Acclaimed Web Development & Online Marketing Blog

Promoting your website through social media marketing can be a lot of work.  It’s no wonder that many companies outsource the job, but if you are just starting out or have a small budget you can still promote your company using social media marketing. These are the steps you can take to become your own social media expert.

1. Content
The best way to promote yourself online is to provide interesting, original and informative content. It’s important for search engine optimization and email list subscribers. It’s also important in social media marketing. You have nothing to market without original content. A blog is a great way to continually add value-added content in a meaningful way for the search engines and for returning visitors.  A blog gives you something to talk about on search media marketing sites too.

2. Create a facebook page
Create a page for your business on facebook. Facebook pages can be promoted with an ad on facebook. Make sure you put information on your page to make it interesting.  As an example, here is a link to Acclaimed Web Development & Online Marketing’s facebook page: http://cli.gs/9TsTt7

3. Setup a Twitter profile for your business
Setup a Twitter profile in your business’s name or in your name so you can become known in your industry.    Follow people who are exports in your industry.  Here is an example: http://twitter.com/acclaimedwebdev

4. Post updates to your facebook page, twitter and bookmarking sites
Post updates for your fans and for the search engines by posting at least once daily to facebook, your twitter account and to bookmarking sites such as digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and others.

5. Create a linkedin profile for you and your business
Create a linkedin profile to show off your skills with other professionals and network online with old clients and co-workers.  One of the extra benefits of linkedin is the ability to use your company profile to market yourself to potential, new employees.

6. Use groups on facebook and linkedin
Use groups to share information with other in your industry and find new customers by starting and joining groups that would be of interest to your target audience.

Social media marketing, much like email marketing, is a great way to keep your message fresh and new and in front of your customers and potential customers on a daily basis.  Your facebook fans will see all you updates on their facebook homepage on a daily bases, so you are only limited by the interesting and relevant information you have to share with them. While customers can get annoyed with receiving marketing emails from you on a daily basis.  A status message on facebook or twitter is much less intrusive as long as it is interesting and informative.

If you’re not sure how to get started or feel it’s just too much work for you to do on your own, Acclaimed Web Development & Online Marketing offers professional social media management services.  Request a quote to get started today!

I have a confession to make. I love free apps for my iPhone! I hate paying even $0.99 for iPhone apps because there are so many great free ones out there. I’ve been doing some research to find the best free twitter iPhone apps and these are the five that I think everyone should have.

1. Twittelator

   Twittelator is the best all-around free twitter app I’ve found for the iPhone.  It allows you to do custom searches and it saves the search each time you do a new search. It gives you quite a few different categories of tweets to browse, which Twittelator calls Groups, including featured Tweets, your own tweets, friends’ tweets, everyone’s tweets, favorites and more.  It gives you twitter profiles with stats too.You can not only use follow, unfollow and favorites from this app, but you can also bookmark twitter accounts that you aren’t sure you want to follow but you want to be able to find again.  The one thing it seems you can not do easily is retweet.

   According to the info icon in the free version of Twittelator, Twittelator Pro has even more features for those of you that don’t mind shelling out a few pecos.  Pro gives you the ability to use dingbats and upload your location and search nearby.  The most important feature is that it allows you to control multiple twitter accounts on your iphone.  It also allows you to email and retweet tweets unlike the free version. Twittelator Pro is $4.99 in the iTunes app store.

2. Twitterfon

   Twitterfon has a simpler interface than Twittelator and not quite as many Groups of tweets to read, but it does have a lot of the features you would look for in an all-around Twitter app.  The tabs available in Twitterfon are:

   • Friends – To read the tweets of the people you follow
   • Replies – To read tweets that are public replies to you and include @yourtwitterusername in them
   • Messages – To read your direct messages
   • Favorites – To read tweets you’ve marked as favorites
   • Search – Twitterfon includes a nice basic search that allows you to search for terms of interest.

   All of the above tabs let you know when you have more messages.  The best part about Twitterfon is that once you click on a tweet you are given a lot of options.  You can reply, favorite, retweet or visit the included link in the programs built-in browser.  You also have the options to see the tweeter’s profile and stats, follow them or unfollow them and see their public timeline.  These are actually the features that may make Twitterfon a better Twitter app than Twittelator.

