Curious about the best ways to improve your Facebook page quickly and easily? There are many ways to do this, but to help you get off to a flying start we’ll limit ourselves to only eight for now. These techniques will not only help you get more visibility in the search engines, but also lay the foundation for better customer relationships that result in greater loyalty, which has obvious and numerous benefits.

1. Commit to Facebook – Facebook takes some effort, plus a bit of time. Many marketers who have set up a Facebook page for their business subsequently abandon it, which also makes a statement about their company. Develop a rock-solid commitment to post updates and content regularly, and also to build relationships with those people who are following you. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time.
2. Lose the Facebook-generated URL – Make sure you acquire a custom URL for your Facebook page. This will aid greatly with search engine optimization (SEO)  or for anyone looking for you.
3. Don’t Repeat Your Tweets – Twitter is excellent, but don’t make us live through things twice. Be unique in what you post on your Facebook page. Your extra effort will be rewarded.
4. Keep Updates Short and Sweet – Like it or not, consumers are into short these days. There is a place and time for longer pieces, but generally try to keep posts short – 150 characters or less.
5. Deliver Awesome Content – Creating lots of great material that people can use and are talking about and sharing will always be the primary goal here.
6. Engagement with Your Readers – Don’t be shy about stimulating conversation, asking questions, holding contests or anything else that gets the conversation rolling!
7. Be Responsive – Take complaints seriously, and be proactive in response to anyone who asks questions. You can head off a lot of trouble using this method.
8. Post Photos – According to Facebook, posts that include a photo album, picture or video generate about 180%, 120% and 100% more engagement than text-only updates, respectively.

Using these tips will give you a great jump start toward making your Facebook page a subject of conversation!

Small business marketing is not for the faint of heart, but if you’ve been in marketing for more than two seconds, you know that. Marketing your business is dependent upon doing some key factors well and these items can make or break a small business in this dog eat dog world we live in. Competition is fierce and understanding how to make the most out of your web pages is tricky.

Here are five essential actions to keep you ahead of the competition!

1. Create a Marketing Plan – Don’t leave anything to chance. Create a well-thought out, concise plan that maps out each of your marketing elements and just what you need to do to accomplish it. Make it as detailed as possible. At the very least fill in the broad strokes.
2. Social Media Marketing – Not just a time waster! Social media is often an enormous source of website traffic and new business. As reported by MediaBistro.com, 91 percent of experienced social marketers see improved website traffic due to social media campaigns and 79 percent are generating more quality leads.
3. Build a Mailing List – So many businesses make the mistake of not collecting customer and prospect emails from the start. Email is far from dead. MarketingProfs.com tells us that email averages a return on investment of $40 for every $1 spent, far outstripping banner ads ($2) and keyword ads ($17). If you choose to neglect it, you’re leaving a big part of your potential profits up for grabs for your competition!
4. Video Marketing – Connect with all the local traffic that’s out there trying to find your business. Video marketing in this space is a relatively untapped vein, and having a simple video advertising your wares on page one of Google can result in tons of traffic and authority coming your way! According to the research company Forrester, any given video stands about a 50x better chance of appearing on the first page of Google than any given text page.
5. Gain a Mobile Presence – Microsoft reports that by 2014 mobile browsing will overtake desktop browsing. If your company does not have a mobile presence, then you will become invisible. Therefore your small business’s website better start optimizing for mobile users and it should get it done fast. Right now, the numbers are encroaching on the 50 percent mark. Are you ready?

Don’t Be a Superhero and Do It Alone!

None of us can do it all, particularly when it comes to the constantly changing realm of online marketing. Find out what’s working now, learn from the best you can afford, and hire the best outsourcing you can get. It’ll pay off handsomely in the end!

Mobile marking is a goldmine!

