What's your Klout score?

Klout’s scoring system recently added a new influencer – YouTube. Klout now uses YouTube activity when it creates its scoring system for social influence and here’s how it works:

Each Klout user can now sync their Klout account with their YouTube account and once they are synced Klout will then analyze the users YouTube habits and information and use it in the users Klout score. The information that Klout takes will be derived from an analysis of the users comments, likes, subscriber counts and engagement and other handy information.

Klout already uses data from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to score each Klout user with a social influence score that will rate from anywhere between 1-100.

Who Cares About Social Media Scores?

Many brands are concerned about their social influence score and more and more businesses are using Klout to identify social media influencers in a bid to hand out freebies and offer perks. A notable addition to the Klout team is Spotify who now offers invitations to users that boast high Klout scores.

In June, Klout added LinkedIn as an influencer on its social media score system and then in July, it also started factoring in Foursquare data. Some of the most interesting news to surround Klout is that it will also add Google+ as an influencer as soon as the search giant announces its social network API.

Klout is proving popular with many investors and Mayfield Fund, Lucid Ventures, Greycroft Partners and Kleiner Perkins are just a few of the most notable names that have helped Klout to raise $10 in funding.

Do you find Klout valuable?

In order for us to survive there are a few things that we have to do such as breathe, drink and of course arguably the most fun of them all – eat! A whopping 700 million of us ‘eating’ humans can be found on Facebook making it a great platform to market a restaurant on.

Being the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook attracts many restaurants but there is room for many more and even the ones that are taking advantage of the site are sometimes not doing it properly. We want to help you  understand how to Facebook about food and here are the top 10 things that all restaurants should do when Facebooking about their business:

1. Engage and Respond

As well as concentrating on getting your fans to engage with you, you need to be able to show them that you are engaged as well. This means that you need to do the following on a regular basis:

• Answer questions quickly
• Address problems and concerns
• Acknowledge new fans
• Respond to people posting on your page

These things don’t take long to do but they can make a huge difference. Even if you simply send a quick “Thank you” post, you should never underestimate the power of those two simple words.

2. Showcase your Food

Tell your audience where the origins of a dish came from, post videos of the chefs preparing meals and provide tasty recipes that people will appreciate. People love this kind of stuff so give it to them! Choose to showcase a popular meal that is notoriously tricky to cook such as lobster (prepping is often an issue) or how to make a soufflé and make sure that it is also a dish that you sell and not just a random dish. An in-depth description full of adjectives can make for a great way to make people want to visit your restaurant and words such as “scrumptious”, “tasty”, “mouth watering”, “delicious” and “succulent” always work well…

3. Use More Than Words

If you specialise in organic food or fresh seafood, as well as telling your customers how fresh and natural your food is, show them. Post videos of your delivery trucks turning up or pictures of your vegetable garden, as a visual stimulus goes a long way in marketing. Food should look good, smell good and taste good and as Facebook is not yet that advanced that you can smell and taste food through its pages (watch this space!), you need to ensure that it looks good. Give your audience a taste of food porn – make their mouths water with your pictures and videos and accompany them with a description that makes them want to eat!

4. Don’t Always go for the Hard Sell

While your restaurant is your livelihood and you want to market on Facebook to boost your brand and revenue, the hard sell tactic can get tiring. You can wear your audience out with bombarding demands for your customers to visit your restaurant, so try to keep it more lightweight. Special offers and new dishes should be advertised but any page that comes across as too self serving will tire out its visitors. Find the right balance between, videos, pictures, text, new dishes, special offers, education, engagement and customer service.

If it’s National Chocolate Day or National Oyster Day (yes, they really both exist) and you sell neither product – why not do a special menu for that day only. Rather than telling people they must come and try your fantastic and one-day only chocolate soufflé, you can humanize the brand by putting the idea out there that makes them want chocolate. Post a video of your chef making the soufflé a day or two before and simply mention your upcoming “special chocolate menu” underneath. That way, your customers want the chocolate on their own accord without you force feeding the idea to them.

5. Share your News

If you get a good review, share it! Make your audience talk about you to other as word of mouth is a powerful tool to harness in social media. This is a great way to promote your business without hard selling and by simply being an awesome restaurant – you will motivate others to tell the world for you!

