1. There isn’t a limit to the number of fans you can have. This makes fan pages especially valuable for Facebook users who reach, or are approaching, the 5,000 friend limit.
2. It’s free. You don’t have to pay monthly fees to Facebook to keep your page up.
3. It gives you a way to talk to and get feedback from your target audience, because like a user profile, you can update your fans with statuses that will appear in the news feed.
4. You can promote events, offer coupons or sell items on classifieds.
5. It’s an SEO boost in Google. Facebook is currently the second most popular site on the web. #1 site on the web is, you guessed it, Google!
6. You can easily promote it with Facebook ads or apps to customize your fans experience.
7. The Facebook Pages Insights analytics tool gives you useful information about your fans and their interactions.
8. You can build a community for your clients and prospects.
9. It’s another funnel to your website.
10. You can add unlimited photos and videos.

Benzing Web Design Marketing

Your gonna love it or your gonna hate it…Facebook’s new look, first shown at a Facebook developers conference in September, rolled out worldwide on December 15th 2011.

The feature offers users a visual personal history that is similar to a digital scrapbook or vanity license plate. Some have even compared its look to Myspace.

Users looking to check out the service immediately can click “Check it out” link below. Otherwise, an announcement will eventually appear at the top of your profile, according to Facebook.

Facebook is the world’s most prominent social network and hopes its latest digital makeover which aggregates and organizes your profile chronologically will help you “rediscover” the things you shared, collected, and liked for the most important moments.

“It’s the heart of your Facebook experience, completely rethought from the ground up,” Zuckerberg said when he first introduced the feature during this year’s f8 conference. “Timeline is the story of your life.”

For those worried about what exactly from their past might be popping up with the new profile, Facebook is giving users up to seven days to review their new Timeline before it becomes public.

Benzing Web Design Marketing

There has been some hype lately with Facebook news saying you are only 4 connects away from anyone. The 90s movie and play “Six Degrees of Separation” indicated that we are only separated by six people (of course this was based on a 1929 study by a Hungarian author). But on Facebook, according to a new report, we are only separated from anyone else in the world by 4.74 connections which I guess rounded up can be considered 5 but 4 makes me feel more important.

This comes as great news for Business owners who are looking to get the edge on their online marketing efforts. Even consumers can enjoy knowing they are 4 degrees from Kevin Bacon heck I know I am for sure.

So how do you get new customers using Facebook? stay social for one. but here are some other great tips:

• If you have a business profile, where your “friends” are your customers, friend their friends, then friend the friend of friends, etc. You won’t get a yes from everyone but you may make some new friends who will eventually turn into customers.
• Once you have a good amount of friends, don’t spam their inbox constantly with sales messages. They friended you so more than likely they are interested in your product or service and if they are not, they will eventually unfriend you just as easy.
• Post quality content and information on your wall and it will show up in your friends newsfeed. You may want to send a private message occasionally on upcoming specials or incentives. Post information at timely intervals so it doesn’t appear as if you are spamming their wall.
• If you have “fan pages” offer an incentive to fans that bring you new fans. Often a simple suggestion to your fans to “tell your friends” will bring work or by offering discounts to friends of friends. Even offering a free gift to those who get so many people to fan your page.

Social Media Marketing techniques slightly differ from the traditional but by using the KISS principle and staying social will help increase your sales.

Benzing Web Design Marketing

We all know that more Likes will benefit your Facebook business page but how do you turn those likes into sales? At the end of the day, the effectiveness of your marketing team is likely evaluated by metrics like traffic and leads. If your Facebook page has 500 fans but is generating no traffic or leads for your website, you really don’t have much to brag about.

Facebook fans offer a great opportunity for lead generation if you know how to leverage them. As they say, it’s not size that matters it’s how you use it. To get you on your way to use Facebook effectively for lead generation, here are six guaranteed tactics for turning likes into leads.

• 1. Implement a Like Gate – Like gates are popping up all over Facebook these days, and it’s not difficult to understand why. So what is a like gate you ask? They’re a great way to convert new likes into leads. Use your like gate to initially turn new page visitors into fans. Once they like you, present them with valuable content offers that they can obtain directly from a form on your page.
• 2. Share Links to Landing Pages on Your Wall – Amongst the updates and content you share with your fans on your wall, be sure to include a hearty mix of landing page links for lead generating, premium content like ebooks, webinars, and other educational downloads. In addition, make sure any blog posts you share include call-to-actions within the post.
• 3. Offer Exclusive Content to Facebook Fans – According to research from ExactTarget, 58% of Facebook users expect exclusive content from business pages. Take advantage of this insight by offering downloadable content that is exclusive only to your Facebook fans. Set up a website landing page for this content, and share the link exclusively on your Facebook page. Require that page visitors must “Like” you in order to view your offer to make it even more exclusive. You’ll be generating leads and leveraging the power of exclusivity at the same time.
• 4. Use ALL your Page Real Estate to Promote Offers – There are quite a few places on your Facebook page you’re likely overlooking to promote your offers. What about highlighting your latest offer in your page’s profile picture like the image to the right. Have you added links to offers in your page’s ‘Info’ tab? Don’t miss out on these high visibility areas!
• 5. Create Custom Page Tabs to Promote Offers – Customization of Facebook pages is tough…but not impossible. Creating custom page tabs are a great way to expand the possibilities of your Facebook page. Consider creating a tab just to highlight your offers. You can use it to syndicate some of your best-performing offers, or maybe just promote your latest offer or promotion on a rotating basis.
• 6. Create Product/Service Awareness – While it’s always a bad idea to be overly self-promotional in your social media efforts, you also want to make sure that your fans are aware of your products/services. Sure, they might keep coming back to you again and again because you offer engaging conversation and valuable content, but if they don’t even know what you sell, you’re not doing your job. Make sure your page clearly communicates what your business sells, and use your lead gen offers to support that with content that aligns with your product/service offerings. This will help spark a connection between your content and your product.

