The new Twitter API, which has been a topic of conversation for some time, was officially released on February 20, 2013. It is a new advertising platform that will make it a more viable alternative to Facebook.  Twitter’s new API will make it easier for large advertising agencies to upload ads onto Twitter where their older API allowed this, but only one ad could upload at a time. This could mean a major increase in revenue for the Twitter as more companies will be able to make better use of…

Hubspot, a major inbound marketing company, recently conducted a survey of its 7000 customers to determine how big a role blogging plays in business success. The results of the survey show that companies that only blog once or twice a month get up to 70% more leads than those that do not blog at all. A company that posts three to five blogs a month saw their leads double when going to more than six posts a month. It also seems that if you have a large inventory of posts,…

Last month marketing expert Mark Simpson penned a very interesting article regarding social media and business. The article entitled “Lost at Like: the Ten Reasons Brands Fail to Convert Facebook Fans to Paying Customers” looks at the reasons for a business’ inability to convert prospects. It seems that though many people are willing to “like” a company on a social network they aren’t too quick to drop in for a visit. According to information provided by Hub Spot, only 1% of the adults on Facebook actually make their way to…

When John Lennon brought out his album Walls and Bridges in 1974 he may have known about computers but he probably didn’t have much information on the concept of the internet. The album could however be a description of the way the internet is constructed. The World Wide Web can be seen as a bridge leading to wherever you want to go. A company in London can easily log on to the internet and get information about their accounts in Cyprus with the click of a button. This virtual trip…

There is something that a small business might overlook when going for search engine optimization. You may have interesting, non-duplicate content generating good indexing results from Google and other search engines nationally, but what about getting the word out locally. When Google made the changes earlier this year to Panda and Penguin they also started employing the Venice algorithm to adjust local search engine rankings. SEO expert Mike Ramsey has a guest post on SEOmoz.org that looks at Venice and explains how to use it to your advantage. You want…

The biggest social network site for professionals, LinkedIn, has contributed to a tremendous spike in page referrals to Facebook since Twitter severed ties with them June 29th. LinkedIn now sends more traffic to Facebook than Google and Bing combined according to the recent article by internet marketing expert Anita Li. Twitter had contributed a large volume of content to the LinkedIn news feed. Without this volume there are more clicks going to Facebook pages and posts, which are much easier to find now, because the content delivered through Twitter is…

The web hosting company GoDaddy recently issued an apology to customers that use the company’s email and web hosting services for an outage that occurred on Monday September 10, 2012. An online activist (@AnonymousOwn3r) took responsibility for the problem but further investigation seems to point the finger at an internal network problem. Go Daddy is one of the world’s largest web host and domain registrars in the world and the news that they were not attacked most likely has many breathing a sigh of relief. GoDaddy will provide a refund…

Business Cloud News has a guest blog post by Matt Gordon-Smith, security director of Attenda, addressing the current level of trust in cloud hosting/computing in the UK. Overall Cloud hosting is gaining acceptance in the UK. A survey of 100 CIOs showed that 87% of them have more trust than they did before but there are still concerns about the cloud when it comes to where data is being stored. Mr. Gordon-Smith states that the security of the data is the greatest priority but certain industries for example, financial services,…

In August 2012 the Adobe Corporation released its first open source family type to happy web design and graphic design communities. The Source Sans Pro has many different type families available and a number of free fonts. The font family can be downloaded from Adobe’s official announcement page. Adobe was thoughtful in their font decisions as they wanted to use fonts that were good for short interface labeling as well as easy to read in long passages of text and print. The community now has another free tool to work…

The digital marketing advantage that is offered by social media has proven to be a drawback to the Financial Services Industry. According to an August 2, 2012 guest post by Anthony Cooper on Fourth Source’s website this is the primary reason that the financial sector has pulled back its investment in social media. Last year 22% of firms in the sector used social media – this year only 8.5% are investing money in social media strategies. An analysis by the author that looked at twitter mentions for six of the…