But you wouldn’t know it looking at the marketing activities of many local businesses…

While it’s true that the mobile revolution has arrived, small business owners are still struggling to understand changing consumer behavior. In a Web.com survey of 500 small-business owners, only 26 percent of respondents said they’ve invested time and money in making sure their site was optimized for mobile devices. Exactly what does this mean for you? It means you have a great opportunity to get noticed as a leader among local businesses—and poach competitors’ customers in the process!

Since we are now seeing over fifty percent of all searches happening on a mobile device of some sort, the time is now to take advantage of this. Here are five proven ways mobile marketing can help local businesses on a budget.

1. Mobile Optimized Site – Making sure that the site is optimized properly for mobile is step one, and without it almost everything else doesn’t matter. Be sure it is designed with mobile in mind, and is available on all platforms. According to a survey from Google, 61 percent of consumers will leave a website if it’s not optimized for mobile.
2. Get into Mobile Ads – As surprising as it may seem, mobile ad platforms can be cheap and effective. Also, there is a lot of inventory going unsold every month, keeping prices down. Now is the time to explore mobile ads.
3. SMS and Push Notifications – SMS messages have several advantages. First and foremost; they get opened. A lot. According to Frost and Sullivan, SMS messages have an astounding 95 percent open rate! Push notifications are also a great way to connect with your subscriber base.
4. Combining Mobile and Your Social Media – Nothing says social media like real-time connections with your customer base. This is the latest trend and even the smallest of companies can get in on the trend by combining their social media site with a mobile devices. Combine specials, events, coupons or just link a YouTube video to create buzz. Then Tweets and traffic will soon start coming your way. Next thing you know your site’s search engine ranking will start climbing and so will your Google . However, the best part is, you’ll be connecting with your client base in a real-time way and they will provide you with valuable feedback.
5. Location Based Marketing and Passbook – Your small business needs to be found on the web. Up to now, it meant Foursquare and Yelp. While this still holds true, you also have to start looking into new technology like Passbook in addition. Passbook is an excellent new app that enables its user to store all kinds of things like boarding passes, gift cards, coupons, store cards, coupons and all sorts of mobile payments.

Using mobile marketing in local business doesn’t need to be either complex or pricey. The key is to collect knowledge first, and add pieces as you go.

Social media is a ripe ground for making connections, as well as for offending and creating enemies. Knowing what you shouldn’t do in relation to social media is almost as vital as understanding what you should be doing. Here are several social media mistakes to avoid like the plague!

Jokes in poor taste – It ought to be obvious, but you must put on your thinking cap before you tweet, update or post. And above all, don’t try and benefit from someone else’s catastrophe as a way to promote your products or services. While a celebrity death or embarrassment may seem like easy pickings for trending traffic, you might end up alienating more people than you attract!

Offensive statements and political rants – Closely connected is the temptation to broadcast your preferences political, social or otherwise, which may have the misfortune of NOT aligning with your your clients and customers. Don’t go there! Try to keep from sharing anything that might be misunderstood, or you’ll end up scrambling for cover! Once trust is broken, it’s very difficult to rebuild.

Not making business only accounts – An account solely devoted to your company has not only a much better chance of being found in the search engine results, it projects an altogether more professional image for your business.

No social media buttons on your website – These are readily available for all social media platforms, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot if they are inaccessible on your homepage and every post you make. This will make it easy for your readers to share your posts and in doing so help promote your business.

Not using your social media profiles to link back to your site – You’ve gone to all the effort to set up and use these social sites, why not take the free, authoritative link they’re offering back to you! Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google all permit you to link back to your website. There’s five great links to your site, and a great chance for your (hopefully) many followers to end up on your site.

So far, Google+ has been sort of like that dog that keeps coming back into your yard looking for scraps. I mean, what do you do with him? The fact is, this dog can hunt! Businesses are beginning to wake up to the opportunities with Google+, aiding not just with social media interaction, local visibility in the search engines, and helping to establish your brand; but the many ways it helps you with your content. And it’s having results: websites using the +1 Button increase page traffic by 350%, and over 925,000 people join Google+ every day!