Benzing Web Design Marketing

The Concept

Social media marketing is a method of promoting your brand, be it yourself, a product, a service, or a company, by strategically making your presence known across various social media networks such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Reddit, etc. This may seem overly simple but “getting yourself known” is the kicker because each category of social media has a different detailed method for effective promotion.

The key concept to social marketing is that it is not designed to immediately provide business but instead it provides the visibility your brand needs to ultimately convert fans into buyers. I often get clients saying “I don’t think being on Facebook will get my products sold”. The truth is they are often correct. Having a presence on Facebook that provides great content or interesting widgets to raise the awareness of your brand so that users remember your service provides you with a soap box to share the benefits of your brand. In short, it is important not to forget this essential concept – social media marketing drives brand awareness which later translates into sales.

Social Media Categories and Strategies

This is an introduction to the various top social media portals segregated into their appropriate categories and paired with a recommended strategy can be rather effective. Please keep in mind the following is only a partial listing of some social media sites. If you want a more comprehensive list check out this list of social media sites.

Here is an organized list of Social Media Marketing categories I have identified:

1. Social Networking Sites
2. Business Networking Sites
3. Social Bookmarking Sites
4. Content Voting Sites
5. News Sharing Sites
6. Collaborative Directories
7. Video Sharing Sites
8. Photo Sharing Sites
9. Niche Networking Sites
10. Forums/Discussion Boards

Creating Your Plan

Now that you have an idea of the various social media categories and their potential marketing application(s) it is important to identify what you want to get out of them before you market to them. Be sure to ask yourself the following questions:

What is your ultimate goal?
Consider the objectives that come to mind. Here are some examples of common answers and what they might mean to your planning efforts:

“I want people to know my name and acknowledge my expert status.”
In this situation you may want to drive traffic to your main website about page or bio where you feature your services, testimonials or even your resume. Using social media you can build your online reputation by participating in sites that appear to have a strong following of potential customers; provide answers to their questions, find associated content that you know will help them and bookmark it. All-in-all you want to make friends and create a personal profile.

“I want my company name to be found within all of the major social media sites when my industry-related keywords are typed in.”
There are a variety of ways to achieve this but I expect the most effective is to create quality content that no one can help but link to. That is far harder than it sounds but the fact is that company names don’t rise to the cream of the Internet crop without blowing people away with helpful and thoughtful content. Once you create the content use a blog to disseminate it quickly while placing a snippet (say the first 3 paragraphs) into your social media profiles in such sites as Facebook, Bloglines, Blogger or Newsvine along with a link to your main article where readers can continue reading. By only providing a teaser for your article and pointing readers to your website for the full article you will be emphasizing the original content on your main site as the original article and you will heighten its visibility.

“I need to get the word out on my product/service.”
Press releases are not mentioned within this article but I would definitely not want to mention them. Use PRLog.org, OpenPR.com or 1888PressRelease.com to submit a carefully crafted press release to the web. Next go to each of your established profiles and tell your friends about your submission and perhaps even offer them a free product or trial of your service. Whatever you do the ultimate goal is to make it unavoidable for them to help you get it known.

How much time are you willing to commit to social media marketing?
This is a crucial question because it will determine just how big you want to make your social media plan. If you are doing this yourself then force yourself to set a few hours aside every day or every two days to keep your profiles up to date. If that is too much work then consider hiring someone to help you keep the content fresh OR just target the top social media websites in your strategy to market too. Whatever you decide to do start out small and then increase your social marketing workload only when you know you have the time and patience to do the additional work correctly. Remember it’s only as effective as the amount of time you spend on it.

Get Out There and Participate!
I find myself blown away by the shear number of social media websites that appear to be prospering and are regularly adding new creative methods to share and receive great information. Which is why it’s so important to keep in touch regularly, update often, and keep the content related to your niche. Not participating or updating regularly will just result in less traffic and exposure. The more exposure you have the better the opportunity to convert those leads into sales.

Measure Your Performance
Another thing I find that most people do is not track their performance. Social media marketing effectiveness is still a trial and error and you need to measure the performance to get the best results without knowing which content drives you the most clicks, comments or retweets. There are several tools that you can use to measure your performance. But let’s get some of the terminology out of the way first:

Sentiment
Are the comments positive or negative? Most current tools attempt to assign sentiment to a post automatically. While this is helpful for brands with tons of mentions, it’s only about 70% accurate in most cases[1], so manual verification and spot-checking is encouraged across the board before making any decisions based on influence data.

Volume
This is simply the amount of “buzz” that exists. Many monitoring tools give the ability to chart volume for specific keywords over time. This gives you a great way to measure the impact of your marketing efforts and social media campaigns, especially when combined with sentiment. A lot can be learned about your brand and your customers by investigating spikes in social media volumes.

Workflow
Workflow is the process of assigning, tracking and responding to social media, typically in a team environment. An effective workflow can prevent double responses and missed opportunities.

Now that we have an understanding of the purpose and the terminology surrounding social media monitoring, let’s take a look at some tools that can help you monitor your presence.

