Social Networks – Blog Tech Guy

The most commonly used strategies

There are many different basic strategies that are highly viable to be used as some of the best link building strategies. They are as follows:

Coining a new phrase and setting up a Google Alert system.
Manufacturing a particular resource and setting up alerts simultaneously.
Earning your link by updating content belonging to a good blog that you have come across.
Create a blog with an RSS feed.
Try to work with some of the best professionals in this field of work.
Always take time to research your competitors.
Set up a profile link designed for you.

There are innumerable numbers of strategies that can be greatly used in the lucrative link building processes. There are many websites along with professionals who provide information for such purposes. It is up to the ultimate link builder to opt for the strategies that he is sure will greatly benefit him.

The Top 5

The best professionals in the field of link building and search engine optimization can assist you with processes that will greatly increase the visibility of your website. Here are some of the latest and extremely effective strategies:

Making use of multiple domain links with deep link advantages

In almost all the productive cases, your link building process should greatly focus on volume. However, you should incorporate in your planning the concept of not resourcing all the available links form a particular single site all the time. In order to achieve the best results, you must always focus on getting different links from many different sites that appeal to you. Always make sure that you use the ingrained linking processes. This means that you should never provide links that will directly go towards your homepage. Instead, focus on creating links that direct to specific places on your website with specific images and information.

Use of social media

These days social media is something that does almost all the talking. In fact, in many cases news is released faster in social media than any commercial news providing site. Hence, social media is a very powerful tool that can greatly help you to spread links that lead to your website. There are many sites like Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon through which you can share content easily and effectively. This process is highly effective because people interested in the content you shared will be ultimately lead back to your website. Hence, your strategy is a success.

Making use of Business directories as a link building strategy

This process is controversial as well as effective at the same time. Many experts have used this process and gained excellent results in attracting or linking people back to their website. The process of using business directories is mostly an underutilized technique. Hence, due to the lack of great competition, you can easily use this process and get your site literally on the online map.

Using an RSS feed

When you have had a blog that runs on WordPress, you will definitely possess an RSS feed. You can also get the various statistics regarding your subscribers by burning your feed on sites like Feedburner.com. Having an RSS feed gives you great perks and it is very simple and precise for link building. Using the RSS Footer Plug-in in WordPress, you can add a link after every post and you are sure to get a link back to your blog on your website.

Using Anchor Text

Anchor Text is the most effective as well as the strongest when it comes to using this tool as a link building strategy. Make sure that in order to gain the best ranking in terms of the SEO result, you greatly manipulate and exploit the usage of Anchor Text. This tool adds keywords in your text in the form of hyperlinks. People clicking on any of these keywords are directly linked to your website thereby increasing overall traffic.

In the art of Search Engine Optimization, you need to make your website visible and ultimately ranked through natural selection. This is done by the link building processes. Using relevant keywords, utilizing important link building strategies are just small steps in the bigger picture. Always try to increase your SEO rankings greatly by proving effective and precise links and not just links in greater bulk.

About The Author: Brianne is a writer/blogger. She loves writing traveling and reading books. She contributes to Scott Studenmund.

Tricks for beginners to restrict social media spam

This is a guest post written by Brianne Walter. If you’d like to write a guest post please contact me.

The current social media scenario is very complex and vast. You could see countless of people venturing their ideas. Hence the complete idea of twisting and playing with the protocols and ethics of online marketing has become too obvious. Now, it seems to be a rat race, where people simply want to leave their competitors behind at the cost of compromising on the set rules and ethics. This has given birth to the menace called social media spam, which seems to be occurring over these platforms in various forms.

Despite appearing innocent, social media spam seems is often a trap. Hence before you actually leverage these platforms for your business promotion, it is always important to understand the ways to tackle social media spam. Let’s check some tricks for beginners to restrict social media spam.

