Short Stack – A Great Facebook App Development Tool

by admin on September 14, 2011

shortstack Short Stack A Great Facebook App Development ToolAt work we started using a web application called Short Stack that allows you to easily create Facebook applications without dealing with a lot of code and has built-in functinalities that would take a lot of work if you were to code or manipulate manually in the Facebook developers section.  We’ve saved a ton of money by being able to create more dynamic and better looking Facebook applications in half the time we were developing them in the past. I now don’t balk at quoting to do a contest for a client. Here are some of the types of apps we’ve created for clients so far:

  • Fan Gate Welcome Tabs
  • Photo Contests/Giveaways with voting capabilities
  • Contact Form (submit straight from Facebook page and emails to recipients of choice)
  • Twitter Feed/Foursquare Feed
  • Mailchimp sign-up form

Here are some major advantages to Short Stack and why it makes sense for small and medium-sized marketing agencies and businesses looking to develop apps in-house.

  1. Cost-effective. If you have less than 1,000 fans, you can create apps for FREE! There are some limitations, but this is pretty awesome, because you can try the product with no obligation and no trial period.
  2. Ease of use. It’s all widget based, so it makes creating Facebook apps very easy, and you can install them on Facebook all through their interface.
  3. Manage multiple apps for multiple pages. You would be surprised how many app managers there are out there, but every one I came across required you to create a separate account for each fan page. Shortstack doesn’t work that way. You can manage unlimited apps for unlimited pages. Their pricing plans are based on the amount of fans, not the amount of pages.
Our company did a ton of research, and we looked at a lot of social media managers and Facebook app managers. Most of them are very expensive and are set up more for larger brands and large agencies. Check out Short Stack. I’m a big fan!

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Really, Stumbleupon is generating 50% of Social Traffic to Websites?

by admin on August 24, 2011

There’s always those weird headlines you see in your Twitter or Facebook feed that catch your eye and this was one of them:

Stumbleupon Drives More Than 50% of Social Traffic.

I didn’t believe it when I saw it on Mashable. I thought Stumbleupon was so 2008. But apparently, it’s still going strong, and its viral capabilities still pump in droves of traffic to blogs. Stumbleupon only has 12 million users compared to 750 million that Facebook has, but the difference is that all Stumbleupon users are doing is surfing the Internet based on their interests and receiving targeted results based on community votes.

statcounter 640 Really, Stumbleupon is generating 50% of Social Traffic to Websites?

So the question is, “Do you need to start paying attention to Stumbleupon again?”

Should Internet marketers include this in their strategy for building traffic to client websites?

These are all questions to consider, but it all depends on what your business has to offer. If your business doesn’t have a blog that’s integrated into your website, then Stumbleupon doesn’t make a lot of sense. Stumbleupon is about discovering great content that teaches you, inspires you, or makes you think. If you Stumble your “About Us” page, that’s not what people want to stumble on.

This brings up the importance of small and large businesses using their blog as their main source of producing original content. It builds credibility and it’s SEO gold these days. Having said all of that, I’m going to resurrect my old Stumbleupon account and start being more active with it, because I think it does serve the purpose bringing in a steady flood of new visitors that could be converted into regulars if you capture them with your content.

 

 

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Google Plus – Will It Be Google’s First Successful Social Network?

by admin on August 4, 2011

Google s Latest Social Network Google Plus PICS Google Plus Will It Be Googles First Successful Social Network?

I don’t know about you, but I am always skeptical when I hear about the next great social network being rolled out by Google. If you keep throwing darts at the dartboard, and you keep hitting the wall, don’t you think you’d stop throwing darts?

Google has failed miserably with Orkut and Google Buzz. Now, they are rolling out a more robust platform that includes the +1 button and Google+, a social network that tries to take what works best for Facebook and Twitter and make it better for a certain niche of social network drones. By the way, don’t make a comment to me that Orkut is big in South America, so therefore, it’s a success.  I guarantee Google’s intention when they rolled it out was NOT for it to get big in South America.

Google +1 Button

This was the first piece to the puzzle of this new social network that Google put together. It’s a pretty nice concept. Google found a way to make search results social. The +1 button allows anyone logged into a Google account to +1 a search result they like or found useful, and Google remembers it to help deliver more and more relevant information in the future.

The +1 button is supposed to have SEO implications for those on the other side of the spectrum looking to have their website +1′ed. Those SEO benefits are still undefined, but my recommendation is that you add it to your website, because it can’t hurt it at this point.

Google Plus Social Network

So in true Google fashion, they made the new product available by “invitation only” to make people feel special if they got invite to join it. I wonder who perfected the exclusivity marketing tactic first, Google or Apple?