6. Be Digitally Aware

As well as having a Facebook page, you need to get savvy about the digital devices that your customers are using. If you sell takeaway, you need to have an iPhone app that allows you customers to place an order via their super-popular iPhone. Remember that more and more people will access their Facebook via a mobile device rather than a PC or even a laptop and this means that if you run an email marketing campaign alongside your Facebook – you will need to make sure it works well for small, handheld devices.

Blogs are also important to a marketing campaign in 2011 and all of these additional marketing techniques can work well with your Facebook page and here’s how:

• Integrate them
• Promote your Facebook through your emails
• Tweet about your Facebook
• Blog about your Facebook

7. Be Consistent

It is vital that your Facebook page promotes deals that are actually happening as the last thing you want is for a customer to read about a promotion on Facebook only to find out that it is old news when they arrive for a meal. This is especially important when you run more than one outlet and keeping a seamless flow between your Facebook and your actual restaurant is crucial. If you advertise via Facebook a deal on crab cakes that runs from August 30 to September 30 – make sure that your staff are all aware of the deal. Being inconsistent will not only drive customers away but it will lead to bad word of mouth being spread about your restaurant and on a social networking site – bad word of mouth tends to travel faster than good!

8. Don’t Give Away Too Many Freebies

Although we all know everyone loves free stuff, it can be overdone in the restaurant industry to the point of it being detrimental. A restaurant isn’t a single-purchase industry like a car dealership is (after all, how many cars are you likely to buy in one go?). A restaurant sells food – something that we have already established is a necessary part of life! Discounts are great and they work well, but only once in a while.

You can boost your “Likes” with buy one, get one free giveaways but you can’t sustain a business this way. The value of your restaurant will go down if you constantly give away free food as your customers will come to expect great deals that won’t actually earn you any money. Think of your customers as trainable in that if you train them into thinking they will always get a free meal when they visit your restaurant, they will end up disappointed when they have to pay full price when the deal is over.

Give away vouchers, discounts and freebies – just not all the time!

9. Be Unique

Work is hard and often stressful, so when your audience takes a break to check out your age – you want to make them interested in what you are marketing. Rather than asking them to simply click the “Like” button, ask them: “Do you like me?” Flirt with your customers; make them want your food! Having a genuine human voice than comes through your Facebook page is a great way to get people more interested.

10. Facebook vs. Twitter

Don’t use the same posts on Twitter as you do on Facebook as it is a different platform with a different audience. And those audience members who are the same don’t want to read the same information on both sites! Posting the occasional link to persuade your audience to check out your other posts is fine, just don’t overdo the similarities. Facebookers are not always Tweeters and vice versa, so constant encouragement for your audience to visit the “enemy” site may result in you losing customers.

Variety is the spice of life and if any business should know their spices – restaurants should!

Boost Revenue Via Twitter

The gadget-reviewing fans at TechCrunch recently looked into how Twitter users rate a business and it soon became clear that if a business answers a question that a user posted on Twitter; they would be far more likely to buy from the business. In fact, a massive 64% of users claimed that if a company responds to their question via the social networking site they would be more likely to buy from that company!

How Twitter Can Boost Your Reputation and Sales

This is HUGE news for Twitter fans and the few businesses left in the world that don’t use Twitter and evidently should as it shows just how important it is to connect and interact with potential customers to boost you sales!

What the Survey Revealed…

The survey showed that consumers were more likely to feel that a company was readily available, reliable and willing to put the customer’s needs first if they answered their question quickly and the fact that a company listens to what is being asked; builds up the ground level base of trust.

So, how can you use this useful info to your advantage?

Expand your Followers!

If consumers are more likely to buy from companies who answer questions posted on Twitter, doesn’t it make sense that you should have as many followers on Twitter as possible? Build your list and when you have attracted more followers, attract some more!

A large social media base is great if you want to boost sales and here is the stat that back up the concept:

• 59% said they were more likely to follow a company that answered their questions on Twitter

With more than half of those questioned more likely to follow your business if you answer their questions and even more followers more likely to buy from you if you answer their questions – answering consumer questions via Twitter seems like a simple way to boost sales!

