Social Media

With the amount of social media programs available on the Web, businesses must be able to efficiently leverage time spent on social media marketing. This article will provide readers with a brief introduction to the social media services Eventbrite, Tweriod, WiseStamp, Disqus and Mr. Unfollowr. These five tools are quick to use, helpful and conveniently free of charge.

1. Eventbrite — Eventbrite’s mission is to make events as easy to create, find and attend as possible. With this online service, businesses can create and promote events online. This tool allows users to customize event pages, integrate with email marketing services, connect with Facebook and offers the ability to scan QR-coded tickets for attendees with smartphones at the door. If your event is free, this service is free to use. For paid events, there is a small fee to sell tickets online.

2. Tweriod — This tool analyzes both your company’s tweets and your followers’ tweets to provide you with the best times and days to send tweets. By tweeting during time periods where you’ll receive the most exposure, you will make the most out of your efforts. Businesses should run a free monthly Tweriod analysis and use the provided data to schedule posts in programs such as HootSuite or TweetDeck. For more information on scheduling social media posts at the right times, please read our article, “Timing is Everything: When to Blog, Tweet and More.”

3. WiseStamp — WiseStamp allows users to create unique, branded email signatures through customized apps. For example, you can link your email signature to any social network, share your latest WordPress blog articles, include QR codes and much more. The free version of WiseStamp allows users to create one personal and one corporate email signature.

4. Disqus — For those who receive an excessive amount of spam in the comment section of their blog, Disqus can be very helpful. This free tool can get rid of spammers by upgrading your comment system so that users must create an account before they can comment. This program is compatible with WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Drupal, HTML and JavaScript. Also, Disqus has been approved by the Google Search Quality team to be organically crawled unlike any other comment platform.

5. Mr. Unfollowr — If you need to clean up your “following” list on Twitter, this free program will help you keep track of people who have stopped following your account. To join, just follow @unfollowr on Twitter and you will receive digests to your email or direct messages with a list of unfollowers. This is a great tool to remove inactive or unfruitful accounts and ensure that you aren’t losing any important business contacts or personal connections.

For more information, please contact The Public Relations and Marketing Group at (631) 207-1057 or johnzaher@theprmg.com. You can also visit our blog for more valuable articles, advertising spotlights and more.

On June 19, LinkedIn announced that companies are now able to send targeted status updates to followers of their company pages. Aiming to increase company engagement on LinkedIn, users can now tailor the way they communicate with followers and help meet their unique needs.

Thanks to this new capability, businesses are now able to update their company pages through the popular social media publishing giant, HootSuite. This is incredibly convenient for businesses and marketers since it’s now easier than ever to update multiple social media platforms in one place.

One of LinkedIn’s challenges has been that, compared to other social media platforms, users are less engaged and typically spend less time on the site. For example, according to Nielsen, visitors to LinkedIn averaged only 16 minutes and 46 seconds on the site in April while Facebook saw visitors spend an average of more than seven hours on the site in one month alone.

However, with these new updates, LinkedIn users should enable better listening and engagement between companies and professionals. Like with all social media, the power lies in exploring new frontiers, making connections and developing relationships with people.

For more information on using LinkedIn to market your business, refer to our articles, “Making the Right Connections with LinkedIn,” and “Top Five LinkedIn Mistakes to Avoid.”

For more information, please contact The Public Relations and Marketing Group at (631) 207-1057 or johnzaher@theprmg.com. You can also visit our blog for more valuable articles, advertising spotlights and more.

Measuring your business’ social media return on investment (ROI) is essential if you are looking to analyze the value social media can bring to your organization. Social media ROI is notoriously difficult to truly measure because there is the question of whether or not financial return really indicates its true value. Many marketers find more value in social media’s power to promote engagement and interaction between businesses and consumers. Aside from monetary gain, social media can significantly boost brand awareness, identity and online influence. However, it’s still important to show quantifiable results for your time and effort spent on social media.

