At the heart of successful businesses often lies effective marketing. This is especially true in today’s scenario with the ever increasing popularity of Social Media Marketing (SMM). No matter how good your product or services are, unless you market it right, you may not attract enough eyeballs. Keeping that in mind, friends, I thought it is a great idea to discuss Social Media Marketing here. Let’s start! Firstly, what is SMM? It is a form of internet marketing (integrated communications plans) which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through participating in various social media networks. It involves relatively inexpensive, low cost promotional methods and is available easily to anyone with an internet...

So far I have shared with you a brief overview about Quora. Now let’s delve into it further and touch the business angle. Lets see how Quora works for your company, how it can be used as a marketing tool; both in terms of creating awareness about your products/brands and services, creating leads for you and finally working as a potential tool to generate business for you. Generating Leads: This is a very important feature of Quora. It allows you to see how many people have viewed your question, and how many are actually following it. This way you can build your list of prospects and generate leads. The very fact that they are following you shows that they are interested in your answer. If you wish, you could reach out to them at a...

The Social Media scene is rapidly changing and how! Emerging trends like Social TV, Micro and Video-blogging could evolve as new tools for marketers to engage consumers in the coming time. Guys, as the future of social media continues to look bright, let’s look at what we can expect to look out for in the social media front in 2012. Integration with corporate websites: Big brands will increasingly be seen using social media space to integrate their content to get closer to their customers. Social media connect and user generated content will be one ways to get closer to the customers. ROI is still huge: Social media is expected to ‘perform’, i.e. become more result oriented in the future. Though ROI is a talked about area in...

Sharing at some point was restricted to forwarding interesting content to friends and family members via email. With the launch of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, sharing is just a click away and faster than we could even imagine. After analyzing the social sharing habits of over two thousand active Facebook, Twitter and Google+ users, Beyond has come up with this interesting infographic that lists out the social sharing trends of future: Here are some key predictions from the study: The rate of shared content will eventually plateau. Users become more passive the longer they are on a social network, which means that brands need to find ways to keep their fans active and...

Think of an incredible combination of social networking, Wikipedia and a question and answer site? What could it be? It’s Quora for you my friends! Some of you may be perhaps using it actively, some still in the process of figuring it out and some others, may think of it as something similar to the Yahoo Answers site. But it certainly is much more than posting questions and users getting answers. However, at the moment it is on an invite-only mode outside U.S.A. If you need an invite, just visit our Facebook page. So how exactly does Quora work? Quora is a place where members can post questions, on a wide array of topics they would like to get answers on. These questions form part of the Quora community. If one is an expert or...

Guys, after the interesting discussion on Social Media Marketing, I bring you yet exciting topic to explore – Social Media Optimisation (SMO). Have you heard of SMO before? Well, for those who are not too sure of what it is, it is about making changes to a website, so that it links better and is highly visible on the social media searches on custom search engines. In short, it makes your content easily shareable across the social web. Isn’t that great? After all, that is an important objective behind creating a website. But hold on, SMO is not about driving traffic alone, it is also about ensuring that people, who have landed there, ‘see’ and ‘read’ the content. This also makes their friends more likely (statistically...

On the surface, Pinterest may appear just like another photo sharing site, but in reality it is much more. Pinterest is a virtual pin board (scrapbook) which allows users to bookmark things they want to among the tons of varied images across categories. Pinterest connects you all with images that are beautiful and interesting. But friends, Pinterest isn’t quite like Flicker or Instagram! It’s not Facebook or Twitter either, but connects to both. So how does one get started with Pinterest and what are the other features it offers? Let’s explore. Pinterest is currently in its Beta phase; hence it is still an invite-only platform. The first thing you need to do is request an invite because you need an invite to join Pinterest....

You have a killer idea for an app. You create a fantastic app out of it. It is so cool that take it can take the world by storm. And you have just launched it. However, during the app development process you did not market and promote it adequately. Now that it has been launched, it is not creating the stir it could have. Much to your disappointed your efforts seem wasted. Well guys, this happens. Apps do fail. But there are ways to prevent such failure, by taking the right measures in the development stage itself. The first thing to do is to start creating the ‘hype’ around your app, much before you launch it. Here are some tips for you to market and popularize your app, while it is being developed: Create something Unique: Simply...