Social Media Marketing | Best Marketing Techniques

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

June 8, 2012

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

Comments Off on 6.5 Million Passwords Compromised – Don’t Let It Happen To You | Internet Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Marketing | Tagged: linkedin passwords | Permalink
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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

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

Comments Off on Are Social Platforms Turning Into Visual Platforms? | Facebook, Infographics, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Marketing | Tagged: facebook timeline, pininterest, visual marketing, visual platforms | Permalink
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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.

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.

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

Comments Off on How Facebook Timeline Can Enhance Marketing | Facebook, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Marketing | Tagged: facebook marketing, facebook timeline, facebook timeline marketing | Permalink
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How Should An Effective Twitter Profile Look Like?

November 2, 2011

By Zia Ul Aein

Whenever people ask me about the top social networking sites that I am using for the promotion of my blog, I never forget to mention Twitter. The reason is simple enough; Twitter is the world of breaking news. Any major news, related to any topic, first gets published on Twitter and the most famous example is of Osama Bin Laden’s Death.

Twitter is a place from where you can direct people to your blog, website, LinkedIn profile or Facebook page. There are thousands of brands and celebrities on Twitter who are effectively using Twitter to maintain communication with millions of fans all around the world.

The focus of this article is on creating an effective Twitter profile which can drive targeted and useful traffic, first to your Twitter and then to your blog or website.

A Unique Name

If you are reading this article then you might know that Twitter is free to register at. You can register as many accounts as you want to but every time with a unique email. You can register a number of accounts by using variations of your own or your business name. You should not forget that Twitter allows a limited amount of characters for the name and unfortunately I had to face this issue. I kept the name of my twitter profile as Best Marketing Blog instead of Best Marketing Techniques but you can see that I still managed to make the new name as interesting and effective as the name of my blog.

Profile Picture

Select a professional picture of yourself or your business to use across all of your social media profiles. This technique would allow you to create a brand out of yourself or your business which would be used by people in recognizing you.

Found!

Double check your Twitter profile name for spelling and SEO purposes. You definitely want people to find you over Google or Twitter so make sure that your name is correctly spelled and optimized.

Website

If you are going to put www.google.com in the space provided by Twitter for a URL then it is better to leave it empty because Google doesn’t need such favour and it is not going to benefit you in any case. If you have a website, blog or a Facebook page, you can make the best use of the space. I would suggest leaving out the WWW particularly if the URL is a long one because the space is limited.

Who? What?

You will need to describe yourself or your blog in a very refined manner by making use of the 160 characters provided by Twitter for bio. Use the most important aspects about yourself or your blog to describe who you are or what your blog is. There is an image below where you can see the bio of my blog and how it reflects the objective.

You Are A Human!

The design feature of Twitter is my most favourite. You can choose a unique design for your profile just like your profile picture. This shows that you are someone worth following. Don’t be lazy by selecting the existing designs because for most of the people on Twitter, such profiles are computer generated.

So this is how your Twitter profile should look like. Now you can start connecting with people by following them and allowing them to follow you. Do not forget that Twitter is the most famous online newspaper and the exchange of information is very important. Keep on tweeting some useful and interesting information.

On Twitter and Get Interesting Tweets about Internet Marketing and SEO.

7 Comments | Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Twitter | Tagged: Best Marketing Techniques, how twitter profile should look, social media marketing twitter, Twitter marketing, twitter profile | Permalink
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How Good Is Your Social Media Marketing? – Part 2

October 3, 2011

By Zia Ul Aein

Formulation of a Social Media Marketing Strategy and Things to Consider Beforehand

Social media marketing can be a beneficial and successful path for your business, product or service to adopt. Proper planning and right formulation is very important otherwise every strategy can backfire and your objective of achieving the best marketing techniques can get hurt.

Before you formulate your social media marketing strategy, understand the state of online presence in which your organization is at the moment. The focus of this post is on the things which you should consider before the formulation of a SMM strategy.

