'Net Features : google+, twitter, facebook

Which Social Network is Best for Merchants?

Michael Garrity — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:00:00 GMT

For the most part, e-commerce and marketing professionals tend to agree that social media plays an important role in the success of an online retail business. That’s good to know, but one tiny problem remains: With so many social networks and ways to interact with consumers on the World Wide Web, which site is THE BEST one to invest your time and energy on?

This is a question that has plagued marketers for a few years now, but since social media has officially been around long enough for every facet of it to be thoroughly examined (in most cases, more than twice), the pros and cons of the various social networks out there are well documented. This means finding the one that is going to be best for merchants should be a cinch, right?

Facebook
When it comes to social media, the first thing that pops into most people’s minds is their Facebook profile. Mark Zuckerberg’s famous website may have a questionable privacy policy, but there’s no doubt that when it comes to growing and engaging with your audience, advertising and even selling your products (through “f-commerce” services from companies like Volusion and Ecwid), Facebook has all of its competitors beat. With more than 1 billion users, Facebook has the largest collection of potential consumers out there, and plenty of ways to get your brand in front of their eyeballs, including its various advertising programs (display ads, Sponsored Stories, etc.) and the new-ish Graph Search feature.

Twitter
Twitter is a great platform for marketing your brand and sharing your unique message with the world. Since you only have 140 characters to say what you need to say, it really ensures that you stick to the essentials (something most marketers would be smart to do more of). It’s also an excellent platform for accepting and responding to customer queries and complaints (and retweeting compliments) in an efficient manner. Plus, with new services like Chirpify, in-stream Twitter-commerce is starting to become a reality, although a shaky and certainly immature reality, for the time being.

Google+
Google+ has yet to come out with a really feasible, useful shopping option like Facebook or Twitter, and it certainly doesn’t have the audience reach that Facebook can offer, but it does do one thing: help you get found. Since G+ is so closely integrated with Google Search, setting up a Google+ Page for your online e-commerce business is a great way to improve the way your business shows up on the world’s most popular search engine (by a long shot). Google+ also offers the added benefit of Google Authorship, which is great for online merchants with a blog, as it will provide their content with more credibility and authority in the SERPs.

Pinterest
Merchants love Pinterest, because it allows them to share images of their products to interested consumers, and we all know how much people on the Internet love pictures. The huge surge in popularity that Pinterest has seen in the last two years has been a dream for retailers, particularly those that sell products that lend themselves to being looked at repeatedly, such as apparel or home décor. And although interested consumers can’t actually make purchases on the social pinboarding site, Pinterest does allow them to click and link and be taken directly the specific page on their website for the product their interested in. So, since it is basically the online version of “just browsing” through a store, and can thus lead to impulsive purchasing decisions, Pinterest is certainly a favorite among online merchants, for good reason.

So, which is best?
Well, I guess that depends on what you’re looking for. Having a presence on the “Big 3” (Facebook, Twitter and Google+) is more or less imperative for different reasons (brand recognition, search visibility, customer engagement, etc.), but finding the one that works best for your business is really a matter of what your company’s unique needs are. While Facebook currently offers the largest selection of audience targeting and advertising options, as well as third-party services that allow you to actually sell your products through the search engine, making it the most solid, go-to social network for most merchants. But with that being said, don’t discount the power of Pinterest as a way to drive interest in your products and help browsing consumers find your offerings while they’re already searching for similar items.

Five Mother’s Day Social Strategies

Allison Howen — Wed, 08 May 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Sunday is Mother’s Day, which not only means that you still have time to pick up gifts for the most important ladies in your life, but also that brands have put their Mother’s Day marketing campaigns into full force across all social networks.

In fact, every holiday, event and change of season provides marketers with a timely promotional angle. And naturally, all brands take a different approach in their holiday-related campaigns. For example, a retailer typically promotes products as gift ideas, while content publishers create relevant content or contests to increase engagement. Yet, the best and most complete strategies combine multiple techniques in order to cater to every fan and followers’ preferences.

