Social media changes the relationship between companies
Numbers don’t lie and the social media statistics definitely show that social media continues to change the way we do business. Social media is the most popular online activity, and 22 percent of time spent online is spent on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Two-thirds of Internet users regularly use social networks online, and within these social networks, consumers share or obtain information on products and services.
Businesses are responding to the overwhelming evidence and developing a stronger presence online. In fact, 91 percent of experienced social marketers see improved website traffic from social media campaigns.
The rise of social media is among the greatest changes to the business world in the 21st century. Social media demands attention because it has completely changed consumer behavior –a phenomenon that is still growing and changing as broader age groups start to utilize this tool.
People born between 1978 and 1994 are the first generation to be raised “on the internet.” This age group expects to have information at their fingertips and the freedom to control the information they consume. As a result, this group of consumers does not tolerate the traditional marketing tools of T.V. advertisements and cold calls in the evening. It is up to businesses to change and adapt their marketing strategy to cater to the consumer- a wise move since it is expected that this age group will be as large or larger than the baby boomer generation.
Businesses that see the power behind social media to speed their progress forward and embrace a new way of doing business, while those who resist the advances may find themselves dwindling into obscurity. The goals of businesses—to generate leads, develop healthy relationships, and define an identity—are still dependable goals. However, the method used to get there must change.
Progressive businesses that grasp the speed and scope at which this is happening are wise to use social media to their advantage. Social media allows businesses to build more meaningful relationships and get to know future consumers better. A business can build a fan base and receive feedback from their target audience. It can create new avenues of traffic that lead people to their products and solidify their identity to the consumer. The David Eccles School of Business realizes this shift in the way business is done, and makes it a priority to incorporate it into the curriculum to help students embrace their futures in the business world.
The Impact of Social Media on Business in 2021
Social media has had a huge impact on how businesses find and communicate with their audiences.
Prior to social media, businesses had to travel to live events to find a targeted group of prospects. Unfortunately, the average cost to attend even a small business conference comes in around $1,000, making it very difficult for startups to get in front of their target audience.
Social media has transformed that by:
- Allowing startups to get in front of a targeted group of people virtually
- Changing the way businesses communicate with their audience
- Replacing business cards (which often end up in the trash) by popping up in your audience’s feed
- Making it easy for businesses to provide value upfront prior to asking anything from a prospect
That said, social media doesn’t impact your business overnight. In fact, building a presence and seeing the ROI will likely take years. However, if you use social media correctly, it can build long-term relationships that will transcend any ads you might run.
8 Ways that Social Media Impacts Your Business
- Allows Businesses to Become Omni-Present
- Increases Personalization
- Generates More Loyalty
- Increases Industry Collaboration
- Adds Credibility
- Increases Referrals
- Helps You Build a Personal Brand
- Helps You Gauge Audience Feedback
- Where You Should Start
Social Media is Impacting Social Life
Natasha Malik
4 New Ecommerce Features Launches by Facebook
Facebook is introducing new ways for online retailers to get their products discovered by more customers and increase sales.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are gaining new features that will help retailers get their products in front of more customers and drive sales.
Customers increasingly turn to Facebook as a discovery engine to find new products.
The company reports that 74% of people use Facebook platforms to discover brands or products online.
Certain categories of retail perform better than others. Over 85% of people surveyed purchased a fashion, beauty, furniture or electronic product they first discovered on a Facebook platform.
Now there’s new ways for customers to discover and purchase products, which means more opportunities for retailers to sell.
Today’s updates include:
- Bringing shops to more places
- Customer reviews on Instagram
- Ads for Shops
- Expanded use of AR
Here are the complete details.
Facebook Shops in More Places
Once a Facebook Shop is set up, products are eligible to appear in the Shop tabs on Instagram and Facebook.
Over one billion people use Marketplace each month, so Facebook is making it easy for businesses to bring their shops into Marketplace to reach even more people.
Businesses in the US can now choose Marketplace as an additional sales channel.
In addition, businesses in several countries can showcase their entire Shop in WhatsApp.
