New social networks are being launched on a regular basis. This is because of the success of Facebook with over 800 million users from all over the world. Everyone wants to a piece of the social network action and aims to become the next Mark Zuckerberg. However, is there really any value to joining these new social networks for most brands?

To answer this very important question, we need to take a look at some things. Organizations shouldn’t rush to create pages or advertise on all social networks. To take full advantage of social networks, it is imperative to create specific strategies for each community. Here are the things you need to think about when thinking about joining newer and smaller social networks :

Are there members of your target audience in the social network you’re looking at?

Research is the most important part in almost all online business activities. Check if your target audiences are represented on the particular social network you’re looking at. The quality and focus of the members of a social network is very important especially when it comes to interacting with potential and current customers. If they are not well-represented, there really is no value to joining the social network and you will just be wasting your resources.

How much do you need to invest in this new community?
You need to at least have an idea of the resources such as time and money you need for the new community you’re looking at. Think about the time and money you can afford to invest or make a good budget of how much you’re willing to invest. You also need to think about the possible return on investment. Will you get your money’s worth from creating a new community?

How will the channel be used?
First of all, what are your expectations from this new channel? Are these expectations realistic? You also need to think about your main goals such as collecting feedback or promotion. Broad-based communities such as Pinterest are great for improving the relationship between the brand and its users by enabling brands to showcase their brand voice by using images and ideas.

Summary
These are only the basic questions you need to think about before diving into a new social network. The latest social networks always look very attractive. However, the real goal for brands is to choose the best social networks for their particular situation. By asking these simple questions, you can come up with a good strategy and plan for your social marketing campaign.

Controlling your brand’s message is one of the most important aspects of business that is crucial in achieving success. For online businesses, this can be done several ways including website optimization, using social media, releasing videos, etc. The main point is to ensure that your target audience hears what you want to say. The internet has revolved in recent years and one of the results is that controlling your brand’s message is now more important than ever particularly because of the popularity of social media.

Site Audit: How do You Use Social Media?
Before starting to optimize a site, the first action of a seasoned SEO practitioner is to perform a thorough technical dive with the intention of discovering the major and minor problems. Once these problems are established, it is time to make a plan on what actions need to be taken. Prioritization is also important in order to solve the bigger problems first and have faster results.

One of the most important parts of any site in terms of optimization is title tags. This is because it is one of the most important signals that search engines check when determining what a particular page is all about. Also, this gives visitors an idea what each page is about. Social media is the same and optimization it is often overlooked. This is obviously a big mistake especially because of the popularity of social media with hundreds of millions of users all over the world.

In one study conducted by ShareThis, they came up with the conclusion that Facebook makes up about 37% of traffic from shares with the use of the social share button. So, the question is if you’re fully taking advantage of this opportunity. In some cases, some organizations are still in the dark having no Social Media strategy at all.

Where to Begin
If you want to begin as soon as possible, you need to initially focus on two social optimization tactics:

1. Social Sharing – you need to have your Social assets in place and continuously improve on these assets. You should also leverage these assets on your site. This will not only enable you to become an authority through the point of view of search engines but it also allows users to share your content easily. It is very simple, the more shares you have, the higher your authority and visibility in SERP.

2. Social Graph and Social Sharing – this automatically points to the Open Graph because of its close connection to adding social share buttons. These two should come together since not having Open Graph tags hinders sharing.

Do you agree that the era of traditional website authority building is long gone? With today’s multitude of fresh and innovative channels, it is undeniably true that you have better options when building site authority. Using social media seems to be the best option, don’t you think? Well, on the surface this options appears easy and simple, but truth is social media also entails commitment, hard work and ample dose of strategy.

What is Website Authority?
If you have a website with awesome contents but it never seems to rank high on major search engines, then take a look at your website authority. What is it? It simply implies that your website is legitimate and has some pull. You’ll know you’ve increased your website authority when people start visiting your website because they learn something. Some might even leave an informative comment or link to your site. With this, search engines will eventually like your site for particular reasons. So once you create a useful post, search engines will get that content indexed quickly and rank just as fast.

