Month: September 2012

Over sharing on social media can hurt your online business and reputation. To avoid the damage, do the following:

Be selective about instant sharing. Turn off most location-based apps. Only share with real and trusted friends. Update settings on a regular basis. Use a service that monitors your online interactions so you can track it, like Facebook.

You might also consider keeping your private interactions under an alias or private name for close friends, something that has no ties to your business. Otherwise, clients will have too much insight into your personal matters and opinions.

It takes a great deal of effort to build a good reputation online, but it seems like it takes no time at all for someone or some event to tarnish your good name.

Protecting your online image can be achieved through great customer service, avoiding crises, coming through for clients and readers, reviewing your past business mistakes, and, most importantly, keeping communications open with your customers.

Read more:

Protecting Your Corporate Reputation in the Cyber Age

SEOmoz’s Mozscape is now faster and cleaner.

There are much larger indexes, and updates are improved.

A while ago, Mozscape AZI beta suggested these changes and people came from all over to try them out. The testers helped spot and correct bugs in order to get the best version.

The speed of it is in another realm; it produces 200 requests per second for all people on all paid levels. That signifies a twenty percent increase from existing paid levels. This allows users to set the speed for pulling the data as they need.

Mozscape API documentation has also received a valuable update after numerous customer complaints.

Every year, Fortune 500 publishes a ranking of America’s top corporations, divided by categories like growth and profit. It’s all about the numbers—who commands the most of everything.

What this list fails to provide is how those numbers were achieved. For instance, how much do some of the top corporations profit from being on Twitter?

Read more:

Are Fortune’s Top 5 Fastest Growing Companies #Winning or #Losing with Twitter?

Two-factor authentication, two-factor authentication, two-factor authentication. I wrote it three times, but hopefully you get this one vital point.

It’s a big deal. Do it for your Google account to help prevent hackers taking over your online life. When all accounts are “daisy chained” together, it permits hackers to quickly devastate your digital life within a mere hour. Two-factor authentication helps prevent that.

Information has to be backed up, too.

However, there are still huge flaws in both Apple and Amazon security that allows a horror like this to happen, and it did happen to Mat Honan.

Read more:

How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

Many content marketers separate their content marketing from their social media marketing.

Just because many do it doesn’t make it a good idea. Actually, it is a terrible idea that wastes resources and reveals a lack of understanding about how to bridge mediums in a profitable way.

It is best to blend all content into a story that strikes a chord with readers, according to author and social media strategist Amy Porterfield.

Read more:

Secrets of Content Marketing World: Agent Amy Porterfield

For a long time, advertisers on Microsoft’s AdCenter have wanted a way to verify that their ads run. A recent Microsoft Advertising blog post states that a new ad preview tool will finally allow advertisers to monitor how ads are being seen.

For example, the ad preview tool can reveal whether or not an ad shows to a targeted audience, along with diagnostic features and targeted feedback capabilities. That means an advertiser can enter criteria such as language and domain according to cities and states.

It will be made available even if the business is not logged into AdCenter. The launch should be in the next platform builds.

Saving money is a good thing for business.

That said, there’a difference between saving money and being cheap. A viable online presence takes time and money. Money is time. Your online presence is usually one of the first introductions to your budding empire. Make it classy.

No one likes cheap. Not your friends, not your employees, certainly not Google.

Google, you say? Yes, Google. They will block you faster than a click for taking the spam route in hopes of online success.

One costly mistake results from linkbuilding campaigns. Google hates them, and will give you the Penguin if you do it— it’s sort of the online way of getting the finger from a major global player.

Read more:

The Hidden Cost Of Cheap SEO & Social Media Labor

Developing a popular Twitter following goes a long way toward expanding business. Customers enjoy seeing what a company tweets, plus having access to insider information or links of interest.

However, companies often make the mistake of not interacting with their followers, which leaves many of them feeling unappreciated. Many companies also overlook a valuable part of Twitter, which is engaging with others on their tweets. A simple niche search will provide opportunities on relevant subjects.

Another valuable thing that Twitter provides is a way to search for content, although few people use it this way. Following trendsetters, industry leaders, and SEO professionals should spark ideas about content for your own company as well as keep you on top of trends.

Having content shared on Facebook helps build loyal traffic. Achieving that requires the use of plug-ins, whether on their own or in some combination that works well on a tested basis. According to Andrea Vahl, the plug-ins are:

• Recommendations Bar: This is the newest plug-in in the form of a pop-up box that readers see as they scroll a blog. It directs people who could share to other well-liked content on the site, and appears in the Facebook newsfeed. Shows likes.

• Recommendations Box: This features popular articles appearing as a share on Facebook without being labeled as a “like”, and is the oldest plug-in.

• The Like Button: Well-known, but completely invaluable. Readers clicking the button means the “like” is transmitted to their Facebook profiles so their friends see it.

• The Like Box: It transmits your Facebook page to your website instead of putting your info on your audience’s Facebook pages. This can be very useful for developing a loyal following that sees both of your worlds at once.