Category: Social Media

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Using QR Codes For Your Business

Now that you has seen QR Codes or Quick Response Codes on other sites how can you use them too? Here are a few of my suggestions.

Add a QR Code to Your Print Brochures
Add a QR Code to your print brochure, you can send your user to your home page or better yet send them to a custom created landing page that has a special offer to allow you to actually measure the results of your exposure from a trade show, speaking engagement, direct mailing.

Offer Special Coupon Codes and Promotions
Want to track mobile Web users? As most desktop users are not using QR Code scanners, you can encode special offers as a text snippet and even embed a special coupon code in a QR Code that can then be used immediately by smartphone users.

Encourage Google HotPot, FourSquare, and Google Places Reviews
By embedding your QR Code on your menu or guest check, restaurants can encourage visitors to interact immediately with location specific places to share their favorite spots with others and encourage visitors to even leave service reviews.

Print a QR Code on the back of your business card
With the ability to embed a vCard in your QR Code, you can make it easy for smartphone users to add your contact information to their phone and if they are syncing to Outlook will appear there too.

How do you think you will use a QR Code? Just click comments and let me know your suggestion too.

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Interesting Nuggets on Social Media You May Not Have Known

You’ll want to read this full article as it has some excellent tidbits many of which I didn’t even know about. It is titled “Lesser Known Secrets for Better Social Media Results” at the Search Engine Journal.

Here are a few of the secrets that I liked best from the article and some of my own.

1. Start a tweet with .@somename and the update will appear publicly in all your streams and your friend’s you are talking to not just in the feed of your followers and in the feed of the other person’s followers as well. Who knew! .@ you will be my next update.

2. Try to use only one or two hashtags in a tweet. Too many starts to look like spam. We tell our writers try to stick with one.

3. On Facebook have your images for your wall be at least 403 pixels wide by 403 pixels tall. If you are using your smartphone, check your image size settings so you aren’t sending a small photo. Not only will they look better, but when you feature the photo on your page it will not be blurry.

4. Did you know that Pinterst allows the use of hashtags in the description box? Use them wisely and to your benefit.

5. Spend your time in Google+ Communities. Your updates there will be posted to your personal profile and you’ll have more interaction and fun. Personally I have really built up my circle numbers by creating a community and moderating it.

6. In Google+ don’t use the @personname use +personname. Although Google may understand the @ you’ll see that others are using the +.

Make sure to read the article as there may be more great tips you can glean for your own use.

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Did You Know That Share-ability Impacts Who Sees Your Facebook Updates?

Did you know that most likely only 15% of your Facebook Business Page status updates are actually seen on your fans’ walls? Scary isn’t it, to know that the time you spend in keeping your Facebook wall updated may actually have marginal impact. Why? It’s about EdgeRank and share-ability.

Just like Google has an algorithm to rack and stack websites to determine where they appear in the organic or unpaid search results, Facebook has an algorithm to determine when your updates will appear on the walls of subscribers and fans. Not everything you write will be shown, but why such a little amount and how can you get more updates to show?

A great article that explains this topic further and really digs into EdgeRank can be found at SiteProNews.

The bottom line is that the higher your EdgeRank the better your chance that others will actually see what you write and post to your Business Page’s wall. A very simplified explanation of EdgeRank is share-ability. If more people comment, like, link to, and share an update you’ve posted on your wall, the higher the EdgeRank and the more likely this update is to appear on the wall of people who have liked you or subscribe to your news feed.

One way to work to raise EdgeRank is to be specific in a status update and let the reader know what action you really want them to take upon reading your update. Do you want them to share it? Ask them to do that. Do you want them to like your update? Ask them to click like! If you are linking to a download back on your website – ask them to click in and download your paper. Be specific and make the action simple and easy to do.

Improving your EdgeRank is all about action that people take when they read your post. Make sure you are doing your part to help to raise your own EdgeRank by changing your wall post to be more share-able and actionable. EdgeRank will rise when you do so and are successful in engaging reader activity.

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LinkedIn and Twitter Broke Up But LinkedIn Moved On

Although the fact that Twitter cut LinkedIn loose, meaning that Twitter does not allow Twitter feeds to appear in a LinkedIn page widget anymore is not new news, but the fact that LinkedIn has leveraged this into its own success story is new news.

This article gives a very insightful view of the blunder that Twitter has made in breaking up with LinkedIn. By disavowing their relationship Twitter has encouraged LinkedIn to pursue its own course in direct competition with Twitter.

“Back in July Twitter announced that it was no longer going to allow users to post tweets automatically to LinkedIn. Twitter gave us the usual gumpf about wanting to “provide the core Twitter user experience through a consistent set of products and tools”. What Twitter really meant to say was, “We don’t want anyone reading tweets where we can’t put ads”.

What LinkedIn then did was to encourage use of their own newsfeed and nicely integrated it with HootSuite and easy sharing sites. Now for business people the LinkedIn newsfeed may actually be more meaningful for them than a Twitter feed.

This was a very foolish shortsighted decision on Twitter’s part. If they had stayed the course they could have expanded into the business market and created a very nice partnership with LinkedIn. My feeling is that in the long run, business people may leave Twitter totally to the spammers and ads and move full throttle over to LinkedIn now that they have a full social and interaction platform.

If you are not posting updates to LinkedIn, now’s the time to give that some consideration and review our LinkedIn update services.