6.5 Million Passwords Compromised – Don’t Let It Happen To You

June 8, 2012

By Best Marketing Techniques

If you have a LinkedIn account then this article is of a great concern to you. You might have heard or read that 6.5 million passwords from LinkedIn were leaked. If you didn’t change your LinkedIn password yet then stop reading this article for a minute, change your LinkedIn password to a very strong one and come back!

For the moment, it doesn’t matter what information the hackers found or what they were looking for. What matters is that a very serious issue has been exposed regarding online security.

There are more than 150 million users on LinkedIn which means that your chances of getting your password compromised are not more than 4%. Some of us might think that 4% is not such a big deal but think about this fact for a moment that the password you use online is a gateway to very important information and it is important for you to take action whenever the safety of your password is threatened. Even you if have checked your account and didn’t notice any suspicious activity, it is better to change your password to feel safe especially if your password is not a very secure one.

Secure password is very important and many of us make a huge mistake while choosing passwords for our accounts. A secure password is a combination of both capital and small letters along with numbers and characters. Another mistake many people make while creating online accounts is using the same password everywhere which is very insecure and easier for the hackers to hack into every single account of yours.

Another problem which many folks face is of remembering different passwords especially when they are a good mixture of everything on your keyboard. There are many websites and apps over the internet which offer services in password protection. They allow you to create and save different secure passwords for all of your online accounts. You are guaranteed safe storage of everything and you can access your credentials whenever you like. I will recommend Roboform, Lastpass, Passpack and Mitto.

I changed all of my passwords following the recent password leak of LinkedIn and I made the same mistake of choosing similar password for all of my social networking accounts. I personally use Lastpass to manage my passwords and it provides me with the feeling of being safe and secure. All of such services also provide you with the option of auto-login so there is no need to shake your head by remembering your complex passwords.

Zia Ul Aein’s LinkedIn

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Are Social Platforms Turning Into Visual Platforms?

March 13, 2012

The fact that internet is not more public and open is simply not deniable. Due to the virtue of social networks, people are able to maintain better connections with their friends and business contacts.

It can be observed these days that social platforms are transforming into visual platforms. Pinterest is one the top of the list which is considered as one of the fastest growing social and visual networks around. Facebook recently contributed to the list of visual platforms by lunching the Timeline. Infographics are everyone’s favourite and we like to check out one or two on daily basis. It is clearly visible that content in the form of visuals is taking over the social web.

Many of us claim these days that we are not fond of Television anymore. Do we really need a TV when we can watch more on the Internet? It is more attractive for us to browse images, videos and graphics on the internet than watching programs on the television. The question still remains, why are social platforms becoming more visual now?

pininterest

Pininterest

Comments and suggestions are user-generated content which enhance the engagement in a brand’s page. Community managers and page admins use these types of content (comments and suggestions) to carry out the sentiment analysis. Facebook also wanted the brands and marketers to think like publishers and that is the reason why Facebook launched the Timeline.

I had the experience of handling a couple of Facebook pages and I was able to see that Pictures and Graphics is the form of content attracts instant feedback from the users. Cameras and albums were used by people to compile photos before hits like Facebook, Pinterest and other photo-sharing platforms got introduced. Infographics are also a great way of distributing substantial data and users find them not at all boring to look through. Infographics make it easy for people to understand a particular subject by creating a visualization of a data or a process. Even if the subject of a particular infographic is not familiar to the users, they enjoy getting themselves informed on the subject by interacting with the mixture of text and pictures.

Visual social platforms is the next step in the field of social marketing where customers will interact with other customers and increase the brand awareness as well as PR. Soon the user-generated content will contain more of pictures and videos rather than simple or plain text and it would not come as a surprise because the number of photo-sharing platforms is on the rise.

Brands like Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts are encouraging the fans of their pages on Facebook to post not only comments and suggestions but also photos related to their products. Coffee and doughnuts is not the only thing their fans are getting, visuals are being served as the major part of the meal. Sharing photos and videos is a human instinct and brands should understand that being visual is the key to user engagement.

By Best Marketing Techniques

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How Facebook Timeline Can Enhance Marketing

March 12, 2012

Facebook has recently launched the Timeline for brand pages. Many marketers and brands are looking to enhance their customer relationship management and user engagement with the help of Timeline. Brands like Coke and Starbucks are first in the line to introduce their interactive and good looking Timeline pages and soon many other brands would have to follow as Facebook would make the change as mandatory. Facebook has also provided the option of Preview to the page admin in order to check how the page will look like. This makes the task of planning and assessing much easier and useful. One of the visual temptations of Timeline is the cover photo. This approach of Facebook shows that Brands can use the visual approach to connect with their customers. This post is going to discuss why Timeline can make or break a Facebook brand page.

