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Over the past few years, social media has aided various kinds of small businesses on their way to success. There is no doubt about the fact that social media is the best tool to get a small business’ visibility to the roof. Everyone, most especially your potential customers, are included in the social media loop. Here is a list of the most popular social media tools for small businesses.

Timely.IS

One drawback on social media sites is that business owners cannot find the time to check on their updates from time to time. Timely.IS is one of the social media tools for small businesses that give a solution to this problem. You can actually schedule your Facebook and Twitter accounts to do the updates for you. For example, you have an upcoming product you will launch, you can schedule your Timely.IS to do the Facebook and Twitter updates for you. This way, you won’t need to worry about your followers and likers about being updated regarding these updates. 20 minutes on Timely.IS for the month is enough to make sure that the updates are scheduled.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is what social media gurus refer to as the master of all social media sites. If you sign up with multiple social media sites, the problem is updating all of them when you need to. Tweetdeck will basically give you one single user friendly dashboard for all your social media accounts. You can post to multiple profiles at once. This includes Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google Buzz, Foursquare and LinkedIn. All those profiles will be update with just a single click. Moreover, the service will be for free. In addition to that, Tweetdeck is on the go. You can install it on on your smart phone so you can access it any time you want.

Storefront Social

Storefront Social is basically a Facebook application that turns your Facebook page into a store. Similar to e-bay and Amazon, you can actually buy and sell through storefront social. However, unlike the mentioned e-commerce websites, you can customize Storefront Social the way you want to. This way, your landing page would already automatically show something about your product. In addition to this, you can put all the information you need regarding your products in an organized manner.

YouTube

YouTube is the most popular video sharing website in the world. For sure, if your uploaded videos on YouTube get a lot of hits, you are automatically popular. For many years, businessmen have used YouTube as a means of sharing information through videos. It is very practical. The best way people can learn about products, services and promotions is through watching a video about it. If you plan to use YouTube, make sure you have your own channel so that customers can subscribe to it. This way, when you have new uploaded videos, it will automatically show on the landing page of your subscribers. There are even freelancers you can pay to generate likes and views on your YouTube videos.

As you can see, if your business has no social media sites connected to it, you will really have problems in getting the attention of potential customers. The world that everyone lives in today is practically connected through the internet. Without a doubt, social media websites are the best tools for small business. Who knows, this might be the key to getting your small business into a world wide industry.

It is confirmed that social media impacts search ranking. SEO experts are now looking more keenly at different strategies to maximize the impact of social media on SEO.

And content being shared via social media is emerging as a very strong social signal for SEO.

When you look at it logically, it makes sense. Only content that is relevant and adds value will get shared. No one wants to recommend low quality content to their friends. So more your content gets shared on social media, higher is its relevance and quality as perceived by Google, resulting in higher rankings.

And if you don’t believe so much in logic, here are some conclusive proofs. An experiment conducted by SEO firm Tasty Placements, showed clearly the impact of social shares (Facebook shares, Twitter tweets and Google +1s) in enhancing the search rankings. And an analysis of over 300,000 top ranking websites by SearchMetrics listed Facebook shares as the #1 factor that was common amongst all of them.

This post offers 3 simple tips to create sharable content

1. Find the Right Content to Share

The key trick in getting your content to go viral is providing content that people want to share. Latch on to the current hot topic in the general media and give your unique twist to it. Sometime back, it was all about Kirsten Stewart having cheated on Robert Pattinson. Now that they are together, if newspapers write about the break-up, no one will even look at their content.

Likewise look at the current topics of interest in your industry and provide insightful analysis, predict trends etc on them. Here are some tips on finding the right content to share.

2. Use Emotions

Make people connect to your content, whatever the topic. Humor, inspiration, motivation are all strong emotional cords your content should be able to touch.

When you write about the travails of dealing with your toddler’s tantrum in a humorous way, you can be sure that mothers across the world are smiling, nodding their heads and busy sharing it. Because believe it or not, two-year olds are the same, whether in the US, UK, India or Australia.

This is an interesting article on humor and sharing behavior.

3. For Heaven’s Sake, Spell-check

Even the best content, if it contains spelling errors and grammatical mistakes, can create a negative impression. Make sure your copy is error free.

Here is the list of the top sharing platforms for August 2012 compiled by Shareaholic.

I would like to end with this article that attempts to unveil the psychology of online sharing, which is of relevance to all of us.

So what strategies do you use for creating sharable content? And do share this content if you found it of value.

This post has been written by Yasir Khan, SEO Consultant, and Founder of Quantum SEO Labs. While not grappling with clients’ SEO strategies, Yasir is busy updating his blog.

If you are continually surprised by the facts and figures and the mind boggling statistics that are thrown up by global social media networks then you cannot go past this presentation.

By now, most marketers understand the importance of mending the traditional rift between sales and marketing. The mistrust and miscommunication that’s so often found between the two teams can act like an anchor on your company’s growth rate. In fact, organizations with good alignment between sales and marketing teams achieved 20% annual revenue growth in 2010, according to a study by the Aberdeen Group. By contrast, companies with poor alignment saw revenues decline by 4%… Read more

This list is a compilation of our staff favorites from Inbound Marketing Agents that covers social media, online marketing, search engine marketing (SEO), and search engine marketing (SEM).  Every listing has a link so you can easily check them and out and start bookmarking your favorites.

If you are looking for more information about the channels of inbound marketing and want to learn from the best in the industry, this post is for you… Read more

One of the most pressing questions whether you’re a social media newbie or a social media maven is: What’s the best way to post information or share content to optimize your reach?

Compendium, a content marketing firm, may have some insights to help answer this perplexing question.

The firm conducted a study with more than 200 companies to determine how social media professionals may optimize their engagement with both business-to-business and business-to-consumer conversations.

Researchers evaluated numerous factors such as the number of words in a post, the time of the posting, the day of the week as well as punctuation and the usage of hashtags… Read more

On October 1st, Google announced Google Tag Manager, a free tool for managing marketing and tracking tags on your site. I’ve sensed a lot of confusion around its launch, so I’d like to discuss what tag management is and why it’s so powerful.

There are a number of companies that have been providing tag management software as a paid service for years (I’m sure they’re wild about Google making it free). I won’t discuss the pros and cons of different tag management software offerings, rather, just the concept in general, and some directly actionable tips using Google’s service. At the end of the post, I’ll include links to some of the other, likely more robust, tag management services… Read more

Social networks and their icons are indelibly printed on our visual memory.

If you’re a business owner or publisher with a website or blog, you cannot ignore the importance of social media. You might spend hours working on an article, but it will not be of much use if no-one reads it.

Social media is the most effective medium for taking your voice to your readers and customers. In this post, I’ll discuss the most effective ways to integrate social media features into your WordPress website to widen your reach and gather a worldwide following.

WordPress is perhaps the most popular content management system or CMS. You can easily customize it to create professional business websites, online stores or boutiques, newspaper or magazine sites – the sky is the limit… Read more

With the global economy still slumping, businesses and marketers are embracing new methods of social marketing as a way to spread the word in a more reliable, consistent, and cost-effective way.

Are you taking advantage of all that the LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter platforms offer?

Read these quick tips to double-check what you’re doing now and identify what you could do better.

LinkedIn

1. Complete your personal profile… Read more