Social Media is where you want to be when it comes to helping your business expand, as it is a priceless asset in the marketing world. Social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin attract so much continual attention from Internet users, it has become a phenomenal and powerful venue for advertisers to create interest and traffic. Here are five reasons to use social media for business.

1. Help Increased Search Engine Rankings:  Social media profiles frequently rank highly with major search engines. Using brand names and keywords in your profiles can help you to generate traffic for your social media sites and company homepage.
2. Generate Site Traffic:  By updating regularly on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with posts that link back to your site, you can create additional traffic to your site.
3. Find New Customers Through a Company Profile:  Your company profile is a great opportunity for you to post regular updates on your activities, but also about important news and trends in your industry. It’s critical to post regularly if you want to increase your followers or fans and convert them to potential leads.
4. Brand Monitoring:  Having a social media presence allows you to better understand what current and potential customers are saying about your product or services.
5. Networking:  Through social media you can quickly build a network of core supporters, which is essential for any up and coming business to keep growing and expanding. It is that group of loyal followers that will keep bringing your company business and referring it to others if they are pleased with what they are finding.

Following on from this, here is a little bit of ‘New News’ - Introducing Tokkster, a new type of chat room.

Tokkster is a new type of Internet chat room, which enables users to chat with other people over the same webpage. Pretty Unique.

All you need to do is sign up with a Tokkster account (and yes, it’s free). And that’s it. Once signed up, you browse websites like usual. What you will notice is a Tokkster Status bar in which you are able to see other peoples faces that are browsing the same page at the same time. Of course, if you don’t feel like chatting, either minimize the app (to become invisible) or don’t log in.

Only available in Internet Explorer version 7.0 and above (other version coming out soon).

You have seen the adverts, had the emails and will probably have been told that you can get cheaper websites online than going to a website design agency … well its all true, with one big BUT!

You will no doubt want to appear in the search results on Google? You probably want the best chance of a high position? Well if you go down the template route from the large suppliers your website will likely be penalised according to respected professionals in the SEO world who test and monitor Google’s search engine algorithms. In recent updates to it’s search algorithm, Google has devalued websites that duplicate content. Fair enough, who needs 27 websites all saying the same thing about the same company … but it now goes further.

Google now devalues websites that duplicate code as well. That’s essentially what a template site is, duplicated code. Nobody knows what percentage of code Google classes as duplicate content, its a well guarded secret.

So, if you want your new website to rank on search engines your first step is to avoid template, automatic or build your own websites. If you have your website built properly, from scratch and individually your foundation is solid. If you choose to use a template site you will be facing an uphill struggle to compete for position now and in the future … and who needs that?

Talk to AsOne on 0161 368 9100 before committing to a template project that you may later come to regret.

There has been a lot of talk about the ‘new’ Google Panda update. This is a change to the Google filtering used to rank sites. The update is designed to hurt the sites that try to cheat or use what is called ‘black hat’ techniques to get to the top. The people it is affecting badly are the sites with traditionally high traffic and rankings. If they have used sneaky methods to inflate their position they will suddenly drop and others don’t necessarily rise, they just don’t drop. The net effect is they appear to rise.

However, a lot of SEO companies are advocating changing the sneaky methods to new sneaky methods to compensate. They fail to realise that the practice is the reason Google introduced Panda and when they see people working around it they will just make a new update. Its’ an expensive battle to keep on top of Google’s attempt to normalise results and keep high quality sites at the top. It’s why AsOne believe that Social Networking and Social Marketing using the power of people is a more reliably long term strategy and the foundation on which your Marketing should be based.

Think of this, Business has thrived for thousands of years based on word-of-mouth. You best clients tell their contacts and before you know it you have a good business. Concentrating on Search engines is like advertising in the yellow pages … time, effort and money getting a good advert, good position. Remember people changing their company name to ‘1st widget company’ so they appear first in the book? Google is the modern Yellow Pages. It relies on people ‘picking it up’ and looking for what they need. 

Social Marketing goes back to the beginning, it’s the modern equivalent of word-of-mouth. People will always trust their friends over an advert. Use that power to encourage and assist your customers to advertise for you.