Whenever people speak about social media and business in the same sentence, the word that relates them in advertising. Most people feel that social media is only used for advertising by businesses. However, there are a number of examples of establishments achieving far more than just advertising. The tools employed are being called as the ‘social media tools’ or the ‘web 2.0 tools’. It has not only improved the communication within the organizations but also made reporting easier. Feedback is given on a daily basis and it is incorporated regularly. This has effectively eliminated the communication delay and brought out results faster than anyone had ever expected.

How A Burger Chain Used Social Networking to its Advantage?

A famous gourmet burger company recently introduced a new line of burgers into its menu. There are 460 restaurants under the company and the company had to get it right in all the outlets or risk the failure of one of its more ambitious introduces. The usual method is mailing out recipe books, taking feedback during manager store visits and making changes from the information gathered. This time, they used social networking for the knowledge transfer and briefings were done on a daily basis. The reactions were discussed on video chat and tweaks were made based on customer feedback. The chain is already introducing four new burgers within a span of a month. Earlier, this process would have taken a minimum of 6 months.

Easy and Fun to Use

The above example is just one of the few innovative uses of social networking for business purposes. The networks are there for the taking. The onus is on you to be innovative and use them to your advantage. According to Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com, Facebook is the most popular application ever. The brilliance of using Facebook for business purposes is that you do not have to teach people how to use it as they will already know. Developers at Facebook keep coming up with innovative ways of using Facebook in a fun way. The ability to obtain information is much better now as it is easy to get information.

Advantages of Combined Usage of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Tools

When the first generation Web tools were introduced in the 1990s, many companies used it to automate several systems and reduce the human involvement. This not only increased the efficiency of processes but also reduced the error margin. Companies like Wal-Mart used internet to help manage inventories better and in streamlining supply chains. Web 1.0 tools were primarily used for automating routine processes. In today’s world, Web 2.0 tools are being used for organizing workloads, design processes and even for creative work.

Direct Customer Reach and Hiring Advantages

With social networking sites, businesses have been able to reach customers directly and take feedback. Before, it had to be collected at their outlets and then implemented. With the ability to interact with the customers directly, businesses can incorporate the feedback on a regular basis.

The hiring process has also been revolutionized by social networking. HR experts can judge the personality of a person by glancing at their profiles. Your profile has practically become your resume. There have been number of instances where a candidate has been hired with only a single interview because of his/her impressive social networking profile.

The author, Penny, is a local seo expert with extensive experience in local marketing through the usage of social networking sites.

Related article: 5 Simple Yet Effective Tips For Successful Social Media Campaign

As powerful as Twitter is for promotion and networking, it can be a challenge to maintain and use it effectively once your network grows beyond a few dozen people.

Since you can’t keep increasing the amount of time you spend on Twitter as your network gets bigger, it becomes important to find tools that can help make your Twitter experience better, faster and more effective.

Fortunately, developers have been busy building new tools that make Twitter easier to use, more powerful and, most importantly, more efficient.

Though there are countless tools that can help, here are three that you will definitely want to check out if you’re a power Twitter user or just someone trying to get more out of your tweets.

Tweepi

Once your following and follower lists hit four or five digits, user management can quickly become your biggest challenge.

Tweepi, however, can help with that.

Tweepi makes it easy to unfollow people who aren’t following back, determine which followers you should follow back and even find all-new people to add.

A free version of Tweepi allows you access to the basic tools but paid versions, which start at $7.49 per month, give you more advanced sorting tools, the ability to see more users per page and additional filters to find others to add or remove.

If you have more than a few hundred people in your Twitter network, Tweepi is an invaluable tool to help you manage your connections and grow your audience.

Timely

Apart from user management, actual tweeting is probably the most time-consuming part of using Twitter successfully. While it doesn’t take long to type out a single tweet, deciding what to say can require some serious brainstorming.

Many people have periods where ideas for tweets are hard to come by and periods where they come up with dozens at once. However, posting all of your tweets as you think of them all can blast your followers. This not only buries your first tweets, but can get very annoying.

While there are a lot of services that will let you forward-post tweets, Timely takes is a step further by looking at your followers and finding the best times for your tweets to go live. Then, it automatically schedules you’re outgoing tweets for those peak times.

Timely is free, but there is a pro plan for $9.99 per month that provides priority support.

Proxlet

Finally, if you follow enough people on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that there is a great deal of noise in the timeline. This includes automated tweets from various services, annoying apps that put garbage into their user’s timelines and even popular hashtags that are completely uninteresting to you.

