If you run a blog, you may wonder what really goes on when you write and publish. Blogs seem simple, yet under the surface there is so much technology at work, which makes it seem simple. Take tags. Tags can help in blogging and SEO. Tags can differentiate your pages from others, avoiding duplication problems. And tags are very different from categories.

Tags and Categories
There are some basic similarities between tags and categories. There are many reasons to use categories, such as how they separate your blog posts and make SEO easier. You should, for example, avoid using multiple categories for one post, because in doing so you risk duplicate content. Tags are different. With tags, you naturally want to use more than one on one blog post, using them to batch similar blog posts together for SEO purposes.

Tags and categories separate your blog posts, for SEO and for functionality. They look alike, but there are some key differences. If you run a celebrity blog, you may write on the same person enough to create a tag, but not a whole category. Or you may use a unique category and tag for SEO if the person is a major subject.

When should you use tags?
Tags should be used to separate subjects and as well as link them. If you are running a celebrity blog, it can be useful for you to use simple and short descriptions in order to capture social media hits. Tags should be used often. There is no danger of duplicate content. You can likely come up with 10 good, short tags for your celebrity blog, from “quarterback” to “action star” and specific names.

When should you use categories?
Categories are used to batch articles together, rather than linking them together for search engines. As stated, unlike how using more than one tag can be beneficial, you rarely want to use more than one category. Categories are typically known prior to writing the blog post; you have a category for “movie stars” for your similar themed posts.

How do they help SEO?
While you should quite often use multiple tags, you don’t want to be seen as spammer. However, tags along with categories are a necessary tool to use. You can do more with tags, capturing hits via social media, and using keywords. So where do categories help? Categories have some key advantages, namely that they are considered stronger keywords by search engines. Tags will have less of an impact on SEO than a category, because search engines like Google use categories for page rank.

Now that you know more about tags and categories, you can optimize your blog so more readers find it.

LinkedIn dominates the world for freelancers, small businesses, and corporations. Well, not always, because there is a social market called Facebook where hundreds of millions flock every day. But the key benefit of LinkedIn marketing over marketing in other social media is simply this: you can focus on business.

Facebook is not run directly for businesses, while LinkedIn is a social network for every business, from the solo freelancer to the corporate CEO. It’s unique, it’s useful, and LinkedIn marketing is relevant when it comes to social marketing.

So how can you succeed with LinkedIn marketing? Consider these 5 features for the social network which can be easily implemented.

Contacts
You start with a few contacts, but upload your digital address book to LinkedIn and you can get hundreds if not thousands of contacts. Still, you might need only to increase from 1 to 10 contacts in order to get what you want. But the shear weight of users available to network with makes it a dream for a business at any level looking for new ways to connect with contacts.

Web Networking
You can learn about your customers, their needs and wants, in new ways with LinkedIn marketing. You can do so much just on your main network page. Right there you can watch for job changes, updates from colleagues, new job offers, companies looking to connect in your niche, and much more. Of course, with Facebook the usability is paramount, but LinkedIn has some similarities in terms of updates and following friends. For example, you can post updates much like Facebook,while also connecting these short updates to your Twitter account.

New Jobs, Leads
You can turn leads into prospects and prospects into clients. You can find new jobs for yourself or others. You can ask 100 people to recommend your small business and refer to this on your main site.

Lead Management
Say you’re a small technology firm looking for new clients in relatively small amounts. You send out 10 emails every week to new leads. You want them to be customers. With LinkedIn, you can connect and nurture them through the sales process of lead, to prospect, to client. A lead is someone who may be interested, a prospect is someone who’s shown interest, and a client is someone who buys. With lead management, you can see what they’re looking for. In most cases, the company will hire someone for the work you want to do with them. This is simply the nature of the business–supply meets demand. If you can connect with a potential client via LinkedIn, you can have an advantage over the competition.

Stay Connected
With all the options you have with LinkedIn Marketing, you may not know where to begin. The best option is to sign up, upload your email contact list, contact these leads through LinkedIn, and start asking for referrals and testimonials from your current clients. If you’re a small business, you can upload your Gmail or Yahoo address book to the site, follow up with all leads who agree to connect, and then ask them for referrals after your work is done.

Blogs, social media and personal branding combined are the way of the future for internet marketing. They are the ultimate tool for creating awareness, building a community and generating real results.

But how do you use them together to build a web brand? First, let’s take a look at them individually.

