This week Facebook launched a new networking platform called Facebook Studio that has been created especially for Facebook’s advertisers.
Facebook Studio aims to bring together both current and prospective advertisers in order to share their successes, give each other feedback and provide hints and tips about how to get the most out of implementing advertising on the social network.
According to online sources, more than 19 million iPad devices have now been sold worldwide and that number is growing rapidly every day. With more and more people turning to tablet computers to send emails, engage on social networks and browse the Internet, it’s imperative that your website looks good if people visit it using an iPad device.
The popular blog hosting platform WordPress has recently announced that it has been working with a service called Onswipe to make sites more “iPad friendly”.
A lot of brands and businesses are beginning to realise the importance of social media, here’s a great video that shows you what you should sign up to and how:
However, once they’ve set up their accounts a lot of brands are just pumping out information or being far too formal with their audiences.
Here are some points to consider when thinking about how you’re talking to people and sharing content via social media channels, like Facebook and Twitter:
Every day there are changes taking place to the way we consume, interact with and design online media. So, it’s important to always be aware of what’s happening so your website and online presence is always the best it can be.
We’ve collected together some of the key things that need to be considered when looking at the future of web design and what the rest of 2011 could hold…
Optimisation for mobile and tablet devices
This is something we’ve discussed a few times here on the Codastar blog, but with so many people now browsing the internet using their mobile phones and tablet devices, it’s something that needs to be considered.
When many companies consider building their online presence they put a lot of focus on the words they’re using on their blogs and websites. It’s important to carefully select keywords and work them into text in order to help rank highly in Google when people come to search for related terms.
However, although these words and SEO practices are important, from our experience far too many organisations neglect to think about how their images appear in search rankings, as well as their copy.
The truth is that the way you use, label and link your images is very important and can have some impact on your search ranking, as well as driving a great deal more traffic to your website or blog via Google Image Search.
Many people chose the start of the spring and summer months to clean their homes and often sort our their personal affairs. This means it’s also a great time of year to organise your online life a little better, so you can be more organised and make your working day as streamlined and efficient as possible.
Here are a few of our top tips to a thorough online spring clean:
Take advantage of Google Mail
A lot of the people we speak to use a range of different email providers, but Google Mail is considered one of the best because it offers such a vast amount of storage and a range of innovative features you won’t find elsewhere.
Many of the organisations we speak with think that if a font is both readable and accessible then it’ll do just fine for their website.
However, there are so many different styles and online font tools available that sometimes you need to think outside of the box. A different font could actually fit better with the current design of your website, work well at mirroring your brand’s values, or just look much more pleasing on the eye than run-of-the-mill fonts like Arial or Times New Roman.
There’s a general misconception that to use Facebook as both an individual or a business requires you to give away a lot of your personal details.
In actual fact, you have a great deal of control over which information you share with Facebook, as well as which information you share with other Internet users.
Facebook’s privacy settings are very detailed and a little confusing. However, it’s useful to become familiar with them as some are important and some change when new features are introduced.
1. Connecting on Facebook
Account > Privacy Settings > Connecting on Facebook
This section lets you decide who sees your information.
You can choose different settings, from everyone to friends only. Even once you click friends only you can restrict certain people from seeing all of your information.
This is the first in a series of posts that we’ve written in order to give you an insight into ways to manage your social media activity.
This week, we’re going to be looking at social media management tool, TweetDeck.
TweetDeck is a personal browser that you can use on your computer or download to your phone or tablet device.
It lets you connect with your contacts across a range of different platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It works in real-time, which means everything updates instantly in front of you.
The TweetDeck interface allows you to personalise and customise your social media activity, so you can set up separate columns for different groups of people or searches.
For instance, if your main priority is finding current information about the health and fitness service industries, you can set up a specially dedicated column to follow those particular lists and accounts.
If you’re keen to see if anyone has mentioned your company or one of your services, you can set up a dedicated column that conducts a constant search of every tweet, not just the ones you follow.
For instance, here are a few snippets from a dedicated search column for British Gas:
