How to Improve Your Marketing With Facebook Apps

Want to grow your email list or drive more people to your business?
Are you looking for ways to connect Facebook to your business goals?

Read on as Mike Gingerich takes you through a detailed breakdown on how to do this. He's provided excellent examples and strategic inputs and advise to help you formulate your own success...AND, done this industry wise. :)

You can read the whole article here

Here's a little snipped to get you started:

Why Facebook Apps?

What kinds of apps (also known as tabs) do you have on your Facebook page?
Are you using the right features on those tabs to support your business goals and Facebook strategy?

Goals can include having visitors sign up to receive emails, download a coupon or ebook, enter a promotion or make a purchase.
These actions need to be easy to complete. By making it possible for visitors to do this in tabs on your Facebook page, you can increase the rate of visitors successfully completing the desired action.
Using the right tab apps can increase your success!

Below I reveal common goals of four different industries (restaurants, hotels and travel destinations, local retailers and professional service companies) and outline key tabs that these industry page managers should consider implementing on their Facebook pages.
As you’ll see, there are some commonalities of tab types that can and should be used to increase Facebook marketing success. So if your industry is not represented specifically, don’t fret—common threads do apply!

Can read the rest here:
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/marketing-facebook-apps/

How Adobe Social Helps Maximize ROI of Social Media

Adobe Social is conducting a free, live webinar on Tuesday that is sure to be pretty interesting. Craig Stoe and Jeff Feldman from Adobe will be showing off their solution to integrating social media efforts to maximize the ROI of social marketing. They’ll focus on how you can perform scalable execution and measure your results.

  It’s slated for noon ET, 9 a.m. PT on Tuesday, March 27. It’s free. So hop on over and register.

Smartphone evolution

Technology is bridging the communication gap and getting us to be more social than ever before. Mobile phones became an instant hit with users being able to connect and stay in touch with just anyone they wish to. As technology gets easy and intrusive, (if I can say) the growth rate of mobile phones is enormous. The mobile market in India is the fastest growing with 791 million users with China leading with 900 million users!

If that’s what the market is, the entry of the smartphone is sure changing lives and getting us closer to the digital and social world. The features and the innumerous benefits that the smartphone provides is letting businesses and consumers explore the mobile market with great fervor. Mobile developers are working on applications for smartphones that break the digital divide.

Get your movie tickets, place an order for the book you want to lay your hands on, send that tweet, check-in from any location with Foursquare and make the whole experience as exciting as possible. Though the mobile industry is growing rapidly, the numbers of consumers are few and the question of accessibility and penetration is an issue.

With America catching up with Europe, the number of teens entering the market is pretty interesting. With India, of course we all want to possess a cool smartphone but with 3G just making it here, it will be a long way to go. Internet penetration in India is an issue and this needs to be tackled to reach the smartphone generation.
What are consumers using the smartphone for? There are applications that get you instant information, updates, reviews and entertainment. Marketers do not want to ignore mobile marketing, as the benefits it produces are enormous! Tell us more…

Are you experimenting with QR Codes?

There is no dearth for marketers to get their products/services across to businesses and consumers. In the highly connected world, we are all marketing our ideas to people and ourselves. Just when the smartphone is taking the US market by storm, marketers across the globe are investing in the 2-D dimensional bar code called the QR Codes or the Quick Response code.

It’s a Japanese technology trademark of Denso Wave and has been extensively used. With the evolution of smartphones, and digital content a part of our lives, the QR Codes is being extensively used by businesses and organizations. All you need is a bar code reader on your mobile phone which has a camera of course. Take a picture of the QR Code and get information fed into the code. The digital information here can be a link, a picture, video, website, contact details, customer feedback form, instructions, registration details, social media communities and many more!

They are placed on products, magazines, newspapers, catalogues, event venues, you name it! Be as creative and imaginative as possible when it comes to these as they are inexpensive to implement. The expense factor comes into play when marketers risk playing with these codes in a market that is still unaware about its usage and benefits both as a business and a customer.

