5 Social Media Tools for your blog and website

Social media has become an integral part of a business’ marketing strategy. Reaching out to hundreds and thousands of your audience in a matter of seconds has been made possible by the power of a tweet or wall post.

The idea of managing social media profiles of your business is to maximize interaction with potential clients and increase sales.

However, there comes a time when your social media activity can get overwhelming. Aside from keeping up with the different social media channels you have registered for, you need to deal with posting timely messages on your feed and replying to disgruntled customers to control your online brand reputation. Thus, managing all your online accounts on a regular basis takes up hours of your time at work, leaving you with little for your other tasks.

Ideally, there’s no reason you should spend more than 30 minutes replying and posting on your online profiles. To do this, you will need the help of free social media tools and services to organize your workflow. Below are five highly recommended social media services to make your online work much more efficient.

Hootsuite

One of the problems why people take so long in messaging on social media is because they have to sift through different windows and interfaces just so they can send out messages to their audience.

With Hootsuite—arguably one of the most useful social media tools out there—you can register up to five of your social media profiles so you can interact with your Twitter,Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn followers with ease.

Interface on all accounts is streamlined, so you won’t get confused with the different designs of each site. If you need to dispatch the same message on all your profiles, Hootsuite lets you do that in just one click after selecting the profiles where you intend for the message to appear.

Another advantage of using this tool is the ability to schedule your posts to appear at specific dates and times in the future. This proves very useful especially if you won’t be able to tend to your online profiles due to other commitments. Once you’ve set up the message, they will be posted on the social media sites even if you don’t log in.

InboxQ

There are Twitter users who are simply waiting to become your followers, if not clients or brand advocates. The problem is just they don’t know it yet. These people ask questions about products and services that your business offers such as “What’s the best X?” or “What Y should I buy?” InboxQ, arguably the most helpful when it comes to generating leads for your business, lets you find them.

The app can be installed on your Internet browser or Hootsuite dashboard. Once installed, enter the keywords relevant to your business and InboxQ will search for questions on Twitter. You can input as many keywords as possible, as long as they help return more questions. From there, you can answer questions relevant to your business.

Commun.it

This social media service lets you build more Twitter leads to increase your sales by focusing on your list of high-value members. Users who mention your name will appear on the list, making it easier for you to engage with them and strengthen your relationships. The tool will also automatically populate your different followers into groups for segmentation purposes. Similar to InboxQ, you can list down keywords that will be used to discover new leads for your business.

A free account allows you 30 times to engage with a single user, so be judicious with the posts you will make using this service.

Topsy and Social Mention

Social media is breeding grounds for customer feedback. This will prove valuable to possible clients of your business since they research on the Internet before they do any purchases. Positive reviews draw them in to your business, while negative repels them. What you want is to augment positive feedback, which is why searching for posts on Topsy and Social Mention and retweet, like, and comments on said posts.

For negative comments, make sure to provide answers to the issues they raised on their posts. If possible, find a way to correct your mistakes. This way, even if you received negative feedback on social media, the manner in which you addressed their concerns speaks volume of your customer support.

Long Tail Keywords versus Head Term

Long tail keywords are the longer, more specific keywords that are less common, individually, but add up to account for the majority of search-driven traffic.

 In the recent time , after updates of Google panda and Penguin updates, SEO world has completely changed, just because of many webmaster are doing spam and choose wrong keywords for their websites and then Google algorithms for the safe journey of keywords on ranking in Google SERP

So taking your website to get high rank you should take the steps of PPC campaign for generating traffic towards your website .

Take long tail keywords for the PPC because they are very helpful in comparison to the Head term

Head term Keywords : "fish tanks" is a head term,

Long Term Keywords:  "compare prices whisper aquarium filters" is a long-tail keyword.

Google Panda Update 23 in December 2012

Google has confirmed rumors of a Google update announcing on Twitter that they pushed out a Panda data refresh today impacting about 1.3% of English queries.

This would make for the 23rd Panda update since the first Panda algorithm was introduced on February 24, 2011. Since then we had 22 updates both to the algorithm and also to the index or data refreshes.

The latest impacted 1.3% of the queries, whereas version 22 impacted only 0.8% of English queries.

Social Media Failures 2012

Google Update : Bing Scroogled Google

It’s on again: the eternal rivals fight dirty. At least one is: Bing. Google’s most powerful search competitor, a Microsoft product, is now populating the web with a questionable anti Google Shopping campaign [complete with URL - scroogled.com - and YouTube (!) videos]: From Google to Scroogle.

If the term Scroogle sounds familiar, this used to be a web service that allowed users to perform Google searches anonymously. It disappeared at the beginning of 2012, and re-emerged today, in a Bing ad:

Bing advises: don’t get Scroogled this holiday season.

As innocent as this may seem, the ad is a powerful attack against Google Shopping. Bing aims to raise awareness that since May 31, 2012 all Google shopping results are paid ads:

“Google Shopping is nothing more than a list of targeted ads that unsuspecting customers assume are search results. They call these Product Listing Ads a truly great search,” Bing warns on scroogled.com, then continues “We say that when you limit choices and rank them by payment, consumers get Scroogled. For an honest search result, try Bing.”

In all honesty, the reaction would be natural if it came from consumers rather than direct competitors. In the past, Google Shopping, formerly called Google Product Search, used to list merchants for free. Now all listings are paid – a brilliant monetization model by the world’s most powerful search engine, which also emphasized in a SEC disclosure that “after all, ads are just more answers to users’ queries.” Still, the transition from freemium to premium, although officially announced in May, begun in October. Naturally, Bing needed to wait for proof to initiate the attack. But it was carefully planned, and brilliantly executed.

