Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the office
Not a status was pending; no clicking of mouses.
The tweets were posted by the interns with care,
In hopes that friend requests and follows soon would be there.
The Best Times to Post, Part I: Finding the Sweet Spots
November 25, 2012 by 9 Comments
I know it’s the heart of football season and the beginning of basketball season, but baseball is the sport that truly helps to illustrate this particular post. On social media, not all times are created equal. It’s important to know where and when to place your pitches to let your fans and followers hit home runs for you.
Five Social Media Tools to Grow Your Business
October 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Technology has become a walking, talking part of our daily lives. In fact, technology is so built into the decision-making of most people that it is nearly impossible to grow a company without utilizing social media tools. A company has to be visible in order to be relevant, and these strange new systems like SEO writing and link building services, which can be difficult to understand, are also essential tools for the modern-day entrepreneur.
Of the many tools that are out there, here are the five that every businessperson should be using.
1. Facebook
The fact is that everybody is there, and the Millennials especially are plugged into Facebook like you wouldn’t believe. More and more, that’s where people go to find things, and so to be viable you at least need a company facebook page. Once you have that, encourage your customers to like it; that’s probably the best way to drive referral business today.
2. Video
Video is a great way to increase the visibility of your business. The videos don’t have to be brilliant, they don’t have to be shot well, and they don’t really even need to be about anything. Again, it’s mainly about creating presence. But if while creating that presence you happen to come up with something that people respond to, you just might go viral.
3. Link Building Services
Link building services embed quality links to your Website from other content around the Web. To search engines, that appears as incidents in which other well-traveled sites are referring to your site. That makes your site seem more important, and search engines pick it up.
4. LinkedIn Endorsements
In important ways LinkedIn is still trying to define itself in the social media niche. However, as Facebook’s extreme popularity begins to catch up with it, professionals are looking more and more to LinkedIn for professional networking. That includes making endorsements and writing recommendations. If you jump in and endorse people you know, you’ll get endorsements back. A professional network can be crucial to growing a business.
5. Targeted advertising
Online advertising is still struggling to define itself as a truly new genre – a feat the major markets for advertising need to accomplish to make online advertising truly effective. But it does have the benefit of being inexpensive and, through social media sites, incredibly well targeted.
There are many other places to spend time and money online, and the fact is that a list written today, however true it is now, might be outdated in three or four months. The social media space is constantly changing, but investing in that space, especially in link building services and other search engine optimization methods, is the best way to help your business grow.
How Will Facebook Job Boards Impact Businesses?
August 10, 2012 by 3 Comments
Facebook is certainly stretching its legs into the business world. Rumors of Facebook launching its own job boards later this summer, possibly in response to other professional groups’ postings, could have a huge impact on recruitment for companies. How could this vast social network of nearly one billion help or hinder searches?
Facebook’s launch might be a strategic response to the growing popularity of LinkedIn, which is prevalent among the very specific crowd of business professionals. Facebook does a great job connecting and engaging with young people and will want to find ways to expand that notion. Facebook’s rumored job boards could very well make a significant impact on how recruiters, small business owners, and employees worldwide find good fits. With its expansive network, Facebook could be primed to make a large impact on hiring and job-hunting if it manages to employ this new idea correctly.
Can Facebook and LinkedIn Coexist?
Remember the song, “Video Killed the Radio Star?” The premise was that T.V. and video would kill the radio. Decades later, however, the radio is still around and doing just fine. Even if Facebook’s job boards succeed, I don’t think they will be able to wipe out LinkedIn. LinkedIn is very specialized, which will lend it the upper hand on Facebook for business professionals. As long as LinkedIn continues to innovate and seeks to serve its specific niche better than anyone else, it will continue to thrive.
Many believe that Facebook is viewed as a “more personal” social media platform. It does have a perception to change, but more than that, Facebook has to overcome the ways in which we all use it. If Facebook becomes a place where people could find work, overnight you would see a much more disciplined use. No longer could young professionals afford to post pictures of their crazy nights out (many can’t even do that today); their future employment could depend on the content they choose to share on Facebook. People would have to make the mental shift from using Facebook to catch up with old classmates to using it as a way to catch recruiters’ eyes, and that’s a major transition.
Enhance and Engage
The implementation of job boards will increase Facebook’s involvement even more. When you take Facebook and add a new dimension to it, you will increase engagement, and this move will still very much be within the boundaries of “social media.” This new brand extension theoretically blends well into social media, and does nothing to dilute Facebook’s brand in the minds of its users. This move will give users a whole new reason to check into Facebook, update their accounts, and share content that wasn’t relevant before.
This would absolutely increase Facebook’s engagement with its audience. And this means that small businesses would do well to ramp up their own involvement with Facebook – where the people go, leads follow.
Impact on Unemployment and the Economy
I, hopefully along with many others, would love to believe that Facebook could positively impact the nature of the economy, not only domestically, but around the world. With its unprecedented reach around the globe, if done right, Facebook could connect employers and employees better than any online platform ever has. While I don’t think Facebook will get everything exactly right, any attempt to connect people who need labor with the people who want to work could very well be a step in the right direction for a stalled worldwide economy.
Many employers today say that there’s a mismatch between what they’re seeking in potential hires and the skills listed in the applications they receive. Because Facebook touches so many various segments of the population, its job boards should help connect employers with people who meet their qualifications, regardless of where they currently live or work. Addressing this one element of the marketplace could have a significant impact on the economy.