What Search Engines Take Into Consideration?

• Number of quality inbound links
• Age of Domain
• Time that Visitors Usually Spend on the Site
• Site Authority

This article will give you 4 tips on how to influence social metrics using social media. This will help build your website’s authority.

Be True. No, you can’t fake becoming an authority in a specific industry. So be creative and be passionate. Train your staff and keep them updated regarding industry related topics. Create clever content that you can add to your website, which can be shared also on Social Media .

Know Your Target Market. Sure, identifying your audience is simple, but knowing your target demographic is not that easy. Determine how to effectively craft your messaging using social media. Encourage more meaningful interaction. Aim for maximum impact by engaging with your audience appropriately. You may send out customer surveys or conduct social listening research. This will help you recognize niche social networks including social sites, blogs and forums.

Grow Your Network! So you’ve shared contents on Facebook, tweeted out a few posts and received some +1’s? Should you stop right there? No. Using social media to develop your brand’s authority requires continuous participation. Your goal here is to have other authoritative users on the platform recognize your site and acquire a lot of friends, followers and/or circle-ers. Apparently, it’s mandatory to have regular interactions and high engagement levels.

When it comes to advertising, Facebook is at the top of the list.

Studies have shown that among all other social networking sites, advertising companies have chosen Facebook as their number one advertising site. And this is not so surprising because Facebook has currently the widest reach in terms of users. But, Facebook should not be too confident because other social networking sites are growing rapidly; sites such as Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, YouTube, and the new Google+. These sites are expected to get more advertising gigs for the next year or so.

The Advertising Market

Advertising is the life of every company. It is done in many ways. Through billboards, posters, TV commercials, radio ads, in newspapers, and fliers. But the newest form of advertising that has been developed so far is online advertising.

Online Advertisement

There are different ways of advertising online. There are some who put up links and SEOs, there are some who spam their way into emails of prospective customers, and there are some who use social networking sites.

Research shows that almost 2/3 of companies in the market are using the social media to run their advertisements (through SEOs etc.), and in the next few years, other companies plan to follow the current trend. Yes, social advertising has definitely grown and will still grow in the next couple of years (it will still evolve from SEOs and how social networks are used).

Although television ads still owns 41 percent as the most preferred advertising method, digital advertising does not come too far behind. Digital advertising (SEOs, social networks) has raked in 24 percent of the advertiser’s choice and is still increasing fast.

Why Facebook?

Well, simply because Facebook is number one. You can’t deny the fact that it has been number one for a couple of years now and they have been very hard to beat when it comes not only to the social network itself but to the social network advertising. Why?
Because number 1: They have a lot of members and users.

Users+ advertising=customers=advertisers.
2: 93 percent of advertisers are already using Facebook to promote their products and services. Another 5 percent plant to do the same.

Now you might think, what? Twitter is doing so good, it’s competing with Facebook already. Well, yes. But it still has a lot to work on if it wants to be head to head with Facebook. Compared to Facebook’s 93 percent, Twitter only has 79 percent of the advertisers, followed by YouTube who has only 66 percent.

And no, Facebook does not have any plans whatsoever of stopping. The site got the highest satisfaction rated by the marketers, garnering 69 percent of good or excellent votes. Oh, to top it off, Facebook is predicted to gain $2.19 billion this year. Beat that. Facebook is really winning this game.

With time and the advent of technology it is but fair that man must adapt to the changes. The politicians of today are no far behind. Be it twitter or Facebook or any other social networking sites, politicians are coming up with new and improved forms of campaigning and reaching the people as a whole. Twitter seems to be the favorite amongst the politicians and now and then we see some encouraging, informative or debatable tweets being posted. It is as though an entire new generation of politicians have been born who have taken technology as their tool for campaigning.

The White House, led by President Obama, started to post on twitter not to campaign any kind of new bill/law, neither to inform about any form of media trivia nor did they try to create any kind of controversy which would lead to any form of negative publicity. The White House used twitter to make the American people aware of the dangers and precautionary methods of swine flu. The Library of Congress is also known to share lots of historical free pictures on Flickr and many agencies have opened up channels in YouTube to handle their media content.

