UpStart Internet Blog

So you have a Google+ page for your brand and you have been trying hard to make the whole social-networkingthing work for you, right?

There are at least a million of such pages belonging to small businesses around the world; most are getting nothing out of it, while some are using their uncanny skills to attract new customers and business opportunities every day. What are the differences between these two groups of successful and unsuccessful retails brand marketers? Is it even possible to make Google + work for the average retail brand? In a few paragraphs from here, you will know more about this.

The Raging Debate:
You must have already heard about this. People from all over the world, marketing people especially, are trying to compare Twitter & Facebook fan pages with Google+ pages. Their sole motive – to find the better of the two.
While the jury is out on this debate, let us consider a few facts. In terms of the total number of users, Google+ is at the bottom of the ladder.

• Facebook Users – 845 million
• Twitter Users – 350 million
• LinkedIn Users – 150 million
• Google+ Users – 90 million

But, it is catching up pretty fast, and it is a part of Google! An overwhelming majority think Internet and Google are synonymous. Google search engine is the starting point for most of us in anything we do on the Internet. As such, we cannot underestimate what this social platform is poised to do in the coming years.

Glamorizing Google+
Did you know that more than 60% of the users on Google+ check their account every day, while the rest try to get their quota of Google’s social charms at least once a week. Even if you succeed in getting a meagre proportion of that number to come to your page, you will break into the group of the elite few such as Pepsi and Toyota.

However, do not get your hopes floating in the sky without doing anything about it! How did Pepsi get 367,016 followers on its page? Many things, but at least extrinsically, the looks of the page are very important.

By looks, we mean the comprehensiveness of the page. Use your brand logo as the profile picture, get videos done about the work culture at your factories and offices – post them on Google+. People visiting your page will love details, they are tired of incomplete profiles with very little details -give them something to read and know about you.

Keywords in Google+
Before you say ‘oh no, not again’, understand that these keywords are the flowers that attract the honeybees (read: Google bots) with their allure. A recent report on a famous SEO blog suggested that you would get better visibility if you used keywords in one or more of these:

• Introduction
• Education
• Places

There is quite a bit of debate going on in the expert circles about this right now, but prima facie evidence suggests that those who have used keywords at the right places have made it to the top quicker than those who have not.

What’s the Latest?
Now there is a new thing that advertisers in the US are using in huge numbers, it is called product ads. PLA (Product Listing Ads) and Product Extensions are being used in conjunction with great content to pull users to retail brand pages.
The beauty of this new thing is that you do not have to do much, just add your Google Adwords account with your Google Merchandize account and Google will do the rest. This results in better ads with great pictures and purchasing details, which educates the customer on what they should expect from the product. What’s more, you need to pay CPA (cost per action)!

Therefore, instead of sitting on the fences and wondering about these things, jump in, earmark your marketing budget for Google+ and spice up your brand. Make it visible, desirable and approachable. Google+ platform is still in a state of continuous evolution, so start early and make the most out it.

What We Think
There is no need to abandon ship just yet, or ever! Every single platform is rock solid and offers great advantages. As you might have seen already, there is not much difference in the features. Google+ is particularly popular among small and medium business because it is less intimidating than Facebook and more intuitive thanTwitter. A few days with it and you will be doing it like a pro.

A cursory glance at your blog is all it takes for a reader to continue reading or ditching your blog for life. Sometimes blogs that one comes across are so ruthlessly senseless that one wonders if there was any human involvement at all. So, what can you possibly do to make your blogs ‘read-worthy’ and popular?

● Make Text Readable

Plan your paragraphs. Make sure to optimize wordings to keep the length of each paragraph within four sentences each. Any longer than that and you might be wasting your time at blogging. Write a book instead!

Make ample use of white space, but do not over do it. Eyes often scan content for interesting things and spaces help in doing just that. Extra white space will make the content entirely worthless. And also, keep the title sweet, succinct but meaningful.

● No More Ads (if possible)

Well, the ideal thing is to allow no ads within the content. A little advertisement is totally acceptable, but ads all over the place is sure to strangulate your blog to death. Why should readers work their way through a maze of ads on your blog when they have alternatives?

● Social Overkill

OK, agreed that Social Media Optimization is the new thing in, but bloggers who have more social media buttons than content to share are heading the wrong way!

Better ways of using an unified ‘Share’ button exists which can make the process hassle free and very effective. Even if you have to have the Facebook ‘like’ button on your blog, use the official version and keep it simple.

● Stale Images

Images should be suggestive. Stock images which do not excite users are no good. Good bloggers have original photographs instead of overused stock images. Original photographs do not cost much, so pick a point-and-shoot camera and infuse some freshness into your blog.

● Ignoring Reader Comments

Do not blame your busy schedule for not replying to your reader’s comments. Apart from blog trolls, most people want to see their comments being replied to and look forward to have a meaningful conversation with the author of the blog.

Engage them in meaningful dialogues and get them to voice their opinion. Who knows, this might give your blog all the publicity it requires.

After reading these broad guidelines, we expect that you will get your blog to grab more eyeballs. After all, visual hints on your blog are the windows through which readers peep before deciding whether they want to come in or look for other windows elsewhere.

It is not something you hear commonly, nor is it something, which has been conducted on a large scale to make it thesis-worthy, but what was a scientific experiment of a few Canadian scientists, can indeed be the secret route to successful online marketing. Imagine that you already know where your customers will look when they visit your website! You can doll up that part of the website with all things pretty and embed revenue-gathering objects so that they appear exactly where customers will look.

