Category: Social Media

Will Workplace by Facebook Takedown Slack?

If you are annoyed by sending emails to your staffs to converse, collaborate and get tasks done, Workplace by Facebook is your solution at hand.

Workplace by Facebook is a software that was launched yesterday (10.10.2016) with 1K clients already on board. We are already familiar to collaborating software like Slack and Britrix24 which we use at work to keep in touch with our other colleagues. Now with Workplace by Facebook, we will be stepping into another dimension which will be similar to the Facebook we use for our personal use.

Enterprises normally don’t prefer its staffs using Facebook during the working hours. With Workplace, I think, it is going to be different. Here your senior officers are going to get you use Facebook’s Workplace since it is going to be a tool to be used for your office.

Although the mission of the Workplace is similar to Facebook – Connecting people – here it will be connecting you with your colleagues. While Facebook connects people with personal life, this software will be connecting different audience like your colleagues who you might not have even met, but are connected to the company network. So this is going to be a similar platform with different purpose like collaborating and connecting with your colleagues.

[blockquote photo=”” author=”” ] People do their best work when they have more knowledge of what’s going on at their company, and people work together better when they understand their colleagues. – Mark Zuckerberg [/blockquote]

According to Julien Codorniou, the director of the project, since Facebook is not a new platform, enterprises doesn’t need to get its staffs trained to use it.

The Workplace is going to be a competitor to Slack because of its primary feature – getting the colleagues collaborate in one platform. But, Workplace seems to overtake its competitor through its additional features like making the distant colleagues get accustomed to the company culture and make them feel that they are at the office virtually.

Since there are companies with branches around the world, like the automatic translation we see on Facebook, we can get an auto translation on this Workplace Platform too. So far they have covered like 100 languages, and they are working on the other languages.

Pricing. Since enterprises are the target of this product, this software doesn’t come for free. Not free, but cost-effective, I would say.

Slack has both free and a standard package. Still, the free pack doesn’t allow a permanent storage of conversations and shared files, while the standard package which costs $6.67 per user per month allows you with unlimited conversation storage.

But you can begin Workplace with 3 Month Free-Trail-Period, but from then on it charges $3 per user for companies with 1,000 monthly active users or low, $2 per user for companies with 1,001 – 10,000 monthly active users and $1 per user for companies with 10,000+ monthly active users.

Comparing to the features Workplace provides us, it is quite cost-effective. In this expense, you can have unlimited file storage, live streaming, monitoring tools and most importantly secured connections.

Expense and the features of Workplace

Conclusion

While Slack and other collaborative software should be worrying about bringing similar or advanced features of Facebook’s Workplace, it is going to be an email-killer. You wouldn’t be hereafter worried about file storage or in need to send documents over email fearing that your storage would be deleted over time.

But what Facebook wants is to bring a better change in the company style, its company culture and how every colleague works with each other.

Prime One Global has registered to get this Workplace, and once we start collaborating through the software, let me get back to you with the feedback. Meanwhile, if you are already using the software, feel free to let your thoughts on how it would bring down Slack and be an email-killer.

15 SepSocial Media

Facebook Blueprint’s New Credentials for Social Media Marketers.

“Do you want to be a professional in Social Media Marketing?” is one of the phrases I come across more often when I check the websites of the institutions for Digital marketing courses. Even though many follow such degrees, social media marketing is not done effectively, as I have said in my last post.

Most of the marketers and companies want to stand out in the crowd, yet they are not sure how they could. While some struggle to use Facebook products, most of the others fail in campaigning their products.

It looks like Facebook thought the same. The effect of Facebook’s worry is this platform “Facebook Blueprint” with the tagline “Plan to do great things.” Having launched in 2015 March, and 18 months later, it has 1 Million course enrollment.

What is Facebook Blueprint Certification?

It is a program by Facebook to enrich knowledge on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram advertising. Interestingly, here you don’t only study and take an exam, but here you get trained. This Facebook Blueprint is a solution with individual courses and self-directed learning paths to most Social Media Marketers.

So, this is like a blueprint to Facebook and the apps it owns.

This Certificate provides two credentials:

Facebook Certified Planning Professional that targets digital media marketers who successfully have done Facebook Ad Campaigns.
Facebook Certified Buying Professional that targets the professionals at ‘creating and buying Facebook advertisements for maximum impact.’

What one could expect from this e-learning?

Like Facebook, this e-learning is free of charge. All you need is a Facebook account. Once you sign into, you can look into the modules. Here you would be educated on how to use Facebook and its products effectively, create better and creative ad campaigns, and how to measure your campaign reach and optimize it.

No matter what your role is in the advertising industry, Blueprint Certification can give you the edge you need – Facebook Blueprint

One of the best features I happen to notice about Blueprint is that you can learn it at your pace. No one is going to rush you or put you under pressure unless it is you.

Once you think you have learned enough, you can try out the “Practice exams” before settling for the final exams.

And, once you pass the exam, you will get your certificate, which can be used on your virtual marketing platforms.

Why should you try Facebook Blueprint?

The foremost reason is IT IS FACEBOOK. Aren’t we all pretty crazy about the platform, Facebook, itself? Although it is one of the social media platforms, it is the most popular social platform with 1.71 billion users.

Let it be the global or the local audience (3 million Sri Lankans), Facebook has a reach.

Local institutions do teach about Social Media Marketing, and of course, Facebook campaigns. But… Yes, there is a but. Wouldn’t learning from the platform creators be entirely different from what the learners teach? At Blueprint, they would be guiding you through every product of theirs and how the marketers could raise a ‘great’ advertisement campaign.

Another reason why you might want to get this certificate is that it is a new Standard recognition to the marketers. The certificates aren’t going to stop with giving you an identification for Facebook marketers. It is going to be your recognition for your skills in the following fields:

Facebook Advertising
Instagram Advertising
Messenger Advertising
Buying and Planning on Facebook properties
Facebook Analytics and Reporting

And once you get your certificate, it is going to be a digitally verified badge that would help you stand out in the virtual world of marketing.

Apart from every other feature I have mentioned above, Blueprint live is another feature of this e-learning process. This session is unique because it is an interactive one. Experts at Facebook conducts this workshop, and it is an ideal way of learning for marketers with 5-6 years of digital marketing experience and/or 1-2 years of Facebook-specific experience.

Although the team has conducted many workshops around the world, they are planning to take it to every possible city they could.

Finally, the coolest reason to try this is that it is all FREE. It is not only free of cost but also it gives you the freedom to choose the course and time to learn it.

Out of curiosity, I have signed myself into the learning process. If you are one of those marketers who has enrolled in Facebook Blueprint, let us have your feedback on the e-learning process.

07 SepResearchSocial MediaSri Lanka

What Should You Do to Take the Lead in Social Media Marketing?

It has turned out into a habit for many to fall asleep on Facebook and wake up on Twitter, and it is one of my habits too. While some use Social Media as a hobby, others tend to make money through it. But in the process of marketing, how far do the Sri Lankan brands do Social Media marketing?