Here is a great example of how the concept works:

Instead of being in Jamaica on holiday I am sat on the tarmac at MIA. The reason for this is a four-hour delay that I endured at JFK and I after making numerous phone calls to both airlines involved; I turned to Twitter for some guidance. After attempting to contact both airlines via Twitter, guess which one I will be using again for future flights? The one that responded to my questions!

A total of 2049 people were questioned in the Twitter survey conducted by the technical gurus at TechCrunch and with 64% of these people agreeing with me that when a company answers your questions when you need them to most – you are more likely to use them either again or for the first time!

Are you listening to this airline no.2? If you had responded to my Tweets for help and advice while I spent part of my holiday sitting on the tarmac instead of sunning myself on a beach; I may consider using your services again!

However obvious these statistics may sound, lots of businesses still fail to engage regularly with their users and as a result, they are losing customers. Not only will people be less likely to buy from you, they may also end up feeling rage at being left stranded at an airport for hours with no support and end up Tweeting about their bad experience.

Or in some cases, writing songs about damaged guitars… Contrary to popular belief – not all press is good press!

What do you think about the way that businesses use Twitter?

Feel free to read more at: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/29/users-say-theyre-more-likely-to-buy-if-a-business-answers-their-question-on-twitter/

Click "Like' to Optimize Your Facebook

After Facebook introduced the world to its now famous ‘Like’ button and began allowing users to leave comments, the ‘like’ button’s visibility has been boosted dramatically, which is a benefit to marketers, brands and sales people.

So, why does the success of the ‘Like’ button mean so much to so many businesses?

The volume of traffic, the quality of traffic, revenue and conversions are all important points for any business. The ‘Like’ button is addictive to press but it is also interesting to see how many people look to see who else has Liked you, thus increasing your visibility. The more people who choose to ‘like’ your business or status update; the more attention you will receive as your friend’s activity will appear in their News Feed page for their friends to see and so on.

Check out these handy tips on how you can optimize your Facebook pages:

• If you let your users leave comments on your business page, you will increase the number of ‘Likes’

• Figures released from Facebook claim that you are five times more likely to get ‘Liked’ when the button displays a thumbnail image of friends

• You should place ‘Like’ buttons at the top and at the foot of your posts

• Post video clips with titles

• Always post links to similar content on your website

• Keep your content up to date by talking about current events that are relevant to your business and some that are not. For example, if you sell American Football merchandise then it would be wise to start up a poll to see who will win the next Super Bowl a week or so before it starts but even if you sell dog food; you can still benefit from starting conversations up about popular current events

• Use your wall to offer discounts and coupons, with all posts displaying the ‘Like’ button

• Send out the occasional message to your fans to ask them what they would like to see more and less of in your group

• Include a ‘Like’ button on your video clips, images and infographics as well as your status’s

• People love to play games so offer your fans trivia questions, present them with polls and relevant games – all of which should of course include the ‘Like’ button…

Noteworthy facts:

When Pretzel Crisps offered Facebook fans an exclusive coupon, the company enjoyed a 53% growth spurt of fans in 24 hours! Like…

ShoeDazzle began allowing their fans to go directly to their website from their Facebook page and as a result, these shoppers are 50% more likely to make repeat purchases! Like…

Tea Collection says that they welcomed a revenue increase of 10 times the amount that they were previously enjoying after they added the ‘Like’ feature. Like…

Metacafe’s daily referral traffic from Facebook doubled from 60,000 to 120,000 after placing the ‘Like’ button above as well as below its video clips.

Do you love the ‘Like’ button and the other social plugins provided by Facebook for commercial purposes?

Did you “Like” this post? Don’t be shy, go ahead and click the Like button, you know you want to

We all know the power of online marketing but what about marketing your business through online video? You can snare millions of viewers into watching a video that advertises your business at a really low cost and here are a few tips on how you can take your small business video viral:

What Is a Viral Video?

A viral video is a video that becomes a sensation around the world after being shared on various social networking sites, video sharing websites and email.

Firstly, creating hype is the name of the game when you advertise and market a business. The internet is a great tool to use for creating hype: hype about celebrity love scandals, hype about royal weddings, hype about dead terrorist leaders and most importantly – hype about your business! The internet offers an affordable way for small businesses to create hype and interest in their offerings and the modern promotional sector is all about going viral!