This might seem like a thing from the future, but slowly and gradually, modern technology is gathering enough steam to reach out to the future even before it actually happens. One of such miraculous, albeit a little uncertain, off springs of man’s pursuit of fine tuning science is – eye movement tracking.

The science of taking into account how people look at the screen of a computer or a book, a picture or as in this case – a handheld device, has been around since the beginning of the bygone century. Recent times have polished the technology to be truly applicable. As such, several quarters are taking a keen interest in practical uses of understanding the gaze patterns of users.

The experiment was exclusively carried out on iPhones – as a result though a comparison with computers might not be apt the results might be very well applicable for other smartphones as well. Volunteers in the experiment were asked to search tattoo shops in different locations within Canada using Google search. It was observed that a significant number of the participants began with the top-left of the screen and followed across until the end. However, they were willing to skip things in between in favour of a review with a catchy image! The 3.5-inch screen of the iPhone cannot be blamed. A similar study conducted by the same group of researches revealed that viewers skipped relatively less on wide screen monitors. Instead, they clicked or concentrated on the first couple of listings with rare clicks on the third or the fourth. The big difference is the willingness of viewers to take the trouble in finding the product with better images and more reviews, screen of the device notwithstanding! Ergo, if you are targeting mobile users, the presence of reviews is much more critical.

Digital agency gurus are of the view that this experiment suggests the pivotal role of user reviews in making a product saleable. The reviews posted on Google Places had a special role in this matter. Further, users followed only those products, which had a positive review on Google Places with at least a 3 stars rating! So although having a presence is important, it is crucial to have a good reputation as well. Social signals and good reviews are indeed indispensable if a company wishes to sell its products, online or offline. Who knows there might be a robot taking shape in some clandestine laboratory, ready to read our emotions? We will not be surprised if in a couple of years, mobile devices come with the capacity of accumulating tracking data using the embedded front camera.

Thousands of teenagers are earning a fortune by marketing and promoting their wares on Facebook. Another thousand is making money trying to preach the effects of doing so in books, white-papers and speeches in meetings, gatherings and motivational sessions across the corporate world.

The high powers in business are doing all they can about advertising on Facebook; it’s the smaller ones that are being left behind with the dilemma about the efficacy of one of the fastest growing avenues of advertising online – Facebook.

Perhaps the statistics on the number of users on Facebook no longer matter to you, but as a business, you cannot pretend to ignore the immense opportunities. All is not fine about the way companies are using the platform to advertise. Those who have attained limited success are too reluctant to applause the potential of the process, thus putting small businesses deeper in their dilemma. The question that we hear repeatedly:

Is This a Profitable Technique?

Yes it is. But that has an addendum – it generates profit only for those who have who understood how to do it correctly. Now, how does one do Facebook advertising correctly? No doubt that there is a lot of literature about the process to teach novices the tricks of the trade. If it were so easy, every business would have made millions by reading books!

So is profit making via Facebook advertising cryptic? Unfortunately, that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. It is not a “sow once – reap forever” technique. Getting started requires a conscientious and vigilant approach. Below are a couple of most important considerations:

➢ Investing in Installments
The common aphorism of not putting all eggs in one basket rings true here. The significant shrinkage in the success rate is due to the impatience of companies to take it slow. Investing a little at the beginning learning from the experience and then planning for the future can considerably reduce the risk factor.

➢ Taking Advantage of Facebook Packages
Facebook encourages businesses to advertise on its platform. If you have a goal of advertising, take you pick from the actively involved community of Facebook experts who sell their services or you can choose to go solo with your in-house operations. Facebook lets you target sections of viewers and point your ads according to age groups, gender or language preferences – use this analytics guidance to make sure your advertising is targeted.

And the most important lesson to keep in mind is to test and optimize at regular intervals to make sure you are getting the biggest bang for your buck!

No one is particularly sure what Google achieves with the repeated upgrades that it has been rolling out for its much discussed and fairly popular social network – Google Plus. Paranoid users are growing jumpy with the efforts of Google in integrating search with personal information. In a recent upgrade of the growingly popular social network, the search giant strives to interface the data on the Internet with your personal data such as photos, links and pages posted on your personal Google+ profile. The aim is to get you better information that makes sense to you and to those in your circles. Relevant searches after signing into Google+ will throw up results that have your friend’s recommendations, photos and reviews on things related with your search term.

Of the several downsides that this upgrade has is that it makes real time updates redundant. People will definitely see posts, images and links that they might have skipped while scanning their Google+ account, but the recent update gives users an option of ignoring updates until they are signed onto Google for search. With Facebook and Twitter siding with Microsoft, the effects of this update will be primarily on Google Plus.

The second thing that gets on my nerve is that obscure hint of Google trying to make it big in social networks! Not that I have a thing for Facebook, but it is miles ahead of Google+ and will require more serious efforts than ‘search plus your world’ to topple the monarch of chitchat, online games and cyber discotheques.

Quite piquantly, the search results are not being presented as most people wished for. Reviewers and early adopters of the update have complained that they expected Google to use social profiles as votes and enhance the quality of the result rather than putting others personal profiles on display. However, before paranoia reaches a feverish pitch, let me assure you that your profile or posts will not be visible to anyone other than those in your circles and vice versa.

What Google Says About this?

Google summarizes the update in the single line, which reads, ‘…a search engine which understands not only content, but also people and relationships.’
As you search for a particular topic, results with relevant profiles and Google+ plus pages will feature the content you want to see along with the person’s profile that posted it. You can effectively write back to him or Plus One the post! Adding interesting people to your profile becomes easier, because new profiles show up on the right pane of the page.
All in all, there is nothing much to note about it, but do definitely try it out and leave your comments on what you think about ‘Google Search Plus Your World’.