Even though the methods used for social media are completely different to that of PPC, they still aim for the same results. This is why social media should be seen as part of the team, as opposed to the only way.

Social media should be used tactfully to achieve these objectives:

-          To achieve targets that cannot be accomplished by other marketing methods.

-          Increase access to your target audience.

-          Make your business more available to a brand new audience.

-          Turning potential clients into converting sales.

-          Improving experience for existing customers.

Conclusion

It’s vital that you remember social media is another form of marketing. It is not its own individual field of marketing. Although it can be used to achieve many different goals, it generally is used to achieve a higher amount of sales. However, social media campaigns can be aimed at strengthening the relationship between customer and company.

Whatever you are using Twitter management techniques to achieve, you must remember that you can use your other marketing campaigns, such as SEO to help benefit your marketing campaign. If you use web design strategies to help visually optimise your social media profiles, ontop of your other marketing techniques, then you are sure to see a better return on your social media efforts.

What Not To Do

First off, it’s important to know what not to do. Social media, is a social environment which is built around friend ships and conversations. Your audience do not want to log on and be sold to constantly, if you do this, then it is likely that you will lose their interest because you have annoyed them etc.

Techniques

The first and probably the most beneficial is promotional codes or discounts. Everyone loves a bargain and are more likely to purchase when money is being saved. Exclusive social media vouchers are great, it makes your followers feel “exclusive” but it’s also a great way to measure how many people are using the social media voucher code. Using voucher codes is most likely the best method  to sell on social media, it is not direct and if anything can be seen as a nicety online.

Sending links to new or old products is also a good way to get sales, although not as good as voucher codes. If links to products are constantly posted out and make the majority of your content, then it is likely that your followers are getting annoyed with the constant stream of sales and will begin to ignore them. Getting the balance is crucial.

Contests are similar to voucher codes. They can be posted about all day long, however it does not necessarily convert to a sale; it will help establish a following but not an instant sale because these followers would be interested in receiving your product for free. This can however convert into a sale organically or with the help of a voucher code.

Conclusion

Selling on social media is difficult and is a completely different tactic to SEO or even web design. Social networking sales are very laidback and are more of an “the offer is on the table” situation, where the follower does not feel pressured into purchasing anything but is aware of the products and offers available.

Detecting And Resolving Customer Complaints

Finding and resolving complaints is very easy to deal with when using social media. The most easy would be twitter management to accomplish this. This is because you can run searches for your business name and receive all tweets containing your company name, this way you can deal with any negative opinions. You can also acknowledge and thank any good comments. Both of these actions will help improve your following and relationship with your followers.

Receiving Feedback

Through proper Facebook management techniques, you can run polls and ask questions to your fans about anything you want, so this can be very helpful as you can receive feedback on new product and find out what your customers really want. You can also do the same thing on Twitter, however this is a little harder to manage than Facebook because all you can do is tweet out and hope for your followers to reply.

Providing Technical Support

Tech support is usually handled over the phone, but we have so much technology available nowadays and social media really helps with this. For example, you can use Google Plus hangouts to visually answer and explain answers to your customers, and text support can be given easily to followers via Twitter and Facebook.

Conclusion

Social media has many benefits, and using social media to benefit the customer experience is a great idea and is something that very company should be trying to do. A social media agency can run these kind of techniques effectively and beneficially to you and your company, whether you’re a retail company or an SEO agency.

Many users on twitter are simply listeners and only want to receive updates from those who they are following without posting many updates themselves. The power users of Twitter, e.g. celebrities, companies and influential people in niche industries create the majority of tweets, which is very interesting to know because you as a business are most likely targeting an audience, and this audience has a tendancy to listen, as opposed to feel the need to be heard.

Branding

Chances are that you have heard this a million and one times, but social media is great for branding as it establishes brand awareness as more and more people will like/follow your social media profiles.

Building Relationships

As well as branding, building relationships is something that social media can be used for, it is also very easy to do. There are a few points you should remember to build an effective relationship:

-          Know what you talking about

-          Contribute to the community regularly

-          Avoid “in your face” sales techniques

-          Provide valuable, third party info via links.

Conclusion

It is important to keep in mind that social media is a long term commitment and should be treated as such, if your Facebook management campaign or even Twitter management campaign is planned for short term success, the benefits will be a fraction of what a long term plan would bring.

There are seven main types of social network and every social service can be categorised into at least one of these: Blogs, Social networking services, Social media sharing, Social bookmarking, Social news services, Location based networking and Community building services.

Blogs

Blogs were one of the first forms of social media and have really evolved. Blogs are designed to allow easy content posting, and also easy commenting and sharing. Examples of blogging services are: WordPress, Type Pad and Blogger.

