Archive for Social Networking
Facebook, Twitter, and probably soon Google+, get most of the analysis of the social networking world. With that comes most of the attention of advertisers. This is the billion-user World Wide Web, though. For every bar that all the cool kids are hanging out at, there are plenty of local bars near them with people spending money the same as anyone else.
These local hangouts, though, can often be a little less friendly to marketing sharks. Let’s face it, too: you’re not interested in being one. You just want to advertise your services to people who might honestly be interested. Even the local dives have ads posted in them. To do so simply requires that you understand the scene, and treat it with respect.
So let’s drop the metaphor and look at some of the smaller but still popular social networking sites. For our purposes we are going to focus on native English sites that mostly have at least 1 million users. If you can speak other languages then there are many very large ones that represent good alternate markets.
CafeMom
CafeMom has been growing tremendously, and is on the verge of breaking through “niche” status to become one of the web’s bigger players. An outgrowth of ClubMom, this social networking site panders to the moms who need an outlet that they can share with other moms (men are specifically barred from registering). General socializing happens here, but also advice and support for just about every mothering need out there.
What the advertiser should know: CafeMom is very advertiser friendly. If you are offering a physical product of some kind, you should consider sending free samples: this is one of the draws the site uses to get people to register. Remember that the goal of this site is to make the lives of the mothers there easier. Make sure that whatever you are advertising is geared towards that, even if indirectly.
Care2
It’s a sign of how huge the World Wide Web has become that a site with 14 million users is considered 2nd-tier. Care2 hasn’t rushed to growth, but has been slowly building their user base since 1998. The reason is that this is not a site that puts profits first. Care2 is a social networking site for activists. It allows individuals to work with each other, discuss issues, and most importantly find concrete ways to channel their energies into effective social change.
What the advertiser should know: Care2 takes their commitment to social values seriously. This includes their approach to advertisements. They have on their site a long explanation of what their advertising principles are. Read it. Make sure you can convince them that you will enhance their site, not just draw from it. One minor marketing addendum: according to the site’s founder, Care2′s user base is also mostly female.
Link Expats
If you measure the success of a web site by how well it fulfills the Web’s potential of bringing disparate people together, this is about as successful as it gets. Link Expats is a place for people who are removed from their home country for any reason to find each other, talk, and assist each other.
What the advertiser should know: While some of the reasons that someone would be a member of this site are benign, some are (literally) deadly serious. This site as a result has strong privacy protections. Users can’t even friend each other, but they can ban one another easily for spamming. Get the idea? Follow the site’s rules to a T, and don’t push.
deviantART
deviantART is one of the longest running and best supported amateur artist social networking sites in existence. Just about every type of 2D art is represented, and with 14 million members, just about every demographic is represented. There isn’t that much in the way of large communal spaces: chat rooms are the only thing this site has that fulfills that function. Most of the interaction occurs on the pages of artists and their works.
What the advertiser should know: Ads are only visible to users who don’t upgrade to premium memberships. That doesn’t look to be a small demographic on this site any time soon, though (reference the term “starving artist”). In fact, it’s large enough that you can almost treat this like a “normal” demographic distribution of users, albeit one with a bit of geeky edge to it. Anything either tech-oriented or counterculture-leaning should find an audience here.
Stickam
You might have used this site before and not realized it. Stickam is one of the premier media sharing sites on the web, with a particular focus on streaming video. Because the demand for this kind of service is quickly growing, and because they make embedding easy, Stickam winds up often quietly embedded in other web sites. If a site you use has recently addedy a video chat room, check the credits: it’s possibly a Stickam room.
What the advertiser should know: Stickam has worked heavily with major media kings like MTV and CBS Radio. This gives it a bit of a MySpace feel: if you know the kind of demographic that comparison brings to mind, then you know about what to expect. If you don’t, we’ll sum it up: a culturally diverse group of mostly beginner to intermediate web users (this is a broad stroke: please don’t take offense Stickam wizards) who probably are used to seeing web advertising. This is with one catch: many chat rooms are adult-oriented. Be sure you’re OK with this.
It may seem like we’re just fulfilling some editorial requirement of including one “strange” site by closing with these guys. This isn’t so much that case. It’s more to hammer home the point that sometimes you are dealing with a very specific subculture, and you need to know how to approach them with respect.
VF servers the “Gothic Industrial Culture”. If you don’t know what this is then it’s hard to describe it without resorting to obnoxious stereotypes. Consider it those who like to “play in the dark”, in just about every meaning that this phrase might bring to mind. The name itself is likely a “scaring the normal” point of pride jab. If this description in any way weird you out, you should probably look elsewhere.
