depend on bloggers they like to provide content on some sort of regular basis that doesnt change radically or often. In the same way, other bloggers must feel you are a dependable supporter of their efforts to build buzz.If you get a favor from another blogger, like a link, they expect something in return down the road. If that something in return never appears, that blogger is not only likely to never pay attention to you again, but they can end up telling other influencers in your market that you arent dependable. That youre not one of them.

8. Exciting: Shaking things up in any niche is a good thing. Bloggers who run contests and have the ability to pull other bloggers together for a common campaign, whether a contest, their content or marketing-based, seem to always put themselves in the center of the action.

9. Respect: All popular blogs come to be so because of respect. Respect for their ability to define, entertain, teach, provoke thought, provoke laughter, incite intense bouts of commenting, and to gather lots of voluntary links from all over their niche from people who are normally very hard to get links from. Respect from your readers and respect from thought leaders and bigger blogs is absolutely essential in gaining serious popularity.

10. Being Fast: Popular blogs are always on top of whats going on in any niche. They are always among the first to break stories, new ideas, gossip, insider secrets, or other news their market relies on.

Ive found that the less a blog looks like it is trying to be making any money, the more it is probably making for the blogger. The more a blogger looks like a selfless giver, the more money they can make. The more readers feel like they get for free, the more they spend when the time comes for the blogger to launch a book, product, service, or announce an affiliate product.

In the end, blog popularity is much like high school popularity. And it works both ways. Most people immediately think the cheerleaders and football team are the only popular ones. But remember all the other groups and cliques that were popular precisely for not being in the clich groups.

So in your market, be a cheerleader. Or be a Goth. Either way, get popular in your niche by being defined by the 10 examples above!

Badoo- Find Your Classmates

Badoo.com history:

Badoo is a social networking website and was launched in 2003 and owned by an offshore company based in London. It was run by Badoo Services Limited. It was relaunched in 2007.

Badoo claims that it has 46,953,527 users as of September 26 2009. This website was also listed in the top 200 websites by Alexa Internet. Badoo is distinct from other social networking websites as it does not display advertisements. All content on it is user generated.

Russian investor Finam acquired 10% stake in this website for an amount of $30 million on January, 2008.

Development:

Badoo was relaunched in 2007 and it upgraded its features and several options. Badoo offers a distinct feature from rest of social websites, by use of Rise Up feature a member can be placed high in the profile search for a limited period.

Badoo generates revenue from Rise Up feature rather from advertisements. It charges an amount of $1 for Rise Up feature. Badoo offers photo, video sharing and also instant messaging to its members and has its most of user base in European countries. It was also offered in the following languages: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.

Current usage:

Badoo offers numerous options for its users to connect with friends and also make new ones. The minimum age to register at this website is 18 years. Members can share photos, videos and also chat with friends who are online.

Badoo members can get instant publicity by using feature Rise Up which give high ranking in profile search. Member profile displays updates from his/her friends. Updates includes new friends, photo’s added, events, etc.

Photo’s can be voted on Badoo and every one can vote anyone’s photo. Members should the photo on a scale of 1 to 10. One shortcoming of this social media website is that it does not include group or community section and you cannot meet people with similar interests.

Future developments:

Badoo offers a lot of features to its members. The following features may be added in future:

1.Including groups feature: Currently Badoo does not have groups, in future it may be included.
2.Reduced spam messages: Members receives high amount of spam messages, the security may be increased in future to reduce this.
3.Increased security: Security and privacy need to be tightened in the future.

User benefits:

1.Badoo connects members who have similar interests and hobbies.
2.Members can use it to maintain blog where he/she can express their interest/opinion
3.This website includes an instant messenger using which its members chat from their profile.
4.Members can share their photo/video with others and also be rated by them.
5.Members can send Gifts to other users to show sign of friendship or admiration. The gifts sent to user will appear on their profile page.

Technical explanation:

User needs to register in order to use features of this social networking website. You register by clicking on the Become a Member link on home page.

During registering you need to provide your email address, password and date of birth. After registering it sends a verification email. After you confirm and login to your account you can fill your profile.

You can search for other people by searching for users, chatting with currently online users and viewing newly registered members.

Members can add another user as friend by clicking on Add to Friends link on the desired member profile. You can view your friends from Friends folder. Badoo members can view recent visitors to your profile by going to your Messages->Your Visitors folder. Member can give messages to others (people in your friends list or others) by visiting their profile page and clicking on Write me a Message.

You can view your messages from other members by going to Recent Contacts folder here you can view the members who left a message to you. Badoo members can post a blog entry by clicking on Create New Entry on top of home page. You can choose a title and blog body.

You can add photo album by clicking on Photo and Video Album. You need to name your album and also give description.

Worldwide usage:

Badoo has extensive user base in European countries. Badoo claims that it has 46,953,527 users as of September 26 2009. Badoo has been ranked 134 based on web traffic by Alexa.com(as of 27 September, 2009).

Badoo website visitors are from Italy-16.2%, Spain-12.6%, France-11.0% according to Alexa.com as on 27 September 2009.