Proxlet is a way to filter out much of that noise. It works as a proxy for your Twitter feed, running it through a set of filters you define and removing the tweets you don’t want to see. It can pull out Foursquare check-ins, hashtags and even annoying users. You can also use it to display only tweets with links in its “RSS mode”.

Best of all, Proxlet works just about anywhere you use Twitter. You can use it in Tweetdeck, on Twitter for your iPhone or even on the Twitter site via a Chrome extension. You’ll never have to look at unwanted tweets again.

Proxlet is free to use.

With these three tools, you can manage your network more effectively, tweet more often (not to mention at better times) and focus on the tweets you need. That should go a long way to making Twitter a more powerful and more useful service, ensuring that you get the most return for your time and money spent on it.

However, these are far from the only Twitter tools aimed at power users If you’re struggling with a particular issue or challenge on Twitter, you may want to search around. It’s almost certain someone has developed a tool that can help you out.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a psd to html company, and who also consults for vacation secrets, a resort vacation site that customizes discounted resort style vacations for individuals and businesses.

Related article: 5 Free Useful Tools to Manage Your Social Media Efforts

Ask yourself if you would like to live in a house with poor construction, leaks, rats etc or in a good location with a well built, sturdy, healthy yet modest home. Proper design plays an important part in all aspects of our life, thus it is crucial for websites to have a great design too.

Technology rules this age and many if not all companies, have a good website. If you are a budding entrepreneur in this age; a website is essential for growth and development. A good web design is needed for any site if it wants to be great at some point in time. Professionals need web design which has no flaws along with one which will look and feel modern, trendy and above all; user-friendly.

Previously the beauty in an idea of a website could not be transformed into the real deal online. There would always be limitations of some kind or the idea may not be interpretable in the website. However with the great leaps in technology, software and connectivity comes a new breed of efficient professional designers with sharp tools and sharp minds who repeatedly come to the aid of great ideas, bringing their design into reality every single day. Along with this they help market your site to the best of their skill.

Instead of adjusting and bargaining with designers for features and designs, it is now possible to state your requirements and needs, and get a site custom made for you matching your needs. The price quoted will be directly proportional to the features demanded. Since the best of professionals use this method they put their reputation on the line every time they work and hence can give you a great site at the best price for you.

The best of companies offer a free web design quote to give you an idea of what you need to invest to get the site of your dreams. An example of such a service can be found at atlanta website design. These professional companies can help you along with the design process and feature selection; most times they put your vision before their profit. If you wish for your website to make an impact on every single one of its visitors then you better make sure that it has the best design possible for it to reach new heights every day.

There is a lot happening behind the scene which a normal blog owner is not aware of. The hardware in the form of server is churning out data while the internet backbone is grinding way to deliver web pages from one part of the earth to another. Your blog is not text and images alone – its flesh and blood. Choosing the right host is very important if you want a healthy blog.

What to look for while selecting a web host?

There are three primary requirements which must be fulfilled by a web host – server capacity in terms of memory, bandwidth and tools for extending the capability of your blog. Each of them requires to be examined carefully before reaching a decision.

Server capacity

The hard disk capacity of a server may be in terms of GB’s. However a single server may typically host several hundred sites. This means that the memory gets divided between them. While your blog or website may require only a few MB of space, it may still feel cramped for space because of other sites residing on the same server. To avoid any problem later, you must ask your host provider to clarify on these issues. Overall 80% disk capacity can be accommodated without any outrages.

Bandwidth of your server

While your server may be robust, it will only perform when connected to a high speed internet backbone. Though this topic is quite complex, it is sufficient to know that there are different types of internet backbone through which your server gets access to outside world. The bandw3idth of your server should be big enough to accommodate the data flow from all the sites on the server. If you experience slow download speed of your web pages, it means paucity of bandwidth. Slow speeds can be extremely dangerous for your site and excess stress may even bring your server down.

Internet tools to enhance performance of your site

Many blogs use WordPress. I consider WordPress as the king of   blogging. Every big and small blog is hosted on WordPress. Your host provider must enable use of this great tool. Likewise there are other tools for ecommerce – shopping cart, SSL certificates, SEO etc. which can enhance performance of your blog. You must ensure that all tools are provided by your web host free of cost.

Reading between the lines

There is a lot of difference between what a web host promises and what they actually deliver. The only way I have found to establish credentials of a web host is to get this information from the horse’s mouth. You must ask existing users of the web host provider to confirm all the claims. I am not suggesting that all web host providers are rogues. The issue here is to complement your specific requirements with hosting services. You may not require huge resources and may have a modest budget. You can find a suitable web host to match your pocket.

About the guest author: Mariana Fang Lin spends most of her time writing about the web hosting industry including small business web hosting . Follow her on Twitter here.