What the advertiser should know: This is a very self-aware demographic. Thus it’s best to neither approach them with a typical suit-and-tie motif nor try to pretend you’re a part of this crowd, assuming you’re not. Despite the very showy appearance of this crowd, believe it when we say that they’ll respect you the more real you are.
Related posts:
- October 25, 2011 – Competition in Social Networking: The Rise of Google+ and the Status of FaceBook
- September 10, 2011 – Common Advice in Search Engine Optimization
- September 6, 2011 – E-commerce and Social Media: No Longer Oil and Water
- December 8, 2009 – Understanding Your Community Hosting Options
- December 4, 2009 – Introduction to Video Hosting
- October 15, 2009 – Amaxus CMS Gets a Serious Upgrade
- October 1, 2009 – Establishing Your Online Presence with WordPress Hosting
- August 26, 2009 – Google Launches Homepage Enhancements
- August 21, 2009 – Incorporating SEM and SMM into Your Marketing Campaign
- April 30, 2009 – E-commerce Hosting and Web 2.0
Getting advice on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can sometimes seem like trying to get advice on, say, the stock market. Everybody is trying to leapfrog ahead of everyone else, and as a result you wonder if, in the end, anyone actually knows what they’re talking about.
This is a fair objection. The truth, though, is that there are some fundamental principles that most experts agree on. The reason that they work is simply that not everyone tries to make their pages more easily findable by Google. Some web site owners simply assume that all they have to do is put their page up, and Google will automatically pick it up.
This much is accurate: they will. If you don’t want to be on page 17 of their listings, however, then you need to do a few things to put you ahead of the people who are making no effort at all. These are basic rules that anyone can easily follow.
Keywords are your best friend
There is a larger truth about search engines that is so obvious that is seems unfathomable that more people don’t intuitively realize it: search engines can only search through text. This means that you need the text on your web site as relevant as possible.
Take care, therefore, to make sure that key phrases that you think people who would want to come to your site would search for are somewhere in the text of your web pages, word for word. These are known as “keywords.” For example, if you are selling “Victorian wall ornaments,” those are your keywords, and you need them used on your site in multiple places, especially your front page.
A warning, though: don’t go crazy. In the past people created pages that had thousands of words consisting of nothing but keywords in invisible text. Search engines are now trained to filter out these pages. Use your keywords only in the appropriate context, but don’t be afraid to use it multiple times. Make sure as well that you throw in a few synonym phrases (“Victorian ornaments”, “Victorian decorations”, etc.)
Links are your next best friend
Search engines catalog links as much as they do basic text. Make sure that there are plenty of links on your site, optimally ones that contain in their URLs the terms that people are searching for. Other good ways of adding links that users might find are by setting up external sites that link to yours, as well as getting into link exchange programs with the appropriate types of partners.
Don’t forget social networking
Most common social networking websites are business-friendly. Be sure to setup an account on each of these, and optimally, keep them at least moderately updated. This is one more route by which users can find you, and one more potential entry in a search engine’s top 10 results.
Keep up with the trends
Finally, don’t stop here. Since everyone is trying to game search engine results, search engines themselves constantly revamp their formula. Keep an ear to the ground on the latest trends, and remember that Google isn’t the only search engine out there. Search engine optimization is a job that never quite ends, but one that the dedicated web users can easily keep up with, and are well-served by the effort.
Related posts:
- April 23, 2010 – SERPs and Backlinks – The Keys to SEO
- March 19, 2009 – Options for Valuable Search Engine Submission
- September 14, 2011 – The Dummies’ Guide To SEO
- August 9, 2011 – SEO 101 : Focusing on Backlinks
- March 14, 2011 – How Dedicated Host Can Enhance Search Engine Optimization Results
- December 17, 2010 – Search Engine Optimization with No Investment Needed
- September 8, 2010 – How to Track Search Engine Optimization Progress
- May 4, 2010 – SEO and Backlinks – Quick and Easy vs. Slow and Calculated
- March 8, 2010 – Search Engine Optimization and Consumer Awareness
- January 18, 2010 – Search Engine Optimization – The Basics Explained
Once upon a time, there was a hard and loudly enforced social rule on the internet: there were places to hang out and places to shop, and never the twain should meet. Anyone who dared break this rule suffered the wrath of the collective cyberworld, and the results weren’t always pretty.
