LinkedIn, the premier social media network for business professionals, has finally started to make waves with its updated Company Pages functionality. With the recent upgrades came the new ability to create a LinkedIn product or service page that can highlight each of your offerings and inform interested individuals of the features and benefits of each individual offering. With this one new type of page, you can capture targeted prospects and even direct them to a special landing page on your website for them to learn more or convert to a generated business lead.

What Is It?

The LinkedIn Product or Service Page is a sub-page of your Company Page that highlights a single, specific item and can include the following details:

• a description of your product or service
• a photo or representing graphic
• a bullet list of features or benefits
• a targeted landing page URL for lead/sales conversion
• list of contacts from LinkedIn for product or service support
• a “promotion” block to highlight a special deal
• even show a YoutTube video of your product or service

This new tool helps answer the question: How can I share my product or service directly on LinkedIn?

Why Should I Use It?

LinkedIn is working hard to make their Company Pages tool more valuable to businesses and marketers. With these additional features, it certainly creates a new opportunity for you to promote your products and services in a highly vibrant and active community where users are often looking for things that can fill a need beyond simply connecting one professional to another. If used correctly, you can most certainly expect an increase in website traffic to your product or service specific pages, and most definitely an increase in overall awareness.

Do You Have Any Questions?

If you had trouble following the tutorial or have any questions regarding LinkedIn’s new Product or Service Page feature, drop us a comment below!

LinkedIn is the premier social media network for business professionals with over 150 million users in over 200 countries around the world. For years this has been the de facto standard place where these users could find, engage, and connect with one another in hopes of driving commercial opportunity or advancements in their careers.

But at the same time, LinkedIn had fallen behind most of the other large social media networks in its ability to provide a way to connect with, track, and engage companies and brands. With the new Company Page feature, businesses can now have their own “profile page” where they can post updates, list their products and services, and allow users to become a follower as a new way to engage their audience.

What Is It?

A LinkedIn Company Page provides a single location where members can go to learn about and track what is happening in your company.

Members can learn about:

• what your company is about, in essence it’s “story”
• information about your products and services
• explore any career opportunities you have listed
• view who is an employee of your company on LinkedIn
• review any status updates posted to your company page

This new tool helps answer the question: How can I get more people to learn about my company on LinkedIn?

Why Should I Use It?

Like Facebook Fan and Business pages have benefited many brands who want to directly engage consumers, your LinkedIn Company Page provides a platform where B2B and B2C marketers can directly engage individuals who could become their partners, investors, employees, and even customers.

If used correctly, your company page could lead to an increase in prospective leads, more visitors to your website, and definitely an increase in the awareness of your products and services.

Do You Have Any Questions?

If you had trouble following the tutorial or have any questions regarding LinkedIn’s new Company Page feature, drop us a comment below!

A recent eMarketer report highlighted that around 114 MILLION U.S. consumers are expected to access the Internet using their mobile device this year. Included in the report was the top 3 activities that consumers would use their device’s web browser for and they included shopping, searching for information, and searching for entertainment. This means for that you will likely have more mobile visitors to your website in the near future than you might expect. Are you ready?

Creating a mobile version of your WordPress website will become increasingly important to be prepared for the onslaught of visitors viewing your content on a tiny screen. In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the free WordPress plugin called WPTouch to instantly create a mobile version for anyone accessing your website using a smartphone or tablet!

What Is It?

The WPTouch WordPress plugin is a free plugin that provides a mobile version of your website for your content pages and blog posts to viewers on one of these devices.  This extremely robust plugin has many features and settings that allow you to customize this mobile version or you can leave it with the default settings to instantly provide your mobile visitors a website they can actually read and interact with on their small screen.

This tool helps you answer the question: “How can I create a mobile version of my WordPress website?”

For those that want more control over their mobile experience, Brave New Code – the developers behind the WPTouch plugin – have built a PRO-level version that gives you absolute full control over the entire layout and even allows you to build your own custom theme that can be integrated to work with their component. This is an extremely worthwhile option for those website owners who want to try their free product first, then upgrade to the Pro version when they want to spice up their setup.

Click here to get Pro!

Do You Have Any Questions?

If you had trouble following the tutorial or have any questions, drop us a comment below! Want to know more about how to use this tool or create a mobile version of another type of website, ask us a question below!

There are a lot of fantastic Facebook social plugins that can integrate with and leverage the social media platform to help you find, engage, and track your fans on your website, within various applications, and even within social media monitoring tools.  In order to use these tools, you will often need to identify and provide your unique ID numbers for your personal profile, your fan page, or your FB app if you have one. These are often referred to as your admin id number, page id number, and app id number.

