social media

June 25,2012ByDAVID VEGA

Facebook Changed Everyone’s Email – Here’s How to Fix It

Brands . social media

Facebook’s Recent Email Facebook just removed everyone’s email address from their profile and replaced it with an @facebook.com email address without asking you. Here’s how to easily fix the problem. A while ago, Facebook launched its own email service, which was promptly forgotten by everyone. Recently, they removed everyone’s email addresses from their profile, replacing them with @facebook.com email address instead. Luckily, your old addresses are very easy to get back on your profile – How to rectify Facebook’s recent email: Click “About” on your profile and scroll down to your email address. Click “Edit” to change them. Click on the circle next to your Facebook email address and change its setting to “Hidden From Timeline”. Click on the circle next to your other email addresses and change their settings to “Shown On Timeline”. Click the Save button at the bottom of the Edit popup (Don’t forget this step)....

June 5,2012ByDAVID VEGA

Facebook News…

Brands . social media

Cutting Edge Web Technology Double Dipping Tip for Tuesday: Photos and text for Facebook Page posts will now appear larger in the News Feed, rather than the smaller version that had appeared previously. Additionally, four photos from an album will be made visible at once — previously only three were included in album stories. So put more energy into sharing high-quality images, or risk being overlooked… www.facebook.com/tridence...

June 5,2012ByDAVID VEGA

Tip: Pinterest users

Brands . social media

Tip: Pinterest users – Get the Pinterest’s new weekly email digest which will let you know which of your pins was most popular. The newsletter displays a few popular boards, pins from friends, and your most popular pins of the week — a feature that will be useful for brands and marketeers. www.facebook.com/tridence...

May 21,2012ByDAVID VEGA

Google+ a Ghost Town as Brands Decamp for Pinterest…

Brands . social media

Is Google+ Dead? See Why Major Brands Are Abandoning It for Pinterest’s Explosive Growth! Though Traffic From Marketers and Users Is Light, Google Doubles Down on Investment Google+ launched brand pages six months ago, introducing new social lingo, including “hangouts,” “circles” and “+1s.” But strike up a conversation with a digital marketer these days, and talk of “+1s” has been replaced by that of “pins.” Rather than challenge Facebook and Twitter for mindshare, Google is a distant fourth to Pinterest, with its “pin it” button now appearing alongside Facebook, Twitter and email buttons on prime web real-estate such as eBay and Amazon product pages. Even the platform’s “best” brands haven’t put a ton of effort into building out the pages. Nissan, for example, was lauded late last year for having one of the best new Google+ brand pages, even down to the animated GIF in its header image that gives the illusion of a car speeding by. Nearly 424,000 users have added the page to their “circles” (Google+ lingo for following a person or brand) and yet Nissan’s agency decided early on not to invest in developing content specifically for the page, which mostly contains re-purposed content from Facebook. “The bottom line was that it was pretty bleak in its traffic,” said Brandon Kleinman, director of social media and strategy at TBWA/Chiat/Day. The broad consensus is that Google+ is an empty city where the masses go to set up a profile but then seldom return. Still, Google is continuing to double down on the investment from both a product and a marketing standpoint. It has rolled out seven unique TV spots to promote the platform since December, according to Ace Metrix, which tracks and evaluates ad creative and, earlier this month, launched an iPhone app and the ability for any user to set up a “hangout on air” to broadcast video chats to an unlimited audience. There’s evidence of some — if not exactly Facebook-size — engagement. According to an analysis by the analytics firm Simply Measured, 64 of the top 100 global brands named by Interbrand in 2011 have Google+ pages, up from 61 when the platform was a month old in December. It found that 22 brands have been added to circles by more than 100,000 users, up from zero in December. Google is touting successes such as that of the Cadbury U.K. page, which organized three hangouts on air in March and saw its follower base grow by 150,000 afterward, according to a case study published by Google. But there are also brands, such as Pizza Hut, Visa and Heineken, which have created pages but haven’t posted anything since. Christian Oestlien, Google’s social-advertising lead. Avi Savar, founding partner at the social-media agency Big Fuel, said there’s a widely held notion that Google+ users skew male and technology-savvy, which means having a presence on the platform is useful for consumer-electronics brands such as Samsung and T-Mobile. Such companies could potentially research which aspects of a device resonate with their niche audiences before bringing it to market, for example. “It’s a good place to do some community outreach and focus grouping, and to get insights from a specific type of demo,” Mr. Savar said. “Outside of that, I don’t find too much value for a brand to spend time, energy and resources there.” The latest official report from Google said more than 100 million people have been active on Google+ in the past 30 days, but that number includes people who’ve set up Google+ accounts and then visited another “socially enhanced” part of Google, such as search pages or YouTube. ComScore data paint a less rosy picture, showing that the average Google+ user spends three minutes on the platform every month, compared to 405 minutes for Facebook users. The average time spent by each Pinterest user per month is 50 minutes, per ComScore. But Google’s social-advertising lead, Christian Oestlien, says that third-party projections of adoption and engagement are off the mark, and he’s bullish about the platform’s continued growth. Mr. Oestlien also pointed out that there are carrots for brands to develop robust Google+ communities, both in increased search visibility and clicks on ads. Advertisers can link their pages to their AdWords accounts to create a social layer within ads that can show friends on the platform who have recommended the brand. “Taking social and being able to apply it at the moment of commercial relevance is incredibly powerful to our advertisers who spend thousands, if not millions, of dollars on Google on a quarterly basis,” said Mr. Oestlien. He said ads with social context are seeing 5% to 10% higher click-through rates. Even before the launch of brand pages, there was a notion held by some marketers that ignoring the platform could jeopardize their search rankings, since Google could one day reset its search algorithm to give considerable weight to signals from Google+. While that hasn’t happened, there’s evidence that Google+ is beginning to have an impact on paid search. According to Chris Copeland, CEO of Group M Next, his team has started seeing examples of high-priced keywords that would typically fetch anywhere from $6 to $15 per click retrieving Google+ listings instead of paid ads. “If investing in and building a Google+ community offsets paid media, brands will respond to that,” said Mr. Copeland, who sees the emerging pattern as evidence of Google’s commitment to its social network, since it’s leaving money on the table to reward advertisers for Google+ activity. “They’re in essence forgoing a quarter-million a year off of one term,” he said. By: Cotton Delo...