1.       Leveraging Content Management

Content is the most useful asset and the soul of the internet. Content in the social media is not only about a couple of sentences or text. The world we live in is instant where people or in other words users share content with the help of mobile devices. The most shared content on Facebook comes in the form of videos, photos, site links and locating sharing pins. Facebook Timeline is a useful tool for brands to spread content. It is important for brands to know which content will drive the most engagement. Dunkin’ Donuts is making an effective use of Facebook Timeline in the sense of the content. There are more than 5 million fans of Dunkin’ Donuts page and the reason is that it is highly customer-centric. Visual is not the only thing which comes with Facebook Timeline, brands should also allow their fans to share content.

2.       Leave The Tabs Behind

Landing pages have always been a great help to brands and page admins. The landscape of brand pages has undergone a transformation after the introduction of Facebook Timeline. Before there were tabs which could be controlled by the users to get the desired impression but with Timeline, there are none. This leads to less instant likes and fan-gating. The advantage is that Timeline lets the users to get lost in the pages and explore to learn more about the brands. The disadvantage is no call-to-action likes such as ”Like Us Now to View More” which helped brands to get instant fans. It’s totally up to the brands to customize their pages in such a way that users would like to share them.

3.       Spread The History

Timeline is a great opportunity for the brands to engage their users with not only the user-generated content but the brand-generated content as well. There is no difference between a Timeline page for brand and a Timeline for a user profile. Every brand owns a rich history and Facebook Timeline enables brands to expose their history, achievements and milestones. Timeline for brand pages acts like a Wikipedia with everything documented in and readily available for the users to know about. A brand with an open history can definitely drive more fans and ultimately customers.

Facebook Timeline BestMarketingTechniques

4.       Better Customer Relationship Management

Facebook is now serving as more of a customer relationship management tool than a social networking website. Brands are able to communicate more effectively with their customers. With Facebook Timeline Page, customers are able to exchange private messages directly with a company which turns the experience of customer relationship management into something more personal and it is appreciated by every customer

5.       Real-Time Social Analytics

Real-Time Analytics were launched by Google in 2011. Facebook was missing this feature until the release of Timeline for brands. The Timeline for brands has provided the community managers and admins with the tools to enhance their experience of social monitoring.

Real-Time Social Analytics

The Real-Time Social Analytics of Timeline enables the page managers and admins to get the data in the form of Engaged Users, About, People Talking and Page post metrics. This also provides the brands and marketers with the opportunity to act instantly regarding replacements of content or ads in order to make it less stressful and more interactive for the users. It is still important to discover if Real-Time Social Analytics of Facebook is a game-changer or just hype.

By Best Marketing Techniques

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Looking To Fire Up Your Blog Audience?

January 4, 2012

There is no doubt about this fact that the current blog audience is more intelligent than the way it was when blogs were first introduced on the cyber world. Today, it is important for a blogger to know the techniques which should be utilized not only to find an audience but to retain them for as long as possible.

Your blog should cater to the needs and interests of audience by keeping up with the factors of amusement, entertainment, information and benefits.

The big question is what are the ways to fire up the blog audience?

Quality & Relative Content

If you want to see that how effective and useful the quality content can prove to be then simply make a small list of your most favourite blogs or the ones you like to visit the most. Do you like those blogs because they have quality and useful content? Do you find it easy to navigate through those blogs? Does the subject matter of those blogs fascinate you?

Now think about all these questions in terms of your blog and how you can optimize the content to be quality as well as relative so that your audience can bookmark your blog.

Personality

The term blogging has unfortunately been made limited to content and only content. What about those people who make and fill the blogs? They are the ones who are thinking and writing to cater with the needs of their audience. The audience in return asks for some level of informality and intimacy from the bloggers.

The audience looks for the ways and opportunities to connect with the bloggers and if you want to build a loyal audience then provide them with the ways to connect with you.

Make Some Friends

Blogging is not all about the competition. Blogging is mainly about providing your audience with the most useful and interesting content. You can do this by asking and allowing other bloggers to enter your friends list. This opens up a whole new chapter of guest posts and a high quality way for friendly link exchange. Do not forget about the factor of relevant and quality content.

Shhh! Start a Fire!

Conflict is a very strong word and it can start a huge fire when integrated into a line, a paragraph or a BLOG POST! Write about those ideas and concepts on your blog which can prove to be a great source of friction for people to start talking about.

Keep new posts coming in and don’t let the passion of discussion die in your blog audience.

 

By Best Marketing Techniques

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Facebook – More Than Just a Profile

September 10, 2011

By Zia Ul Aein

Facebook Marketing

Undoubtedly, Facebook is one of the most famous websites over the internet. With every passing day, thousands of people join the powerful online community of Facebook, fill up their profiles, add friends and chat with their loved ones. But, according to my perspective, Facebook is a lot more than just a profile and chat. For business owners, marketers and advertisers, Facebook is a pipeline of achievement and one of the best marketing techniques to flow through and prove to be successful.

There are a number of ways on Facebook using which you can promote your business, products or services.

