5 Advanced Twitter Tips for Your Small Business

By Alex Fitzpatrick at Mashable:  
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

So you’re running a small business and you’ve got the basics of social networking mastered: You tweet often, you’ve created a venue on Foursquare and your Facebook Page is beautiful. How do you move to the next level of social marketing mastery?
Devin Desjarlais, social media manager at Max Borges Agency, has five can’t-miss tips for upping your Twitter game.

1. Don’t Schedule and Split

Scheduling tweets with a platform such as HootSuite or Tweetdeck can be a great way to spread out your business’ social sharing throughout the day. However, Desjarlais says that it’s important to pay attention to any responses your scheduled tweets may elicit — the follow-up conversation is just as important as the initial tweet, if not more.
“The key to attracting a following on Twitter is to engage with users,” Desjarlais says. “Hootsuite is a free platform that allows companies to schedule tweets for all accounts in one place. That means that you won’t have to spend all day planning the next 140 characters to publish. However, check back hourly to see who has tweeted back at you. Twitter users have a short attention span, so it’s important to respond as quickly as possible.”

2. Sit in the Stream

Get familiar with platforms that let you build streams around phrases or hashtags relevant to your company. That way, you’ve always got your ear to the social ground.
“Hashtags are an excellent way to track conversation about a specific topic,” Desjarlais says. “With Hootsuite, companies can create streams that track a specific hashtag, giving the account manager an easy way to find content and engage with other tweeters. For example, if your company makes custom guitars, you might want to follow a stream dedicated to the #music hashtag.”

3. Don’t Rely on Your Handle

It’s the mark of a successful social company to have plenty of customers tweeting at you or about you using your Twitter handle, but you can’t rely on all users to do that. If you’re only listening for tweets mentioning @BobsBurgerShack, for example, you’ll miss out on a tweet such as, “Man, I wish Bob’s Burger Shack had relish!”

The solution? Enhanced listening techniques.

“Topsy.com is a little-known website that lets users do real-time searches in the social web,” Desjarlais explains. “Do daily searches for your company’s name and narrow the search results to just tweets to see who is talking about your company but not @-mentioning you.” Or you can save searches for some key terms and common permutations of your company name, such as “Bobs burger” and “Bobs cheeseburger.”

4. Don’t Be a Social Egomaniac

While the majority of your tweets will probably be about your business, it’s important to develop a personality beyond tweeting out discounts or new menu options. It’s all about building a human personality.
“The last thing a company wants to do is spam their followers with tweets,” she says. “Twitter is about sharing ideas, information and occasionally inspirational quotes in order to build a community around what the business offers. Try to tweet at least five times per day and dedicate one or two of those tweets to sending users back to your company’s website. Schedule those posts between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m. EST on the weekdays for the most engagement.”

5. Stay on Track

Determining the return on investment of social networking can be a real challenge, especially for smaller businesses that don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to complex analytics. Desjarlais says free tools are available to make that task just a bit easier.

“The URL shortener Bitly lets users create shortened links for any URL available online,” says Desjarlais. “Sign up for a free Bitly account and create custom Bitly links or ‘bitmarks’ that can be used whenever you send users back to your company’s website. To see how many people have clicked the link, simply paste the URL with a ‘+’ at the end into your Internet browser to see up-to-date metrics.”

 

Facebook Ads Running on Zynga Website

The beginnings of the long-awaited Facebook ad network could be here. Facebook ads began running on Zynga.com today.

First reported by Inside Facebook today, Facebook display ad units including Sponsored Stories are now being served on Zynga.com, the casual games site from the company behind popular Facebook gaming apps like Farmville.

"People may now see ads and sponsored stories from Facebook on Zynga.com," confirmed a Facebook spokesperson in an email sent to ClickZ. "We don't share any information about people or advertisers with Zynga and advertisers do not have any new targeting criteria."
In other words, this is not really the ad network ad industry watchers have expected Facebook to launch in conjunction with its Open Graph. Many anticipate a robust ad network that will allow advertisers to target ads across the web based on behavioral and contextual data gleaned through Facebook share buttons, and data collected through interactions on Facebook itself.

Whether or not that will ever come, in the nearer future observers can probably expect to see Facebook ads running on other sites that allow people to sign in using Facebook.
Facebook also piqued interest in its alleged ad network ambitions when news of partnerships with several DSPs broke last week. Facebook plans to open its site up to a large pool of data for display ad targeting, allowing advertisers to target users based on data from the DSP partners. Advertisers will target people through the DSP partners, and if Facebook finds a cookie match, an ad will be served on Facebook. However, they can't combine native Facebook data with that outside data, which would be sure to ruffle feathers among privacy advocates.