Related article: Web Hosting Plans – comparing apples and oranges

You are at a party or a seminar and overhear bad or untrue rumors going around the place, as the story spreads from person to person another ridiculous lie or detail is piled on and eventually your name is being tossed around the place like a rubber ball. This seems unlikely to happen often but in any case you have the natural instinct to wipe your name clean of all the false negativity as soon as possible. With the proper speech and persuasion it is possible to save your name for the night and keep it clean for a while.

Stated above is a scenario in the real world; however in the virtual world no matter how much you try to avoid gossip and infectious remarks to your reputation it cannot be stopped manually. A small side effect of a medicine prescribed by a certain doctor can become gossip on the internet and can result in the doctor losing many potential customers due to lack of trust. Even worst is that the doctor could lose his license and his livelihood.  Due to various mediums such as social media and instant messaging the old saying that, “good news spreads fast, but bad news spreads faster” is presently a reality.

One of the main reasons the public at large is taken advantage of online is the abuse of their privacy. If a person has not taken any protective measure visits a site which looks shady there is a high probability that on his opening of the site his personal data was sent to 3 to 4 other sites.  At the end of the day an average internet user without knowledge on the dangers of the internet will have 50 to 60 external sites tracking him or her. None of which the individual has ever visited during that day. Professionals have a lot more to lose as their data transactions are of more value to people and thus potential targets for thieves online. At such times it is always better to have someone watching your back. There are many tools and sites online such as reputationdefender which specializes in online reputation management

It is essential that even the common man must have control over the perception of his identity online in this ever changing world where third parties can make money using personal information.

Keeping track of new books coming out on your favorite topic or from your favorite author can be a daunting challenge. Either there are too many books to monitor effectively or the gaps between releases are so long you forget to check and miss a book.

However, Google Alerts can solve both of those problems. Widely used by marketers to track mentions of their company, Google Alerts is a free tool that emails you whenever Google’s spiders detect a new page with the content you are looking for.

Best of all, Google Alerts works with Google Books and can email you when a new title relevant to your interests appears on the Web. Best of all, it is completely hands free, meaning you set up the search once and do nothing but check your email.

Using Google Alerts is easy, but you definitely want to make sure you set up your query correctly.

How to Use Google Alerts

Using Google Alerts is very straightforward and not much more difficult than performing a regular Google search. Simply log in to your Google account and visit the Google Alerts page.

Then, all you have to do is enter a Google query that you want to monitor. In this case, it would be relevant query about new books being released. For example, if you’re interested in books on laser tag you might enter the search term “laser tag” (with quotes).

The next step is to configure the options so that you only get the results you want. Under “Type”, you can select “Books” to limit yourself to new book results. Then you select how often you want the results, usually once a day or once a week works best, and then choose if you want “Only the Best Results” to limit the results you get or “All Results” if you want to see everything.

Generally, you’ll want to choose “All Results” unless your search query returns a large volume of works, making it better to refine the results with “Only the Best Results”. Otherwise, since even Google isn’t perfect, you may miss books you want to know about.

Once you’ve done that, all you have to do is enter your email address (or select it if you’re already signed in) and click “Create Alert”. From then on, until you tell it to stop, Google will email you every time it detects new books related to your field of interest.

It’s a great, hands-free way to keep track of books in your favorite niche.

Getting More Advanced

However, the power of Google Alerts for finding new books doesn’t end with keeping on top of a topic, the queries can do much more with a few tweaks.

For example, if you want to track a single author, you can just preface your search with “inauthor:”. For example, you could search for Stephen King with the query “inauthor:”Stephen King”.

In addition to “inauthor:” there are other queries you can try including: inpublisher: Lets you track a specific publisher. (EX: inpublisher:”Random House”) subject: Lets you track a book on a specific subject (EX: subject:”Laser Tag”) intitle: Lets you look specifically in the title of a book (EX: intitle:”Harry Potter”)

You can also combine queries to make your search even more accurate. For example, “subject:Music and inpublisher:”Random House”” only produces results for books about music published by Random House.

This can help make sure you only get alerted about the exact books that you want.

In the end, Google Alerts is a truly “Hands free” solution, meaning that you set it up and never worry about it again, other than checking your email.

This can be especially useful if there are large gaps between books or if you simply don’t want to search manually for new works every so often.

This makes Google Alerts both a time saver and a powerful tool to ensure you never miss another release.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that offers a to do list application for businesses and individuals, and who also consults for a printing company that provides a variety of smartpress options

Basically I am a dumb girl and many things about SEO don’t really hit me till someone explains things to me. Now, page download speed is not a romantic topic under any circumstances and therefore I have never bothered about it. But I should have. Here are a few reasons why?

