To be able to launch a successful social media campaign, the very first thing you should do is to choose the social media platform or site that would best suit your product/service. There are many popular social media sites right now, with Facebook still reigning supreme in the social media world. However, just because Facebook is the most popular right now does not automatically mean that placing ads on Facebook concentrating solely on your Facebook page is the best social media strategy for your product. Going all out and building up your social profile an all the popular social media sites also does not make sense, because you will need to pour in too much resources for your social media campaign to do that. Besides, as already mentioned, not all the social media sites will be apt for your product, so that spending your time on some of the social sites will just be a waste of time.

If you’re wondering which social site would be best for your product, here are some tips to help your decide which site(s) to use:

• If you are into personal brand building, make sure to use LinkedIn and Twitter. Facebook is ok, but be careful about keeping your personal and professional profiles separate.
• For products that are more into the creative side or would look great in pictures, you might want to consider Pinterest and Tumblr.
• If you are heavy on promotions, go ahead with Facebook.
• And if you just can’t decide you can’t go wrong with Facebook.

While it is still best to keep your social and business account separate, you need to make sure that your personal social accounts are reflective of you as a brand. This means not putting up anything that you think can compromise you, and more importantly making sure that your personal account shows a side of you that is complementary to your business side. After all, you don’t know if any of your personal posts will leak out, so you want everything your put on the Internet to be something that will help build your reputation.
You can also use your personal account to grow your network by adding and/or “important” people in the industry as your friend/contact/follower. This way you can start developing a “closer” online relationship with them, which might help your business in the future.

You can also sometimes opt to share important business or industry related posts to the public by tweaking your sharing options. In Facebook, this can be easily done since you can always control who can view your posts. Show the world the “expert” side of you by allowing the public to view non-personal posts. If your family finds such posts a bore, you can just exclude them from seeing such posts so that your personal account still feels very personal to them, but can still be used as a tool for building your personal brand.

Always stick to using your company or business page as your primary way of connecting with your customers, but don’t miss out on opportunities to further build your personal brand by supplementing them with public posts via your personal account.

Image via ZoneAlarm

The bias became especially glaring last January when they launched Google Plus Your World and the social aspect of search quite obviously overlooked more relevant social results from Facebook and Twitter. This is true despite pages of people and businesses on other social sites outranking their Google Plus pages in Google’s own organic results. This is also true even for social accounts on other sites that far outstrip the number of followers people have on the Google Plus account. In short, it doesn’t matter how good your page is on other social sites, Google will still prefer your Google Plus page.

Well whatever the case may be, the point here is that with Google’s obvious bias for their own brand services, it’s even more important that as a business you do not overlook Google+ as part of your social media campaign, because whether you like it or not, Google will be more likely to suggest a Google+ page than pages from other social sites to people in your circle. While your primary audience in a social campaign are people you link to via the social site itself, don’t forget that Google is still the primary gateway for people in getting around the internet. This means that you’ll be missing out big time in the people that search traffic can bring thanks to Google’s bias for Google Plus if you don’t have a Google Plus account. So forget controversy, and go ahead and make the most out of Google+ Brands!

Facebook may be the social media platform with the most number of users, but that doesn’t mean that Twitter with its estimated active monthly users of 100 million is something to scoff at. If you have been neglecting Twitter in favor of Facebook for your business’ social media campaign, then you are seriously missing out on a huge opportunity.

If you plan on incorporating Twitter to your social media campaign though, make sure you understand how it works first because it is of a very different nature from Facebook. The first thing you need to understand is that it is a micro-blogging site. That means that everything you tweet should be really short and to the point. The next thing you need to realize is that users of this platform will expect you to be very active, even more active than you are on Facebook. People expect almost instant replies to their tweets (at least for tweets that do need replies), unlike with Facebook’s comments where a lag in replies is to be expected. While hourly updates are not required for a company’s Twitter account, daily tweets (at the least) are a good idea. You don’t have to worry about running out of important company related content either since Twitter is very much about information sharing, so short announcements, links to interesting stuff (ideally business-related for company accounts), and official press releases are perfect as tweet content. Retweets (the equivalent of Facebook’s share feature) will obviously be appreciated by your followers, but as a business account is not to be expected. However, it’s obviously your goal to have tweets be retweeted as much as possible.

Image via DigitalTrends

Despite the advantages that businesses can expect from Timeline, you should also be wary about the possible negative effects on your users. First of all, though it has absolutely nothing to do with your business and purely Facebook’s decision, you should still acknowledge the fact that many people are upset about having to transition to Timeline. Whether they truly do not like the new look or as simply do not like change, the point is that these people will tend to be hypercritical not just of Facebook, but also the Facebook pages they visit. They’ll be more likely to notice the littlest of errors, and be more particular about how your Facebook page looks and feels.

With this in mind, make sure that you clean up your own Facebook page so that when Timeline does go live for you, your audience will find it difficult to nitpick. Start by populating your about page, choosing a good cover photo, and tweaking your post settings. Delete anything on your wall that will be an eyesore right away, and tweak/resize post sizes for an optimal Timeline. Make sure to follow their advice and star and delete posts to make your page more effective.

Image via Facebook – Introducing Timeline

Facebook’s Timeline has both fans and detractors, which is to be expected of any new major UI upgrades. After all, some will find it pretty and useful, while some will just want to keep on using the old look being more comfortable with it. No matter what your personal preference may be though, for your business pages, you have to set aside your personal biases and use whichever look will benefit your business the most.