INFOGRAPHIC: Are People Sharing Much Online? What Are They Sharing & Why

As social media's usage has risen, so has people's willingness to share personal information via that medium. The problem is that what some people might think is a harmless note about going on vacation might be just the news a burglar has been waiting for. People share so much information now that one study said that 90 percent of adults think people share too much information online. But what type of potentially dangerous information is being shared and why do people share this information in the first place? Check out our infographic to learn the answers to those questions and more.
This Infographic is Published by Online-Education.net

5 Best Practices for Global SEO

By Crispin Sheridan at ClickZ:  

5 Techniques to ensure your website is optimized from a global SEO perspective and allows for increased visibility to drive traffic and conversions and ultimately "business value."




 

1. Utilize multilingual markup tags. There are several multilingual-specific HTML tags that should be leveraged across each of your country sites. The first is the hreflang tag. Search Engine Watch has an article explaining how and when to use this tag. The hreflang tag allows you to specify for each page what the language and intended country audience is; similar to how you can control these settings within Google Webmaster Tools (covered below).
2. Implement geo-specific schema tags. The second set of HTML tags is the geo-specific Schema.org tags. For those unfamiliar, Schema.org provides a collection of tags that webmasters can use to mark up certain content elements with structured data that Google, Yahoo, and Bing all recognize and use to better understand the intent of the content. There are many geo-specific schema tags that can be leveraged to further send signals as to which audience the content is intended for including organization names, addresses, phone numbers, geo-coordinates, etc. In addition to sending these signals to the engines, the data is now being incorporated into the search results pages for relevant queries. Not only does this improve the user experience, but it also helps attract a searcher's attention to your content and will likely increase click-through rates. To find out which tags are available and how to implement, visit the Schema Documentation page.
3. Create webmaster accounts for each country. Google Webmaster Tools provides in-depth information into many different elements of your website and allows you to control certain aspects around how Google indexes your content; in particular, the ability to set up geo-targeting by country. A webmaster account should be set up for each country site regardless of whether the content is located in subdirectories, on subdomains, or on a ccTLD. Once the account is created, ensure that you set up the geo-targeting rules by accessing Site Configuration>Settings and selecting the appropriate country in the Geographic Target drop-down menu.
4. Set up Google Places listings. In addition to leveraging the Schema.org tags to associate your content with the right countries, if you have brick-and-mortar locations, you should submit their information to Google Places and claim ownership of the listings. Places pages can be optimized using traditional SEO techniques to help them appear in organic listings and can also be used to funnel traffic back into your main site through backlinks. Furthermore, once the maps are created, you should embed the maps alongside your address information on your main site.
5. Engage in local link building. Link building, whether through traditional efforts such as outreach programs or guest blogging, social media, and leveraging partnerships, will always be one of the strongest ways to obtain more favorable rankings. In addition to helping with rankings, the search engines will look at the origin of the links to help determine local relevance. For example, a Chinese site that has a large number of links coming from other China-based sites will have a stronger authority within the local China search engines. Having quality links coming from within the region will in most cases be slightly more beneficial than having them come from sites from other countries.

Following these five best practices for global SEO in addition to the five previously provided techniques will go a long way in helping your site minimize potential penalties and increase visibility with the most relevant audiences. Are there any other strategies that you've found to be beneficial when optimizing content across a multinational website?

INFOGRAPHIC: How Badly Do We Behave on Social Media?

By Neil Vidyarthi at Social Times:  
Where have you seen the most offensive stuff – Reddit, YouTube or Facebook? I’m sure most of you would guess YouTube, where people are hidden behind anonymous IDs and have zero reason to hold back on their worst thoughts. A great social experiment will one day be done comparing our sentiment on the various social networks, but until that day we have a smart study by Salesforce Rypple which looks at our behavior on social media.
There are a few shockers – 44% of adults encounter “mean or cruel behavior” on social networks “once in a while,” while 41% of teens will “sometimes” tell an offensive person to stop when they see the activity. Most uplifting is that 79% of teens will never join in the mean or offensive behavior once it’s started. There are some good stats in here, and thanks to Rypple for the insight.

Infographic Source