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Great tips on using twitter for social media marketing

Follow these ten basic strategies for improving your marketing effort on Twitter and you will notice a big difference in how much traffic Twitter can bring to your business. Marketing on Twitter is not difficult, but there are some basic rules that you need to follow if you want to be successful in such an endeavor. Whether you are selling a product or a service, or just trying to gain attention for your web presence, Twitter is an advantageous way to attract interest in who you are and what your company is all about.

Great post from Michael Fruchter on getting started in Social Media... Everything from personal branding to blogging to Twitter

Getting started with social media, whether for personal or professional use, requires learning the basic fundamentals. Social media is more than just creating a blog or Twitter account. The tools are great and give us big advantages, but they are simply extensions of how we engage and participate in social media, they are not the answers. The social in social media is all about the human element. This post touches upon 40 key elements to aid your success.

Last year this time we posted about setting up a budget for your web strategy.. So, we decided to do the same this year. When we plan a web strategy for our clients it always includes a cost budget and time budget . Here's a generic version of our web strategy budget, including what 48Web budgets for our web strategy. This post turned out extremely long so we'll be releasing it in chunks - for easier reading. In this post we'll cover the hosting aspect of your web strategy.

So now you can NOT ONLY read these influencer's blogs, but know what other blogs THEY read - and what's on their minds. Why wouldn't you do this? It's all about relevancy, recency and respect: by reading their own recent blog posts as well as their recent comments on other blogs, as a PR pro you show a true interest in your "target." You learn how to not waste their time.

Learn what bounce rates are, how they affect you, and what you can do to improve your user's experience.

Bounce rates can be an important measurement for your website and web pages. They can help determine whether a certain ad campaign is successful, whether you're targeting the right keywords, or whether changes you make are improving your site. Knowing the bounce rate of your site and individual pages can give clues about what is and isn't working for your site.

The influence of search visibility as well as word of mouth on social media sites (the social web) is too significant for companies with any kind of brand equity to ignore. Lucky for readers of this blog or those you pass it on to, there are two upcoming opportunities to learn in depth about how to tackle online reputation management.

For years the Public Relations industry has ironically one of the worst reputations -esp since they are hired to look after the reputations of their own clients. Things only got worse as some brands got punk'd; the introduction of self-publishing tools that allowed anyone to connect to each other using social technologies, causing a shift in power. We've already talked to death about the risks and the changes that are happening to this industry, yet I'm hoping to elevate the viewpoint out of the gutter and focus on the larger opportunities -and risks at the industry level.

Here are some basic and core factors to optimize a web page that could be your index or landing page. No worries about that. SEO

Today at Searchology, Google has launched a search results enhancement called "rich snippets" that uses meta data from web pages (from microformats such as hCard, hCalendar, and RDF) to display additional details (both content and meaning) about pages in the results. This initial launch supports reviews (with sites such as Yelp) and people (with sites such as LinkedIn). They will be adding more sites and categories over time.

The first thing clients say to me when requesting SEO is invariably centered around rankings. "I want to be position so and so, for such and such a keyword." And I am certain that this is a situation familiar to many of you providing SEO services. However, search isn't always about ranking. And rankings aren't an overnight success story - they take time to achieve. In the meantime there need to be other indicators of success. There are a range of metrics possible to use to act as such indicators, many of which are key to gauging small business SEM success. Ranking high for "xyz" may deliver huge volume of visitors, but not sales. On the other hand, capturing niche rankings for "uvwxyz" and "abcdefg" may deliver less traffic, but actually better sales, not to mention may be easier to achieve in a shorter lead time.

If you're thinking of exploring social media for your company, go for it! But before you do that, here are five important tips you need to know:

Great tips on budgeting time for your online reputation management

Monitoring your business' social media presence is incredibly important. You need to respond to people talking about your brand and understand how people view your company. However, a common concern is that it takes up too much time.

When considering the tools of social media and how they relate to your business communications needs, it's important to think about two parts of the equation: possibility + function. These tools open up new ways to communicate, which is great. It also means that you have to consider what the functional goal of that communication means to your need.

"Bring wine to the picnic." In this case, Conn was talking about the idea that if you show up and try to market, people will be frustrated and will shut you out. Instead, if you bring something of value to people, they'll be more likely to accept you.

Great list of resources to learn Google Analytics - from beginners to experts

Great list of terms dealing with Google Local search results and local SEO

A collection of terms and definitions from a number of Google's patent filings on Local Search (not everything discussed in these patent applications have been incorporated into Google Local search - but the interesting thing about many of these patent filings is exploring whether or not they may have been).

What does this say about SMB's and social media? This piece says, that SMB's are: "Still feeling their way into social media..." Interesting. What's your take?

This is probably a good reason why everyone displaced from a marketing or PR job is now a social media expert :) because they're trying to help SMB's learn how to make this work for themselves. We're seeing great results with businesses we work with but those all take a "long term approach" and realize that seeing results takes a "cultural shift" not a new set of tools.

Advanced link building queries, for the link builders who use them extensively, remain a closely guarded secret. It's easy to understand why. For one, they want to protect a valued link source from getting flooded with link requests from the general link-seeking public. Secondly, there are some choice opportunities out there that would lose their value if the entire SEO community happened to learn about them. Another complication with discussing and sharing link building queries is that they're often tailored towards the linkable and shareable assets of a particular organization. Further, two businesses within the same vertical may have widely different linkable assets, and therefore will need to seek different link targets, which requires different queries.

All about the secret behind SEO.