Mashable’s article wherein they used data from eye-tracking group EyeTrackShop to compare visual statistics from Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, as well as compare the old Facebook and the timeline version, showed some interesting points in favor of using timeline. These three include the following facts:

1. Facebook Timeline cover photos get noticed first
2. Facebook ads get noticed more in Facebook Timeline
3. Personal information such as employer and location gets more attention in the new Facebook Timeline

As you can see, using timeline on your page can help you leverage certain things you want to get noticed more. Since cover photos get notices first on the timeline version (Not surprising with it occupying such a huge amount of space), it makes sense to put up your company logo and whatever special product/service/event/promotion you are pushing for at the moment in that space. Of course, you’ll have to be creative about it, because putting up something really boring and amateurish as cover photo will mean that the poor quality will also get noticed first as well. With the info page also getting more attention, this means that it is important that you really fill out those fields and squeeze in as much information as you can.

Last, but not least, with ads getting noticed more in timeline, and with more people shifting to the timeline version each day, this means that it would be a good idea to start looking into investing more money into your Facebook ads.

Image via Facebook – Introducing Timeline Page

2012 might mean the world’s end if you believe the popular doomsday movie, but it sure is looking good for those who have invested much, and are thinking of investing their resources in social media. With so many different internet marketing strategies to choose from, it seems that next year (and probably more years after that) will see social media marketing efforts gaining even more in popularity.

We might not need convincing when it comes to the usefulness of social media for word-of-mouth marketing, but what you might not have realized is that social media marketing’s sister industry, the search engine optimization industry is becoming more and more reliant on the social media aspect of SEO. In fact, gone are the days of the two being treated as separate online marketing techniques. Instead, any self-respecting SEO nowadays know that they need to brush up on their social media offerings to survive the evolving SEO landscape.

What this also means, however, for those who specialize in specific social media platforms, is that you need to gain a better understanding of social search. No, there’s no need to suddenly become an expert in technical SEO, but you at least have to get a firm grasp of the relationship between the two because it will help you steer your social media efforts in a way that will benefit you not just in that specific social media platform/site, but to also have a positive effect (and minimize the negatives) on SEO efforts. It might not be your primary responsibility, but anything that will benefit your client/site, will surely benefit you as well.

As Maria McDavis put it, “Social Media and SEO is not an either/or proposition, it is an AND equation.” Forget about the days of social media or SEO, social media in the new year is all about Social SEO.

Image via WebSuccessDiva

Did you know that you can post your blogs automatically to your Facebook account? Since blogging today is now considered the most powerful marketing strategy for both business and personal purposes, combining it with equally powerful social media site, you can expect a stream of success in the blogging business. Sharing contents through your Facebook page will result in more comments and feedbacks on personally constructed or imported blog posts. By automating your system, you can publish all posts you want simultaneously on your Facebook wall. Your blog could be about any topic like nursing. Click here to know more and follow the steps below:

• Sign in to you Facebook account
• Go to account Menu
• Click  on the “ Use Facebook page”
• Choose the “Switch” command for your page
• On the top search box, type in the word “Notes”
• And then from the drop down list, choose the notes application
• Choose the “edit import setting” located at the left column
• Place the web address or the link for you blog. Be sure to include the http:// on the address
• Check the agree box and then save the settings

After following these simple steps, you can rest assure that all your blog posts are going to be posted automatically on your Facebook page. Facebook will automatically check for new blogs and post them if there’s any. This is extremely beneficial for those who are promoting their websites and their business as anyone can include back links on these posts. Your Facebook friends and followers can place their comments conveniently without leaving their Facebook page.

Skype announced last week that the release of Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and 5.7 for Windows will mean support for Facebook-to-Facebook calling from within Skype. While video calling within Facebook has been possible for a few months now thanks to Skype, the ability to call your Facebook contacts while logged in to your Skype account takes the Facebook and Skype integration much further.

Facebook to Facebook calling within Skype is really easy and is possible for any who links their Skype and Facebook accounts. All you need to do is choose a Facebook contact while on Skype, and call them like you would your Skype contacts. Of course, previous features that have already been supported like reading your friend’s status updates and sending them IMs via Skype are still possible. While these features are not revolutionary in anyway, it is still quite convenient for users who do prefer to be able to have an easy way of contacting their Facebook friends, but prefer not to be constantly logged into Facebook or are not allowed to access their Facebook accounts at work.

Skype also said that the Skype 5.7 for Windows will mean that group screen sharing will now be available to Windows users (a feature that has been available to Mac users for earlier Skype versions). This is good news to business who use opt to use Skype to communicate with their employees, or even with customers, because it is a great way to go through presentations/tutorials without having to rely on words alone. Of course, group screen sharing is still available only for Skype users with Premium subscriptions.

Image credit: Skype Blog

Directory submission is an online strategy that has been around longer than search engines, after all directories were the in thing before Google made its appearance. Directory submissions, however, fell from grace due to the many link farms that littered the Internet, which then had the unfortunate effect of getting many of the sites listed on those link farms devaluated by Google due to their association with the said spammy link sites. Despite this, there are indeed good web directories still in existence today that can really help you promote your blog. All you need to do is to learn to separate the good from the bad before you submit your site to the sound ones.

One such web directory/portal is the Blog Search Engine. The good thing about their service is that they will not only provide a link back to your site’s blog, but will in fact review your blog, providing a better value link not only in the search engine’s eyes but more importantly to users who can glean information from the review. Submitting a site there is easy. All you need to do is submit your blog details, pay the basic fee of $14.99, and sit back and wait for the traffic they send your way. You can also choose higher packages, which will earn you more links from their network, get your blog featured, and even have your banner ad place on their homepage.