Author: Lisa Sicard

This is a guest post by SEO analyst Sarah Bruce.

What role do you think Facebook or any other social media plays in our lives these days? Being connected to family and friends is of course, a feature that social network provides. However, it is not limited just there.

Until now, I had the notion that social networks are for “being connected” to known niches, but this idea has been completely changed by a few wonders that have happened lately.

I bet the recent incidents would have been an eye opener for many online users who are skeptical of the power of social networks like Facebook. They have shown their online influence and also proved that ‘strong desire’ can drive you to achieve your goals. ‘Kindness’ that exists globally has also been proved.

Does everything sound strange to you? I don’t blame you. In fact, there are many people who are not aware of the incredible happenings of the last year, and what is still happening.

So, I decided to share all the wonderful incidents on a platter for you. Let us have a small glimpse to know, how social media and people can be extremely intimate.

Facebook campaign helped the sisters get a puppy!

You must be wondering how a social network can possibly get you a puppy when you can go to a pet shop and buy one! Trust me, Facebook has that potential.

Not all parents wish to buy a pet for their children and a similar thing happened to an adorable gang of kids. Skeptical father had put a tricky condition of getting 1 million likes on a Facebook page to two siblings, and said that the success would fetch them a puppy.

Motivated by the father’s challenge, the two sisters decided to post a message on their Facebook Profile and requested other users to like it.

Message reads, “Hi World. We want a puppy! Our dad said we could get one if we get 1 million likes! He doesn’t think we can do it! So ‘LIKE’ this!”

To everyone’s surprise the post got 1.2 million likes within an hour!

Father had to keep up his word and the siblings had an addition to the family. Two little siblings proved the power of social network to the world.

Woman finds her birth mother!

The Power of Facebook should never be ignored! Jenessa Simons started her search of her birth parents three years ago when she was 18. After a long search, she decided to give a Facebook campaign a shot – inspired by the success of the Facebook viral puppy campaign.

She had posted her photo with what little information that she had on her Facebook Profile: Hospital, birth date of her parents, her birth date, and her contact information. This post went viral in no time, with 86,000 shares. Many people contacted Simons, saying falsely that they are her parents!

Then, a woman contacted her claiming to be her mother. Simons was skeptical initially, however the woman knew certain facts that were not known by anybody else. She told Simons that she was born via caesarean section. Simons said, “Then she sent pictures of me as a baby that my mother (adoptive) had given her”.

“I found my birth mother just because 70,000 people shared that picture and
took one second of their day to hit share and I found my family”, she said.

Simons was overwhelmed with emotions, after she had found her birth mother. The search of her birth father is still on, though.

Likes get a CAT added to the family!

When his kids asked for a cat, another father from Massachusetts, Dan Urbano, put forward a condition to his little daughter, Evelyn Urbano, and his 7-year old son, Remi. He told them that if they could get 1000 likes on Facebook he would buy them a furry cat.

Their mom, Marisa Papile Urbano, helped her children in writing their plea on a board and posted it on her Facebook Profile. It says, ‘Hey Facebook! My sister and I really want a CAT. Our papa promises we can get one if we can get 1,000 Likes. Please like this picture. Thank you!’

The heartwarming post crossed the threshold of 1000 likes and
reached almost 120,000 likes, with 100,000 shares across the globe.

What next? Dan had to give up and brought a green-eyed feline,
which they named as Hairietta L. Pawturr!

They say that the middle initial ‘L’ is their gratitude towards the
social network,which helped them add a friend to their family.

All these campaigns scream to the users to get rid of the suspicious notions about the influence of social media platforms. These networks have the power to reach and connect everybody, globally, irrespective of any barrier of differences.

Authored by Sarah Bruce. An SEO analyst, who predominantly works on removing Negative feedback from websites, Do you wish to Remove negative reviews about your Business/Services? Visit www.lemonpeak.com

What is IFTTT?

We are fortunate to have a guest post today from Rich Jarrott to explain IFTTT.com which is a tool I have known about for some time now that programmers find easy to understand, but the rest of us mortals haven’t quite figured out yet.

What is IFTTT.com?

Part of my job here at The Watch Hut is to track down new and evolving technology platforms that enable the team to do their jobs more easily. One of my favourite discoveries of recent months has been the website IFTTT.com. The site provides a platform to easily link the API functionality of multiple services together without having to code or use servers dedicated to the purpose.

By bringing together multiple services, it vastly simplifies the process of spreading content around the web to followers on disparate sites. Whilst it is not as elegant as writing bespoke (custom) tailored content for each site it does serve a purpose in alleviating the work load of busy social media managers whilst keeping people in touch.

