Wednesday, April 6, 2011

How to- Get the Most Out of Facebook and Twitter Promotions

Once upon a time, you had to use a phone book to find a business’s contact details. Mercifully, those days are behind us. As social media has worked its way into every aspect of our lives, we as a culture have come to expect that our favorite brands — from “Big Gay Ice Cream” trucks to national airlines and fashion houses — are easily accessible on the most popular social networks.

However, it’s no longer enough to simply interact. Consumers are increasingly hungry for promotions, exclusive discounts and giveaways. In fact, recent data suggests that most people who follow brands on Facebook and Twitter both expect and want to receive coupons from these brands.

According to an Ad Age/Ipsos Observer survey of 1,000 participants regarding digital consumption habits, 65% of consumers want the brands they follow to offer coupons. Compare this figure to the percentage of respondents who said they wanted enhanced customer service (42%) and you begin to get a clearer picture of the landscape.

Certainly the Ad Age numbers indicate that the demand for promotions exists, but how effective are Twitter andFacebook promotions in practice? Do they really increase engagement or sales? While no conclusive studies have been done on this exact topic, substantial anecdotal evidence suggests that they do.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The Role SEO Plays for Your Online Business

When it comes to e-commerce, operating and concentrating on the improvement of the website is more or less meaningless if no one on the internet knows that you exist on cyberspace. This is why promotion and marketing are at the heart of e-commerce.

Even the best brands on the internet cannot perform well if they do not keep up their efforts to promote their websites and the product and services they are offering, apart from the activities related to a business. As the consumers are exploring all the shopping options while sitting at home, this rather invites them to take more liberties with their choice and to explore the options, which perhaps they would not have had they been visiting a store in the local market.

That is very much how convenient life has become for an online consumer, and this convenience has only made the competition even fiercer. Even these top brands employ all the SEO techniques to make their websites rank better in the pages for the search engine results for particular keywords, related to their business. If these SEO tools and techniques do work in their favor, it offers them with an immense competitive advantage. But such a certain advantage can only be attained if businesses take timely measures and consult with top-notch SEO services in how to optimize their websites and content for better search engine result rankings.

A SEO service is a team of experts at optimizing websites and their content for a better reach across the audiences active on the internet. The reason why such a service and the concept of SEO itself work so well is that the potential customers narrow down the search themselves by looking up certain keywords. The search engine mechanism presents all the best related sites as a search result within a couple of seconds. A SEO service can use that very mechanism to optimize your website to get your better ranks and more customers.