However, you may have come across a few myths that are preventing you from getting the greatest ROI from your content marketing efforts. If you’re in the early stages of a content marketing strategy, you may believe at least one of the following myths.
Myth #1: If I tweet it, they will read it

Reality: It takes more than simply publishing a blog or posting a tweet to bring visitors to your website. Sysomos recently revealed that the average lifespan of a tweet is one hour–meaning that if no one retweets you within an hour, you’ll have to either try again later or post something more compelling.

The same thing applies to the rest of your content. Only a limited number of people will subscribe to your blog or trade their contact information to download a white paper. If you want to reach a larger audience, you should make your content available in different formats on different channels. For example, you can turn a series of blog posts into a white paper or make a video of an educational presentation and share it with your social networks.
Myth #2: The number one purpose of developing content is to make search engines like me

Reality: Publishing keyword-rich content can improve your search engine rankings and bring more visitors to your website, but those visitors won’t stick around unless your content is engaging. Don’t try to get to the top of the search engines by stuffing your social media content and website with keywords. This makes your copy boring and tells your readers, “I wrote this for Google–not for you.”

Instead, write about topics that interest your readers. When readers find your content valuable, they will share it with their networks. The inbound links to your website will do more to improve your Google rankings than stuffing your copy with keywords.
Myth #3: Content marketing is a great way to sell my products and services

Reality: You have a huge opportunity to attract customers with your content. However, many marketers turn their blogs, white papers and social media messages into blatant sales pitches. If you try to pitch to potential customers before they get a chance to know, like and trust you, they will tune out. The bulk of your content should educate potential customers and help solve one of their key problems. Once your prospects view you as a trusted and helpful resource, they will be more likely to turn to you if they need your product or service.

The new format also changed the way consumers experience brands on Facebook.

In a webcam eye-tracking study for Mashable by EyeTrackShop, participants spent less time looking at Wall posts and ads and more time looking at the cover photo on brands’ timelines than they did on their old Facebook Walls.

“The new Facebook Timeline limits the effective branding space, and the top portion of the page must be effectively utilized,” suggest the study’s authors.

EyeTrackShop recorded eye movements of 30 participants as they were shown brand profiles — before and after being converted to timeline — from the Dallas Cowboys, Good Morning America, “The Muppets” and Pepsi in 10-second intervals. What participants looked at on each webpage, for how long and in what order is recorded in the images below.

Results suggests a few ways our perception of Brands on Facebook has changed:

Ads on Facebook Timeline are less visible than ads on Facebook Brand Pages. While 30%-40% of study participants looked at ads on brand Timeline pages, 80% looked at them on Brand Pages. In both cases, ads placed higher up on the page fared better than those below them.
Cover photos are the new Facebook Wall (at least as far as attention goes). On brand pages, Wall posts were the star attraction. Viewers on average looked at them first and for the longest amount of time.

On the brand Timelines, however, viewers always looked at the cover photo first. In all but one case, they spent a longer time looking at it than at Timeline content.
Everyone will notice your cover photo. It’s larger than anything else and at the top of the page for a reason, and 100% of viewers looked at it. On average, they saw it in 0.5 seconds or less. Meanwhile, only 65% to 92% of viewers noticed profile photos on Brand Pages.
Viewers see Timeline content last. In every case, viewers looked at either the left or right column of Timeline content last — after ads, navigation buttons and brand logos.
Information that was invisible is now a focal point. Facebook moved the number of Likes, events and apps to prime top-and-center territory. It now gets more attention than when it was listed on the right-hand side of the page.

In the case of Good Morning America, for instance, the show’s 585,000 Likes went from being completely ignored on its Brand Page to being the biggest attention-getter on its Timeline.
Cover photos with faces attract the most attention. Good Morning America and “The Muppets” have cover photos with faces, whereas the Dallas Cowboys and Pepsi do not. The cover photos with faces attracted more attention.

Creating stellar content for your online marketing is great. But great content doesn’t (quite) distribute itself. It needs vehicles for people to pass it along, discuss its merits, argue over its controversies, blog it, mash it, tweet it and even scrape it. Which is, of course, where social media comes in.

Social media didn’t create content marketing, but it’s an unsurpassed tool for getting it distributed. On the flip side, great content gives social media life, by giving people something more interesting to talk about than what they’re ordering right now at Starbucks.