Blog Marketing
If you’re a building a small business or want to create awareness for your company, blogging can create the buzz you need.

The most important thing when it comes to blogging is creating a constant stream of fresh, new content. Whether you write it yourself or opt to hire a company to do the writing for you, content is key.

Social Media Marketing
There’s been quite the buzz regarding social media lately and rightfully so. Social media allows businesses to engage clients and network in a variety of new ways.

No other field can reach so many people in a matter of seconds. When you post to your Facebook page, you’re immediately engaging an audience of limitless size. How it’s done is the viral aspects of one user who follows you turning into two, three and continuing to grow afterwards. For example, with Facebook, you have a prospective audience for your niche in the millions and a clever marketer will attract them all by building a community on their Facebook page.

Social media marketing buzz is true. Engaging clients on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is practically a must to develop any brand today. It’s also simple. Join social networks and you can market your business in a variety of ways.

Personal Branding
Personal branding is about getting down to the details about you, your company and your product. It’s your chance to prove that you’re human, you want to help others with your product and you’re interested in your clients too. No two fields work better with personal branding than social media and blog marketing.

Using Blogging, Social Media and the Personal Brand to Create a Complete User Experience

The cliche, never put all your eggs in one basket, works for marketing too: never put all your marketing goals into one form. Use as many fields as you possibly can. Do you see major companies only using TV commericals to promote  a new product? No, you see them using a variety of tools, from Facebook campaigns to PPC Ads.

Online, beyond the static site, you’re best method of marketing is using blogging, social media and branding together in a process designed to create that unique user experience. 

For your blog and brand, social media marketing creates awareness and responses. You might have a Facebook page created simply to market your blog. This is even simpler than starting up the blog. And with applications to connect your main Facebook company page to Twitter, you can constantly promote new posts across the web. You can do the same thing with your company site.

There are many other social media tools you can use to create buzz for your blog, which in turn creates brand awareness. Two of the simplest and best are StumbleUpon and Digg, which improve response to every blog post you share with readers.

Let’s connect the dots for all these forms.

To create a user experience, web marketers use marketing in a cycle. For instance, you can use Facebook or Twitter to create buzz on your blog, your blog can help you define your personal and  business brand, and your brand can attract attention to your Facebook and Twitter pages. One buyer reads your Facebook page, travels to your blog, is impressed by your expertise and buys. They then continue to follow you on all these forms. Why? If it works out, you’re creating a unique user experience.

Web branding is inexpensive and when done right, can be very powerful. By utilizing social media and blogging together to create a strong and integrated web branding campaign, you can increase the worth of your company, your personal brand and can expect to earn more. And all it really takes…. is time, so let’s get web branding.

Social media and email marketing together can mean the difference between success and failure online.

Some say email marketing will go the way of direct mail marketing. Did email marketing really kill direct mail? No. Actually, direct mail is still a major business. Just because you can get higher response rates for lower costs with email marketing, doesn’t mean one can replace the other. And many major businesses are seeing the light.

Recent studies on social media pointed out that older generations actually respond more to direct mail. Why? The majority of buyers older than 60– a huge market already –don’t get on Facebook, don’t Tweet on Twitter, don’t network on LinkedIn and certainly don’t watch YouTube marketing videos.

The same thing that was said of direct mail was and is considered for email marketing in comparison to social marketing. But it’s not a decision to try one over the other; the new rules of marketing say using social marketing and email marketing together provides the greatest opportunity to generate buzz and increase consumer response.

Now that we’ve established email marketing as far from dead, and that social marketing isn’t for all buyer groups, let’s define how you can use social email marketing.

Make Social Email Marketing Simple
Twitter is 140 character messages, Facebook is a vast ocean where it’s hard to make a splash and although email marketing messages are often longer, you still need to master the fine of art of simple, direct, short marketing.

Typically, email marketing messages have shorter content when compared to the general direct mailer and a much shorter response rate. Nearly 80% of recipients will respond (by either taking action or deleting the message) within 48 hours. Email marketing needs to be condensed for social media and network sites. This means shorter posts, quicker calls to action and adapting to much faster response rates.

