We’re often asked how companies can stand out on Linkedin. Yes they can create informative pages with good content and links to external websites and social media channels, but what about on the platform itself?
In our last blog post we discussed the four key changes that Facebook will be making to its social network, including replacing Personal Profiles with Timelines and adding in more Gestures than the standard “like”.
However, the focus so far has been on how Facebook’s changes will be affecting personal users, but how might business pages be affected?
Last week at Facebook’s annual f8 developers conference, key representatives from the social network and its founder Mark Zuckerberg himself made a number of big announcements about the ways the platform will be changing in the near future.
These changes include a new look and feel personal profile, less focus on the Facebook “like” and more opportunities to share and discuss all kinds of entertainment.
There’s a lot of misconception when it comes to what web cookies are and where they’re used.
This BBC resource called Web Wise provides a brief explanation:
“When you visit a site that uses cookies for the first time, a cookie is downloaded onto your PC. The next time you visit that site, your PC checks to see if it has a cookie that is relevant (that is, one containing the site name) and sends the information contained in that cookie back to the site.
“The site then ’knows’ that you have been there before, and in some cases, tailors what pops up on screen to take account of that fact. For instance, it can be helpful to vary content according to whether this is your first ever visit to a site – or your 71st.”
Up until May of this year, sites were able to use cookies on their websites and many did because it meant they remembered your surfing history, buying habits and log-in details, making it particularly useful for e-commerce sites.
However, it’s now officially illegal for any kind of business to use cookies on its website without getting permission from the visitors first.
There’s no need to worry just yet, websites have until May 2012 to make sure they comply with the new rules and here’s how.
Many businesses with Facebook pages write about the products and services that they offer on the social network so fans can find out more about their companies. They then include links through to their external websites, so if someone wants to find out more or even purchase something, they can do so quickly and easily.
Increasingly, companies both big and small are looking at ways to integrate shopping and e-commerce experiences into their Facebook pages. Back at the start of this year we explored the way brands like Dove, Max Factor and French Connection use social commerce techniques and now there are even easier and more effective ways to explore social commerce, or f-commerce as shopping through Facebook is now widely known.
This kind of f-commerce allows companies to sell things directly through their pages, making it easier and more likely for people to make the purchases they want to make.
It also makes it more worthwhile to concentrate a lot of your time on Facebook if you know your hard work could directly lead to sales.
When people refer to storing content in the “cloud”, it means keeping things on the internet so you can access them from anywhere, regardless of the device you’re using instead of keeping it on your hard drive.
So, if you realise you need a document you’ve been working on from your home computer but only have your iPad / tablet PC with you, you can access it from the internet without having to worry. Best of all, you can edit your document and re-save it from any of your devices, and it will be updated whenever you use it again on other platforms.
You can store and access all kinds of different content on cloud services too, including text, spreadsheets, photos, videos, ebooks and music.
There are a number of different cloud solutions available and the space will definitely change when Apple’s service iCloud launches later this year.
But for now, here are three of the most popular services and what they can offer you.
Here at Codastar we help clients optimise their Google place pages, which makes their businesses visible in important local searches.
One of the main components of these local searches is a review section, created by users that have visited or had contact with your company, whether that be someone who’s eaten in your restaurant or used your local garage. People are able to leave reviews as well as give your company a star rating out of five:
The launch of Google+ a few weeks ago had many individuals and businesses wondering whether they really needed to sign up to another social network.
So how many social networks do you really need to be signed up to and actively using?
A major trend in web design is to have a very clean and simplistic home page with minimal text content. Instead the focus is on large typography, pictures, video content and large icons that lead the user to other sites and pages.
Although this style is visually very appealing, it’s important to remember that Google still heavily values text content on any web site’s home page. Therefore, a home page with no text content at all, which is solely graphics-based, could have an impact on your Google search rankings.
