Social media channels such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare are being used by a large proportion of the population and help us to communicate, free of charge, and keep in touch with our friends. In a short span of time, these virtual places are becoming centers of exchange of views, information and experiences. It is here that customers and users seeking information about a service before using it: they inform, comment, leave reviews and opinions.

It is evident then as today is that every company must be active on social networks and listen to the opinions (both positive and negative) of its customers in order to improve. Here are three tips on how you can use social media to help you find online and to promote your service.
The company blog

1) Have a Corporate Blog
Having a corporate blog is very important. Creating your own business blog is an important factor that determines the flow of your business and would also help you to update it with information related to your service. For example, if you are a web agency, write articles, tips or guide on how to optimize your CMS for search engines and post it own your blog. You can write on any topics related to your service and post on your blog.

2) Set-up Facebook and Twitter Profiles
Facebook and Twitter are definitely the two most used social network of the moment. These two social media sites can be used to listen to things people say and think of you, create contests and competitions on behalf of your company online, ask questions to your customers and make yourself available to clarify and or assistance. You can also promote your services, company related updates, blog posts etc. in an efficient way through Facebook and Twitter.

3) Embrace Foursquare
Foursquare is a social network that is mainly based on geo location is being widely used by a lot of people. Its popularity is being increased day by day and is one of the most powerful social media channel. When the user goes through a particular public place Foursquare makes a check-in and notifies his friends that he was there. You can enter any suggestions or pictures on the site and you can effectively use it to provide discounts to those who make a certain number of check-in near your business, or you can give a prize gifts or gadgets.

These three are the most modern ways of promoting your company through social media and I have found it useful so far in the year 2011.

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Twitter is one of the most powerful micro blogging and social media site, which is having a large number of users as of present. Twitter is being used for a large number of purposes and is one of the most easy to use social media site. Twitter has finally decided to take off its old version and to migrate completely to the new one.  The old version of Twitter would be killed off this week, which has been revealed in an official tweet.   All the users using the old version of Twitter would be migrated automatically to the newer version.

The new version of Twitter was launched in September 2010 with some improved features and facilities. But since then Twitter had provided the users to switch back to the older version.  Some of the users (including top users)  didn’t find themselves comfortable with the new version of Twitter and as a result they continued using the old version.

The old version was pretty simple and clean and also had a good loading time. But with the new version certain new features got enhanced and  for some users the new version was not as fast as the older version, even though it had some new good features added.   The newer version of Twitter contains some cool integrated multimedia option and Twitter is planning to migrate all its users to the new version.

In my personal experience, ever since Twitter launched its new version in 2010, I shifted to the new one. But after experiencing it for a few weeks, I had to shift to the old version as I didn’t feel much comfortable with the new one. There are also a large number of friends, who also had the same experience.  But now, since Twitter has decided to take off the old version and migrate fully to the new version, we can hope that Twitter adds some more good features so that we feel most comfortable with that.

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Social Media is the real buzz of Internet and is constantly evolving all the days. Those who are internet savvy cannot ignore the contributions of the various social media sites.  There are various types of social media sites that suits for different purposes. Social Media really helps you in connecting with other people over the internet in a much efficient and effective way.

Social Media have already proved to be one of the best advertising platforms and since it is easy to target a specific audience through social media, most of the online advertising or marketing companies gives top priority to social media sites. Social Media is all about engagement and mutual encouragement. You may not taste success in social media channels overnight, rather it requires constant and long-time involvement to be successful.

There are a large number of social media sites that are available on the net and they are used for various purposes. There is a huge classification of social media sites and the list goes on never-ending. Here I would like to project 7 major types of social media sites that we come across in our day to day life. There are even other types which are not mentioned in this list, so I would like you to come up with the suggestions, if I have missed out anything.

1) Blogging Sites
Blogging is the most common thing that is used by online users and is one of the best way to share and express your content and ideas over the net. The major example for blogging sites are Blogger, WordPress, tblog etc.

2) Microblogging Site
Microblogging is the latest blogging trend and has achieved huge support from the social media audience worldwide. Two of the major microblogging platform that have captured the internet market in the last few years are Twitter and Tumblr.

3) Location Based Networking Sites
Location based networking sites are yet another latest social media channels which helps you to enhance  and easily interact with your social networking range based on a particular location or are. Two of the major location based networking sites are Foursquare and Gowalla.