What Is It?

Your Facebook admin ID, page ID, and app ID are unique codes that represent your specific profile, page, or application both within and outside the social network.

When you are logged in, these identifiers are used to track what you do in terms of liking and sharing content, plus viewing of pages, and using the various apps like “birthdays”, “Farmville”, and so on.

When you are viewing other websites who are using the various social plugins and you are logged into Facebook, your ID is what is tracked when you interact with one of these tools; for instance, “liking” a blog post or posting a comment with your Facebook account.

Why Is It Important?

If you ever plan to use any of the social widgets that are available to place on your website or you want to build your own socially-aware program, then you will need these unique identifiers to connect those tools to the Facebook platform. So be sure to locate and save your ID numbers for when you choose to use these tools.

Do You Have Any Questions?

If you had trouble following the tutorial or have any questions, drop us a comment below! Want to know more about what tools you can use to integrate with the this social network, ask us a question below!

Sharing your website content with the various social media networks is a great way to gain new traffic, fans, followers, and customers. Creating this link has never been easier with the creation of the “social media sharing” buttons developed by each network to easily post your content to their users personal feeds.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to easily add these social media sharing buttons to your WordPress website or blog through the use of a simple plugin called “ShareThis.”

What Is It?

Social media sharing buttons are simple little interactive buttons that allow your website visitors to share your content to their select personal networks. These buttons are relatively easy to install into your website with a simple “copy & paste” of the generated code or by using a social media sharing service such as ShareThis and AddThis.

Some of these networks include:

These tools help you answer the question: “How can I make it easy for my website visitors to share my content on all the social media networks out there?”

Why Should I Use It?

Sharing content on social media networks is a proven technique for attracting more traffic to your website. This helps you reach a broad audience that may have required a large advertising budget using more traditional marketing methods.

With these simple little sharing buttons, you could receive the following benefits:

• Gain new website traffic to your website
• Increase the number of tweets, retweets, and shares of your hashtag on Twitter
• Increase your search engine rankings from these shares and social bookmarkings using Delicious and StumpleUpon
• Gain new “fans” and “likes” that increase the reach of your content on Facebook
• Increase your awareness and credibility on professional networks like LinkedIn
• And a whole lot more with the over 100 networks that these tools help you reach!

The benefits for your website could grow exponentially just using these simple tools, so follow our tutorial above where we show you how to quickly install these buttons using a single plugin for WordPress!

Do You Have Any Questions?

If you had trouble following the tutorial or have any questions, drop us a comment below! Want to know more about the social media sharing, ask us a question below!

Facebook, with its 800+ million users, can be a fantastic source of traffic for your website that could then become new readers, new fans, and even new customers.  In order to attract them, you need the right tools to let people know all about the great content on your website.  Even more importantly, you need to leverage the power of “social influence” by showing your visitors what their friends and network have read, interacted with, and “liked” on your website. This will then encourage them to read, “like,” and share your content even further within their own networks, gaining you more traffic.

What Is It?

Facebook Social Plugins make up a set of tools designed to be installed into your website that create a “bridge” between your website and the social network.

These tools provide the ability to:

• easily share content from your website to Facebook
• allow visitors to become “fans” of your Facebook fan or business page
• post comments on your articles directly to Facebook
• and use “social influence” to get your visitors to engage your content at a higher success rate

These tools help you answer the question: “How do I get more traffic from Facebook to my website? And, how do I get more fans of my Facebook fan or business page?”

Why Should I Use It?

The Facebook Social Plugins were designed to help encourage more engagement between the platform and websites across the Internet. If your target audience is on this social media network and you want your content to be shared to gain more awareness, credibility, traffic, and even sales then these are tools that you cannot ignore to have integrated into your website!

Here is just a brief description of some of the social plugins and their potential benefit for your website:

• The “Like” button
  The most common tool we’ve all seen allowing website visitors to like your website, your articles, and your products and services. Once someone clicks the “Like” button, that web page is then automatically shared to their personal profile for all their friends to see, which could lead to more “likes” and definitely more traffic!
  
• The “Recommend” button
  Operates exactly as the “like” button, only using the word “recommend,” which psychologically could encourage someone to follow the link since the shared content item is “recommended” to be read rather than just “liked” by a friend.
  
• The “Send” button
  This button allows website visitors to send a link to any web page directly to one or more of their friends in a private message. This has benefits in that the “shared item” is now sent to a more targeted group of people with a more personalized message, thus converting to a follow-up action at a higher rate then a simple share to a person’s wall.
  
