Facebook: Great Marketing Tool or Annoying Distraction?

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Facebook: Good business tool or annoying distraction?

            Facebook was introduced at Harvard University in 2004 and was originally called TheFacebook.  Its core idea was to be a network for college students to communicate.  Facebook has since grown to be one of the largest social networks on the web, at over 8 million unique users in the United States alone.  (Yadav)  Many thought that social media would fade away and become a dying fad but the truth is that Social Media, “in less than three years, has become the most popular activity on the web.”  (Swartz)  Facebook has found a way to facilitate engagement and connection between people like never before. 

With these facts, it is no wonder many businesses have started exploring the use of Facebook as a business tool.  However, there is huge debate going on in the marketing and corporate world as to the benefits and drawbacks of using Facebook as a way of connecting and engaging with customers.  Many businesses have not yet embraced social media networking as a major component of their success strategy for a multitude of reasons.  Some companies steer clear of Facebook because they feel it is a distraction to their overall goals, too time consuming, results can’t be measured, investing more effort than getting qualified buyers in return (poor ROI). 

Correcting the Social Media Myths

Social media is the buzz word in marketing. You can be watching TV, eating in a restaurant, or on your computer and you will see or hear some mention of a social networking site. It may be Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Blogs, or another of the many social networks.

Whether you are on the social networks or not, you’ve even come to recognize their logos. Social media has become a way of life and a powerful marketing avenue for businesses.

But as powerful a source as social media presents, there are some business owners who still aren’t utilizing this incredible opportunity to grow their business sighting one or more of these 4 myths:

Does Your Company Have a Social Media Plan? If Not You Should!

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Social media and conversation marketing have the potential for transforming brands like no other communication methodology ever employed. The reason? It transforms the fundamental nature of the traditional brand/customer relationship. Historically, companies have used traditional media to advertise in a uni-directional way. It used to be all about broadcasting a message – with feedback loops tied chiefly to the ultimate purchase of a company’s product – or worse, no purchase at all.

Thanks in part to the transformative impact of online social media, that brand/customer relationship is experiencing a sea-change.. As increasingly informed and savvy consumers begin to demand more transparency and honesty from businesses they support, companies are no longer able to hide behind an ability to fully control the message. Steadily, businesses are now leveraging social media as both an offensive and defensive means to forge new and solidify existing relationships while building trust through transparency. The most successful of these organizations are now doing much more than simply monitoring the consumer pulse… they are engaging and interacting on a real-time basis with existing and potential customers, throughout the entire buying cycle.

Top 10 Social Media Sites To Help Market Your Business!

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Today we’re going to talk about the top 10 social media sites, how they play a role in web 2.0 marketing, and how you can easily build accounts with each of them, along with our personal ranking chart and how marketing by social media to these top 10 sites can help you begin expanding your business.

1. Digg.com – After in depth analysis, we decided Digg, in terms of article marketing, social media marketing, and expanding your presence on the internet, to be ranked higher than both Facebook and Twitter. Here’s why; Digg is a social bookmarking site that let’s you easily setup an account, connect it directly to both your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and bookmark links with embeded urls that direct back to web pages, articles, social sites, videos and blogs. Digg has been around since 1998, and has a page rank of 8. Digg receives millions of visitors every single month. When you are marketing by social media, using Digg as a social media site is crucial to your success.

General posting capabilities – 10
Account setup – 10
Google pagerank – 8
Activity – 9
Spam Friendly – 9
Overall User rating – 9.2

2. Facebook.com – Facebook by far has been the fastest growing full capacity social media site thus far. Currently they have over 400 millions users worldwide with over 50% of them active on a daily basis. Facebook has a fully capable user interface with applications, blogs, comment posting, friend adding, video uploading and more. Adding friends on Facebook is easy. Building lasting relationships is a bit more challenging, but critical. Adding comments each day to your own page can be seen by your friends, which virally transcends out into the community and can eventually be seen by thousands and thousands of potentially interested prospects. But be careful, once you get up towards 5,000 friends, Facebook will prevent you from gaiNing any more friends, and at that point you will need to create a fan page where you can post from and invite friends to give you positive feedback.