My.barackobama.com is a website which allows hundreds of users to use the website as a blog and this is an online way of getting the opinion of the people forward to the President and his team. Such innovative ideas can be a huge boon to all such politicians who are looking forward to making a bigger change to the economy and social life of the people. Social media is the place where you can connect with millions instantly. What better way to get your voice heard?

The Indian politicians are also coming up with their own set of technology tools and tech-savvy mentalities. We are all aware of the controversies which were initially associated with Shashi Tharoor, but inspite of that, Mr. Tharoor has a huge fanbase known as “followers” on twitter and is a regular user of the service.

Not far behind is the C.M. of Gujarat, Mr. Narendra Modi. Mr. Modi is considered as one of the most tech-savvy politicians in India and is very often seen keying messages on his palmtop or browsing the internet on his laptop. It is highly encouraging to see that Indian politicians are coming up with new and innovative ideas to stay connected with the “junta”, a common Hindi term for the Common Man.

If you search on Facebook you will also come across a fan page dedicated to the Indian prime minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh. The fan page supports opinions of the direct fans and there are lots of updates from the minister’s side which talks about political as well as personal updates. A true visionary and a big supporter of technology, Dr. Singh has made good use of social media to bring about harmony in the online world.

Since Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook in 2004, it has grown from being simply a website to bring friends together to a website which can be the platform for some serious business. Facebook has a world wide reach and is increasingly becoming more and more popular amongst the younger generations and also amongst the other age groups. Facebook is closely associated with Microsoft which has a 1.3% share in Facebook and hence most of the revenue that is generated from the banner ads are supplied by Microsoft. The bulk of Facebook’s profits are due to their Flyers application and the Credits application. Moreover Facebook provides a huge platform for independent entrepreneurship and other developers So it stands to reason that the potential of Facebook can be tapped for serious marketing.

Before we go into suggestions, let’s look at some statistics about Facebook which can help one to decide.

People on Facebook : More than 400 million active users. Every user has an average of 140 friends.
Activities: Over 160 million objects such as pages, groups and events.
Global impact:  Facbook is available in 70 different languages across the world.
Platform: More than 1 million developers and programmers are associated with Facebook and around 70% of users interact with platform applications.
Mobile: 100 million active users presently using Facebook through their mobile phones.

Most people must be wondering how is it possible then to market products on Facebook. Simply get associated with Microsoft’s advertisement program and you can see your company’s ads on Facebook. Recently Facebook has been nominated as the site with most amount of videos and pictures uploaded, over Flickr and even YouTube. So, with permission, a company may even launch their video ads or new image based ads on Facebook. With its large user base it will be very easy and effective for companies to market their products online.

But this is simply the tip of the iceberg. Association with Facebook would also mean that you can also tap into the mobile phone market. There are some advertisements which are targeted specifically for mobile users. With the advent of Zynga, we have all come to know the power of online games and applications. Associating with these or even launching a new online product can be achieved through collaboration with Facebook. Maintaining a company profile in Facebook is a very common thing nowadays and it helps in keeping track of business prospectives, employee tracking and even getting a heads up about upcoming competition.

For the individuals who think that their small scale business cannot be helped, here’s some good news. You can also share your blog online amongst your friends or create groups and increase the traffic into your website and thus generate more revenue. Facebook has truly become a use for all ages and purposes.

Social Media – The word that is driving many people crazy is actually unpopular amongst the  CEOs of Fortune 100 companies. In a recent survey carried by ÃœBERCEO, it was revealed that very few CEOs have ever touched the social media sites. And the ones who did create an account, never came back to update or manage their profiles on the social media sites.

The popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Flickr, etc. have failed to lure the top bosses to use them. Take a look at the presentation from ÃœBERCEO and get to know the real stats.

What did this presentation tell you? Do you think that the top bosses are lazy in not maintaining their social media profiles? Will their active participation help their companies to fare better than others?

Share your opinions and you might just be able to make a difference.