Seven Tips for Utilizing Your Google+ Page

Confused on how to use Google+? No worries – use these to get going!

1. Complete your Google+ profile – Give this some thought as you do it. Use interesting photos and images, and be sure you link out to your other social media accounts.
2. List your key information – Especially hours of operation, contact information, as well as maps and directions.
3. Link to your blog or site – Make sure you link to your primary business blog or site. This will result in added traffic and a great link.
4. Create a business page – Showcase your small business where it matters. This has direct benefits for search results as well as for people that find you on Google+.
5. Link out to your content –Doing this will have several benefits, first of all getting them indexed almost instantly, along with a various other search engine advantages. You can even use your Google+ page to create posts, including multimedia that can link out to your posts elsewhere.
6. Utilize Direct Connect – Utilize this feature in Google+ to allow visitors to add you to circles when they find you in search. Think of this as a Facebook “Like”.
7. Use video chat in Google+ Hangouts – This tool is very useful. Any time you conduct a video chat, Google+ streams it, records it, and sends you the recording via email. Then you’re able to upload to YouTube if you wish, thus creating more useful content. One terrific way to use these is to generate impromptu product demos.

This barely scratches the surface of what’s possible with Google+. To discover even more strategies as well as a very cool infographic on the subject see this post on CopyBlogger.

If you’re asking yourself the best way to improve your Facebook page, I’d like to offer you eight solid methods for fast improvement that won’t cost anything but some time. The following tips will not only enable you to optimize for Facebook and Google search better, but will also lay the premise for better social interaction, and that is where the money is nowadays.

1. Make a Commitment – Facebook takes some time and thought. Many are the marketers who’ve wanted to use a Facebook page for their business, and shortly abandoned it, which also says something about your company. Make a commitment to post and participate frequently, or it may be counter-productive!
2. Create a Custom URL – You should definitely get a custom URL for your page. The one it includes isn’t likely to help with search engine optimization (SEO) or for anyone looking for you.
3. Don’t Auto-Post Your Tweets – Twitter is great, but don’t make the mistake of reposting the exact same tweets onto your Facebook page. Be sure to post fresh content, not warmed-over stuff from elsewhere.
4. Keep Updates Short and Sweet – Like it or not, consumers are into short these days. There’s a place and time for longer pieces, but generally try to keep your posts short – 150 characters or less.
5. Deliver Lots of Awesome Content – Creating content that people are able to use and are talking about will always be the #1 mission for your page.
6. Engagement with Your Readers – Don’t be shy about encouraging conversation, asking questions, holding contests or anything else that will get the conversation rolling!
7. Be Responsive to Problems – Take anyone that complains seriously, and be proactive responding to anyone who asks questions. You can head off a lot of trouble this way.
8. Post Photos – According to Facebook, posts that include a photo album, picture or video generate about 180%, 120% and 100% more engagement than text-only updates, respectively.

Using these recommendations will give you a very good jump start to making your Facebook page a subject of conversation!

The web is going mobile, and it’s not too late to jump on-board the mobile bandwagon and grab a piece of what is turning out to be a rather large pie! Google reports that more than half of all local searches are done on mobile devices of some kind. Folks are doing business on the move, browsing and price comparing on the way to shop. This is the time to make certain that your business is aligned to take advantage of this mobile revolution. The following are five easy ways to get this done!

1. Having a mobile ready site – Making sure your website is capable of being viewed on any mobile device is a mandatory first step. There is something of an art to designing the mobile version of your website, because the emphasis here is on speed. It is estimated you have about five seconds for your site to load on a mobile device or they’re on to greener pastures. Make sure your site loads fast and looks good! According to Google polling, 52% of users say a bad mobile experience makes them a lot less likely to engage with a business.
2. Offer deals, coupons and incentives to readers – 29% of web consumers have showed a desire to download a coupon using their mobile device. Be sure to take them up on this!
3. Buy inexpensive mobile advertising – Mobile paid ads are the new kid on the block, there is however a lot of opportunity using these. Expense is still quite low, and you can get a considerable amount of targeted traffic to your site rapidly.
4. Create a mobile loyalty program – Utilizing a mobile platform to make a mobile loyalty program is simply a smart move to make. No longer only used by resturants, you can create rabid fans by utilizing a simple, simple to operate digital loyalty card application.
5. Utilize mobile email and SMS – Mobile email is currently being opened at a rate of 41%, and it’s on pace to surpass PC open rates by the end of 2013, reported by MarketingLand.com. SMS (texting) provides a whopping 95% open rate. These two stats by themselves ought to be plenty to get you mixed up in the mobile side of marketing!