Restrict the benefits

The first and basic thing you can do to get away from the spam techniques is to simply avoid giving reasons to spammers to join your network. The best way out is to start using the nofollow links. Also, you need to restrict the accessibility of your blog by engaging only the registered readers or followers. At the same time avoid the techniques which demands for excessive self promotion. Though, you may find some adverse effect to these restrictions but the idea here is to carry out things in proper balance. Make sure you maintain an appropriate balance between restricting yourself promotional benefits along with offering your users a good reason to join you and get engaged.

Inform and educate your social media team

The best way to restrict the social media spam comes with educating and arming your marketing team with proper training. Hence make a schedule of a proper training of your social media managers ask them to diligently check all the comments remain proactive for hunting out all the fake accounts and other things like the coupon offers.

Clearly imply rules for your affiliates as per your terms & conditions

The other way to avoid the social media spam is to simply make it very clear to all your affiliates that they are not allowed to post anything over the affiliate links over the official social media brand web page or simply pose it as your brand. At the same time add a line asking them to protect their accounts from hackers by simply using a strong password.

Maintain your manually approved communities

To get away from the spam, communities are now planning to choose an application based registration method. Hence when the user submits his or her application it has to be approved first by the editor/moderator after a proper review. The manual checking is the best way to get authentic users and avoid spam.

Ban the spammers

Another way is to ban the spammers. However, it is very difficult to ban them since the spammers have become very smart and appear too genuine to be called as spammers. Even though if you ban them they would appear with a different IP address making things difficult for you. At such junctures, the best option is to make the spammers invisible if you want to control them over social media. The classic example comes from Reddit, wherein these people have banned the spammers in such a way that they remain unaware of this ban. Regardless of the things the spammers do, they are never seen visible to others.

Final word

If you want to fight social media spam, it is vital to understand and find them out. The above are few of the basic ways, in which you can restrict the social media spam. All you need to do is to try them with wisdom and care and start getting the results.

About The Author: Brianne is a writer/blogger. She loves writing traveling and reading books. She contributes for Caribbean Cruise Line Scam. Find here her contributions for Caribbean Cruise Line Scam

How Businesses Use Facebook for Business

This is a guest post written by Veronica Clyde. If you’d like to write a guest post please contact me.

Facebook is the social media powerhouse that just about everyone seems to be using. Businesses are making good use of the features on the site, as well. However, it pays to know some of the best practices when it comes to using the site so that it is possible to remain in compliance with the terms and conditions of the site and to gain more friends and followers.

Proper Profile Management

One of the areas where people and businesses seem to have the most trouble is with the profile. It is important to manage one’s profile appropriately. You should make sure that you have a business page for your company, and always read the rules and regulations for the business accounts. These rules change periodically, so you will want to make sure that you have the most current information.

Photos on the profile are a great way to add more elements of interest and to humanize a company. It is important to make sure that any photos, graphics, or videos that you have on your profile are image appropriate and that they represent your business. For different businesses, this may mean different things. A law firm might want to have headshots of their legal team. A crafter who sells quilts online may want to have some homier photos for customers to see. The media you show on your site should match your company. Inappropriate content may turn away some potential followers and customers.

Make sure that you have links available for your website, as well as any other social networking sites to which you belong. The more information available for customers and followers the better. They may want to start following your blog or they may bookmark your site. You should also make sure that you have a Facebook vanity URL, which is going to make it much easier for people to find you on FB.

Connect and Engage

When you are posting content on your page, you have to remember that people want to see more than just information about your latest projects, products, or news. They want to have interesting and engaging information. In addition, make sure that you ask some questions and invite discussion on your page. When you do this, you are able to connect with users more easily on a deeper level. This may even make them want to know more about you and your company, which could lead them to your website.

When you add friends and look for followers for your page, you will want to make sure that you are choosing those that have the most in common with what you have to offer. Having high quality followers and friends on FB is going to be more important than having the most followers.

On those days that you do post information about your products or services, you will find that it is often a better idea to make sure that you are running some sort of special or sale. This will help to get people more excited, and they will be more willing to share the information with their friends and family. You should also make sure that when you have any special events happening on your blog or at your company, you let the people on Facebook know well before it happens. Reminder updates are appropriate as long as they are not constant.

