Following are some most effective social media marketing strategies which can enhance your social media presence:

Stay on Top and Update Regularly:  Update your social profiles on a regular basis – post interesting content and contests that will engage the users and play an important factor to visit your profile regularly. Business owners can create polls and quizzes for a particular product or query and know what customers are looking for and what the latest trend is.

Value Visitors Comments:  Make sure to take comments from visitors in a regular basis and work accordingly. Ask your users to share their thoughts and opinions on your products / services offered and personally thank them for their valuable feedback.

Respond to concerns and questions quickly and handle it in a professional manner especially if someone leaves a negative post / comment. Be open to criticism since your users are experiencing the products and know their pros / cons best – accept it and modify accordingly.

Unique Information Distribution: The information posted on your profile should be unique to attract customer’s attention. Publish catchy content snippet relevant to your niche and provide latest news and updates on the same.

Be Well-informed on Competitors: Constantly review your competitor’s social profiles and implement their best ideas to your advantage.

Social Media marketing is dynamic, it’s not a stand-alone campaign, so you have to keep an eye on the latest trend and strategies and implement accordingly.

Facebook has a secret formula to calculate the reach of your content to its audience. The process may sound complicated at the first instance but if given a second thought it’s actually quite logical. Facebook simply gives more weightage to content with more interaction. For example, the more “LIKES” a post receives, the more people interacting with it and the more private interaction resulting from it has more weightage and probability of displaying on user’s page increases. We might not be realizing the fact that Facebook’s News feed only displays a subset of the posts having higher Edgerank generated by our friends which gave birth to the concept of “News Feed Optimization” and it’s success is determined by Edgerank. It would be overwhelming if the news feed showed all the possible stories from your friends. By optimizing for EdgeRank you will always have the chance to increase the effectiveness of your Facebook posts, yielding better returns in the long run.

How does EdgeRank work?

Each Edge has three components contributing to Facebook’s algorithm:

1) Affinity Score: It means how well a particular user viewing the post is connceted to the Edge. For example, if you are friend with your brother and sister on Facebook and you post frequently on their walls and have a good number of mutual friends among you then you have a very high affinity score with your brother and sister as Facebook assumes that you’ll probably check their updates frequently.

Affinity score measure not only your actions for a post but your friend’s action and their friend’s action. For example,  if you comment on a page, it’s more worthy if your friend comment on the same which is even worth more than if a friend of a friend commented on the same page. All friend’s action in your network are not treated equally. If you LIKE on someone’s status update on a regular bais and write on their wall regularly, according to Facebook that friend’s action will influence your affinity score significantly than another friend who is not in your regular communication list.

Moreover if the interaction with your friend is on the lesser side who used to be in regular touch with you then that will affect your affinity score. Technically Facebook multiplies each action by 1/x, where the value of x is the time since the action happened.

2) Edge Weight:  Each and every edge has a different weight associated to it. A comment to a profile / page surely has more weight than a LIKE on the same. Again, photos and videos have a higher edge than simple links.

Generally the new Facebook features have a have a higher Edge weight to promote the features among the users. For example, check-ins by default had a very high weight when Facebook Places was introduced; if you have noticed for the first few months your news feed was probably flooded with feeds like “Person A checked into X, Person B checked into Y and so on.

Time Decay: TIME is the most oblivious factor – the older an Edge is the less weight is has. Today’s comment will obviously have more relevancy than last week’s or months. It also focuses on the following factors:

• when the user last logged into Facebook
• how frequently the user logged into Facebook

Optimizing my fan page for EdgeRank

• Publish your content as a question / poll that compels your fans to engage.
• Different researches proved that a Facebook page gets more fan interaction from photos than links, text updates or videos.
• The new post-targeting feature which was earlier available only to advertisers and yet to be rolled out to all Facebook pages allows you to target your fans by criteria which includes age, gender, genre interested in and the old options like language, country, state and city.

Facebook developers have confirmed that there are still certain aspects of Facebook Edgerank which weren’t unveiled yet. Meanwhile let’s continue to optimize the posts based on the features that are already in place to increase the engagement of your posts.

More exam papers and questions from different schools / colleges / universities / institutes will follow suit shortly. Even in beta version, this education portal has received a lot of accolades from both the students and critics. Lots of features will be implemented in a very short time, most importantly is the gamification feature where student can earn reward /credit points as and when they answer a question. Moreover Examify in the process of recruiting teachers and professors in their board to assist in the verification of student’s answers.