Social media marketing is sacred to the New Creed of Entrepreneurs

The new breed of smart, savvy online entrepreneurs are creatures of the social web. Gathering points like forums, Twitter and Facebook are the campfires that pull the tribe together. Some of us have been convening around digital campfires for a long time. (I found my first in 1989, before the invention of the World Wide Web.)

Social media has grown so explosively because connection is probably the deepest drive we have. The campfire gives us a place to share information about the day’s hunt, a forum to air out the tribe’s differences, even a place for us to consider new and better ways to build campfires.

No, it’s not a utopian picture. Our campfires are places for bickering and malice as much as for inspiration and community. But without a connecting place, without a central spot to bring us together for conversation, there is no tribe.

Our gathering places are never perfect. They’re human. Which is what makes them so extraordinary.

Great content is the New Entrepreneurs’ Online Marketing Lifeblood

It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the Yanomamo in the Amazon rainforest or friends at a barbecue in Teaneck, New Jersey. Anywhere people gather around fires, they’re going to tell stories.

It’s in the nature of the human animal to play with language, to create fables and songs and nonsense to entertain ourselves with. And it’s in our nature to make beautiful objects and embellish anything that will stand still long enough.

These instincts are alive today in great writing and imagery being shared all over the Web. The impulses that make us reweet a blog post or a fantastic Flickr image are the same ones that bring a superb Navajo weaver renown across four states.

Wonderful words and beautiful images capture our attention, no matter who we are or what technology we might have at our disposal. Our impulse to create, and our desire to remark on skillful creations, haven’t changed much since we started walking upright.

The New Entrepreneurs Have Arrived, Riding the Online Marketing Wave

In addition to our passion for connection, the other remarkable human trait is adaptability.

No other animal can adapt to as many different ecosystems and environments as we can. We’ve built dwellings in Antarctica and in space. We’ve survived the Ice Age and world wars, tsunamis and earthquakes, and even Joan Rivers winning Celebrity Apprentice.

When the environment is stable, we get complacent. We settle into calm, self-satisfied habits for thousands of years at a time.

But when the earth starts to shake, we wake up again: the same smart, watchful, inventive and dangerous monkey we’ve always been at heart.

I’ve heard the current economic meltdown described as “economic climate change,” which I like a lot. We don’t know where it’s going to get unbearably hot and where the temperature will plunge to permafrost. The system is too complex to predict, except we know it’s going to change and it’s likely to change fast.

But some things won’t change. If we can sing a remarkable song, others will gather to hear it. And now, digital campfires connect us from Kuala Lumpur to Iceland to Dallas.

If I create content that’s worthy of attention, the world will show up and talk about it. I don’t know how they’ll show up in 5 years (or 5 months), but I know they will.

My job is to make something amazing, then use the global network of digital campfires intelligently to find the people who will love and appreciate it.

How about you? What songs and legends are you bringing to your campfire?

Many webmasters make common keyword research mistakes and are later surprised that their campaigns are not producing results. They have all the technical details, data, scope, and so on, but one small mistake sinks the entire ship.

Before trying your hand at researching a keyword and targeting a few phrases, here are two of the pitfalls you should steer clear of.

Targeting Keywords You Think Are the Best match for Your Company

“You know what? I think we should target the phrase ‘blue sportswear for men’ because our research shows that men are looking for blue sportswear,” says one of the data analysts at your company.

But that is a trap! You are prejudging the user, which you should avoid doing at all cost.

Of course, your data analyst has all the data and your company’s previous sales records, but when you are marketing a product to a global audience, never prejudge and arrive at a decision from your perspective.

Instead of targeting exact-match keywords, try finding out which keywords users actually type on Google, Yahoo, Ask, and other search engines. Common users are not familiar with all the common product names, so you should start by putting yourself in users’ shoes and then begin your keyword research and analysis.

Here are some options worth considering:

• Set up a poll on your website and ask users to type the name of the product they like using.
• Create a social media campaign and track user responses, feedback, questions, and opinions.
• Use your Google Analytics data to see which keywords and phrase combinations users are typing into search engines that bring them to your landing pages.
• Master the usage of Google AdWords keyword tool and Wordtracker.