Three reasons made me write this post. Firstly, it is the Social Bakers’ statistics about the leading social media profiles and pages. According to that statistics, I noticed that it is mostly Sri Lankan entertaining sites like Hiru TV and celebrity profiles that are being followed by most of the Lankans, and the local brands don’t top on that overall list. To know further, I checked into the overall profile reach, and I found out that there are brands like Coca-Cola in the top ten. “So why couldn’t the local commercial sites get more fans than the local entertaining sites in social media?” was the only mind voice of mine.

Secondly, while writing about Digital Marketing in my last post, I happen to notice that most of the local marketers think Social Media Marketing is digital marketing, while it is not. And what Sri Lankans think of social network marketing is posting something about their product on famous social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter and boosting them would attract more users.

Thirdly, in my last post, a user commented on what he felt about social media marketing. The one who commented said that some of these pop-up adverts on social media are more annoying than helping us pick the product or even to check the website about the product. The result of all these reasons is the post.

If new to social media marketing, know why you should do it.

With an internet penetration rate of 29.3% in Sri Lanka, the per cent of active social media users has reached 14% of the population. With the entry of smartphones, most of them use social network platforms on mobile. An overall view suggests that the most frequently used social media platforms, especially on mobile by the locals, are Facebook (94.17%), Twitter(2.62%), Pinterest(0.67%), Google Plus, YouTube, Tumblr, and LinkedIn. This usage rate is the reason for one to make use of social media effectively if he/she is into promoting products and services.

Unlike the traditional marketing methods, this social media marketing allows the marketers to interact with the target audience. Through this relationship, a marketer can analyze the preferences of the users and change his way of marketing according to those wish lists of overall consumers. Plus, it is the portal to get a direct and quick response from the customers, and for the customers to know about products.

Guess what? Social media marketing improvises the brand’s loyalty because of the crowd one has on such platforms. Such loyalty is build up through the brand’s engagement with its audience on the platform they use.

One might have a website, but the traffic the site gets is limited. This social networking is a portal to attract more diverse users to the site one owns. The more one is active on social media, the more the page or profile attract the audience.

Another plus is that the platform, Social Media, is free. Let it be Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, every platform is open. But, social media marketing tools are not free. There is little cost when using such tools, yet the tools are cheaper when compared to the marketing trends used earlier.

Are you unsure where you fail?

The Biggest Mistakes We See Companies make when they first hit Twitter is to think about it as a channel to push out information.

– Tim O’Rellly & Sarah Milstein

Most of the marketers kicked off into this social media marketing because they thought it is a cool thing to do, and they entered the virtual world with no objectives. This irresponsibility, I would say, has led them nowhere actually. The reality is that having a thousand followers isn’t the only thing about social media marketing because one cannot make money out of it. What one as a marketer has to do on Social networking platform is entirely different. After an analysis of where marketers fail, let’s look into how one could overcome such failures as well.

How often do you update your pages?
Most of the local companies have created a Facebook page, Brand’s Twitter and Instagram, but how often do you update your account? While the media sites and celebrities of Sri Lanka frequently update their page to make fans stick with them, brands fail. Regular updates are quite important to show off the followers that the page is still active and worth following.
About what do you post?
From a user point of view, local marketers seem to focus on posting only about what they sell. But when a new follower check into their social media page, how would he/she feel when he/she sees that everything shared are links to the site? Pretty boring right?
As a marketer, do you monitor your social media sites?
Like the first reason mentioned here as a failure, most of us don’t take social media severe enough to follow it closely. We fail to hit hard with the fact that social media is one of the leading platforms to “catch” audience and customers if used in the right way.
Are you on the right platform?
Everyone wants to have an account on popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. But, think. What if your site is not relevant to be on either of those stages, but on stages like LinkedIn and Instagram? Creating a profile on all the social media platform can be stressful when thinking of maintaining them all.
Unsure of when and to which post “boost” option should be used.
The boost option is to attract new followers. Where our marketers make a mistake is, not choosing the right audience, and not thinking of the alternates like “promoting a post.” But what most of the marketers sometimes do is, boost almost every post they publish which would cost them more than they have allocated.

A few handy suggestions to overcome failures

Publish great content — content that teaches people something, entertains them, makes them think or, in some other way, adds value to their lives.

– Brian Boland

Keep the profile updated.
It is very much important to stay active on your page (even more than you are on your profile, maybe). Even if there are days when you couldn’t be updated, maintain a regularity or make use of “scheduled posts.”
Publish random posts.
Don’t stop with publishing about your product; share something you found interesting from other profiles. If you are on Twitter, retweet some tweets from your followers, and let it be something interesting (and that may or may not have to do anything with your product.)
Keep an eye on your social media sites.
There are tools like Buffer that would not only help you analyze your social media reach, but would also assist you with scheduling your posts for a different social media platform.
Choose the right social media platform.
Marketing is not seeking publicity. It is promoting your brand and product to potential clients. Therefore there is no need for you to choose the popular social media platform, but the right one. Know your audience, and know about the platforms available to stick with your followers.
Know your content and choose.
Boosting a post is an option that could be worth enough if you know to handle it. Maybe it is time to stop boosting almost all the post you have shared, and to choose the right one. If you are someone who had made the above-said mistake, start with your “EverGreen posts.” Keep in mind that the “boost” option is to attract new followers, so when boosting let it be a better post. And, do not choose the boost option to make a post reach your “target audience.” Either you could you “promote your post” option for such activities.

Tips and Trick to make the lead in it

Use hashtags.
If you are still trying to attract “like-minded” clients, use Hashtags (#) in your posts. Not all the platforms are going to allow you to use hashtags, yet popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram do allow you. Hashtags allow you to engage as a community.
Maintain a community.
Always remember the primary goal of being on social media: to create a network. Just by posting links from your website, or about your product wouldn’t help you. Talk to your audience, and listen to their thoughts. Create a poll, or make them review your product. Use your creative team to make users get engaged with your social media accounts.
Do some “re-marketing.”
There are always some posts that would bring a new audience, maybe because it turned “trendy” recently. Such posts can be re-marketed with relevant hashtags of the “trending” subject.
Use images, videos, and GIFS.
These are known as visual content marketing. I happen to see most of our local marketers using their Television ad promos as Video sharing on Facebook and Twitter. People who watch your ad on TV and Facebook can quickly get bored of seeing the same promotion. Try to do some new uploads. And make sure that your uploads convey your message as well as has a CTA.

Write according to the platform
It is general to post contents on social media, but some platforms are good enough for longer posts while some are not. For example, Twitter doesn’t allow more than 140 characters, so your contents should be catchy and short. While Google plus encourages long timeline conversations more when compared to Facebook. Know your social media platform very well and change your content according to that.
Marketing plan
If you are a starter in doing marketing in social media, make sure you have a plan. Have a SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) framework when planning your social media marketing.

As a follower of some local brands, I happened to notice how such brands handle their social media. I have covered only a few, yet essential suggestion to the local marketers. If you are a consumer, let us know how you feel about social media marketing and advertising. And if you are a marketer, feel free to share your thoughts on handling social media. Let your thoughts flow in the comment box below.

Adieu.

30 AugSocial Media

The Most Comprehensive List of 101 Social Media Management Tools

Social Media Marketing is constantly evolving. It is an inevitable fact that whether you are an online marketer, offline marketer, local business, blogger or startup entrepreneur, Social Media Marketing will act as a pillar to your business if used in the right way or otherwise become a ‘blackhole of destruction’ for your resources that sucks energy, time and money if you do not have a well-executed strategy.

I had set out to write a post on the Top 20 Social Media Marketing Tools, but when I sat on my laptop, I realized that our Social Media Management division itself uses more than 37+ Tools and Services for Social Media Marketing for our clients.

Upon a little bit of discussion with our Social Media Marketing head Dilan Shan, he explained why it is important to work with so many tools because there is no one-stop solution for Social Media. It is better to mix and match with laser-focused tools that offer fewer features because of their efficiency.

Therefore, I have compiled a list of over 101 Tools for Social Media Marketing in no hierarchical order. I did not rank them for obvious reasons. All of these tools range from Free to Freemium and Premium. So take a good look. If you are responsible for the Social Media Marketing of your company, you should definitely have these, at the tip of your fingers.

1. Desygner

Desygner is a creative drag and drops designing tool which provides numerous free design templates for blogs, social media elements, and marketing materials for business. The platform is mostly free to use. However, you will need to upgrade to a premium account if you want to export files as layered PSD files. Desygner has a massive library of vector elements and stock photos like Canva.

2. Canva

Canva is a drag and drops graphic designing platform, which allows you to design social media graphics and presentations in a matter of minutes with its wide variety of templates. Be it Social Media Headers you want to design, or a banner, or an advertisement image for PPC campaigns. You can accomplish anything in a matter of minutes with Canvas massive library of stock images and graphic elements.

3. Adobe Post

Adobe Post is a designing app that fosters a speedy graphic design experienced even for the newbie design artists. It works in conjunction with some Adobe platforms like Adobe Slate, Adobe Voice and many other popular tools. The utility pulls most of its functionalities from Photoshop and InDesign, however creating stunning graphics with its library of Fonts and High-Resolution images is a matter of few clicks.

4. Buffer

Buffer is a social media management tool that allows you to share messages across different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Its offers three different pricing options for Small to Midsize to Enterprise Businesses and helps in marketing on social platforms with its features like RSS integration, analytics, scheduled posts and much more.

5. BundlePost

Bundle Post is a content management tool and marketing workflow automation software that assimilates your data & manages social media materials under a single dashboard. This software allows you to add hashtags to hundreds of posts and find the right areas of maximum consumer engagement.

6. Babbly

Babbly is a one-of-a-kind Social Media Sharing Tool that literally has the power to make your posts viral. All you need to do is share your link in the Babbly Community, give the number of shares you think your URL Deserves and it will be shared with a diverse and massive audience. going viral is just a matter of time, not luck. The more links you share on Babbly, the more share-love you will receive.

7. MavSocial

MavSocial is a social media management solution that allows you to manage all social profiles from a single dashboard. It has some unique features including campaign planning & management, visual content management, access to approved digital content, social media publishing, reporting and file organisation.

8. SproutSocial

Sprout Social is a social media management tool that helps you to interact with your users across multiple social networks. This tool helps you to monitor brand keywords, indulge in bi-directional communication, track social media messages and complete customer profiles. It also helps businesses to communicate with their clients and increases their social media presence.

9. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a social media marketing tool, which helps you to plot and execute your marketing strategy. Its headline analyzer feature analyzes the strength of your headlines. With CoSchedule you can manage your social media profiles from your WordPress window, leading to a hassle-free user experience.

10. Nuzzel

Nuzzle allows you to discover the latest stories of your friends and families on Facebook and Twitter without skipping any interesting story. What Nuzzle does is, aggregates the shares of connections into a single dashboard and ranks them by popularity (The amount of Likes, Shares and Comments they have received).

11. Feedly

Feedly is a news filtering tool that allows you to arrange, learn, and share all of the content that concerns you and your industry. Do not miss a beat from any of the publications you follow. Screen information about your company, your product, your craft, and your opponents by plugging it with Google Alerts. It aggregates the content material you depend on into a handy-to-read collection.

12. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a product of Twitter itself so it uses the Twitter API to pull data. You can manage all your tweets from multiple accounts in a Single Dashboard and follow interesting and trending stories as well, without losing track of your workflow. In the latest version, it is even possible to schedule tweets with images and organize a timeline of tweets.

13. Cyfe

Cyfe is a cloud-based intelligence application for business. The platform is popular for its Business Dashboard app, which allows users to seamlessly connect with third-party sources and collect, analyze, transform and report data. The application offers a freemium version, which allows users to manage all business metrics on a single screen.

14. SocialClout

Social Clout is a social media monitoring and sharing tool for Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. It aggregates all the data from forums, blogs, and social web pages to check the buzz about your brand or any other keyword you specify. It helps your company to make future forecasts with present and past statistics curated from Social Web.

15. AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse is a social media management tool for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It engages your audience with Facebook managing applications such as quiz, polls, and contest. Its key feature is the automatic moderation tool, which schedules your post to publish and tags your followers. The tool measures your post quality and compares your brand page statistics with your competitors.

16. HootSuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool, which features post scheduling, advanced analytics reports, RSS integration, custom URL, Geo-targeting, message archiving and much more. It helps you to manage your social channels and tracks your brand mentions across the web. Hootsuite screens multiple profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram from its dashboard.

17. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is an analytical tool specially designed for a Twitter profile to search for tweets & bios, maintain a Twitter relationship, compare accounts, and increase your followers. It helps you to reach out to your fans with the right content at the right time eventually increasing traffic and exposure of your brand.

18. Google Alerts

Google Alerts Keep you notified with trending blog posts, news articles on specified key terms from the Google Index. If the stories containing your required keyterms make it to the top list of Google, only then you will be more likely to receive an email. This can help you keep a track of Industry trends or brand mentions and latest news on specified topics of your interest.

19. Brandmentions.com

Brand Mentions is a web and social listening tool, designed to keep you up to date with everything important in your market and anything connected to your company. The tool monitors multiple sources & social networks, and it provides instant alerts straight to your inbox. It also allows you to engage in online conversations in real-time, directly from the app.

20. SumAll

SumAll is a free statistics aggregator that collects data from various accounts like Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Google Analytics and so and forth. This tool stores your data from Web Traffic, Social Media and Sales Metrics to track and analyze social and business metrics. Irreplaceable tool for Marketers depending on the Size of your business.

21. Brand24

Brand24 is social media analytics and monitoring tool that helps you to store your social media conversion statistics under one roof. This software features social search, sentiment analysis, influencer score, topic grouping, automated PDF stats and much more. This is suitable for small to midsize businesses (SMB).

22. Quintly

Quintly is a social media analytics and benchmarking tool that analyzes the performance of your company and your competitors. This software is integrated with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube to provide you metrics and statistics of your followers.

