Facebook timelines for brands have the same format as timelines for personal profiles. The content is split into two columns and there is space for a cover photo at the top of the page. Like individuals, brands can craft a narrative for existing and potential customers that humanizes the company and engages visitors.

The best way to use this feature is to post content that offers behind-the-scenes looks at the company’s activities, provide exclusive access to promotions, and updates that promote user interaction with the brand and each other. The milestones feature is an excellent way to create a story that focus on and promotes discussion about the company’s major achievements.

Tabs Take a Back Seat with Facebook Timelines

The left-hand tabs that visitors could use to visit different pages within the company’s Facebook page have been relocated to sit beneath the cover photo. The way the timeline is setup only allows for three custom tabs to be shown at any one time. Although you can still have multiple custom tabs, visitors will need to click a drop-down box to expand the panel and see the rest of the pages.

This change poses a challenge for marketers. A good way to get around this is to change which tabs are visible according to the company’s objectives. For example, if you are having a contest, then the page with information about the contest should be visible for as long as the contest is active. An analytics tool can assist with determining how users are interacting with the timeline and help you decide which tabs to promote.

Default Landing Pages Go Away in Facebook Timelines

There is no way to set a default landing page with the new Facebook timelines, so you can no longer control where your visitors go when they land on your Facebook page. The loss of this marketing tactic means you must be savvy about the type of information displayed in your timeline. Focus on making sure the topmost spots on the page conveys the company’s message as this will be the first thing visitors see. Whether by accident or on purpose, Facebook ads will now be a prominent part of your Facebook marketing because this is the only way to guide visitors to the places you want them to go.

Sticky Content is the Consolation Prize

To make up for the loss of default tabs, you now have the ability to pin posts to the top of your Facebook timeline. This is the same as making a blog post stick to the top of the site for a period of time. Pinned posts are demarcated by an orange flag and show up in two places: at the top of the page and within the timeline. You can only pin one thing at a time and the item will automatically fall away after seven days or when something else is pinned.

Needless to say, this is a good way to highlight content you want your visitors to pay attention to. You can pin anything in this space including images, call to actions, company statements, and current promotions.

Changes in Layout

The layout size is different. All pages are now 810 pixels wide and content on existing pages will be centered in the middle. The size of the application icons has also changed to 111×74 pixels and will need to be updated. Your company’s primary task, however, will be to optimize the information found above the fold such as the visible tabs and the header photo.

On-Site Private Messaging

Users have always been able to message each other, but now brands can message people in their community. This provides the ability to make deeper connections with visitors as well as avoid cluttering your timeline with customer inquiries and other items that may not be relevant to the conversation.

Despite all newcomers, Facebook still dominates the social media scene. Although it will take time to get used to the changes, Facebook timelines provides a unique way to share the company’s story and engage users. What do you think of Facebook timelines, and what changes will you make to your company’s Facebook page?

Pinterest is an image-based sharing platform that allows users to become the curators of things that interest them. Users create virtual pin boards and post images to them according to the topic of the board. For example, a fashionista would post pictures of clothing she likes. Each board is categorized under one of the site’s 32 general categories, which allows users to find other boards that interest them. Like Facebook and similar social sites, people can follow other users and pin boards.

Although the site is young, brands and businesses can take advantage of the site’s rising popularity to attract customers. Here are five ways you can increase customer engagement using Pinterest.

Use Contests to Promote Customer Engagement

Contests are an excellent way to get users to engage your brand on Pinterest and spread your sales message to the people in their networks. You can host a variety of contests such as giving prizes to people that have created the best boards or who have earned the most repins. Another option is to have people submit pictures of themselves using your products in the real world and then choose the best out of the bunch. You are only limited by your creativity and resources.

Allow Customers to Pick New Products

Pinterest is a great place to conduct market research for new products. The site’s commenting platform allows you to soft launch products and get feedback about whether or not it will do well in the marketplace. Since the site is still small, it will be easier for brand managers to track the conversation surrounding new products and interact one-on-one with users. This intelligence can help companies decide if a product is worth pursuing before spending tons of money on it.

Show Brand Personality to Increase Customer Engagement

Even if you don’t sell products or services, you can still use Pinterest to showcase your brand. For example, select government officials are using the site to showcase their election platform, community outreach, and philanthropic endeavors. You can create similar boards that show your company working in the community, the brand’s mission, and other things that are happening behind the scenes at the company.