After analyzing all those campaigns, you will have a rough idea about user viewpoints. I am certain that the results from your internal data analysis will be very different from the user data analysis.

Not Considering the Competition

“Hey, the phrase ‘blue sportswear in Denmark’ gets the highest hits, so we should definitely use this phrase for keyword marketing.”

That assumption is only partially true. If you are targeting a very popular keyword, you have to cut through enormous competition. And that competition will most likely increase over time.

It is very difficult to target popular keyword phrases and get fruitful results from your campaign. You have only a slight chance of landing in the top three results, because thousands of other webmasters are already spending their time, money, and resources to gain the first spot.

To avoid this pitfall, ask yourself the following four questions:

•     Do I have enough incoming links to the landing page for which I am targeting this very popular keyword? (By incoming links, I mean those you get naturally, not paid links.)
•     What is the status of my nearest competitors? How many links do they have, and how popular are they?
•     Will I be able to offer enough value (e.g., relevant products, affordable prices, freebies, and goodies) to users who arrive at my landing page? How much relevant content do I have on my website to support my pillar page for the keyword I am targeting? For example, you wouldn’t target “T-shirts for Manchester fans” if your website sells Barbie dolls.

If the answer to any of those questions is not favorable, you are probably aiming at something out of reach.

A smarter approach would be to “start small” and grow over time. Target keywords that have low competition, and grab those users who want something nobody has offered till now. Those small pages add up, and they will help you create a firm base for targeting those really popular keyword phrases.

For more tips and tricks relating to social media marketing and website design, keep watching this space.

Twitter timelines follow a chronological timelines, with the time that a given tweet was made being the only claim to prominence; the older a tweet gets, less noticeable it is. Given the sheer volume of tweets some users receive, it’s quite natural for your followers to miss a good degree of your tweets. On the other hand, Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm prioritizes each users’s news feeds with respect to the user’s interests; thus, if you’re not creating content that’s consistently interesting to your friends or followers, chances are you won’t show on their news feeds or their ‘walls’.

Social Media Marketing: The Importance of Content

The above mentioned facts make a strong case, more than ever, for compelling and relevant social media content.

Those facts make a good case for the need to write compelling social media content. They also underscore the value of converting your social media followers into SMS- and email-marketing subscribers. As people who have a genuine, expressed interest in your products and services, your fans and followers are the perfect targets for those efforts.

By recruiting your social fans and followers to your email and SMS lists, you can forge deeper relationships with them by offering more personalized and targeted content than you ever could via social media alone.

You can also increase the likelihood that your communications will be read—particularly in the case of SMS, since 83% of all text messages are read within an hour of being received.

How Social Media Marketing can Help Your e-mail and SMS Marketing Efforts

Here are five steps to accelerating your email and SMS list subscriptions using social media.

1. Reel in ‘friends’ and ‘followers’

Publicize your presence on Facebook and Twitter in your stores, on your website, and in your ads. Facebook ads are another cost-effective way to get more fans. Entice people to “fan” or “follow” you by offering them exclusive content and special they won’t find anywhere else, and emphasize giveaways and discounts.

One study found that 37% of Facebook users “Like” fan pages just to receive coupons and deals. “Liking” (Facebook) or following (Twitter) you is a lighter commitment for customers than opting in to your SMS or mobile lists. By acquiring social followers and offering them relevant deals, you can help them see the value in joining your lists.

2. Leverage Social Media to convert fans and followers into subscribers

Dedicate a permanent tab on your Facebook account to a Web form that people can complete to join your email or SMS lists, and tweet a link to your form on Twitter. To grow your lists quickly, offer incentives for filling out the form. For instance, Signal customer Culver’s, a Midwestern fast-food chain, offers its new subscribers a free value meal for joining its eClub and a free scoop of frozen custard for joining its Text Club on Facebook.

3. Encourage Fans to share mobile number by texting them discount coupons or other offer details

Invite your Facebook fans or Twitter followers to text for a special offer. In return, ask that they join your SMS or email list, while emphasizing their ability to unsubscribe at any time. Movie and game rental company Redbox (also a Signal client) has had success doing that by offering customers a free rental in return for joining its email list.