WhatsApp users can browse a Shop’s inventory, get product information, and chat about specific items before making a purchase.
Businesses only need to set up their shop once to have it work across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Customer Reviews
Over the next few months customer ratings and reviews will be expanded to products in Shops on Instagram.
When this feature rolls out it will include photos and videos from the community in addition to written reviews.
Facebook says in an announcement:
“We always want shoppers to feel confident in the purchases they make, so we’re giving people more information before they buy…
These changes will help people make more informed decisions on what to buy, and will let businesses know if they are meeting customer expectations.”
Personalized Shop Ads
Facebook is launching new ads to personalize the shopping experience and point customers toward a Shop’s curated collection.
Shop ads will have the ability to send shoppers to where they are most likely to make a purchase based on prior shopping activity.
In the future, Facebook will add ways to help businesses further personalize their ads by providing special offers or promotions to select customers.
Expanded Access to AR Try-On Feature
Augmented Reality (AR) brings the “magic” of the in-store shopping experience to mobile, Facebook says, and more brands can now let customers try on products virtually.
Facebook is developing new APIs that will make it easier, faster and more cost-effective for brands and advertisers to bring AR into their catalogs.
This is rolling out first to brands in the beauty category, with support coming to other verticals in the near future.
Lastly, Facebook is bringing AR to a new ad unit that will automatically show relevant products to people based on their interests, encouraging them to “try it on.”
Testing of AR-based ads is underway and will be available to more brands by the end of the year.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram making life easier and better.
Javvad Ali Qureshi
After Covid-19 world thinking approach is entirely changed. Stay Home Say Safe
How to Optimize Your Website for SEO and Conversions
Want to built an awesome website? Great. But who cares if no one sees it? These simple SEO tricks and tweaks will help you rank well in Google, Bing, and other search engines and get your site seen.
Build a well Design Website
There are many reasons to create a website. Maybe you built an amazing product that you’re ready to sell online. Maybe you’ve written your magnum opus, a personal essay that will certainly win the Pulitzer once it’s uploaded to the internet. Maybe you just want to share your hobbies with the world. Unfortunately, none of that matters if no one visits your website.
If you want people to discover your website, search engine optimization (SEO) is a must. SEO is a blanket term for the processes that webmasters use to boost their sites’ chances of ranking well in search engines, such as Bing and Google. Whether your site is running on a shared, VPS, or dedicated server, you should leverage SEO so that your site (hopefully!) appears on the first results page after someone keys a term into a search engine. The following SEO tips won’t guarantee superb results placement, but they’re essential for helping search engines—and people, by extension—find your site.
Build a Well-Designed Website
If your site is new, large, or contains many multimedia files, considering creating a sitemap. That’s a file that provides search engines with the information they need to swiftly crawl and index site pages, video, and audio. Google has a useful sitemap generator. Bing does, too. In fact, your website must contain a sitemap in order to appear in Google News.
In addition, your website should encourage visitors to explore and share your content. Selling products? Your homepage should spotlight at least a few optimized product images (more on that later). Running a blog? Link to your latest posts and marquee essays. These actions appeal not only to visitors, but search engines, too. It shows them what you consider important.
On the backend, your website’s title field should distill the entire site down to its name and relevant keywords, as that’s what appears in search results. So, carefully choose your site’s name and keywords to attract people and spiders. We’ll show you how to do that in just a bit.
Lastly, don’t underestimate the value of an attractive website. If your site looks like an old GeoCities page, people will leave, never return, and search for a more professional-looking competitor. That’s lost visitors, valuable external links, social media buzz, and revenue. Our recommended website builders give you the tools to quickly build an attractive, functional website.
Focus on a Specific Topic
Search engines want to point people toward the most authoritative and correct results. So, if you’re an expert in a particular topic that you wish to explore, your website’s content should reflect that. Want to share your recipes with the world? Then food should be your site’s focus. Don’t blend pancake content with, say, metalworking. After all, it’s unlikely that your website is a massive multinational corporation or a large news organization that needs to be all things to all people.