People don’t like to wait. Period

How many times have you moved on to another site just because the present one took ages to download? I do it all the time. Even the most patient viewers will abort a site which is slow and sluggish. This can be dangerous for sites and site owners. I consider it a tragedy if you have lots of nice, wonderful stuff to show but no one is willing to wait. This situation must be avoided under all circumstances. You must make sure that your web pages, especially the home page downloads at lightning speed.

Factors effecting downloads

There used to be a time when it took forever to download pages. With broadband access fast internet downloads are now common. You don’t even need to be physically wired. Wireless internet has made life easier (Gee, Facebook is accessible anywhere now). Despite all these conveniences many websites are still slow and frustratingly so. Don’t forget that user expectation has also increased. As a website owner what can you do about it?

Effective user interface design

UI or user interface design is a huge topic which I can’t cover in its entirety. But there are some salient issues which I can discuss.

1. Home page has Flash

This is a common problem with many websites. To make your site attractive you shove in a big Flash file and wonder why your visitors don’t stick. It’s obvious isn’t it? The Flash file takes so many years to download that no one ever bothers to wait and watch. You must ensure that your home page has no Flash. If you just can’t do away with it, you must at least make sure that it’s very small in size.

2. Web pages not to exceed 100k

Here I am being very conservative. Many UI designers would recommend 70k max for one web page. This includes all images, animations, advertisements and such.

3. Avoid too many sidebars and footer content ( for WordPress sites specially)

Too many widgets and sidebar content can make your site to crawl like a tortoise. It’s best to keep the look and feel minimal.

Google search algo takes download speed into consideration

I suppose this is the most important reason why you must optimize your site. Not only does Google take download speed as a factor but links this with other criteria as well. For example your bounce rate will increase with slow downloads. Bounce rate is a big factor in calculating your Google ranking.

Conclusion

You have to tighten your belt and work on your site till it’s trimmed down to the basics. You will see a magical transformation on your visitor count once you speed up your page downloads.

Sarah lamb is a blogger who takes keen interest in web design.  She   is presently promoting Time Warner Cable internet  , providers of High speed internet, DSL, Wireless Internet and  Cable by Zip Code.

Looking for an idea for your next internet venture? Here’s one – how about making a fan site? A fan site of course being a website dedicated to something popular be that a TV series, a particular celebrity or a gizmo. It’s like a hobby site, but it has some advantages over even that. Here we will look at why and how to develop a fan site.

Why Develop a Fan Site?

There are plenty of great reasons to make a fan site your next project and here are just a few…

They Are Popular: If you are making a an site about a TV series, a book series or a celebrity then chances are that they have achieved at least moderate success in order for you to have thought of this particular subject. That then means that there is a broad appeal for your topic and a large proven audience. The success of that celebrity or that series becomes you success and that whole marketing team they have behind them will in way benefit you as well.

They are Niche: Likewise though, although you will have that mainstream appeal, you also get the benefits of being in a niche with diehard fanatics – as though you were making a website about a very rare hobby. Thing is, that there are diehard fans out there for almost every actor and almost every TV series. Take Star Wars for instance – we all like Star Wars (actually I don’t really… but I’m in the minority), but some people really like Star Wars enough to go to conventions, dress up as characters, write fan fiction and keep figurines in their wrappers. And these people are likely to gobble up anything that is related meaning that they will become the backbone of your website. This way you will have some loyal visitors who will likely check back daily, click on relevant adds and contribute to your forums. These kinds of people are gold dust for a website.

There is News: Writing a breaking news story is something that has great value if you are running a website because there’s a chance you’ll break it first when there’s no news. And if you get to the number one spot, and that same story gets a lot of publicity elsewhere your site can enjoy a momentary boom in popularity. Meanwhile you will have built up a lot of authority on that topic in the eyes of Google, and so you’ll have an advantage over general sites when reporting the news. If you had a website on the old Tron film, then just think how well you’d have boomed when the new one came out. If you had a website on Arnold Schwarzenegger, then just think about how successful you’d have been during the time news of his affair came out.

There’s Little Competition: Surprisingly this isn’t something that many people are doing. Choose a topic that is only averagely popular, and other than the official sites you’ll have little competition.

There’s Officials: And those official sites? They’ll help you out and they’ll link to you, send you free things to review and mention you in publications etc. Their success is your success and vice versa, so as long as you are generally positive and presentable they will be happy to help you out.