Use Pinterest for Public Relations

If your company has several departments, you can showcase those departments using specially labeled boards. For example, you can show off the talent in your art department by pinning remnants or prototypes to a specially designated art board. Your human resources department can use a board to post pictures of employees at the company picnic or holiday parties. This will humanize your brand and create interest in the company as a whole.

Turn the Spotlight on Customers

Customers love attention and a great way to use Pinterest is to create boards that focus on them. Curate pictures of customers using your products and pin them to the appropriate boards. For example, clothing companies can post pictures of customers wearing their pieces. Customers will feel special, especially if they receive positive comments, and your other clients will feel as though they are part of a real community.

Images are powerful, sometimes even more powerful than words. Pinterest provides the perfect opportunity to use images to engage customers and create buzz around products and brands. How are you improving customer engagement with Pinterest?

How do SEO mistakes occur? Presently, more than 93 percent of B2B marketers make use of social media for promoting their products. This has made online sales more of a social business.

It is very important for you as a marketer to present yourself not only personally, but also online. With the social web witnessing frequent changes, it is not easy to create a highly effective online marketing strategy and this leads many to committing some serious SEO mistakes. Here are a couple of things that you need to avoid while preparing an online marketing plan.

Basic SEO mistakes

In online marketing, there is no scope for guesswork. It is very important for you to know where you are actually heading. Online marketing has nothing known as ‘least important’ or ‘most important’. In fact, everything single bit is important. For instance, it will be wrong to consider your Internet marketing plan way to less important as compared to your marketing and sales plans. Mentioned below are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself while working out on a new marketing strategy.

• What is the target you intend to achieve through your marketing campaign?
• What is it that the people find themselves highly interested in?
• What set of audiences does my content focuses on?
• What should I do in order to be able to achieve my target?
• What is it that I am exactly looking for?
• What steps should you take in order to avail the most desirable results?

Easy Way to Avoid Worst SEO mistakes

• Your company profile should have all the necessary keywords
• All your social media profiles must redirect to the same URL
• Most importantly, your contact information should be clear and easy to access

One of the Worst SEO mistakes that can ruin you completely
Assuming that your company will not at all receive any negative feedbacks is completely wrong. The audiences are free to raise their opinion and there is no way you can stop them from doing them. Of course, not all of these feedbacks may turn out to be authentic. It is very important not to react to any of these feedbacks. This will be one of the worst SEO mistakes. No doubt, it is not possible to investigate the authenticity of all of these feedbacks and comments. However, you can definitely take some of these comments into consideration and accordingly work upon finding areas in your business that actually need a further improvement.

• Make use of some social media tracking tools that can help you get rid of these issues with ease.
• In case, you feel the urge to respond to a negative comment, do it in a very polite manner and if possible try mending the affected relationship.
• If need be, you may also try to convince the commenter to discuss the issue in person.
• Similarly, it is equally important to reward positive feedbacks. This will help in strengthening the relationship further with customers who are satisfied with your product.

In online marketing, even the slightest SEO mistakes can sometimes make a huge difference. Therefore, it is very important to take all the necessary steps while working out an Internet marketing strategy. A perfect strategy can surely take your business to the next level. Now may be a good time to correct any SEO mistakes on your site?

For a very long time now, I have been working on form optimization for landing pages. This article will cover some of the most amazing tips on form optimization. These tips will greatly help you in further improving the form conversions on your websites.

For those who know little about landing pages, it is very important to know what the term means. A landing page is a simple web page that appears when one clicks on an advertisement. This page usually consists of a sales copy.

So, what do you do in order to optimize the landing pages?

The first thing you need to do is include a privacy line. The form should have a privacy line at the bottom. You may add a line that says, ‘Our Company respects your privacy’, or ‘We do not share your personal information with anyone’. However, there are numerous other variables you can use, but they would hardly do anything to increase conversions like a simple privacy line does. The trust factor is primarily responsible for increasing the form conversation rate. The next thing you need to do is include less number of form elements. Now, how is this helping you?

Your prime motive should be to create a strong relationship with your clients and you cannot do this by asking a thousand questions. Therefore, it is important to restrict the number of questions you intend to ask the audience. The next thing you need to take care of is the amount of space between each of the form fields.

