According to a consumer online behavior study from Forrester Research the number of people visiting social networking sites has doubled since 2007. Forrester surveyed 40,545 US heads of household in January and February 2009 about a variety of topics including online behaviors and media consumption. Their executive summary states that,

Our 2009 data shows a stabilization of consumers’ overall time spent with online media. However, engagement with the online channel has deepened, as evidenced by the widespread adoption of such activities as social networking.

Take a look at this graphic that shows the very clear trending in favor of social networking.

Notice the not so subtle big red circle I added? It shows a large jump in the number of people that visit social networks. That’s great news! However if you look a little further down on the graphic you’ll notice that less than 20% of those surveyed read blogs, so there’s a key lesson to learn here.

When you decide to launch your business into the social networking world it’s important to incorporate your blog posts into your social network. Import your blog posts into your Facebook Page and other social networking accounts, because chances are that people may not visit your blog, but they much more likely to view your content through a social network platform.

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LEVELTWO Medical

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If there is no other reason to join in on the social networking for businesses, this one statement should be important enough for any company to see the value.

Protect your corporate identity. Register your social usernames or someone else will. Sites like Twitter and Facebook don’t monitor username registration. Anyone with an email address can sign up for any username that is not already taken so be proactive about your online reputation and grab your company’s name on the major social networks.

And just in case you were wondering what those other reasons might be, here’s a short list of a few more reasons to jump into the social media networks.

1. Online Reputation Management – making sure you are the one that is in control of your name and brand socially.
2. Customer Service – if people know you can be reached via Twitter, they will reach you. You can often help people much quicker and easier through Twitter. (140 chars, or less baby) Saves a ton of time from annoying phone calls, am I right??
3. Tips – Get in front of the millions of people who are using Twitter everyday. Tips are a great way to get people checking back and can help increase the number of followers you have tremendously!
4. Services – Let it be known why you are on Twitter, and how exactly you can help people via Twitter (what services you are willing to offer etc).
5. Humor – Just because you are on “trendy Twitter” does not mean you can’t be yourself and make people laugh. In fact, the more you are yourself and let people know its the real YOU, or the REAL COMPANY that they have grown to trust and love, the more likely it is going to do you good – and get you more followers.
6. Videos – If you are in a field that has videos, Twitter is a great place to share them – especially if they are going to make people laugh, teach them, or in some other way “enlighten” them!
7. Content promotion – Got a blog? Well make sure you put up a “tweet” every time you got a new post live. The more people that like it will re-tweet it and share it. The more people share it and pass it around, the better it is for you (but that should be a no brainer huh?)
8. Product promotions – Its OK to promote products that you offer on Twitter – it really is. Just make sure you are doing other things with your Twitter account besides just “promoting”. You are more likely to make sales and gain (not lose) followers by mixing it up!
9. Contests – A great way to gain new followers and get more people interested (or knowing) about your brand. Offer something that will get people talking about, and linking back to you. This is very powerful when done right!
10. Reach new customers – You want to be doing everything you can to be finding new customers. The old hard core base is great, but the only way to expand and gain more customers is by stepping outside the traditional methods of marketing.

Find LEVELTWO on your favorite social network.

Tips from Mat Siltala over at dreamsystemsmedia.com

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In order for a company to successfully utilize social networks like Twitter, you must directly associate it with your business. The easiest way to get started is to start blogging about your industry and distributing that content across the web. It’s a great way to let other people know who you are and what you do.

However, for the visitors that come to your site outside of a social network link it’s important that they also know about your social network contributions.

I recently came across a great way to keep your website visitors directly connected to your social media efforts. It’s called Tweetboard.

Basically, Tweetboard is a Twitter conversation for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream onto your website and allows for conversations between you and your visitors. They’ve even started using a new term to define it, “micro-forum”.

It’s less than a forum, but more than commenting because it lives in a real-time discussion environment. Each time someone posts via your board, a link back to the corresponding conversation is appended to their tweet, creating a viral stream of Twitter traffic to your website.

We’ve added the Twitter app to our own site so please feel free to leave us a comment via our tweetboard and let us know what you think about our blog.

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You’ve probably heard of the Kindle, Amazon’s wireless reading device, but something you may not know is that you can get your blog published on the Kindle and even make a little extra money doing it.

It’s called Amazon Kindle Publishing for Blogs. Basically you upload your blog to the Kindle Store and let Amazon sell it for you via their wireless reader. So for the Kindle users, they will pay a small monthly fee to receive your blogs delievered directly to their Kindle and you, as the blog owner, will receive 30% of the monthly subscription price.

There are a few draw backs. First of all, you only get 30% of the subscription fees and also Amazon sets the price for your blog’s fee. They’ll set the price for your blog somewhere between $0.99 and $9.99 and you can be paid via check or electronic funds once your earnings reach 50 bucks. 30% of 99 cents isn’t much, but it’s so easy to do it’s worth your time.

To get started you will need to visit http://kindlepublishing.amazon.com and set up an account and submit your blogs. Not all blogs are approved for sale on the Amazon Kindle, but it’s a great way for distribution of your blog and a way to reach readers that were otherwise unreachable.

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Blogging is important for your business, but it’s a waste of time if you don’t gather new visitors and generate interest. Routing traffic from search engines is especially important and these 9 SEO plugins below can help you accomplish that on your blog.

