Pinterest for Businesses: Branding, Direct Traffic, and So Much Fun

in Social Media by iqmadmin March 1, 2012January 21, 2014 0 comments

Pinterest works almost like a never-ending magazine with just the prettiest, most-loved pictures. That’s great for people wanting to browse through vintage wedding dresses, recipes, or artwork…but what does that mean for a business?

Pinterest just cracked the list of Top 10 Social Media sites. So, a lot, apparently.

1. Collect visual material

You can collect pics that you come across – on your hard drive, or on the Internet – into your Boards. All it takes is a single click and you can Pin. Great for personal use, but for businesses, especially visual-centric ones like designers or artists, can use this as an opportunity to showcase their material. If pics are borrowed from places on the Web, Pinterest automatically sources the pic, so that infringement of copyright is minimized. It also means anyone who clicks on an image borrowed from your site can just click straight through to your site. That direct traffic alone may make Pinterest worth it!

2. Give a Presentation Some Oomph

Pinterest is a way to visually represent your ideas. Once that is in place, a Pinterest board can be linked to a PowerPoint presentation; or a screenshot can be printed on a poster board—neat and simple, and looks great.

3. Brand Yourself

Have a brand for yourself or your business? Use Pinterest to help people recognize you as an expert. Want to own a vintage dress boutique someday? Start pinning products from your closet, ads of vintage dresses from days past, or vintage dresses from others’ boards that you love, and people will start to recognize you as the go-to source for beautiful vintage dresses. If you’re a graphic designer, pin your own work, as well as work that you love from others.

If you’re in a less visual industry, you can also post infographics that relate your field, images of work you’ve done, or books, quotes, or poems that you’re reading. And since every pin comes with a source linked, this can also help drive traffic to your site or blog.

4. Engage Your Customers

Again, Pinterest just cracked the list of Top 10 Social Media sites — so if you use social media to market your company or brand, it’s time to consider throwing Pinterest in as part of your mix. Lands’ End recently hosted a (quite successful) contest on Pinterest, asking participants to create a pin board featuring their favorite Lands’ End products. The 10 people who made the best boards won a gift card—and Lands’ End got tons of its products promoted throughout the site.

Pinterest is more than just about play. While you’re being inspired by the stream of new images in your personal life, you can build your business brand and reputation. Get a little organized. Have fun. Call iQuarius with your questions.

Google+ Reaches 90 Million? Kind Of.

in Social Media by iqmadmin February 2, 2012January 21, 2014 0 comments

google+ larry page Google CEO Larry Page announced last week during the year-end earnings call that Google+ (Google Plus, or G+) now has over 90 million users. This is in addition to the amazing growth in the single month of December, where Google+ saw almost 20 million new sign-ups, much of it through the millions of brand-new Android devices unwrapped during the holiday season, according to Google+ watchers.

Google+’s last official estimate, in October, was 40 million users. And though Page claimed that 60% of Google+ users engage with Google every day, he did not specify if these 54 million users were engaging with Google+ pages or the other wide range of Google products.

Google also reported its first $10 billion quarter, and they’re up 50 million Android devices since last quarter, bringing it to 250 million.

At any rate, Google+ is only 6 months old. It took Facebook almost a year to reach one million users. Google+ had 10 million in 16 days. On the other hand, Facebook is expected to reach the billionth user mark by the end of this year.

(Do any business owners have any doubts right now as to the reach of social media networks? If you do, please, call us. We’ve got some talkin’ to do.)

As for Google+ and Larry Page, we’re going to file this under “one to watch.”

B2B Social Media Marketing

in Social Media by iqmadmin January 24, 2012January 21, 2014 0 comments

b2b social media As a business owner, you can no longer ignore the role social media plays in the survival of any business.

You may think that Business to Business has nothing to do with social media; you may be surprised how vital B2B social media is for your business’s success.

6 Steps to Get You Started with B2B Social Media Marketing

Step 1: Understand what you want B2B social media marketing to achieve for your business. Remember, with B2B social media marketing, it is a means to an end. This golden rule will help you measure your B2B social media marketing success. If, at any stage, you are unable to identify what you are trying to accomplish, you are wasting your time. Begin your B2B social media marketing by setting one or two clear goals and always have them in mind as your guide throughout your marketing efforts.

Step 2: Find your B2B social media audience. The main point of B2B social media marketing is to successfully reach your target audience. Find out where your customers spend their time online. Where are they most vocal? Identify the proper channels to address. Otherwise, you are just wasting your time.