Social media marketing is the practice of using social media networks and user-generated content platforms to promote a business, product or service. Social media marketing typically involves participating in conversations with a key audience instead of blatantly throwing out a sales pitch to a large number of people.

Social media marketing also includes creating and promoting content that is meant to be shared by users. The viral and personal nature of social media makes it an effective channel for product advertising, reputation management or corporate branding.

Social media facts you should know

Facebook

• The average Facebook user has 130 friends.
More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) is shared each month.
• Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application.
• 
More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.
• Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.
• There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that access Facebook via mobile are twice as active than non-mobile users (think about that when designing your Facebook page).
• The average Facebook user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events.
People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
• There are more than 1 million entrepreneurs and developers from 180 countries on Facebook.

Statistics from Facebook press office.

Twitter

• Twitter’s web platform only accounts for a quarter of its users – 75% use third-party apps.
• 
Twitter gets more than 300,000 new users every day.
• There are currently 110 million users of Twitter’s services.
• Twitter receives 180 million unique visits each month.
• There are more than 600 million searches on Twitter every day.
• Twitter started as a simple SMS-text service.
• 
Over 60% of Twitter use is outside the U.S.
• There are more than 50,000 third-party apps for Twitter.
• Twitter has donated access to all of its tweets to the Library of Congress for research and preservation.
• More than a third of users access Twitter via their mobile phones

Statistics from Twitter and the Chirp Conference.

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn is the oldest of the four sites in this post, having been created on May 5 2003.
• 
There are more than 70 million users worldwide.
Members of LinkedIn come from more than 200 countries from every continent.
• LinkedIn is available in six native languages – English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
• Oracle’s Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Epstein, was headhunted for the position via his LinkedIn profile.
• 80% of companies use LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.
• 
A new member joins LinkedIn every second.
• LinkedIn receives almost 12 million unique visitors per day.
Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn.
• Recruiters account for 1-in-20 LinkedIn profiles.

Stats from LinkedIn press centre and SysComm International.

YouTube

• The very first video uploaded was called “Me at the Zoo”, on 23rd April 2005.
• By June 2006, more than 65,000 videos were being uploaded every day.
• YouTube receives more than 2 billion viewers per day.
Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
• The U.S. accounts for 70% of YouTube users.
• Over half of YouTube’s users are under 20 years old.
• 
You would need to live for around 1,000 years to watch all the videos currently on YouTube.
• 
YouTube is available in 19 countries and 12 languages.
• 
Music videos account for 20% of uploads.
YouTube uses the same amount of bandwidth as the entire Internet used in 2000.

Statistics from YouTube press centre.

Blogging

• 77% of Internet users read blogs.
• There are currently 133 million blogs listed on leading blog directory Technorati.
• 60% of bloggers are between the ages 18-44.
One in five bloggers update their blogs daily.
• Two thirds of bloggers are male.
• Corporate blogging accounts for 14% of blogs.
• 
15% of bloggers spend 10 hours a week blogging.
• More than half of all bloggers are married and/or parents.
• 
More than 50% of bloggers have more than one blog.
• 
Bloggers use an average of five different social sites to drive traffic to their blog.

Statistics from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2009.