23. CrowdBooster

Crowdbooster is an analytics software that helps you optimize your digital marketing. It has some decent features such as social media scheduler, user access management, customized recommendations, email reports, real-time audience metrics, post scheduling and much more. It integrates with social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

24. Over-Graph

Over-Graph is a social media marketing software that allows you to research, analyze and publish posts on social platforms. It is integrated with five major Social Platforms namely, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

25. Fanpage Karma

Fanpagekarma is a free benchmarking tool that generates statistics data from fans and followers on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It provides comprehensive data insights and analyzes your competitor’s audience statistics that can be used to find ideal market opportunities for your business.

26. Buzzbundle

BuzzBundle is online tracking software that allows you to track your brand mentions across the web. It is a social listening and social influencing software, which features social media coverage, multiple social profiles, scheduling posts to publish and much more. This software integrates with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Forums and can be used to create buzz strategies and counter moves for your brand by monitoring your competitor’s activity.

27. Socedo

Socedo is an automated B2b lead generation tool, that helps you engage and qualify prospects across social platforms. The tool uses bio, location and conversational keywords to search and identify prospects on Social Media to help you reach out and convert them into customers.

28. SocialOomph

SocialOomph is a social media management tool that helps you to improve your company’s productivity. This software’s function includes URL shortening, schedule tweets, filter profiles, track keywords, schedule status and posts update, and more. It is integrated with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and uplifts your online business activity by automating its functions.

29. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a social media monitoring and marketing solution that allows you to schedule your contents across various social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. It helps you to manage multiple social accounts, discover trending topics, automate posts and much more. It is available in three different options such as Free, Professional, and Mobile Application promotion.

30. Qzzr

Qzzr is a quiz creator tool that has myriad free quiz templates, which you can use to create engaging quizzes on your social media profiles to attract more traffic to your site. This tool has a “Custom Share Text” option, which enables the feature to share the quiz on social media.

31. Contently

Contently is a content marketing solution that provides you with a comprehensive content marketing strategy for your business. It features a compilation of ideas, data insights, robust management, and optimised distribution to increase conversion rates of your business. Its advanced features include competitor assessment strategy, content workflow control, reporting and collaboration tools designed by their content experts.

32. Storify

Storify is an online platform that helps you to integrate curated content into your website on social media. This tool allows you to collect and organise contents from multiple resources. You can modify the most trending contents into your post to drive a better traffic.

33. Klout

Klout is a free social media metrics that analyze your social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Foursquare & rates you on your ‘overall online influence’. Klout score depends on ‘True Reach’, ‘Network Score’ and ‘Amplification Probability’ of your multiple social channels and it mainly tracks down your social networking habits.

34. IFTTT

IFTTT (if this, then that) is an automated software to schedule posts on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It allows you to create content involving two applications, 1 for generating and the other for promoting your brand’s activity on a digital platform. It provides sync services, supports multiple social sites and blog services. Even without knowledge of coding, you can send commands to the integrated apps in one go.

35. Twittercounter

Twitter Counter is a social media tool that optimises your tweet timing for maximum exposure among audience and tracks old tweets and their stats to help you discover the type of content connects with your audience. It also gives you an overview of your Twitter profile and shows you how much traction it’s gaining.

36. Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics is a useful analytic tool for your Twitter account. It helps you to monitor and analyse any tweet on the web and provides you the valuable data on the recent activity and the user’s perception via Twitter Graph. The graph includes some of the important points like link click, embedded media clicks, re-tweets, favourites, and replies.

37. Crowdfire

Crowdfire is a social media management application that mainly integrates with Twitter and Instagram to drive more traffic. This tool schedules posts for your online profiles and DM them automatically on Twitter. It keeps a track of your competitor’s followers and helps you to increase yours.

38. Plumlytics

Plumlytics is a social media management software having built-in predictive analytic and comprehensive listening features. This tool helps you predict about customer’s thought process about their likes and dislikes & based on the advanced algorithms i.e. it helps you to find out the right time to engage with users.

39. Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a powerful tool to measure the performance of a Facebook Page in terms of Post Engagement and User Interaction. If you own a Facebook page, you can access it from the Admin Panel, this tool clearly outlines your page activity and the number of active users on your page to understand better your page performance. Facebook Insights will give you data like the best time of the day, the best day of the week and the type of content that works best amongst your fans.

40. Google Trends

Google Trends is free software that shows you the most recent searches and activities on the web. It also allows you to compare the volume of searches between two or more terms. Google Insight, an extension of Google trends allows you to track different words or phrases for in-depth analysis.

41. HowSociable

Howsociable is a free social media marketing tool to monitor your brand’s influence on the web by integrating with 36 most used social media websites. This tool tracks your online activity and shows you, which online platform is driving more traffic for your brand and how you can improve it for a better result.

42. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a free Instagram marketing tool that analyzes your Insta-Stats and provides you with the overall data about your performance and fan base growth on the web.

43. Klear

Klear is a social influencing and organising software that helps you to produce and manage successful online campaigns to influence audience under the guidance of their experts. It analyses the effectiveness of your campaigns by monitoring them for your brand’s growth.

44. Mentionmap

Mentionmap is a Twitter analytic tool that helps you to discover the most trending topics on Twitter and shows the inter-linking of users through the most searched items.

45. NutShellMail

Nutshellmail is a mail service that allows SMB to monitor their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Yelp profiles and manages their online reputation and social media influence and send them statistics through daily mails.

46. Omgili

Omigili stands for “Oh my god, I loved it”. It is a search engine designed especially for forums, opinions, and Discussion groups. It monitors millions of group discussion threads and helps you to find out customer’s opinion, debates and personal experience about a particular topic.

47. Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest analytics is a software that analyses social listening and the social influence of your brand on Pinterest, which is connected with other online platforms as well.

48. Pluggio

Pluggio is a free social media management tool mainly designed for managing Facebook and Twitter profiles to automate every task including automated tweets, friend suggestions and auto follow-up with the users.

49. Kenshoo

Kenshoo is an online marketing solution that provides services like online advertising and search marketing for your enterprise. It allows you to optimize and automate your Ad Programs, marketing investments to increase the productivity of your company. Kenshoo offers various of templates that are easily plugged into MS Excel and provides a simple statistic for measuring your business progress and success.

50. SlackSocial

Slack is an online social messaging platform to communicate with your teammates for business purpose. It has many features such as direct messages, private chats, group conversations, drag-and-drop file sharing and link sharing for effective communication. This app is also recommended by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is available both for desktop and mobile.

51. Tweepi

Tweepi is a Twitter management tool, which shows who is responding to your tweets and who is not. It tracks all the activity happening on your Twitter account and record the metrics that help you to analyze and take action accordingly.

52. SocialFlow

Socialflow is an online social media data-driven software that optimises your business data to schedule your posts to publish. This tool is mainly for big size businesses with a substantial branding campaign, which can actually opt for PPC and paid promotions.

53. SocialBro

Socialbro is a Twitter management tool that optimizes your tweeting schedule, manages your Twitter Direct Message campaign, keeps an eye on your competitors, finds relevant followers and stores up all the metrics of your twitter profile.

54. PostPlanner

Postplanner is a Facebook managing software that helps you automate posts to publish for your Facebook Marketing. It mainly targets your audience, schedules posts and provides a status idea to increase engagement. This tool spies on trending topics and helps you to generate relevant posts. You can also automate post publishing from the RSS feed.

