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6 Google+ Tips for Businesses

Posted by waterford on Feb 21, 2012 in BLOG Posts | Comments Off

Has your business set up a Google+ page?

Google+ is growing at an impressive rate. In less than one year, Google has reached over 90 million registered users—far exceeding expected growth rates.

According to CNN’s Mark Millan, it took Facebook about four years to grow to that many users. It took Twitter almost five years to grow to the same size.

There’s No Leap of Faith With Google+

You already know Google is important to your business. Just check your analytics. Which search engine are people using to find your website? Google. And if you’re using YouTube effectively, chances are YouTube is driving traffic to your site too. News flash: Google owns YouTube.

If Google is sending you the majority of your traffic, doesn’t it make sense to figure out how to help them send you more? Google+ is the answer.

• It’s like Facebook: On Facebook, people can “like” your business. That allows your business’ page updates to have a shot at getting into readers’ timelines. People can do that on Google+ too; it just involves adding your business page to a “circle.” This similarity may help people feel more comfortable trying a new platform.
• But it’s not Facebook: Facebook does weird things with the information on pages. But Google wants the information to be found, so it uses Google+ to impact search results.
• It’s easier for your customers to share your posts than on Facebook: Like Twitter, Google+ has made sharing much more targeted for your customers. If you post something about a new type of bacon you sell, they have the ability to share it with only their friends who are interested in bacon.

Your customers can share your business’ updates with the people most likely to become customers.

And if they’re using Google+ in the Chrome browser, they can have an extension like “Replies and More for Google+,” which lets them share posts with their Facebook friends and Twitter followers at the same time they’re sharing on Google+.

Google+ works well in all browsers, but extensions like “Replies and More” make Google+ even better in Chrome.

Six Google+ Business Page Tips

Here are six steps to help your business grow in Google+ influence and in search engine results.

These steps will increase your chances of getting seen on Google+, and more importantly, help Google drive traffic to your page.

#1: Fill Out Your Page

The first thing you need to do is create a page for your business. For step-by-step directions, check out Kristi Hines’ How to Set Up a Google+ Page for Your Business.

As you’re setting up your business page, focus on using keywords as you fill out the Introduction in your Google+ page’s About section. Use both the keywords you want to rank high on and the keywords your customers are using.

And as you fill out this section, be sure to think about what would be attractive to your customers. The day Google opened business pages, Chris Brogan tweeted:

Read over your page and ask yourself if it’s bragging about how great your business is or if it’s engaging your customers.

#2: Add Links Throughout Your Page

Google+ business pages allow you to add links in lots of different places. Take advantage of it! You are able to create links in the Introduction section.

In the image below, you see examples of inserting links as phrases (like “fundraising training”), as a web page (like “FundraisingCoach.com”) or as a straight web link (like “http://fundraisingcoach.com/subscribe/).

Help drive traffic to your own site by using all the link opportunities on your Google+ page.

These links will help you get found in searches. And more importantly, they will help customers go directly to your website.

#3: Make Use of the Hover Text

As with setting up personal Google+ profiles, you can influence what people see when they mouse over your business name in Google+. They might do this when searching on a topic or simply responding to a post.

So you’ll want to have a compelling, short tagline.

The tagline both explains your business and fills in the “hover card” on other parts of Google+.

The extra words on this hover card come from the business’ tagline on their Google+ page.

You can see that only the first five words of the tagline made it onto the hover card, so make them count!

#4: Promote Your Business Page Everywhere

One of the best ways to get people to follow your Google+ business page is to let them know you have one! In addition to putting the link in your email footer and on all of your other social media pages, you can add a badge to your site.

Google+ offers a way to make a badge. But a prettier way to make a badge is to use a site like Widgets Plus. This site allows for an impressive amount of customization.

Adding a badge to your site allows people to circle your business without having to go over to Google+.

Including an interactive badge helps people circle you while on your site. They don’t have to go to Google+ to do it. As soon as they circle you, they’ll be able to see your updates in their news feed.

Getting people to circle you is crucial. Being in more people’s circles, or having more Google+ followers, improves your position on regular Google searches.

And at this point, businesses can’t circle people until people have circled them first! You’ll want to be aggressive in telling people about your Google+ page so you’ll be able to share with them too.

#5: Get Your Employees on Google+

Because your posts are generally only seen by the people who’ve circled you, you want to encourage your employees to set up personal Google+ profiles. You can’t tell them how to use those profiles. But you can ask that they add your website as a link in their Links section. You should also ask them to share your business page and its posts with their friends.