Social Media Overall Stats

• Three out of every four people in North America use social networks
• 
Internet users spend an average of 6 hours each month on social networks and view more than 800 web pages
44% of Internet users are between the age of 35 and 54
• The biggest age growth sector on Facebook is 35+
• Women are a growth area online 
51% of social network users are female and they consume about 200 pages more than men and spend an extra 2 hours online
• Online video and multimedia has grown over 300% in North America
• The average length of an online video is 3.4 minutes
• 89% of all Internet users have watched a video in the past month
• 
57% of all videos are watched on YouTube
• 
Blogs reach more than 60% of Internet users in North America
• Blogging is growing at almost twice the rate of the Internet
• 
Social networking and multimedia has a reach of more than 80% of the North American population

How to make social media marketing work for your business

A recent report from Jupiter Research has shown why most brands are failing to make impact on social networks.
Many advertisers are building branded social networking pages that broadcast content rather than invite users to interact.
 Most advertisers simply don’t know how to market properly within social networks.

A few tips on how to make social media marketing work for your business:

Building viral buzz is difficult, so instead of relying on viral marketing to get your sales message out, promote your social media pages through paid advertisement.
Engage users through simple things such as contests to keep your audience interested on your branded page.
Focus on media content instead of products. Social media users love multimedia and are more likely to visit a branded page that has entertaining media content rather than product information.

Starting your social media marketing campaign

Choose the best social media site for your business. Obviously if you are selling insurance, a social network focused on online gaming is not the best place for you to promote your business.
Sign up and create a professional profile. Look around the site and observe how people are communicating. Ask a question and see how people will respond.
Publish content that can establish you as an expert in your field. Link your social media presence to your blog or website and add promotional buttons on your pages to make it easy for readers to share your content.
Although social media marketing is becoming a trend, you should not do it because it is popular – do it because it works.

Google started in 1998, after the “big boys” in the search engine game like Yahoo and AltaVista were already well-established. At the time, few people would have bet that Google would overtake them all – but in less than five years they did exactly that. What’s even more remarkable is they did so without a bunch of hype and loud marketing. They literally built a better mousetrap and the world beat a path to their door. So what happened?

Google’s mission in life was to build a search engine that would give people exactly what they were searching for, as fast as possible. If you were searching for “Spanish Villa’s” they wanted to give you the very best and most popular Spanish Villa’s websites on the very first page of results. They developed an amazing mathematical formula for figuring out who visited websites and why, and using that information in their search engine. So … when they began to sell Pay Per Click advertising, they were extremely concerned that advertisers should also put out messages that were highly relevant. Google rewards you for being relevant, and they let people who are searching vote for you. If your ad gets clicked on, it’s relevant. If it doesn’t, it’s not. It’s that simple.

The higher your click through rate – i.e., the more folks who see your ad and click on it – the less you have to pay for the position you want. But if you write lousy ads, Google will make you pay more to get your ads to show at all. So this creates a “Darwinian” effect, a deliberate natural selection that weeds out bad advertisers and rewards good ones. What’s good for Google’s customers is good for Google and good for you. When all the dust has settled, what really matters is that your ads and your content be relevant to the keywords you’re bidding on. Your message must match what the person is thinking. So … what were they really thinking when they typed in “Spanish Villa’s?” That is the question! Figure that out and put it in front of them, and you’ll win at Google. Write an ad that matches exactly what they’re searching for and you’ll beat your competitors by a country mile.

A Valuable Little Piece of Customer Psychology for You:

Here’s a little mental trick (a check list if you like) to help you write Google ads….

1. Imagine that you are not you. You are your customer.
2. You’re not the person with the perfect solution.  You’re the person with the problem.
3. You’ve got an itch and you want to scratch it.
4. And you’re not in front of your computer.
5. You’re sitting in front of their computer.
6. What do you type into the search bar on Google?
7. And what do you hope will come up? Answer that question and you’ll be successful marketing online.

More information that can help follows right here:
“How to Cut Your Bid Prices by NINETY PERCENT – Plus a Permanent Solution to Keywords Made ‘Inactive.’”