4. Generate buzz through social promotions such as contests, trivia quizzes and sweepstakes

Sweepstakes, voting contests, and trivia campaigns engage followers, and they also allow you to add them to your email or SMS lists as the price of entry. Signal customer Memphis Car Audio recently ran a social sweepstakes tied to email-subscriber collection. By offering a trip for two to the Brazil premiere of the movie “Fast Five,” the company successfully increased brand awareness, drove in-store traffic, and added more than 93,000 subscribers to its email list.

5. Encourage social media fans and followers to bring in fresh fans by offering referral benefits

Rewards for referrals—a common tactic used by your favorite daily deals sites—can be a powerful tool for accelerating list growth beyond your current fans and followers.

Ask all new subscribers—right on the confirmation page they get after signing up using your Web form—to refer their friends to also join. Give each referred friend an offer or coupon for joining, and give the referrer a special offer of even greater value if she refers a specified number of friends.

By attracting your social fans and followers to your subscriber lists, you can develop a universal profile of your best customers across all digital channels. Over time, by analyzing your fans’ and followers’ responses to different communications, you will be able to determine the type of deals each prefers and whether they respond more favorably to an afternoon tweet, an early-morning email, or a midday text.

Ultimately, that information gained through social media marketing will enable you to create the kind of highly personalized offers that inspire customer loyalty and repeat business.

Social Media Marketing: Reaching Out to Audiences and Prospects

Social media makes access to several demographics, whether pertaining to age, gender or region, easier than ever before. Before marketers create their advertisement they need to determine who they are trying to reach. They may have to do several different versions of it in order to meet the demographics. Most marketing on social media shows up on profiles of specific ages. The highest percentage of Facebook users are between the ages of 18 and 34. Marketers would not advertise the same message to a 30 year old as they would to a 15 year old. Social media has over 400 million users worldwide making the chances of someone clicking on a marketing ad first choice.

Social Media Marketing Helps You Enhance Your Digital Footprint

Intelligent social media marketing costs nothing but effort and time. There’s nothing that paid campaigns can achieve, that a little clever tweaking of your social media and networking tools can’t. An ad may attract current followers of the product or service, or bring in a new customer base. Either way social media marketing is an easy way to connect to consumers. Social Media Marketing Agencies can help bring a company to the top of Google search as well. When users seek a company advertising a product or service they use, they can share the marketing campaign with others. On Facebook one can share a link of the website with all their friends and on Twitter they can re-tweet. On both of those social media sites, you are given the option to follow a brand. Users might see the ad and choose to look up the company on social media where most news and promotions are most commonly announced. Along with grabbing a social media user’s attention and getting their following, social media marketing also includes promotions and contests on their pages. Companies may run contests such as giving something away when they get a certain number of followers, or receive something free, or a coupon, for participating in something on social media. A company can also put promotions on social media where only people following them would only know the discount code for the store.

Social media marketing is instant and viral in nature. Gone are the days when you had to pay for market research reports that arrived by the time the data on them was outdated. Social media is not going away soon; new sites come out daily for people to stay connected to each other and businesses. Marketing on these sites are the best way to get the word out to millions of people-for free. We’ll bring you more on social media marketing tips and strategies, so keep reading.

Some telecom brands have doubled their online advertising budgets, while automobile companies have increased it by 20-35% over fiscal 2010-11, executives said. Some consumer products, retail and tyre brands have also started online promotions this year.

Online Advertising Gaining Momentum in India

India has more than 100 million people who use the Internet, around half of which also shop online, according to Google India. There are 22 million subscribers of the social networking website Facebook, according to a 2010 report by Vizisense, which covers the digital media space.

The digital media market, including the Internet, social media and e-commerce, is expected to be worth Rs.1,500 crore this year, said Manish Vij, founder of the digital agency Tyroo Media Private Ltd.

The current size of the online advertising market, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), is Rs.1,100 crore, while the total advertising market is estimated at Rs.25,000 crore.

“Women’s apparel retail brand Biba and tyre brand Bridgestone moved online recently,” said Namrata Balwani, chief operating officer at digital agency Media2win, which handles the accounts of these concerns for their online advertising requirements.

Nitin Chowdhary, business head at digital agency Tyroo Media, said, “Retail brands will be the game changer in online advertising.” He said Tyroo is doing online work for retailer Shoppers Stop.