• The “Comments” block
  With this tool, you can allow your website visitors to post comments to your web content using Facebook instead of other services like Disqus, Livefyre, CommentLuv, etc.  The benefit of this is that when someone posts a comment to your article, it automatically shares that web page to their personal profile. So, think of an article with 100 comments. That’s 100 personal networks who now see the article… automatically!
  
• The “Activity Feed”
  This block shows website visitors what their friends (and others) are doing on the social media network with the content from your website in terms of shares, comments, and “likes.” This can influence them to read these articles and share them as well.
  
• The “Recommendations” block
  This block shows a list of articles that are specifically recommended for reading to each website visitor by showing them your top content (if they’re not logged into their account) or by showing them the top engaged content by their friends (if they are logged into their account.) This can be a great way to get your best content read and shared!
  
• And Facebook keeps adding more!
  To see what these are, go to: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
  

With just a few of these tools you can start leveraging the power of the largest social network to gain more readers, fans, traffic, and potential customers! They’re free to use and relatively simple to install! Just follow our tutorial above and we’ll show you how to install them into your WordPress website!

Do You Have Any Questions?

If you had trouble following the tutorial or have any questions, drop us a comment below! Want to know more about the Facebook social plugins, ask us a question below!

What Is It?

Facebook Insights is the built-in analytics tool created by Facebook to track users’ engagement with internal Fan pages and Facebook Apps that has now been extended to your own personal or business website.  Having this package installed on your website allows you to track how your website content is shared and engaged by members of Facebook.

This tool helps you answer the question: “What are people doing with my website content when I or they share it on Facebook?”

Why Should I Use It?

Facebook now boasts over 800 million users, each with the ability to find links, photos, videos, and more all around the web and share it potentially with thousands of people through their own personal networks. This presents a golden opportunity for you to get your website content distributed to a large group of people for free and possibly drive fresh new eyes and prospects to your website.

But how do you know what content on your website is actually driving people to engage your brand, product, or service and actually visit your website?

Before Facebook Insights was available for your website, the only way you could track this was to create a Fan page and manually post all of your website content pieces through your own Fan page and then use your Fan page Insights to see what was happening.  However, that left out any time your content was shared by someone else from your website to their own Fan page or personal profile and how others in their network may be interacting with it from there.

Now, with the ability to connect your website and all of its content directly to Facebook Insights, you can gain the following metrics:

• How many people came from Facebook to your website
  See how well your content is getting people from Facebook to your website. Is it a strong traffic driver?
• Get demographic data on people who have interacted with your website content on Facebook
  Learn the age, gender, and nationality of the people who are engaging your website content on Facebook
• How many times someone interacted with one of your articles on Facebook
  This can quickly tell you how many people are actually interacting with your content, meaning it was interesting enough for them to “like”, share it, or comment on it.
  
• How many impressions all of your website content received on Facebook
  This will tell you how many times an article(s) was shown on Facebook (the aggregate of all articles on Facebook.) This is like free advertising/publicity!
  
• How many people clicked your “Like” and “Send” buttons
  You can use this data to find out what content was “Liked” or “Sent” the most and thus what attracts people to your website.
  
• Check what content items were shared on Facebook and how many times
  See what topics and content pieces drive people to share it the most and thus reach more people!
  
• Track what content items garnered the most comments
  See what topics and content pieces get people talking and thus more engaged with you and your website
  

Having access to data like this quickly can confirm for you what types of web content on your website is gaining the most attention from users of Facebook and can help you better understand what you can do to get more “likes”, “shares”, and fans that can turn into customers for your business, volunteers for your cause, or just plain new people who like what you do!

Do You Have Any Questions?

If you had trouble following the tutorial or have any questions, drop us a comment below! Want to know more about Facebook Insights, ask us a question below!

What Is It?

Today most all of us know what Facebook is. The social network phenomenon has brought together over 800 million people worldwide and has created a whole new way for us to find, connect, and engage one another anytime and from virtually anywhere using our own virtual personal profiles.

A Facebook “Fan Page” is essentially a profile page, but for a particular person, place, or cause that is separate from our own personal profiles.  Through this page your “fans” (customers, partners, volunteers, constituents, and… well, fans) can connect to you and be engaged in a more professional manner instead of connecting to you directly and viewing those embarrassing photos your Uncle Pete posted to your personal profile.

Why Should I Use It?