1. Google Alerts- An oldie but a goodie! Google Alerts allows you to set up keyword searches for the name of your company or competitors, for example, and receive updates in your email inbox or through an RSS feed.When combined with iGoogle, you can create a pretty nice consolidated page that contains the latest findings for your selected keywords. When it comes to monitoring social media, this is the least you should be doing; it’s free and an absolute snap to set up.
2. Icerocket- Used by many, Icerocket helps you keep watch over Twitter, blogs, web, news, images and more. Features include a topic cloud and basic listing of mentions. This social media monitoring tool also offers the ability to bookmark your search results for later reference.Although helpful, some users might find the interface and the style of the search results pages a little archaic compared to the other options.
3. Addict-o-Matic – This tool is a consolidated page with search matches across blogs, Twitter, Digg, Flickr and more. Featuring an appealing interface and one-page dashboard, Addict-o-matic is one of the best free tools available for summarizing all your “buzz” in one place.
4. Boardtracker – Boardtracker focuses on grabbing “buzz” from message boards and forums. Features include a topic cloud and influencer list. There are ads mixed in with your search results which may turn off some users. A premium version is offered. If your target customers are more active on message boards than other channels, this could be the right tool for you.
5. Social Mention – This social media monitoring tool features an interesting combination of easy-to-read metrics including reach, sentiment, passion, and strength (volume/day). Social Mention tracks blogs, blog comments, Twitter, mainstream news, images, video, and audio. Searches can be saved as an RSS feed so you can easily stay up-to-date.
6. ScoutLabs- Scoutlabs has a great clean interface and overall excellent features for volume trending, sentiment-tracking, learning about key quotes (based on sentiment), and managing workflow for response management. Unlimited results helps protect you from increased monthly cost due to unexpected spikes in volume.It’s a great option for agencies and freelancers because you can give clients access to a dashboard with your logo on it, branding the service as your own. Note that it can be a challenge to output some graphs and reports which may be an issue if you want to produce reports for your clients.

There are several more websites and tools out there to measure your success but these are some of the more popular choices.

Conclusion

So following the information above will help you gain more through social media marketing. Keep in mind there is still no guarantee you will get the results your looking for and you should always consult with an expert. So lets recap on some of the things you need to consider before running with your social media strategy:

1. Are you ready to invest adequate time in Social Media Marketing?
2. Will you do it yourself or need to involve a firm/others?
3. Will you and/or your employees need additional training to maximize effectiveness?
4. Do you know how to form a proper brand strategy online?
5. Where should you direct your main efforts, how much and when?
6. What tools will you use to measure social media marketing success?

Benzing Web Design Marketing

It’s been a while since I released a blog post and have been tinkering with ways to drive more traffic to our client websites through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Social websites are major tools in today’s online realm so knowing how you can utilize and track them becomes very important. This blog post will go over 5 ways you can drive traffic through social media.

So let’s start with some questions…Do you know how your social media activities are driving offline sales? How many customers came into your store or called for more information after viewing your social media profiles? Will the time they spend interacting on Facebook and Twitter affect your sales? more than likely Yes.

With that said what are ways we can improve our sales through social media? Let’s identify some:

1. Place Your Phone Number on All Social Media Accounts
Now I know what your thinking…I already have my phone on my social sites duh! well yes you do but not your Google Voice number. Not sure what a Google Voice number is? read more here. Currently Google Voice is invite only but you can find invites online or through eBay for $1. I have 1 invite left so first come first serve. Use Google Voice to track incoming calls from your social media profiles if your business has a more consultative sales process or you run a conversational blog or use social networks to generate leads. A natural extension is to place your Google phone number on all of your social media presences and on each blog page for the customers who find you via search. The best part about Google Voice is the ability to have a separate number that forwards to your main number. This also lets you track the number of inbound calls you receive from your Google Voice dashboard.

2. Promote Offline Events on Social Media
This is another no brainier and you are probably already doing this. But how you are doing it matters. Facebook has an especially robust function for creating events and promoting them. Facebook events allow you to post pictures and event location information, while also inviting your fan base to participate. You also can message all attendees to remind them about the event or give special instructions. Creating a Facebook event page then gives you a landing page that will direct visitors to your blog and Twitter followers too. Make sure you take advantage of all the aspects of the tools provided. Twitter also allows for events using hashtags or establishing Tweetups.

3. Offer Coupons Exclusive to Social Media Channels
This is an easy way to generate fans and followers. People love getting things for free or winning things. Not only will this drive more traffic online but also offline at your place of business. Make specific offers through each social media channel you use, like 10% off a purchase if you print a coupon from Facebook, or “buy one get one free” if you use a code sent out in a Tweet. Keep a spreadsheet of the different offers and the response rate, and you’ll begin to generate really useful data about the best way to optimize your marketing campaigns for each channel. Incentives are a great way to build the size of your social media communities. Also, giving fans and followers an incentive to follow you shows the importance you place on social media outreach.

4. Host a Tweet Up or Facebook Party
Creating fun meet ups for your online followers can be a great way to introduce the atmosphere of your business. Charity events and cocktail hours work especially well for drawing attendees to TweetUps. The best way to cement interactions online is to meet your contacts face to face, and there is no better way to do this than to host a party. While you probably won’t bring 1,000+ members to your event like Ford did in the largest TweetUp ever, TweetUps let you form more personal relationships with your local followers. Here’s a great in-depth resource on how to host a successful TweetUp.

5. Connect Social Media and Email Campaigns
This is hugely important and helps retain the interest in your products or service. Many businesses have established email lists they use to stay in touch with customers. Drive visitors on your social media accounts to sign up for your email list to receive more information about your business. Getting social media visitors on your email list can connect you with people you might not otherwise reach through social media. This also keeps things consistent.