Social Networking Services

Social Networking Services were originally created for the soul purpose of two way communications and content sharing, e.g. videos, picture and information. Even with this category, there are three child categories: Full networks (Facebook/Google +) , Micro blogging (Twitter/Plurk) and Professional Networks(Linkedin/Xing).

Social Media Sharing Services

Social media sharing services are based around posting content such as videos and pictures, and sharing the content and also commenting on it. There are three types of these networks, video (YouTube/Vimeo), Photos (Flickr/Picasa), Audio (Podcast Alley).

Users of social bookmarking services can bookmark their favourite pages for other users of that network to see and enjoy. Recommendation sites (Stumble Upon/Delicious), Social Shopping (Kaboodle/This Next).

Social News Services

Users of social news services can favourite news for the rest of the network to see, these articles are usually voted on in some way. Examples of these services are Digg and Reddit.

Location Based Networking

Location based networking is something users have to help bring them closer together and explore their local area, examples of this are Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt.

Community Building Services

Community building services are mostly forum like networks such as Yahoo! And Google Groups, these networks can be very niche.

Conclusion

It is important to know exactly what category the network you are going to be using falls into, this way you can make the most of your social media agency and have the best return on your campaign. Whether you are using social media as an SEO company or even PPC.

Step By Step

Using a process to record progress is extremely time consuming. There are many different factors that must be measured and for a really helpful report on your campaign, stats should be measured daily to see what works, and what doesn’t.

The more networks that your business is on, the more time you have to devote to making notes of new stats and so on. So by not using a reporting suite, you’re wasting time measuring your profile’s success and not helping it to succeed.

Choosing A Reporting Suite

There are tonnes of social media tools to help you measure your social media campaign, so how do you find out which is the best? Many of the suites offer free trials, so assign your social media profiles to the systems, and give them time to sync with stats. This can take a few days with networks like Twitter, but Facebook should sync automatically, this is because Facebook has it’s own insights available.

It is important to take note of the networks that the reporting software in question supports. If it is limited to Twitter and Facebook, it is likely that a tool that supports many others, such as Digg and Google Plus, would be much better for the present and future if your company is thinking about going from Facebook management, or even Twitter management to social bookmarking and many others.

The general layout differentiates between the suites and will appeal to some people’s tastes more than others. So it is just a case of testing the networks and seeing which is best for the job.

Conclusion

The only way to find out what is best is to try before you buy. Chances are that you will only be using one, and the prices that are charged, it is well worth making sure you are 100% happy with the services that are provided.

Whether you are using social media as an SEO company, or you are in the retail industry, it is important to be able to measure your social media activities precisely and accurately.

If you log onto Google.com, you will notice at the bottom of the page there is a message from congress which states “Tell congress: Please don’t censor the web”, and by clicking this link, it will take you to another section of Google in which you can sign an online petition to stop SOPA and PIPA, on top of that… information about the two bills are available. More importantly the effects of these bills are explained which is something that is hard to find. Then there is a community section that proves the growing community that are opposing the movements. Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter, eBay, PayPal and of course Google, not to mention the countless others who are opposing the censorship of the internet.

The Effects

According to Google, SOPA and PIPA will do more harm than good. This is because it will force internet businesses to closely monitor everything linking to their site and if they are in violation of any new laws according to SOPA and PIPA, then it could potentially mean the end of the business, which will leave a huge number of people jobless.

It would be different if SOPA and PIPA actually worked, according to the big G!, these acts won’t stop online piracy. The regulations written in these bills wont successfully shut down their sites, they will simply transfer them to another domain and continue until they are caught again.

Conclusion

Anyone who works on the internet frequently has had their work stolen and pirated before. Whether you’re a writer or film maker, it happens so often and there is not much we can do about it. We do need a bill or law to prevent online piracy. However we need one that will work and not end up crippling the internet as we know it. This change will have a huge effect on social media and could potentially put a stop to it, not to mention SEO and PPC as the algorithm will be a completely different and most likely biased, and that is if it hasn’t been banned by a government.

Whether you are for, or against SOPA, we really need to consider both sides, especially before we jump into any rash decisions like take our site down for the day because of SOPA. Granted, if this act does become approved, then the internet will be a completely different place for every user. Many huge sites are taking action against SOPA and if you are against the act, you must think abou what will happen if you join the blackout movement.

Points To Consider

The first point would be the obvious “am I going to make a difference”. The chances are that you won’t. As blunt as that may be, it is the truth. Compare your impact to what a site like Google would have. If Google blacked out their site for the day, then it would have a massive effect on users of the internet. It is the most popular site on the web so there would be a devastating impact, if anything would get the word out about SOPA, then no doubt it would be by Google. That said, your site is most likely no were near as popular… Unless your name is Mark Zuckerberg.  Consider how much money you would lose to having a website down for a day, it can be fatal for some sites, this loss would need an indefinite gain, and unfortunately since there isn’t, then I feel it would not be a wise move to blindly jump on the SOPA band wagon, in terms of blacking your site out.