If businesses want to be successful in their social media marketing campaigns, it’s critical that they understand what is actually working and what is not. While measuring social media ROI isn’t always easy, it is possible. There are various programs, both free and paid, that provide users with valuable and useful measurements. This article will provide an overview of what social media metrics are important to measure and some of the best tools to track them.

Conversion Rates — It’s important to know when a lead comes from social media. Many marketers are able to easily track conversion rates and other metrics using HootSuite, a publishing program that has integrated Google Analytics into their custom URL shortener “Ow.ly.” HootSuite’s new custom social analytics reports provide users with valuable insight on the impact of their social media profiles. These reports measure Twitter to Web conversion rates, which geographic areas produce the best campaign results, top content, activity on Facebook such as “likes,” posts, demographics and much more. Users can choose from over 30 analytics modules to customize their own unique and interactive reports.

Shortening your URL through HootSuite will not only conserve space but create trackable links to learn which follower clicks result in conversations on your website. For example, a long Web address like http://longislandmarketingblog.com/ can be turned intohttp://ow.ly/bwPE7. HootSuite offers a free version (which does have limited capabilities) as well as two business-level plans. To get started with a 30-day free trial of this more advanced plan, visit hootsuite.com/pro.

Engagement — Engagement measures the number of people who not only read your post but engage in some kind of action associated with it. For Twitter, this number would be how many people re-tweeted or replied to a tweet. On Facebook, you can measure how many times your links were clicked on, how many times people commented on your page or how many users liked one of your posts. Engagement can be measured with online tools available from Radian 6, Attensity and TweetEffect.

To learn more about the importance of engagement marketing and encouraging consumers to be active participants in a business, read our article, “How to Build Your Business with Engagement Marketing.”

Reach — In regards to social media, reach refers to the number of people who view or have been influenced by your posts. For Twitter, TweetReach is a great free tool for measuring reach. With this program, you can search for a URL, Twitter name, phrase or hashtag and TweetReach will analyze tweets and metrics that match your search. The program will then give you a free report on the reach and exposure data for the information you entered. For example, if a business entered their username, they’ll receive information on how many accounts they have reached, the number of impressions, who their top contributors are and more.

You can also use Twitter Grader and Facebook Grader to measure your influence, your number of fans/followers, the power of this network of connections and more.

Social Media Growth — This is perhaps the simplest measurement to keep track of. It’s helpful to monitor your number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers and any other social media connections in order to analyze this number over a period of time. If the numbers are not increasing, you are doing something wrong. Evaluate your social media content, variety of posts and timing of posts to discover what your audience is most responsive to.

For more information, please contact The Public Relations and Marketing Group at (631) 207-1057 or johnzaher@theprmg.com. You can also visit our blog for more valuable articles, advertising spotlights and more.

On Friday, Facebook went public in a highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) that valued the company at more than $100 billion. Although the initial price of stock cost $38 a share, Facebook stock plunged to $34.26 as of Monday afternoon, which is 10 percent below IPO price. Up against a falling stock market, many investors are questioning whether Facebook will be able to attract enough advertising revenue to justify this huge public offering. Although Facebook is an unparalleled means of branding and engaging consumers in a business or product, many are skeptical over whether it has the same power and success when it comes to advertising. Since Facebook makes most of its money from online ads, the future of its advertising revenue will have a huge impact on whether investors will benefit from buying stock.

One of the main reasons for concern is that General Motors Co. recently announced that they are ceasing all Facebook advertising efforts, pulling a $10 million advertising campaign from the overall $40 million the company spends on its Facebook presence. The company decided that paid advertisements on Facebook had little impact on consumers’ car purchases. This raises the question that if GM, one of the largest advertisers in the United States, has come out publicly denouncing the effectiveness of Facebook advertising, will others be quick to follow?

Facebook is able to insert ads into users’ news feeds and Timelines without excessive intrusion or annoyance on the users’ part. There are no large, overbearing ads that pop up. When a user does click on an ad, they will either be sent to the business’ fan page, in hopes that they will “like” them, or to a custom landing page or website.