20 Online Business Tips – Help Along Your Google Ranking, SERP’s and Website Traffic

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Here’s a list of online business tips to assist you on improving website ranking and search engine optimization. This is not an exact science and I cannot guarantee that working on these areas will put you on the first page of Google, increase page rank and your website traffic. But, it will without doubt increase your chances of better results.

My advice to you is to take each suggestion, Google it when necessary and learn about it. Then go about applying these tips on your website. Once you have done so, then move on to the next tip.

Some of these tips are to be directly applied to your site, such as adding keywords and tags, while others are not. These business tips are not in a specific order of importance. However, I would say that the first five are very important overall if you want to rank well in search engines for your selected keywords.

Comments on keywords:

You can add 60 to 80 characters of keywords on your website’s meta tags for best results. However, when optimizing your site, I would suggest focusing on a few per page, making sure that your chosen keywords are present throughout this page.

Small Business Tips For Tough Times

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The easiest thing to do may be to open a search engine and type in a little information about your business (such as “real estate“) and “business tips for tough times”. It may be all you need to get advice. If you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for, though, there are sites that are designed to offer tips, as well as answer any questions you may have about running your business.

About.com, a network of sites that offer lots of great information on a variety of topics, has a small business site. It offers articles and blog posts that give business tips for tough times, and has a forum that you can use to ask questions that can be answered by other small business owners who might be in the same situation as you.

Top Five Small Business Tips For Success

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There are plenty of small business tips for success that are not necessarily dependent on having a lot of money or technology savvy. In fact, tens of thousands of small businesses are using the multitude of free and very low cost tools that are available on the Internet to manage their business, increase revenues, and reduce expenses. These tools are easily accessible, easy to use, and downright cheap if not free.

#1. If you a business that is local to a specific city then you can use Google’s free service called Google Places to advertise your business whenever someone keys in a search for your type of business within that city. This service is free, and is increasingly being used by many people searching for a product or service.

#2. Create flyers for free using the multitude of free templates that are on the Internet. For example, if you go to Microsoft website you’ll see that there a

How to Hire a Virtual Assistant Quickly and Efficiently

Somewhere in cyberspace (or maybe through a friend’s recommendation) you stumbled upon the term Virtual Assistant.  It sounded intriguing so you did a little research.  The more you read, the more you realized that this could be a fabulous solution for you.  You decide it’s time for you to hire a Virtual Assistant.  Then you get stuck.

How do you find one?  What kind of VA do you need?  How much is this gonna cost?  How do we communicate?  How does this all work?

Well let’s start at the beginning. Before you even begin the process of hiring a Virtual Assistant there are a few things that need to be worked out first.

Internet Business Tips – What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of an Internet Business?

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One Google search for ‘business opportunities’ or ‘internet business ideas’ or ‘home business’ will instantaneously bring forth millions of web pages and it may take several hours for you to even skim through each of them. So what are the advantages and disadvantages of an internet biz?

1. The advantages

The advantages of a successful internet business are: lesser expenditure on commuting between home and office, the luxury of taking time off at will, absence of choked traffic, and the ability to manage multiple income streams. Since the internet works on 24×7 basis all through the year, you can assign convenient slots across the week and the day to accomplish the task on hand.

Home Business Tips – 3 Tips For Getting a Large Slice of the Home Business Money-Making Pie

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Some of the online home businesses ideas hold a huge potential for those people looking at starting a home business. As the Internet blurs all geographical borders, the world has become a playground for everyone. Whether you are based in Thailand or Brazil, you can start your own home business using the Internet and sell your product or service to those who are interested, wherever they maybe.

Today, starting a home business has become quite an easy affair as more and more information on this subject is easily available online. But with so much information, collecting and using this can prove to be daunting. That’s why we present 3 easy steps for starting your home based online business.