So with these 5 tips you can start creating more exposure to your place of business. Now the best way to close the loop between social media and offline action is to promote your social media channels offline as well—adding another way for you to stay in touch with your customers in between purchases or research. I hope these suggestions help you start thinking about ways to convert your social media fans and followers into loyal customers. There are many other suggestions but you will have to wait for our next blog post to find out.

Benzing Web Design Marketing

One of the most difficult, or rather tedious jobs when running a website is getting reciprocal links. It really matters to search engines…a lot. Link building is getting your website address, be it any link from your site, placed on a remote website. Now there are probably several more ways to build links I am not discussing in this post because I have found these five to be the most successful.

So lets go over a few of my link building strategies.

1. Submitting to Design Gallery Websites
If you have a beautiful website why not express how you feel to the design community by submitting it to hundreds of them. And you will be surprised how many accept if your site looks nice and you don’t write a bunch of spammy text about it. One of my favorite submission services is The CSS Gallery List (http://www.thecssgallerylist.com/). They also provide a submission service for $20 which is in my opinion a great deal.

2. Blogging for Trackbacks and Pingbacks
Woah. I may have confused some people. What are Trackbacks and Pings? A trackback is one of three types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to their website. Pingbacks are similar to trackbacks. They use a XML-RPC request to send a link from one website to another and are less spam prone than trackbacks due to their specifications. They are both essentially for peer-to-peer communication and notifications between websites. Lot’s of current blogging and cms systems already use them: WordPress, MovableType, and Drupal. Know who and where to ping is important. There are millions of websites with the ability to send and receive pings or trackbacks. And there are even website services which help ping your website for example Pingomatic.com which pings search engines to crawl your website when you submit new content. (WordPress users can modify their ping list on the Control Panel, then Options, then Writing). Pinging a few sites will benefit heavily. Here is a good list of ping servers to get you started.

3. Get Active In Your Niche
Whether you are a gamer, business consultant, or selling ebay items you have a niche online. And a following of people who are looking for your services or products. If you have a blog with content and your getting trackbacks and people commenting on your posts. Now it’s your turn GET ACTIVE! responding to your comments and visiting other websites in your niche commenting on their posts. This is simple but tedious unless you are a fanatic of reading, writing, and commenting. Make sure you look for those high page ranking websites when reaching out. A great tool we use to check Page Rank is GetRanking.info. They provide a simple way to place your website address in a box and poof your page rank is revealed.

4. Directory Submissions
This I’m sure most of you already have done or at least heard of. Submitting to directories is one of the oldest methods of building links. And can still have some great benefit if you submit to the right ones and use optimized descriptions. Ultimately the most important directories are ones with high Page Rank. I would recommend submitting to Google’s Directory www.dmoz.org, and if your willing to pay for submission Yahoo’s Directory offers a great search return for $299 a year. There are thousands of directories online so submitting to all of them would get boring after say 50. But we are in a technology information age and people created programs to do this for us. Although submitting to 10,000 directories with the same description and information might affect the way search engines judge your page rank.

5. Social Media and PR Articles
This is becoming a strong way to build some links pretty fast. Search Engines are crawling more links every year from thousands of social media and article websites across the internet. Some with high page rank and some with DoFollow links compared to NoFollow. A dofollow link is a method some search engines use to determine if they are allowed to follow a link or not which in turn allows page rank to follow. Most websites like Twitter and Facebook not not allow following of links but there are a bunch of others that do: www.rateitall.com, www.xanga.com, www.yedda.com, www.reddit.com, www.dzone.com, www.killerstartups.com, www.ezinearticles.com. If you search google for ‘dofollow sites’ you should be able to get a few hundred results. Find the websites your topic appeals to most and submit them. Become active in these communities and watch the links for your website sky rocket.

So now that you have five ways to start building links get to it. Or you can always contact us and we will help you plan a link building strategy with some other methods as well as those described above. Benzing Technologies – Your Technology Partner

Benzing Web Design Marketing

As if this hasn’t already been talked about by hundreds of people… Social Media is a successful way to market your business. In this post I will discuss several ways to effectively use social media to make it successful for your business.

Being in the web design industry almost every client in our network is now using Twitter. We use it too, for expanding our blogging efforts and gaining more exposure to our products, services, and outstanding eye for design. But are we using Twitter effectively? How about Facebook, Digg, PR Newswire, or any of the thousands of social sites? We are just reaching around 1400 followers from Twitter, 300 from Facebook and some from social bookmarking sites like Digg which really isn’t that impressive.

So wanting to learn more and find out how effective we are, I did some research and found some interesting results/questions.

1. Your a Marketer, Not a User
Marketers can certainly have success with social media, but the key is to be an active user who contributes to the community of the site. Be a user first and a marketer second. If other users feel that you are only there to market, they will not be as receptive to your submissions, votes, or suggestions. This is why companies usually have a social media person on staff to handle this.

2. Am I Creating Content Specifically for Social Media Audiences?
Effective social media marketing involves creating content that will pique the interest of social media users. Once you are familiar with the community at your targeted social media sites, take some time to brainstorm article ideas that may appeal to them. Hence this is why I follow industry users and not just anyone.

3. Are My Followers Social Media Users?
Many sites and blogs, especially those with large audiences, benefit from having readers who are social media users. This makes it more likely that your content will be submitted without you initiating it, and it will make it easier to get votes. If your blog has a low number of social media users you may want to consider introducing them to specific social media sites in your posts.

4. You’re Posting Commercial Content
Social media users do not like to feel like they are being marketed too, and many social media sites even prohibit commercial content. If you are trying to promote your company with social media you will need to do it passively in order to have any success. The best approach is to use social media to build links and exposure to your site, and leave the marketing to other times and situations.