Subscribing Rules on Social Email Marketing
Social email marketing is about using email and social media as tools. Since readers of your Facebook page may be interested in your emails and email readers may want to “Like” your business on Facebook, you need to understand how to use the two together to position your brand for success. How? Make it simple for current email readers to follow you on Facebook, Twitter, etc. and vice versa. Make it valuable for your target to follow both – run different deals, offer additional discounts or have certain information only available on one. Maybe you link the headlines of your monthly newsletter on Facebook, but in order to view the entire newsletter they have to subscribe to your email list.

Find Your Prospects, Create Customers
Depending on your main client base, you may have a variety of readers and followers. No problem. Research who’s following you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks. See what customers are responding to in your emails. The results may surprise you and change your future marketing efforts.

What’s the Competition Doing?
Lastly, no matter if you’re failing or succeeding with these strategies, social email marketing is still advertising and you still need to know about the guy charging less than you for the same product and the girl charging more than you but getting more sales. Some critical research on the competition– following their Facebook pages, subscribing to their emails –can help you, your brand and your product stand out. There are no rules saying you can’t–all marketers do it.

Social and email marketing aren’t going to work for all brands and all products. Some consumers are going to prefer traditional means of marketing communications, where others are going to prefer social media over email and vice versa. Marketing isn’t about choosing one media and hoping for the best, it’s about strategically reaching buyers across multiple platforms to position your brand for success.

The growing phenomenon of Facebook hasn’t been all due to one simple form of content, marketing or application. Facebook’s success is a combination of dozens of features, which make the user experience better. And any change to Facebook, no matter how small, could impact your social media marketing campaign greatly.

The most recent change proves the point: Facebook will change the “become a fan” button for business pages to a “like” button. This means, if you follow an author’s Facebook page, or a company’s or your favorite brand of coffee, instead of “fanning” the page, you’ll be “liking” it when you subscribe to updates on the Facebook page.

This may seem to be an insignificant change, but few one-word changes will have as much impact on marketing as this one. As you can already “like” a comment, picture, wall post or status update on Facebook, you can now do the same for brands you’d like to give a thumbs up, without declaring yourself a “fan”.

This came about after recent research that Facebook users, an estimated 400 million who log in daily, use the “like” feature far more than the “fan” feature. The Facebook study said nearly twice as many people “like” items than “fan” brands and company pages.

Why is this so important? And what effect will it have on web marketing?

Users feel less commitment to “liking” a page. It can seem less promotional than “Becoming A Fan”. Users feel it’s less of a stretch to say they like a brand. And what if you fan more than one brand? Now you can “like” as many brands, even competitors and not feel conflicted about it.

The idea behind the change then is that more people will “like” business pages than those who were “”fanning” them. Facebook is hoping the new feature will encourage more companies and startups to build Facebook pages and pay for additional advertising, Facebook’s main source of revenue.

But will this truly make a big difference?

Experts are arguing what will happen is users will simply “like” brands the same amount as they became a “fan.” So there are predicting no change whatsoever.

Traditionally, Facebook marketing was not a major business. With companies actively looking to promote their brands on Facebook over the past years and with many other social networks connecting to Facebook (such as Twitter and LinkedIn), it’s become a boon for marketers with any size plan. You could be a Fortune 500 company or a small business selling cookies. With companies actively courting readers to follow them on Facebook and Twitter, it’s only logical Facebook would try to encourage more uses to follow theses companies. It is the companies who write the checks after all.

One word may seem to be a small change, but Facebook is betting money this tiny twist will lead to more users connecting with brands and more advertising dollars. For marketers, it may encourage a larger following. But is more followers what businesses really need to be more successful on Facebook? Or will this just over saturate Facebook with business updates and dilute their messaging to their actual target market?

For now, we have to wait and see.

Well, if you’ve stuck with us this far, hopefully you’ve got a good grasp on Twitter and how you can use it to increase business and communication with your consumers. But one very important question remains: How do you measure its success?

Measuring Social Media Success and ROI

• Exposure
       •  Visits
       •  Search Engine Rankings
       •  Comment Tonality
       •  Buzz
• Engagement
       •  Click-Throughs
       •  Repeat Visitors
       •  Readership (duration of visit)
       •  Subscriptions
• Influence
       •  Awareness
       •  Purchase Consideration
       •  Attitudes
• Action
       •  Visit Key Pages
       •  Attend Events
       •  Make a Purchase
       •  Tell a Friend
       •  Contact

Thanks for watching!