April 3,2012ByDAVID VEGA

How Google Panda 3.3 has effected SEO…blogs de-indexed by Google

Brands . social media

How Google Panda 3.3 has effected SEO? The last couple of weeks I’ve been blogging quite heavily on social media which I’m a big believer in. Why am I such a big believer you may ask? Well the answer for me is the simple fact that social media is relatively cheap and easy to implement in order to get a large amount of traffic to your website. Not just that, it’s great for your brand awareness and reputation management. However in the last week it’s become even more apparent why social media is becoming increasingly more important as part of your marketing strategy. You see what has happened in the last week has been massive in the search engine optimization world which is what I wanted to talk about today. Google has made some massive changes to its algorithm via Panda 3.3 and now has started penalizing websites for having spammy or unnatural back links. There always use to be a hot debate on whether you got penalized for having unnatural or spammy back links to your website. The argument being “well if you got penalized for having certain back links, then you could easily build back links to your competitor websites and get them banned.” Well this almost looks like this is the case. If you relied on SEO as your primary source of bringing traffic to your website, then you would be stuffed. That’s why you need to focus some of your efforts into social media marketing. Most of the SEO specialists I’ve spoken to and confirmed with have also suggested that Google are now penalizing sites for bad back links. Having a look around the Internet, more and more people are getting the following message from Google in their webmaster tools account: We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team Wow!! Moreover in the last week, one of the biggest paid blog networks out there has had all their blogs de-indexed by Google. They have now shut down. The network – Build My Rank. This network is one of the strictest blog networks out there when it came to submitting content with your back links in them. It had to be unique content or well spun content (not poorly spun content that was not human readable) with no grammar and spelling mistakes. Build My Rank did not want to leave any footprint for Google to catch them out. Unfortunately they did. Now Google are after Authority Link Network as well having de-indexed thousands of blogs in that network. I believe it won’t be long before Google de-indexes all the blogs in ALN. So the big G are cracking down hard on people trying to game the system. This now begs the question is SEO dead? Will it still be viable in 6 months time? I still believe there is a place for SEO but it’s definitely now becoming harder to rank websites higher. So below I’ve listed some of my tips on getting your website to the top of Google: Create quality content – I’ve mentioned this many a time and it will never change. Content is king. Produce quality content that helps users and create it regularly! Keep your site content fresh with new content added continuously. Get natural back links – linked in to my point above, by creating quality content other websites will naturally link to your website. Social media – you need social proof for your website period. Once again linked in to point 1, create content that creates a buzz. Get people tweeting your content, liking it on Facebook, sharing on Google+ or pinning it on Pinterest. Google are using social signals more and more to determine the value and rankings of websites. Link diversity – get a variety of links from different sources such as article submissions, social bookmarking, wiki submissions, press releases, RSS feeds, forum profiles etc. The more your link profile is diverse, the better it is in Google’s eyes. Do not put all your back links in one basket. For example, imagine your only source of back links was from Build My Rank and you got hit by Google, compared with someone who also had Build My Rank back links but also had back links from a multitude of other sources. The latter will still be fine. Guest posts- always great to write posts for others and also get them to write posts for you. Guest blogging is great also for your brand awareness. Anchor text diversity – don’t create links to your website all using the same anchor text which is your keyword. This looks so unnatural. Mix it up – use different keywords and variations of keywords. Include anchor text keywords such as “click here” and “here”. Use a fast and reliable website hosting company – Google looks at page load times and bounce rates as metrics in ranking your website. So make sure your website is quick upon loading and you direct your website visitors as soon as they view your web page. If you use wordpress, you can use a caching plugin to improve the loading speed of your website. If you stick to the above tips, you will be fine. Also your website visitors will also be happy...