What make these ads so unique are Facebook’s effective targeting capabilities. Facebook advertisers can specifically target users based on what interests they have listed, their location, demographic, gender and age group. For example, an advertiser may choose to specifically target men between the ages of 18 and 35 who live in a particular location and who like cars. However, skeptics are still unsure of the value in all of this since, as with other social media advertising venues, Return on Investment (ROI) is not always easy to measure. It’s almost impossible to measure the value of a “like,” “comment” or “share” in terms of dollars.

Even though GM has shut down their Facebook advertising budget, the company is still dedicated to building their fan pages as an important means of engaging car buyers. Many companies share this sentiment that Facebook is an excellent way to connect with customers and generate brand awareness and loyalty. Major corporations such as Target and Walmart use Facebook mainly for this purpose, rather than creating targeted ads to solely drive sales. Facebook has been able to connect people and businesses and share content more effectively than any other online medium and having a strong presence on the site can help any business in the long run. For this reason, if your intention is to increase brand awareness and loyalty, running ads on Facebook that will lead targeted users to your fan page can be beneficial for you. Since Facebook is essentially a social network, we recommend it for industries and products that are likely to be shared with users amongst friends. For example, restaurants, entertainment businesses and political organizations are likely to find success through marketing on Facebook.

It’s important to consider that if businesses start to follow GM’s lead in pulling out of expensive advertising campaigns to focus on their fan pages (a free service), Facebook will need to find another way to generate revenue to support the I.P.O. Currently, business can market themselves through Facebook fan pages by sharing content, posting information about new products and offering special deals all at no cost. If enough companies pull out of Facebook advertising campaigns, the largest social networking site may have to limit what businesses can do to market themselves for free.

For more information, please contact The Public Relations and Marketing Group at (631) 207-1057 or johnzaher@theprmg.com. You can also visit our blog for more valuable articles, advertising spotlights and more.

The popular link-shortening service Bitly recently released a study determining the best times to post on various social networking services, based on their real-time link tracking data. They based this study on click-through rates, virality of posts and sharing rates that occurred at different times of the day (Eastern Time) and different days of the week. As this study supports, the time or day that you post something can have a significant impact on who views it, how much it gets shared and how many times it gets viewed. This article will provide readers with a guide of the best times to post on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and blogs.

Facebook — The main thing to remember about Facebook is to avoid posting on weekends, starting on Friday afternoons. According to Bitly, the highest average click-through rates for posts containing links on Facebook are between 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. on weekdays. More specifically, posts on Wednesdays have shown to be most effective.

Twitter — Similar to Facebook, it’s best to avoid tweeting on weekends if you want to secure as many click-throughs and shares as you can. The best time to post on Twitter is between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., Monday through Thursday, since these are peak traffic times. Like Facebook, it’s ineffective to tweet at night, specifically after 9:00 p.m., on any day, and after 3:00 p.m. on Fridays.

Tumblr — Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr users seem to be on an entirely different schedule. Bitly found that on Tumblr, posts sent between 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. on Fridays, Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays received the most clicks and shares among users.

Blogs — According to Shareaholic, the leading global social share widget, the most sharing of blog entries takes place on Thursdays with 10% more shares than any other day. If you’re looking for page views, the best days to blog are Mondays and Tuesdays. As for the best time of day to blog, various sources have found that the best time to update your blog is during the morning or early afternoon on weekdays.

Of course, it’s impossible to make sure you’re at your computer desk to post at these exact times. This is where social media publishing tools come in. By using programs such asHootSuite, Tweetdeck or Social Oomph to update social media profiles, you can schedule posts in advance and make sure they’re updated at the exact times you prefer them to appear. You can also schedule blog posts to automatically publish themselves at any time in the future on WordPress, Blogger and other popular blogging platforms. For more information on these helpful programs, refer to our article, “Social Media Publishing 101.”

For more information, please contact The Public Relations and Marketing Group at (631) 207-1057 or johnzaher@theprmg.com. You can also visit our blog for more valuable articles, advertising spotlights and more.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest business-oriented service and allows users to network and keep in touch with business contacts and potential clients. When used properly, LinkedIn can help members build stronger personal relationships to facilitate more direct contact and business opportunities. This article will explain several common mistakes that can impact the effectiveness of your LinkedIn marketing strategy. Those who are new to LinkedIn can first read our article, “Making the Right Connections with LinkedIn.”