Specificity is also key. If you’re a fisherman with an excellent perspective on fly fishing, as opposed to deep-sea angling, that’s what your website should be about. Lean into what you bring to the table; it’ll help your web presence.
Pick Relevant Keywords
A focused topic makes it simple to pick your site’s keywords. What are keywords? They’re the main words that lead people to your site. To properly use keywords, you take your website’s various elements—articles, images, videos, podcasts—and summarize them in SEO-friendly terms. You’ll also want keywords in your site’s URL, header tags, meta descriptions, and alt attributes. Simply access your website’s backend and place the terms in the keyword fields (if you’re using a website builder) or edit code (if you prefer entering a web hosting service’s backend and tinkering with HTML).
You should optimize keywords to match people’s searches. If your website sells hand-knitted scarves, then “scarf” and “knitting” should be your keywords. As you probably guessed, those same keywords will pull up other sites when someone performs a search. As a result, you should back up standard keywords with long-tail keywords, which are more specific searches.
Using our earlier example, a relevant, long-tail keyword would be “best hand-knitted Pokemon scarves.” That’s a particularly specific search that you can leverage to make your site stand out from the pack. Google has a tool, Keyword Planner, that helps you find potent keywords. Don’t get too obscure, though; you don’t want to use keywords that few people key into search engines.
Create Quality Content on a Consistent Basis
Content quality factors into SEO, too. For example, a blog about car engines needs to answer questions or illuminate niche topics. Rather than rambling on about engines, it’s best to go in-depth with information-packed articles, such as “The 5 Fundamentals of Transmission Repair” or “Things You Might Not Know About Carburetor Cleaning.”
Search engines prioritize websites with fresh, changing content. You don’t want to copy and paste content from another site. In fact, search engines will penalize your site for that. Focus on high-quality, original material.
In addition, you need to update your website consistently, whether that’s in the form of new articles, art, or products. Visitors want a reason to return to your site or share your content to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or other social media networks. Search engine spiders are eager to check out fresh content, too.
Establishing off-site links is necessary for building valuable authority. Search engines look for links to your site from other trusted sites, which include those aforementioned social media networks or other highly trafficked websites. If your site offers focused, quality content that results in a link from The New York Times, search engines will see your site as noteworthy and boost its rank.
You can’t make this happen artificially, though. Know your stuff, put that knowledge front and center, present it clearly, and update your website on a regular basis. Assuming it’s information that people crave, your site will eventually gain SEO traction.
Create Attractive Page Titles and Headlines
A page title and headline are similar, but distinct, ways to name the same website page. The former is a keyword-centric title designed to appease the search engine gods, while the latter is designed to please people who click through to the page.
For example, “2021 Honda Civic Review” is a tight, SEO-friendly page title that only appears in search results. After all, page titles are written for Bing and Google love. “10 Reasons Why the 2021 Civic Is Honda’s Best Car” is a great, on-page headline that encourages shares and returning readers. That’s good SEO, too. Of course, pages and headlines can have the same titles. Experiment to see which method works best.
As a precaution, make sure your page title and headline accurately describes what’s on the page. Don’t name a page “2021 Honda Civic Review” if the content doesn’t reflect that. That’s lying to the reader, which Google and other search engines frown upon. You’ll lose trust, authority, and SEO rank.
Optimize Your Images
On the web, images are the way we color inside the lines; bright, clean images make a website inviting. Beyond that, images highlight the product or services that you want to sell, and break up large text blocks to keep readers engaged. Images are important, so you should take time to optimize them.
The first step in optimizing your images for the web is to shrink them down to a manageable size. You should keep each image under a megabyte in size; even smaller if your have an image-heavy page. Resizing images to a maximum 1920 by 1080-pixel resolution and using the JPG or WEBP formats will help your pages quickly load. Search engines do not like slow-loading sites.
Make sure that your images have proper Alt attributes, too. Google, for example, can’t actually see the images that you upload to your site, but Alt attributes help the search giant categorize your photos. Alt attributes should be a description of the image, but not too long. Aim for around 125 characters, maximum.
