Social media is describing as a category of websites that are based on user sharing and user generated content. Examples of social media sites are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as blogs and forums and sites that have user generate content such as Amazon’s customer review.
Social media is describing as a category of websites that are based on user sharing and user generated content. Examples of social media sites are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as blogs and forums and sites that have user generate content such as Amazon’s customer review.
One can expect quick e-mail clicks with shopping card reminders
An Abandoned cart e-mail receives four or five clicks within 24 hours
According to the data received from Experian Cheetahmail data, it has been found that Email marketers who are looking for subject lines to hold attention of their recipients can expect better results by going for appropriate and time-based messages.
A study was conducted by the email marketing services company. It involved over 40,000 messages in March 2010. According to the findings of this research, around half of transactions and three-quarters of opens and clicks take place within a day of getting a marketing email. Thus, good results can be expected.
Email recipients’ number can be increased by simply sending them abandoned carts notice. According to a statement made by Sara Ezrin, Cheetahmail strategic services senior director to stated to eMarketer, such message recipients are already thinking about cart items and are in the market for these products will make them to respond quickly.
It doesn’t make sense to jump in and use all new social media tools that come along just because everyone else is or because you think they’re “cool.” No one can really afford to be that unproductive with their time (or if they can, that alone speaks volumes). At Social Implications, we’re big advocates of cutting through the noise by narrowing down the social media tools you use to the ones best suited for your target market or audience.
That said, you can’t choose the best social media tools for your business (or even personal networking) unless you know what’s out there. With that in mind we’ve put together a list of 101 social media tools you should know about. We’ve broken them down for you by category below. Note though that we’re not including some of the biggest staples in social media — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Rather we’ll focus on tools to help you get more out of the sites you’re already using or social media tools that you might not have heard of yet. Links in each section are in no particular order. Enjoy!
Social Networking
There are countless social networks on the Web today, letting you do everything from network with old classmates to joining communities with likeminded folks who share similar hobbies or business interests. But what happens when existing social networks don’t really serve your needs? You can start your own! Whether you’re interested in building a niche social network or one around your brand, here are some tools to help you do that.
Ning — As of July 20th, plans range from $2.95 – 49.95 per month.
BuddyPress — Create a social network on the WordPress platform
Elgg.org — An open source social networking platform
Boonex Dolphin — Feature-rich and free; Prime option also available
SocialGo — Setup a free social network or purchase premium access to monetize your site.
Crowdvine — Build a self-hosted or professionally set up community around your conference or other event.
KickApps– Add social networking capabilities and other social media elements to your existing website.
Snapville– Social networking solution focused on employee and customer engagement
Cisco’s Eos Platform — Social networking and content management platform for the entertainment industry
Blogging
Blogging is one of the older aspects of social media, around even before the “social media” label really took hold. Blogs allow you to keep your customers up-to-date on company news. They allow you to have conversations with your audience. They serve as platform elements for professionals looking to build exposure and gain a solid reader base. They’re used in PR. They’re used in marketing. They’re used as private journals. They’re used to host content sites. They’re even used as business models all on their own. So let’s take a look at some blogging platforms you can use to set up your own new blog. The list below includes both hosted and self-hosted (you need your own hosting account) platforms.
Sometimes the comment management tools built into your blog platform just aren’t enough. Here are a couple of extra options you might want to look into either to help you manage comments or encourage more of them.
Chances are good that you’ve already heard of Twitter (and are using it). But there are other microblogging options out there, and plenty of tools to help you more efficiently manage your Twitter account to weed out some of that social media noise. Here are some of those tools and services.
Speaking of microblogging services and their limited character counts, let’s take a look at some URL shorteners currently available. These can condense your long URLs (that might not fit in a Tweet or other post) into a much shorter form. Some even allow link stats tracking.
Like what we traditionally think of as social networks, forums allow us to build communities around a niche, company, product, or anything else we’d like. If you think a forum would be better suited to your audience than a social network setup, then consider one of these forum software options.