55. Sysomos

Sysomos is a social media analytic tool that monitors social trends, conversions, keywords and engage followers for your social media platform. It has four set of tools including MAP (Media Analysis Perform), Influence, Optimise and Heartbeat, which helps you to manage your social profiles by data evaluation, visualisation and optimisation.

56. Shoutlet

Shoutlet is a social app for social posting and managing your social profiles. It figures out your customer’s requirements and present them professional layout of the metrics. It can easily adapt new updates.

57. Unmetric

Unmetric is a social media analytical tool, which can be used for benchmarking your customer’s presence on social platform compared to your competitors. This is a data-driven tool to organise metrics based on your social activity for a better grasp over social engagement.

58. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is an online content research and marketing solution that allows you to search for the most trending contents on the web under any niche. This tool helps you to strategize content marketing for your brand, based on user’s response to your posts and also promotes your content by providing you the key influences for your digital marketing.

59. Oktopost

Oktopost is a social media management app that organises and schedules your post across various platforms. Its social sharing ability makes you easy to organise emails and posts for social media distribution platform.

60. SocialBakers

Socialbakers is a social media marketing tool that includes Social Media Builder, Executive Dashboard, Social Media Ads, Social Media Listening and Social Media Analytics. This app has some valuable features such as Facebook insights, performance comparison, instant reporting and all in one interface that helps you to generate new leads for your business.

61. Spredfast

Spredfast helps you connect with your team members across the Globe to manage tasks and workflow efficiency for your business. Their support service helps your business to raise conversion rates with their planning, organising and implementing a strategy for success of your business.

62. Cision

Cision is a social media tool that offers PR software, Social Software, Government Relations & PAC Software and Global Insight Consultancy, which has ability to sort out good contents and provides you the right strategy for your business. It is capable of sending multiple emails to bloggers and news media. It helps you to find out the Right News Media contacts and builds an editorial calendar efficiently.

63. GroSocial

GroSocial is a social app, which helps you to build, run and trace social media promotions and contests to your Twitter and Facebook profiles to engage more audience. It records the no. of participants and produces a random winner and follow up with them.

64. Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach is an online SMM tool that can be used for content marketing and research, influencer marketing, lead generation, blogger outreach and cold calling & emailing for your small to enterprise-level of business. This software allows you to select from multiple influencers in real-time with effective SEO and social insights under your brand’s niche. It helps you to find the most convinced users from social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

65. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a premium social media listening and influencing app that create reports based on all your social channels and helps you to improve your social conversions with its image recognition and competitive bench-marking feature.

66. Falcon.io

Falcon is a social media app to estimate and implement your social media campaign. It is integrated with multiple social channels. It is a great tool for Facebook landing pages, which influences your audience and promotes brand mentioning.

67. Optimizely

Optimizely is a testing and personalization application that helps you to discover the ways to minimise bounce rates and increases time on website. It aggregates reports on your existing traffic and helps you to engage customers for a longer period by conveying experiences at every interaction.

68. Rapportive

Rapportive is a management app, which stores up your emails and gives you metric about your inbox. This tool provides you a statistic, which shows your nearby clients, about their job profile and company and their activity on MailChimp.

69. Simply Measured

Simply Measured is a social measurement tool that integrates with multiple social channels and analyzes their performance in context of your brand. It also spies on your competitor by tracking their online activity. Reports produced by this tool are easy to understand. So that you can take action immediately to enhance your company website.

70. NUVI

NUVI is data insight tool that monitors and tracks down social media. This tool helps you to get more leads by making your social presence effective and hence your conversion rate increases. It also allows you to see the clients response across the internet.

71. Digimind Social

Digimind is a social media tool that understands your company’s needs, aggregates data insights from your social profiles and implements strategy to maintain your brand reputation, analyze industry and spy on your competitor. This tool is very responsive and flexible making itself user friendly.

72. NetBase

NetBase personalises your company’s dashboard and compares sentiments between two different product of same brand. This tool stores up a huge amount of data and execute these stats through graph, chart and fonts.

73. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is an analytical tool for midsize to enterprise level businesses. It is united with different social media channels for brand listening. You can manipulate social data with this app and extend your brand’s social listening and influencing

74. Social Studio

Social Studio is a social listening and management tool, which allows you to publish posts by calendar view. It helps you to maintain the workflow by notifying others of messages and taking action on it. This tool ties up with Radian 6 to provide you with more features that can be easily accessible.

75. PicMonkey

PicMonkey is a photo editing software that allows you to design, edit, and collage your photos for your social media posting to engage more followers. It has multiple templates to choose from, which helps you to boost your images.

76. Sotrender

Sotrender is a data-driven software for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. It helps you reach out to the customers by effective data visualisation. It presents reports and insights clearly to provide you a detailed summary of your campaigns.

77. Facebook Pages Manager

This tool manages multiple Facebook Pages in one go from your Mobile device. The back end of these pages is different from other pages, which can be easily handled by this app. This app manages your notifications, image uploads, post publishing and many more.

78. Camtasia

Camtasia is a video editing and screen recording software that allows you to record and capture screen, edit and upload videos illustrations, tutorial and review videos for your social profiles. Its advanced features like splitting up and joining the parts of videos, adding your brand’s watermark, annotations, recording highlights and much more to give you results with a professional touch.

79. Sendible

Sendible is a first social media Pinterest integrating tool for small to midsize businesses that helps them to strategize the marketing plans for the exposure on social media. This tool schedules 2000 messages and more for 3 Enterprises over 12 different platforms.

80. ScreenFlow

ScreenFlow is a video editing and screen casting tool that captures the full screen videos, allows you to edit your captures in one go. You can add voice overs, annotations, callouts, add videos, titles, audio filters, chroma key, multi-channel audio mixing and screen recording highlights to give your video a professional touch even without being a pro in this field.

81. ZohoSocial

Zoho Social is a Social media monitoring and managing tool that monitors keywords, handles multiple social channels, collaborates with your team members and schedules unlimited posts from a single panel. It allows you to find and narrow down on the target audience of your business, by measuring, analysing and customising your social campaigns.

82. Any.do

Any.do is a comprehensive task management app that keeps a record of your daily tasks and reviews your tasks to increase your productivity. It has a unique feature called Geo-location reminders that triggers the alert for your next task. This can help you schedule your upcoming tasks and make social media management more streamlined.

83. Flowdock

Flowdock is a social communicating platform that has some unique features like drag-and-drop uploads, quick file sharing, customizable notification sound, videos, image and link previews, private or public messages and many more to ensure an organised communication in a team environment.

84. Hipchat

HipChat is a team communication software that helps teams chat, share files and manage workflow over the Internet. The application also features video calling, screen sharing and enhanced security, which fosters productivity in a team environment. You can create purpose-specific groups so that all members of the Team are not affected by category-based tasks.

85. MeetEdgar

Meet Edgar is an online post filler app that allows you to create categories for your posts for your social networks mainly Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and schedule your posts. When your post become public, it automatically pulls your post down in the library to help you to post it again, when you run out of new post ideas. Its features include social media updates, queue filing, content scheduling, photo update support and more.

