If you are on Facebook or pay attention to social media news whatsoever you have taken a look at Facebook Timeline.
One of the most visual differences between the previous Facebook profile layout compared to the new layout is the cover photo for your Timeline. As soon as I setup Timeline on my account I knew people were going to be...
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If you did not watch the Facebook F8 Keynote today you missed out on the major changes coming to Facebook, you should be able to see the recorded keynote at F8.Facebook.com if you want to get an idea of what is coming.
One thing to note, and a year ago it would of been a big announcement in and of itself, Facebook has 800 millions...
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Although our LocalTek team has spent much time taking a look at various ways our local business customers could use Facebook Places and Deals it was not until today that we decided what promotion we would offer once we claimed our Facebook Places page.
If you are a local business owner Facebook now makes it easier to claim your...
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Unless you have been asleep for the last 24 hours you have probably heard that Facebook has launched an opt-in profile layout change that focuses on the visual appeal (i.e. lots of pictures) of a profile.
Mark Zuckerberg was on 60 minutes tonight showing the layout just a few hours after Facebook announced the changes and allowed...
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On Facebooks 6th birthday they launched a new layout that will be available possibly tonight for 80 million of their 400 million users.
You read that right they now have 400 million users, not bad for a 6 year old company, what is really interesting is that the company started with a focus on social networks for the college...
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If you have not read all the news about social networking sites being the future of how we access information instead of search engines then you must not be reading what is happening in the online world around you. I will help you with the relevant news articles in just a minute.
One thing I think people are missing sometimes is how the BLEND of mobile and local search along with the easy access to Facebook and Twitter on a mobile phone is making it an absolute must to have a plan on how to integrate all of these technologies together when you plan on promoting a product or service. The future is now and if you are not using all methods available then you are doing an injustice to your business promotion online.
For those that may be social media doubters and who do not realize that many people use search on their mobile phone before typing in a name (and I have not even mentioned visual search and verbal search) suddenly search is all that matters at times, be very careful basing everything you have on type-in traffic. Facebook has 350 million users and bypassed Google for traffic during the Christmas holiday, do you think Facebook is going somewhere? Yes they are, UP!
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One of the things I was curious to see was how much traffic I could get to my new Hyperlocal SEO site that I launched a few days back. As with any new site getting awareness and traffic to it can be a challenge unless you are putting an advertising budget in place.
With this site though I thought it would be a valuable tool to see what having an established blog along with Twitter and Facebook could do. As someone who has seen the benefits of what it can do for a site like this one and what I have witnessed on even small business sites in rural Missouri I knew social media can have quite the impact.
In reality I was hoping for something in the range of 50 visitors or so would be a good start for the first few days then build up links from there and continue to use Twitter and Facebook to promote new posts.
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During this past week a couple different things happened both worthy of their own blog post but time never really allowed me to get them done so I am getting them out together.
We all know that the Yellow Pages (and all copy cats) have had a continued decline in the usage of their print version, no secrets there. If early indications from real life examples are a sign of an accelerating move of their customers to smaller, less expensive ads then this year it could be a real scary ride for the industry.
A couple examples:
* While meeting with a large regional bank this week the marketing director indicated they cut their budget to a very small percentage for this year as compared to previous years based on the trends of people moving online. The person indicated that they previously had full page ads in their section of the Yellow Pages but had decided to move to the smallest listing available with a logo. How is that for a significant shift. When a conservative regional bank is making moves like that and starting to put more of their money into online marketing you know it is going to be a tough year.
* A fast growing local restaurant actually moved completely away from any paid listing in the Yellow Pages and moved back to the completely free listing. They thought it made more sense to focus their effort on expanding their web presence.
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