Website Magazine located five stellar Mother's Day social examples to offer inspiration for this holiday and future ones, too. Remember, Father’s Day is just around the corner…

Goal: Get People Talking

Brand: Seventh Generation

Social Network: Facebook

Strategy: Seventh Generation took to Facebook to ask a feel-good question and remind us how important moms are in our lives. The company’s use of an image to assist in asking the question “What is the best advice your mom has ever given you?” certainly grabs fans’ attention better than a text-based post and most likely leads to better engagement rates. Additionally, these fan interactions help Seventh Generation foster better relationships with its customers, as well as helps to increase brand awareness.

Goal: Generate Conversions

Brand: Sephora

Social Network: Pinterest

Strategy: Retailers and Pinterest go together like peanut butter and jelly, as this social network has proven to drive valuable traffic to e-commerce websites. Beauty company Sephora is taking advantage of this influential social network by creating an entire board devoted to Mother’s Day gift ideas. Not only do these featured items take visitors directly to product pages on Sephora's website when clicked on, but many of the images also include the hashtag, #mothersday, in order to increase the product's and Sephora's visibility on the pin boarding social network.

Goal: Boost Follower Numbers

Brand: ExtraTV

Social Network: Twitter

Strategy: Giveaways and contests are always a good tactic for increasing your social following, so why not combine these promotions with a timely event? Not only does this strategy from ExtraTV help the brand obtain more followers, but since the company asks for retweets, it also increases their visibility. Plus, this strategy will ultimately leave the two winning followers very happy.

We're giving away 2 @bfflco gift bags for #MothersDay! Follow @extratv & RT this message for your chance to win! bit.ly/MDWin
— ExtraTV (@extratv) May 7, 2013

Goal: Increase Brand Awareness

Brand: Google

Social Network: Google+

Strategy: Another feel-good strategy comes from Google, who has chosen to use Sunday’s holiday as a way to shamelessly promote its very own social network. That said, this video is very relatable (almost a tear-jerker), and truly shows how technology can be used to connect with the most important people in your life.

Goal: Improve Visibility and Engagement

Brand: Beats By Dre

Social Network: Twitter

Strategy: Advertisements are always a good way to increase your brand’s visibility, but Beats By Dre takes this strategy a step further by using an interactive and timely Promoted Tweet to reach new audience members. In fact, once someone clicks on the link to make a #Pillconfession (Pill is the name of one the company’s wireless speakers), they are directed to the company’s website where they can explore products and interact with the #Pillconfession campaign by posting a Mother’s Day confession either on Twitter or Facebook. Additionally, visitors can view the confessions of other consumers at the bottom of the webpage, which features an interactive collage of tweets and posts.

Got a #pillconfession? Make yours on beats.is/PillConfessTW. Apologies to moms everywhere! twitter.com/beatsbydre/sta…
— Beats By Dre (@beatsbydre) May 2, 2013

Profile Inspirations for the Big 4 Social Networks

Allison Howen — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 19:55:00 GMT

In today’s digital age, it is important for every business to broaden its audience reach by maintaining a presence on four of the ’Net’s most popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

However, posting engaging content and interacting with fans is just one part of the equation when it comes to maintaining a successful social presence, with the other part of the equation being design. In fact, often times, brands focus solely on posting a variety of content to social networks and forget about optimizing the real estate on their profile altogether.

Luckily, Website Magazine has found some of the best examples of social profiles on the Web to help provide some inspiration for future profile-redesign projects. Check them out below:

Facebook

There is a large amount of space to work with on Facebook Pages, most notably, the 851 x 315 px cover photo that is featured at the top of every profile. Although most brands have a Facebook presence, few utilize the social network’s design aspects quite like the brands below.

Kit Kat
This sweet company takes fan engagement to a whole new level by prominently featuring fans on its cover photo.

Priceline
This travel company has streamlined its marketing initiatives by using its Facebook cover photo to promote its ongoing “Priceline Negotiator” campaign. Moreover, the image features a specific hashtag so that fans can take their conversations from Facebook to Twitter without missing a beat.

Method
Method maintains a clean design by featuring and identifying its line of products on a white background in the company’s cover photo.

Twitter

Designing a Twitter profile can be tricky, because this micro-blogging social network displays profile pictures directly in the middle of the 520 x 260 px header images. As if creating a design that works with two images wasn’t hard enough, Twitter profiles also leave room for background images, which can appear differently on computer screens depending on resolution. However, the trick is to make all these elements come together into one large design.