We hope you found this presentation helpful and wish you luck as you start your Twitter marketing campaign. Remember, the most important factor in determining your success when it comes to social media is participation. So what are you waiting for? Go on, join the conversation. Or better yet, start it!

From understanding its culture and attracting followers to choosing your following and using desktop applications, there are a number of factors that can increase your odds of social media success when it comes to using Twitter for business.

Part 8 of the Minnesota and North Dakota BBB’s 2009 Focus Seminar, offers simple tips and information to help you succeed when it comes to using Twitter as a business and social media marketing communication tool. Driving community participation is key and the best way you can get participation is to publish the fact that you are on these channels. Put it on your website. Use it in your email signature. Promote it on your offline materials.

Aside from creating a following and getting real participation, another item that’s going to effect your success with Twitter is finding the right programs.  We mentioned earlier that by itself, Twitter is not exactly “user-friendly” but there are desktop applications and software programs that work with Twitter to make it easier and more convenient for the user.

Tweet Like A Pro

• Desktop Clients – view tweets, replies and direct messages all in one interface, group people together, handle multiple accounts, monitor what others are saying
• Twitter Search – Find other people
• Tweet Schedulers – setup tweets to be published at a later time, auto follow people, send automatic direct messages to people who follow you
• Integrate Files - images and video
• Twitter Mobile – tweet and monitor your twitter account from your mobile phone

The more you know about Twitter and the people who use it (tweeple), the easier it will be for you to use it to leverage your business and marketing goals. Watch Part 8: Setting Up for Social Media Success now and be sure to tune in next week for the exciting conclusion of “How to Use Twitter for Business.”

As a marketing tool, social media is a relatively new concept for many people and many businesses. You might be familiar with what Twitter is or even use it to follow your friends, but where do you even begin creating a marketing campaign centered around it?

What should you know about Twitter before getting started

• It’s relatively disorganized…
• Communications are short… 140 characters
• Offers an API which makes it easier to use… otherwise not very user friendly
• It’s quirky… 98% up time in 2007

Well, one place to start is by looking at what other companies are already doing. The third video segment of the 2009 Minnesota BBB Focus Seminar, “How to use Twitter for Business” begins with a few examples of actual business’s Twitter accounts and different campaign strategies and offers advice on what you should know before you Tweet. 

For more Twitter tips on how to use it as a social media marketing tool for your business, watch Part 3: “What you should know before you tweet.” And be sure to stay tuned for more from, “How to use Twitter for Business.”

The second video segment of the BBB seminar, “How to use Twitter for Business,” addresses the question, what is Twitter. By definition, it’s a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each other’s updates, know as tweets (Wikipedia). But what’s interesting are the different ways companies are using Twitter.

Popular ways companies use twitter:

• As a public relations or marketing channel
• As a research channel
• For internal/group discussions

As you start to think about how you can use Twitter for your own business, keep in mind that although it is free, it does require time and participation.

For more information on Twitter and how companies can use it as a marketing or public relations tool, watch Part 2, “What could be better than free?” now and be sure to stay tuned for more from, “How to use Twitter for Business.”

If you missed the Better Business Bureau of Minnesota and North Dakota’s FOCUS 2009 Luncheon Series, “How to use Twitter for Business,” you’re in luck. We’ve got the whole presentation (by our very own Executive VP, Christian Del Monte) and we’ll be posting it in easy to watch, 10 minute videos over the next two months.

The seminar focuses on how to use Twitter as a business and marketing tool to stay in touch with clients, increase brand awareness and get your company in front of new prospects.

If you’re interested in learning:

• Who’s using Twitter and how to communicate with them
• How to increase your Twitter following
• How to Tweet like a pro with popular software programs
• How to monitor what’s being said about you and your industry and
• How to track results and calculate an ROI,

be sure to stay tuned for the upcoming blog posts.

The first video, “How to use Twitter for Business Part 1: An Introduction to Social Media” serves as an introduction to social media, explaining the value it has for business professionals and companies. With a very loyal audience, who’s highly involved and a reach similar to that of television, no matter how much time you have to invest in social media, it can still be very beneficial to your business.

Twitter can help you:

• Network
• Build / extend your social community
• Gain market research knowledge
• Communicate with other professionals
• Communicate with your target market directly
• Create brand exposure
• Generate leads
• Increase sales

And the best part is? Yup, you guessed it. It’s FREE!

To learn how Twitter can help your business, watch Part 1 now and don’t forget to check back next week for Part 2.