1. Having an Incomplete Profile — Having a LinkedIn profile that is 100 percent complete with an accurate description of your professional experience, skills and qualifications will help to optimize your LinkedIn profile and establish your professional identity online. In today’s technological world, a LinkedIn profile is becoming the new resume. To complete your profile, add a photo, list your professional work experience with accurate dates and responsibilities, include skills and expertise keywords in each section and request professional recommendations from your connections.

1. Not Participating in LinkedIn Groups — There are no benefits to joining dozens of groups on LinkedIn and then not participating in group discussions. LinkedIn Groups are powerful online networking tools for business professionals. We recommend searching for groups that are related to your industry or groups that your potential customers and clients are likely to be active in. Once you’ve requested to join, start participating in discussions and sharing your professional expertise. Users can also participate in the LinkedIn Answers section, when appropriate. By answering other users’ questions in this section, you can boost your authority, online reputation and exposure.

1. Not Requesting or Giving Recommendations — To build authority on your profile, always request professional recommendations from your contacts and return the favor. These can greatly enhance your profile by giving potential clients and business contacts a clear indication of the quality of your company’s work.

1. Not Having a Custom URL — One of the most overlooked yet valuable features of LinkedIn is that users can create a customized URL for their profile in place of the default URL. By creating a customized URL with either your full name or your business’ name, prospective clients or customers will have a better chance of finding and recognizing your account. To customize your URL on LinkedIn, click here and then “Customize Your Public Profile URL.”

1. Requesting to Connect with People You Don’t Know — We don’t recommend sending emails to users who you have never met or spoken to. In some cases, this can get you banned from LinkedIn if enough people report “I don’t know this person.” If you want to connect with someone who you don’t know personally, see if there are any shared connections who may be able to introduce you. You can also develop relationships with users through the LinkedIn Groups’ discussion boards and then send an invitation to connect once you are comfortable enough to do so.

Most of all, it’s important to stay as active as possible on LinkedIn. At a minimum, users should make sure that their profile is 100% complete and use about a half hour per week to browse through LinkedIn Groups and join in the conversation. By consistently updating your LinkedIn profile, maintaining your company page and participating in group discussions, you’ll find that this social networking site is essential when it comes to online marketing, especially for B2B professionals.

For more information, please contact The Public Relations and Marketing Group at (631) 207-1057 or johnzaher@theprmg.com. You can also visit our blog for more valuable articles, advertising spotlights and more.

A recent survey conducted last month by Text 100 Global Public Relations discovered that a significant number of journalists use social media and blogs on a regular basis when researching a business, brand or organization for an article. A total of 72 full-time journalists working in print, online and broadcast media were surveyed and the results found that, on average, journalists look at 2.6 social media channels for every story they research. Given these statistics, and the rapid rate at which social networking is growing, public relations professionals can use social media channels to engage with journalists and reach out to them in an outlet where they’re known to be active.

This article will explain the best methods public relations professionals can use to engage journalists through social media.

Maintain Social Media Profiles — Since reporters may look at several social media channels when conducting research, it’s important that your organization has a positive presence on all of them. By creating professional, thorough and favorable profiles for your business online, journalists will be able to discover the information that you want to be highlighted. For example, use social media channels to display media coverage, upcoming events, company news and anything else that you would like the public to be aware of.

For information on how to get your business active on social media, please see our article, “Getting Started with Social Media.”

Focus on Twitter — An important finding in this study was that Twitter is the best social media channel for public relations pitches and media relations. The survey found that journalists are far more likely to welcome contact on Twitter rather than LinkedIn, Google+or even Facebook. Public relations professionals can use Twitter to connect with reporters by seeking out their profiles and “following” them. Twitter is a great way to stay in touch with journalists and pitch stories, business news and upcoming events. Of the journalists surveyed in this study, 53% found that a company’s Twitter profile was instrumental in their research when writing an article.

