Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

Email newsletter and backlinks.

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

If you want to upgrade your business email look, you should invest in creating an email newsletter. Your email newsletter should have a template that you use for all of your email correspondence with your company letterhead/image/logo, contact information, YouTube Channel name, updates, names and emails of pertinent people whom customers can get in touch with, store hours, etc.

There are many companies that can create one for you (some have free templates available), or you can create one yourself! Many companies will also give you a free 30-day trial. This advancement in itself will give your business more credibility to those with whom you correspond with.

When uploading a video to be viewed on YouTube, the use of keywords is essential. Here is how keywords work. When people want to view a video, they will type in a keyword into the search bar. After they hit return, videos with those keywords will appear in the search results. Well, you want your video to have the right keywords in its title, description, and tags, so it will pop up on potential customer’s search results. Pick descriptive words and try to find out what keywords other popular, relevant videos are using. Another important factor is your thumbnail. You should also make sure your thumbnail is attractive and interesting. This way it will catch people’s eyes and they will click it!

Some more good ideas are: you should post your video to your company blog (if your company does not have one, create one, it is easy and free!), other social network pages (as I mentioned before), and your company website. The more places your video appears, the more exposure it gets. This brings me to another good reason to post your video on these social networks sites: backlink credit. A backlink is basically a link to your site on other relevant web pages. The more popular and relevant the website, the more your website gets noticed by Google and the more they will advance in their search returns. Using YouTube, you get “backlink credit”!

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Posted in Business, Internet, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, Youtube

Using Twitter Advanced Search

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

There is a great feature on Twitter that many people dont realise is there and that is the Advanced search. On your Home page of Twitter on the right hand side is a search box that many people use and it will give you only the result that you type in. Instead,  go to the bottom of the page and look for the word ’search’ in the list along the base of the home page. Once you click on here, you will need to click on Advanced search under neath the text box. this will open up your world of twitter search.

From here, you can search for peoples tweets with certain keywords in them, you can specific phrases and you can also search for tweets that DONT contain certain words. For instance, if you were searching for weight loss and you wanted to find all of the tweets that did NOT contain the words PILLS, DRUGS or SURGERY, then you can do that.

Another great aspect of this search is to find tweets that are in a certain geographic location. You can specify the distance from a suburb/city that you want to see Tweets from.

As well as searching for Tweets from a specified date range , you can also see tweets FROM certain people, TO certain people or ABOUT certain people. This can be great for businesses to keep an eye on their competitors. Just imagine, doing a search last week for all the people that mentioned your competitor , who also resided in your neighborhood. You can then also search to see what your competitor was also sending out to their followers. This way you could easily keep an eye on their business from the comfort of your office.

The other terrific thing about the Advanced Twitter search is that if somebody mentions a particular problem that your business can solve, all you need to do is send them a message about the solution and you could potentially have  valuable customer.

Below, I have posted a video on how to use the Advanced Search feature. Please add comments and let me know what you think of the video

Happy Tweeting searching!

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Posted in Business, Health, Internet, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

Michael Jackson nearly Broke Twitter

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

It took Michael Jackson’s death to really show us the power of Social media today and how it is really affecting the way we get our information. We I first heard the news, it was via a tweet from some I did not know. At that time, I had access to a radio which was saying that he had been taken to hospital for observation. I then lost my radio access and had no TV access either so relied fully on Internet.

As the news came filtering out, I could see the growing swell of information pertaining to MJ’s death from Twitter and Facebook but the official sites such as CNN and ABC were still not saying that he had died, yet it was all over the social media circles as official.

I guess the thing about the instant notifications of social media is that there are so many people with so many ‘news’ connections that when a tweet or status update is posted, it often contains a link to the relevant site of where that information came from. So instead of me doing my usual search of the ‘official ‘ TV sites and News sites where ALL of them were not being updated as quickly as Twitter, I just needed to watch the twitter / Facebook time line and click on any of those links that I wanted to follow.

According to Tweespeed , There are approximately 400,000 to 800,000 tweets per hour on an average day. When news broke of Michael Jackson’s Death, this figure went to approx 1.2 million tweets per hour. This is staggering. Twitter are now saying that in the hours leading up to his death and the hours that followed, 30% of tweets contained the words Michael Jackson. Nearly all social media sites, including Twitter,  reported a large slow down in their server speed because of the Death.

Youtube and all of the video sharing networks have not been left out either.

Michael Jackson’s online popularity continues to soar: Mashable reported previously that 2.6 million songs  from Michael Jackson were downloaded this week;Apparently, no artist has downloaded more than 1 million songs in a week!

Videos of Thriller ( original or tribute variety) have been viewed almost 28 million times since his death.

Michael Jackson, it seems, is getting more popular by the day.

Below is one of the most popular videos on Youtube…now it is even more popular. A prison tribute to Michael Jackson

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Posted in Entertainment, Facebook, Internet, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Youtube

Selling the benefit of social media to the non-believers

Friday, June 26th, 2009

social-networks-logosI have had a few people ask me recently about the benefit of social media and what do i say to people who just cant get into it.I believe that there are a number of benefits that need to be made clear to the people who are still unsure about the great benefits of social media and social Networking. Firstly, have a look at the sheer numbers of people using these sites (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc) According to Alexa , (the foremost authority on web use and trends) Facebook is just about to take over the number 3 spot (behind Google-no 1 and Yahoo- no 2) from  Youtube.

Twitter currently sits at number 27 and is growing rapidly. Now these figures represent a massive growth in companies using these applications for marketing and other business reasons.

The fact that Twitter and Facebook have opened up their applications to 3rd party developers means that people are developing applicaions that suits all types of requirements. Apart form business applications, there are many useful things that these social sites can be used for: Keeping updated on news and events. from friends and family, and also a point that many don’t realise and that is these sites can be used as the best feedback and information booth ever.

Lets say that you need an answer about some current event or trend that is taking place now or in the past few days, you can type your question on Facebook or Twitter and you will get an instant response. If you typed the same question on Google, sure you will get results, but those results will not necessarily be current. Your results may go back in time for several years..not much good if your looking for current trends or want to find the latest sports score! All you need to do is type a question that you need answered and watch the responses flow in, work needed by you to source the answers is very minimal.

The other major bonus is that all of this is absolutely free. The majority of the 3rd party applications are free to, so what have you got to lose?

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Posted in Business, Computers, Facebook, Health, Internet, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Youtube