Self-directed study is becoming an integral part of learning in schools, colleges and universities and Examify has taken extreme care to ensure that their education portal offer you an even greater level of flexibility. So, why waste time? Jump on to www.examify.com and register for an invitation.

by Mithu Sarkar

Designing a professional website is the first step towards your online branding and reputation. Just as the web designers know how to grab the visitor’s eyeballs by designing a gorgeous looking website, similarly an effective SEO strategy holds the key to rank your website higher in the major search engines ensuring more visibility to your customers. There is no point in designing a trendy website if it fails to attract traffic. Thus, designing a SEO-friendly website plays a major role in attracting relevant traffic for your website. In this competitive world, you need to have an edge over your competitors and this can be done by achieving higher positions in the search engine rankings.

Whether you are launching a static website or a blog or an e-commerce solution, you need to follow a couple of basic steps while designing a SEO-friendly website that will help to increase your chances in higher search engine rankings.

Splash Page: Designing a splash page is a BIG NO from SEO perspective. Some web designers insist on placing a flash intro with a link like “Click here to Enter” on the Home Page. The situation becomes worse when this link is embedded in Flash, making it impossible for the search engine crawlers to index the page thereby affecting your page’s ranking in the search engines. Moreover, Home Page is the landing page of your website both from SEO perspective and user experience (UX). Now if the search engine crawler is unable to index the Home Page content, the chances of your website to increase it’s the search engine visibility is doomed from the very start.

Clean HTML structure: Keep your design simple with clear and uncluttered HTML structure. Optimize your HTML structure by providing enough provision for various HTML Meta data elements such as Title tag, meta description, meta keywords, ALT/TITLE tags and other header tags, i.e., <h1> through <h6>.

Avoid Excessive Use Of JavaScript: Be careful while implementing JavaScript in your website as the search engine robots can’t index JavaScript codes. Moreover, too much of JavaScript increase the loading time of your website, thereby annoying the users who might just abandon your site and move on to your competitor’s website.

Focus on Your Link Structure: Users dislike digging for the information they need. Using an appropriate navigational structure will make your site easy to use for your customers. The anchor text should contain the relevant link and title to it.

Avoid using Flash for your navigation as search engine crawlers have trouble to read the flash files.

Avoid Using Dynamic URLs: Don’t forget to implement SEO-friendly URL feature as this is an important place to embed your keywords.

Example of SEO-Friendly URL: www.yourdomain.com/yourkeyword
Example of Dynamic URL: www.domain.com/?p=12354

Browser Compatibility: Test your website in all leading web browsers like IE 8 & 9, Mozilla Firefox, Chrome to ensure proper rendering of your design elements.

Avoid pop-ups as it is frustrates users.

Avoid Horizontal Scroll: Users hate horizontal scrolling, so consider standardizing screen resolution for different screen sizes and devices while designing your website to avoid any unintended scroll.

Add footer links to every page: Make sure to have text-based footer links embedded with your targeted keywords in every page of your website.

Use an XML and HTML sitemap: While a XML sitemap will enhance indexing of your homepage as well as other internal pages, a HTML sitemap will help your customers to easily land on the page they are looking forward to.

Responsive design: Though it is a nice to have feature, with the tremendous growth in mobile device usage if your website design adjust itself by detecting the device’s screen resolution, it would certainly give you an edge over your competitors.

Follow these simple suggestions while designing your website to have the best possible chance to increase your visibility and online presence over the web.

by Mithu Sarkar

You are coming from UNITED STATES.

Featured Tabs Widget is a great addition to the StudioPress resource. Here is a demo of Featured Tabs.

Follow these steps, if you want to display a featured tabs section on your homepage:

1) Create Blog Posts first under different category and upload image/images corresponding to each blog post.

2) Download Genesis Tabs Widget plugin. You can either upload the plugin via FTP or go to Plugins->Add New and search for Genesis Tabs and then Install and Activate the plugin.

3) Once you are done with the activation of the plugin, go to Appearance->Widgets section of your wordpress Dashboard and drag and drop the Genesis-Tabs widget to the Home Top widget area.

4) Now you need to configure the widget, you can select upto 8 categories of your choice, each category you choose will represent a single tab in your site which in turn will display the latest post respective to that category.

5) After the categories are selected, Click on Featured Image and set the image size you wish to display, usually it is set to 150X220

6) Then set the Image Alignment

7) Click on Show Post Title to display the title of your post.

8) If you want to include the author name, post date for your posts, check the Show Post Info box.

