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What Are Some Social Media Websites?

Now that we have answered the question of what is social media, we can move on to social media websites.Because social media is such a broad term, it covers a large range of websites.

But the one common link between these websites is that you are able to interact with the website and interact with other visitors.

Here are some examples of social media websites:

Social Bookmarking.

(Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Simpy) Interact by tagging websites and searching through websites bookmarked by other people.
Social News.

(Digg, Propeller, Reddit) Interact by voting for articles and commenting on them.
Social Networking.

(Facebook, Hi5, Last.FM) Interact by adding friends, commenting on profiles, joining groups and having discussions.
Social Photo and Video Sharing.

(YouTube, Flickr) Interact by sharing photos or videos and commenting on user submissions.
Wikis.

(Wikipedia, Wikia) Interact by adding articles and editing existing articles.
And these websites are not the only social media websites. Any website that invites you to interact with the site and with other visitors falls into the definition of social media.

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Social Media For B2B Marketing – How To Get Started

One of the best things about social media: we’re all still learning and figuring this thing out. There are no true experts. Whether you’re in B2B Marketing, Social Media or any business, the world is getting smaller and great ideas come from all over the globe.

GetIt Comms is a B2B Marketing agency out of Singapore headed by CEO Anol Bhattacharya. I met Anol during #B2BChat sessions on twitter but have come to really respect the thought leadership they are providing. These folks really do seem to live up to their name – they “get it.”

B2Bento is their marketing blog and you should most certainly check these folks out. A couple of months ago they published this amazing INFOGRAPHIC: Quickstart Guide to Social Media Success. And Asuthosh Nair & Jaspreet Sidhu from GetIt Comms recently published this great whitepaper on Social Media for B2B Marketing. You can download it for free but here is a quick summary.

Why Does Social Media Matter

According to the report, traditional tactics just aren’t providing the return on investment that they used to. Our B2B buyers are spending less than 25% of their time paying attention to TV, print and outdoor advertising.

Where are they spending their time? Social Media. Hundreds of millions of blogs, thousands of tweets per second and huge growth in user numbers across the main social sharing sites Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin. B2B buyers are taking part in this trend with as many as 90% reporting that they use social media tools.

The report lists 7 reasons why B2B Marketers should use Social Media:

1. Social media provides the multiple touch points the B2B buying process demands
2. Social media can help identify hard to reach contacts within organizations
3. B2B professional are already actively networking
4. Social media enables 3rd-party influence on the purchase decision
5. It’s easy to showcase thought leadership through social media channels
6. Social media is cost effective
7. Social media enables rapid response to the unique requirements of the B2B buying process

How To Get Started

Plan Your Strategy: I have always said the first objective of social media is to define your objective. Whether you are looking to support your brand, drive leads, support customers or all of the above, it is important to have a clear set of objectives going in.
Do Your Research: Define your audience. What channels are they using most? What are they talking about?
Set Your Guidelines: I was proud to see B2Bento use the SAP company guidelines as a leading example along with other B2B IT names IBM and Intel and B2C brands Kodak and the BBC.
Get Cracking: The paper emphasizes that it is not enough to be visible. You also have to add value to the conversation through content, insight and thought leadership. It also highlights the need to be “transparent and genuine with their reader base.”
The white paper also goes into a few cases studies of companies that are executing on their social media plans and achieving real results. It also provides tips and advice on how to monitor results. But I’ll let you download Social Media for B2B Marketing to see that for yourself.

To me, this paper is the perfect example of social media marketers who “walk the walk” The white paper is using social media and content marketing to talk about social media and to demonstrate the thought leadership that GetIt Comms has in this area.

So I asked Asuthosh Nair who helped write the paper what drove them to create it and how the reception has been:

At the time of writing the paper, the B2B space especially in Asia had not quite cottoned on to using social media for their marketing initiatives. There were many self-proclaimed gurus and wild ideas whirling around that only served to confuse and alienate, rather than educate and inform. The need of the moment was a structured and practical approach with sensible and actionable ideas. We felt the paper would be the ideal platform to share some of the practical experience in this regard gained through engagements with our clients.

