SEO is just the first step to boosting your online visibility. We recommend that you use social media to amplify your online “footprint.”

Facebook is the second most popular site in the world, according to the latest three-month Alexa traffic rankings, and the time spent on a typical visit to Facebook is roughly 24 minutes. Reportedly, Facebook now has more than 900 million active users.

Chances are, you have customers and prospects who are very involved with Facebook. Get in there and start connecting with people. Your fans may not check your website everyday but they will know what you’re up to when you post news, specials, coupons, events and other timely information on your Facebook page. Once you build your presence on Facebook or any social media site, you need to remain active and engaged.

Interested in learning more about using social media to diversify your online marketing? Give us a call.

According to data from Experian Marketing Services, Facebook had 7 billion visits (not unique visitors) in March; Twitter, 182 million; and LinkedIn, 86 million. Newcomer, Pinterest, kicked LinkedIn out of its third place spot in March with 104 million visits.

You simply cannot ignore those numbers. Participating in social media is a must for every business if only because your customers and prospects are spending a lot of time there! In addition to massive numbers of visits, social media sites are taking steps to give businesses more opportunities to engage with their customers and prospects.

All Facebook brand pages have transitioned to the new timeline format. Facebook is also improving its self-service ad feature to make setting up ad campaigns easier and more tailored to achieving specific marketing objectives. Twitter has launched self-service ads for small businesses, but release is currently limited to cardmembers and merchants using American Express. LinkedIn has announced a new program that lets brands embed a “follow company” button from the social network on their homepages; followers will receive automatic updates from the brand in their LinkedIn feeds.

It’s no longer so simple to set up and manage a social media campaign. More advertising and marketing opportunities mean more time strategizing, implementing, updating and communicating. Once you have a social media page, you must monitor and respond to messages to be effective at community building. We’ll take care of all of those details–call us and we’ll get your social media campaign rolling. We can help you figure out where you should concentrate your efforts to best suit your budget.

On February 1st, Facebook filed for an IPO and expects to begin selling shares by the end of April.

In 2011 Facebook reached profits of $1 billion on sales of $3.7 billion. 85% of that income came from advertising and the rest from games and other fees. The Social Media Giant plans to raise at least 5 billion and hopes to raise over 10 billion when it begins selling stock in April or May. This is probably going to be the biggest Internet or technology IPO ever.

For online marketers, the message is: social media must be embraced! Its impact is growing and growing every day. Facebook and other social media websites will continue to be aggressive in looking for ways to compete with search engines. Besides having a presence on social media networks, many marketers are including Facebook PPC to their advertising strategies. From 2010 to 2011, the number of pay-per-click ads displayed on Facebook grew 42% and the average price per ad grew 18%. Consider that it’s easy to make expensive  mistakes when you first venture
into social media marketing. Contact us if you want help with social media.

Without a doubt, search engines are trying to figure out a way to include social signals (activity on social networking sites) into their search results. How big of an impact this currently has on search results is up for debate. For now, we don’t see a very significant impact. We recommend that you participate actively in social media sites so you’re prepared for the day when these sites becomes an important factor in search results. Evidently, that day is coming soon!

Social media sites certainly have a place in online marketing. Facebook has more than 800 million users (compare that to 62 million in Google+’s ) and more than half of Facebook users log on every single day. There’s more than 100 million users in Twitter that posts more than 250 million tweets per day. Facebook and other social media websites are great for reaching out to customers and creating a community around your business. We’ll be glad to talk to you about adding social media to your online marketing plan, for more information visit: http://ibisstudio.com/services.htm

Blogging frequently  is a great way to keep having fresh content on your website but more importantly, blogs can be a search engine traffic magnet! Your long-tail keyword-rich blog has the potential to rank highly for many  long-tail keyword phrases that are relevant to your industry.

Many marketers are inclined to target head terms, which are high volume keywords consisting of a few words (1 or 2). Example ‘attorney’ or ‘tax attorney.’ But head terms are too competitive and there’s small chance they’ll improve your position on search engines. The best strategy is to use long-tail keywords. Example, ‘tax attorney specializing in small business.’ Yes, there are far fewer searches on longer keywords BUT, a recent study demonstrated that using these long keywords can help a website move up in the search rankings more rapidly than head (short) terms. And, long-tail terms converted (visitors clicked on them) two and a half times more than head terms. Long-tail keywords might bring smaller traffic  to your site but chances are, it will be the most profitable kind of traffic!

Need even more proof that targeting long keywords can be good for your search results? Last December, Google announced that it would be doing more comprehensive indexing, making long-tail documents available in its search results. That means that your blog that contains long keywords is now more likely to rank for relevant queries!

There’s a lot of  people that throw a blog post up every day without worrying too much about keywords or quality. IBIS Studio advice: concentrate on using long-tail keywords in your blog and make sure the content you write is useful to your readers.