This rule was strongly agreed upon and enforced by any means necessary until about five years ago. It’s difficult to say exactly what happened to cause this shift. Likely, it was a combination of a number of factors. For one, there was a general sense that web site users were getting a bit of a free ride and that the money for web site owners to pay their bills had to come from somewhere. Also, whereas businesses who wanted to find new customers before had to resort to reviled options such as direct email solicitation (forever etched in our vocabulary now as “spamming”), now alternate means exist, mostly through non-intrusive means found on social networking web sites.
Jump on in! But do it right.
This means that those who are in new or growing businesses who want to use social media web sites to increase their customer base no longer have to worry about the blowback from treading in forbidden waters. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still certain rules that apply. It also doesn’t mean that it’s just as simple as slapping down an ad and forgetting about it.
If you’re a business who wants to expand into the social networking world, here are a few things to keep in mind:
1) Work with the site, and the users
Since large social networking sites need your money to keep going, they’ll be in the best position to tell you what the lay of the land is like: they’re not going to want to see you set up shop just to get chased out of town for not following some social code you didn’t know of until you broke it.
Also, listen to user feedback. While there will always be some trigger-happy users who find spam everywhere they look, generally you’ll get a good idea of what’s fair and what’s not from user reactions. And if you actually asked, you’d be in such a rare category that you’d automatically earn a certain level of respect.
2) Follow the cool kids
Yesterday it was MySpace. The day before that it was LiveJournal. Today it’s FaceBook, but there are already signs that it might have peaked. Tomorrow it will be someone else, possibly FourSquare, or likely Google Plus. The “hot spot” changes at lighting pace. You need to move just as fast.
3) The toys change too
In addition to new places on the web, you will need to keep track of new ways to access the web. PCs aren’t exactly dying as much you might hear, but iToys are going to become more and more frequent. These new technologies more and more often include in their embedded software ways for businesses to interact with customers without having to go through a web browser.
One last bit of advice: hire an IT guru. Or if IT is your specialty, hire a marketer or secretary. The point is that just keeping up with how your business does Ecommerce is enough to keep one person busy for well more than 40 hours a week. You’re going to want to make sure that you have someone who can focus on that, and only that. Social networking is no longer a no-business-class zone. They can and do now coexist. You just have to devote the resources necessary to do it right.
Related posts:
- April 30, 2009 – E-commerce Hosting and Web 2.0
- December 26, 2008 – Determining Your Niche Market
- September 1, 2011 – To Blog or Not to Blog?
- August 8, 2011 – Top 10 Ways to Market Your Web Hosting Business
- August 6, 2011 – RankCheck.org – free tool to check rank of your website
- June 27, 2011 – New Facebook Social Media Store
- June 24, 2011 – Preventing e-Commerce Shopping Cart Abandonment
- May 12, 2011 – Essential Shopping Cart Attributes
- May 4, 2011 – New Social Media Website Announced
- March 17, 2011 – How to Start a Web Hosting Business from Scratch
Social graph theory is the theoretical science of ascertaining how every individual and every entity are related to one another on the internet. This is a theory that emerged with the release of Web 2.0 software. Therefore, it has internet buffers running in circles pondering the extensiveness of this complicated theory. Social Graph Theory relates to all aspects of the web but social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are the most prominent topics of conversation.
Moving Away from the Theoretical Stage
However, like any other theory, a time must come when the discussion moves from away from the theoretical stage. Therefore, one company is attempting to do exactly that by grabbing the concepts from the theory and applying them to large web entities like content management systems. The company championing this massive project is Ektron.
Extraction of Information from the User
The CEO believes the future of the end-user experience will be entirely defined by how much information can be extracted for the user prior to them visiting the site. That way, when they do access the website, the most relevant and engaging information is available to them. This will, of course, require a high level of algorithms and programming that the technology currently available today. However, CMS platforms are an excellent start.
Current CMS programs are developing into a bifurcation within the market which allows high-end companies to focus on content-related issues related to marketing. Therefore, much more sophisticated approaches to the content management realm must be taken. One technology that will continue to be heavily utilized is global positioning systems (GPS) in mobile computing devices.
Utilization of GPS Technology
Although the technology world sees the overabundance of applications using GPS for further functionality, GPS will be used much more in the future. This technology is likely to be combined with content management systems in some aspect which will assist with the unraveling of Social Graph Theory.
There will of course be plenty of users that identify the privacy issues related to utilizing GPS. However, if the customer is choosing to create a more profound relationship with any entity on the web, specific tools will be necessary to allow that experience to occur and improve.
