Social Media

04/11/2016 By Jason Bean 1 Comment

Social Media Image Sizes Cheat Sheet – Infographic

2016 Social Media Image Sizes Cheat Sheet

This is a great resource for making sure you're using the best sized and optimized images for use across your various social media outposts for your brand. If you're doing any kind of business online ignoring the potential power of social media will most likely not go well for you or your business. However, too many businesses put all of their digital eggs in one social media or spread themselves across too many sites that may not have a good return on investment for your potential customers. If you're customer targets aren't active on a particular social media service, you might want to grab your business name to protect your brand on that service, but you probably shouldn't invest too much effort into feeding that channel with content.

And regardless of what social media site you choose to invest time in for your business, you should really never forsake having your own website for generating business leads. Publish your content first on your own site, that you have full control over (which is why I generally don't recommend services like Wix, SquareSpace, etc. for a full business site. You just don't have all the control you may need over your site and changes you may need to make for your business goals.

But when you're sharing content on social media, be sure you're at least making the effort to optimize the visual content you're sharing to the platform it's being shared.

Just click on the image to enlarge if you need.

MakeAWebsiteHub.com

04/03/2016 By Jason Bean Leave a Comment

Getting a New Business Off the Ground

One of the most difficult things to do is to get a new business off the ground. This is especially true if you are trying to start a business that is in an industry with a great deal of competition. The online world is an extremely hard place to compete. This is because it is so easy and inexpensive for people to start their own websites. This allows competitors to come out of the woodwork. Therefore, you must have a terrific business plan in order to keep your company afloat during those difficult early days when sales will be slow. It is also essential that you effectively promote your business to let the general public know what you have to offer. Here is how to get the most out of your website promotion.

Make a budget for advertising

You need to make wise financial decisions in the early days of your online business. Failure to do this will result in it going under. It would be wise for you to make a budget that lays out what you can afford to spend in all areas of your site. You can then refer to this budget on a regular basis to prevent you from going into the red in certain areas. It will be especially important for you to set aside some money for various advertising expenses. You will need to spend some money to make money. Paying for advertising is one of the best ways to set yourself apart from the competition. Most new businesses do not want to spend money before they get a steady revenue stream. You can get a leg up on all of your competitors if you are wise about where to place your ads. Placement is very crucial because you need to be sure that people in your target demographic are actually going to see the ads and respond to them. Make sure you never exceed your ad budget.

Use social media

There is nothing wrong with paying for advertising to give your online business the launch that it needs. However, there are currently plenty of free promotional methods that are available to you. For example, social media is everywhere these days. You cannot deny the power that social media has in the world today. One of the main reasons why businesses of all sizes have gravitated towards social media as a means of promotion is the fact that it is totally free. Using social media can allow your business to save money so you can afford to buy domain names and other necessary things. The reality is that companies need to have accounts on all of the major social media pages because that is how millions of people do their shopping. Not using social media will leave you out in the cold. This is one area that you need to teach yourself about if you have not previously been a social media user. Otherwise, your competition will pass you by at a rapid rate.

11/21/2014 By Jason Bean Leave a Comment

To Buy or Not To Buy… Twitter Followers: That Is the Question

So you have built your website, hosted your site (more on that later), and now you need to get visitors. What next?

Social media platforms account for a good portion of the traffic seen by many websites. It is not surprising therefore, that many web owners today are constantly looking for ways to improve traffic coming from social media, as well as means of improving their social media influence.

There have been a variety of posts on building a twitter followingÂ written, but one of the things some web owners are doing is buying twitter followers.

Do a quick search online for "buying twitter followers" and you will see a large number of sites offering the service. For people looking to grow their social media influence, the thoughts of getting 10,000 followers in a day is appealing, as they think a bigger following means increased business based on twitter popularity.

This is a very artificial notion. If anything, buying twitter followers will hurt your business and website reputation in the long run. This makes buying twitter followers a massive waste of time. Why is this?

1. You are not sure of the kind of followers you are getting

Generally, there are two types of followers that can be bought from these services. Targeted followers are the first group and they are people in your niche that may be interested in what you have to offer on your website. The follower sellers find them with their software, follow them and wait for the followed people to reciprocate.

The second group are artificial followers that are not human. They are bots. Many businesses that pay for followers end up purchasing bots, and, thus, they end up with a following filled with fake people.

2. Buying followers isnâ€™t always a guarantee of engagement

Buying twitter followers means you are buying figures and not people you can expect to mention and get a reply, or people that will post replies to your tweeted links, or click through them. This means that your aim of generating traffic from Twitter is ultimately defeated.

3. People can easily find out you have fake followers

Today, web and mobile apps have made it easy for anyone that cares, to know how many fake followers you have. One such application that is very popular today is the FakeFollowers application from Social Bakers. It makes it easy for anyone to see real accounts, inactive accounts and suspicious accounts following any particular handle. Your account should never have over 20% fake followers or you can be sure of losing credibility in the eyes of the investigator. If he or she is a big influence in your niche, your website may be hit with negative reviews too, which is a situation that is very hard to repair; reputation on Social Media is central.

Hosting scalability

One thing to consider as you grow your website presence is how scalable your hosting is. Marlon Davids, MD at https://www.umbeehosting.net/, explains that â€œone of the killers of business growth is poor website performance. There is little point in your twitter following rushing to your site if you cannot service them with a product, or even serve them your website content in a timely manner. Cloud hosting is a relatively new, scalable way to host your website, which will be able to meet your needs, even if your business goes viral.â€

So in summary, while it may be tempting to gather thousands of followers in a day, you will be better served going the organic way. Create your business account, tweet links from your site as well as other related sites, engage with users, organise promotions from time to time and you will be sure of growing a healthy following in time. Remember, social media traffic comes with active engagement with real people and not bots. They will only make up the numbers on your twitter profile page!