Step 3: Develop the proper B2B social media content. Of course, everything eventually boils down to proper content. Why is content strategy essential in B2B social media marketing? What type of information is relevant and interesting to your target audience? It’s something they’re already talking about. It becomes a matter of creating content and then using the proper methods of distributing that content — which differs from audience to audience (that is, from industry to industry).

Step 4: Consider Search and SEO in B2B social media. Be search engine friendly as a matter of course throughout your B2B social media marketing. People Google their questions and do their research through search. Customers and clients go online to finalize their purchase decisions. Optimize everything. Leverage keywords so they find you when they’re ready to make a deal. This is where your B2B social media marketing feeds into your bottom line.

Step 5: Establish a digital footprint for your B2B social media. Leave a description of your business and an active link for users to click on, everywhere. Besides supporting your SEO efforts, active links are a direct line to your website so users can find it with minimal effort. At the very least, put a link to your site on all your landing pages, welcome pages, and profiles (where applicable) on all your B2B social media channels.

Step 6: Hold yourself accountable. Business requires trust and reliability. Be who you say you are. And establish a regular process for reporting, such as through analytics, so that you can measure your business’ progress at the end of each month.

Summary

One important thing to note through all this is that running a B2B Social Media marketing campaign requires a lot of hours. Keeping open communications with people you regularly do business with is one thing. But knowing when to outsource is a smart move. A good Internet marketing team can improve targeted traffic and:

Create fresh content and push it out on a daily basis
Keep an eye on analytics to measure your business’ reach — then interpret and act on the insights provided
Manage accounts to make sure you’re not missing important communications with potential business partners and customers
Optimize everything

Call us if you need help. We can do all of the above. With a smile.

Social Media Ads: Facebook Users Click Ads Twice as Often than Twitter and Google+

in Social Media by iqmadmin January 19, 2012January 21, 2014 0 comments

Chitika, a data analytics company, has released a study that reports Facebook users click on ads more than twice as often as Twitter and Google+ users.

“Given the announcements and roll out of new social media advertising programs on platforms including Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, we wanted to investigate where advertisers will have the highest potential to engage with users based on CTR (Click Through Rate),” a representative for Chitika said.

The study measured the Click Through Rate (the likelihood of a user clicking on an ad) of different social media users, taking data from referrers. Essentially, what it looked at was which social media advertising platforms were bringing in the most traffic. It examined which social media networks provided the Click Through links that landed users on websites in their sample. For example, if a user saw a link on Facebook and clicked it to get to iquariusmedia.com, Facebook would be considered the referrer. The data was narrowed to include the Click Through Rate of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ — and it was this data that was the basis for the report.

The compiled data set included millions of impressions from social media, which yields the Click Through Rate of the average user on the three social media networks.

In the same report, it was stated that social media users click on ads on Google+ and Twitter with about the same frequency (Google+ at .1% and Twitter at .09%). Facebook measured a .24% Click Through Rate.

There were several key points about social media advertising addressed in the report.

The best social media network to run an ad campaign on is highly dependent on the type of campaign being run.
A time-sensitive ad campaign may benefit from Twitter’s promoted trends
Simply using Google+ to promote products or services may have new benefits to search visibility
It is possible to optimize for all segments of web traffic

“As always, a cost-benefit analysis is key to identifying which platform (if any) is worthwhile for your product or service,” Chitika says, “…and when making the final decision on an ad campaign, it is essential to keep your target market in mind.”

Optimizing Your Social Media Ad Campaign

As marketers, we are excited about the possibilities of optimizing your ad campaign for different types of audiences. We are incredibly optimistic about Google+’s new functionalities and interconnectivity with Google Search — and what that can mean for your marketing strategy and search visibility. We like the growing sophistication of analytical tools for Facebook and Twitter and are confident that they can help us design an ad campaign that is optimized for you as well as for your product or service.

What to do:

1. Call us to tell us what product or service you’d like to promote.

2. We’ll make our recommendations about which social media networks to run your ad campaign on.

3. Then we’ll work with you to custom-fit the ad campaign around your needs and budget.

4. After you make your final choices, we’ll execute the plan within hours.

Google Starts Getting More Personal Today (1/10/12)

in Social Media by iqmadmin January 10, 2012January 21, 2014 0 comments

google people Starting today (Tuesday), Google search results will start looking different more frequently for different people. Google will start including content from their social network, Google Plus (G+), including photos and comments, when it performs a search. This way, search results will be more intimately tailored to each user. The search engine will even start incorporating content from their older photo service Picasa.

