Any company that is considering using Facebook, Twitter and other social sites to communicate with customers could easily have second thoughts due to the potential downsides. One major negative of using social media can arise when something goes wrong, like a customer service or product issue. Any bad news about your company can spread quickly through social sites and hurt potentially hurt the reputation of your business. Even if your company isn’t participating on these sites you still may be getting some bad reviews if your customer service isn’t where…

The focus of many social media based advertising plans was to get as many likes and recommendations as possible from those who participate on the networking sites. Shared Twitter posts, gaining likes on Facebook and even posting company info on LinkedIn have been important drivers in digital marketing efforts. Now there is another way to use the social networking giant Facebook to improve your company’s bottom line – and it isn’t related to Search Engine Optimization. Facebook can help local companies go up against larger companies with the help of…

The Nielsen ratings are something that TV producers in the U.S. have been obsessed with since they began nearly a century ago. These ratings have come into the digital age now by offering new information that advertisers all over the world can use. Nielsen’s 2012 Social Media Report is now available on their website and it contains a lot of interesting information about the explosion of social media and its presence in our everyday life. They identify Pinterest as the breakout star of new social media sites but Twitter and Facebook…

The many emails you have gotten from retailers containing coupons during the holidays may contain some tricks to help you improve your rank in search. A sale e-mail might say, “If you want to save an additional 30% on (enter specific item or category here) click here and enter your special code number.” A link in the e-mail would direct you to a special landing page set up for the items on sale. This store could set up a separate page for the sale items or they can add something…

There is a recent blog on HubSpot.com that features an infographic called “The Meaning of Like”. According to the graphic 60% of Facebook users will tell friends about products or services if they are offered a deal of some kind. The graphic also shows that 51% of online shoppers believe that social sites are credible places to get information about products. This blog post also points to the fact that 40% of Twitter users use the popular social networking site to search for products. Another telling statistic for businesses that…

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 computer software in place at many businesses to maintain good customer service is known generally as CRM or Customer Relationship Manager. Like all software dedicated to enhancing your business’ performance you want to be sure that it is doing what the name implies. A CRM system that is hard to use can lead to mistakes that anger customers and lead to some bad word of mouth. Take for instance a client who has a problem and calls the service center. The person best equipped to handle it is on…

There are a few more options available to the social media marketer these days than just Twitter, My Space and Facebook. Digital marketing writer Morag Cuddleford- Jones mentioned in a recent article some less famous but very useful niche social networks that you may want your company to utilize. Sites like Instagram that make it easy to share of pictures and post comments can be incredibly useful to businesses. Another way to generate more mentions and increase your SEO results could be to use Storify. Brands can use this network…

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…

A story by Cameron Scott at PC World quoted Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang as saying the Twitter outage on June 21 was caused by company efforts to increase infrastructure. Twitter is no stranger to outages and has made many strides to improve service for the ever growing number of users of the popular social media network. A group of hackers, UGNazi, is claiming that they were behind the temporary outage but regardless the source of the outage Twitter was back online serving the public at right around 3 PM…