Analyze Your Online Presence

Keep a considerate eye on the statistics of your website. You should be aware of the total number of visitors on your website and their origin.
Find out the amount of visitors which are directed to your website by the search engines.
The number of links your website has with other sites.
The activeness of your website in the target markets.
Compare your strategies with the competitors and find out what they are doing better than you and what you are doing better than them.
Find out if you already having a presence or reputation over social media sites or if you need to start from the very first step.

Know Your Target Audience

You should be aware of the:

Interaction level of your audience (how do they interact with the businesses, products and services like yours).
Keywords used by your audience to search for the products and services.
Needs and interests of your target audience.

Turning Your SMM Strategy into a Successful One

In case of an organization, you need to achieve commitment and dedication from your top management and especially marketing department so that you can attain the goals of your SMM strategy. Delivery of education and information would definitely be required in order to receive the maximum amount of commitment.
Start from micro goals and slowly move on to the macro strategies. Assign the tasks of posting and distribution of the content to the correct department such marketing or communications.
There are a number of social media marketing sites but you need to study all of them in order to identify the ones you need to focus the maximum amount of your attention on.
Do not dream or create those goals which you cannot achieve right now, always go with measurable, achievable and best marketing techniques.

2 Comments | Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing | Tagged: Best Marketing Techniques, best social media marketing, smm strategy, social marketing, social media marketing, social media marketing strategies | Permalink
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How Good Is Your Social Media Marketing? – Part 1

September 11, 2011

By Zia Ul Aein

Are you having the right mix of social media marketing? Do you think that you have those competitive social media marketing strategies which can help you stay steps ahead of your competitor?

You are most welcome to read further if the answer to the questions above is either ”Maybe” or ”No”. A social media marketing strategy needs planning and careful execution. After the right placement of every aspect, you can benefit long term. Social media marketing helps you in connecting with your customers in real time. You are able to receive immediate feedbacks, a new offer is instantly delivered, target audience is perfectly reached and customer loyalty is achieved.

Social Media Marketing is a blend of Publishing > Sharing >> Discussing through Social Networking Sites > Microblogging >> Video Publishing >>> Photo Sharing >>>> Podcasting.

Social Media Marketing Strategy

A well planned social media marketing strategy is about the utilization of every single online social media. This technique brings diversity to the online presence of your business. There are four basic hubs of social media marketing.

We are going to start our discussion with Social Networking Sites. The giant of social networking sites is known as Facebook. According to the recent statistics, Facebook has 750 million active users and out of those, 50% log in on daily basis at any given time. On the average, each user has around 130 friends. 700 billion minutes are spent by people per month on Facebook. If we talk about the mobile access, then 250 million Facebook users access their profiles via mobile and they do it two times more actively than non-mobile users.

Facebook is one out of many social networking sites or in other words, social media marketing opportunities. Creating a Facebook group or a page allows you to reach live, active and targeted audience. Twitter allows tweeting and retweeting updates and news in real time which is indexed by Google and many other search engines. Creating a profile over Linkedin provides your business with an exposure in the form of connection with professionals and other businesses.

The second online aspect of social media marketing is Microblogging. Blogging or blogs are a healthy way of interaction with your audience, especially your loyal customers. You can also direct traffic from your blog to your company or business website. A blog should be regularly updated and monitored. A community of loyal readers is created by responding to the comments and creating internal links. Microblogging on the other hand includes sending out short but interesting news and updates related to your company like on Twitter.

There are many famous company blogs which you can view in order to get an idea about how a company blog should look like and what kind of content it should have.

Facebook Blog

Google Blog

Acrobat Blog

Video sharing is more than just an enjoyment now. YouTube has changed the world of video sharing. Some years back, YouTube was a hub for people from the entire world to share personal videos and main focus was on the funny content. Now, businesses and professionals are taking video sharing as a serious matter by creating ads and videos related to their products and services.

As a business owner, you can share videos of your product developments, offers, press releases or information in the form of slide shows. Videos in the form of product reviews serve as the most important source for people to know about the pros and cons of a product which later on influence their buying decision.