Let’s start with Facebook Profile. The first thing you will need to create on Facebook in order to utilize other marketing techniques of Facebook is the Facebook profile. You can add the URL of your website or blog in the provided spaces along with a brief bio of your business. Make sure that you fill everything completely and wisely in your profile as empty or incomplete profiles are easily ignored.

After the creation of your profile, start adding Friends. Do not aim for adding 100 friends at a time because you can easily get flagged as a spam by Facebook and most probably your account will be blocked permanently. Add not more than 15 to 20 friends per day or every second day in order to keep it natural and secure. This way, you will easily be able to reach 500 friends in a month.

If you are looking for something like a forum, then Facebook Groups is the best way to go for. The best thing about Facebook Groups is the easy way to add people. You can add all of your Friends in your group and there is no need for them to approve it.

Facebook Groups

The only issue with Facebook Groups, just like that of a forum, is that you can only see the discussions or the content if you are a member of the group. This is because of the reason that Facebook Groups are not indexed by the search engines. Here I will recommend that you keep just a little part of your focus on Facebook Groups and more on the other marketing techniques of Facebook.

Facebook Pages are my personal favourites. I consider Facebook Pages as one of the best marketing techniques over the internet. Facebook pages are easy to promote because they are indexed by the Google and anyone can view the content.

You can make your Facebook page as attractive and interesting as possible. Fill out all of the necessary and important business information along with the URLs. Make sure that you use the most important keyword as the title of your Facebook Page in order to make it SEO friendly for search engines.

Facebook Pages

Facebook page is the perfect marketing technique to put the maximum amount of your focus on. You can make your Facebook page as viral as a Facebook group. Whenever you will post something in your Facebook page, each and every member of your page will get it displayed in his or her Newest Feeds section.

Facebook Applications is one of the most interesting developments of Facebook to this day. Anyone can create a Facebook application to engage users in different kind of activities. Some Facebook Applications are based on fun such as games whereas some are made for the sake of business promotion and they are proving to be useful for the users.

facebook-marketing

There are many Facebook applications which are having thousands of active users and if you want to create one for your business, product or services then check out the Facebook Developers page. After the creation of your application, you can market it in your profile, page or group.

Facebook Advertising is another great way to advertise your business. You can get unexpected CPC and CPM outputs with Facebook Advertising. If you haven’t created a Facebook Page yet then you can advertise an external website otherwise you can direct the traffic directly to your Facebook page. You can always target your audience according to age, gender, interests or locations.

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Top Marketing Techniques – It’s All About The Customers

July 5, 2011

Marketing is one of the most important aspects of a business. Without marketing, it is not possible for any business to gain ranking over the both offline and online world. I have gone through a number of texts and articles and came up with some common and important conducts they share about marketing.

According to my experience with marketing, I believe that these 5 aspects can be termed as the best marketing techniques which should be implemented in order to build a strong base of any business.

1.    Most Profitable Clients and Advertising Focus

For many companies, this fact is of a great surprise that it’s the small percentage of their clients out of which they make the majority of their profits. It might be that you are focusing your advertising on 95% of your customers whereas half of your profit is coming from left out 5%.

Would you find it useful to focus your advertising on non-profitable clients? Not at all, therefore focus your advertising and efforts on finding out the most profitable clients, even if they comprise of a small percentage. If the percentage of your profitable clients is 20% then spend 20% of your advertising budget on them.

2.    Most Profitable Clients and Consistent Advertising

Once you are able to know about the most profitable clients of your business, direct the advertising of your company on those clients and not just once but on regular basis. To build both trust and recognition, make effective use of your advertising. Stay in a regular contact with your clients along with a proper allocation of your advertising budget.

3.    Positioning of Your Company

If you can see that your targeted customers are happy with the service or product of your competitors then position your company in such a manner that it serves as the second choice for them. Many other competitors would like to brag positive things about their companies and spread negative things about the competitors but you should avoid this. This is because whenever clients would require a backup or replacement, your company will be perfectly positioned for that. Many of the companies and businesses avoid this strategy even though it is one of the top marketing techniques. You can achieve long term results with this strategy.

Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company (Michael LeBoeuf)

4.     Advertise. Stay In Contact. Ask For Feedback.

There is nothing better than your existing customers. They trust your business, they know how your business works and they show their loyalty. Always keep the maximum focus of your advertising on your current customers because they always buy more from you and cost you less in return.

Don’t forget: ”A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”

5.     Advertising is Familiarity – Familiarity is Trust – Trust is Customers

The relation between you and your customers is solely based on trust. Your customers will only do business with you if you are trustworthy. But, building trust takes time. A strong advertising campaign would help in making people get familiar with your company, the type of business or services you are offering. This consistent familiarity building will lead to trust building and finally you will achieve your goal of having loyal customers.

trust building cycle

Cycle of Trust Building

Remember: There is no shortcut to building trust.

Posted By: Zia Ul Aein

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