Banking and financial services and online classifieds were early movers, while sectors such as real estate, education and e-commerce are getting in now, said Nitin Mathur, senior director (marketing) at Yahoo! India.

Max Hegerman, senior vice-president and digital head at JWT India, the advertising agency for Bharti Airtel Ltd, said telecom companies have the biggest digital advertising budgets, with 10% of their total budget spent on online advertising. “With the advent of 3G (third generation mobile communication), it is in their best interest to be online and promote themselves,” he said.

Hegerman said his client list has been growing in the two years he has headed JWT’s digital media space. “The shift is gradual but across the board. Companies spend 5-8% of their marketing budgets online nowadays compared to 3% earlier.”

Online Advertising in Various Sectors

C.V.L. Srinivas, managing director at Starcom Mediavest, said telcos and car makers spend 15-20% of their total budgets online.

Anuradha Agarwal, vice-president (sales and marketing) at Vodafone Essar Ltd, declined to share the company’s digital budget but said it had jumped from 5% to 10%.

“Digital space is a great way to build relationships and engage with customers. Besides, the medium is efficient, effective, non-intrusive and saves time,” she added. The returns are well defined and Vodafone has an online grievance redressal system, where customers can complain or ask questions, Agarwal added.

Auto maker Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, too, has increased digital media expenditure by 20% over the last fiscal, a spokesperson said.

“This is our way of connecting with the net savvy, upwardly mobile youth. Online advertising is also a cost effective approach to marketing,” he said.

When the company launched the Swift model in August, the event was streamed live on Facebook. “We had over 100,000 fans online waiting for the launch,” the spokesperson said.

Vij of Tyroo Media said companies are spending more on digital ads as they realise that prospective buyers are spending more time online and can be better targeted via online advertising.

E-commerce brands are also spending more money on digital media. Tyroo’s parent Smile Group operates two shopping portals, Dealsandyou.com and Fashionandyou.com, which spend 40-50% of their advertising budgets online.

“The pressure to spend on advertising comes from private equity investors who push e-commerce companies to acquire subscribers and increase sales,” Vij said.

The medium, however, continues to face challenges.

Satyajit Sen, chief executive, Zenith Optimedia, the media agency for Honda Siel Cars India Ltd, said television remains the biggest advertising medium. He, however, expects companies to expand the share of online advertising in their marketing budgets to about 35%.

Srinivas of Starcom Mediavest and Chowdhary of Tyroo said getting consumer goods companies interested in online advertising is the biggest challenge.

Once they move in, the flood gates for digital will open, and make for some online advertising and social media marketing campaigns.

Yes, websites designed in the past 5 years certainly look a lot better and have more wow features like impressive effects, stunning graphics and clever videos. But that doesn’t mean as websites they perform any better in satisfying the needs of the visitor or the website owner. In fact very often all these effects, graphics and flash videos while enhancing the visual appeal of the website actually make the website worse in terms of performance. By performance we mean how well the website satisfies the objectives it should have been designed to meet.

When you are looking to have a website designed or redesigned the first thing you need to establish is what are the objectives of the website? The objective is obviously to deliver a pre-promised value to your website visitor; this may range from free information to shopping solutions or paid services of a wide variety. You may in turn derive value from this process either directly in form of a B2C transaction, or in the case ‘free’ websites and blogs, through ads.

What is the purpose of the website design?

Is the purpose to :

1.            Stun visitors with a jaw dropping graphics and effects?

2.            Get good reviews for your website design from other web designers?

3.            Inform and educate visitors?

4.            Attract the right visitors interested in what the website has to offer?

5.            Sell products or services?

6.            Capture leads or subscribers?

If you want evidence of the extent to which website design practioners focus on the visual appeal of the website design rather than functionality, you only have to look at the dozens of websites that showcase what they consider to be good website designs.

These showcase sites for good website design feature 1,000′s of websites submitted by web designers that get reviewed and voted for largely by their peers, or so it would seem. Some, but not all of these showcase websites state what they regard as good website design in their submission guidelines.

Ingredients for Ideal Website Design

An ideal equation for quality website designing is:

Quality Design = Visual + Technical + Creativity

Note here the emphasis is on the visual appearance, technical wiz bangs and the creative merit.

Observation, however, would tell you that web designers focus too much on creating good looking websites that appeal to their peers.