With the amount of power and exposure that Facebook receives every day from its nearly one billion users, I would hope that any additions it makes to the site could create opportunities for individuals, as well as still work in a positive, coexisting manner with other groups. And hey, I may very well find my next employee on Facebook’s job boards.
Why Empire Avenue Matters
June 2, 2012 by 8 Comments
Some would argue that the biggest problem with social media and the internet in general is that there are too many ways to waste time on it. Even before the rise of social games like Farmville and Draw Something, “surfing the net” was akin to a more interactive version of being a couch potato. The productivity potential has never been met. Not by a longshot.
Empire Avenue offers something a little different. There is actual value that can be found in playing the game that can help individuals and business achieve their social media goals. Before getting into how that works, it’s important to understand the game itself.
How Empire Avenue Works
In essence, it’s a social game where users buy and sell “stocks” of each other that are influenced by a wide variety of factors including social profile relevance, activity on and off the site, and the standard stock play of buying high and selling low. Users are given currency (EAves) and told to spend them on buying others.
A user’s stock price goes up based upon how many shares are being bought and sold. If, as it is pictured in the image above, a user were to buy a couple hundred shares of my stock, it would get a bump and be worth more. If someone else sells, it’s worth less. Simple, right?
The complication comes with the interactions on social networks. Empire Avenue uses various formulas similar to the ones used by Klout and other social influence measures and rates a user’s account based upon how well they’re doing. Being new to the game (I joined with the Soshable account on May 22), my influence score on Twitter is rising but my others are low. As a result, my dividends are lower. This is important.
Dividends are the monetary rewards offered daily for owning shares. If a player has a high dividend relative to their share price, they are more attractive to other buyers. The closer a person is to having dividends at 1% of their share price, the better of an investment they’ll be.
In the example above, Reg Saddler’s Zaibatsu account is expensive, but it also has a relatively-high yield on his dividends. If I were to buy shares of his stock, I would receive around 3.39 EAves per share per day. This number goes up and down based upon social activity, but as you can see his ratings on Facebook and Google+ are extremely high and many of his other accounts such as Instagram and Twitter are also doing well.
At 3.39 EAves dividend against 445.11 EAves per share, it would take a little over 4 months to earn the money back from the initial investment and I would still own all of the shares to sell at some point or to continue earning dividend revenue.
How It’s Useful
Those who play the game regularly are able to accumulate “wealth” in the form of EAves. They get this currency when people buy their stock and when their dividends are paid out. They also get a little money from their own activities on social networks, but this is small. The benefit of activity on social networks is to make their dividends offered on their own stocks higher, thus making them more attractive for purchase.
The other way they can make earn revenue is through missions. This is also the key to why Empire Avenue is useful for business and personal use.
Missions are commissioned by users and usually require an action on or off of Empire Avenue. Here’s an example with the details blotted out:
In this case, you can see that the user is requesting social media interaction and is offering 1500 EAves for up to 35 people to complete. It’s a very simple and straight-forward way to encourage engagement and improve the social media presence for a business, organization, or individual.
The quality level we’ve found from this sort of action is much higher than other services. Because users are invested (pun intended) in the game and it takes time (as you can see from my account) to get going, the spam level is much lower than on Facebook share groups or LinkedIn groups where people can join and start asking for comments on their teeth whitening blog. As we all know, not all social media accounts are created equal, so getting a retweet from @zaibatsu on Empire Avenue is better than getting a retweet from @hotrussiamchix4919.
Empire Avenue is a game of interaction and intelligence. It requires involvement, but once a user gets the hang of it they are able to do what they normally do on social networks and reap the rewards with minimal effort on the site itself. Sure, there are those who spend all day on the site buying and selling, doing missions, chatting and forming strategies; in other words, it can definitely be addicting and suddenly no longer be a productive endeavor.
Those who play the game right can help their company or themselves be more effective on social media.
Promote Your Company’s Next Event Using Social Media
May 31, 2012 by 5 Comments
Have an important even coming up and want to spread the word? An event usually involves socializing, so what better way to promote an event then by using social media marketing on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? These social networking sites are used for connecting with thousands of people and reaching them quickly in regards to an upcoming event.
Building Relationships Through Social Media Networks
May 24, 2012 by 4 Comments
Social networking has become part of world culture in the last decade or so. Facebook currently rules the roost, closing in on one billion users, while others such as Twitter and Google+, with over 100 million users each, are very popular and growing. There is also a wide variation of social networks available, from those that are music orientated like SoundCloud to professional networks like LinkedIn. People want to get in touch with others, from catching up with old school friends to making contacts in their field of work, and social media networks allow them to do just that. Inevitably, social media networks have influenced the world of online dating.
5 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Twitter Account
May 18, 2012 by 4 Comments
If you don’t have a Twitter account for your blog or your website then you are missing out on a great marketing tool. Twitter’s approach to social media offers a unique way for people to interact, and can do wonders for increasing your readership or business when it’s used in the right way.
Be An Efficient Social Manager With Buffer
May 10, 2012 by 1 Comment
Time saving tools are always welcome to anyone with the job title social media manager. If you have this title, or something similar, it is very likely that you manage multiple social accounts everyday. Whether it is different social networks, multiple Twitter IDs, or brand clients, efficient tools are necessary to keep updates flowing.
Don’t Let Social Media Stop Your Real Life Existence
May 8, 2012 by 3 Comments
It’s a given that social media has turned into a great tool for many things. It has become a digital home to advertisers, writers, business’, musicians and the everyday web surfer. But it seems that more and more people are allowing themselves to be caught up in the social media moment and too much of a good thing could very well be a bad thing.
