Social Media

Tagging in Twitter

If you are new to Twitter marketing, you may be confused by the strange symbols and references that are used. But there is a simple explanation to this. It all makes sense when you consider that Twitter was initially conceived with SMS in mind. This meant that a character limitation had to be put in place which in turn left very little space to do other functions.

The @ – The “@” symbol is used to draw attention to a user. For example, @Harry Johnson accidentally squirted ketchup all over himself at Disney world today. However, you should note that this is used in a broadcast sense. If you need to talk to Harry privately, just send him a direct message.
The RT – “RT” is used as courtesy to others. Let us say that you saw an interesting post from one of your friends and want to post it to your own followers. But you also want to give credit to the person who originally posted it as well. This is where you use “RT” and the “@” symbol. Using the previous example this would be posted as, RT @Harry Johnson accidentally squirted ketchup all over himself at Disney world today.

The # – The “#” or hash tag is used to draw attention to words and help with filtering. This way, you can have one channel that shows you Tweets that you are really interested in and think are important. Using the previous example this would look like, @Harry Johnson accidentally squirted ketchup all over himself at #Disney world today. So everyone who is following you and is interested in Disney will see this message in their filters.

If you need further help in twitter marketing and promotion , we recommend hiring a company like iClimber, who specializes in social media marketing services.

How Social Media can Help Patients

It is easy to class social media as something used by those who have nothing better to do or by those who have something to sell. But in reality, social media has the potential to be a very powerful tool in a variety of different fields. One such field is healthcare.

Patients often find themselves looking for answers. They usually resort to looking online for information, because they simply do not have access to enough of a doctor’s time to completely satisfy their queries. Another reason is that, questions pop up in the mind long after they leave the doctor’s office. In these cases, it is always useful to look online for a solution.

But rather than get confused in medical jargon that may be found in articles, there is another method patient can utilize to find answers. Social media represents a way where patients can interact with others, especially those suffering from the same ailments. This allows them to compare notes and medications and try to find a way to alleviate suffering. This also enables them to find better medical care by finding doctors and facilities recommended by other patients through personal experience.

It also enables patients to inform and others about particular ailments or diseases. By creating awareness they are able to prevent others from contracting diseases, avoiding injuries and other medical nightmares. Social media has given patients a forum where they can openly discuss their issues without and fear and has also given them an avenue for hope.

Making Social Media Work for Offline Businesses

Not every business can afford to be online and in some cases they don’t need to at all. But that doesn’t mean that they will not appreciate any extra advertising and promotions. It may sound surprising, but if you think about it social media marketing can indeed be used to promote a non-online business. Let us look at what Twitter can do for a bricks-and-mortar store.

1. Hold a contest via Twitter. Pick a product you want to promote and advertise in the store window that this product is the prize of a Twitter contest. The rules of the contest should be simple. Tell the people that all they have to do is become a follower of the store on Twitter and make a Tweet about the store. You can now see where this will lead to. Not only are you increasing your offline opt-in list, you are also getting some free publicity for your store every time one of your followers Tweet about you. Keep the promo going for a month before you hold the draw.

2. Dish out code words. Once again pick a product and using your store front, advertise that discounts will be given to those who use a code word when making a purchase on that promoted product. Let the people know that the code word will be Tweeted on a certain day of the week. You will be surprised at the number of people who start following you.

3. Mass Tweeting. Don’t overdo this, but this method will give you lots of attention very fast. Hold a contest for the most Tweets about your store. If you offer a decent enough prize, you will have a flood of advertising on your behalf flowing out on the social media circuit.

4. Build followers. In order for Twitter marketing to work effectively, you need to have a lot of followers. How do you build followers? First way it to post on regular basis, so people that like what you post will start following you. Second way is to follow people who think will be interested in following you and hopefully they follow you back. Your could use some twitter tools that can automate some of these tasks, or you could also higher a company like iClimber that does twitter marketing and promotion services.

Preparing for your Social Media campaign

Social media is a fantastic way to promote your business whether it based online or offline. It offers a cost effective way to get coverage, awareness, traffic etc. But it is a tricky medium to use. This is because it is all about relationship building. So before diving in blindly, prepare for it so that you get the maximum out of it.