Beggin’ Strips
Purina’s Twitter account for the delectable doggie treat, Beggin’ Strips, uses strategic placement to make its profile picture and header image appear as one design.

IKEA USA
While IKEA USA’s Twitter header and background image flow together nicely, the company keeps its branding initiatives strong by featuring the company’s icon as its profile picture.

CoreCommerce
CoreCommerce does a really good job at maintaining a simple profile design on Twitter that still attracts attention with the use of bright colors. Additionally, the company uses its background design to let prospective clients know exactly what type of services they can expect from the CoreCommerce platform.

Google+

Although Google+ hasn’t taken off in the way that social sites like Facebook and Twitter did, it is still vital for companies to maintain a profile on this network – to boost their SEO initiatives, if for nothing else. The main design elements to focus on when optimizing a Google+ profile include the large 250 x 250 px profile picture and the even larger cover photo, which measures 890 x 180 px.

San Diego Zoo
The San Diego Zoo has an unfair advantage when it comes to design, because its entire business is built on animals, and who doesn’t like looking at pictures of animals? That being said, the zoo still took some time to create a cover photo and profile image that feature a variety of the zoo’s inhabitants – mammals, birds and amphibians.

Instagram
For proof that simple is sometimes better, look no further than Instagram’s Google+ profile design.

Silverpop
This cover photo has been leveraged to visually feature the types of services that Silverpop offers.

Brands attract a whole different type of audience on LinkedIn, which is a good thing. However, optimizing the design on LinkedIn Company Pages can be a bit of challenge because brands want to attract attention yet stay professional at the same time, all with a limited amount of customizable space. That being said, the focus for these pages should be the 646 x 220 px main cover photo, because this is the first thing people see when arriving at a Company Page.

Nokia
Nokia uses its cover photo for featuring a variety of its products on a simple background.

General Motors
This automobile company optimized its cover photo specifically for LinkedIn by keeping the focus on people.

HootSuite
Just like Nokia, HootSuite does a solid job of featuring the type of services it offers without being too flashy or over-promotional.

Social Media for Home-Based Businesses

Administrator — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:15:00 GMT

When running a home-based business, the pressure of completing vital daily actions, in addition to time constraints, means social media strategy may not be your highest priority. But to outreach to an extensive customer base, build your online authority and gain a valuable platform for real-time customer service, it should be.

All social networks are not created equal, however. Brand social media is not a tool exclusive to large organizations, and for home businesses especially, can be crucially beneficial and should play an active role in daily business. Choosing a social channel for business depends on a number of variables, so before selecting one (or jumping straight into all networks) consider:

• What the home business is

• Who the target market is and which channel they are most likely to be active and responsive on

• The nature of the products and services sold

Considering what you want your social strategy to achieve can also help with your decision. For example, if you want to build yourself up as an industry leader, network, or promote your company and yourself through industry based discussion, then LinkedIn may be the most suitable network. But if you're likely to post numerous, frequent news, product and offer updates, and want to target and interact with potential clients more directly, using Facebook or Twitter may be a better route to take.

Of course there's nothing to stop you from using both! If you can meet the time requirements to maintain a dedicated and active presence across numerous social media channels, you'll be presenting a more varied, accessible and authoritative business profile. Just note that you don't have to join all networks at once, and be wary of the dangers and damaging effects which incomplete and sloppy social profiling can have.

Key social networks you may consider choosing include:

LinkedIn

LinkedIn acts as a virtual CV, networking and job-hunting tool, and for that reason works well as a B2B social network. Giving you the social status to network as a business figurehead, creating a LinkedIn company page can inform LinkedIn users of your home business, as well as your personal attributes and will showcase your services and company updates. Networking to contact key industry individuals and participation in regular discussion groups can establish your authority as a thought leader within your industry or area of business. It can also allow you as a business owner to advance, network, and raise your professional profile.

Depending upon your business or service offering (this may work well for freelance services for example), LinkedIn can also be an excellent way to source clients.

Twitter

For most organizations, Twitter is the go-to network. With users expectant and tolerant of much more frequent posting (some more brand active profiles post upward of 10 tweets a day), news, links relevant to your industry, retweets and other shared content can boost your profile. Plus, by taking advantage of Twitter features, such as hashtags, your tweets can be easily found in searches and your presence raised. Allowing you to present an accessible front, promote new product and converse with your client base, Twitter lets you directly access a much wider potential customer base, and can be a great way to gather feedback. Have an active follow and interaction strategy to boost and interact with followers and spread the name of your business.