86. Gremln

Gremln is a social media app that aggregates your company’s work report from three channels – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These reports are easily shareable in a presentable manner via PDFs or emails. This app monitors your brand mentions, customer engagement and schedules your updates. Gremln allows you to restrict posts that have specific keywords and also keeps an archive of all your posts for three years.

87. Tracx

Tracx is a social analytics and monitoring tool that analyses your community management and social listening data. This tool helps you monitor back end of your business, track ROI, optimise campaigns, spy on your competition and measure individual team member’s performance. A great tool for Mid-Sized Businesses.

88. Adobe Social

Adobe Social is a social management app that monitors, publishes and promotes your content as well as analyses your social conversion data. This software has a unique feature to attach tracking codes to the posts to examine which content is driving more traffic and take action according to the stats of your target audience.

89. Sentiment

Sentiment is a social customer service platform that helps your schedule and publish content via Facebook, Google+ and Twitter through a content calendar. It also helps in analysing and monitoring social conversations and team performance along with driving customer engagement by resolving complaints and capitalising on available market opportunities.

90. TweetReach

TweetReach is a Twitter management tool that recognises your important URLs and hashtags to provide you a brief report on your audience’s response in its regard. It measures the performance of your tweets to understand the influence of your ideas on Twitter. It helps you find key industry influencers and engage with their followers.

91. ViralWoot

ViralWoot is an analytics and promotions tool for Pinterest that helps you promote your pins on the channel and measure your marketing efforts. The tool allows you to gain followers, promote pins and manage and build multiple Pinterest Accounts from a Single Dashboard.

92. BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a digital marketing software that helps you promote your products, content and services through influencers, thereby creating a buzz about your brand. This software helps you prioritise the most significant content by analysing your social media profiles, website statistics and contact information. The program features a single unanimous platform for all team members to collaborate.

93. TapInfluence

Just as the name suggests. Tapinfluence is an automated influencer marketing platform that helps agencies and brands find the best influencers in their industry. You can use it to find popular people in your niche who can promote your products and campaigns and help build a better brand recognition and reputation.

94. Piktochart

Piktochart is an infographic designing software that helps you design and customise infographics from thousands of preset templates. It has point-and-click and drag-and-drop feature, text frames and photo frames to create a presentable infographic, which can be downloaded in PNG, JPEG or PDF formats. This software imports information from Google spreadsheet, and Microsoft Excel and allows you to seamlessly represent your data in a visually appealing manner.

95. ScheduGram

Schedugram is an Instagram Management app that helps you to schedule your posts for publishing. This is an easy to use software that tells you if your post was published successfully or not. It provides you to repost and upload archived posts from your cloud/hard drive.

96. WebDam

WebDAM is a digital asset management software that allows you to connect with creative teams and files. This tool has some useful features such as intuitive folder trees, batch upload, media management, comprehensive format support, archival storage, version control, presentation management and image expiration. Its search feature includes in-document search, metadata support, advanced search and keyword management.

97. Rival IQ

Rival IQ is a data analytics and competitor analytics tool, which tracks your social networks and helps you boost traffic, engage followers and raise your social marketing ROI to your company. This tool allows you to spy on your competitor’s online activity and on their marketing strategy to strengthen your strategy for your brand growth.

98. LikeableHub

LikeableHub is a content curation and automatic publication tool that manages all your social network channels in one dashboard. This tool shares stories with news posts and thousands of content ideas. It can be used to automatically generate leads and manage your brand reputation by keeping an eye on the social web. It measures your brand’s success growth by simplified data analysis.

99. Click to Tweet

Click to Tweet is a link generator tool for Twitter, which lets you write the content you want to share and generate custom link in context of your content. This tools shares your link and keeps track of its activity to provide you with metrics that show you, which tweet has got maximum response.

100. Addict-o-matic

Addict-o-matic is a social media search platform that allows you to aggregate websites for latest blog posts, news, images and videos in your niche and display it in a single page.

101. Keyhole

If you are looking for a hashtag tracking solution, Keyhole is your answer. It works with most social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. You can find the most popular content in real-time for any niche and keyword you specify. This can ideally be used to reach industry influencers to market your products as well.

At Extreme-SEO, we use 37 out of these 101 Social Media Tools in our day to day activities and our most popular option is Hootsuite.

What about you?

Are responsible for the Social Media Marketing of your company?

Then you may have already used some of the marketing software, dashboards or management tools I have listed above. If So?

How was your experience?

Please share your feedback, reviews, comments and questions about the tools in the comments section below.

Your opinion will help the our readers make a well-Informed decision before investing into any of these tools.

20 DecSocial Media

15 Interesting Facts About Facebook You Need to Know

Facebook has attained the coveted dominant position that makes it the most popular and indispensable part of not only our social networking but also our business. It has become a rage since its inception in 2004. Nowadays, if you are not on Facebook, you are probably non-existent in the virtual world.

” 654 million people use Facebook on mobile on a daily basis, an increase from 609 million last quarter. “

If you are using this social media giant for your business, here are some interesting Facebook facts that will help you know and use it in a far better way. Facebook did have a humble beginning, and its dramatic rise is not without some downsides. There are facts that state Facebook’s negative effect on its users. However, the compelling effect of Facebook on social networking is more powerful than its flipside making it the first choice to socialize as well as market one’s business online.

#1. Are you aware of the Huge User Base of Facebook?

Facebook now has close to 350 million active users, with approximately 35 of these updating their status every day. 63% of users log on to Facebook daily. A majority of this access the network from their smartphones.

Statistics reveal that users log in close to 14 times during a day from their mobiles. On average, a user has 130 friends and sends 8 friend requests every month. Statistics reveal that there is approximately a 3.74 degree of separation between any two Facebook users.

Every minute around 2.5 million photos are being uploaded onto Facebook and close to 4.5 billion ‘likes’ are being generated on a daily basis as of May 2013, equating to 1.8 million ‘likes’ every minute. Every second five new profiles are being created on Facebook.

#2. Are There Fake Accounts? Yes, at least 83 Million Fake Accounts

Yes, there are facebook fake accounts. About 8.7% of users on Facebook are fake profiles and the total of fake profiles reaches 83 million. Surprisingly, there are even accounts of dead people, accounting for close to 30 million! Also, do you know that approximately 600,000 attempts to hack Facebook accounts are made every day?

#3. What Is The Best Time To Reach An Extended Audience?

The maximum traffic on Facebook happens around 1 pm to 3 pm midweek, with Thursdays and Fridays having 18% higher engagements compared to other days of the week. Also, the common age group is from 25 to 34 years, making up 29.7% of the overall users. Gender-wise, Facebook is equally popular and frequented by both genders, with 53% users being females and 47% being males. 50% of youngsters of the age bracket 18 to 24 years usually log on to Facebook first thing after waking up. Women aged 55 years and older are currently the fastest-growing demographics of Facebook users in the US. You can use these facts to focus on more aggressive marketing strategies during these peak traffic hours and for specific demographics too.