For an overview of how businesses can use Twitter, please see our articles, “Secrets to Twitter Marketing” and “Twitter Unveils Brand-New Design and Special Features for Businesses.”

Create a Blog — Blogs are also an increasingly important venue to attract media attention. According to this survey, 63% of journalists found a company’s blog to be extremely useful in their research. By creating and maintaining an active blog, your business can establish itself as an industry leader and nourish an interactive hub of information about your organization. Businesses should provide useful information and quality content that relates to your organization and industry as a whole. For more information on how important blogging is for brands and businesses, read our article, “Should My Business Have a Blog?”

It is also important to keep in mind that while social media is becoming increasingly important, journalists still value press releases and phone conversations. While the media is increasingly turning to social media and online outlets for information, they still rely heavily on these more traditional methods of contact when covering a story. These social media techniques should be used to supplement press releases, media advisories and other traditional communications outlets.

For more information, please contact The Public Relations and Marketing Group at (631) 207-1057 or johnzaher@theprmg.com. You can also visit our blog for more valuable articles, advertising spotlights and more.

An Overview of HootSuite, Tweetdeck and Social Oomph

Social publishing programs are essential for managing a business’ social media presence, especially for those who maintain multiple accounts. The primary function of these programs is to allow users to organize and schedule posts in advance on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. By using these programs to schedule posts and space out your content, businesses can ensure that they have a consistent presence on social media. This article will provide an overview of the three major social media publishing platforms: HootSuite,TweetDeck and Social Oomph.

While all of these programs are free to join, provide helpful URL shorteners and allow for multiple social networking accounts, each of the three has certain benefits, disadvantages and unique capabilities. Depending on your organization and personal preferences, one of these platforms may be better suited for your needs than the others.

HootSuite

HootSuite, which many consider to be the leading social media dashboard, allows users to manage multiple networks, schedule updates and create custom analytics reports to monitor your success. Using HootSuite’s unique social networking dashboard, users can connect multiple social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and WordPress, in one place.

• Advantages — HootSuite’s greatest strength is that it provides users with excellent custom analytics reports to share with clients or colleagues. Through these reports, users can track brand sentiment, follower growth and also incorporate Facebook Insights and Google Analytics right in their dashboard. Also, while Google+ is currently unavailable on these publishing tools, HootSuite will be given first access to Google+ business and brand pages. This is so important because, when this update is unveiled, users can update all of their social media pages, including Google+, in one place. Also, like Social Oomph, HootSuite users can schedule messages in bulk to save time by uploading a CSV file. HootSuite also has a mobile app so users can access their dashboard for free on iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys or Android mobile devices.

• Disadvantages — The most notable disadvantage of HootSuite is that the free version only allows users to manage up to five accounts and there is a limit of 10 columns on your dashboard. This can be a major setback, especially for users who need to maintain multiple accounts on each social networking platform. To avoid this problem, users can upgrade to the premium version for $5 per month.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck also allows users to manage multiple social media accounts, schedule posts and organize social networking feeds. This real-time browser can connect you with contacts and information across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, FourSquare and more.

• Advantages — One advantage is that all of the features on TweetDeck are free – there is no premium, paid membership like HootSuite and Social Oomph require for certain features. With a free membership, TweetDeck users can manage and post to an unlimited number of social media accounts, unlike HootSuite, where basic users are limited to only five. Also, many users agree that TweetDeck’s dashboard is the cleanest and most user-friendly of the three, although this depends on personal preference.

• Disadvantages — On May 25, 2011, TweetDeck was bought by Twitter and since this acquisition, many users have complained about missing features, bugs and certain tools not working properly. Apart from these technical problems, there are two major setbacks with TweetDeck. Unlike HootSuite and Social Oomph, there are no analytics reports or bulk scheduling capabilities available. This is a huge disadvantage, especially for businesses, since they cannot monitor the effectiveness of their social media marketing strategies.