1. Visualize – Create a picture in your mind of your audience. Take into account their gender, age, surfing habits, spending habits etc. What do they look like? This will help you design the rest of your campaign.

2. What are ‘they’ doing? Scope out your completion and get to grips with their techniques. Then analyze their campaign to see if they are getting the responses they should be getting. See how effective it is. If it is working for them – learn from it, if it’s not working for them – then you know what not to do.

3. Enforce a policy – Putting a social media policy in place is essential if your employees are going to be spending a lot of time on it.

4. Trusted blogger – Whomever you put in charge of blogging has to trustworthy, tech & business savvy and very good at writing & conversing.

5. Plan – Get your goals and strategies defined at the outset. Monitor them closely and have clear milestones. Don’t be afraid of adapting along the way according to your learning’s.

6. Take care – Everything you put out there is more or less permanent. Don’t get sloppy, put a lot of thought into the information you put out there.

Making Your Website Social Media Friendly

The advent of Twitter’s @anywhere service and Facebook’s “like” button, are driving home the point that that social media is crucial for a website’s success. This means that website’s should be, more than ever, social media friendly.

There are a few ways in which this can be achieved.

1. The main page of the website is where users spend most of their time. Take advantage of this and place links to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other profiles. If you don’t have any of these for some reason, get them immediately.

2. Have a blog. Don’t worry about having to get a web designer to create one; there are many readymade blogs out there on the web. The main reason for having one is that you can implement an RSS feed. RSS feeds allow syndication of information. Many users subscribe to RSS feeds and in turn distribute the information they find there via links. Incorporate your RSS feed into your website.

3. Turn the blog into a business blog. This needs some work, especially in the form of updates. Having a consistent, daily update will increase your reputation and facilitate more interaction with your visitors. Always reply to any comments that you find there as it will help you form relationships.

4. Reduce the clutter on the site and make it mobile friendly. This does not mean that you have to develop separate pages or develop iPhone apps. Just ensure that it will load up fairly fast on a phone browser.

Promoted Tweets – Twitter Advertising

Since Twitter launched in 2006 the company has been trying to figure out ways to make money. Traditional advertising has been thought about though not very seriously. It is generally considered that this form of advertising would only drive away the fan base. Now, Twitter has come up with an interesting method to generate revenue – Promoted Tweets.

Promoted Tweets are supposed to be normal Tweets by businesses and organization that will be highlighted. They are expected to appear at the top of search result, much like the sponsored links that appear atop Google’s search results. However there is a condition attached to promoted tweets. They will be removed if there is insufficient re-Tweeting or if there are no replies. Currently big players like Starbucks and Red Bull among other have already geared up to use this new method of marketing.

The big question here is, “will it work?” Twitter users are notoriously finicky and may reject advertising even on this level. If users enter the service in a complaining mood (because they know they will see ads) then the service will surely face doom. This is something that Twitter and the advertising companies will have to watch closely and respond to.

However, if this fails Twitter will have to work really fast to come up with a revenue generating plan. Even though it is unfair by users to expect the service to be free forever, that is exactly what has contributed to its success. Unfortunate as this is, that is the tightrope that Twitter has to walk in order to maintain its dominance in the online world.

If you need professional help in twitter marketing and promotion, we recommend looking at iClimber.

Connecting to the World through Social Networking

The concept of Social Networking is not new by Internet standards. It has been around for a while and as with anything that becomes popular, people are making money off it as well. If you are new to the scene or are not involved in business you may wonder how something like Facebook or Twitter could help you make money.

Well consider this; Social networking is about making contact with someone else. Once the other person has added you as a friend, you have access to whole load of information about that person. This is something that most businesses don’t have access to and crave for because they can then profile their customers and better understand them. This also enables businesses to have a dialogue with their customers and get firsthand feedback which in normal circumstances does not happen. It also helps a business to create a relationship with its customers and therefore ensure that they retain them for a long time.