The reception went beyond expectations. We distributed it through various channels – our blog, Scribd, the Twitter-verse, and the like, and hit a thousand downloads in a short space of time. It also gained the attention of several B2B bloggers and to date has been read close to 4,000 times. What people have told us is how they could take the ideas in it and run with it in their organisations right away as it helped get buy-in from their management, and steps to get going sans theoretical clutter. We are gratified at this response. As always, we stand on the shoulders of giants in this space and while we don’t know it all (if that’s ever possible), we’re happy to have contributed in some measure to the collective stream of ideas.

So thanks to Anol, Asuthosh & Jaspreet for the great content. Please keep it coming!

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20 Social Media Tips

1. Spend at least as much time listening as you do broadcasting.

2. It’s called “social media” for a reason. Be prepared to interact consistently.

3. You can’t win the game focusing on the scoreboard. Focus on the game of engagement and the traffic will come.

4. Losing followers is okay, measure the engagement level of who is still here to see how you are doing.

5. Have a goal, measure results, measurement provides feedback and improvement.

6. The internet has always been about helping people connect to people (@nickusborne)

7. Pay it forward. Help, teach. guide and be patient with people new to the scene. [Tweet This Tip]

8. Study people who are credible with the type of clients you want to attract. Model their strategy.

9. Marketers aren’t always synonymous with community builders, traffic and followers isn’t always equal to credibility.

10. If you’re an old school e-mail marketer or pitch artist, there’s some habits you will need to unlearn.

11. Before you start your campaign define your market and their pains.

12. Everyone and every company gets off message once in a while. Refocus and learn from it.

13. Leaders of large “Tribes” need to have thick skin and a tolerance for noise.

14. Continually tweak and update your Linkedin profile, your network will be notified.

15. Social media is changing so quickly that if you stop too long to smell the roses you’ll be out of touch.

16. Try a new platform each month, video blogging, FaceBook, tumblr etc. Curiosity can lead to great discoveries.

17. You can’t make a robot network for you at a party, why do you think they can do it for you on the web?

18. Some un-follows are strategic. People want to know if you’re really listening.

19. You can’t please everyone. But know who you are trying to connect with. Get in sync with your audience.

20. http://www.ping.fm updates FaceBook, Brightkite, Twitter, tumblr and Linkedin statuses all at once.

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Web Ceo

Web CEO is a software package of ten main tools that help you to promote your site in search engines, analyze your visitors, and easily maintain your Website(s) at optimal quality.
Want to cut to the chase?If you’re a Website owner or a web developer, stop reading this review of Web CEO right now

. Head over to www.webceo.com and buy it. Don’t say I don’t give you good advice!

If you’re still not sure, read on and I’ll give you the lowdown on a piece of software that, if I was smart enough, I’d have purchased years ago — and saved myself thousands of dollars and thousands of hours.

So, you’ve decided to read on? Okay, I’ll start at the start.

Features

Web CEO is packed with features, including:

  • Keyword research tool: find the right keywords for your site.
  • Search engine optimization tool: compare your Website optimization readiness against the top ranked sites.
  • Simple editor: access, view and edit the various parts of your HTML page.
  • Search engine submission tool: automatically (or manually) submit your site to the search engines. Contains notes on each individual search engine with space for your own specific comments.
  • Check your rankings: a huge timesaver for search engine specialists and Website owners who need relevant data.
  • Link checker: quickly and easily check who’s linking to you, who’s linked to your competitors, and much more.
  • Website quality assurance: comprehensive review of all site components with detailed analytical reports. Quickly find and repair any damaged files or pages.
  • FTP uploader: quickly upload files without leaving the software.
  • Always know the status of your site: real time monitoring keeps tabs on your site even when you’re not there (and you can be emailed or telephoned the results).
  • Comprehensive site reports: includes hundreds of detailed reports to enable you to make the right decision every time!

Web CEO comes in a few flavours, each at a different price point:

  • Web CEO Free: FREE
  • Web CEO Startup: $19
  • Web CEO SmallBiz: $295
  • Web CEO Professional: $495

But wait! That’s not all!

Web CEO charges an ongoing fee for optional components of the software. This is and will continue to be the secret (aside from the brilliant software!) to their success.