Social Oomph

Social Oomph performs the same functions as the previous two programs but unlike HootSuite or TweetDeck, users have the ability to “Auto-Follow” and “Auto-Direct Message” users. Depending on one’s personal preference, this feature could either be seen as an advantage or disadvantage, as further discussed below.

• Advantages — The benefit of using Social Oomph is that this service has the most detailed and informative analytics reports, especially for those who are managing several social media accounts. Like HootSuite, you can also schedule posts in bulk but only Social Oomph makes this process simpler by allowing users to upload posts from a Word document. Social Oomph’s “Replies Digest” is another unique and useful feature, especially for businesses. This tool will send you a daily email with any @Mentions of Re-tweets your business has received. This email is extremely helpful for businesses to easily monitor interactions on Twitter and respond accordingly.

• Disadvantages — Unlike TweetDeck and HootSuite, there is currently no smart phone app available for Social Oomph. As mentioned previously, Social Oomph is the only service that allows users to set up “Auto-Follows,” “Auto-Direct Messages” and “Auto-Responders,” but this tool is only unlocked when users upgrade to premium accounts. There is a biweekly cost of $3.97 for Social Oomph Premium. “Auto-follow” refers to being able to follow someone on Twitter automatically if they have followed you. “Auto-Direct Messages” and “Auto-Responding” refer to sending Twitter users automatic, prewritten responses. While some users may see this as an advantage, since this practice is only available on Social Oomph, it has its flaws and most social media users look down on auto-responses. It’s far more powerful to interact with users on a more personal level rather than just send them computer-generated responses.

For more information, please contact The Public Relations and Marketing Group at (631) 207-1057 or johnzaher@theprmg.com. You can also visit our blog for more valuable articles, advertising spotlights and more.

Facebook has rolled out significant changes and improvements to how users view and interact with businesses with the new Timeline. With Timeline, Facebook pages have an entirely new design and businesses can enjoy more control over what content is front and center, and what content is hidden on their page. In this article, you’ll find an overview of brand new Timeline features such as the cover photo, apps, direct messaging, the activity log and more.

Choose a Cover — The most visible change in Facebook’s Timeline is the cover photo. The Timeline cover displays an 851×315-pixel banner across the top of the fan page, making multimedia a stronger element than ever before. Since the cover image is very large, it’s essential to choose a cover photo that is eye-catching and reflective of your organization. For example, a restaurant may want to display a popular menu item while a retail store may feature a popular product. It’s important to keep in mind that covers are not permitted to display any calls to action, references to pricing, contact information, a Web address or text such as “like this page” or “visit our website.” It’s essential to focus on the image and choose a photo that entices users to scroll down to learn more about your business. For details about cover photo guidelines and restrictions, please click here.

Complete Your About Section — Directly under your cover photo, two key metrics will be visible: your number of likes and the number of “people talking about this.” Under these metrics, you’ll find your About section. This section is where you can include a brief description of your business and contact information. To the right, you’ll see photos, pages that you have liked and any custom landing tabs. As the following paragraph will explain, any custom landing tabs that you have previously installed will be completely reformatted. Facebook has removed the ability to set one of these tabs up as the default image when a user arrives at your page.

Apps — Perhaps the biggest change to this new format is that default landing tabs, or customized tabs that non-fans would see first instead of the wall, are no longer allowed. With Timeline, users will always see the main page first and they will have to click through to view custom apps. In this section, you can add your custom pages, contests, promotions, coupons or media. However, these will not get the same amount of exposure as they did on traditional Facebook pages. Since these tabs will no longer be the first thing users see when they visit your page, they may not be as powerful or engaging.

Direct Messages with Fans — This new feature is a huge advantage for businesses. For the first time, Facebook users can send private messages to the owner, or Admins, of a business page. With the old layout, the only way fans could communicate with business pages was publicly, through the page’s wall. By making it possible to communicate with business owners through private messages, businesses can handle any complaints or personal matters out of the public eye, making this a better experience for both parties.

Share, Star and Hide Stories — One of the major features of Timeline is that businesses have more power than ever to share, “star” and hide stories surrounding their fan page. For example, by “starring” posts, you can choose which updates you want to drive the most traffic to and highlight historical or successful posts by you and your fans. On the other hand, you can hide or delete posts that are embarrassing, out of date or negative. Users can monitor all of these updates in Timeline’s new activity log.