However, the process of building relationships and harnessing the information is a long and tricky one. Businesses should be careful in their approach. If they start pushing their products constantly then the contacts they have will start blocking them off. The first rule in this whole process is not to spam. By offering help with their products, giving away freebies, giving out lots of information, etc the relationship can be built up. While this goes on, pushing the product in a very subtle way is the advisable method.

The best part about this method is that, other than getting a person or team working on this, there is no other cost involved, making this an extremely cost effective way of increasing sales.

Big Brother is Everywhere

Privacy has been an online issue for a long time. Recently, Facebook revamped its privacy policies and Google Buzz was forced to revamp some of its policies as well. While all this goes on, there are other entities that are working towards stripping those privacies. No, this is not about the CIA, KGB, Mossad or any of those intelligence agencies. It is actually about a company called Teneros, which has released software called Social Sentry that allows employers to monitor the activity of their employees on social networks.

This app is so intrusive it can:

Inform employers when employees are on Facebook, Twitter or other social networking sites

Monitor social networking activity by employees regardless of the device they are using (Computer, iPods, Mobile phones, etc)

Monitor regardless of what network is being used to access the sites

Be configured with advanced rules that send out automatic alerts and notifications

Give detailed reports and statistics

Be deployed in under an hour and requires no hardware or software installation

Using this software to monitor employees’ behavior during working hours is acceptable. However, the software also allows monitoring of everything they are saying on the sites even after working hours. This amounts to an invasion of privacy. While that is the negative side, the positive side is that it allows employers to have tighter control on security especially when it comes to company news leaks.

The pros and cons of this software can be argued about for a while. But the significant fact that emerges from this is that – it is a sign of things to come.

Web 2.0 and the Multimedia Revolution

Although Tim-Berners Lee called the term ‘Web 2.0′ a piece of jargon that found prominence in 2004, thanks to the attention drawn by the O’Reilly Web Conference, one must say that the internet and what is has to offer has changed drastically.

Prior to this, the internet was largely used to get text and photos with very limited or no interactive opportunities available. However, all that has changed now, as the focus has shifted to creating a ‘rich experience’ for the user, so much so that they continue to use the internet in exploring the opportunities and enjoying information in the form of multimedia that is made freely available. Indeed, the internet connection has become more of a need than just a want amongst millions of its users in the world today.

Technologies such as CSS 2.0, XHTML, ,Ajax and Flex among others have ensured that the crossover is complete into a phase where information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration have become an everyday reality through the existence of web-based communities, web applications, social-networking sites, folksonomies, blogs, mashups, wikis, hosted services and video sharing sites.

Even mentioning the word blogging would be obvious because it pertains to a large part of information sharing through print, but the truth is that it has changed the way people look for written information on various topics. One can share art and photography using sites such as Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa, share audio (music) on sites such as Last.fm and MySpace Music, share videos on sites like Youtube, Viddler, Vimeo and most recently, conduct ‘livecasting’ on Ustream.tv and Justin.tv among many others that are possibly not that well known.

And the reason why this has taken the world by storm is because of its appeal to the masses, which will remain for years to come, not unless we find our future in the hands of Web 3.0…

Social Media – An Overview

The idea of consumers generating content only remained a dream until a blast of technology (thanks to Web 2.0!) has spawned a host of users that create content in the form of words, visuals and so on and so forth. Indeed, the world is gradually but steadily moving away from the times when the dissemination of information were purely through the medium of newspaper, television and film and where consumers could only access information and not necessarily use these mediums to produce valuable information themselves.

All that has changed with the advent of the internet (and specifically, Web 2.0), and with blogging in print and visual form, information does not rest in the hands of just journalists, but to common folks as well. Apart from just the communication of information, several other avenues of multimedia has sprung forth such as the sharing and broadcasting of video, photographs and music, that can accessed for no charge at all.

Although, the vision of social media is to help people share media freely, the issue of copyright has also come to the forefront. For example, when the Dark Knight was first released, despite blocking all the routes, it was made freely accessible to users with a broadband internet connection in a matter of 18 hours!

Finally, social networking and bookmarking are also ways by which the ‘online community’ can share ideas, thoughts; keep in touch with friends as well as save information that can have an impact on their lives on a daily basis.
All in all, it seems that we are smack dab in the middle of the ‘Attention Age’.

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