This feature will automatically be made available to all English-language searches conducted by users who are logged into Google. This is just one step toward one of Google’s most ambitious goals. Eventually, Google hopes to amass enough information about each person’s individual preferences and interests in order to provide custom-fit search results. Google is calling this functionality “Google, plus your world.”

People signal what’s important to them through what they do and share on the social networks, and it’s this information that Google is in the business of curating. Facebook has greater insights into personal tastes, though, because of its 800 million users sharing 1.5 billion photos each week. This is the territory that Google is hoping to encroach on with these new additions to their search.

Here’s the part we wanted business owners to hear.

In more general searches, like “music”, “sports”, “fishing”, “design”, you name it, Google will generate a drop-down box of suggestions from companies, people, and places that have accounts on Google Plus. Couple that with Google’s ability to localize search results — and the fact that Google Plus signed up 20 million users in December alone – and the implication for companies is huge. This brings the idea of targeted traffic to soaring new heights.

[Existing clients: Call us, as always, if you want more information on how Google fits into your marketing strategy and what we can do for you. Potential clients: Ditto.]

Pixar’s Next Movie Gets A Mysterious Photo Blog

in Internet Marketing / Social Media by iqmadmin November 28, 2011January 21, 2014 0 comments

Pixar is known for its long development cycles: the Emeryville, California-based company can take years to churn out a new animated movie. Now fans will be able to get an oblique sneak peek inside the studio’s next film — thanks to a new blog started by Lee Unkrich, a director and member of Pixar’s creative team.

The blog, simply called “Lee Unkrich,” will feature one image a day for the development cycle of the new, untitled film. That could mean a lot of updates. Unkrich already guessed, via his Twitter account, that he may be chronicling for up to four years.

Right now, the blog only has two entries. The first is captioned “The starting line.” The opening image — a close-up of a Mac keyboard — doesn’t give away many clues. The second entry is titled “My standard lunch” and shows a bowl of broccoli and a sandwich. In other words, the blog looks like it will touch on things both central to the film and charmingly off-topic.

The blog is a nice way to share exclusive content with Pixar fans, but we’ll see if Unkrich can actually keep up a photo-a-day for the entire development process.

Is this Lee Unkrich feeling the attraction of engaging with fans on a daily basis? Because, if so, we know exactly what that’s like.

It's A New World and Social Media is Here to Stay.

in Internet Marketing / Social Media by iqmadmin November 24, 2011January 21, 2014 0 comments

At iQuarius Media, we speak and interact with company owners, as well as marketing and advertising professionals, on a daily basis about things such as social media, web marketing, online video marketing, email marketing, and even text message marketing. It’s an exciting field to be involved in. Without exception, every business owner wants to solve the same dilemma: how do I get the absolute most bang for the buck out of my advertising and marketing budget? It’s a tight economy today and maximizing resources is an important component of business if one wants to attain — and maintain — success in the marketplace.

Cue internet marketing and social media.

Where else does one tap a potential client base as large as the Internet for pennies on the dollar? Nowhere. If you’re not taking advantage of this precious opportunity to advance the growth of your business, you may want to move into the right lane because passing is in the left lane. If you’re not utilizing this cost-effective means of promoting your business and/or website, you risk losing your loyal clients, as well as a vast well of potential clients, to those entrepreneurs who have the foresight to understand that social media is not just a trend. Social media is a new way of life.

Before you get started…

Once a business owner has decided to make use of the social media platform to help their respective business progress, there are a few things they should keep in mind.

Definitely do some research and ask some questions about the company you are considering hiring. Hire a reputable and well liked company that has some experience and tact. The company you decide on could make you or break you.
Make certain to negotiate a contract before venturing into business together, so that both you and your social media company are legally protected.

Those are the basics. Now we can move on to the main purpose of this article: to accentuate the benefits of having a social media presence to make your business more effective and far-reaching.

Social Media is global.

Building a social media campaign is THE most cost-effective method of online advertising and promoting. Think about it: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter are free. In addition, there are literally hundreds of other less popular websites that can help your business get the exposure it deserves.

All of these networks have a reach that spans the globe. Why not attempt to reach out to this global market? A perfect example of this is Twitter, where one can log in at any time of the day or night and see real-time tweets from Japan, England, France, and India, to name a few.

Social Media is the new momentum.