A Couple of Tips

• Choose a topic you are interested in

• Read news on the matter regularly

• Contact and befriend the official channels

• Be good to your fans

• Make your site look professional

Jeet fell in love with computers/internet since he used his first Unix Based computer with a dialup connection. In professional life he is Cloud Server admin at directoryroll.com and his main job profile is to optimize Cloud Hosting Server for their best performance.

With the boom in social media and file sharing online in the past few years, comes a threat as potent as a virus. Yet majority of the people don’t see the potential of such a threat. The topic in discussion is an individual’s online reputation. In the real world when a person is called names or when your credibility at the office is questioned and put into the negative by those few “rotten apples”, the others slowly but surely start to share their views if nothing is done about it. It is instinctual to try to wipe one’s name clean especially if he or she hasn’t done anything wrong.

The same should apply in the virtual world of online history tracking, social media, online behavior tracking etc. A degrading remark on large social media sites can lead to infective rumors. Too much fun captured in party photos may lead to loss of a job or opportunities in professional fields. The fact remains that an individual’s data is being used without permission and his or her privacy is constantly being bombarded with online abuse.

There are a few good sites such as Reputaion.com which helps the common person to fight against such issues. Professionals should understand that good news spreads fast, but bad news spreads faster. This is especially true with the availability of instant messaging on mobile devices, and social media sites. One bad review can cost a professional like a doctor or a lawyer lot of business. For example- a group of friends read somewhere online that the restaurant they were about to go to has rats, without giving much thought to the validity and the truth in the matter they simply change their choice and tell others to do the same. The one tiny piece of bad news set the hotel owner a good chunk of potential profits

To avoid the dreaded consequences of bad internet reputation individuals and professionals alike should take the necessary precautions. Publicly sharing photos and personal details online on all sites including social media sites should be controlled. Personal email ids shouldn’t be given out to shady sites. Ad blockers and privacy filters should be used on browsers.

A person’s data such as personal information, friends, viewing history, browsing history, addresses, cell phone numbers, etc are sold to several advertising and promoting agencies. The only one not making any money off the stolen data is the data owner itself. The phrase “the higher you are, the harder you fall” applies to the internet everyday. If a person is a business professional or a very popular person online the risk of danger to your reputation is much higher than the common net user. Hence it is essential to protect privacy and reputation online at all costs.

Social media platforms have become forefront of business, where business interacts with its customers worldwide and shares information and news with them. In other words, if Online be a world, then the social media accounts of the business are its embassies that stay in touch with distant customers.

The major reason besides being a source of interaction with customers, social media is also an effective tool for website link building. This objective of link building can be achieved if the profiles are managed like embassies. The lines below give tips for managing social media profiles as embassies.

1. Independence Declaration:

An embassy represents an independent state. Therefore, social media will only work if you have established online presence. There is no denying the fact that the impact of social media is growing with time, but it can never be a permanent place to rely on. The rules of algorithm, and search engine policies can change any time, therefore, it is better to use social media platforms, and not totally rely on them for online marketing objectives.

2. Model Citizen:

The embassy is a representation of the nation or country, therefore, it needs not to be taken lightly. There is no harm in developing a light social media profile, but it should not be such that it gives a fake or spammish look. Therefore, try to make your profile as good a representative of your business as possible, and due the required diligence.

3. Respecting Locals:

Social media is like traveling to other places, and establishing your embassy on foreign lands. Therefore, when in a foreign land, you need to respect the culture, customs, and leaders of the foreign people. Hence, on social media profile, first try to listen to your customer and then preach them your offerings.

4. Language:

In a foreign place, the embassy staff needs to learn the foreign language to be able to communicate better. Similarly, in your social media profiles share content and communicate with customers in their language as much as possible.

Moreover, don’t use one language in the other country, as the language may differ from place to place and would communicate a wrong message to the audience.

5. Credentials:

Anyone with an email can setup a social media profile, the thing that makes an embassy different from a fake person is that the embassy comes with credentials, it has some name and documents associated with it, that work as a justification provider for the authenticity of the profile.

6. Build Allegiances:

Using social media purely for the sake of building links, and driving traffic towards is merely underutilizing it, rather a good social media marketing firm would use social media as a tool for building relationship. Take some time to learn about the people around you, who helped you who in your time of need.

The thing you need to do is to check your existing allegiances, then out of them find the ones with who they are connecting more frequently, and finally getting in touch with those indirect allegiance to build a prosperous relationship.

Conclusion:

In a nutshell, using social media as an embassy is the best way it can be used to represent and defend the business without causing any confusion and miscommunication among followers and owner.

Related article: 5 Simple Yet Effective Tips For Successful Social Media Campaign