#6: Be Interesting

Steps 1-5 set the foundation for Google+ dominance. But only interesting posts will keep you there. Unfortunately, interesting is defined by your customers. Here are some tips to make your posts interesting:

• Experiment across platforms. Try posting the same updates on Facebook and Google+ and see where you get the better response. You’ll be surprised at how the followers interact differently.
• Try posting your blog in Google+. If you already have a blog, rather than simply posting a link to it in Google+, try posting the text and the link in an update. Posts that take up more of someone’s news feed seem to gain more traction than the Twitter-like 140-character updates.
• Use pictures and video. Pictures and video work incredibly well on Google+. People are far more interested in sharing images then straight text posts.
• Be quirky. Google+ users are very interested in sharing and commenting on quirky posts. So if there’s any way for your business to do something quirky, it will help people become interested in you. One great example is this picture of a Crockpot from Jeremiah Owyang. Posted soon after Google+ opened, his question generated lots of conversation about food and workplaces.

Being interesting on Google+ involves a willingness to be a bit quirky.

What could you ask your followers that would make your company seem more “human” and generate comments?

Google+ Is Open for Business

While still new, Google+ is open for business. And it will benefit your business both in search engine results and increased interaction with customers.

From:  http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/

What is this Pinterest Website?

Posted by waterford on Feb 17, 2012 in BLOG Posts | Comments Off

If you haven’t heard of Pinterest, you likely will soon.

Traffic to the website—which lets users create online scrapbooks to share images of projects or coveted products—has grown tenfold over the past six months. In January, the number of visitors on Pinterest.com was almost a third of that on Twitter.com.

Pinterest has found favor with e-commerce retailers, many of which have added its “Pin it” button to their websites, but also become the subject of blogosphere chatter over use of affiliate marketing. Sarah Needleman has details on The News Hub.

There is one problem: The 16-person Palo Alto, Calif., start-up isn’t sure how it is going to make money.

“Pinterest’s monetization strategy isn’t in the oven and it’s not even off the baking table,” said Jeremy Levine, a board member of Pinterest and a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners. “We have one hundred ideas but no execution as of yet.”

Pinterest’s situation isn’t unusual for an Internet start-up; some may even call it cliché. After watching the growth of Facebook Inc. and Twitter—both of which grew quickly at first without having a business model—Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann said he is following the same path and will worry about details later.

“My hope is that if we build a service that a lot of people use to plan and discover things, that will be really valuable,” said the 29-year-old entrepreneur, a former Google Inc. employee.

An Introduction to Pinterest

 

Mr. Silbermann co-founded Cold Brew Labs Inc. in 2008 and launched Pinterest, the company’s only product, the following year. It has raised $37.5 million from Silicon Valley angel investors including Yelp Inc. Chief Executive Jeremy Stoppelman and top venture firms such as Bessemer and Andreessen Horowitz.

The closely held company wouldn’t disclose financial figures, but isn’t yet making much revenue and is unprofitable. Pinterest is currently valued at around $200 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The prospect of making money off of social-networking sites, which are usually free to users, has been a challenge. The options for Pinterest suggested by analysts so far, which center around selling targeted advertising and data on users’ interests, aren’t terribly original and run the risk of alienating users—problems faced by bigger social-networking sites such as Facebook.

But people are flocking to the site. Pinterest last month attracted more than 11 million unique visitors, more than double the 4.9 million who visited the site in November, according to comScore. Those who visited spent nearly 100 minutes on the site in January, compared with 19 minutes on professional social-networking site LinkedIn, it said.

“I haven’t seen another stand-alone site that has reached 10 million visitors faster,” said comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman.

The research firm said roughly 68% of Pinterest’s users are women and many are in the Midwest. Users must be invited to join.

Retailers are looking to piggyback off its popularity. Bergdorf Goodman, a unit of Neiman Marcus Group Inc., has begun actively trying to develop a following for its high-end clothing and accessories on Pinterest, and Lands’ End Canvas, an extension of Lands’ End, part of Sears Holdings Corp., last month added a widget to its product pages, making it easier for browsers to immediately pin, or repost, images of the looks they like to their Pinterest profiles.

Etsy.com, an online crafts marketplace with 50,600 Pinterest followers, is using Pinterest’s price display feature. That means that when Pinterest users “pin” say, an Etsy chair on a board for their followers to see, the image of the chair will automatically include the chair’s title, and a banner showing the price.

It has also been a boon for some small businesses. “Our traffic converts to sales,” said Amy Squires, co-founder of The Wedding Chicks LLC, which posted about $540,000 in revenue last year, up from $340,000 in 2010. The four-year-old online retailer of wedding-party gifts, which joined Pinterest last summer, said Pinterest now brings in more than double as many monthly visitors to its website than Facebook and Twitter.