Content management systems (think WordPress) typically have Alt fields, so you can easily type in an image keyword. If you prefer to edit HTML, the alt attributes work like this:
<img src=”cool_dude.jpg” alt=”Man typing an article” width=”1920″ height=”1080″>
Get into the habit of adding this clarifying text to all of your website images.
Reduce Your Website’s Load Time
According to Google’s market research, 53 percent of mobile audiences leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load. Their time is valuable, so don’t encourage them to bounce with a slow-as-molasses website.
You can analyze your site’s speed with Google PageSpeed Insights, Google’s Test My Site, or Pingdom. These tools offer detailed information on how you can best improve your website’s load time. This includes replacing images or scripts that might be taking a while to load.
If you’re using WordPress, you’ll want to remove any plug-ins that aren’t critical to your site. You should also check out WP-Rocket, a WordPress plug-in that caches pages for faster load times.
Write Information-Packed Meta Descriptions
A meta description, also known as a snippet, is a small paragraph within each of your page’s HTML code. Meta descriptions appear in search engine results beneath page titles, and explain a page’s purpose in a more in-depth fashion. It’s here that you can write longer descriptions (approximately 150 characters!) that wouldn’t fit in page titles. Warning: don’t throw all your keywords in there. That’s keyword stuffing, and search engines frown on that. Instead, write your meta description in simple language.
If you’re comfortable editing HTML, drop the meta description in each page’s “Head” section. Here’s an example.
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=”Free Web tutorials”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”HTML, CSS, JavaScript”>
<meta name=”author” content=”John Doe”>
</head>
Note the meta tags for description and keywords. They are the primary areas where you should focus your SEO efforts.
Many content management systems let you edit the meta descriptions without digging into the HTML. If you’re using WordPress, there are a number of different plug-ins, such as All in One SEO Pack or Yoast SEO, that let you add meta descriptions without dealing with code.
Address Your URLs
Yes, you must apply SEO tactics to URLs, too. Search engines consider the keywords in your site’s URL just as much as they consider the keywords on a page.
Does your website use dynamic URLs, addresses that rely on numbered pages? If so, replace them with static URLs. Take this hypothetical blog post, for example: http://thebestsiteever.com/post/detail?id=27869. The number at the end of the URL represents that specific post, but it’s not at all descriptive.
To fix that, dip into your site’s backend and enable static URLs, so you can add important keywords to your site’s address. With static URLs, that same post about smart cars will appear as http://thebestsiteever.com/post/smart-cars. Search engines love this more informative URL structure. Remember, brevity is key, so don’t make the URL a keyword-packed sentence. Lastly, use hyphens to break up the words in the URL, instead of cramming them all together.
Master Internal Linking
Your site gains search-engine authority when other sites link to it, especially if those external pages are seen as trustworthy and popular. These are called backlinks, and the truth is that you don’t have much control over them. Put your best work forward, and hope they come your way.
On the other hand, you have full control over internal linking. You want to link related articles to drive visitors deeper into your site. Generally, you want to link to anchor text, the words that visitors click to move from one page to another. For example, if your site has a post about spark plugs, and you want to link to it from a post about engine maintenance, use the hypothetical “replace your spark plugs” anchor text for additional SEO juice.
Internal links should be natural and sparingly used. A paragraph that’s nothing but links isn’t very readable, so search engines will dismiss it. You should also make sure your links work. Broken links indicate that you’re ignoring proper site maintenance, so search engines will penalize your site. If you need help scanning your web site for broken links, visit Dead Link Checker.
These 10 SEO tips are just the tip of the search engine optimization iceberg, but they’re an excellent starting point. Ranking well in Bing, Google, and other search engines won’t happen overnight, so be patient as you apply these tips to your website. And return here often! We’ll update this page with more useful SEO tips on a regular basis.
For more on web hosting, check out How to Register a Domain Name for Your Website and The Best Courses for Learning How to Build Websites.