4) Social Networking Sites
Social Networking sites are one of the most commonly used social media sites and there are a large number of social networking available out of which a few have become popular. The social networking sites helps you to stay connected with your friends and peers on the internet. Few of the major social networking sites include Facebook, Orkut,  MySpace, LinkedIn etc.

5) Social Collaboration  Sites
Social Collaboration sites are sites that uses online audiences to enhance their content. The content on these sites are populated by social audience, and these contents are moderated before posting. A major example for social collaboration sites are the Wikis or Wikipedia.

6) Social Bookmarking Sites
Social Bookmarking sites are yet another hugely used social media sites and such sites helps you to save you bookmarks online. Social Bookmarking sites also allows voting for the bookmarked stuffs and there by provides some good amount of traffic to your website. The major social bookmarking sites are Digg, StumbleUpon, reddit,delicious etc.

7) Multimedia Sites
Multimedia sites are actually the entertainment sites on the internet and multimedia sites consist of website that share  video, music and pictures on the internet. The major multimedia sites are Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, YouTube, Vimeo, (Pandora, Last.fm, Groove Shark, Turntable.fm etc.

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The current technology driven world has forced local law enforcement agencies to turn more into social media tools to keep the public informed and even solve various crimes. County Sheriff’s Office in Washington has been using and utilizing a Facebook page for about a year which has around 1,000 followers. The major job of the page includes up-to-date information about crime, information about wanted suspects and significant arrests. The County Sheriff’s office posts alerts about robberies, suspects, flooding, drugg arrests and all type of crime activities that is happening around. Photos of the most wanted criminals and suspects are also posted on the Facebook page, so that the public would be kept more aware about the crime activities in their localities.

The major advantages of using social media channel such as Facebook in low enforcement activities is that people can also post their ideas and confidential information about a sensitive case or so on. This is of a great help to the law officials as they usually get confidential information about criminals, thefts, theft plans etc. A Facebook fan page also helps to arrange discussions between the officials and public that are related to make peace and order in the locality. The public can express their opinions and doubts on the Fan page and they would be getting a resonable answers and appreciation for their opinions and doubts.

Since a lot of the younger generation is  using social media websites or channels such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, the low officials finds it easy to reach out to a wide audience. The social media activities can also be complemented with a regular updation of the official website of the firms. But since social media websites are much popular and easier to maintain and update, the law officials prefers social media sites over the website.

A majority law enforcement department has not yet fully utilized the advantages and benefits of social media site, and it is high time that they take the advantages of social media website seriously. Creating a Facebook fan page does not ensure the venture to be successful if it is not carried out in the proper way. So the Facebook fan page has to used and promoted in the best way to get the most response and benefits out of it. There are certain law enforcement agencies which do not have an official fan page, but has received many help from the social media channel in an indirect way.

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Social Media Marketing is one of the hottest thing in the area of online marketing and is also considered as one of the best viral marketing strategy that exist on the internet. Social Media Marketing have always complemented the traditional SEO activities and if you are really serious about your online marketing campaigns, then both of them should go hand in hand.  Most of the internet marketing professionals make the serious mistake of excluding social media marketing from their SEO activities.  Some online marketing guys also interpret social media marketing and social media optimization as the same, but the fact is that both are entirely different.

It has been proved time and again that Social Media marketing acts as a boosting activity for the SEO campaigns. With proper and effective social media marketing websites gain a lot of benefits in an SEO point of view. In short social media marketing always helps in boosting the SEO activities of a web site.  Some of the major advantages for SEO with an effective social media marketing program are listed below.

1) Branding
Social Media is one of the best platform available to enhance your  reputation and branding on the internet, provided it is carried out in the right and legitimate way. Remember, branding cannot be achieved overnight, but needs continuous effort and patience.

2) Getting More Backlinks
Social Media marketing helps you to get more backlinks to your website, both directly and indirectly. In other words, if your website content is marketed on relevant social media sites, you would surely be getting a handful of backlinks to your website from there directly.  If your content is promoted well on the various social media channels, other webmaster might naturally link back to your content, which is considered as the indirect but the best way of getting backlinks through social media marketing.

3) Traffic Generation
Traffic generation is another major benefit of social media marketing, that is liked by most of the web marketers who are into social media marketing. A site that is  marketed well in the social media platforms would be bringing you a large amount of instant and targeted traffic to your website.

