Really, how much can one say in a six-second video?

A lot.  Twitter Vine is growing rapidly and landing its role as a staple of online marketing efforts. Read the full entry

0 Comments

Small business owners are signing up for Facebook pages in droves.

Dan Levy, Facebook’s director of small business, revealed last month that 15 million pages are run by small businesses around the world, up from 13 million at the end of 2012. (Tweet this stat!)

So, how can these small business owners use the newly launched Facebook Home to further engage Facebook-obsessed users and drive sales? Read the full entry

4 Comments

Social media use and strategy are on the rise among business leaders, marketing executives and practitioners from around the world according to a recently released Social Marketing Strategy report from Ascend2.

While many respondents in the survey cited that the most effective tactics are often the most difficult and costly tactics to use, they don’t have to be.

In this blog post, we’ll cover how you can effectively market your small business while on a budget. Read the full entry

0 Comments

Social media use continues to increase, on both the consumer and marketer side.

According to a report by BIA/Kelsey, social media advertising revenues will hit $11 billion within 4 years, up from $4.7 billion in 2012.  That’s in the US alone. (Tweet this stat!) Read the full entry

2 Comments

Social media is taking the business sector by storm. Businesses use them to generate leads, attract and engage customers, recruit new employees, and perform customer service.

In fact, according to research presented by Bluewolf, the number of customers who attempt to engage customer service through social will grow by 53% in 2013.

Related: 6 Reasons Amazon is an Ecommerce Genius Read the full entry

1 Comment

The long-time social question: What social network should my business be on? While having a presence on the right social networks can make all the difference, engaging with your customers in the right way is even more important.

By getting social, businesses often have one or more of the following goals in mind: customer engagement, lead generation, and thought leadership. Small businesses that are looking to stand out from the crowd should spend some time analyzing which customers are the best for their business, but more importantly, what is going to engage them. Read the full entry

0 Comments

The worlds of social media and SEO are getting more and more intertwined every day. Both Bing and Google have admitted they use social signals and author authority as part of their ranking algorithm.

The Bing-Facebook integration strives to personalize Bing search results with Facebook data, and Google launched their own social network (Google+) to compete with Facebook for social prowess. Read the full entry

1 Comment

Having employees contribute to your social media profiles can help you expand your outreach, increase your followers, and attract new employees through the positive engagement of your current workforce.

However, this contribution can backfire if you do not have policies and training in place that guide how your employees participate on your pages. SmallBusiness.Chron.com suggests, “A proactive approach to starting official company accounts and managing the content helps you maintain a positive online presence.” Consider these tips before letting employees loose on your social accounts. Read the full entry

0 Comments

In January, Twitter introduced its newest application, Vine; a mobile video service that allows users to capture and share short, six second, looping videos.

Put simply, a Vine can be considered a tweet in video form. The short videos are meant to inspire creativity, but are they capable of wielding much more in terms of marketing value? We believe that they can.

As a small business owner, it is important to have as many marketing tactics up your sleeve as possible. This free application has many marketers thinking outside of the box for methods to engage their audience. Read the full entry

4 Comments

In the past, businesses connected with customers through direct mail, phone calls, and in-person conversations regularly. Now, customers are looking for more channels to have their questions answered and aren’t shying away from reaching out to businesses online. Social networks are no different.

More and more, customers want timely responses from brands they reach out to online. Twitter, one of the fastest moving networks, has become one of the major customer service outlets for today’s consumer. Here are three steps you can take now to be more successful with customer service on Twitter. Read the full entry

1 Comment