5. You Need To Build a Network
This is a very important point when using social media as a whole. The most successful social media marketers are very well connected. Having a network of friends and fellow social media users allows you to help each other with votes and submissions when needed. Many social media marketers share voting requests with their friends via email or IM, and sometimes even via Twitter.

6. You’re Only Focusing On One Method
Another common mistake is only focusing on the major social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, or Digg. While the major sites are the ones that will send the most traffic, they also have far more users who are competing with you and have more spam/hacked user accounts. If you focus on smaller sites or niche social media sites you may be able to get a “popular” submission with only a few votes. This traffic is much easier to come by and at least you will have something to show for your efforts. A very small percentage of Digg users will ever get results with their submissions. Why? because your a needle in a haystack. Same with StumbleUpon.

7. Your Not Engaging Your Followers
I’m sure you’ve seen voting buttons and widgets on blogs, like buttons, share this, and more. They are there for a reason. Use them and people will do the same for your content the objective with social media is to be social and engage your potential clients just as if you are going to a networking meeting. Plus the more content you share and contribute the more people will engage you and become positive social media followers.

8. Promote Your Social Media Accounts
One important thing with social media is sharing. Promote the fact you have a Facebook or Twitter account and make it easy to become a friend or fan you will be surprised who is already a fan or your work or product and doesn’t mind keeping up to date. The easiest way for you to share your website is with Share This widget. Which makes it easy to share your website or individual pages amongst the internet social sites.

9. Know The Tools
Social sites such as Twitter have tools which you can use to track and manage yours and others tweet activity through their website. Make sure you know what these tools do. Here are a couple social media cheat sheets:
Twitter Cheat Sheet
Facebook Getting Started Guide
Digg Cheat Sheet

10. You’re Only Submitting/Voting for Your Own Content
Don’t be selfish. Social Media needs to have involvement of others and your own content. Read other peoples articles, comment on other blogs, and share other content besides your own. You will not only gain followers but backlinks to your website it’s a win/win.

So What’s Your Experience?
Do you have another important tip to help manage social media effectively? share it with us.

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Benzing Web Design Marketing

The boom of social media is here and more and more businesses are jumping on board. But can we manage our reputations? With Facebook gaining over 300 million users and Twitter with about 50 million we know that consumers are looking more towards the net for information and purchases. Social media has added a new bump to the growing numbers with being able to comment and post what they want, when they want, and how they want it. This in turn makes it easy for them to say a product or service sucks and not to use it as well as how great it really is. Reviews aren’t new to the net and with more people buying online they depend on these reviews to buy their products.

So how do we manage our reputations in these times? does your company need to hire a staff member to manage social media and brand reputation? perhaps. But knowing a few tips can help without hiring additional staff.

1. Identify a strategy. Running blind you’ll run into trees. Make sure you know your plan of action. This is more of a general social media tip but is still valid in managing your business reputation.

2. Make sure you know your platforms security and privacy settings. For example Facebook has settings and options in your profile that allow you to limit people posting on your fan page or profile. Here’s 10 privacy settings for Facebook users

3. Limit your personal and business interaction together. Social media is about conversations but if you have a personal profile create a fan page for your business or on other networks create profiles for your business only. This will help eliminate those emotional moments in your personal life on your business name.

4. Always read the terms of service when joining a social network. Some social sites hold your information for whatever use or can resell your information to marketing companies.

5. Don’t just friend anyone and everyone. More numbers means better odds but identified numbers sell. Make sure you know their not going to just post a bunch of spam or become ineffective in your social media strategy.

6. Don’t fight fire with fire. Use water. Properly and humbly take care of outtakes or bad remarks with a way to improve their experience. This will ultimately add positive reputation and build great feedback around your brand.

7. Interact with your fans or friends respectfully. Leaving your ego at the door is recommended. You are basically creating a character online for your company to interact with your potential sales or customers. In other words don’t create a dick.

I hope these 7 tips help you as much as they do me. I keep finding news ways everyday to interact with my clients through social media. Now I just need to keep a solid strategy and stay respectful.

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Benzing Web Design Marketing

If you are familiar with blogosphere you know what is Technorati.

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. You can submit your blog to Technorati and ping their servers when your blog site is updated. when you ping Technorati their web crawlers read the updated information on your site.

Technorati offers an XML-RPC ping web service to allow blogs to notify content changes.

In this article we discuss how to write a PHP script to programatically ping Technorati when there is new content in your site.

The URL to ping is rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping.

The method name to call is weblogUpdates.ping.

The request XML must contain two parameters – your blog site name the blog site URL.

From the API documentation of Technorati, the sample request XML is as below:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
  weblogUpdates.ping
  YOUR WEBLOG NAME HERE
  http://www.YOURWEBLOGURL.com/

Let’s start writing the XML-RPC client to ping Technorati.

Our first step is to generate the required XML request string.

<?php
$site_name = "YOUR WEBLOG NAME HERE";
$site_url = "http://www.YOURWEBLOGURL.com";
 
$request = xmlrpc_encode_request("weblogUpdates.ping", array($site_name, $site_url));
?>

The function xmlrpc_encode_request as the name suggests, creates the request XML string. If you echo $request variable you will see output like below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
 
weblogUpdates.ping
 
   Benzing Technologies
 
   http://benzingtech.com

The next step is to create the streams context.

<?php
$context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array(
    'method' => "POST",
    'header' => "Content-Type: text/xml\r\nUser-Agent: PHPRPC/1.0\r\nHost: rpc.technorati.com\r\n",
    'content' => $request
)));
?>

The code snippet states that we are preparing to make an HTTP POST request to the server rpc.technorati.com.

