Social Media: Comment on Facebook’s Timeline Takes Off
January 19th, 2012
Jeff DeChambeau, a Senior Analyst at T4G, an IT services company, made a comment on a start-up community site (Facebook timeline is too awful to be an accident) on how Facebook is manipulating user behaviour to increase brain activity and increase susceptibility to advertising , along with a link to his personal blog.
Here’s a good article that covers the kind of things we do for Toronto Small Business clients after the essential web site optimization has been done. Content curation, blogging, white papers, photos, videos and article syndication all support the promotion of a small business’s expertise in a particular domain:
While world-wide car manufacturers don’t fit the profile of most Toronto small business (especially when it comes to social media marketing resources), I found this article instructive in showing several ways how investing time in social media actually has business payback:
Kia redesigned the seats for their Optima SX sedan after noticing complaints from consumers and automotive writers on the Internet.
Ford invites consumers to submit their vehicle improvement ideas directly to the automaker via a website called thefordstory.com.
Nissan (with three Twitter streams and Facebook pages for each of its vehicle brands) social media is becoming the de facto process to receive and resolve customer-service issues.
A Canadian-based survey of media users suggests that most value Internet access over their newspaper, cellphone and TV subscriptions. And if forced to choose one, they would stay online.
The Canadian Media Research Consortium commissioned the online survey and found:
42 % of respondents said the Internet would be the last service they would cut
24 % would keep their cable TV
17 % would keep their cellphone service or newspaper subscription.
Overall, the survey really speaks to how Canadians get their information – important news for business seeking to find customers.
First, you were told you needed a website. Then, you were told you had to have a blog. And that you need
to be on Facebook, YouTube and now Twitter.
Market surveys show that 80% of buyers now research on-line before making a purchase decision, so getting found on the Internet is important. It may be that your business can leverage all these types of on-line media – that will depend on your product and target customer.
What is most important is that all your Internet properties share a common set of words called Key Words that describe your solution and aligns with what people are typing into search boxes…
Here’s an article from the Toronto Globe and Mail that supports the business maxim “easier to maintain an client than find a new one”.
Ryan Caligiuri, a Winnipeg-based marketing specialist, references several good examples of what to do and what not to do, plus shares an instance of effective social media marketing that works for one small business.
Restaurants Use Social Media to Reach Out to Customers
January 20th, 2011
Restaurants and bars count on repeat business, with customers increasingly expecting more than service, food and drinks. They want to be engaged as well, and major food restaurant chains are turning to location-based social media to help keep customers happy and loyal.
Internet users now spend more time on Facebook than Google
September 13th, 2010
Associated Press: U.S. Web surfers are spending more time on Facebook than searching with Google
According to new data from researchers at comScore Inc., people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook — or about 9.9 per cent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month, surpassing the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 per cent, people spent on all Google sites combined, including YouTube and Gmail e-mail.
U.S. Web users spent 37.7 million minutes on Yahoo sites, or 9.1 per cent of their time, putting Yahoo third in terms of time spent browsing.
In August 2009, U.S. web surfers spent about five per cent of their online time on both Facebook and Google and almost 12 per cent on Yahoo.
ComScore bases its findings on a combination of reports from a panel of two million users around the world and data from websites’ servers.
The time spent posting photos, updating status messages and scrolling through news from friends has at least grown to rival just about everything else people do online.