4) Better Search Engine Performance
Social Media marketing is an amazing marketing strategy that helps in achieving a much better search engine performance for your website and it has been proved many times. And with the real time results by Google, social media marketing efforts has further improved its ability to improve the search engine rankings of a particular website.

5) Get More Targeted Traffic
Since marketing activities through social media channels is carried out on a specific groups or communities, it is quite clear that one would be getting more targeted traffic on to his web site. This aspect would certainly help and enhance the SEO campaign which is aimed at getting traffic from a targeted niche group.

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Twitter is one of the most popular micro blogging and social media platform which is being used by a large number of users. This is one of the most amazing social media platform to share your ideas to a large number of fellow Twitter users. Different people use Twitter for different purpose such as business, information sharing, chit chat etc.
Most of the companies have set up their own Twitter account by now and uses it for Tweeting about their management updates, product updates, major changes, job openings etc.  The companies do hire someone to manage their Twitter account and their main objective would be Tweet major updates via Twitter profile. Most of them tries to acquire as much followers as possible in the belief that their tweets would reach to a wider range of followers.

Even though most of the them manages to get a large number of followers, they are not able to get the expected responses for their tweets.  For example, if a company has 20k followers, then a plain tweet or  a tweet with a link has to get the desired results. But in most of the cases a Tweet with a link hardly gets 5-10 clicks at a time which is really hard to digest. We can say that majority of the users are from different countries and may not be on the system at that time.

If you get a good number of clicks on your tweets on any particular time, then you can say that your followers are responding enough to your tweets. But if you are getting the same number of clicks, i.e 5-10 clicks at all the time, then there are some serious issues with the number of followers in your Twitter profile. There are many other Twitter profiles that I know which hardly has 5k followers but produces 10 times higher clicks for Tweeted URLs when compared with a profile having 20K or more followers.

Some of the major reason behind this may be that your followers might not be relevant, they are not relevant or they are bots. If 19K out of 20K followers falls in these categories, you only have 1K followers and 40% of them might not be online at the time of your Tweet. so you would be able to reach your Tweets to the remaining 60%. Of these 60 % of followers 20% of them misses your tweets due to some other reasons.  In the remaining 40%  a few of them might not be interested to click on your tweeted links while the remaining few manages to click on your links. As a result you would be getting much less clicks than expected.

It may also be a fact that the active followers in your list may not be having an authority profile and as a result even if they retweet your links, it goes unnoticed. So if your followers are having a popular and high authority profile, then you have a better chance of getting your links go viral much easily.

So rather than filling your followers list with unwanted profiles, better to search for relevant, active and high authority profiles and try to get them as your followers. Even if your followers list is small, don’t worry. Make sure that they are interested in your Tweets and don’t make them bored. Also try to get involved in your followers tweets and this would help you in the long run. If your followers are having  great popularity, then it would be much more beneficial for you. In the end, it is not the quantity of your Twitter followers, but the quality that really matters.

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Propeller.com, another small social bookmarking and news aggregating site is set to stop it activities from October 2010 onwards. Propeller.com is owned by AOL- Netscape and works very much similar to the way the old Digg did. Users can share stories / news, vote for other stories and also comment on stories. Based on the number of votes the stories would be displayed on the front page.

The site is useful in getting some small traffic to our website and some of the popular categories of Propeller.com include Politics, World News and Health. The recent time have witnessed a decline in the overall user activity at Propeller.com accompanied by some poor technical flaws on the website. The technical flaws has led to more user migrating away from this site. This is evident from the stories that are present on the front page and top story section. A story with a fewer vote of 2-4 would appear on the front page and the front page normally consists of some spam stories.

Propeller.com’s plan to stop it activities have left me shocked as I was a regular user for the past few years and have made a good network.  All my hard work have been drowned and hope that I need to find out some similar news aggregating site for my online marketing purpose. I would not like to go ahead with the new Digg and it would be pretty hard to find a new site and build a reputation.

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A Social Media Professional or consultant is usually entrusted with the strong reponsibility of enhancing the online presence of a website through various social media channels. Social Media Marketing is an interesting job once you have hit the right track and are in full flow. Social Media Marketing has also become one of the best career opportunities for those interested in online marketing and actually there is a shortage of quality social media consultants world wide.

To be a successful social media professional, there are many things that you need to work on. Here I would like to provide 10 points that I think is essential for anyone aspiring to become a successful social media marketing professional.