February 23,2012ByDAVID VEGA

Branding And How It Works In The Social Media Age

Brands . social media

Branding For Social Media Age To get a better idea of how US consumers are interacting with brands in the social media space, review this graph below: Source: AYTM Market Research...

January 14,2012ByDAVID VEGA

The Definition of Social Business?

Brands . social media

Per request of the Author. We removed the imported shared text blog. http://www.facebook.com/tridence...

December 2,2011ByDAVID VEGA

Need a Social Media Strategy? Start with These Three-Pronged Approaches

Brands . social media

Need A Social Media Strategy Most nonprofits understand the potential power of social media to connect with both old and new supporters, advocates, and clients. But few nonprofits can articulate the strategy behind the time they spend on blogging, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. All good communications strategies start with a goal: What are you trying to accomplish via your communications? More specifically with social media, what do you want the reaction to be when someone reads your blog, or Facebook status update, or tweet? I think the answer boils down to three basic choices for nonprofits. You want people to DO something, to THINK something, or to FEEL something. DO Something. Your words are calling them to some kind of action. Donate, volunteer, call your legislator, register, andtell a friend are all common examples of nonprofits asking supporters to do something. THINK Something. Your words are sharing something helpful or educational. You share a link to a news article or to a free download. You share an interesting fact or story. You offer some how-to instructions or tips. By sharing these updates, you hope readers will think about what you have presented. FEEL Something. Your words show the human side of your organization and prove that there really are passionate people behind the 501(c)(whatever you are). You are building rapport by sharing content that makes your supporters laugh, cry, smile, feel included, or swell with pride. Never discount the value of building that human rapport. As Dr. Maya Angelou says, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Strive for a mix of these three outcomes as your write for social media. Now, let’s look beyond the specific updates and think a little more broadly about how you want your organization to be perceived within your social media communities. Social media success is most often defined by what we call “engagement,” and we only get engaged to people whom we genuinely enjoy being around. So how can your social media strategy help you move down that path from being introduced to “just friends” to getting engaged and, you hope, into a life-long relationship with your supporters? I have another three-pronged approach that I call the Three G’s: Be Genuine, Generous, and Grateful. Be GENUINE. Let your organizational personality shine through, and build up that rapport that makes people love your cause. Let us know how you feel about what’s happening in the world. Express some opinions, instead of just sharing facts. Take us backstage and let us see what’s really going on. Be GENEROUS. It’s all about being a helpful human. Think of communicating as gift giving—are you a good gift giver who thinks about the people on the receiving end and what they want or need? Or are you a bad gift giver, thinking about your own needs and treating communications as just another chore on your to-do list? Listen carefully and constantly to your supporters, and then respond in kind. Empower them with helpful information and resources, even if those materials have been created by other “competing” nonprofits (it makes you look really smart, confident, and in the know). Be GRATEFUL. Being grateful is what you do in response to generosity from others. You can say, “Thank You,” directly or you can do what I call “blowing kisses” throughout the day. Share a link to someone else, retweet them, or otherwise pass on information from others who have been kind to you, as a way of saying thanks. Tell stories not just about you and your clients but about your fans and followers, too. Show them how much they really mean to you. Every nonprofit is a little different, and your social media strategies should be, too. But any strategy with these three-pronged approaches at its core is bound to be a success. Author: Kivi Leroux Miller...

November 21,2011ByDAVID VEGA

Inactive subscribers are still valuable to your brand…

Brands . social media

Inactive subscribers are still engaged Inactive subscribers are still valuable to your brand and can generate a significant amount of revenue. It makes perfect sense to stop emailing someone you know would never buy your products again or who actively dislikes receiving your emails. But long-term inactivity isn’t a good indicator of whether someone falls into that category. There are 5 reasons why your subscribers may be – or appear to be – inactive: They want your email, but haven’t needed your product for a while. You’re receiving false negatives – your email is optimized to be read with image blocking on, so some subscribers could be opening it without you knowing. The subscriber doesn’t want your email, but doesn’t care enough to unsubscribe. Email address churn – the subscriber no longer uses or rarely checks that email address. They don’t see your email because it goes into the junk folder. By far the largest group is the first one – we call these people the unemotionally subscribed. They will happily ignore your emails until they’re ready to buy, because it’s easier than unsubscribing and having to remember your URL or Google you later. We’ve gathered plenty of evidence on this group and demonstrated that while they might not read an email, they’re still a very important customer base. For example: One of our clients generated $120,000 from subscribers who had not opened or clicked on the previous 25 to 40 emails. Another saw 14% of revenue generated by subscribers who did not open or click a single email. Common marketing advice would have been to delete those subscribers after a year’s inactivity. But by retaining unemotionally subscribed addresses, the client brought in a significant amount of additional revenue. by DAVE CHAFFEY...