Activity Log — Your activity log will be an organized list of your posts and activity, from the current date back to the very beginning of your page’s history. Through your activity log, you can control what information goes on your Timeline and what information you’d prefer to hide. You can also mark certain posts as spam and hide posts from appearing on your Timeline, but that you’d still like to store in your activity log. For more information about the features of Timeline’s activity log, click here.

How Should I Begin — To switch to Timeline, visit the Timeline for Pages preview manager, where you can walk yourself through the features discussed in this article. When you’re comfortable with how Timeline works, click the “Publish Now” button at the top of your page to show your new design to the public. If you prefer to wait until March 30th, Timeline will automatically become publicly visible and you will have to adjust your page at this time.

To find out more about Timeline, visit Facebook’s Timeline: A New Kind of Profile.

For more information, please contact The Public Relations and Marketing Group at (631) 207-1057 or johnzaher@theprmg.com. You can also visit our blog for more valuable articles, advertising spotlights and more.

For those who are new to social media, Tumblr is a free blog hosting forum that allows users to share anything from text, photos, quotes, music, audio files, videos and more. Although Tumblr was developed in 2007, it has seen a resurgence in popularity this year, with more than 4.5 billion unique posts published each day from over 30 million blogs.

This article will provide you with an overview of how Tumblr works, how it can help your business and how you can get started.

How Does Tumblr Work? — Tumblr combined elements from Twitter and traditional blogging websites like WordPress to create a site that really embodies the best of both worlds. Like Twitter’s “re-tweet” button, you can “reblog” another piece of content that was already posted by someone else. You can also “follow” other Tumblr blogs and their updates will appear in your dashboard, much like an RSS feed. However, there’s no frustrating 140-character restriction and, like traditional blogging websites, you can display more than just text. Users can share anything from photos, videos, audio files, music, quotes and more.

Tumblr describes itself as “the easiest way to blog,” and its claim is supported by its simplicity and user-friendly features. This microblogging site is so unique because of its clean interface and simple sharing features that allow users to post from their desktop browser, mobile phone or even through email. The Tumblr directory organizes blogs into categories, making it easy for users to discover new content and find new bloggers. These categories include Business, Design, Photography and much more. To ensure that your blog is properly categorized, make sure to “tag your blog” to the most relevant category, under the “Directory” tab of the navigation scheme.

What Are the Benefits of Using Tumblr for Business? — Businesses can use Tumblrto boost their Web and social media presence, stay connected with a greater audience and tap into a very active and unique social media community. Tumblr also works well with search engines, so having an active profile will enhance your overall search engine optimization and online visibility.

Since Tumblr users tend to be younger, businesses that have a younger target audience should take advantage of this website. It’s also important to keep in mind that, with Tumblr, your posts should never be too heavy on text. Short posts that are more visual and include multimedia tend to do much better on Tumblr.

How Do I Begin? — Before jumping in, we recommend taking a look at how other businesses and organizations in your industry are using Tumblr. For example, you can reference these Tumblr blogs for Rolling Stone, Huggies, Newsweek and Sesame Street. While Tumblr has been very successful on these large brands, it can work just as well for smaller businesses. For example, C-Town, a small grocery store in Brooklyn, New York, actively uses Tumblr to share the latest deals and photos of products with their customers.

Once you’re comfortable with how Tumblr works, you can create a profile by clicking here. Businesses should take advantage of the ability to customize their domain name on Tumblr. For example, you can easily change your domain name from yourbusiness.tumblr.com to www.yourbusinessblog.com. Thanks to Tumblr’s high level of personalization, businesses can also customize their template, layout and color scheme using HTML and CSS. However, it’s far easier to choose from the hundreds of themes that Tumblr offers.

For more information, please contact The Public Relations and Marketing Group at (631) 207-1057 or johnzaher@theprmg.com. You can also visit our blog for more valuable articles, advertising spotlights and more.