Social Graph Theory is a complicated and difficult to master idea. However, with most new ideas, the use of technology will help to decode the inner workings of the concept. Therefore, as technology improves in the coming years, the idea of Social Graph Theory will be an easy-to-understand model.
You would be amazed at the amount of social networking and community software tools that are on the market today. The immense popularity of MySpace, Facebook and YouTube has encouraged many people to create their own online community. Community sites are expansive in topics, ranging from sites such as dating and video sharing to pets and video games. Below are just a few of the many options that exist for online communities:
Social networking sites
Social media sites
News publishing sites
Dating sites
Blog sites
Video sharing sites
Photo sharing sites
What Type of Hosting Do You Need?
Web hosting plays a huge role in the creation of these types of community sites. Such a website requires an added dose of power in comparison to the typical website. However, what it requires the most is a scalable environment that supports the growth of the community. As your site increases in popularity, it will attract more users, which means it will be populated with more pictures, videos and possibly other interactive features. This tremendous growth means that the average shared hosting package may not suitable for the needs of your community. You have to consider critical resources such as disk space, bandwidth, RAM and CPU, all of which impact the overall performance of your website. While you might be able to pull this off on a shared hosting platform from a technical aspect, your community could be the one to suffer from slow loading pages and sluggish performance.
A dedicated server makes for one of the most reliable ways to host an online community. This type of hosting will give you the scalability you need and dramatically reduce the occurrence of performance issues you would endure on a shared server. The problem is that maintaining a dedicated server can be very complex and expensive. Leasing the server can run you upwards of $100 per month – and this is just for an unmanaged service. If you choose to run your community on a dedicated server, keep in mind that you will be responsible for updating the operating system and web server software in addition to managing all the applications and security mechanisms it requires. This is something many people simply are not equipped to deal with. For this reason, you should strongly consider looking into a service provider that specializes in community hosting as they are more likely to have the unqiue environment you require.
Conclusion
A community site can be very beneficial, but only when choosing the right web hosting solution. Before heading out to look for a service, take both the present and future growth into account when factoring in your requirements. Think about the features you need, the type of content and media you plan to host, and the volume of traffic you anticipate. If you truly want your community site to be a success, don’t hesitate to ask prospective web hosts questions and find out exactly how they can suit your needs. This will make it much easier to find the ideal solution for your online community.
Video hosting has become immensely popular due to the prevalence of video sharing community sites such as YouTube and MySpace. If you have ever visited one of these sites, you know that it is possible to find everything from music videos and commercials to movie trailers and full length wrestling matches. The best part of all is that you can upload and share your own content, which makes video hosting useful from a social or business aspect.
What is Video Hosting?
Video hosting is one of the many types of web hosting. As the name implies, this service provides all the tools needed to create and manage a video-orientated website . Most use these services to create community sites where visitors can watch videos, rate them, post comments and more. Those looking to create a more interactive environment even allow memberships where register users can upload and share their own content. The extreme popularity of video sharing sites have put video hosting solutions in great demand.
Who Needs Video Hosting?
Video hosting is the perfect option for users who want to share video content but do not necessarily require traditional web space to host an entire website. This is mainly because most of these services are free to join as the companies that run them make their money via online advertising. Video hosting benefits users seeking entertainment, as well as business professionals who want to market their products or services through the visual power of streaming of media. Thousands of videos are added to the web on a daily basis and millions of people around the world tune in to watch.
A Growing Market
Today, video hosting is a huge segment of the web hosting industry. As its popularity grew, so did the interest from big name companies looking to jump on the bandwagon. For example, internet business guru Rupert Murdoch purchased the popular community site MySpace for the cool sum of $580 million. Not to be outdone, Google when out and acquired YouTube for the unbelievable amount of $1.65 billion. Whether you agree with the money spent or not, these deals received major attention and the participation in these respective communities is growing at a steady rate.
The Power of Social Networking
Video hosting goes hand in hand with the social networking phenomenon that has taken the web by storm. Instead of just uploading videos, it also provides a way for users to express themselves and create beneficial networks. As a member or even a visitor of a video community site, you can run across people who share your same interests and develop some key relationships. When joining a site that encourages interaction, you can create your own page customized with the videos, photos or music that suits your preference. You also have the option to purchase a hosting plan equipped with the tools that allow you create your own video driven community. Video has become the new way to communicate online and at this point, it looks like it’s here to stay.