Top Social Media Tools -BUSINESS.COM

From real-time customer service to reputation management and competitive intelligence, B2B marketers are quickly discovering the powerful and versatile effects of social media. With interactive marketing forecasts projecting social media spend to outpace all other types of online marketing at a compound annual growth rate of 34% from 2009 to 2014,1 and research indicating 86% of B2B firms use social media,2 it‟s clear social media has become a key component of any online marketing program.

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Google Places: Does Local SEO and Google Boost Make for a Local SEM?

Small businesses face a multitude of challenges daily; servicing customers, generating sales, meeting payroll, and in effect doing what they 'do' for a living. Basically, they've got there hand in everything and this rarely allows for deep specialization in any one specific facet of their business. Local businesses do not have the time required to research keywords, monitor results, and modify bids and ad creative along with all the additional complexity that is associated with SEM.

Read More: Google Places: Does Local SEO and Google Boost Make for a Local SEM? | ClickZ:

Connecting the Social Web and Your Business

A very specific - but too often overlooked - aspect of social media-based marketing is integrating the social Web with your online (and by extension, offline) marketing conversion process. Creating an online presence is a 'Step 1/Must Have' for most businesses now, and right behind that is carving out a space in the social outpost for brands, products, and services whose customers and business objectives indicate a social presence. For the record, I'd argue that this means 'most, if not all.'

The missing step? Connecting the two. It sounds simple enough, but consider the marketing context: for many marketers, individual marketing channels are often treated as standalones, with an overall level of coordination (only) around the message and objectives. This is a hold-over practice that grew out of traditional media planning and creative, and it makes sense from efficiency and overall awareness campaign management points of view. However, from the vantage point of those learning about your product or service through collaborative interaction on the social Web, the experience is obviously much less compartmentalized.

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You Have Verified Your Google Places Listing, Right?

There's a ton of great things that come to a business owner that verifies his business.

You get to:

* Upload pictures
* Upload videos
* Make coupons
* See really cool stats about your Google Places listing
* Create tags to make your listing stand out
* Post events or specials to your page

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How To Get Found By Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making a website appear more prominently in search-engine results, and it’s a battleground for anyone who relies on eyeballs on websites. If you’re a casual blogger you may have never heard of it, but with a bit of simple SEO tweaking, you’ll see your hit rate rise rapidly.

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Get the Most From a Small Business Social Media Presence

Today’s reality is that your business needs to be on social media, but the mere existence of your business on sites like Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter) doesn’t guarantee a single sale, or even a single referral. In order for businesses to succeed in the social media space, they need to be properly educated on what works and what doesn’t. More importantly, business owners need to have realistic goals about what they’ll get out of social media.

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Real Estate Hunters Turn to Mobile

Putting to rest any doubts about the importance of its mobile app, real estate search website Trulia found that the percentage of its online visitors — who also used its app — was as high as 46% in some cities last month. The just-released study is further evidence of the growing mobile web, which Morgan Stanley recently predicted will eclipse the desktop web by 2012.

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Is Your Brand New Website Already Outdated?

As new devices, platforms, and programs enter the marketplace at a dizzying pace, it's almost impossible to stay at the forefront of what's new. In most cases, it's not even important to have the latest, greatest technology driving your website. There is, however, a baseline of functionality and usability that is surprisingly absent from many sites - even when they've just launched. Here's a quick litmus test to check your site.

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