Facebook steps to Business success

Build your Facebook Page

Facebook Pages let you build lasting relationships with your customers and create content that gets shown in news feed.

Pages allow you to:

• Express your identity with features like cover photos (851 x 315 pixels) and your business’s key milestones

• Add information about your business and respond to your customers in a quick, more personal way

To build your Page, simply:

• Visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php to create your Page

• Use the Build Audience button and invite friends, family and employees to like your Page

• Get your web address and promote it on all your marketing material by downloading free Facebook signs

• Click here for more information on Pages: ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/Pages_Overview.pdf

Connect to new people with multiple well-targeted Facebook Ads

Once you have created your Page, increase your Page likes by connecting withmore customers using targeted Facebook Ads.

Facebook Ads allow you to:

• Grow your Page likes by offering valuable benefits and calls to action such as “LIke us to get exclusive sales”

• Reach a large audience with a well targeted Ad campaign so you can reach more people with your Page

To create Facebook Ads, simply:

• Go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php to set up your Ads

• Create atleastfour versions of your Ads so you can experiment with differentimages, calls to action andmessaging

to understand which Ads are performing the best. Test out differenttargeting options like Broad Category targeting.

• Test a variety oftarget groupsbasedoncriteria suchas age, gender, likes, interests, location, etc.

• Regularly review the performance of your Ads by visiting http://www.facebook.com/ads/manage

Engage your audience with quality content

Create a posting strategy to engage your audience on an ongoing basis and increase your posts’ visibility in news feed.

Your posting strategy allows you to:

• Give your Page an authentic and consistent voice and encourage people to like and share your posts

• Bring more customers to your store with Facebook Offers they can claim and share with their friends

To develop your posting strategy, simply:

• Create a conversational calendar to help plan the timing and themes of your posts (we suggest 1–2 posts per week)

• Post engaging contentlike photos, videos and questions to encourage participation

• Schedule your posts tomanage yourtme and download the Pages Manager app for iPhone to manage via mobile

• Once you have 400 likes, promoting your posts is an easy way to reach more people in news feed

•Monitor and optimize your Page performance regularlyusing Page Insights. Get the Insights guide.

Facebook’s Steps to Business Success

Influence the friends of fans by promoting social activity from your Page

Extend the reach of your posts by promoting stories coming from friends about them engaging with your Page.

Promoting your Page’s social activity allows you to:

• Drive awareness and promote interactions from people with your business

• Increase the visibility of your audience’s engagement with your Page to generate word-of-mouth promotion

To promote social activity from your Page, simply:

• Create sponsored stories at: http://www.facebook.com/ads/create

• Ensure your Page has a minimum of 1000 likes so you have enough reach for your campaign

• Sponsor your most important and compelling posts and create Page like sponsored stories to get more likes

• Regularly review, pause and optimize your campaigns at http://www.facebook.com/ads/manage

• Review the Steps to Success and continue testing to see what works best

Tips for promoting a Blog

Even if you write a quality post, no one will see it unless you promote it. But if you have more subscribers, there is no big problem because your subscribers will see your new posts. How ever, every blogger love to get more traffic. That’s why you read this post.

How to promote your new blog posts?

There are many ways to promote your new posts.

1. Sharing on social networking sites

Social networking sites are becoming popular day by day. So you can’t forget social networks. You can create a Facebook fan page and a Twitter profile for your blog. Then you can promote your new posts via those pages. And also you can promote your new posts via your personal Facebook account and Twitter account. You can also share your new posts on other social networking sites such as Google plus or LinkedIn.

2. Bookmarking on social bookmarking sites

Most bloggers say that Digg is the most popular social bookmarking site. That may be correct. But for me, Stumbleupon is the best social bookmarking site to promote your new posts. And also you can use Reddit and Delicious.

3. Commenting on CommentLuv enables blogs

CommentLuv is one of the most popular WordPress plugins. It allows the latest blog post of the commenter to be put automatically below his/her comment. Try to be the first commenter, and also put valuable comments. You can get many benefits like building relationships with the other bloggers, in addition to promoting the blog through blog commenting.

4. Forum posting

In a previous post of mine, I shared top 10 forums you should know as a blogger. If you use those forums correctly you can get decent traffic via those forums. But don’t start a new thread about your new post with the new post link. If you do that thing always, you will be banned from those forums (Spam reasons). Anyway, you can use your new post link as your forum signature.
If you have time you can do this this type of work also.
For an example, if you write a post about link building methods you can start a thread about link building. But never put your link in to that thread, you can put your link as your signature.
Forums members who visit to your thread, want to know about link building. So, that’s why they check your thread. Then they see your signature. After that they will click your signature and will land your blog.

5. Guest posting

I know that it is not possible to write guest posts after write every post because writing a guest post takes too much time. But after writing a high quality post, it is good to write a guest post. The reader who lands your post via that post, will check your most recent post. Even if most recent post is high quality there is a high probability of subscribing your blog.

6. Adding social sharing buttons

If you posts are quality, your reader may like to share it with their friends. So your social sharing buttons help to readers to do that. If your blogging platform is WordPress you can use a WordPress plugins like ShareThis or Digg Digg for adding social sharing buttons.
How do you promote your new posts? You can share it as a comment.