Businesses today are starting to find more ways that they are going to be able to connect with their customers, thanks to technology. Facebook has the potential to be one of the most important tools in any business’s arsenal.

Veronica Clyde is a tech writer at VPNServices.net – a place where you can read reviews about the best VPN providers. If interested check out a Private Internet Access review.

5 Elements of a Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign

This is a guest post written by Gina Smith. If you’d like to write a guest post please contact me.

Everybody wants to succeed at social media marketing. It seems like such a good idea when you think about it. Social media, on the face of it, appears inexpensive and immediate and imminently scalable. Social media is guerrilla marketing on steroids; a tempting sea of potential customers lurking out there on Facebook and Twitter, just waiting to “Like” your product or become your company’s friend. Or so it seems.

In some ways social media is almost too useful a tool for marketers. Far too many of them have succumbed to the temptation to indulge old bad marketing habits in their social media marketing campaigns. They go for big numbers and neglect to personalize their contacts. They create new organizational silos by forgetting to connect their social marketing to customer call centers, special events and more traditional types of advertising.

They frequently use the wrong metrics, measure the wrong thing or fail to do any measuring at all. Marketers often flood social media because it’s easy and cheap to do. In the process, they wind up diluting their own message and turning off potential customers.

Finally, some of our marketing brethren fall back on the same old boring marketing tricks, using the same incredibly dull content, sanitized by the legal department. Many of these outbound marketing strategies hardly worked when they were new. They certainly don’t gain any power simply because they’ve been foisted on a new medium.

Successful social media marketing campaigns require five key elements to insure that you accomplish what you set out to do and that’s win friends for your company.

Listen: Before you ever post the first blog, tweet the first Tweet or put up a company Facebook page, listen to what your customers are saying to you. Find out the five W’s – who they are, what they want, when and how they want it, where they want it and why they want it. Studying the demographics of your target group is essential. Just because social media is cheaper, doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost anything. Your time is extremely valuable. Social media makes up for its low up-front costs by draining your time.
Plan: Draw up a clear marketing plan. Decide who does what and which medium each of the elements of your team is going to target. Develop guidelines for what can be said and almost as importantly, what CANNOT be said. A lot of companies have paid dearly for ill-chosen comments by their young social media “experts” on Twitter and Facebook. Even informal stories and jokes need to advance your marketing goals in some way. You can’t afford to let those who generate your inbound marketing content indulge their private whims.
Communicate: The strength of social media is the facility with which it opens doors to potential customers. But having 20,000 “friends” doesn’t mean you’re getting through to any of them. If you are not communicating with them in a meaningful way, your blast posts have likely been reduced to white noise and are being ignored. Spend some real time communicating, not just with groups, but with individuals. Reply to their comments. Offer them help or content that’s of value to them. In-bound social media marketing is all about building the relationship. You cannot do that unless you’re spending a great deal of time producing content that makes your customers sit up and take notice. Whether it’s humor, important information or special things that are of real help to them, customers notice companies that give them things they enjoy, want or need.
Monitor & Measure: If you aren’t monitoring what’s going on with your marketing efforts on social media, you’re wasting your time. Facebook, Google and Twitter all have tools that help you monitor the behavior of your fans. Use them. Track how often your posts are shared or your company is mentioned. Social media is, after all, largely electronic word of mouth. If they’re not talking about you, you have to give them something to say.
Adapt: The other part of monitoring and measuring is putting that knowledge to use. You have to adapt and change your strategy if your tracking data shows you’re not getting through to your customers. Social media marketing is a dynamic process. This is living organic communication. It’s about building relationships and delivering more value to your customers than the other guy. You have to always be striving to be honest and genuine with your customers. If you’re phony or you assume their loyalty without delivering the goods, you’ll make far more enemies than friends.

