Joining Google+ for Small Business

For the famous brands, Google+ is possibly a good investment. But for small businesses, is it good enough to spend your time there?

Google launched Google+ brand pages in last November, enabling businesses and brands to come and join its social network. After that, top brands like Pepsi, Toyota, and Macy’s have joined on the Google+ bandwagon, creating  yet another hub page for their content.

Based on that record, we were interested to collect some opinion, to get better understanding about how if small businesses are using  Google+. Mashable’s community has received more that 50 responses focusing on the benefit and disadvantage of using Google’s social network in a small business.

Benefits:

1. Expand Content Distribution
2. Connect with Early Adopters
3. Use Google+ to Network
4. Just Explore
5. Get an SEO Boost
6. Host a Hangout
7. Segment Your Audience

Disadvantages:

1. Social Dashboards Don’t Integrate Google+ yet
2. Growth is Small
3. Facebook and Twitter Reign
4. Administration is Difficult

Google Side Projects are Unreliable

Holiday Easter Eggs to Celebrate Christmas

It seems like tech sites doesn’t want miss this christmast moment. You can see Google and YouTube.  As famous sites, Both of them now, are treating its visitors with a series of seasonal surprises from pictures to falling snowflakes to celebrate Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.

Google is the king of barrel roll search result surpires, so you can expect them to have more interesting holiday surprises. Type “Hanukkah” in search box and a row of star will pop up. Last week, there is a report that typing “Let it snow” into the search box delightfully fills the browser up with flurries and fog.

Youtube is also celebrating christmast by adding a snow button. The button will appear in some video. When you see a snowflakes-shaped button, just click it and you’ll get the snowflake feature. The snow flakes accumulate at the bottom of the video.

Moreover, Instead of the typical circle-shaped time-counter that shows the progress of a playing video, some clips feature a snowflake-shaped buttons. Certain results pages on YouTube has flurries as well. See it by searching a “snow” video. You can also see something different on Bitly and Klout. Christmas is coming and these tech sites celebrate it, so why won’t you?

Improve Your Facebook Fans into Super Fans

For most of men and women, football season means it’s time to pay more attention for every Sunday games and not forget to grab your favorite team jerseys to be the fanatic supporters. But super fans are another breed entirely. They purchase season tickets, endure below-zero weather to watch and catch every action, and most of them always paint their faces with team colors.

Your brand might already have plenty of weekend fans on facebook, but it is the super fan you want to attract now. In terms of purchasing the power of WOM (word of mouth) promotion, one super fan means more than a dozen weekend fans. Here are the level of engagement according to Moonthoast’s “Anatomy of a Fan”:

• Potential fans
• Engaged fans
• Advocate fans
• Purchasing fans
• Super fans

Now, here are four ways to start moving your fans through the ranks.

1. Attract your ideal fan with engagement ads
2. Create WOM (word of mouth) advocates with contests
3. Grow your lead list while you grow your fan base
4. Convert with calls-to-action

So, are you ready to approach that suggestions to gain a lot of super fans?

Recognize Your Employee on Social Media

Social media created countless new and newer place to promote any kind of business. As a result of Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, My Space and more,  it feels like we can access a bullhorn, and of course the ability to promote ourselves anytime to whomever we choose.

In your company, surely you have experienced the use, disuse, and maybe a misuse of social media.  But have you ever thought about using it to recognize your employees? You can communicate with your staff by employing social media as a positive acknowledgement tool. This is a highly visible and low-cost way to show how you support them.

Zoomerang has interviewed 1,180 small to middle sized business decision makers and 500 consumers for their study called “Marketing in a Digital World.”. They found that the three most important points for small businesses to leverage social media are :

• Connect with their customers.
• Increase the visibility
• Promote themselves

Why not starting now to appreciate your employees?

Activate Your Facebook Timeline in 3 Clicks

Back in late September, Facebook was experimenting their first new Timeline interface. Previously, I have shown you the way to have a preview before it even exist. Now, you can enable it in an even easier way and publish it so that your friends will be able to see it. The Timeline itself is planned to be launched on December 22.

Let’s start the simple steps. Firstly click this link to go to the Timeline page. Now you have done your first click. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and find the “Get Timeline” button, where you have to spend your second click. Now, you got it enabled, but not published yet. To publish it, click “Publish Now” on the next page. That’s all you need to do to activate the Facebook Timeline.

Actually when you click the “Get Timeline” button, you will have seven days until it can be seen by your friends but until then, you are the only one who is able to see it. But if you want to show off to your friends, just do the third click on the “Publish Now” button. You can still edit what you want to share with your friends in the new Timeline. So, enjoy the new Facebook Timeline.