Do not leave too much of space between the form fields. It is very necessary that your form incorporates more number of elements in a very small space. Here is how you can do it. Try lining up two different elements in one single link. This will occupy less amount of space. For instance, the first field can hold name and the surname together.

Some More Ways to Optimize Landing Pages

Apart from reducing space between form fields in the landing pages, it will also be wise to utilize the optional form fields. As a result, this greatly decreases the amount of information one has to fill in. One of the most effective formulas that I rely on is the ‘five field form’. This form consists of three requisite fields and the remaining two are optional. Here is what an ideal form on a landing page should include:

Name: __________ (requisite)
Email: __________ (requisite)
Contact
Number: __________ (requisite)
City: __________ (optional)
State: __________ (optional)

Another amazing option you have at hand is the two-page strategy. Not many are aware of this strategy. You may also use a two-page strategy. Again, encompasses the idea of not moving too fast. Let us consider a simple analogy here. Imagine you are on a date and you hardly know anything about her. You try asking her questions upon questions and this in fact turns out to be quite irritating. The next thing she does it walk out. Had you asked her those questions later, say on your second or the third day, you would have saved your date. In the similar manner, a form with multiple pages can convert much better than those having a single page.

What Else Can You Do With Your Landing Pages?
The lead form should be just above the fold. According to my personal experience, the lead form is able to convert the best when located at the topmost right hand side of the page. You equally need to focus on the submit button. It should look very attractive and compelling. Instead of using ‘submit’ or ‘click here’, you may use ‘click here to get a free quote, or simply ‘avail a free quote’. These words are able to convert better.

At the same time, the design and the color of the button too should be attractive. Well, I prefer having either a red of a blue button. Also, determine the size of button. Just watch it on your computer screen from every angle and you will easily be able to make out the error if any. It will be wise to optimize the buttons for a small sized screen, as the desktop and the laptop users both will be able to view the buttons clearly. So, what do you think? Is optimizing the landing pages difficult or easy?

Adwords advertising increases your website’s popularity. With Adwords, you can reach millions of subscribers that use popular search engines. In fact, with Adwords, you open up host of opportunities for your business by gaining access to new clients on daily basis.

Further, it depends on what kind of plan you decide to choose, Adwords advertising gives you freedom to Pay Per Click (PPC). That is, Adwords advertising do not charge money for the advertisements that go unnoticed. Besides, you only pay for the number of visitors who come to your site when they check out the ads. This helps you save lot of marketing money.

Following are a few tips which you can make adwords advertising more efficient for your business:

• Split keywords: You can split keywords into different target words. By doing so, you make your keyword combinations more relevant and closer to local searches made over Internet. Besides, avoid combining two irrelevant words, as wrong combinations are highly improbable to be searched over Internet. In fact, by breaking keywords, you make your visitors more probable in seeing your ad. Thus, as a rule of thumb, never keep keywords in more than combination of two words.
• Optimize the Content: Despite having an ad placed over Internet against a split keyword, there are chances that your ad will not be noticed. This could happen if your advertisement is too crowded with others. To avoid this, make the content of your website as relevant to the keyword as possible. In fact, search engines arrange the target position of your ad depending on the relevancy of content hosted on your site. Thus, to optimize your web searches and gain more number of hits, optimize content of your site by incorporating keywords based on their relevancy.
• Use logical Ad copy: This means, that you can keep a logical copy of ad within Adwords itself. By doing so, you can keep it interesting and attractive to read. Besides, you increase the probability of getting more visitors.
• Split testing: A split testing is a continuous ongoing process, which demands perseverance and good amount of efforts. It involves splitting and correcting your Adwords keywords periodically over time. You can tweak a copy and gauge its performance based on the relevance number of hits that you gain for the ad.
• Avoid content network: Most people think that placing their ad over content on web pages could fetch them more links. However, choosing content network could cost you more money. Besides, content network would not generate relevant customers to your website and hence, will not convert traffic into business.

Additional ways to use Adwords advertising more effectively

These are only some of the tips that you can consider to make use of Adwords advertising effectively and for the enrichment of your business over the World Wide Web. Hope you find these aforementioned tips useful. Share with us on which one of the above Adwords advertising techniques you intend to use?