Social media marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. To work it has to be interconnecting with everything you do from manufacturing to marketing and sales. Done well, social media marketing is the job of every single person that works for the company. Failing to back your social media marketing with alternative communication tools like customer service call centers, chat rooms, excellent tech support, focus groups and surveys soon waters down everything you’re doing on social media.

Social media IS important, but it’s no magic wand. You can’t wave a bunch of tweets over the heads of your online friends and expect to generate the kind of buzz that gets your YouTube video three million hits in a week. It can be done, but it takes hard work, thorough research, planning and imagination.

Gina Smith writes freelance articles for magazines, online outlets and publications on behalf of a number of companies, including Spanning.com. She covers the latest topics in the business, golf, tourism, technology and entertainment industries.

Top 5 Essential Tips in Facebook Targeted Posts

This is a guest post written by Celina Conner. If you’d like to write a guest post please contact me.

By now, you have probably have heard that Facebook has recently released its post targeting feature for fan pages. If not, you might have been sleeping from a coma! Kidding aside, here’s the gist. In an attempt to develop new features for users to enjoy, social networking giant Facebook is gearing toward positioning itself as the top of all marketing platforms on the social web. Its latest innovation is providing advantage to users, specifically retailers or business owners, by allowing them to set targets to page posts thereby reaching their rightful targeted audience segments.

In this article, we will tackle on 5 essential tips on how you can leverage with this new feature.

1. Target by demographics

Facebook’s post targeting feature now allows you to select options with criteria such as the age, gender, relationship status, education, location, school, workplace, interests and language. Being the page admin, you can manipulate the promotion of your posts by highlighting your posts to certain users with your chosen criteria.

For example, you are selling corporate heeled shoes and want to target female young professionals who reside in Manila, Philippines. Then, you can apply these layered conditions using the targeting tool. In this way, you can look to directly marketing your content related to your offering to a smaller but more aimed subset of likes.

2. Muster longer fan retention

When you’ve successfully done the first step in narrowing the people who see your highlighted posts, you can get them to be more engaged to your updates naturally. When they have seen and acknowledge the level of relevance of the product to their lifestyle, you will have higher response rate. This is because you are speaking to audiences who have more interest in your products rather than pleasing a wider fan base to “like” your posts. By essentially selecting only your most relevant fans, you will gain greater control and ultimately longer fan retention.

3. Improve optimization by scheduling

As a page admin, aside from targeting users with your posts, you can also schedule your posts. This is important to make sure that your posts will be more likely read by your intended audience. If they are working from 9AM to 6PM, for instance, they won’t log onto Facebook during those hours. Instead, they will check updates after dinner or probably before going to bed. Therefore, study their habits as well and set pre-determined schedules of your targeted content accordingly.

4. Review insights

Facebook gives you access to your page insights on the Facebook admin page itself and/or by email newsletters you can subscribe to. This tool will help you measure what works and what improvements you can make to better your target parameters and tactics. You can watch the trends of the page insights on the graph and you can see the most engaging posts by sorting by the Talking About This column.

5. Interact with your audiences

People naturally love building friendships and establishing good relationships. And as a vendor, having timely responses makes up for good customer service. Connect with this specific audience and reach out to meet their needs and wants as a real human behind the computer monitor screen.

Conclusion

Facebook’s targeting tool is another means of advertising and promoting your offerings through the site and you can do this for free. Remember to use this powerful feature aptly and be involved with actual communications with your audience to a greater sales conversion. By doing so, you’re not only turning your audience to fans but in the long run, also as your friends.

Author bio:

Celina Conner is a Yoga Instructor, an alumna of Marketing Management at Martin College Australia and a mother of a beautiful daughter, Krizia. She has a passion in cooking and formulating vegan recipes.

What is Twitter actually for?

These days, Twitter is as much a part of our everyday lives as drinking coffee or taking the car out. Whenever we sit in the movies, go to a concert, or see something interesting on the street, it’s inevitable that at least half the people around us are tapping on their smartphones, and updating their status through a nifty tweet as they watch. Because of this, many small businesses may feel a little jaded with Twitter, thinking it has been taken over by self-promotional activities, political grandstanding, or youngsters updating their site with a stream of mundane drivel.