  • For example, HitLens (the traffic analysis component) is priced at 59 cents per 1,000 page views for “Power Reporting” or 79 cents per 1,000 page views for “eCommerce Reporting”.
  • Site monitoring costs between $0 and 41.80 per day.
  • Access to the downloadable Knowledge Base updates costs a little more.

Now, many of us balk at ongoing fees like this. But, be realistic: the provision of the analysis and monitoring services, and keeping the knowledge fresh, takes time, money and significant resources. The guys at Web CEO aren’t about to compromise the success of the sites that use their product by scrimping to save the customer a few cents here and there.

You want the best quality software with ongoing quality service? Of course there needs to be an ongoing fee. To ask for anything less would compromise the quality of the ongoing service, and very quickly diminish the value of the software to customers like you and I.

It’s a great strategy that’s of great benefit to the customer.
…Sound Like Anyone You Know?

Once upon a time there was a handsome man. Let’s call him Brendon. Brendon was handsome and charming… in equal parts! Brendon owned a few ecommerce businesses, and he also ran a busy little Web development firm that did quite a lot of search engine work.

Brendon was going along very nicely and all was good in his world.

“I’m so very clever, I surprise even my handsome self,” he would often be heard to say. “Here I am, making quite a bit of money from my Websites,” he said gaily one day.

“Sure, it takes a while to manually check everything I need to check, and I’m not 100% sure of my search engine strategies, and I certainly won’t ever know what my competitors are doing — that would be far too difficult to figure out. And, although I’ve spent thousands of hours and dollars on my site management systems, I’m quite, quite sure no-one would have as much information on their site as I do! I’m so very clever… Let’s go find a mirror for me to look into….” And off he skipped.

I confess: I’m “Brendon”. I’m not very handsome. And I’m certainly not charming. But most of all, I’m not smart. What I’ve seen Web CEO achieve means I’m pretty much a moron.

If I was smart, I’d have purchased Web CEO as soon as I laid eyes on it. Why? Well, it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty and find out.

Web CEO Online SEO Toolkit

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IBP – On page, offpage, website analysis

In the wide field of search engine optimization,there had been lots of tools as well which paves the way in order to have effective search engine optimizing.

In this case, there was lots of software that had been developed in order to aid the needs of those internet marketers whom are handling several SEO tasks. There had been lots of SEO software that had been mentioned in any articles that we can see online, however, there is only one which hailed as the best search engine optimization software that you can really use. Among those software that were being developed were the SEO Elite, Web CEO, Link-assistant, Trendmx, Traffic Travis and even with the Web Master Toolkit, and with all of these SEO tools it is the IBP or the Internet business promoter that you can rely most of your search engine optimization tasks.

With the use of this Internet Business Promoter you can now have the chance of making all your tasks simpler. It has the ability of simplifying all your SEO processes and thus, this will also help your website gain the best page rank in the soonest time. Aside from these things, with IBP, you can also have those tested techniques that you can use in SEO and making a successful search engine optimization is already possible. Just like any other SEO software, this IBP is also riches with its reliable features however, it is somehow tested than those other software. If you wanted to harness the power of your website through the various SEO tasks, then you can make it possible with the help of the latest features that Internet Business Promoter is having.

Keyword generator, keyword density analyzer, keyword editor, HTML validator, pay per click campaign manager, link popularity improver, manual ranking checker and the customizable SEO reports are among the features that you can full employ in the processes relevant with search engine optimization. With the utilization of IBP, you can expect to have an all-in-one pack of SEO tools which will help you a lot in order to succeed with your goal in doing the said processes. You can also be sure of the fact that you can have the chance of having a top ten rankings in the search engines. This is already a guarantee since you can have a money back guarantee as well if you cannot gain the said top 10 rankings.

You can also make use of the user friendly search engine submitter which is one of the benefits that you can get from IBP. Thus, simplified process will be done out from doing those tedious submission processes. You can also have your own comprehensive IBP reports and data, which will provide you with the analysis of the various aspects which pertain to SEO processes. With all these reasons, there is no more doubt that you should make. Make use of the IBP as your best SEO software now and became among the top internet marketer in your field.

Try IBP Today!