Social media is about more than conversations. It’s also about empowering members of your community to share what you have to offer, or “vote” if you will. There are several sharing, aggregation, and social bookmarking tools available to let them do that. Here are a few you might want to use or somehow incorporate into your website or blog.
Social media encompasses all types of media. Users want to be able to share information, videos, photos, and other images in addition to their thoughts. If you’re one of those users, you might get some use out of the following social media tools.
Sometimes being able to share documents online isn’t enough. You need online collaboration tools like the ones listed below where your work group can collectively edit and save documents while you collaborate on projects.
Podcasting is a sometimes overlooked area of social media. But if your audience could be effectively reached through a podcast or other type of audio show, you might be able to put these podcasting tools to use.
Love it or hate it, we’ve probably all heard of Wikipedia. But why not create your very own wiki on your company site or related to a niche you love? Pull people together with some of the following wiki software options.
Social media goes far beyond personal and even business use. It can also be used in education. If you’re with an educational institution or organization, or you’d like to add online courses and other learning materials to your site, these social and online learning tools could come in handy.
There is a lot of noise in social media that you have to sort through on a regular basis if you want to stay productive. These social media search tools can help.
There’s rarely a way to completely and accurately measure social media. Most tools have their faults and most metrics can be manipulated. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the information you can access though. Social media monitoring and metrics-related tools like the ones below can give you a solid snapshot of trends resulting from your social media work.
You don’t see abandoned shopping carts in the aisles of your local grocery store, so what is it about the
online shopping experience that leads to cart abandonment?
Answering this question is the holy grail of e-commerce conversion rates. To help our clients get a little
closer to the answer, we surveyed 753 frequent online consumers from both Canada and the US who recently
proceeded to the checkout stage but failed to complete the transaction.
We’ve summarized three of the major findings from our survey below, and coupled them with some recommendations
on how you might improve your online customer experience. 1 Not Enough Information
Shoppers often visit a website to get information about a product or service they are
considering purchasing. This includes everything from product specifications to prices to
delivery times. And when they can’t find the information they need to make an informed
purchase decision, they don’t buy.
Getting hit with a shipping charge at the end of a shopping experience is a very significant
stumbling block when it comes to completing online transactions. Almost 60% of
respondents said that higher than anticipated shipping costs were “very important” or
“important” reasons for not completing their transactions, with over 24% reporting that
higher than expected shipping costs were directly responsible for abandonment.
But the quest for information may impact shopping cart abandonment in a way you may not have
considered.
When asked what the primary reason for clicking the “checkout” button in a purchase that wasn’t
completed, an astounding 45.9% of respondents said they did it to gather information that was not
provided previously.
What to Do
So how do you prevent shoppers from using their carts as a research tool? By being as transparent as
possible. It is critical to provide information like the total cost of the order, shipping costs, and estimated
delivery date before the checkout process begins.
2 Higher Than Expected Shipping Costs.
Getting hit with a shipping charge at the end of a shopping experience is a very significant
stumbling block when it comes to completing online transactions. Almost 60% of
respondents said that higher than anticipated shipping costs were “very important” or
“important” reasons for not completing their transactions, with over 24% reporting that
higher than expected shipping costs were directly responsible for abandonment.
What to Do
Identifying what the shipping charges are before the checkout process begins is critical for online
consumers. In fact, 43% of those we talked to cited this as the number one service online businesses
could add to facilitate purchases. You may want to consider the following:
• present various shipping options and let your customers choose how they wish to have the
product shipped, select the speed of the shipping service and ultimately decide what price
they are willing to pay,
–or–
• test free or special shipping offers such as “free shipping if you spend $50” for a short
period of time and determine if a lift in your sales offsets the shipping costs that you
would absorb.