In India, QR Codes have been initially used by Ford and Mid-Day. Ralph Lauren introduces QR Codes on its clothing and United Airlines used it as boarding passes! Sky is the limit! Businesses today are using technology like never before to reach specific and niche audiences in a short span of time making it profitable for both. The process is also known as tagging.

Advertisers and mobile services are cashing in on the experience here in India. Catch up on the Blackberry ads and look out for more such marketing around you :)

Get that RSS feed!

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is what most online geeks love to tap! It allows users to share content on blogs, websites and other social networks. RSS is called a ‘feed’. It helps readers access to content that is regularly updated. Many websites and blogs include the RSS icon which lets users read content.

The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed's URI or by clicking an RSS icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds. (Wikipedia)

The biggest advantage of RSS is that it allows users to stay informed about things that they want to. You can subscribe to RSS feeds of my fav blog and read posts and updates when something new comes up. Feed Reader and News Aggregators allow users to use RSS feeds from the sites of their choice whenever they want. Web-based feed readers like Bloglines, Google Reader are quite popular and simple to use. Find sites that allow you to syndicate content.

Viewing content gets easy and controlled. For instance, in my Google Reader I have subscribed to blogs, websites, articles, that I would love to read more about such as Mashable, Social Media Examiner, TechCrunch among others. You could also add keywords that interest you.

Go ahead, and subscribe to the RSS feeds of websites you simple love! Also, make sure to add one on your blog/website.
More at http://www.whatisrss.com/

Social Science & Social Media

An article on Social Media Today, talks about the relevance of social science and its relation with Social Media. Social Science as we know is the study of society and relationships. We are all born into a society and are constantly communicating with people around us. The need to interact and communicate is what keeps a society/community well bound.

Similarly, Social Media is all about communicating and engaging with customers across channels online. With the rise of Facebook and Twitter, networking is just a click away. Brands need to engage with customers in a way that allows people to share and exchange information. Social Media is all about gaining visibility by developing human relationships. Posting content or talking to your customers increases loyalty and helps you win new customers in the process. This creates credibility and trust.

It's important to have friends, to share knowledge and information, to network and make life a bit easier. The same applies when it comes to virtual friends. It's great to see that you got a whole lot of friends out there. (The average number of friends a person has on Facebook is 150.) It overwhelms us when we get so many friend requests, likes and comments. There is a transformation taking place; we are a whole new personality. We love talking to friends via a wall and through pokes. It keeps us going. Social Media is changing the way we maintain relationships.
What we do in life is replicated online. Take for instance, LinkedIn- the fastest growing PNS. We all want to be recognized for our work and our skills and talent. A LinkedIn recommendation is a great way to get noticed for the right reasons. Twitter allows us to share information to a whole lot of people with similar interests.

There many such examples of online activity that is closely related to 'social science'. Social Science is the way forward in Social Media.

Infographics to tell a story!

A picture speaks a thousand words and infographics do just that!
It is nothing but a graphic work that is designed to tell a story in words, pictures and graphics. Also known as Information Graphics it helps tell a story in few words.

Businesses and design professionals make use of this amazing technology to convey ideas in a simpler manner. Infographics appeal to social media marketers. With a vast amount of information to keep up with, it’s easier to reach out to social media experts through infographics which get the message in a clear and concise manner. It not only helps end users grab information but also helps social media marketers to sell what they got. As it is more appealing, users are more likely to bookmark, vote or share it online. Most social media marketers are using infographics to collect data in an image and get it across to users.

Working with design professionals for creating the best infographics is a must. It works when the information said is accurate, has less text, the image has colors that are visually appealing. Most businesses are resorting to infographics to communicate messages both internally and externally. Externally, it helps brands acquire more traffic, and saves time. It is an excellent method to showcase facts and figures.
For more on Infographics, read searchengineland
sociatic