Social media enables you to join groups of people with the same interests and goals. On LinkedIn and Facebook, one can join groups on yachting or interior design or web design. The possibilities are limitless. Think limitless when you think of all of the potential clients out there in this massive world of ours. The ability to have direct contact with people who have the same interests and hopes and dreams as yours is amazing. So get on board the greatest momentum shift to happen in eons. You have no excuse not to.

So Why Social Media Marketing? Why Bother?

in Internet Marketing / Social Media by iqmadmin November 21, 2011January 21, 2014 0 comments

Based on a current Razorfish Consumer Experience Report, 49% of Internet users now buy something according to suggestions they acquired via a social media site. Yet, only 25% of companies employ a Facebook page. Is it just us, or are the numbers a little off here?

Social networking online communities are breeding grounds for connections. Consumers are discussing your products, your services, as well as your organization itself, on social media sites such as Facebook. It’s inescapable. Are they going to understand how to locate you? Social media networks are where the PEOPLE are.

Let’s say there was an expo taking place in which 300 million people would be attending, and we offered you a totally free presentation area. Would you accept it? Of course you would. Facebook, for instance, keeps growing at a rate of 600,000 new users a day. Attention spans continue to keep getting shorter and trust in advertising and marketing will continue to deteriorate. The only real option you’ve got is to take part in the already occurring conversation. You probably know this. We trust our friends a lot more than those overly pleasant folks in commercials. You could be the voice on television that gets ignored, or you can befriend your customers on Facebook, or Twitter, or the ever-expanding Google Plus. The call is yours.

Social Media : Ups, Downs, and All Arounds

in Internet Marketing / Social Media by iqmadmin November 9, 2011January 21, 2014 0 comments

Social media channels and social networking websites continue being among the most popular commodities in the global online sector.

Ups, Downs, and All Arounds

As the number of users to these websites increases, the software applications and venues broaden at the same time. We’ve seen sites decline and some have gone up in a glittery, moving unicorn gif-filled ball of fire (like, you know, MySpace). But even sites like MySpace are not necessarily declining – they are evolving, partly to jostle for position in the social media space, which they don’t want to lose.

That being said, the level of popularity of Facebook and related gaming apps continues to increase and will likely see even more growth in the coming years. The explosive growth of Google+, only a few months old, is changing the game. So much so that Facebook continues to roll out massive changes to their interface to incorporate some of the functionality of G+ and to try to stay on top.

Twitter continues to offer immediate gratification for millions around the world, while specific niche market networking sites are gaining a share of the market as well. A look all around the world reveals an infinitely diverse social media market and a great deal of possibilities.

(We will be getting more in-depth about Google+ Pages for Businesses in a very near future post. We’re excited about it!)

Google Dictionary Is Now Undefined

in Internet Marketing / Social Media by iqmadmin November 7, 2011January 21, 2014 0 comments

Google has closed yet another property. The Google Dictionary is yet another service to get the proverbial ax. It is just another in a long line of abandoned Google properties, which include their web directory,Google Labs, and Google Wave, just to name a few.

Before the “Google is burning to the ground” reactions start appearing, it should be noted that Google is doing just fine on the financial end. The shuttling of these properties are little more than housekeeping and the removal of extraneous materials that people may or may not miss. Nevertheless, when Google discontinues something, even something as innocuous as a dedicated dictionary, it’s newsworthy.

That being said, it’s not the end of the world, although some are disappointed. Furthermore, Google is very a “trial and error” company, and if something doesn’t work the way they envisioned, and/or it’s not being used by the masses, the company has no problem scuttling what it considers dead weight. As pointed out by Barry Schwartz, a Google employee ventured to the Google Web Search Help forum to explain Google’s decision.

Simply put, they didn’t need a standalone dictionary any longer, at least from their perspective:

As many of you know, we’ve recently introduced a dictionary tool into Google Web Search to help you quickly look up the definition of a word,. Because the dictionary tool offers the same functionality as Google Dictionary, we’ve decided to discontinue dictionary.google.com.
For your definition needs, you can type your query right into the search box and use the dictionary tool located in the left-hand panel on the results page, or you can type [define (your word)] right into the search box.

User Reactions

As for the reaction to the closing of the Google Dictionary, that’s precisely what led Kelly F to issue her response. There’s only so much of this you can take without setting the record straight:

OMG! How can google do this without any warning. I’m not a native user. So, I use Google dictionary all the time. It’s the best dictionary out there. I’ve starred a lot of words too. Now I don’t see a way to get them back. Please google make Google Dictionary available again!!! Definitely a bad move by Google.

The sources Google gets/got their definitions from are not gone. Is typing “Dictionary” into a Google search bar really that difficult?

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