Video Sensations…

Think about the best videos you have seen online. Why did you like them? The answer to this is normally because they make you laugh and occasionally because they have such a bold and interesting theme they simply drew you in but humor is the easiest way to entice an audience in.

From babies who talk to each other through to disgruntled airline passengers who write songs about their experiences; the internet is a blank platform that is all yours to use to create funny and interesting video content to promote your business. Millions of people saw Dave Carroll create his now infamous “United Breaks Guitars” song. What did it cost him to create a video viral other than his broken guitar? Not a cent.

However, creating a video viral is not quite as easy as it may seem!

If you want to create a video that will spread like wild fire then you will need to do the following:

1. Creating vs. Editing

Ok, so creating a Blair Witch-esque video may look easy as we only ever see the final product but while grabbing a hand held camera and shooting a video is easy enough; the editing can be complicated. Some cameras actually have a built-in editing feature that saves you from having to attempt to edit but going completely native can be a risk. It would be wise to get an editor to look over your video and you can save money on this job by asking a university student to do it for you at a fraction of the price or you can post it as a job on CraigsList with an amount that you are prepared to pay for a job well done.

Having a well-edited video will help it to go viral so while you don’t have to spend out on the video itself; you should pay attention to the editing.

2. Include Themes

A viral video will include some but preferably all of the following:

• Sexiness
• Humor
• Shock and awe
• Interaction
• Interest and engagement

While it’s not always appropriate to feature all of these traits, it is apparent that the above features are what make videos go viral so if you can incorporate as many as possible then you will be more likely onto a winner.

3. Video Length

Take a look at the most viewed video clips on YouTube. How long are they?

Videos that go viral are engaging and you can usually only keep viewers engaged for a short period of time so keep your videos to a minimum of one minute and a maximum of three. Use the opening 10 seconds to suck your viewers in and use the last 10 seconds to spit them back out with a big bang!

4. Boost Your Viewers

This point is simple: The more subscribers you have, the more people you will be able to reach with your video.

The easiest way to get organic subscribers when you are sharing videos is to ensure that your video is uploaded by someone who already has a long list of subscribers. You can hunt these users down by clicking on the “Channels” tab on YouTube and then follow the link to the “Most Subscribed”.

As a small business I am assuming that your budget is minimal. As such, you will need to create a cheap video that features friends or family so you don’t need to pay them, use university students to help with shooting and editing, find avid video posters with numerous followers and then once the ball has started to roll; you are under way with your viral video on a very small budget!

We are in the midst of a social media boom! Everyone is busy spending their days Tweeting away or updating their friends on what they had for breakfast – so how can we use the dominance of social media to boost our websites?

SEO is relevant to the social search engine and here’s how:

Search engines now use far more complicated methods when they rank a website. Long gone are the days when the engines would simply send out their crawlers and rank a website depending on keywords – they now even employ techniques to monitor the relevance of a search result! This means that searchers are offered far many more relevant websites in their SERPs than ever before is a bid to cut back on the amount of pointless websites that searches can throw up.

If our clients can improve their social networking skills then we as SEO experts will reap the benefits! Check out these handy hints and tips on how we can use social searches to our benefit:

1)   Insert links to your website through your social media

If you are a member of Facebook then you should be using to do more than informing your friends about how hung-over you are after a wild weekend away, what chocolate bar you have just eaten or what the bloody weather is doing… Update your friends about your business and add links to your website to promote more visitors. The same can be done on any of the top social media forms from Twitter through to myspace.

2)   Create a group

As a business you should have created a group for your business. Once a group has been created then you can start posting comments are your business, about your business, to benefit your business!

i.e. Your business name is Community Craft Charity Thailand and you have a sale on your handmade soaps this week so your social media update will be posted under your business name and whatever you are promoting will appear underneath.

3)   Be active with your accounts

When you are a member of the likes of Twitter you must make sure that you dedicate time every week to posting updates and promoting new products or money-off deals. Use keywords when you post updates and make sure that your business profile is set to public so that EVERYONE can see your business profile!

As well as these tips you can ask people to review your products and services and post useful links and comments about what you offer. Word of mouth via social media has the potential to spread like wildfire so make sure people talk about you. Social networking is big business and if you can tap into it as a means to generate more site traffic then you will continue to grow your online business.