#4. Want More Data to Judge Facebook’s Growing Popularity?

If the above facts and figures are not enough proof of Facebook’s ever-growing popularity, then the following ones should seal the deal.

- There are more Facebook users in the US compared to the number of citizens who voted in the last US elections.
- In Australia, a court notice can be served to defendants on Facebook, and summons posted on Facebook are considered legally binding.

All these figures point to the fact that Facebook has become an inevitable part of our everyday lives and cannot be ignored by businesses trying to establish a footing in the now popular social media domain. Hence we can indeed make a good profit if we can use this site effectively!

#5. Is Facebook A Boon for Businesses? How Can You Make Profit Using It?

Doing business on Facebook has never been so lucrative. There are about 1.35 million active Facebook users worldwide of which 864 million users logging in daily, thus indicating an increase of 14% over the last year. In Europe alone there are 223 million people who have accounts on Facebook. Interestingly, if Facebook was a country, it would be the fifth-largest, after China, India, the US, and Indonesia. All these figures establish the fact that there is a large active target audience on Facebook. And most of this audience is a consistent audience to various marketing efforts of marketers. Also, as Facebook has a worldwide reach you can catch the attention of not just the US, but reach out globally.

#6. How Facebook Helps Marketer? Can It Be Termed As A Marketing Heaven?

There are close to 30 million businesses that have a Facebook Page. Close to 1.5 million businesses are now paying for advertising on Facebook. Most of these businesses are paying 122% more per ad unit than they did last year. The sales are impressive – if last quarter’s figures are considered – users purchased goods worth $234 million dollars! Close to 42% of marketers suggest that Facebook is vital and indispensable to their business. However, to make the best use of this site and get maximum profit, you need to market your business in a positive manner and stand out among your competitors. As of May 2013, almost 16 million pages of local businesses have been created as compared to 8 million created in June 2012, indicating a 100% increase. These figures are proof that companies are acknowledging the fact that Facebook users comprise a major chunk of their clients and are thus willing to advertise, as well as create interesting pages to be seen.

#7. Making Use of Facebook’s Tracking Data in Reaching out to Your Audience

Facebook keeps a track of the sites we visited even after we have logged out. This tracking assists businesses to indulge in intelligent marketing, but only when they get access to the information. Pages will display advertisements in accordance with the type of pages or sites visited by individual users, and thus will help you reaching the interested audience faster.

#8. Facebook is a Platform to Know and Understand People

Facebook has now become a sort of people search engine and is often used to know people, their likes and dislikes, opinions, etc. Data reveals that people search one billion times in a day on Facebook. This has made Facebook the overall second-ranked site in the US, after Google. A survey of 500 colleges revealed that Facebook accounts were visited by 10% of admission officers to evaluate the applicants seeking admissions. About 38% of these officers acknowledged that what they saw on Facebook affected the applicant’s admission negatively. Even job seekers and prospective marriage suitors are evaluated on Facebook. The police department as well as citizens are resorting to Facebook to nab suspected criminals.

#9. Facebook’s Role in Helping Businesses to Grow

Facebook and social media craze has also given rise to different types of professionals. There are a lot of consultants who guide businesses on how to tap the market on Facebook, how to launch campaigns on social media networks, and how to advertise. Also, programmers and developers are benefiting from this rage. The number of developers building applications for Facebook is close to 800,000.

#10. History of Facebook: The Beginning

Are you aware that Facebook had humble beginnings? Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, created Facemash in 2003, where photos of undergraduates were placed beside each other, and visitors to the site could rank which student they found “hotter”. Facemash eventually turned into the now universally known Facebook in 2005. In the beginning, Facebook was like a directory of sorts linking all students, faculty alumni, and staff at various colleges and universities through social networks. Initially, Facebook was limited to only Harvard university students but later on added other colleges and universities. Within 6 months of its launch, Facebook had around 200 colleges registered as users. Mark Zuckerberg went on to become the youngest billionaire at the age of 25 with a net worth of $1.5 million. As an aside, if you ever wondered why Facebook is blue, it is because its founder Mark Zuckerberg suffers from color blindness and cannot distinguish between red and green. Another intriguing piece of historical information was that twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had hired Mark Zuckerberg to program their site ConnectU or Harvard Connect but claimed that he stole their idea. There was a lawsuit that was settled for an undisclosed amount. Mark Zuckerberg’s fellow students such as Aaron Greenspan also made similar claims of having invented Facebook.

#11. The Facebook to Facebook and Its Role in Ads

By the way, do you know that Facebook was first called Facebook (thefacebook.com)? Right from the beginning, Facebook or Facebook had its media plan chalked out. Eduardo Saverin, Facebook’s CFO, back in 2004, approached advertisers to run standard IAB ads emphasizing the personal data they could access and target audiences by their universities, political inclination, or even dorms or their sexual orientation. Even though at its nascent stage, Eduardo Saverin quoted $80,000 for advertising through Facebook.

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, was the first person to invest in Facebook in June 2004 and invested $500,000 dollars. Li Hu Shing, East Asia’s richest man, invested in 2005 in Facebook around $120 million dollars. Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment firm, in May 2009, invested $200 million for a 1.96% stake in the Facebook website. By September 2009, Facebook was making a profit, with Mark Zuckerberg announcing that for the first time Facebook had a positive cash flow and made more money than it spent.

#12. The Facebook-Myspace Affair

In 2005, MySpace, another popular social network site, sent an offer to buy Facebook but when Mark Zuckerberg quoted a price of US $75 million they rejected the offer thinking it to be too expensive. The tables have turned since then and Facebook not only outnumbered the traffic on MySpace but also American users spend 13.9 billion minutes on Facebook in a year compared to 5 billion minutes on MySpace. Facebook spends approximately US $30 million in a month to just host the site and loses about US $25,000 every minute when the site is down.

One of Facebook’s many quirky facets is that the language can be changed to ‘pirate’ too. Another interesting Facebook fact is that the “like’ button was originally going to be called ‘Awesome’. In 2009, the New Oxford Dictionary declared “unfriend” to be the word of the year and defined it as “to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site”.Even though Facebook boasts of being a gold mine for investors and advertisers, it has had negative impacts on users too.

#13. What are the Negative Effects of Facebook?

However, this social networking giant has its negative too. It has led to many negative consequences. For example, people have been murdered after they ‘unfriended’ someone on Facebook. Cases of depression too, with 1 in 3 users feeling low and unsatisfied with their lives post visiting Facebook were in the news. Girls have been predisposed to depression and anxiety by chatting too much with their Facebook friends. Frequently talking about the same problems is called ‘co-rumination and can lead to a serious obsession, which is not healthy. Of the divorces filed in the US in 2011, around a third of them had the word Facebook mentioned.

Facebook has become such an addiction that a man hired a woman to slap him every time he logged onto Facebook. Another bizarre incident is that of a woman in Britain who created fake profiles and sent abusive messages to herself. She was sent to jail for 20 months. In England and Wales, the head of the Catholic Church warned patrons that children could be vulnerable to committing suicide because of Facebook and MySpace, as these sites barbarize community life and encourage fleeting relationships among teens. Facebook also has eating disorder groups named “Get thin or die trying” and “What nourishes me destroys me”, which encourage starving, and since the majority of users are teenagers and young adults such groups influence them negatively.