Millions of iPods are sold every year and this brings us to the last but not least online aspect of social media marketing which is known as Podcasting. The term ”Pod” in Podcasting originated from iPod because the trend of downloading and listening to podcasts started after the invention of iPod. People find it easy and interesting to keep themselves updated while on the move.

This is the reason why so many companies create podcasts and make them available for download for their customers to listen and get their knowledge polished about the latest innovations and offers. Podcast.com and Apple’s Podcast store are on the top of the list for famous Podcast sites.

My next blog post will focus on the things which should be considered before the formulation of a social media marketing strategy.

25 Comments | Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing | Tagged: Online Marketing guide, online social media, social media article, social media guide, social media marketing, social media marketing strategies, social media online | Permalink
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Facebook – More Than Just a Profile

September 10, 2011

By Zia Ul Aein

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.

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 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.

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.

10 Comments | Facebook, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Marketing | Tagged: facebook advertising, facebook applications, facebook as a marketing tool, facebook best marketing techniques, facebook for business, facebook groups, facebook marketing, facebook pages, facebook profiles, social media marketing | Permalink
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Why to Switch from Facebook or Twitter to Google Plus?

August 14, 2011

By Zia Ul Aein

If you are one of those folks who are making use of social media for 2-3 years now then most probably you are having a set of both professional and personal accounts divided between Facebook and Twitter. It is possible that you need both Twitter and Facebook to monitor and manage your social media activities because both of the social media websites provide different options for social media marketing.

What if there is a solution which has the properties of both Facebook and Twitter?

That solution is known as Google Plus. Google Plus was released by Google a few months ago and many people didn’t pay much attention to it just like Buzz. I was myself not so moved by Google Plus but recently I decided to sign up for it and see if it’s worth using as a social media website. At the moment, Google Plus is the first website I open when I turn on my laptop in the morning and it is also in my bookmarks. I found it very useful to switch from Facebook or Twitter to Google Plus and here is why:

Google Plus proved itself to be an exclusive social media platform by introducing the concept of invite-only sign ups. Those people who were always attached to the network of social media jumped right in. The system of invites created a hassle and there are so many threads over different forums with at least 2000 replies where people are only asking for invites to sign up for a Google Plus account as fast as possible.
You can easily set up your profile with Google Plus once you are in the account. There are five tabs named Posts, About, Photos, Videos and +1’s. Posts will be activated automatically after the creation of your Google Plus account and in +1’s tab you will be able to see the websites, photos, videos, posts or anything you did Google Plus to.
There is no need to create multiple accounts at Google Plus for personal or professional use because Google Plus Circles are there. You can write anything you want to and it will only be exposed to those people to whom you want it to. There is no need to spend hours in creating lists and adding people to those lists in Facebook when you can simply drag the people in Google Plus to specific circles. I have created around 7 circles named Friends, Family, People I Sort of Know, Following, Co-workers and my Business Relationships.
Video Hangouts in Google Plus, in my opinion, can present a great amount of competition to Skype. The video quality is actually better than in Skype and without paying any extra money you can start a video group session. Google Plus would simply inform the people in your circle that you are hosting a video stream and you should expect anyone to join in (and maybe make some new friends).
There is one last reason but definitely not the least which made me switch my social media efforts from Facebook or Twitter to Google and that is the availability of Gmail, Google Buzz and Search at one place. I can switch between all of those services without the need of logging into multiple accounts or opening multiple tabs. I can save both time and efforts with Google Plus and you can do the same.

There is no doubt that Facebook would make use of counter marketing strategies and Twitter would keep on acting as the gold mine for people with 140 character messages but Google Plus has its own place and people are slowly realizing that. It was unbearable for Google to see Google Buzz failing but now I see their efforts proving with Google Plus.

14 Comments | Google Plus, Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing | Tagged: facebook to Google plus, Google plus, social media marketing, twitter to Google plus, why to switch to Google Plus | Permalink
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