Warby Parker Inc., an eyewear brand sold online, has seen the number of visitors to its website coming directly from Pinterest quadruple over the past four months, according to Warby’s co-CEO, Neil Blumenthal. Pinterest allows us to market the company’s products “in an organic and authentic way,” he said.

Like other websites with user-generated content such as Google’s YouTube, Pinterest has procedures in place to deal with the posting of copyrighted images and other material, where content owners can report a violation and have the content taken down. Pinterest said copyright problems “haven’t been a significant issue so far.”

In recent days, Pinterest has attracted some online ire for not disclosing the use of what is known as affiliate marketing, a prevalent form of online advertising that companies such as Amazon.com Inc. also use. Affiliate marketing lets merchants place links to their Web stores on related sites in return for giving up a percentage of every sale that results from those links.

However, affiliate marketing isn’t a major part of Pinterest’s business model right now, according to the company and its venture capitalists.

Another concern raised by some: Pinterest’s terms of use include broad language giving it the right to “sell” and “modify” its member content, creating the potential for future privacy issues.

So far that hasn’t stopped UncommonGoods LLC, an online gift retailer in Brooklyn, N.Y. UncommonGoods began using Pinterest in October after noticing traffic coming to its website from the social network, according to David Bolotsky, its founder.

In recent weeks, traffic from Pinterest to the UncommonGoods website has begun approaching and even rivaling traffic that comes from Facebook, Mr. Bolotsky said. “The overlap between Pinterest users and our customers is just perfect,” he said. Near logos on its website linking to the retailer’s Twitter and Facebook pages, the company recently added a new icon.

“Follow me on Pinterest,” it reads.

From: http://online.wsj.com

How Much Do Sports Fans Love Social Media?

Posted by waterford on Feb 16, 2012 in BLOG Posts | Comments Off

Sports and social media are a marriage made in heaven. News and score updates break constantly. Heated debate is a big part of the fun. And fans love any chance to interact with the athletes they idolize. But just how much do sports fans love and use social media overall?

The brand-engagement firm GMR Marketing recently conducted a study and came up with interesting results, presented in the infographic below.

According to GMR, people today are 10 times more likely to check the Internet for breaking sports news than they are to turn to sports radio. Slightly more people use Facebook and Twitter than national news websites, at 41% to 40%. By comparison, just 13% said they get their breaking sports news from TV, and 4% from radio.

And it doesn’t matter where fans are; social media lets them get their sports fix in any place, any time. Nearly three quarters of respondents said they’ve checked social media for sports news at a party, nearly 70% during a meal, and 58% said they’ve done so while in the bathroom.

Don’t just take our word for it, though. Check out this infographic and then let us know in the comments what jumped out at you:

From http://mashable.com/

 

 

 

 

 

3 Twitter Browser Extensions for Better Social Management

Posted by waterford on Feb 15, 2012 in BLOG Posts | Comments Off

Do you have more than one Twitter account?

If you use social media for your business or to promote other companies, you probably have many different accounts to keep track of.

Dashboard apps can help you keep tabs on various networks at once and update multiple accounts.

However, when you want an enhanced Twitter experience from your browser, these three free tools can help.

#1: Silver Bird

A feature-packed little extension, Silver Bird offers a multitude of Twitter features in a smart pop-up box.

Main view in Silver Bird’s pop-up box.

Silver Bird uses neat tabs to organize separate views of your timeline, mentions, direct messages, favorites and lists. A search box is tucked in between the tabs as well, for quick hashtag or keyword searches.

Extensive options give you complete control.

An extra tab titled “Unified” is a collection of tweets that you choose. This can include mentions, direct messages, lists and your home timeline—or just some of these options—which allows flexibility and control.

A recent update added a trending topics feature.

Silver Bird’s icon changes color to notify you of new tweets, which is an unobtrusive way of keeping you up to date. On the settings page, you can choose which colors the bird will change to, depending on what kind of new tweets come through; for instance, you could make it change to green for mentions and yellow for new tweets in your home tab.

A number icon shows how many new tweets you have.

Composing a tweet in Silver Bird is simple, with the now-standard options of adding media and shortening links included. The compose box stays out of sight until you open it, making for a smoother view of your timeline.

Two clicks to start composing a tweet make this a great tool to share thoughts quickly from within your browser.

Silver Bird has some other handy features that make it extra useful, including a “mark all as read” option, a preview of image links and follow/unfollow features. You can also set on-page pop-up notifications if you find them useful.