Do you have any ideas on what you should do with your social networking in order to ensure that you increase your site traffic?

Be careful not to overexpose….

Blogs are a vital part of any good search engine optimization strategy and making sure that they are optimized well is hugely important to their success rate. Blogging is just as popular as Tweeting nowadays and as an SEO tool it should never be left out of a campaign to get noticed by the search engines!

There are a few ways to ensure that your blogs are fully optimized and there are lots of reasons why blogs should always be used with your SEO and here are some of the most valuable pointers:

1. Blogs are a Magnet for Traffic

SEO is all about attracting traffic to a website and the best feature of a blog is that it draws in traffic like a magpie to silver!  They naturally attract traffic and this organic benefit is huge! Most blogs are already set up on optimized websites and they will inherit this linking potential that the website already boasts.

1. Use Directories

Blog directories are a really useful tool and should be used by all optimizers. One-way links are a great benefit to a website and these can be generated via blog directories. If your blogs are well optimized then you will enjoy the best keyword placement in the searches so ensure that your blogs are optimized with the appropriate keywords before you submit.

1. Choosing the Best Keywords

Deciding whether you should target keywords that attract lots of traffic but that don’t stand much chance of ranking highly and or whether you should try for a target keyword that gets medium-level targeted traffic but will be optimizable is tricky! This is always somewhat hit and miss but experience will always help with this decision and erring on the side of caution is usually the best plan so if in doubt go with the safer (latter) option.

1. More Traffic = More Sales? Only Sometimes…

Lots of people make the mistake of thinking that more website traffic means more sales and while of course there is more chance of making more sales with the more people you can attract; a high ratio of site visitors to sales can also be had with less traffic that comes from the less popular search terms.

1. Length of Search Terms

The best conversion rates of people who come from search engine traffic are those who use keywords that are four words long. You can ensure that your blogs are well indexed that will then mean you can appear for a whole range of relevant four-word phrases.

Optimizing your blogs to ensure that they are attracting traffic to your website rather than just using them as something for people to read is a great way to get your website up the rankings.

How do you optimize your blogs?

Social media is seemingly taking over the world but how do we make sure that we are getting the most from our Twittering when it comes to ensuring our website optimization plans are going smoothly?

We all have those friends who live for Facebook right? They are on every five minutes changing their status from what they ate for breakfast to what they want to eat for lunch or something equally as boring! We either end up de-friending them as we get sick of their constant and usually meaningless life updates or block them from our homepage so we don’t have to see their annoying face and even more annoying washing-up-antics messages.

So SEO professionals take not that there is simply nothing more annoying than repeatedly receiving updates from the same person over and over and over and over again! Subconsciously, the majority of the time these posts are simply skipped past in and to find someone new. A little bit like the boy who cried wolf; it gets to the point that it doesn’t even matter of these posts are interesting anymore – once you plagues people’s pages with a constant barrage of updates they will be skipped past anyway!

How Do I Promote a Business Through Social Media?

When you want to promote a business it is vital that you find the best balance when it comes to updates. Facebook and Twitter have proved to be the most profitable forms of social media and while you don’t want to use them too sparingly you certainly don’t want to irritate your public!

Social media is a great tool in the promoting of a business but they should be used in moderation.

Find that delicate balance of promoting enough bit not too much and make sure that every post is relevant to your business and not pointless whittle. You can post the odd witty comment to get attention but don’t overuse humor in your promotion as that can be equally as irritating.

Every customer is unique in that they will all have different breaking points as to the amount of posts they are willing to handle before pressing the delete button on your face but you can build a strong following by playing it safe and assuming that once or twice a day is enough for the majority.

In this case; less really is more!

How many times a day/week do you think is enough when it comes to posting updates and Tweets?

Facebook is a vital part of modern marketing but unless you get people to ‘like’ you; your marketing strategy will be as useless as Matthew Perry’s career since Friends.

Most of the interactions that take place on Facebook happen on walls rather than on fan pages and research actually shows that 199 out of 200 interactions will occur on a wall. So, what does this tell us and why is it important to know?