9) Next, select Show Content Limit from Content Type and Limit Content to any characters of your choice.

10) Click on Save and you are done with the configuration of Featured Tabs widget.

The Featured Tab widget is an excellent solution to emphasize many categories at the same space thereby performing space management at the same time.

By MITHU SARKAR;

1. Log in to your WordPress Administration panel (http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin, replace yourdomain.com with your owned domain)
2. Click the Posts tab in the left panel
3. Click the Add New Sub Tab  located under the Posts menu
4. Put the title of your post in the Title field (read Enter title here written in gray), try not to use special characters in the title field
5. Leave the Permalink field as is,  WordPress generates the Permalink from the title you have entered
6. Select Visual (generally Visual is selected by default, do a double check before starting to put your content)
7. Proceed with entering your post content
8. If you are copying the content from notepad, then click on “Paste as Plain Text” icon and paste your content as shown in the image below:
9. If you are copying the content from word document, then click on “Paste from Word” icon and paste your content as shown in the image below:
10. Select a Category and/or Categories, add categories if required, make sure your post does not get published under Uncategorized
11. Also create Tags for your post
12. Once you are ready, the new post can be published just by clicking the Publish button
13. If you are not finished with the post make sure to keep it in Draft status, if you want to schedule the publication to a future date then set a future date and time against Publish: immediately, if you want you can even set an old date in the same field
14. Don’t forget to input SEO fields (Keywords, Description, leave the title field blank to use the your post title in the title field)
15. Preview your post before you finally Publish / Schedule for publishing

Click here to watch the WordPress TV AV for Writing and publishing a post by Michael Pick

Points to be considered while writing your blog post:

1. Wear your SEO hat while choosing a title for your post, don’t stuff it with keywords only, come up with something intelligent, easy to remember, search friendly
2. Proof read your content meticulously for spelling mistakes, wrong grammatical constructions, choosing of right vocabulary
3. Write Search Engine Friendly content but make sure you don’t stuff the content with keywords only, write relevant, intelligent & useful content
4. Wear your SEO hat while choosing Category and Tags for your content

By MITHU SARKAR

Mobile marketing is the buzz of social media now. This is because the number of Smart phone users are increasing in leaps and bounds. Almost 20% people out of over 91% total mobile phone users are now using internet-capable Smart phones. More than 150 billion mobile text messages are being sent every month by these mobile devices and surprisingly these mobile text messages get opened at a rate of 90% within an hour of being sent. That is incredible!

Currently, mobile advertising has become a perfect way of promoting your products/services to your target audience. You know you never go anywhere without your phone and neither do your customers. No matter if your customer is watching TV, jogging or busy in a party, mobile marketing instantly connect with your customers through a single message. Send a message and it will arrive within a moment.

More and more companies are now taking advantage of mobile marketing to grow their business.

Let’s look at some of the components to mobile marketing.

• First, there are the mobile directories to get listed in.
• Next you want to be sure and have a mobile responsive website.
• Make sure that all your potential customers receive your text messaging service
• Your text messages should contain a catchy tagline and it should add value to your customers’ needs.
• You can have your customers sign up to get text messages from you for special announcements or discount offers.

Also, don’t forget that smart phone users also get email on their phone and may check that before reading email on their computer.

Mobile marketing is a powerful marketing tool to enhance your business if executed in a proper way. SO, looking at the current trend you cannot afford to ignore mobile marketing campaign for your business.

Contact me to know more about mobile marketing and how it can help your business.

By MITHU SARKAR

Facebook has taken the decision to delete all the Fake accounts and pages once it was revealed that around 8.7% of its users are not REAL. According to BBC reports, most of the accounts were set up by spammers who use them to make pages popular artificially deceiving the users. Facebook said “On average, less than 1% of Likes on any given Page will be removed”, if these pages abides by Facebook Terms & Conditions and hasn’t been purchasing LIKES from from hackers.  This move is intended to ensure transparency for advertisers by having a genuine target audience. Advertisers will not invest money if the target audience is not genuine.

Due to huge popularity of Facebook and its incredible growth in recent years, some companies and celebrities were focusing on building a big fan base as quickly as possible. This resulted in the popping up of different companies which created fake accounts and sell them to increase the number of LIKES in the pages artificially. Actually Facebook’s current sign-up process is free and easy which makes their work tougher. But Facebook is on top of deleting fake accounts and LIKES from pages and are working really hard to establish the fact that Facebook was built on the principle of real identity  and the same should be followed in the pages as well.

By MITHU SARKAR