The next step is to make the request.

<?php
$server = "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping";
$file = file_get_contents($server, false, $context);
?>

We now decode the response XML using the function xmlrpc_decode(). We determine whether the response XML contains a fault structure using the xmlrpc_is_fault() function.

<?php
$response = xmlrpc_decode($file);
if (is_array($response) and xmlrpc_is_fault($response)){
    echo "Failed to ping Technorati";
} else {
    echo "Successfully pinged Technorati";
}
?>

The entire script is pasted below.

<?php
$site_name = "Benzing Technologies";
 
/**
 * The URL of your site
 */
$site_url = "http://benzingtech.com";
 
$request = xmlrpc_encode_request("weblogUpdates.ping", array($site_name, $site_url));
 
#echo $request;

$context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array(
    'method' => "POST",
    'header' => "Content-Type: text/xml\r\nUser-Agent: PHPRPC/1.0\r\nHost: rpc.technorati.com\r\n",
    'content' => $request
)));
 
$server = "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping";
$file = file_get_contents($server, false, $context);
 
$response = xmlrpc_decode($file);
 
if (is_array($response) and xmlrpc_is_fault($response)){
    echo "Failed to ping Technorati";
} else {
    echo "Successfully pinged Technorati";
}
 
?>

The source code is available from the Code Album Github repository.

Benzing Web Design Marketing

Customizing social media pages is an important factor for designers, users, and social media marketers. The ability to create custom backgrounds and designs for myspace, twitter, etc. can become a lucrative business model for savvy designers and developers.

Compared to many other social networking sites, Myspace offers the most flexibility in the layout and design of a profile page. They provide a ton of customization options and make it easy to get a new look quickly.

There are some prerequisites before we jump into a fully custom design. You will need a photo hosting site account like flickr,photobucket,or picasa. This will host your background images or other media you want to put on your profile.

Let’s create a professional-looking page with the new Myspace 2.0.

Once you sign-in to your account, you’ll click to edit your profile.

Now, make sure that your profile is set to MySpace 2.0. If you already upgraded then you can skip this step.

You’ll now easily be able to browse around and interact with the theme editor at the top of the page. This is where the magic happens and you should play around with different settings to get the feel for how it works and what each selection in the theme editor does.

Now you can choose to use the themes that Myspace offers or upload a custom Myspace theme.

This is where your design skills come in handy and the creativity runs wild. To upload your professional Myspace theme, paste your own CSS code into the appropriate box. Don’t know how to write css? no problem. Get a brush up on CSS at W3Schools.

Make sure that you’ve clicked in the appearance box that you don’t want to choose a layout. Then input your CSS code in the textbox as seen above. Once you know what CSS is and have an idea on how to code it you need to know what codes in MySpace can be modified. Below is an example blank 2.0 CSS file:

/* body, main font properties, background of page */
body{
  background-color: #f8f8f8;
  font-family: helvetica, arial;
  font-size: 11px;
  color: #333333;
}
 
/* width of profile, second background color */
div.wrap{
  width: 60%;
  background-color: #fff;
  border-left: 1px solid #878787;
  border-right: 1px solid #878787;
}
 
/* header & navigation properties */
div#header, div#googlebar {background-color: #878787;}
#topnav {background-color: #878787;}
#topnav a {color: white;}
#topnav ul, #topnav ul li {border: none;}
#topnav ul li a:hover {background-color: #6C6C6C;}
 
/* global module properties */
div.moduleMid1 {background-color: #EFEFEF; padding: 5px; border: 1px solid #AFAFAF;}
 
/* basic details */
div.profileDemographics {background: white; border: 1px solid #AFAFAF;}
 
/* Interests, Blog Entries, Details, Friend Space & Comments */
h3.moduleHead{
  font-weight: bold;
  font-size: 16px;
}
 
/* general, music, status, ethnicity */
strong, h4 {font-weight: bold; color: #333333;}
 
/* link properties */
a:link {color: #333333; font-weight: bold;}
a:hover {text-decoration: underline;}
 
/* odd/even properties */
.interestsModule .odd, .detailsModule .odd, .commentsModule .odd {background-color: #F7F7F7;}
.interestsModule .even, .detailsModule .even, .commentsModule .even {background-color: #EBEBEB;}
 
/* footer properties */
div#footer {font-size: 10px;}

If you want to hide boxes and elements on your profile MySpace 2.0 Codes has a great reference of information to help you out. And a tutorial from Skeedio should get you up to speed on modifying the css files for MySpace 2.0

Once your done, click to publish your profile. Once published, click to view your profile and your Myspace page should appear like so:

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Benzing Web Design Marketing

I came across another great article written by Spencer Spellmen of Tutorial Blog:

It’s no surprise that Twitter has quickly risen in popularity among social networks. Few national and local newscasts can go an episode without mentioning the powerful tool. It’s almost become a competition to see who can gain the most followers or who can follow the most celebrities.

As a blogger, there are many different ways you can promote your website through Twitter.Here are 5 ways to market your blog with Twitter.

1. Promote your blog posts.

Use your Twitter account to share posts with your followers. There’s several different Twitter applications available that will automatically update your Twitter status when you publish a blog post. The power of it comes when your followers then share/retweet your blog post to their followers.

2. Involve your followers.

Twitter ultimately comes down to interaction. You’re not going to get more page views by just telling your followers to check out your new post. Pose a question or target your followers in a way that will spark discussion. Engage your followers!

3. Put a Twitter app on your blog.

Many bloggers are very active on Twitter, yet much of their audience doesn’t know it because there’s no place to show it on their blog. Put a Twitter widget with recent Tweets or a link on your blog that points people to your profile.