Google+ has a couple of unique features, Circles and Hangouts. Circles is a feature of Google Plus that allows you to connect and segment the different groups of people in your life. Circles allows you to choose which information to share with your friends, family, and professional connections.

Hangouts is an innovative feature that allows you to group video chat with up to 10 other people — for FREE. Google is trying to virtually simulate the experience of bumping into someone in real life by making video chat easy and convenient. Hangouts could also become a popular tool for small and large businesses to run more interactive conference calls and meetings.

I’m a part of Google+, but I haven’t used it much yet. However, I am intrigued by the fact that I can segment out my network as much or little as I want, which is annoying with Facebook. If I want to share something with just my best friends, I can. If I want to leave out my co-workers, I can. I think it has promise, but I am still a little skeptical, because so far, Google and social haven’t mixed well.

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Google Continues Focus On Local Search With Business Photos

by admin on May 13, 2011

Have you ever taken a look at some of the crappy photos thrown together on a Google local listing that hasn’t been claimed by the owner? Google might have pulled them from Tripadvisor, Yelp, or some other review site where the photos were taken by customers.

Google sees the gateway to more profit from the very people that drive our economy, small business owners. And now their testing 6 cities by offering up free photography to businesses that will be posted on their Google local listing. There is a catch of course…Google will own all of the rights to the photos, so you can’t go and grab them and use them on your website or other third-party review/local sites.

It’s a good move on the part of Google, because if they’re going to bank a lot of their revenue success on these local listings, they need them to look good, and photos are everything when it comes to appearance.

To learn more about Google business photos, watch their video:

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Stop Writing For Search Engines, Google Doesn’t Own You

by admin on May 13, 2011

I find myself constantly saying this to clients and colleagues, and they usually look at me with a blank stare.

“What do you mean, don’t write for Search Engines?”, they say.

“I mean, stop writing with only SEO in mind. Your goal is to get people to read it and for the content to compel them to take action on whatever you want them to take action on”.

SEO has killed good writing on the web. All we care about is inserting our keywords and writing crap that hardly makes sense, but as long as the keyword shows up in our copy three times, it’s all good. I write this with a lot of passion and authority, because I know that Google would agree with me.

In the late 90′s and early 2000′s, so many SEO “specialists” were trying to trick Google with a bunch of different tactics, and that’s why Google started changing their algorithm to reward content that was bringing value to the people that were reading it. They started building the algorithm to focus on the content that was getting passed along by other websites and other influential players on the Internet.

This article by the The Atlantic got me thinking about how much Internet copywriting sucks nowadays. You never get those catchy, witty headlines online, anymore, because everyone is so concerned about keywords and making sure headlines have all the right search terms in them.

There’s no fun in that, and it’s at the expense of the end user. So loosen up, and know that Google is smarter than you think. Just because you put a keyword in the page title, the meta description, and the content, doesn’t mean you’re going to rank highly for it. Instead write something that’s interesting, solves a problem, or inspires someone and it’ll be linked to and shared with others, and Google will notice and value that much more than old-school SEO strategies.

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Social Media Marketing By The Numbers

May 1, 2011

Here’s a fun social media infographic from the people over at Hubspot. By the way, Hubspot is one the BEST original content creators in the Internet marketing industry, IMHO. I thought it was pretty interesting that 17% of social media marketing spending was done on MySpace. It just goes to show you that MySpace isn’t [...]

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Facebook and Google Enter The Group Buying Game

April 28, 2011

So Facebook and Google are now looking to flex their muscles and take down Groupon and Living Social for the business that’s growing faster than our national deficit, social group buying. Google Deals I don’t know much about the Google Deals, but the logical place for them. O be run is Google Places. It’ll be [...]

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Does Google Instant Pose New Challenges For SEO Professionals

September 9, 2010

Google surprised everyone yesterday by rolling out an entirely new way of searching on Google.com. It’s called Google Instant, and it aims at being one step ahead of you when searching for something online. Instead of statically typing in a search term and hitting enter, the moment you start typing a search term, Google starts [...]

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What’s New In The WordPress 3.0 Release

June 21, 2010

WordPress has recently released its 13th major update since it was first developed, and this is a significant. I’ve been using WordPress for 5 years now, and It’s definitely the best open-source blogging platform in the world. You cannot find a better blogging platform with more plugins, free themes, and premium themes than WordPress. It’s [...]

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I Pre-Ordered the New iPhone 4 Today

June 16, 2010

It’s official, I’m upgrading to the new iPhone 4. If you tried pre-ordering one yesterday, it was freakin’ frustrating. There were so many people trying to pre-order, it crashed AT&T and Apple’s servers. You’d think that multibillion dollar companies would account for the amount of bandwidth they’d be eating up, but apparently not. I got [...]

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