It also provides a method of monitoring the effects of social media on search engine placements, meaning that useful social sites can be prioritised for bespoke content

How does IFTTT Work?

The site utilises a log-in of its own, so the first stage is to get this signed up. It’s a fairly normal procedure to get this far.

Once signed up, you then connect your additional services. We have added The Watch Hut’s Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and Facebook to this melting pot of social.

This can be a complicated process dependent on the type of service that is providing the incoming feed. Let’s look at Facebook as an example:

In the above example, the user will upload the photo to Facebook which will then sit on that page. IFTTT.com will periodically monitor the page for new content. When it sees an update has occurred, it will pull the photo and any associated tagging through its servers and on to the pages of Tumblr. IFTTT makes a pretty neat job of it too.

For GrowMap readers who prefer video, here is an IFTTT tutorial from ThatSnazzyiPhoneGuy:

So what’s the downside of this method?

Problems:

As a short term fix or a means to dynamically refresh your basic content, the method above is great, but beyond this it falls down. Here’s why.

Different groups are… well… different

If you are putting together a marketing strategy to cover various markets you would check for differences in culture, language and tone. Whilst we assume that people visiting the sites tend to be Anglo-centric there will however be a difference in modes of interaction between the various people within the different networks.

Let’s imagine that we used Twitter as a source to feed Facebook with text based updates. We would probably anger people with our short posts littered with hashtags and @names that mean nothing to the Facebook user.

These differences and breaches of netiquette are likely to impact on the willingness of subscribers to engage.

If the content is the same – why would I go there too?

At The Watch Hut we are competing for people’s eyeballs and precious time – unless you are communicating disaster relief information or something equally important then you will be too.

If people are already following you in one medium, you need to consider what else you are offering to make them follow you to new places.

For some people it will be a convenience thing and this grouping will probably enjoy seeing your messages in their new social media space, however, for others their needs to be something special.

Exclusive photos for instance make sense on sites like Flickr and Pinterest, whilst Instapaper readers will probably appreciate something wordier.

Does it work?

The take-home message has to be that in moderation, automatic syndication is a good way of getting core content to more than one place quickly and efficiently. It may even be enough to sustain a presence on sites with less traffic. But, it should not be used as a means to feed important sites with high visibility and where you have a large following.

RELATED POSTS:

• Bill Hartzer: How to Use IFTTT to Automate Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• BloggingTips: 5 Apps with Buffer Integration You Should Be Using
• Mathias Philippe: IFTTT or how to connect most your services together

This is a guest post by Gerald Heneghan on behalf of PR Fire that explains why press releases are still valuable for business promotion.

Online PR has been pivotal in lowering the marketing bar for companies up and down the scale, but has arguably been a double-edged sword.

Because it’s easier than ever for brands and businesses to promote themselves, competition has intensified rapidly.

New tools like social media, blogs and video attract so much of the attention these days that it’s easy to overlook the value of tried and tested marketing methods. In this guide, we’ve compiled some of the most effective examples of traditional PR and will make a case for their continued relevancy.

Video Killed the Radio Star

Television has been a firm favourite with marketers for many years, but the cost has typically proved prohibitively expensive for companies at the smaller end of the scale. However, studies indicate that TV is one of the most effective channels in its effect on purchasing decisions and is still miles ahead of YouTube video adverts and website banners in terms of efficacy.

Direct Mail

Used for millennia, this format is as tried and tested as they come yet is something of a novelty these days. Research indicates it’s particularly effective among older people and has significant conversion rate. Physical correspondence also seems to engender more of a response, with this Millward Brown Case Study finding that more emotional processing is involved when dealing with direct mail.

Press Releases

Invented over a century ago, press releases are favoured by organisations with something to shout about and are one of the most common ways to gain press coverage. The digital era has made creating and distributing these easier than ever.

The growth of sector-specific and niche news sites, alongside free or low-cost online repositories means that even the smallest companies can put together a release – although there are countless companies to which you can outsource elements of this process.

For those of you worried about detracting from your SEO efforts,

research seems to indicate press releases have SEO benefits.

Print

Despite decreasing circulation and online publications usurping many readers, print is still a favoured resource for advertisers. Regional publications are especially useful for companies looking to promote themselves on a local scale, with the UK’s IPA finding 5.8 per cent of advertising budgets deployed in this area during 2011.

Online

It’d be remiss of me not to note that online channels are still seeing the most growth and are positioned to be forerunners going forward. Among these, email marketing and social media are the clear favourites and are only set to grow as more companies realise their effectiveness.

Marketing is getting ever-easier for companies and this trend looks set to continue. However, by tying together new-fangled digital technologies with proven, traditional methods – companies can stand heads and shoulders above their narrowly-focused competitors.

