Blog / 2009 / February

Why Twitter is Awesome for Business

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

I have been asked many times about the usefulness of Twitter in business. The answer really lies in your customer base. It is important to be where your customers are and if your customers are using social media websites then that is where you should be as well. Social Media is not a kid’s game and more and more people are joining social communities like Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It is important to know your customer and build relationships with them. Having a presence on Twitter should not be about advertising it should be about connecting with your customers and learning from them. Twitter is useful for a variety of reasons it can aid in customer service, marketing, News updates, and driving traffic to your websites.

As I stated Twitter is not a forum to sale products. Marketing yourself or your business is a little different in this space. You can still create brand identity and develop new customers and business partners, but it must be done in a new way. You cannot simply try to sell people on your product you must offer cool and useful information to the community in order to develop a following. The self-serving business will not find twitter useful you have to be useful to others in this space and offer something to the community. If you do not offer value to the community you are not much better than a spammer. If you offer advice, tips, or instant updates on the status of your business people will start to follow your company and you will have a successful social media campaign.

Here are some ways a Twitter post can aid in your business:

  • Customer Service: Easy questions can be answered using this forum
  • Branding and Relationships: Keeping people updated (sale announcements, customer feedback, nforming people of emergencies)
  • Direct sales: “30% off using product code XYZ”
  • Consumer Products: Announcing the launched a new product
  • Retail Information: You can get consumer feedback and learn what is working.

As we have seen, more and more people are joining spaces like Twitter. As social media continues to become more mainstream, it will be important for companies to view this as another channel to communicate with their Customers. But remember, you get as much out of social media as you put in, be useful, provide value, and always be rethinking how you want to interact with customers.

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Posted in Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

3 Ways to Get YouTube Views

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

There are 10-60,000 videos posted on YouTube each day, and without a little  help, it would be impossible for any of them to become successful. Here are 3  tips that have worked for me to increase the hits and views for my videos.

  1. It is important to have a video that quickly captures the viewer’s interest.  The video should cause laughter or create thought and want to cause the viewer to further investigate the company who created it. In order to make it truly viral. there are a few tricks that are sure to help generate viewers:

    • Make it short. It is always a good idea to keep a clip to about 30 seconds and to break up long stories into smaller clips
    • Don’t make it an ad. If the video feels like an advertisement, people are less likely to spread the word.
    • Make the content unique. You want people to investigate further.
    • Make the headlines eye catching
    • If you cannot be creative or all else fails, Sex appeal always works.
  2. It is important to draw viewers in from other sources to build a viewer base. Here are some ideas on how to get people to your video.
    • Blogs: Reach out to bloggers who write about relevant content and ask them to post your embedded videos.
    • Forums: Start a thread and either provide an embedded video or the link to the video. It may even be a good idea to get the conversation started from another account.
    • Social Networking Site- MySpace and Facebook let you embed videos onto peoples pages and Twitter is a great place to leave a link for people to click on.
    • Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Building an email list is not an easy task but if you already have a list, this can prove to be a great strategy.
    • Of course getting your friends to watch the video and email it to their friends, and mobilizing your friends to keep the video moving, could very well lead to a huge boost in viewership.
  3. Title Optimization
    • Titles and thumbnails are an important way for video creators to persuade users to view their videos. This may seem like basic information, but it is surprising how much time people put into creating a video and how little time they spend creating titles, thumbnails, and descriptions. Titles can be changed constantly so you can title your video something catchy at first and, once you begin to see traffic mount, change it so something a bit more relevant. Catch phrases like “exclusive”, “leaked video” or “never seen before” are terms that can drive traffic.

If you follow these three easy tips, you can definitly see an increase in traffic. YouTube is truly amazing. Creating one video can generate millions of  views and thousands, if not millions, of new visitors to your website. I hope you are able to create a successful YouTube campaign.

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Posted in Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

Web Design Tips: CSS Basics

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)…it sounds complicated, but it is simple, yet powerful. With a few lines you can transform a plain black-on-white web page into nice looking layout.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, CSS is a language used to style your HTML by making declarations for various selectors. A selector may be a class, an id, or a predefined HTML element such as p, a, h1, div. Classes and ids are similar, but an id should only be used once throughout the page while a class can be used many times. Classes and ids are used to specify an HTML element within your code.

Let’s take a look at some HTML using a class and an id…

<p>This is a standard paragraph block</p>
<p class="some-class">This paragraph is using a custom class</p>
<p id="some-id">And this one is using an id</p>

Now that we’ve got our HTML we can style it using CSS. First I am going to set all paragraph elements to have 12pt and red text. Then I will change the background color of any elements using the some-class. And finally I will add both margin and padding to the element with the id of some-id. This code will go inside of <style> tags in your head section or in a separate .css file.

/* an HTML element */
p {
	color: red;
	font-size: 12pt;
	}

/* a custom class */
.some-class {
	background: blue;
	}

/* a custom id */
#some-id {
	margin: 10px;
	padding: 5px;
	}

The results should look something like this…

This is a standard paragraph block

This paragraph is using a custom class

And this one is using an id

Next time we will go deeper into CSS and learn some intermediate tips and tricks to help stylize your content. If you have any questions be sure to leave a comment or email me and I will try to cover it in my upcoming tutorials.

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Posted in Web Design | No Comments »

Welcome to Promoting Group

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Dear Readers,

It’s almost one year that our devoted team of ‘marketeers’ came together, and worked to bring unique and unforgetable campaigns. It has definitely been one roller coaster ride from being college graduates to an unstable economy to staying up endless nights that evolved into mornings with brainstorming the next big idea to implement on your behalf. With all that said - none of what I just stated would have been in writing today - if it wasn’t for our all-star staff, who have excelled and performed on the world wide web stage like superstars. We are a group of online promoters with vivid imaginations and a killer instinct to help you reach over the top. Our blog is set up for you to learn on how to implement various marketing strategies online and offline in order to achieve maximum exposure. We urge for everyone reading our posts to interact with our team by commenting and don’t be shy to contact us with any questions you may have about anything we post, as well. You can also ask us questions using your twitter account and follow us for the latest updates.

Thank you,

Eli Natan

Posted in News and Updates | No Comments »

 

About Promoting Group

Who We Are: Promoting Group is an internet marketing company whose priority is to make your organization rise above the competition. We are a group of talented and dedicated individuals with a passion for marketing and demonstrated skill in public relations and search engine optimization. We will custom-tailor marketing strategies that are right for you and ...

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