#14. Are You Aware Of Issues Like Banning and Misuse?

Since 2009, Facebook along with Twitter and The New York Times have been blocked in China due to its negative influence. The site has also been banned by Syria, Iran, and Vietnam.

The sharing of information, including personal details, on Facebook has been a bane, too. This information has been used without permission by various miscreants. The director of public policy of Facebook, Tim Sparapani, complained that millions of users shared information online without stopping to think about the consequences. Facebook itself is to be blamed for this at some point, as the information assumed to be public (like profile name, display pictures, cities) is available to any Facebook user or to their friends who use any Facebook application. Also in 2009, Facebook’s controversial advertisement system, Beacon that gave out user’s shopping activity information to other sites, was part of a lawsuit. The settlement resulted in Facebook paying $9.5 million towards a settlement fund.

There are also several absurd cases where Facebook has been misused. Lauren Michaels, a 23-year-old woman, in 2008, created a group on Facebook titled “I need sex” and slept with about 50 of the 100-plus members. Since then her page has been removed. An EMT in 2009 took a picture of at the crime scene of a dead New York woman who had been beaten and strangled to death and posted the picture on Facebook. He later faced arrest on charges of official misconduct and was removed from his job. Such facts and cases warn us to use Facebook wisely. It is not its popularity, but the consequences of this popularity that are rather frightening.

#15. Facebook becomes one of the most powerful Marketing Platform

If you evaluate properly the ratio of active users of Facebook to any other social media, you can notice the big difference! Here are some tips that can help you to better market your business on Facebook:

- Try to find out if you are marketing at the right time- that is during peak hours!
- You are targeting the right demographic
- You are consistent in engaging people and keeping them updated about your business

We are sure you will get better results following the above simple tips. We would appreciate your next query on better marketing on Facebook to get the maximum profit!

22 SepSocial Media

Advanced Social Media Strategies for Offline Businesses

In our contemporary world of today, most entrepreneurs use social media to enhance their businesses in several ways. This is because of the several benefits such businesses will derive from social media platforms. However, let us define the key phrases in our title.

Social media:

This is an online platform for social interactions among friends and contacts that afford you the opportunities to create and share information and ideas in virtual communities. From this definition, we can deduce that the social media platform has a pool full of people or contacts; has a pool full of information or ideas and opportunities to create and share with others whatever is of interest that you wish to share.

Offline business:

This refers to businesses that are done in the physical, where buyers and sellers meet one on one to interact and agree on terms for the transaction. Offline businesses require physical infrastructures like offices, factories, electronic and print media for the advert, and a lot of human resources for efficient service delivery. In the offline business platform, customers see whatever they want to buy physically; advertisements are done on Televisions, Radios, Magazines, and Newspapers and on Bill Boards; payments are made either with cheques or in cash, and sellers and customers meet physical, discuss and agree on terms of the transaction.

At this junction, it is important to highlight some of the benefits your business can enjoy from social media platforms. These will help you know the best strategies for your business as an entrepreneur. Social media afford you the opportunity to introduce your new products and brand to targeted contacts who in turn can become your potential customers. Whichever social media platforms you belong to, you can build and grow your contacts base to become your targeted clients or customers.

You can advertise existing products and services on some social media platforms. This could be either in your timeline or fan page etc. Some social media have spaces for paid advertisements with a wider audience than your contacts, fan page members, or group members. Thus, you can take advantage of this to promote your offline business. Building your brand or business image and keeping it fresh in the minds of people is very important in enhancing your business. Social media are sites that millions of people visit daily. You can therefore seize the opportunities to build and constantly keep your brand image in the minds of millions of people when you constantly post and advertise on social media.

Cracking Social Media Platform

Social media is a real-time interaction platform. This means you can always interact with your clients or customers at regular intervals. This will help your brand or business have a human face and you will readily know the opinions and views of your clients. People want to be able to ask questions, express their minds and get quick responses, social media gives you this chance to interact with your potential customers. Several social media have platforms for groups of like minds. People or businesses that are in the same fields or offer the same services can meet and share interests, ideas, challenges, etc. The interactions between group members help them to know each other and find ways of promoting their businesses. Social media help in positioning the entrepreneur as an expert consultant. People who need the services can easily contact you for offline transactions. Thus helping you build a loyal brand or business customer base.

So much for the benefits, let us shift our attention to the strategies for enhancing your offline business with social media. You must understand that social media is far more than content and conversations. It is a platform where you have thousands of contacts, fans or followers ready to be converted to clients or customers. There are several methods one can use to convert social media contacts to customers and derive great benefits for your offline business.

Three Myths About Social Media Strategies

The first strategy is to have a special offer for your online contacts who visit your business place personally. The offer should be posted online with a code to identify them when they appear physically. The special offer must be very attractive and could be in form of a discount, reward, or something that is worth an online contact coming physically to patronize your business.

Also, you can always post in your social media blog descriptive articles, images, comments, and content that draw attention to you or your business. This will make your contacts, fans, and followers want to meet you or visit your office physically. If it is permitted you can post your URL so that people can easily reach you. You can search on social media for contacts and group members in your immediate environment or locality, those who can easily come over to your shop, factory, or office. The strategy is to target these contacts and convert them to become your customers. If your business is nationwide or international you can develop a method targeting your fan base and refer them to your offices and outlets across the country or internationally.

Another very effective method is to extract the emails of members of your targeted groups of contact and send them direct or individual emails inviting them to visit your offline business office. An enticing offer will do the trick to pull them to become your customers. You can also mail them your newsletter, promotion offers, new arrivals or products, etc.

It is also very good to advertise your offline business on any of the social media paid-page. Here you can reach a wider audience that can become potential customers. In the advert, you can give a description of your services or products and how you can be contacted. The advert will have images that can attract potential customers to your offline business.

You must develop a good interactive pattern with your social media contacts. This will build confidence in them and they will be willing to contact you personally to patronize your offline business. Effective interactions with your online contacts will also make them refer other customers to you. On the other hand, poor interaction can have a negative effect as well. Incorporate your offline business website with some major social media. This will increase the number of people who visit your website and invariably have contact with you or your offline business.

Make sure the press releases, catalogues of your new products, and promotions of your offline business are posted on your website and also shared with your social media contacts base. Thus, they will always have new and fresh information about your business. Of course, this will pull them to want to do business with you physically. Develop yourself to become an expert consultant to your social media contacts in your niche. Be ready to play the role of “customer service” to your potential customers. Answer their questions and queries quickly; provide advice and support services; inform them of new products or services and if possible ensure that they are able to call you directly. By so doing you can direct them to your offline business place.

Conclusion:

I encourage you to either join or affiliate your offline business with as many social media as possible. This will increase your contact base and create more sources of interactions like blogs, forums, and timelines between you and your targeted audience or potential customers. The numbers of social media are increased by the day but here are some that you can easily join and utilize to your advantage. Facebook, Pinterest, Linked In, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Yookos, YouTube, and Tumblr.