This article was brought to you by Gerald Heneghan on behalf of PR Fire, a leading provider of online press release services and marketing tools that aims to help companies connect with both consumers and the media.

Image used courtesy of Shutterstock.

This is a guest post that reminds us once again of a serious deficiency in WordPress. If we grant contributor status, guest bloggers can not add images and have other limitations.

But if we give someone author access we have to trust them to remember to save posts as drafts or have unedited posts go live as happened here. My apologies to my readers; errors have been corrected.

Many people have valuable insights to share who may not know a run-in sentence from a complete one. That is why major publishers – and even blogs like this one – need editors. Some readers take great offense at minor errors, so you do need to proofread and edit your content.

Businesses and bloggers can benefit from using this resource: Common Blogging Mistakes: Editorial Guidelines for Bloggers. The reason I do not publish more guest posts is they frequently take hours to edit.

Writers who will apply the information in that post and who can provide publish-ready content are encouraged to contact me. If your posts do not need hours to edit I have multiple established blogs where they can be published.

BRANDING

It’s a competitive market today. That much is obvious. Brands are using every strategy they can to impact and of course, one of the main arenas in which this battle is being fought is the internet.

With almost an entire third of the world’s population online, companies are trying to get their chunk of business. Internet marketing can take many forms, all of which it would be impossible to delve into here. Instead, here are a few ways to improve existing marketing techniques.

Engagement

You’ve most likely heard this a million times. If you want people to buy from you, then you need to show them you are more than a faceless entity. But it really does work. Actively engaging with your target demographic in a personable and personal way is a proven method of increasing sales and traffic. Creating a community around your brand enhances the ‘trust’ factor.

This online retailer regularly engages with its community. And they sell white goods – which many people might find to be uninteresting. But through social media, video channels, blogs and competitions, they sell without selling. There’s no sales pitch. No attempt to trick the audience. They create trust.

One clever tip to recommend, which this retailer does, is to add Facebook to the top of their webpages. This allows a visitor to see who of their friends or family has used the retailer. Any reviews made are visible and this really promotes trust.

And the results are there to see. On Facebook alone, this retailer has well over half a million ‘likes’ and over 60,000 people talking about them.

Value Marketing

Go to any online marketing agency and they will tell you that Google wants unique content that adds value.

If you want to make your marketing more successful, then the work has to be put in. This means the creation of content that people will want to read, to listen to or to look at, and to share: articles, blog posts, infographics, videos and images. All this combined will enhance your profile and make your brand the one that gets found.

It’s no good focusing purely on one aspect; the full range has to be considered if you want your marketing campaign to prevail.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the best ways to do this. By giving people something they will want to use and share, then you are marketing yourself as a viable source of great content. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as a video such as this.

Of course, there’s more to it than this, but these are great starts that are easy to implement in your marketing.

Even though we focus on online marketing, that does NOT mean that offline promotions are not essential. In this guest post, Jawad Latif shares with us how businesses could be using stickers to raise awareness and increase sales.

When competition is high and the economy is challenging, organizations and businesses have to adopt new and different marketing and advertising strategies.

While most people think of stickers as being for children and simply laugh off the idea of marketing your business with printed stickers, savvy businesses find creative ways to use them. Continue reading How to Use Stickers to Make Businesses Popular in Untraditional Ways

This is a guest post by Samantha Bilk who writes for Zoober Digital Training, an online social media education portal with various course offerings on digital marketing topics.

There’s no denying the awesome reach and power of the latest social network to grace our screens – Pinterest.

Launched in 2010, it has been noted on several occasions that Pinterest has grown faster than any other social media site on the web including Twitter, Facebook and even Google Plus.

In the U.S., pinterest is mostly adopted by women (as of March 2012) with this recent infographic showing 80% of US pinterest users are women.

Interestingly, this UK pinterest users infographic shows that in the UK, 56% of pinterest users are male and only 44% are female!

How can you harness this behemoth for your benefit?
What are some good ways to grow your initial followers?
We have a few good ideas below on how to do just that.

See our top picks on four clever ways to grow your Pinterest followers this week. Continue reading 4 Clever Ways To Grow Your Pinterest Followers Using a One Week Blitz Campaign

This is a guest post by Ellee Parker of Web Host Gear, a British Columbia, Canada provider of web hosting reviews.

Finding decent web hosting and building a website is only the first step to successful Internet marketing. This isn’t a matter of if you build it they will come; you need to attract customers and potential customers to your site. One of the most efficient and cost effective ways of doing this is with social media.

Internet marketing isn’t like traditional marketing, where you create a series of ads and customers sit in their living rooms and watch them. The new age of marketing is about participative marketing. Continue reading Social Media and Increasing Website Traffic