Despite the Twitter phenomenon becoming ever more popular and mainstream, however, it is still a great tool for marketing your business effectively, and building strong relationships online with your customers and peers.

Twitter is essentially a public text messaging service. Whereas many of us like to let one or two of our closest friends and colleagues know what we are up to, Twitter publicizes your antics to the whole world. The site which started out as a miniature blogging concept has now revolutionized online communications, inviting ever more public and controversial figures to share their thoughts and actions with the online world. Executions, political spats, governmental updates, and celebrity break-ups are all announced through Twitter, leaving no doubt as to the power and magnitude of this social phenomenon.

If you are the sort of person who would rather text message someone on your mobile than give them a call, then Twitter is probably ideal for you. Short, sweet, and to the point, the site’s restrictions on word count and content mean that no-one can spend a long time updating their status, and you can get what you want people to know out there with minimal effort. The very brevity of Twitter is the attribute that has made it so successful, leaving people who are nervous of Facebook and its in-depth plumbing of people’s lives, flocking to this more succinct and economically-worded site.

Essentially, Twitter features two basic functions. It enables people to follow updates that you post, and allows you to follow those people whose updates you want to read for yourself. The concept is simple – it’s taking the status bar from Facebook, and focusing upon that as the primary means of contacting others. Because of the simplicity of Twitter, it has become widely used as a business and marketing tool, enabling online entrepreneurs to share information and updates about their products and services, for free. People who regularly use Twitter can glance across their page and catch up with updates from those who they are following, for simple, quick, and easy access to the latest goings-on.

There are a number of easy ways that Twitter can help you with your online marketing and customer generation. Consider doing one or more of the following:

Follow people across your industry so you can stay right up-to-date with issues, changes across the business, or new innovations.
Connect with people to share best practice and advice, and ask for help when you need it.
Set up search terms to get a list of tailored tweets (even for people who you may not be following) to stay abreast of issues that are of interest for you and your business.
Ask people for services, and offer your services to others. Remember that you need to sell carefully, as Twitter is not primarily designed for cold approaches – build up relationships first, and offer your support when asked.
Conduct market research on certain products and services in your market, to ascertain what people want, and how best to provide it for them.
Send out requests for feedback, shares, and comments on blog posts or new webpages you’ve developed.
Market your products and services in a friendly and approachable way to those people who follow you on Twitter.
Offer an instant customer service to people who mention you or your products, keeping an eye on potential complaints and addressing them promptly.
Network with a group of people with whom you can quickly and easily connect, and with whom you can develop ongoing and strong relationships.

Twitter is fast, simple, and easy to use, and doesn’t have the invasive quality of a direct email. It’s ideal for short, pithy comments and marketing messages, as it is restricted to a 140-character limit, meaning you don’t have to spend hours crafting your messages.

However, using Twitter is the same as any other online platform, and governed by the same rules. Stay clear of spamming, keep your Tweets professional and friendly, and avoid bombarding your potential customers with reams of sales material. You can use Twitter with a number of tools including TweetDeck and HootSuite to manage your list of contacts efficiently, searching through the messages posted by other people quickly and easily.

If you’d like to know more about using Twitter for your business marketing and advertising, there’s a great little guide available at http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Twitter. There are loads of different features available for Twitter, so have a look around at what you can achieve, and develop your knowledge to provide focused posts with techniques such as hashtags. If you fancy sharpening your tweeting teeth on someone, my address on Twitter is @BlogTechGuy!

Twitter Tools

Hootsuite

HootSuite is asimple to use online application that lets you combine all of your social media accounts into one, incorporating Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It enables you to schedule, send, and receive messages across multiple platforms, all from one place. By bringing all of your social networking into one application, you can save hours of time. There’s a simple HootSuite plugin for Firefox through which you can schedule messages and follow RSS feeds.

If you find maintaining social media accounts too time-consuming, try using HootSuite once a week, scanning the feeds to see if there are any interesting conversations that you can join, “like,” or share.