3. Retweet

   Retweet is just exactly what the name suggests.  It is an app to see tweets that have been retweeted and retweet them yourself.  It keeps a count of the number of times a tweet has been retweeted too.  It allows you to see tweets from the last 30 minutes, 3 hours, 12 hours and 24 hours.Cons – Retweet doesn’t have a lot of added functionality which does make for a very simple interface, but some of the lacking features stand out as things I really need to have when using this app, like the lack of ability to favorite a tweet that’s been retweeted.  Maybe I would like to come back to a tweet, but I don’t think it would be of interest to everyone.  Instead, if you want to come back to a tweet you find in this app you almost have to retweet it, so you can find it again in your own updates.  I would just suggest being careful when using this app so you don’t overload your followers with retweets.

   Pros – It is a very helpful app for finding materials that others have found interesting enough to retweet and materials you want to share with your followers.

4. TwitterTrend

   TwitterTrend is an app that finds the hot, rising and emerging trends on twitter. Right now, it is telling me that Adam Lambert and American Idol are hot, iPhone app is rising, and “consumer prices fall” is emerging. Here is what Twittertrend says about it’s algorithm:

   • Hot: Most popular topics in the last 24 hours
   • Rising: Fastest rising topics in the last few hours
   • Emerging: New topics just emerging in the last few hours

   This is a great app for finding out what people are talking about on twitter.  Using this tool allows you to make sure your tweets or blog posts are relavant to current events.

5. Twitterlink

   This is a pretty cool little app once you figure out how to use it. You install it on your iPhone then create a javascript bookmark to this app in safari on the iphone. Then, it allows you to find sites you want to tweet in safari and launch them from your Twitterlink bookmark. The cool part is it automatically gives you a short URL to tweet.  This twitter app has only one function, but it is an important function and it does it well.

Other apps you should be using with Twitter:

1. ShoutNow - Put your voice messages on twitter as a link.
2. pic.im – use this tool to tweet pictures you have on your iPhone.

Are there any other twitter iPhone apps you’d recommend?  Let us know by posting a comment.

Well, they are both huge right now.  I don’t know which is growing at a faster pace.  I, for one, certainly jumped on the facebook bandwagon first.  It was an easy jump from myspace, but myspace is long gone in my book.  I’m still out there.  I think most of the 50 or so friends I had on myspace might still have myspace pages too, but I don’t login or even look at myspace unless someone sends me a message.  Most of the working adults I know never bothered with myspace, but facebook is a different story.  Just about everyone I ever worked with is suddenly on facebook.  I’ve found friends from college, high school and even junior high.

Well, then, along comes twitter.  I think I initially signed up for twitter because I saw an ad on facebook.  I signed up and then my account sat there for months.  I just didn’t get it.  I had no idea what to do with it.  Then, I started hearing about twitter on the radio.  Hmmm, I thought.  I have a twitter account.  Maybe I should take another look at it, but I didn’t.  Not for a few more months.  Then I started hearing about it from friends.  Then, I found a twitter feed and checked it out.  It was slow process for me, but I finally figured it out.

Twitter is a great way to get your message out there as often as you like in 140 characters or less.  Twitter is finally taking it’s place in social media marketing and in a big way.  I’ve found that by simply finding and following people in your industry, people start following you, people you don’t even know.

I feel like twitter is really just starting to take off and many people haven’t figured out what it can do for them yet, but once they do it’s going to be as big if not bigger than facebook, especially for businesses.  I also found another great website called twibs.com.  It’s only purpose is to provide a directory of businesses on twitter.  I think websites and programs that use twitter as there main vehicle of getting their message out there are going to be popping up like mad in 2009.  I can’t wait to see what will come out next.

A client recently brought up the idea of putting their website on myspace.com.  My response was to wonder if businesses are on myspace.com.  Isn’t business facebook.com domain?  Clearly not all social media marketing sites are directed towards businesses.  Many are directed towards people making friends and staying in contact with friends, so I decided to do some research on myspace.com to see if I found any businesses advertising.  I first looked for online book stores with myspace.com and found one that looked like a legitimate business.  Then, I searched for web developers and found a few, but only a tiny fraction of the web development businesses you would find on facebook.com.

My client pointed out to me that myspace.com is for bands.  She sells music, so myspace.com may very well be a great place for her to do a little social media marketing.  For most businesses, I would certainly recommend setting up pages on facebook.com and linkedin.com.  Join twitter.com and start following people in your industry.  Tweet everyday about your products, services and your industry.  Not only is twitter a great opportunity for people to find you, but you may actually learn a lot from twitter too.

Here is a list of social media marketing websites:

http://www.joe-whyte.com/2007/04/02/looking-for-a-list-of-social-media-sites-i-have-them-all-here/