A Facebook Fan Page is an excellent way to create an online community “meeting place” for the people that are connected to you, your business, or your organization.  Through this page you can engage, converse with, and provide valuable information to an audience that has the potential to reach into the millions (yes, you CAN have a fan page with over a million fans! It just takes a bit of work… or you have to already be famous…)

Facebook offers these different types of Fan Page setups that you can choose from:

• Local Business
  You can list your business address, which will allow users to “check-in” to your location using the Facebook web & mobile apps
• Company, Organization, or Institution
  This is the most basic of pages where all you need is the name of your business and what category it should be in
  
• Brand or Product
  Would you rather people be a fan of your product or brand rather than your business? (ex. I’m a fan of Fruit Loops! Not Kellogg’s!)
• Artist, Musician, Author, Comedian, or other Public Figure Type
  Do you need a professional page for fans of your artistic endeavors?
• Entertainment
  This option is great for entertainment venues, concerts, conferences, or other types of “events”
• Cause or Community
  This option will help set up a fan page for social/economic causes, non-profit charities, or communities centered around a topic or even geographic location

Using a Facebook Fan Page combined with the Facebook Social Plugins on your website is a great way to set up your own “mini-social network” and who doesn’t want their own little Facebook world?

Do You Need Some Extra Help?

If you had trouble following the tutorial or have any questions on how to complete the creation of your Facebook fan page, drop us a comment below!

In this tutorial, you will learn how to add the Google Analytics tracking code into your website to begin acquiring performance tracking data that can help you improve your SEO page ranking, your engagement process conversion rates, and your overall visitor experience.

What Is It?

Google Analytics is a powerful and FREE website statistics capturing and reporting tool that anyone can install into their website to gather valuable data about how visitors are interacting with their website.

This tool helps you answer the question: “What is my audience doing on my website?”

Why Should I Use It?

Besides the basic features included that help you understand how many people are coming to your website, how many pages they’ve viewed, and how long they stayed on your website, Google Analytics providers a deeper level of metrics that can help you define the following:

• Learn what are the top viewed content pieces on your website
  What content is attracting visitors to my website?
• Identify the top pages where people leave your site
  Where on my website am I losing people?
• Learn where geographically the majority of your visitors are coming all the way down to the city level
  It looks like most of my visitors are in the town right next door! Maybe I should open a location there?
• Learn how often visitors keep coming back to your site
  I see there are quite a few that visit my website more than 10 times in a month. Maybe I need a loyalty program
• Track your sales or lead conversion processes to find the bottlenecks and jump-off points
  Where am I losing people in my process and how can I correct it?
• Even track how people navigate through your website to find under-performing pages and navigation links
  I want to see exactly how people are navigating my site and what they are doing

Google Analytics can be as powerful of a business and website planning tool as you want or as simple as just keeping track of how many people stopped by to say “Hello!” It’s your choice!

Do You Have Any Questions?

If you had trouble following the tutorial or have any questions, drop us a comment below!

What Is It?

Quantcast Analytics is another powerful and FREE website statistics capturing and reporting tool that can be installed on any website to gather valuable data about how a website performs. But the power of this tool isn’t just in tracking the number of visitors to your website, but in giving you detailed demographic data about WHO is visiting your website.

This tool helps you answer the question: “Who is the audience of my website?”

Why Should I Use It?

One of the most important tools that can help you successfully grow your fan base, your customer base, heck even your friend base is research about who you want to attract and match that with performance data about who you are actually attracting.  The analytics tool from Quantcast can help you discover the latter through providing the following demographic and geographic metrics:

• Learn the average age of your website visitors
  Am I getting the ‘teeny-boppers’, the ‘baby boomers’, or the ‘late-in-life zoomers’?
  
• Learn the gender and nationality specifics of your website visitors
  Are my visitors mainly Asian males aged 35-44?
  
• Learn the education level, family make-up, and household income of your visitors
  Are most of my visitors college graduates with 2.5 kids and make $100K per year?
  
• Learn where geographically the majority of your visitors are coming down to the city level
  Wow, so it looks like half of my visitors are coming from Charlotte, North Carolina! Should I do something to focus on them?
• And, if your profile is set up for it, you can even track the different types and sizes of businesses that are visiting your website
  What, is that IBM checking out my report?

Quantcast is one of the most powerful tools that can help you identify the audience of your website. Who wouldn’t want to know that?

Do You Have Any Questions?

If you had trouble following the tutorial or have any questions, drop us a comment below! Do you use Quantcast, tell us what you like or dislike about it!