Deciding on what is a good website design also depends on whether you want a website that looks good or one that’s designed for a purpose and to satisfy some clearly defined objectives. If you want a website that does more than just look good then you need to look a bit more closely at the design of your website, because just looking good is never good enough, at least not for me.

We’ll continue to bring you more tips related to website designing and social media marketing, so keep reading!

Now, we’d love to go on about these charlatans, but a bunch of Facebook marketing misconceptions don’t clear themselves. So here goes:

More Facebook Myths#1: My ‘Fans’ are going to love my social media marketing contest for writing the best song for my brand

While it is true, that we all love prizes, brand marketers often become too full of themselves in the assumption that consumers would be able to (or even want to) build a creative piece around their brand. In a perfect world, your fans would be so passionate they’d spend their free time taking photos, recording videos, and generating other content around your brand, thus making for the perfect social media marketing campaign. Unfortunately, out in the real world, few brands ever achieve this level of reverence. The rest of us have to get creative with our social media marketing campaigns. Your fans may not have a picture of your product at the Eiffel Tower, but they do have content to share. All you need to do is make it easy for them. Ask for ideas or opinions and make the submission process simple. That’s how you tap into the content engine that is your fan base.

More Facebook Myths#2: Facebook needs to approve your social media marketing campaign

Not long ago, you had to ask Facebook to approve your promotion’s official rules in advance of launch. To ask approval, you had to have an account executive, costing you $10,000 on Facebook ads. After about six months of uneven enforcement, the policy was reversed for the better. To run a social media marketing campaign on Facebook today, all you have to do is obey Facebook’s promotion guidelines. If you feel to meet that precondition, your campaign will be shut down faster than you can say ‘social media marketing’.

More Facebook Myths#3: The rules don’t apply if I run a contest on my wall

Facebook’s promotion guidelines state that you cannot run a contest or sweepstakes using its native functionality. That means you can’t randomly award concert tickets to someone who likes your wall post. And you can’t run a photo contest in your page’s albums. Facebook wants these promotions run on third-party apps. How real is the risk of being tossed? Refer to Myth #2.

We’ll keep updating you on social media marketing trends in the future, so keep watching this space.

Nascent as the field of social media marketing is, it doesn’t lend itself particularly well to measurement; the disembodied communication, for all its interactive goodness, ensures that. Ultimately, the success of a social media marketing effort depends on how well you can measure your impact and make amends for the future.  So naturally, the call of the hour is in-depth, and accurate web analytic data with which marketers can measure campaign performance and understand the complex social network behaviors of prospects and customers.

Principle #1 – Move to a “viewable impressions” standard and count real exposures online.

Today we count “served impressions” as recorded by ad servers. Often, ad units are not in a viewable space to the end-user or fail to fully load on the screen – potentially resulting in substantial over-counting of impressions. Viewable exposures are increasingly the norm across other media and better address brand marketers’ needs.

Principle #2 – Social Media Marketing must measure success by audience impressions, not gross ad impressions.

Brand marketers target specific audiences. Social media marketing professionals need to understand the quality and number of exposures against their targets – and the respective reach and frequency of such exposures. The existing digital currency makes this extremely difficult. Moreover, the practice of selling ad impressions makes cross-media comparisons extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Principle #3 – Because all ad units are not created equal, we must create a transparent classification system.

Unlike traditional media, which have a limited number of inventory types (e.g., 30-sec spot, full-page back cover), social media marketing has a myriad of units. Making Measurement Make Sense advocates a transparent classification system, adhered to by all publishers. Such a system will enable marketers to identify and spotlight the best offerings for brand building, and for other marketing objectives.

Principle #4 – Determine interactivity “metrics that matter” for brand marketers, to evaluate the contribution of social media marketing to brand building.

Currently, the industry is awash in digital interaction metrics. However, these metrics are not necessarily relevant for brand marketers. Aside from ‘likes’, there are few standards for enabling reliable comparison. The industry must identify and define the specific metrics most valuable to brand marketers and define and implement reliable standards for existing social media marketing metrics.

Principle #5 – Social Media Marketing measurement must become increasingly comparable and integrated with other media.

Measurement solutions must facilitate cross media platform planning, buying and evaluating of marketing and media. This is a substantial issue that hampers analysis and decision making throughout the social media marketing ecosystem.