As you have probably have heard, Facebook has now over 500 million active users and is still growing. If you have a business and you are still not marketing your business on Facebook, you are crazy. Now is the perfect time to be using Facebook. Below is a 97 paged presentation by Chad Richards, he is going to share with you effective ways of using Facebook to market your business. Also have shared a fantastic presentation by Onitz on how to set up super cool Facebook fan pages. Enjoy

Facebook For Business
More about Author: @chadrichards

Facebook Fan Pages – A Step By Step Guide
More about Author: @Onitz

It can be hard to track how you are performing across social media and across the internet, but with powerful monitoring tools you can judge the effectiveness of your social media efforts and keep track of what people are saying about your business, your products or services.

Here are three of the best social media monitoring Tools for free to monitor your brand’s performance and results across multiple social media sites.

Addict-o-matic

Addict-o-matic – This tool gives you comprehensive information that will be invaluable for monitoring your performance in social media. It gathers information about your keywords or brands from across the Web, including Flickr, news, YouTube, Digg, Blogs, as well as most known social media platforms. You can also create a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic you want.

Boardreader

Boardreader – is a search engine for forums and message boards for your keywords, bringing up the latest results which you can click through to, as well as graphs that will trend your results over certain time periods. Keep an eye on the conversations in forums, as these can give you an insight into how people feel about your brand.

Social Mention

Social Mention – is an social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, bookmarks, events, news, comments, and videos all in real-time. As well as displaying the latest results, it also gives you a related keywords, reach and many other useful metrics.

For more social media monitoring tools – click here

Even more social media monitoring tools – click here

I hope you have found this post useful, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

In the last post I talked about The 6 key points you need to be a aware of when creating a logo for your business. Now am going to talk about how businesses advertise and the consumers perception of your advertising.

What is advertising?

IPA says advertising is “the means of providing the most persuasive possible selling message to the right prospects at the lowest possible cost”

Kotler and Armstrong thinks “advertising is a paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods and services through mass media such as newspapers, magazines and television”

I personally think its both definitions..what do you think?

Check out some advertisements below that are creative and clever..see what the key persuasive selling messages are.

What determines the key advertising messages?

The advertising message is often more important than the amount spent. The advertising message must be carefully targeted to impact the target customer audience. A successful advertising message should have the following characteristics:

Meaningful- customers should find the message relevant
Distinctive – capture the customers attention
Believable – which is hard too do since most consumers doubt the true authenticity of an advertisement

What makes a consumer take action?

In advertisements, action words in present tense are used and visual imagery is use to illustrate that action. Also Important benefits to the consumer is highlighted in the advertisment, that sometimes will make a consumer want to take action, especially if they know they will get alot of value from it.

Advertisers also like to use persuasive techniques to play on consumers emotions such as fear, guilt, insecurity, shock and even humour.

I hope you have found this post useful, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

Sponsored Tweets is a new Twitter advertising marketplace, owned by IZEA, that connects advertisers with Tweeters. Advertisers can create sponsored conversations on Twitter. Sponsored Tweets system allows you to compensate tweeters with cash in exchange for promoting your product, service or site.

Tweeters can earn money for spreading the word. Think of it as the Pay Per Tweet version of Pay Per Post or like eBay for tweets..

John Chow has made over $1,000 using the Sponsored Tweets System and is sharing 10 tips on how you can make money from using Sponsored Tweets. Read John Chows tips Click here

Leave your comments below and let me know what you think of Sponsored Tweets

You can publish your tweets via an RSS feed. Simply log into your Twitter account, and scroll to the very bottom of your profile page where you will see a RSS button available.

Click on the link to load the page where you will be given the option to subscribe to the feed using a variety of RSS readers including Google, Live Bookmarks and Bloglines.

Browser Plugins

There are also Firefox plugins designed for use with Twitter that make it even easier to stay up to date.

TweetBar:
One of the most popular plugins that displays Tweets within a sidebar in your browser.
http://www.mikedemers.net/projects/tweetbar

TwitterBar:
This app makes it easy to post tweets based on current websites that you are browsing. You can easily add notes to the websites that you showcase.
http://spatialviews.com/twitterbar

TwitterFox:
Displays a pop-up notification when new tweets are posted on the Twitter network.
http://www.naan.net/trac/wiki/TwitterFox

TwitBin:
This Firefox extension features all of your friends tweets within your sidebar, similar to other Twitter browser plugins.
http://www.Twitbin.com