Another point would be to think of other ways you can help the cause. You can raise awareness from other methods, whether you’re for SOPA or against it, there has to be something you can do, this is where you can use your own personal experience and creativity to “fight the power”.

Conclusion

There are many reasons in which why not to jump into the SOPA act, whether you are a supporter or not. If you are not getting traffic on a scale of Facebook, Google and Twitter, it is unwise to jump into a decision like that. The best thing you can do is use your skills, whether you are a plumber or a SEO company, there is something you can do to help your side of the argument.

If you want to increase the amount of traffic to your website, you are most likely using social media to not only do that, but increase sales and build customer relationships. On top of using social media for the above purposes, you can also use them to drive direct traffic to your site. More specifically you can use your Facebook page to drive direct traffic to your site.

Adding The Tab

The first part you will want to do is add a custom tab to your page, this is called a static HTML page and can be found by using the search bar atop Facebook. Simply add the application to your desired page then go onto the selected page.

There should be a new tab on your Facebook page which says welcome with a star as the icon. When you click on the icon, you are taken to the backend of the application, this is where you can add the correct HTML code.

The standard code that is required for pulling a website into a custom tab like this is: <iframe src= “ENTER URL HERE” width=600 height=1000> .

The width and height settings are the best specifications for Facebook because the space provided is 600px wide and 1000px seems like the easiest size to have, although this is customisable. The “enter url here” is obviously where you enter your address, but you need to keep the quotation marks around the web address.

Conclusion

Although iframes do not pass on any SEO value, as page rank is not flowed by the use of iframes. However, for customer usability and many other reasons such as traffic, they are highly beneficial. This is another case of social media optimisation and how an agency can greatly increase your social media campaign.

According to the most recent social media report by comScore, Myspace is still generating a hefty amount of traffic on a daily basis, despite fierce competition and a dwindling reputation. Naturally, Facebook and Twitter top the list of the world’s most visited social sites, but the statistics (which document the number of unique visitors from the US the site receives) indicate that users are actually flocking to MySpace ahead of Google’s much-talked-about Plus platform.

It seems that, despite consistently being described as ‘outdated’, Myspace continues to entice back those who have enjoyed the site since it was launched way back in 2003. And who can forget Myspace’s golden days? Often considered the pioneering social network of the early noughties, this platform was once renowned for its innovative features and was even recorded as the most visited website in the US in summer 2006. It was attractive, it was fun, and above all, it was simple and accessible.

But there are a number of reasons why Myspace has experienced a steep decline in popularity of late. Many people have criticised the network for not expanding to keep up with the demand of users. Although it’s introduced a huge number of layout changes to try and chase its competitors, this has had a huge impact on the load time of its pages, many of which are easily customisable and fairly image heavy anyway. Myspace has always been heavily reliant on ad banners and as a result tends to look a lot more cluttered than Facebook – a major turnoff for those seeking a user-friendly experience!

Secondly, Myspace is lacking a broad strategy. While many users consider it an important hub of activity for the music and entertainment industry, it’s failed to continue to appeal to people outside of this niche for a long time. Simply taking a look at the newly revamped homepage says it all – users are bombarded with banners from up and coming artists and are encouraged to head over to ‘Music News’ and ‘My Music’ straightaway. It’s a great deal for the performers, who get to advertise their tours and releases free of charge, but those who once used the site for communicating with friends and family may be overwhelmed by its current direction.

Then there’s its alleged lack of commitment to web protection. The site suffered a bad rap a number of years ago for failing to produce a decent spam filter, leaving many concerned that kids were able to stumble across adult content at the click of a button. While this is nothing new for social media sites (Facebook and Twitter have all experienced bad press as a result of ropey privacy procedures and security issues), Myspace has always been designed to appeal to teens and young adults, and it’s this demographic that are considered most vulnerable.

While there’s a lot of condemning evidence of Myspace’s shortcomings here and many will still question the relevancy of the site, we’re never quick to judge a platform as a waste of time for businesses looking to advertise on the web. While your company may be eager to join the millions of firms who flock to Facebook and Twitter to sell their wares on a daily basis, ultimately your social media strategy needs to be based on your individual needs, and for many, Myspace still remains an indispensable tool that continues to attract an active audience. The site may never stage a proper comeback, but on the flip side, there’s no reason why it should be considered dead in the water if it’s working for you.

Remember, if you’d like to learn more about the potential of Myspace and social media as a whole, SEO Positive is now offering comprehensive social media management and monitoring services. Feel free to get in touch if you believe a social strategy could boost your business’ online profile.