1) Online Marketing Knowledge
Online Marketing Knowledge is the basic requirement for all social media professionals, and without the basic knowledge of Internet Marketing one cannot go far as a social media professional.

2) Knowledge of  SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the process of enabling website to get relevant organic traffic and this includes a lot of research and market study to get implemented. Since a social media consultant is always engaged with online marketing activities, he should have good knowledge of SEO and other search engine ranking algorithms.

3) Social Media Channel Identification
If a customer comes with his website for social media marketing, the social media consultant should be able to quickly identify the right social media channel or relevant social media sites to promote that site. Different social media sites have audiences with different behavior and hence a SM consultant should be able to detect from which social media site he can promote his client more effectively and efficiently.

4) Strong Branding Knowledge
Branding is an essential ingredient of any marketing activities and a social media professional should have enough knowledge about branding and different ways to achieve it.

5) Knowledge About Social Media Content Development
Social Media marketing needs different types of content which suits the interest of respective social media channel’s audiences. The content should be made as compelling, catchy and simple as possible. There are certain thing to take care while writing content for social media marketing and as a social media consultant one must be able to have enough knowledge about the ways to write and develop content for SMM.

6) Ability to Identify the Taste of Audience
On whatever social media channels a SM consultant is working, he should be able to identify the taste and interest of the audience. This helps him to market his website content in a much more effective way.

7) Active Engagement with Audience
Engagement is a mandatory activity in all social media sites and you should be able to effectively engage and communicate with the social media audience for better Social media marketing results.

8) Patience
One cannot achieve social media success overnight and you need to take your own time before you build a strong reputation around your social media channels. At times you may hit success instantly, but on the other hand there would be instance when you might take a little time to embrace success.

9) Desire to Learn More
Social Media Marketing is a never ending learning curve and every day you can see new and update social media sites, feature etc. So you should have the strong desire to learn about the latest social media technologies to go ahead with your social media career.

10) Strong Social Media Profiles
This one is the main thing and without this you cannot ever claim to be a social media professional. You should have a strong social media profiles atleast in your major top 5 social media sites. It is impossible to have great profiles in all the social media channels, but you need to have strong profiles in atleast few of them.

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Twitter is the most fastest growing social media site and has a large number of users. Twitter is so easy to use and most of the guys use Twitter for various purposes. Usually Twitter stats becomes too complex and makes it  difficult for us to manually monitor the tweets and hence we rely on various Twitter monitoring tools available.

A large number of Twitter monitoring tools are available and I have tried  a few of them. At last I have hand picked the top 5 of them, which I feel comfortable and easy to use. They may not be in the order listed below, but these 5 Twitter monitoring tools are always there in my browser’s bookmark.

1) Dailyrt
Dailyrt  is an online Twitter monitoring tool which helps you to view the most popular tweets on the web. This is one of the most interesting tools and it helps you to monitor tweets based on the hottest tweets, live tweets, personal tweets etc. You can also login with your Twitter account to take advantage of this amazing tool.

2) TweetReach
TweetReach is another powerful Twitter monitoring tool to find how far your Tweets travel. The tools lets you to  search for any term, including a URL, keyword, hashtag, name or phrase.

3) Twidentify
Twidentify helps you to view people who gets retweeted the most, current discussions and trends and also lets you know about the related conversations happening.

4) BackTweets
This Twitter monitoring tool is used to search for particular links on Twitter. The tool also has an advanced search option which makes your searching more flexible.

5) TweetMeme
This is the most common and widely used Twitter monitoring tool which is used to search and find the hottest stories on Twitter. It shows you Tweets based on the category and is used to make it easier for you to filter and share your searches.

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Digg seems to be going through a bad phase these days due to some reasons and the most recent departure of its CEO Jay Adelson has added to its long list of woes. The 39 year old Jay Adelson has decided to call it a day with Digg and is looking ahead for other better prospects. Jay Adelson have played an integral part in making Digg one of the most popular and efficient social news sites and his absense is sure to make some negative impact on Digg.

There is  a strong opinion that Digg is gradually fading and losing its relevancy due to the emergence of other social media channels which are somehow becoming more efficient in spreading the news than Digg. The management and staff were all working hard atleast to keep Digg afloat with its competitors. The quitting of Jay at this critical time has made matters more worse for Digg.

Mean while Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg has taken over as the acting CEO of Digg and is hopeful in taking Digg forward for more success. Read more at TGDaily.

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