3 Not the Right Payment Method
If your customers can’t pay for items you have for sale using a payment method they feel
comfortable with, or if they don’t feel that their payment transaction is safe and secure,
they aren’t going to buy. Almost 18% of those consumers we spoke to told us that providing
payment methods other than credit cards would be the single biggest thing they could
do to facilitate purchase. In fact, 17% of respondents said that not having their preferred method of
payment available was directly responsible for abandonment. On top of that, 32.5% of those surveyed
said that they simply weren’t comfortable giving out their credit or debit card numbers over the Internet. What to Do
Offer your customers a range of payment options, including those that don’t require entering credit
card or bank account information. It is also critical to create a secure payment environment for your
customers and communicate the steps you have taken to protect them. Furthermore, ensure that
you adhere to international PCI (Payment Card Industry) standards. This is one of the best ways to
reassure your customers that you are protecting their privacy and their sensitive financial information
Web3.0 The semantic web.The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Wikipedia describes Semantic web as,The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information on the web is defined, making it possible for machines to process it.According to semanticweb.org,The Semantic Web is the extension of the World Wide Web that enables people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications and websites. It has been described in rather different ways: as a utopic vision, as a web of data, or merely as a natural paradigm shift in our daily use of the Web. Most of all, the Semantic Web has inspired and engaged many people to create innovative semantic technologies and applications. semanticweb.org is the common platform for this community
Semantic web is the future. I assume the coming era will be of semantic web.
I found a really good presentation that well describes web 1.0, web 2.0 and web 3.0 in detail with suitable examples.
It’s a must watch presentation for Web designers, developers, planners, architects and IT businessmen.Presentation by: Hatem Mahmoud.
Semantic Web a simple description:
The semantic web stack described by Wikipedia:
Another good presentation on web evolution from web 0 to web 3.0 by Liam O’Morain can be found on youtube:
Few places I would suggest to go to for learning more on semantic web :
Promoted tweets help you reach to your targeted customers. Promoted Tweets appears at the top of the search results page.
A Promoted Tweet isn’t guaranteed to stay afloat for a long time — if the tweet isn’t tracking well in terms of replies, clicks, and a number of other metrics Twitter is calling “resonance”, it will be pulled, and the advertiser won’t pay for it.
It’s a common question: what is difference in Websites and Web Applications.
There’s an often misunderstood distinction in the IT world between Web sites and Web applications:
» A Web site is typically designed for casual or infrequent usage by individuals who often do not know, or do not even want to know, too much about the deeper mission of your organization.
»A Web application, such as an HR Intranet or portal that a company provides to its employees, is a very different system that must be optimized for a different use case.
Tim McLaughlin (computerworld.com) has written a good description on what is the difference in Websites and Web Applications.
It’s important to make a clear distinction between Web sites and Web applications for three reasons:
To define what the site or system is optimized to do
To identify how the user is going to approach the features that are being made available
To pinpoint which specific use cases your designers and developers must create and test
For Web sites, consider that most users are coming through a search engine or by browsing the Web. If they are not able to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for, they usually take off. The most common example would be a marketing focused, “brochure” Web site. Casual site visitors like to ease into getting to know your company and will rarely take the time to learn all of your products in their first interaction with your site.
Designing an interface that is easy to browse and navigate should be a high priority. Marketing Web sites that are difficult to navigate, or those that have poor search interfaces, experience high abandon rates, poor pull-through and fail to meet marketing goals.
Web applications are different in that their users are likely coming with a very specific goal in mind. Taking the HR portal example a bit further, consider that some of your HR staff believes that employees like to browse the HR resources available to them. Based on that assumption, they design a content-rich Web site that offers company information, articles of interests, special employee discounts, etc. In fact, the more likely scenario is that employees only tap the HR Intranet when they have to fill out a vacation request, or to update their benefits information, etc. Because these activities are performed less frequently, it’s important that they be optimized for usability.
Found full article here.Here is a snippet of the article. Found full article here.