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Redirection
3. Robots Meta
4. SEO Smart Links
5. SEO Friendly Images
6. Google Positioner
7. Permalinks Moved Permanently
8. Nofollow Case by Case
9. SEO Slugs

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Plugin tips are from Problogger

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Over at ÜBERCEO, a blog that discusses everything about CEOs, they have an interesting article about the Fortune 100 company CEOs and their lack of social media exposure.

They looked at Fortune’s 2009 list of the top 100 companies and tried to find out if their CEOs are on any of the major social networks, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, or had a blog. The results were not very impressive and led them to label those elite 100 “Social Media Slackers.” Their results are listed below:

• Only two CEOs have Twitter accounts.
• 13 CEOs have LinkedIn profiles, and of those only three have more than 10 connections.
• 81% of CEOs don’t have a personal Facebook page.
• Three quarters of the CEOs have some kind of Wikipedia entry, but nearly a third of those have limited or outdated information.
• Not one Fortune 100 CEO has a blog.

They put their results into a presentation, which is embedded below.

Fortune 100 CEOs and Social Media

Read the full blog post here.

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TechCrunch.com recently posted an article about how Facebook’s total traffic is nearing Google and Yahoo.

While it is interesting to see how the hot social networks stack up in terms of traffic, I thought I’d also take a look at how well Facebook is doing compared to other Web giants like Google.com, Yahoo.com and MSN.com. To my surprise, Facebook appears to have become a real challenger to these Internet juggernauts, who are relatively old compared to the social network that started out in 2004 as a university student-only service and only really opened up to the public in September 2006.

So what we are seeing here is a very fast growing SOCIAL network that showing traffic trends that could overtake both Google and Yahoo. This is very significant because while Yahoo is more of a destination search engine that frames its site to be a fully functional website, more people are using a social network on a regular basis AND at an increasing rate.

With visitor stats this strong it’s even more important for you business to dive into a social marketing campaign. You might be using search engine marketing and other forms of lead harvesting, but unless you are present on the social networks, you are missing out on a very large part of viewership.

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While millions of users twitter away details about what’s happening in their life, you can use Twitter to market your product and services to customers in your area.

We’ve put together a list of some online and mobile tools you can use to search, find, and interact with people in your area.

1. Twitter Search
   You can use the advanced search function built into Twitter. We wrote a detailed how-to back in March. “Twitter tools for those who don’t have an iphone.“
2. Social Meetup
   While you can make an impression on the internet, you can really gather a lot of new contacts and leads by attending a meetup that is organized online. A group of people that are interested in the same topics will schedule and plan to meet to discuss their common passion. Here’s two great places to find a meet up in your company’s industry:
   – Tweetup Meetup – http://tweetup.meetup.com
   – Twtvite – http://twtvite.com
3. iPhone Apps
   If you have an iPhone there are several apps that can provide you with geo-locating tools.
   – Twinkle
   – Twitterfon
   – Twittie
   – Twittelator
4. Non-iPhone Tips
   TwitterLocal is similar to the advanced Twitter search, but you are able to manage your local Twitter feeds directly from your desktop using their free software. It’s basically a free way to do what the iPhone apps provide.
5. LocalTweeps
   It’s a local Twitter directory. You can use this local twitter directory to find and interact with users in your area. Since it is based on zipcode and not on city names your listings and searches can be much more specific. Other similar services include:
   – NearbyTweets
   – happn.in

If you found these tips useful, please consider subscribing to our blog via RSS or email. You also follow us on Twitter to get the latest updates.

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About a month and a half ago @aplusk reached 1 million followers on Twitter and now just about a month and a half later he has reached over 2 million followers.

The Ellen Show has really increased it’s followers over the past 3 months and now is just behind Ashton by only about a quarter of a million followers, which is really not that much.

So all of this push for online social dominance tells us 3 things about the future of Twitter:

1. It’s popularity is universal.
   The demographics of Ashton, Ellen, and CNN fans is an extremely wide range. This tells us that the social landscape is important and vital to many different generations of people. No one demographic represents the Twitter audience.
2. It’s a great tool for communication.
   If major networks take time from the shows to voice their interest in social networks like Twitter then it is surely a valid tool for other smaller industries. In other words, it’s not for the other guys, you can make use of it too!
3. It’s going to be around for a while.
   With thousands of people joining Twitter on a daily basis, it basically assured that social networks like this will be around for a long time. It’s not a passing phase or a trend.

If you are interested in setting up a social media campaign for your company contact us or use the form here.

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We’ve discussed the benefits of having a content platform on your website that publishes new content on a regular basis. Continually refreshing and new content (like a blog) is:

• Preferred by search engines
• A great way to achieve high rankings in search engines
• Indexed (searched) faster than static content
• More up-to-date than static content

And now Google has given us another reason to recommend adding a blog to your online marketing campaign. As you can see in the screen shot below, Google now offers a new search option called for recent results.

When a searcher chooses the option for recent results, the typical search results for keywords are replaced with the most recent blog and new articles.

There are varying ranges of dates, but in the example below we chose to see the most recent results.

As you can see, the top 5 search results were all posts that were made in the last 24 hours. If you repeat this same search one day later, you will see a new top 5 search results. That’s because the most optimized and most recent blog posts are always going to at the top of the Google search result page.

If you are unfamiliar with the term “refreshing content”, it simply means something that is new or fresh on a constant basis. Here are a few example of refreshing content.

• Blog that is updated at least 3-5 times a week
• New product page that updates often
• Weekly specials page
• Newsletter page
• Company news page that updates a few times a month
• RSS feed from your Twitter or other social networking site

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