Silver Bird is free to download from the Chrome web store.

#2: Tweetings

Tweetings is based on the same open-source Twitter extension as Silver Bird—the no-longer available Chromed Bird. Thus, the two are similar in many ways. The design, however, is much better in Tweetings.

Tweetings uses icons to distinguish each tab.

As you can see, the basic layout is very similar to Silver Bird. Tweetings puts the compose box at the bottom, but keeps it open so you can create an update with just one click. The basic timeline view is very simple to navigate, with unread tweets in bold font to make catching up much easier. As with Silver Bird, you have an option to “mark all as read,” which I find very useful.

Map previews make your Twitter feed more dynamic, without loading extra pages.

Twitter lists, searches and trends are all available in Tweetings, so you can keep up with tweets on any topic. As in Silver Bird, the app comes with detailed settings, including the option to change the color of your icon for notifications.

An extra cool feature in Tweetings is that the icon can show two different colors at once.

This app includes some handy features to stay connected to your Twitter community, such as follow/unfollow features and the ability to view other users’ timelines. One of my favorite features is the auto-completion of usernames, which I use regularly.

Clicking on a username gives you several options to connect with the person.

Lastly, Tweetings offers Windows, Mac, iPad and iPhone versions of its app, which you can sync with the Google Chrome extension. You can grab the extension for free from the Chrome web store, and download full apps from the Tweetings website.

#3: TweetBar

TweetBar takes a very different approach than the full-featured Silver Bird and Tweetings extensions. Simply put, TweetBar lets you send tweets from the URL bar of your Chrome browser. This is certainly one of my favorite additions to Chrome, as there are many times I have wanted to quickly send a tweet without opening a full-fledged Twitter client (probably because I closed them earlier to help me focus!).

Using TweetBar couldn’t be simpler. Once your account is connected, typing “t” and hitting space or tab will let you type in a tweet. Hitting enter sends your message to Twitter. That’s it!

A character count will show up in Chrome’s drop-down box when you start typing. Image source: babbl.me

If you often find yourself needing to send a tweet right away, this is the quickest and easiest way I’ve found to do so. Forget opening a new window or even a new tab in your browser—just type and send.

You can download TweetBar from the Chrome web store.

While none of these extensions offer the features (like multiple account support) of full-blown dashboard apps, they are useful to keep on top of a single account, especially if you spend a lot of time working in your browser.

From: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/

5 Twitter Changes and How to Make the Most of Them

Posted by waterford on Feb 14, 2012 in BLOG Posts | Comments Off

Are you wondering how Twitter’s changes will impact your use of its network?

Recently, Twitter got a complete revamp that changed things drastically. Interestingly, it didn’t pump the social network with more and more features.

Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s head of API, explained it crisply: “In a world where Facebook and Google are competing on features, Twitter wants to focus on being simple.”

This article will review all the changes, from user interface changes to Twitter brand pages, what the new changes mean and how you can best use them.

#1: Easier and More Streamlined Navigation

The first thing you’ll notice with the new Twitter is that navigating has become a lot easier and more streamlined. With just one click on any update, you can now get all the information you need from a tweet.

It will show you the number of retweets, replies and favorites, without going anywhere else.

This means you can jump into the conversation right from there. It also gives you a great overview of how well that particular tweet has performed. While some Twitter tools offer this already, it is very helpful to have it right inside Twitter.com.

You can see all the information you need right here.

Another feature that might just have become very useful is the “Who to follow” box on the left. This is a fantastic new way to discover people close to your network whom you might not know about. You can click the “x” on any person who is not suitable, and browse endlessly through this tool to find people.

The little note below each of the suggested people tells you who from your network is already connected to that person. This makes expanding your Twitter tribe much more focused. I like this, as you aren’t stabbing in the dark when connecting with new people.

See who’s following these people before deciding to follow them yourself.

I am immensely impressed with the new “Discover” area in the new Twitter. It surfaces content much more intelligently now and becomes a very powerful place to find new articles.

With one glance, you can browse through the hottest stories on the web and get updated on everything, without having to search endlessly through past tweets. This area also has a complete “Who to Follow” stream ready for you that you can explore:

It’s now easy to discover the hottest stories.

How to Make the Most of the New Twitter.com in 10 Minutes a Day

These new design improvements mean that if you are super-busy handling all of your business activities, the new Twitter allows you to expand your network in a very short and focused stretch of time.

Here are a few tips on what you can do:

• Browse your new and improved stream for great tweets and conversations. Click “open” on any tweet to get the full context more easily.
• Spend 5 minutes browsing the “Who to Follow” stream and expand your network easily and in a focused way.
• Hop over to the new “Discover” area to find all of the latest stories from your network in one glance.