Regarding the time restraints of being commercially active on Twitter, tweets can be scheduled, searched for and ordered using management applications, such as HootSuite or TweetDeck - meaning all daily social activity can be done at once.

Pinterest & Instagram

For businesses that offer a visually appealing product, having a Pinterest or Instagram account can be incredibly beneficial. Whilst Instagram works well in conjunction with Twitter (owing to its use of hashtags allowing users to locate images) and can be a way to encourage customers to create social content/ their own images related to your brand product, Pinterest works more as a virtual pinboard. Allowing users to 'repin' images of your product (once you have a developed profile), if your product can be aesthetically endorsed, both networks could work very well to an advantage.

Facebook

This is an excellent tool for home businesses with small audiences who wish to get to know their audience and fans. You can use your page insights to see what sort of content garners the best responses. Facebook is ideal for sharing and is more directly personal than Twitter, so knowing what content (images, links, competitions, etc.) your Facebook followers respond best to, can work to a business advantage in that you can encourage those followers to share your brand content to their own friends and followers as well. As a great place to share news, offers and promotions, Facebook works well for businesses with a wider consumer base, such as fashion or food, and offers a simple approach to customer service (comments and interaction).

Google +

Though less popular than the other networks, a Google + presence can be just as important. More relaxed when it comes to self-promotion, Google + allows for status and content sharing as with Facebook and LinkedIn, but importantly, as a Google owned service, means it is linked with all of Google's other products. An active account can provide additional SEO benefit: especially useful for smaller, location-dependent businesses.

Once you've decided which network to use:

Any social network can encourage customers to move from your social profile to your business site, and once you've decided which network(s) to be active on, you should consider some form of basic strategy to build a following - this can be as basic as deciding to use HootSuite to schedule in a certain number of tweets a day and replying to any customer feedback (good or bad), to forming a more comprehensive approach such as following targeted users and ensuring you mix your content between status updates, links, images etc.

The approach you take toward social media will vary depending on the time you have to invest in it, but making this investment can really help launch the profile of a whole business, especially if targeting a local market. You should make it easy for people to access your social networks, connect, share and promote you.

About the Author: Alastair Kane is a freelance writer working for 2touch, a leading provider of fulfillment services helping businesses keep their customers happy.

Picture Proof of Email's Value

Michael Garrity — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 22:00:00 GMT

One of the more well-received presentations at HostingCon 2011 was by Jeff Hardy of SmarterTools about the importance of email. The presentation has been put online and accompanied by an infographic that displays the difference in size and value between email and its closest competitors.

To quickly summarize the data in the graphic:

- Websites: There are 463 million websites, this term meant in the most general sense, that are currenly online with about 3.3 billion daily searches.

- Google+: There are 10 million accounts (obviously this is higher now, since they've had over 25 million users since August) and about 1 billion items shared on the site daily.

- Twitter: Twitter has more than 300 million accounts, though new statistics tell us that over 50 percent of those are inactive, and registers about 140 million tweets a day.

- Facebook: The world's largest and most infuential social network has over 750 million users and sees about 60 million updates every day.

- Email: Across the world, there are 2.9 billion email accounts, or the equivalent of approximately 42% of the world's population, and there are 188 billion messages sent each day.

This means that there are about 3 times as many email accounts as there are registered Facebook and Twitter users combined. Daily posts on those two social networking sites only account for 0.2 percent of the email traffic that occurs in a single day. The total number of searches on Google, Yahoo! and Bing, combined, is only about 1.1 percent of daily email traffic. Finally, the total number of page views on the Internet every day still only accounts for one-fourth of all of the emails sent.

Hmm, what possible conclusion could this draw? Well, let's go out on a limb and say that email is important. Web companies should take note of the power that their email has and how much it means to a company like Google, who find value in users above and beyond the price of email hosting.

As the infographic states, "Email is the most used, most valuable and highly-prized real estate on the Internet. This is why everyone wants it."

It's clear that even with the social media revolution in full swing, it's still going to be a long, long time before email is dethroned as the ruling power in Web business and marketing.