It basically means that after someone joins your fan page they are unlikely to ever return to it and this will make for utterly pointless marketing. Think about the amount of times that you have ‘liked’ something and never given it a second thought from that click onwards! I apparently ‘like’ 247 pages and around 246 of these I have no recollection of ever visiting after my initial click.

The Like Button

Create a custom landing tab so that when visitors come to your page for the first time – they will be greeted with a customized tabbed page rather than your wall. Some of the best news about custom landing tabs is that they are FREE and they increase conversion rates massively.

Check out these top five ways that you can create a custom landing tab on FB:

1. North Social

This fan page application developer maintains an increasing stable of widgets that will add to the power of your Facebook presence. The custom tab is known as First Impression and it works alongside video applications and photo galleries and the set up is simple with the customization occurring in Facebook only to increase its speed.

2. Tabsite

This works on the same lines as North Social and it specializes in offering tab pages that are easy for businesses to customize. This developer allows users to manage their Facebook content as a blog site of web page and it is easy to use multiple images and videos.

3. Pagelever

Pagelever is arguably the simplest custom landing tab creator and could be used by someone with the intellect levels of Paris Hilton and a welcome tab can be created in just two minutes!

4. SplashTab

Similar to the much-loved WordPress theme, SplashTab provides a whole gallery filled with templates in order for customers to choose their tab layout from. Non-designers will love the ease of this application and while a little more intricate than Pagelever; Paris should still be able to manage if needs must…

5. FanBldr

Created by my good friend Tommy, this app is so easy to use and creates a fantastic landing page that’s easy to customize and perfect for businesses that want to keep their company look integrated into facebook.

Useful Tips!

Whatever type of system you choose to use, remember that the custom tabs can only be 520 pixels. Once the tabs are completed, make sure that you click on ‘Settings’ and use the pull down section that is titled ‘Default landing tab for everyone else’ so that you can choose which is your landing page for anyone who is not a ‘fan’…

Have you customized your landing tabs and if so, what difference has it made to you?

Before we get started I would like to say that I think Facebook and Twitter are the places to
market a company at the moment and by ‘a’ company I mean ‘all’ companies!

The problem with Facebook is that it is home to all sorts of hidden do’s and don’ts that
many people don’t actually know about and these problems can be detrimental to a
business.

Facebook is always changing its features and the way that it is laid out in a bid to keep it
fresh but actually this is one of its most annoying downfalls!

And honestly, how many people out there have actually sat down and the ‘Terms of
Facebook’?

Facebook Crimes…

So, let’s assume that most people don’t read them ‘ does this mean that most people don’t
know that it is a violation of the terms of Facebook to use your personal profile for business
purposes?

Yet how many people do just this? Thousands and probably actually millions so even if we
read the terms of Facebook would we know what we are allowed to do for our business
promotion or are the meaning of the terms different depending on the mood of Mark
Zuckerberg on any given day?

The thing is if you break a violation of Facebook then you are liable to have your account
disabled and you can kiss goodbye to your 4,999 friends! So, wouldn’t it make more sense if
Facebook placed this information somewhere where you can actually see it and where it will
get read? Why do they make it so hard for ordinary people to use to promote a business?

Facebook Terminology..

Facebook’s terminology to an outsider is as confusing as its rules and regulations to an
insider but I am going to have a go at clearing the meaning of a few phrases up:

1. Your becomes ‘friends’ with a personal profile page
2. You ‘like’ a Facebook page
3. You ‘join’ a Facebook group page

You can also ‘like’ comments on profile pages, Facebook pages and group pages!

Confused much?

The list is endless and I could go on’ However I have many more Facebook gripes to
address first.

A customized URL for your personal profile is available at www.facebook.com/username
but a customized URL for your Facebook page can only be gained after you receive 25 ‘like’
clicks from your friends!

Are you starting to see why Facebook isn’t actually all that easy to get to grips with when

you go a little bit deeper under the surface?

Ok, so if you are not using Facebook for any reason other than to communicate with old
friends then you don’t need to be in the know but if you want to use Facebook as a way
to advertize your business then it is vital that you learn all the ins and outs or you may
become very frustrated’

Do you use Facebook for your business and if so, how do you find the legalities of it and if
you don’t use it I would be interested to know why not?