HootSuite also allows you to upload multiple messages in advance and then pick the date and time that you want them to appear. In around half an hour a week, you can do all of your marketing and social networking in one go, saving a great deal of time compared with going into each site individually. It is, however, worth keeping the HootSuite application open while you’re working, so you can respond to any direct messages in a timely manner.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is considered to be the most useful and practical application available for managing your Twitter account. You can customize the interface to control the users, tweets and columns on your account, saving valuable time and making Twitter easy to manage and use each day. TweetDeck allows you to write status updates, create short URLs for webpages, shorten messages, and apply hashtags to your messages, all from one simple interface. Easy to use, fairly intuitive, and convenient, it’s a great way to access your Twitter account and use it without any undue pressure.

TweetDeck provides options to start new groups, manage them, and choose members for each, enabling you to send out direct messages to specific groups of people. You could, for example, divide your updates into personal, business, family, or advertising messages. There is an advanced search option that lets you see all recent tweets that may be relevant to you, and you can use this to start new conversations with people.

Five Simple Ways to Increase Social Engagement with your Customers

This is a guest post written by Khushboo Aulakh. If you’d like to write a guest post please contact me.

Customer engagement is a dominating factor for brands to use social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. By interacting with their customers through social media, not only can brands increase customer satisfaction rates, but also attract new customers.

For the most part, social media is a free channel that takes advertising to a whole different level by bringing brands closer to their target audience, and by personalizing their experience online.

Frequent user centric updates and user interaction are the key to increasing customer engagement, but here are five other ways brands can increase social engagement on Facebook and other platforms.

Make interaction easy

With Facebook rolling out Timeline for business pages, some users may find it difficult to interact with your page. Include simple call to action phrases to increase participation and allow users to share information. Remember that your customers are visiting your Facebook page for a reason – they want to know more about your brand, are interested in your products or services, or want to share feedback.

Include links to important tabs below the cover image. Tabs like reviews/recommendations, contact us, e-store, and blog are ideal for an e-commerce website.

When making a status update about a new product, ask for feedback rather than mentioning the product USP. When sharing a new blog post, ask what your users feel about the subject.

This opens the door for conversation, increasing social and online engagement. Posting updates with specific call to action phrases allows users to feel involved with your brand.

Understand what your users want

This is the fundamental premise for building engagement on any platform, social or otherwise. Any business must invest resources in finding their audience – the demographic, geographical location, income level, and so on. By doing this, you can understand what products and services will appeal to them.

Once you have this information, social media planning will be a breeze. Status updates that resonate with your audience build engagement and drive traffic to your website, thus increasing conversions and generating a positive return on investment.

Share what is relevant

Your Facebook fan page is not your personal Facebook page. While it may be interesting to share what you had for breakfast or how the weekend went, refrain from doing so. Your updates should always promote your brand, directly or indirectly.

If your company had a BBQ on the weekend, share it because it personalizes your brand. Refrain from sharing anything that may have a negative impact on your brand.

By sharing content that is relevant and highly targeted to your users, you increase customer participation.

Use productivity tools

Productivity dashboards like HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Buffer are a must have for all social media strategists. They help you plan your strategy weeks in advance and save time by reducing the manual effort involved in updating multiple channels.

These tools also make it easier for users to participate on multiple social channels.

Measure customer engagement

A strategic step in increasing social engagement is to analyze your current customer engagement rates. This can be done through Facebook page insights, Google Analytics, and other web analytic tools.

Use these simple tips to build a strong relationship with your customers. Remember, these tips are not set in stone – feel free to adapt them according to your business goals.

Social Media Bookmarking

People of all ages are now accessing the Internet, affording us the opportunity to reach a broader customer demographic than ever before. With social media becoming more and more important when it comes to influencing public opinion and creating trends, it’s evident that all online business owners need to get in on the action and have a strong digital media presence.

