The Power of The Facebook “Like”

Advertising and Marketing are likely the most costly aspects of owning and running a successful business especially if you want to market to a very large group of consumers at one time. For example the Super Bowl, commercials during half-time can range from 1-10 million dollars and up, but what if you could target roughly the same people for 1% of that price or even for Free? Everyday 2 billion people post “likes” to the social network, with the Facebook database totaling more than 901 million users. As a consumer you may have noticed that the more people like a post or a business the more positive your idea will be of the person or company, which is exactly what Facebook is traveling the country trying to sell to investors.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Gaining Customers Through Video

Within your daily scrounge about for info on Google, you’re almost sure to see videos on the first page relating to your keyphrases. If you’re a budding business, since most of you happen to be, you’ll hope for people to see your commercial every time they hit the enter button. What could possibly be a lot better than that? Getting the video on the first page

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Yahoo goes Limber; Lays-Off 2,000

The CEO of Yahoo, Scott Thompson, took the very first steps today to turnaround his plagued company in hopes of becoming known inside the mobile computing market. This move marks the sixth lay-off in the past four years whilst moving through 3 different CEOs. The employees being released are going to be notified Wednesday and definately will shear off about 14% of the current workers Yahoo employs. By causing these cuts Thompson hopes the company can hire the much needed specialists in mobile technology and create the remainder of the company in a faster and much better equipped body ready for the coming consumer developments. To increase the mass lay-off, Yahoo has hinted at selling one of its services, Right Media, which often will permit them to shed even more workers.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Socially Centered Search

Not too long ago Google began a rivalry towards Facebook and sent an intense note with the introduction of Google+, but now, Facebook may be leveling the playing field.

Posted in Social Media News | Comments Off

Twitter Predicts Presidential Polls? Let’s Take a Look

Twitter is an important communication platform. It is changing the face of PR and marketing, and oftentimes for the better. That said, it is sometimes a bit annoying when Twitter’s importance is overstated. Consider this Mashable article, published last Friday, touting that “Twitter Can Predict Who’s Winning the GOP Presidential Race. A bold claim to be sure, and one worth investigating.

The article is actually simply reiterating the content of another post, from 140elect.com, claiming that analyzing Twitter follower numbers directly corresponds to how a candidate will perform in polls. They further claim that analyzing this data can actually predict poll performance in advance by over two weeks!

Posted in Social Media News | Comments Off

Top 5 Facebook Contest Ideas

You’re a small business owner and you’ve been thinking that it would be nice to expand your presence on Facebook. That’s great!  Facebook has become an important, powerful platform in every small business’s marketing arsenal. You know that if you could just get a starter base for your page, a few hundred followers or so, it could grow from there as they tell their friends and family about you and see you in their Facebook feed. But how do you get that initial boost? Phoenix Synergy thinks that a Facebook contest is the fastest, most impactful way of getting people interested in your Facebook presence. So here are the top five Facebook contest ideas that you could implement to bring attention to your Facebook page:

1. A Facebook Treasure Hunt

Posted in Social Media Marketing | Leave a comment

Things to Take Away from the Nielsen Report on Social Media

Social media has continued to grow at an exceptional rate, a rate which the traditional advertising world can no longer justify ignoring. But social media has always been hard to quantify. Marketers are seeking more data about the changing behavior of their customers, and Nielsen, the TV ratings giant, is testing the waters with a new report offering a variety of metrics for social media adoption rate and usage patterns.

Nielsen, which has long provided such information about the traditional media, is seeking to become a go-to source of data for new media. Nielsen released a report on Monday morning that will offer a big-picture look at social media.

Posted in Social Media News | Leave a comment

Top 4 Reasons to Use Contests in Your Social Media Campaign

Contests, sweepstakes, raffles and the like have been around for a long time, but in the age of social media they have been revitalized as a robust avenue for marketing and market analysis. Here are the top four reasons why:

1. Contests Build a Fan Base

Only have 100 fans and want to grow that number quickly and cheaply? Start a compelling contest that your existing fans want to share with their friends, and watch that number grow. A simple “like this page to enter” sweepstakes offers a low barrier to entry that provides the best option for those just starting out with social media contests or without a large base of fans in place.

Posted in Social Media Marketing | Leave a comment

A Browser Built for the Social Web: RockMelt Teams Up With Facebook

For some users, social media IS the web. Makes sense then, that there is a web browser designed just for them. It’s called RockMelt, and it was designed by some former members of the Netscape team. For the Facebook- and Twitter-obsessed, RockMelt offers tons of thoughtful additions to the browsing experience to make connecting with social networks that much more organic. It has a prominent button to share instantly any Web page or link. It has a bar that shows what’s happening right then on their preferred social sites and another bar that shows the activities of their friends. It has been designed especially to facilitate connections, making it easy to chat with friends, share pictures, and an assortment of other neat social features.

Posted in Social Media Marketing, Social Media News | Leave a comment

Google and Bing’s Social Competition

You got your Facebook in my Bing! Well, you got your twitter in my Google!

Sheesh, what the heck is going on with social media and search engines these days? First Google announces something called “Social Search” that would allow Twitter and other social networks to influence a user’s results, and then Microsoft announces a partnership with Facebook to integrate Facebook user’s data into Bing search results.  The services are both in their fledgling stages, but it seems clear that the battle lines have been drawn: the next big fight in search engine land is who can best harness the social web. So, today we’re going to talk about Bing and Facebook, but check back soon for how Google is responding to all of this with social integration of their own.

Bing “Likes” Facebook

While Facebook data has been incorporated into Bing in a number of subtle ways for a little while now, it is not until just a few weeks ago that Bing progressed into the second phase of those efforts by including Facebook’s “Like” functionality directly on its search results pages. When you do a generic search for a restaurant, for instance, and there happens to be a restaurant that three of your friends have “liked”, Bing may favor that result over others while also showing a user pictures of up to three of their friends that have “liked” that restaurant. This is part of Bing’s “Trusted Friends” initiative, and for now it is only using Facebook data.

The next part of Bing’s efforts is called “collective IQ”, and it pertains to influencing Bing results based off of the aggregate activity by Facebook users on the web. In other words, if a number of Facebook users have “liked” a link in the last day or so, and another Bing user performs a search that is relevant to that link, then that will cause that result to be displayed more prominently and it will be coupled with how many users have “liked” that result. This will obviously encourage content creators to push their users to “like” a specific page on their site to hopefully affect how it may appear on Bing.

The third part of Bing’s Facebook integration is called “Enabling Conversation”, which seems the most interesting and is also the least straightforward aspect to this merger of services. Essentially, Bing wants to inform users of friends in their network who may be able to provide personal recommendations for a particular subject that a user is searching for. Perhaps someone is looking to move to a new city, so they are searching for apartments in that city. Bing will see this, search through that users network for someone who might be connected to that city somehow, and suggest to the user that this might be the guy they want to ask about apartments in Houston or what have you.

So, that’s what Bing and Facebook are getting up to. Come back tomorrow to read about how social media is also working into Google results.
Posted in Social Media News, Web Marketing | Leave a comment