Achieved great score using your outstanding information
Noor-ul-Sabtain
As your budget progresses and evolves, continue referring to your SMART objectives. Stay focused and remember your goals – they will always inform what your next step will be!
How to Increase Your ROI Through scientific SEM?
SEM, Search Engine Marketing which uses PAID strategies to appear in search.
SEO, Search Engine Optimization which uses ORGANIC strategies to appear in search
The main difference between SEM vs. SEO is that SEM is a paid strategy and SEO is an organic strategy.
What is SEM?
SEM, or search engine marketing, is often considered the part of search marketing that uses PAID tactics to gain visibility in SERPs. A paid SEM strategy includes both the activities involved with setting up and optimizing ads as well as setting a budget that pays for the placement of ads.
This strategy is often referred to as paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.
Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is the search provider most commonly used for this strategy. With this tactic, brands conduct keyword research and create campaigns that target the best keywords for their industry, products, or services. When users search for those keywords, they see the custom ads at the top or bottom of SERPs. The brand is charged each time a user clicks on the ad.
For more SEM tips and basic strategies, check out our post on PPC lead generation.
SEM vs. SEO: What’s the Difference?
SEM and SEO are unique elements of search marketing. But when you compare SEM vs. SEO, you’ll find that they have both similarities that overlap and differences that separate them.
Both help a brand appear in search results. One of the SEO and SEM basics is that they both aim to help a brand appear in prominent positions on SERPs. The goal of each tactic is to help a brand show up in search results when users search for specific terms related to the brand’s industry, business, or offerings.
Both are designed to drive more traffic to a website. The goal of both is to gain visibility on SERPs, but more importantly, to drive traffic to a website. Each strategy employs tactics to increase click-through-rates (CTR) and get more users to click on the search results.
Both require knowing your audience. To succeed at both strategies, you must have a good understanding of your audience and how they act. By using buyer personas and psychographic segmentation, you can get to know your audience, discover what their needs are, and what they are searching for. Then you can create valuable content that shows up when they go looking for solutions related to your brand.
Both use keyword research to uncover popular search terms. The first step for both SEM and SEO is performing keyword research to identify the best keywords to target. The research includes looking at keyword popularity to determine the top keywords or buying keywords that your ideal audience searches for. It also includes looking at keyword competition to see what other brands are targeting the same keywords and determining what you will need to do to compete with those other companies.
To conduct keyword research, start with Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool. Enter a search term related to your industry, business, products, or services and view a list of related search terms along with scores on their popularity and competition.
Both target specific keywords. Both strategies focus on targeting specific keywords that are identified during keyword research. At the core of each tactic are keywords.
Both require testing and continual optimization. When comparing SEM vs. SEO, you should know that neither is a strategy that you can set and forget. Both require continual testing, monitoring, and optimization to increase performance.
SEM search placements include an “Ad” designation. SEO does not
Search results that appear as a result of SEM or SEO look different on SERPs. Paid ads that receive placement through SEM tactics are often identified as an ad (e.g., by an icon appearing next to the placement), whereas the search results that appear as a result of organic SEO are not marked in such manner.
Improve Both of Your SEO and SEM Strategies
When comparing SEM vs. SEO, there is no quick formula or simple answer. There are a lot of factors to consider. Some businesses may choose to focus on SEO. Others may choose to focus on SEM. And sometimes the right approach is to implement a combination of SEO and SEM strategies. It all depends on your unique business and goals.
But now that you know the similarities and differences between SEM and SEO, you’ll be better equipped to decide how each can help your brand reach its goals.
To get even more insight and data to help you make those decisions, sign up for a free trial of Alexa’s Advanced Plan. You’ll get access to tools that help you research competitor search and link building strategies, find keyword opportunities, review your site’s SEO, and learn about your target audience. These insights, paired with what you know about SEM and SEO, will help you uncover the best search marketing strategy for your unique brand and goals.
As your budget progresses and evolves, continue referring to your SMART objectives. Stay focused and remember your goals – they will always inform what your next step will be!