Bonus Tip: The new Buffer browser extension has been updated to work inside the new Twitter. Click “Buffer” on any tweet next to “Retweet” and easily schedule your retweets to be posted at an optimum time.

#2 and #3: Twitter Brand Pages and Embeddable Tweets

Evidently, one of the biggest changes coming for businesses is Twitter brand pages alongside the new embeddable tweets function. While only 21 brands were given access to creating their page, it is said to soon roll out to everyone else.

What is most notable about brand pages is that they allow you to pin the top tweet, so it is not cluttered with replies. This means you can find one of your top-value tweets and have it ready whenever a new visitor arrives.

Secondly, you are also able to customize a banner slot right beneath your account information. You can fill it with a promotion or special deal for your followers. Here is an example from Best Buy’s brand page.

Check out Best Buy’s Twitter Brand Page.

With the new embeddable tweets function, Twitter has also given a major incentive to bloggers and publishers to come back to Twitter.com. To get to the embed function, just click “Details” after you have expanded the tweet once. Then simply click the “embed” link to get all of the options to include the tweet in your next blog post:

Notice the “Embed this Tweet” link at the bottom.

The great thing is that you can customize the styling of the embedded tweet right from there. This means you can control the position and text wrapping on the page. Once you are happy with your changes, just copy and paste the code into the HTML of your next blog post.

You can customize the Embeddable Tweets.

Here’s how this looks (note: what you see below is active, NOT a screen shot):

Four Quick Tips to Make the Most of Embeddable Tweets

Personally, I believe this feature can be an extremely powerful blogging tool for anyone using Twitter. The fact that it places a Follow button on the embedded tweet alone is very attractive for giving any Twitter account a lot more exposure.

• If you’re writing about an event, try finding relevant tweets to embed so you can give your article a more lively appearance.
• Add credibility to your articles by embedding tweets from experts talking about the topic. Simply search Twitter for some keywords to find relevant tweets.
• If you are reviewing a product or service, place a few tweets from across the Twitterverse at the bottom of your post to show more varied opinions.

Bonus tip: Whichever tweet you embed, let the person who tweeted it know, as you are providing them with additional exposure. They might just help you spread your content even more.

#4: The New, Much Faster TweetDeck

Another equally significant announcement from Twitter is that the new TweetDeck has been unveiled. As a heavy TweetDeck user myself, there is one most important improvement I see right away: TweetDeck is no longer an Adobe Air app, which means it is less sluggish to use.

Since TweetDeck’s acquisition by Twitter, it is evident that a lot of effort has been put into making the dashboard simpler and imitating the Twitter.com experience more closely. You’ll realize this quickly as there is no bar at the top to add your tweets, but only a box similar to Twitter.com.

The improved TweetDeck is easy to use.

However, my feeling is that these changes have taken away some of TweetDeck’s previous flexibility and functionality. Clearly, the new TweetDeck is geared toward more mainstream usage and less focused on providing the go-to dashboard for power users.

#5: The New iPhone and Android Apps for Twitter

Twitter’s new mobile clients for Android and iPhone I would like to call huge successes. The experience, much like the new Twitter.com, has been greatly improved and streamlined for you.

You can access your #discover area with top stories in the exact way as on Twitter.com. Also the @mentions and news stream have received a major design update. They are much easier to browse and interact with. Especially whenever there are unread updates in one of your streams, it displays a little line beneath the icon like you see below:

The improved mobile Twitter news stream.

Here’s the improved mobile Twitter @mentions stream.

What I also greatly enjoy is that on the home tab, you now have a notification counter of how many direct messages are in your inbox. At the same time, it’s very easy to access your Twitter lists right from there with just one tap. It makes focused reading of news a lot easier for you.

It’s easy to see the number of unread Direct Messages waiting for you.

Tips to Make the Most of the New Twitter Mobile Clients

There are quite a few hidden tricks and features on your new Twitter mobile clients that might just make your life a lot easier. Here is a list of the top three things I found:

• Whenever you’re writing a tweet and you don’t want to send it just now, hit “Cancel” and then “Save as Draft.” This is a great way to space out your tweets and avoid flooding your followers.
• You can easily connect multiple Twitter accounts from the home tab and switch between them conveniently. Just click on “change accounts” and swap over to your business or other Twitter account.
• For better monitoring, save some Twitter searches, as you can now easily access them right from the home tab too. This is a great way to stay up to date with your most important keywords about your business.

From: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/