4. Interact with other bloggers in your niche.

Although it may not seem relevant to promoting your blog, it’s important to network with other bloggers and even promote their work. The better relationship you have with fellow bloggers and the more you share their work, the more likely they’ll be to share yours.

5. Offer incentives to your Twitter followers.

Doing regular contests and giveaways are the easiest ways to get easy traffic to your blog. Giveaways and deals are one of the most shared types of tweets on Twitter and as long as you’re giving away something interesting, then you’re sure to get traffic to your blog.

Article Source – TutorialBlog.org – http://tutorialblog.org/5-ways-to-market-your-blog-with-twitter/

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Benzing Web Design Marketing

Article written by: Spencer Spellman of Tutorial Blog

Everyone knows about the top social networking sites. Most people would agree that Myspace, Twitter and Facebook are the best social networks, but how about beyond that?

Although Myspace, Twitter and Facebook are some of the most recognized networks, many people around the world don’t use them. So, where do all the social networks rank? Below I’ve listed in order the top 10 social networks, taking factors into mind like registered users, funtionality and unique visitors.

1. Facebook. Although it hasn’t always reigned supreme, in recent months Facebook has come head to head with Twitter. Facebook is more stable technically and offers many features that Twitter doesn’t.

2. Twitter. Twitter has definitely gotten a lot of face time in the news lately, however, it still has some work since its in its infancy. Luckily for avid users, the creators are continually working on new features and better functionality.

3. LinkedIn. Many business professionals use LinkedIn. It’s a great resource for posting an online resume and highlighting your business skills.

4. Myspace.  Up until this last year, Myspace was easily the number one social network. However, Myspace is falling behind — some might say it’s been left in the dust. Although it’s in decline, Myspace still holds value for musicians and artists.

5. Ning. Although Ning has millions of users, it’s little known and utilized by most people. Ning has revolutionalized social media in a lot of ways in how it boasts thousands of niche networks within itself.

6. Bebo. One of the better known social network sites among the smaller sites, Bebo, like Myspace, gives users the option to customize their profile. Bebo has recently increased traffic because of new features that let users see their friends’ activity on other social networking sites.

7. Orkut. Although its little known in the U.S., Orkut is extremly popular in other countries, including Brazil and India. Most suprisingly is that its owned and operated by Google.

8. Hi5. Hi5 has been floating around as a social network for a while, but has never been able to keep up with the competition of Facebook, Myspace and others. It has most of the same features as Myspace and Facebook, but is more popular in Central America.

9. Friendster. Many people think that social networking began with Myspace, but it really originated with Friendster. It remains a top-notch social network similar to Myspace and Facebook, despite being overtaken by them a few years ago.

10. Xanga. Of the ten listed here, probably one of the lesser known, although its been around for more than 10 years. Xanga is different in how it focues on photo, video and weblogging.

ARTICLE SOURCE – Tutorial Blog – http://tutorialblog.org/top-10-social-networking-sites/

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Benzing Web Design Marketing

While I was researching other ideas on how to market myself socially I found a website with a great article on Developing an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy. Anna Laura Brown with Examiner.com writes:

Do you have an effective social media marketing strategy or plan? If not, you are just wasting time with social media and you may earn some money or get some business but you will not succeed at the level that you would like to. I see many people using social media in the wrong way or in many cases they are wasting time and goofing off. Now if your goal with social media is just to have fun then there is nothing wrong with this, but, if you are using it to get clients and make money, then it is crucial that you develop an effective marketing strategy and that you stop playing around.

Here are some tips to help you develop this strategy:

1. Write down your social media marketing plan. It is not good enough to simply have it in your head. It must be written, clear and specific. Include as a part of your written plan your goals by month and year as well as exactly what you plan to accomplish with your social media marketing. For example, How many new customers will you attract this month? How many newsletter subscribers? How many people will you approach about a joint venture partnership?

2. How much time per day will you spend on your social media marketing? Unless you are just getting started and you need to set up your profiles, or you are in the business of internet marketing or teaching social media, an hour a day will be just the right amount for most people.

3. Do you have a friend or follower policy? Do you know exactly who you are looking to connect with and what your rules are for accepting a friend request or following someone back on Twitter? Is this policy written down or just in your head?

4. What is your target market on social media? There are all kinds of people who are using social media and it is crucial that you decide exaclty who you want to connect with. In many cases, you will choose the same target markets that you are marketing to off line or with other marketing methods. However, you also need to consider where you can best connect with your target market. For example, if you are looking to connect with sales professionals or other top executives, while you will find many of them on Facebook or Twitter, it may be smarter to use Linkedin to connect with them. Or if you are looking for moms of young children you may find that more of them use Facebook than Twitter. You need to evaluate your target market and determine where the majority of them are and then spend the majority of your time on that social network.

5. What is your budget? Do you have money to spend on social ads such as those on Facebook? If you do not right now, then you should set a goal to eventually be able to do so as this will increase your marketing effectiveness.

6. What products and services will you promote with social media? If you have more than one business or job, which one will you market? or will you market both of them? If you have only an off line business or a physical product will you create some information products you can also market with social media? Doing this is another way to increase your social media marketing effectiveness.

7. Which sites you will use on a regular basis? Which ones will you use less frequently? Most people find than any more than four sites are too many on which to be active. Decide which ones you will use and then stick with them.

Answer these questions in written form and then take the time to adjust your plan as needed. Then get busy and work your plan and your social media marketing will be much more effective.

