Generate interest, create leads, engage with the community, and convert believers. If you don’t want to do any of these things, Instagram is still a great place to play, but if you are serious about your branding and marketing efforts, Instagram is definitely the place to be.

At its core, Instagram is almost entirely visual, but the comments and hashtags are a dimension that makes the social media platform even more intriguing for marketers. Read more…

No matter you are a blogger, content distributors or brand marketers, social media is the must-have platform to engage with your online audience. We all know that content is king thus posting breaking news, impressive images, or interesting videos on social networking sites will surely catch people’s attention making them share with other people.

However if you post a great content at the optimal time where most of the social users are right in front of their computers or smartphones and primed to share the content, chances are your post will receive tremendously high click rates and shares. Who knows your post may go viral within hours? Read more…

After black hat SEO, now comes black hat SMO (social media optimization). Black hat strategy is quickly gaining grounds, spawning new ways to spam the web. The effects are three-fold: users, businesses and sites themselves. While black hat SMO and SMM is happening for about three years or so, discussions regarding such are limited. Search Engine Land started the topic, and we will continue it here.

Read more…

Most of the blogs, websites and businesses have both Facebook and Twitter profiles to engage with their online audience. However having only these 2 social profiles are simply not enough, you should have multiple social media profiles targeting different groups of Internet users.

Among myriad of social networks available on the web, Pinterest is definitely one of them you should add into your social marketing strategy. Basically Pinterest is a visual discovery, collection and sharing service that allows you to manage collection of images, videos and other online contents, and share with other people online. Read more…

Blogging is in great demand. Today, most businesses worth their salt are investing their marketing dollars in blogging to bring more traffic to their websites. These businesses are also using social media to promote their blog content to get the desired results from their blogging efforts.

However, social media operates under a set of rules. Every time you share a social post, you will be tried in the court of public opinion. This court is of significant importance as it is getting bigger by the day and also because it’s the people’s court both in letter and spirit; it’s the people who are sitting in judgment. For businesses that don’t follow the guidelines set by this court, the verdicts can be harsher than a court of law. Read more…

Social marketing is not limited to the Famous Facebook and Twitter only. When it comes to posting photo updates online Instagram could be the better choice to market your brands and businesses. The mobile photo and video sharing app has more than 200 million active users including celebrities, top brands and multinational corporations worldwide.

We all know that a picture speaks thousands of words. If you happen to post some really awesome and exclusive photos and videos on this rising social platform, chances are you could get instant overnight viral success. To help you achieve that below we’ve gathered 32 proven tips for you to better engage with and attract more Instagram followers. Read more…

How many social networks do you use to keep yourself updated on what’s happening amongst your circle of friends and news from across the world? Everyday, with so many posts, tweets, photos and videos being uploaded to social networks, it’s certainly not an easy task to log on every of your social account for updates.

However, the good news is that the hassle can be avoided through some awesome web applications. Below we’ve compiled a list of extremely useful social media feed aggregators where you can view all your social feeds in one place. It means that you can check out all your status updates from Facebook, tweets on Twitter, posts from Google+ and even photos from Instagram simultaneously, within one browser window. Read more…

It’s been a decade since social media became mainstream. While the invention of Internet and social media, in particular, has made life easy for many business developers, there is still a lot of ambiguity about the real power and usefulness of social media. Here are presented some myths and truths about social media backed by extensive findings from experts.

There was never much doubt about the power of networking for business growth. A good network supports a healthy discussion, creates positive buzz about a product, increases sales, finds new customers and makes a fortune on the bottom line. Read more…

The social networking bug has bitten and gone viral. With invitations to join Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, MySpace and many more streaming through the inbox and endless new networks cropping up by the day, connecting with friends, family and business associates all on one platform, has never been easier.

For example, take Facebook. A name synonymous with social networking, this media powerhouse has taken the Internet by storm. If its popularity is anything to go by, the user count is predicted to run into billions in the next few years. Add to this the amount of private information being uploaded every second on hundreds of social networks that overrun the web and what you get is a strong requirement for security measures to be firmly established. Read more…

Social media – one of several offshoots of the internet – has completely changed the way people interact and socialize in cyber space. With a large number of people spending a good chunk of their time on various social media websites each day; these multimillion dollar corporations have developed huge databases containing personal bio of millions of users. This essentially means that these particular websites, by means of their terms of service, have the liberty to modify, ban or completely remove a user’s content as they see fit.

Read more…

Facebook is the best place for sharing your status updates with family and friends. However, sometimes you might have some interesting outdoor activities which you want to share with your friends only and not your colleagues. Or there are some personal things that can only be shared with your family members and not the others. To manage your post privacy, you should keep these people separated, putting them into groups like family, close friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. This helps you to easily share information with relevant people and avoid some sensitive data to be seen by others.

Below we’ve written 2 step-by-step tutorials guiding you to create a friend list of your own on Facebook as well as restrict certain people from seeing your posts. We hope these simple tutorials and screenshots are helpful for protecting your post privacy. Read more…

Yesterday we’ve recommended you 4 tools for searching hashtags across multiple social networking sites. During our research for this particular topic, we’ve stumbled upon quite a number of online services developed for exploring and analyzing hashtags from Twitter only. Apart from hashtags, contents like Mentions, Tweets and user profiles can also be managed by using these free and user-friendly tools.

In today’s post, we’ve rounded up 12 Twitter hashtags tools, adding to our existing 14 hashtag tools collection. That means you’ll have total 26 hashtag online resources to help you make the most out of this popular microblogging service. Read more…

Hashtag is one of the easiest ways to share and follow a specific topic on the Web. It was firstly used within IRC networks for labelling groups, and rapidly gained popularity through Twitter. These days hashtags have been widely used on many social networking services such as Instagram, Google+, Orkut, Pinterest, Tout, etc. And the good news is that Facebook will soon be supporting this form of metadata tag too.

Previously, we’ve published a post introducing 14 Twitter hashtag tools to keep track of trending topics. Today, we would like to recommend another 2 online services that not only can search hashtags from within Twitter but also other major social networking sites. So if you want to search hashtags on multiple social media sites to explore the latest trending topics, or promote your products, services and campaigns, then these free tools can be very helpful to you. Read more…

Any company would be able to help their new brand by encouraging community members to play games online. This is particularly successful through the social site Facebook. Social media can make a brand world-wide as it goes viral. It is much cleverer then basic advertising. Gaming is addictive, fun and talked about!

Read more…

Since Twitter launched its new profile header feature, we’ve published 2 posts to teach you creating your own Twitter header cover and to showcase some of the most creative header images created by talented designers worldwide. Similar to Facebook Timeline covers, it’s important to custom design an impressive header for your Twitter profile page. Not only can it helps to build a good image for your social media presence, but it can also attract more followers and improve social interaction.

If you haven’t figured out any ideas to design your header cover, why don’t you try some “ready made” header banners which can be easily found from the Web? Below we’ve listed 14 websites where you can download tons of eye-catching, creative and beautiful header images for your Twitter profile. And yes, they are all free to download. Read more…