The rise of Facebook and Twitter, in particular, demonstrates that the Internet has influence and power when it comes to raising public awareness and generating customers. Like it or not, we live in a time where executions are announced over Twitter, and Facebook campaigns can alter the result of which record reaches number one in the charts. As a blogger, there is no more valuable tool to promote your site than social bookmarking. You can harness the power of social media in a number of ways, all of which are free, easy to do, and highly effective.

Social bookmarking is simply the process of a reader sharing your content with a number of widely-used social networks, which you should encourage in order to increase visibility and enhance customer engagement. The entire World Wide Web operates as a linked series of networked applications, all of which offer distinct advantages and services to the business blogger. WordPress is the ideal platform to connect to these services, making it simple and hassle-free to benefit from social networking online.

While it is possible to craft all of your social bookmarking messages by hand, it makes much more sense to take the efficient route to online marketing: Plugins. WordPress deliver a series of simple tools that streamline your communications processes and make it easy to join the online fray with the minimal effort and zero expense.

Link to Your Twitter Account

Twitter is an extremely powerful and convenient way of communicating a lot in a few words. Set up a Twitter account that outlines your products and services, and provides regular keyword-rich updates to your readers. Pick who you follow according to your specialized industry, and people will tend to follow you in return. Every time you update your blog, post the link to your Twitter account.

It has taken the site just five months to double the number of Tweets it had, from ten billion to twenty billion. As of April 2010, there are reportedly over 100 million user accounts. Everything you write on Twitter is indexed and can be found on the web.

WordPress supplies a great ‘Twitter’ application at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/new-twitter-button/. This is the ‘daddy’ of Twitter sharing, in that it keeps a track of ReTweets and is very easy to add to your site. It is also a visible and familiar tool which visitors to your site will recognize and readily use, encouraging information sharing.

The Power of Facebook

Facebook is the hub of social networking and bookmarking. It’s simple to set up a page linked to your business, and update it as your blog posts go live. People use Facebook to follow products and businesses they like, so it makes sense that if you engage readers then they will follow you… especially if you make it easy for them. When you set up your profile, again use keyword-rich texts and keep your page up-to-date with useful information.

Facebook hosts over 550,000 third-party applications, and boasts 500 million active users. More than 150 million people engage with the site on external websites every month, and there are more than 150 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. A simple tool to benefit from this popularity is Facebook Like.

The new style of the Facebook Like button has spawned numerous plugins, but I like this one the best. You can choose where to locate it and add custom styling.

Generic Social Bookmarking Plugins

The following plugins for WordPress all link you up to a range of social networking sites and take the hassle out of repeat communications to your customers. I recommend all of them as they will each bring specific benefits to you as a business blogger:

Sharebar: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sharebar/
This is what I currently use on my site, the vertical bar on the left hand side with sharing options.

Sociable: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/
This plugin features a wide choice of bookmarking icons and you can select and re-order the ones you want to use.

ShareThis: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/
The ShareThis application reduces the ‘footprint’ of the buttons to a single option with expandable categories. However, in order to get it up and running you will need to register an account when you set up the plugin, by visiting the ShareThis website.

SocioFluid: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociofluid/
SocioFluid creates a great-looking bar of icons that can grow or shrink as you mouse-over each one. While there is a limited choice of icons, the plugin does look good on your site.

SexyBookmarks: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sexybookmarks/
This is one of the most popular applications for WordPress bloggers, as it looks good and is highly visible.

The most commonly used strategies

The Top 5

Making use of multiple domain links with deep link advantages

Use of social media

Making use of Business directories as a link building strategy

Using an RSS feed

Using Anchor Text

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Restrict the benefits

Inform and educate your social media team

Clearly imply rules for your affiliates as per your terms & conditions

Maintain your manually approved communities

Ban the spammers

Final word

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Proper Profile Management

Connect and Engage

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Twitter Tools

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Make interaction easy

Understand what your users want

Share what is relevant

Use productivity tools

Measure customer engagement

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Link to Your Twitter Account

The Power of Facebook

Generic Social Bookmarking Plugins

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