ARTICLE SOURCE – Examiner.com – http://www.examiner.com/x-13398-Salt-Lake-City-Social-Media-Examiner~y2009m7d30-Developing-an-Effective-Social-Media-Marketing-Strategy

Benzing Web Design Marketing

Wikipedia defines twitter as “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications.” But is it limited to this definition! Twitter has outgrown to become much more complex though simple to use tool for getting instant business as well.

Though twitter was started with ‘what are you doing?’ concept, it is no longer merely what one is doing individually but also the whole company, the market, and the world at large. It is similar to wiretapping the internet with the tweets. A twitter user can give away or take immediate information on the news or events or latest buzz in the online world well before, it is converted into news. It is the best platform for catching up with the people choices, dislikes, and understanding the market pattern. All you need to do is follow right kind of tweeple, meaning the tweeter users of your interest or choice.

Twitter also happens to be a great platform for getting opinion of the people regarding any particular thing, business, or company. It also enables to know what the people in general think of our business, company, or about us. This knowledge enables us to improve and fine tune our lacking. Here are certain sure tips to help you to make it big on the twitter.

• Never forget to add your picture or your company’s picture to your profile as people wish to connect to the real people and if they know your face then they can easily connect with you.
• Make a truthful profile description including your interests so that people can know you better and hence follow you.
• Tweet during the business hours as it is the best way to stay connected with your prospective clients, customers and establishes a strong bonding with them.
• Make use of direct message feature when you wish message the person who is following you and you are following him as well. This will enable you to maintain and strengthen your bond with that tweeter user.
• Congratulate, thank the tweeple if they have achieved or helped you respectively. Try and be genuine and humble this will fetch you a lot of goodwill over the twitter. If possible try answering the questions in the tweets or participate in the opinion polls. This will all help you to create more contacts and thereby make you have good online reputation for marketing your business.

ARTICLE SOURCE – PLAVEB – http://www.plaveb.com/blog/is-twitter-merely-a-platform-for-socializing/

Benzing Web Design Marketing

Over the last year, and especially the last few months, Facebook fan pages have quickly risen in noteriety. The launch of the new Facebook a few months ago shot fan pages into the spotlight as it allowed fan pages to be more customizable.

Fan pages also became more like profile pages, in that status updates now appear in feeds. Over the last month, fan pages have gotten even more publicity, as Facebook announced that administrators could create vanity urls for their fan pages. All of this begs the question: What makes a good Facebook fan page?

One of the most important things to make a good Facebook fan page is to make it pop. This requires more work, but it pays off as users want a page that’s going to jump out at them. Many fan pages fail simply because they don’t grab the user. All successful fan pages have at least some html or flash that is graphically appealing to users.

Another idea for creating a good Facebook fan page is to offer incentives or specials. Make your fan page a resource for people and they will return again and again. If you’re a small restaurant, you might post weekly coupons or specials. If you’re a service provider, you might use the fan page to answer questions from your fans or offer discounted services one day per week. You have to find what’s most relevant to draw people to your fan page, and then ultimately to your business or website.

Similar to incentives, another way to build an interactive Facebook fan page would be to run contests or giveaways for fans. Contests are great for fan pages because they build a loyal audience and makes your fans feel like a VIP. With the economy how it is, everyone is looking for all kinds of giveaways and contests. Think about partnering with another brand or Facebook page to give a prize away and encourage your fans to “cross-over.”

Fourth, leverage all your resources. Odds are that many of your customers and friends may be using Facebook and not even know that you have a fan page. Use your website, email, instant messaging, printed material and other social networking sites to drive people to your fan page.

Lastly, give fans the opportunity to connect, interact and have fun with the fan page and your brand. Many fan pages fail and lose fans because there’s no interaction with fans and no reason for fans to come back daily. Most people check their Facebook several times a day, but how often do they check for updates to your fan page? It doesn’t have to be something complex, but just a way to get people to interact and participate, because ultimately, the power comes when it’s not you, but other users who help spread and promote your fan page virally.

Article Source – Tutorial Blog – http://tutorialblog.org/what-makes-a-good-facebook-fan-page/

Benzing Web Design Marketing

If Twitter wasn’t in the media spotlight already, it’s certainly come out in the last few weeks with the competition between CNN and Ashton Kuchar to get a million followers and the massive use of it with the conflict in Iran.

Although many people are using it for fun, there’s a wide-range of people that are using Twitter for business. Whether an Internet marketer or a small business owner, many businesses are tapping into twitter power.

Get started with the Top 5 Twitter Apps for businesses

1. Twitter Search. As a business, this can be one of, if not the most important business tool you can use. Unlike most search engines, Twitter Search offers results in real time. The benefit for businesses is seeing up to the second trends in their industry.

2. Digsby. What many businesses want more than anything is a way to streamline their work. With Digsby, you get instant messaging, email and social media all in one tool. Select the sites you want to use and you easily have access to all your accounts in one window.

3. Tweet Later. If you’re in business, you probably don’t want to pull up Twitter every 30 minutes to Tweet. You would rather be able to automate your Twitter experience. With this application you can schedule tweets, unfollow those who unfollow you and track keywords that are relevant to your business.

4. CoTweet. Contrary to some of the other Twitter applications above, CoTweet is geared solely for businesses and brands. This application makes it easy for multiple people to sign-in and effectly manage tweets, respond to replies and messages and assign duties and tasks to specific users under that account name.

5. TweetLister. A great tool for realtors, buyers and sellers, this application lets you post a variety of different property listings. It offers yet another outlet for realtors and owners to get their listings to a broader audience. Easy to use, simply fill out the property information and it gets sent out to the twitterverse.

Article Source: Tutorial Blog – http://tutorialblog.org/5-twitter-applications-for-business/

Benzing Web Design Marketing