It’s a common question for Internet marketers that- Where should I place Google ads on my pages?
The answer lies in “Heat Map”. The concept is based on -identifying the place on the webpage where visitors click most as their eye sight concentrate on those locations. A map is generated based on the data of user clicks. This is called Heat Map. This heat map suggests which are the most clickable regions on a particular web page.
Read a good article on “Google Help” to know -Where should I place Google ads on my pages?
To Analyze your pages, what are the hot & click-able zone on your page, you can use some free and open-source solutions. On of them is ClickHeat from labsmedia.com
Mobile payment methods are becoming more and more popular these days. During last 1 year online games and social networking platforms like facebook have promoted mobile payment methods.
On facebook you can purchase virtual goods paying from your mobile phones.
According to to a research by Justin Smith (Founder, Inside Network) the market on alone virtual goods on the internet was over $1 billion in the year 2009. Different gaming website let you pay through your mobile phones
Mobile payment is becoming more popular due to its fast transaction speed. Over 70% of the global online audience does not have a credit card, but most all of them have a mobile phone. All your user needs is a mobile phone to make a payment.
Its more secured (till now, as no major security breach has been reported ) and more faster than credit card payment system.
The process of mobile payment is as easy as:
1. Enter your mobile number and click on Payment button on any mobile payment enabled site
2. A message pops up in your mobile with the secret pin
3. Enter that pin back to the Text box provided on the same website and you are done
-You will be charged in your next mobile phone bill.
There are different companies emerging these days who provide software and infrastructure for mobile payment to websites and other businesses.
According to Zong :
Zong is the leading mobile payment service used for monetizing Web audiences in the social media and gaming industries. Zong gives you a new way to expand your customer base by providing an easier way to pay. Zong provides frictionless payment service in leading social networking applications, virtual worlds and in online games.
This video will help you understand how fast and easy is mobile payment system-
Zong’s frictionless user experience gets real results. Our customers have seen conversion rates skyrocket after adding Zong as a payment option. No billing address, no expiration date, no 16-digit card number to type. Just type something you know by heart: your mobile number.
Currently Zong is providing services in 26 countries partnering with the mobile service providers of those countries.
Wikipedia has a good article on Mobile Payment that can be read here
According to Paymate:
PayMate lets you link your mobile to an existing bank account, credit card or pre-paid voucher and use your mobile to make secure payments anywhere, anytime!
Features of paymate include
Convenient - Pay online, offline, or from just about anywhere. Secure - 2-factor PIN authentication keeps you in control. Easy - Works on any basic mobile handset or operator. Free – PayMate’s services are free with no hidden costs!
MCheck [http://www.mchek.com] is another Mobile payment system provider in India.
These are few other mobile payment and allied service providers:
The online media has huge potential and can take your business to greater heights. With the right mix of latest online marketing trends, quality resources, expertise and a well-drafted marketing road map, you can turn the Internet into a highly efficient medium.
We, at Nirvana Canada, understand the importance of the Internet and what power internet marketing can do for your business. It can only expand your business to remotest of areas but also bring you instant feedback.
We offer a wide range of online marketing services – SE0 (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Keyword Research, E-mail marketing, Social Media, Pay per Click and much more to provide you with best solution to match your needs for brand promotion.
The advantage of online marketing for a business is the ability to track, measure, monitor, test and improve the results of your campaigns in real time as frequently as you want..Even if you are only interested in local sales, your customers are on the web, and they will expect to see you there. There are many ways to market your business; the key is to find what is right for your target audience. As a business owner or entrepreneur you are always looking for opportunities to capture your audience. If you are a small business with limited budget internet marketing offers an affordable price and great platforms such as Google Analytics to measure the efficiency of results.
Nirvana Canada can help you decide which online medium or strategy is best for your business with our expert consultation. We want to share our time with you to learn about your business so we can help you find the best solution for your internet marketing approach.
